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student achievement than did any other use of school resources (Ferguson, 1991).

Today's teachers must understand a great deal about how children develop and learn, what they know, and what they can do. Teachers must know and be able to apply a variety of teaching techniques to meet the individual needs of students. They must be able to identify students' strengths and weaknesses and plan instructional programs that help students make progress. In addition to this expertise in pedagogy, teachers must master and integrate content knowledge that underlies the various subjects in the children's curriculum.

Pre-service and in-service teacher education is intended to develop teacher expertise for teaching reading and preventing reading difficulties, but it encounters many obstacles. Programs for teachers' professional development often flounder, lacking a strong apprenticeship system and hobbled by the course-by-course approach in college education. They cannot meet the challenge inherent in trying to prepare teachers for highly complex and increasingly diverse schools and classrooms; the challenge of keeping abreast of current developments in research and practice once teachers begin to teach; the complexity of the knowledge base itself, which often appears to support conflicting positions and recommendations; and the difficulty of learning many of the skills required to enact the knowledge base, particularly to work with those children having the most difficulties.

Early Childhood Education

The field of early childhood education has traditionally offered professional training at prebaccalaureate levels in both pre-service and in-service programs. Some colleges of education have baccalaureate and master's degrees for early childhood teacher education programs, but often they are add-on programs to an elementary teaching certification. Sometimes training in early childhood education is divorced from the schools of education, housed instead in departments of home economics, for example. Given the cognitive complexity and practical importance of development in early child-