Older adults currently represent at least 40% of the clinical caseload for physical therapists,1 and their health needs promise to increase substantially over the next 20 years. As early as the mid 1980s, physical therapy educators had recognized that geriatrics content in physical therapist education program curricula was both limited and fragmented.2 Curricular inadequacies and concerns about student interest in working with older adults were noted to have continued into the late 1990s,3 prompting a special issue of the Journal of Physical Therapy Education (JOPTE) in 2001 that highlighted curricular initiatives to better prepare physical therapist graduates to work with older adults. This struggle to ensure adequate preparation of physical therapy practitioners continues and is a reflection of the struggles across the broader health care community.In 2008, a landmark Institute of Medicine report, Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care Workforce,4 warned of a looming crisis-the inadequate number and preparation across the spectrum of health care workers providing services for older adults. This report prompted immediate reaction by a range of health profession groups, including the Partnership for Health in Aging (PHA) and the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) Section on Geriatrics (SOG) (now known as the Academy of Geriatric Physical Therapy). The PHA developed and disseminated the Multidisciplinary Competencies in the Care of Older Adults at the Completion of the Entry-level Health Professional Degree5 in 2010. The SOG subsequently produced and made directly available to all SOG members and PT program directors the more professionspecific Essential Competencies in the Care of Older Adults at the Completion of the Entrylevel Physical Therapist Professional Program of Study6 in 2011 (see page 91 of this issue).While the specialty sections of APTA sometimes seem to operate in isolation from each other, the Section on Education and the Academy of Geriatric Physical Therapy have worked collabo rati vely on multiple occasions over the past 30 years, facilitating research, publications, joint conference presentations, and now this second special issue of JOPTE devoted to improving geriatrics education in our profession.Physical therapist management of older adults often requires complex decision making, as a host of internal and external factors must be taken into account. Age bias, fear of working with older patients, and difficulty recognizing and prioritizing multiple interacting factors all can impact the preparation of students for this major area of clinical practice. A primary goal of this special issue was to provide a forum for faculty to share educational strategies, approaches, and experiences that address these barriers. We hope you will agree that this goal has been achieved. This special issue begins with 2 Expert Perspective papers and continues with articles that provide examples of creative and effective educational strategies to enhance the real-life preparation of physical therapy practitioners to work with older adults.Guccione and associates open this issue by providing a demographic and sociopolitical backdrop, focusing on potential and impending changes in health care financing, utilization, and delivery of care to older adults. These authors examine the challenges and opportunities inherent in these changes and their likely impact on the physical therapy profession as it strives to meet societal needs related to our aging population. Next, Wong and colleagues describe efforts over several decades to improve the entry-level educational preparation of PT and PTA students to work with older adults, including the recent development of entry-level essential competencies. These authors believe that educator utilization of these competencies, and of their model that summarizes educational setting characteristics, practice expectations and curricular themes, are critical to the preparation of a physical therapy workforce that is well-qualified and inspired to work with older adults. …