Education: More from Ford

U.S. teachers, all too often, are trained in schools that offer substandard instruction, skimp courses in academic subjects in favor of courses on teaching method, give far too little practice teaching in actual classrooms. Ticking off these familiar failings this week, the Ford Foundation's President Henry Heald, sometime (1952-56) chancellor of New York University and an old teacher himself (during the '30s he was a professor of civil engineering at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology), announced an impressive new foundation gift aimed at achieving "a breakthrough in teacher education.'' The donation: $9,161,210, to be divided among nine colleges and universities.

The new Ford grants, for the most part, will allow expansion of topflight teacher-training programs already under way. Recipients: Barnard, $70,000; Brown, $1,047,000; Chicago, $2,400,000; California's Claremont Graduate School, $425,000; Duke, $294,210; George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tenn., $600,000; Harvard, $2,800,000; Stanford, $900,000; Wisconsin, $625,000.

The expanded projects vary widely, but Stanford's is fairly typical; there, liberal-arts graduates will begin a 15-month program early in the summer by concentrating on the subjects they are to teach. During the regular school year, they will serve as practice-teaching "interns" in local high schools, receive salaries from the school districts, spend three hours a week in a seminar on teaching methods. They will study subject matter again during the second summer, receive California teaching certificates in time to begin classes in the fall.

Brown's program bears inspection by other universities; there, veteran schoolteachers receive fellowships for one-year refresher courses in their subjects, are replaced in their classrooms by graduate interns. The University of Wisconsin will tackle the problem at the core of the merit-pay controversy—how to decide which teachers are most effective. At Duke, graduates of 25 cooperating liberal-arts colleges will study toward master of arts in teaching degrees. Outstanding teachers from local schools will be released from other duties to supervise M.A.T. interns.