In the United States and Canada, a school of education (or college of education; ed school) is a division within a university that is devoted to scholarship in the field of education, which is an interdisciplinary branch of the social sciences encompassing sociology, psychology, linguistics, economics, political science, public policy, history, and others, all applied to the topic of elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education. The U.S. has 1,206 schools, colleges and departments of education and they exist in 78% of all universities and colleges. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 176,572 individuals were conferred master's degrees in education by degree-granting institutions in the United States in 2006–2007. The number of master's degrees conferred has grown immensely since the 1990s and accounts for one of the discipline areas that awards the highest number of master's degrees in the United States.
In the United Kingdom, following the recommendation in the 1963 Robbins Report into higher education, teacher training colleges were renamed colleges of education in the UK. For information about academic divisions devoted to this field outside of the United States and Canada, see .
Typically, a school of education offers research-based programs leading to Master of Arts (M.A.), Master of Education (M.Ed.), Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) or Educational Specialist (Ed.S.) degrees, as well as professional teacher-education programs leading to Master of Arts (M.A.), Master of Education (M.Ed.), or Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.) degrees. Schools of education also offer teacher certification or licensure programs to undergraduate students. Generally schools of education have graduate programs related to teacher preparation, curriculum and instruction (or curriculum and teaching), public policy and education, and educational administration. In addition, some schools of education offer programs in school counseling and counseling psychology.