News that Susan Fuhrman will be the next president Columbia University Teachers College couldn’t come at a more propitious time. Her accession will have the potential to mark a new start for a troubled institution at a time when the debate over education couldn’t be more important. Teachers College itself is troubled in an unusual way. It isn’t going broke. It has no difficulty attracting students. Its reputation has never been greater. But as its influence on the American educational scene has waxed, serious questions have arisen, and the early indications are that Ms. Fuhrman is a good choice to answer them.

Teachers College has long been the center of the so-called “progressive” education philosophy, ideas based on the notion that learning is a natural process that children will master with little intervention on the part of adults. As children are left to their own devices, teachers are relegated to become the “guide on the side,” rather than the “sage on the stage.” Since they are relieved of the primary burden of educating the children, teachers are thus free, under this theory, to do what the education school monopoly feels is the teacher’s real job, that is to be agents of social change. This kind of politically correct thinking has infected more than a generation of teachers to disastrous effect.

As Teachers College and the other institutions sharing a similar outlook gained a monopoly in influence how our schools teach our children, a funny thing has happened. The performance of American students has continually declined. In recent years it has begun to dawn on many of the more astute observers of the educational scene that a connection must be made between failure in the classroom and the influence of our schools of education. As public expenditures for education have skyrocketed in the past two decades, student performance has continued to lag. What schools of education should be doing is finding ways to educate our children more efficiently, not prescribing more of the same failed nostrums, paid for by continued picking of taxpayers’ pockets. Ms. Fuhrman, who is the dean of the school of education at the University of Pennsylvania, has a record of research and activities suggesting that she is focused on real world ways to allocate public moneys to the best effect.

The educators we’ve talked to tell us that Ms. Fuhrman appears to have respect for the role of scientific evaluation in driving educational policy. As logical as this sounds, this represents a shift from the current prevailing thinking that infects our education schools. She is said to be a scholar, not a political activist. If that is borne out, it will be the second such positive development on the New York education scene in less than a year. The first was the appointment of David Steiner as Dean of Education at Hunter College. It’s no doubt too soon to declare that a new day has dawned for teacher education here. But the news of Ms. Fuhrman’s accession is encouraging.