CEPR Faculty Director Thomas Kane proposes conducting a modern day Flexner report on teacher preparation in order to provide evidence for a new model program in the following Brookings Institution paper.
Abraham Flexner transformed American medical training with his 1910 report, “Medical Education in the United States and Canada.” His chief recommendations—higher admission standards, two years of laboratory training, two years of clinical training in a hospital setting—left an imprint which is still visible a century later.
However, the landscape of medical education at the beginning of the last century was very different from the state of teacher preparation today. Many university-based medical schools were already combining laboratory training with clinical training in an affiliated hospital. The American Medical Association had been championing such a model before 1910. By personally visiting all the medical schools in the country, Flexner documented conditions in schools which were not using that model (for instance, identifying those still teaching students homeopathic medicine and flagging those with grossly inadequate laboratory facilities.) The Flexner report did indeed transform medical education—but not by persuading schools to change. Rather, the report created pressure on state licensing agencies to close the medical schools which were teaching outdated theories or providing inadequate facilities. In 1910, there were 155 M.D. granting institutions, with more than 25,000 students. By 1935, there were 66 schools (and about half as many medical students as before).
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