American colleges and universities do such a poor job of training the nation's future teachers and school administrators that 9 of every 10 principals consider the graduates unprepared for what awaits them in the classroom, a new survey has found.

Nearly half the elementary- and secondary-school principals surveyed said the curriculums at schools of education, whether graduate or undergraduate, lacked academic rigor and were outdated, at times using materials decades older than the children whom teachers are now instructing. Beyond that, more than 80 percent of principals said the education schools were too detached from what went on at local elementary and high schools, a factor that made for a rift between educational theory and practice.

"I thought there were problems in the field," said Arthur E. Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University, who is to release the findings in a report today. "But I didn't realize the depth of the problems."

The majority of programs range from inadequate to appalling, even atsome of the country's leading universities.

A growing number of education schools are lowering admission standards,watering down programs, and offering quickie degrees.

The curriculum seems little more than a grab bag of survey courses. If the class on the principalship were removed, it would be a real challenge toguess the purpose of the program.

Even the more competent students tend to produce poor work. Students are so busy at their day jobs that they have little time to devote to their graduate programs.

Most of the programs examined in the course of this study were in fact inadequate. Some of them have the capacity for substantial improvement; many do not.