While I am sure Stanford is a good school, I was amazed to see that tuition alone in $35,000 a year. This is more than most teachers make in their first year of teaching. I don't know how many prospective teachers can afford this. I recieved a teaching credential and a masters degree at CSU Dominguez Hills, was very well prepared and for only about $2,000 per year. Why on earth would anyone want to attend Stanford for a job that pays so little?

I completely understand the concern about cost at Stanford. However, as a current student in the STEP program, I can tell you that very few of us are going to have to pay back the full extent of our loans. Because of a generous grant from a benefactor, many of us received a $20,000 loan that is forgiven as long as we teach for five years. In addition to that, the APPLE program will forgive up to $13,000 additional for teaching for four years in a California Title I public school. Stanford has an excellent program, and is working to draw the best and brightest into the field by looking for innovative ways to offset the cost of education.

It doesn't make sense. At that cost you cannot produce enough teachers to make a difference.

It is easy for me, an amateur golfer, to ascribe a "cost" negation to the various lessons a pro-golfer may take to raise her competitive prowess. This is especially true if it is not obvious through my amateur eyes that she has improved all that much. But to the pro, the "cost" is seen through the prism of "value". It takes infinitely more resources to ripen a great skill than it does to send forth a green one to fend for himself. The pro golfer has skills honed and refined to such a delicate art that their application serve to make golfing look easy and make us amateurs think we can do the same thing with no training. Likewise, the pro teacher; she can make a great lesson seem so simple that even the most thorough-going idiot believes she can do replicate it. So before we measure teaching programs along the cost axis, we need to measure the learning output along the benefit axis. My experience is, The Bernie Madoff's of the world aside, that more often than not, we get what we're willing to pay for. (I know, prepositions shouldn't end sentences). A great teacher taught me that! LOL