Education schools in Pennsylvania are howling over changes to the state's standards for teacher preparation, claiming the state is undermining their authority to determine curriculum and creating overly burdensome requirements that will discourage prospective teachers.

As we're usually the first to scream when state departments of education add new coursework requirements, we decided to investigate.

First, the state has decided to divide its K-6 elementary certificate into two separate certificates, one for teachers of PreK-4 and one for teachers of grades 4-8. The 4-8 certificate seems complicated, but is nevertheless well intentioned, with a sound requirement that teachers have at least one subject area concentration to teach grades 7 or 8. Nothing to scream about yet.

The other major change is a new provision that all ed schools must require coursework both in special education (9 credits or 270 hours) and in meeting the needs of English language learners (3 credits or 90 hours). Ed schools are claiming that these courses constitute wholly new requirements. However, the state is not insisting that these new requirements be satisfied in stand alone courses; they are allowing ed schools to embed the new requirements within other existing course requirements, including student teaching.

So why all the bellyaching? It may just be the simple fact that the state takes 34 pages of FAQs to describe what we essentially explained in half of a page.

Or it may be that the real cause of all the outrage is that the state is requiring all of the ed schools to reapply for approval this year, rather than gradually implementing the changes as each program comes up for its periodic renewal. That's quite a shock to the system for institutions where change is looked upon as a four-letter word gone amok.