The New York Board of Regents showed considerable moxie in picking our favorite ed school dean David Steiner as its new schools chief. The job entails overseeing not only K-12 schools but also presiding over the state university system, which includes at least a dozen teacher preparation programs.

The news is jaw dropping because for a while Steiner was persona non grata among his fellow teacher educators as the result of a courageous paper he gave in 2003 (subsequently published here) when he was a professor of educational policy at Boston University. The paper concluded that the core courses in leading education schools were generally flaccid and irrelevant.

(It did so by examining syllabi, a methodology that NCTQ has since been using to look at other aspects of teacher preparation. Our results have been equally unsettling to many in the teacher-prep line of work.)

When Steiner left BU in 2004 to head the arts education portion of the National Endowment of Arts, he didn't know whether he would have the choice of again working in an education school.

A year later, though, he was named dean of the education school at Hunter College of Education. There, he joined with three charter school networks, Teach For America and the NY City Department of Education to forge a new model of teacher preparation. The program aims to have both intellectual heft and in-the-classroom practical worth for teachers soon to be or already in the classroom.

He has also just launched, with a New York City public education advocacy group, the city's first teacher residency. That model of teacher preparation centers on a year-long apprenticeship that teacher candidates serve in the classroom of a master teacher.

Steiner, not surprisingly, has said he is concerned that the standards for New York's teachers and students have not been set high enough. It's a concern we share.