What are some education schools doing wrong? Notably providing opportunities for teachers to "learn how students learn," essentially a useless exercise which does not make first- or second-year teachers more effective.

While the study's authors include numerous caveats in their discussion, the paper is an unqualified success as a model for future research.

Also on the research front, researchers at the University of Louisville's College of Education and Human Development, University of Kentucky and Florida State University are working to better identify the geometry knowledge that high school teachers need to be effective in the classroom. Not just that, but they're hoping to produce a geometry test that education schools and school districts can use to determine whether teachers not only know the difference between interior and exterior angles, but can teach it as well.

"There are not a lot of predictive measures for determining how well teachers will teach," pronounced Bill Bush, the principal investigator for the study.

After all, no one actually knows if current licensing tests--such as the Praxis II content knowledge test for secondary teachers--are assessing what a teacher really needs to know, or just what the Educational Testing Service thinks they need to know. No less than 90 years after America's colleges of education began to take their current institutional form, Bush's admission is disheartening and makes filling the vacuum in our understanding long overdue.