Teacher Education is Out of Touch, and I am Proud of It

No doubt much hand-wringing will result from Arthur Levine's out-of-touch appraisal of how out-of-touch teacher education programs are. Here is how Brahmin Levine's Executive Summary (PDF) frames it in the opening sentence:

The nation’s teacher education programs are inadequately preparing their graduates to meet the realities of today’s standards-based, accountability-driven classrooms, in which the primary measure of success is student achievement.

I haven't had a chance to read the whole report, but there is enough here to get my attention. Let me say unequivocally that, as a teacher educator, I agree wholeheartedly with Levine's opening statement, and, furthermore, I would not have it any other way. Teacher education programs, the best ones at least, are entirely out-of-step with the present-day disaster of "accountability-driven classrooms" to which Levine refers.

Indeed, the present-day "accountability-driven classrooms" neither require, nor desire, teacher education programs, particularly if these programs include any departure or variation from this high tech version of the same iron-fisted 19th Century traditional pedagogy that was just as ineffective a hundred years ago as it is today. The fact is that the federally-mandated classroom of today looks much more like the prevailing model classroom of 1906 than it does the education models of 2006, which, by the way, continue to be the focus of good teacher education programs despite the anti-democratic aberration that has sucked the oxygen from any other educational narrative or methodology. So yes, Levine is right, thank god--we are hopelessly out of step with the march toward the past, a past that makes teacher preparation as irrelevant and foreign as, let's say, social justice and equality of opportunity.

In today's test-obsessed classrooms, no one needs teacher training to teach to the the high-stakes standardized junk tests that have replaced professional standards and curriculums all across the nation. In today's test-obsessed classrooms, no one needs teacher training to do the parrot math and reading programs that are pushed by the Reading First thugs (and what will soon be Math First thugs). In today's test-obsessed classrooms, no one needs a child development course when the insanity of testing kindergarteners and first-graders has made core principles of child development entirely irrelevant. In today's test-obsessed classrooms, no one needs an historical or philosophical foundations course when the current agenda of worldwide economic domination has replaced all the other purposes and aims that historically shaped schools that were once devoted to creating good people and to building a good democracy. In today's test-obsessed classrooms, no one needs educational psychology courses when the current chain-gang behavior modification tactics for classroom control are provided in the various commercial scripts and canned instructional programs that accept no deviation in their lock-stepping toward "data-driven" results.

When, eventually, sanity is restored, when the public dialogue once again replaces the silenced voices, and when these crooks, hucksters, and corporate fascists are expelled from the seats of power in Washington, we may, in fact, come to celebrate those teacher education programs now demonized for not "preparing graduates to meet the demands of today's . . . accountability-driven classrooms." Perhaps those university teacher prep programs will have at least preserved the possibility of a free and just society during this melee of the fundamentalist cultural revolution, and perhaps then, when humanitarian decency is again restored, we can truly begin to give teacher education programs the attention they need to honestly make them better.

In the meantime, let us celebrate our failure.

Posted 09.20.06 to Schools Matter

Arthur Levine and foundations

Arthur Levine's Educating School Teachers report is out today, with responses already from NCATE's Art Wise, Alexander Russo, and Jenny D., thus far. It's sure to get other press as well.

Let me focus on the section which discusses the history of teacher education (pp. 23-26). Praiseworthy: Levine's read one of the old classics on schools of ed, Clifford and Guthrie's Ed School and one of the sure-to-be-classics on normal schools, Chris Ogren's The American State Normal School. On the other hand, Levine entirely missed Jurgen Herbst's classic And Sadly Teach as well as David Labaree's more recent The Trouble with Ed Schools, and those omissions may explain some blinders in both Levine's treatment of the history and an amazing inconsistency in the general approach to reforming teacher education.

Levine's focus on the story at elite institutions misses the broad use of teacher education institutions for more than teaching teachers. In the late 19th century, educational institutions were far less specialized than their names often implied. Often as not, a state normal school would be the local tertiary school that local residents could access. So they were as filled with general education as with teaching specific skills. The historical irony of state normal schools is that their success in providing access to general education helped many rise in that common institutional trajectory upwards into college and university status. The tried-and-true example for education historians is Illinois State University, whose college town is Normal, Illinois.

I think the omission is important. Levine ties the dislocation of ed schools from practical effectiveness to a claimed historical shift to a more theoretical curriculum in the competition with disciplinary schools (such as chemistry and psychology). He specifically calls out two social foundations areas—sociology of education and history of education—as prime examples of such theoretical lacunae (see p. 23 of the report). There are several factual problems with Levine's claim. First, if there's any discipline that colonized teacher education, it was psychology, not sociology or history. Second, this story is true primarily for elite institutions, where the influence was largely with administrators, not the bulk of teachers. It isn't even true at some very important teacher education institutions, historically Black colleges and universities, which have never risen as high in institutional status as their historically white counterparts. Third, the only institutions where humanities and social-science perspectives on education dominate teacher education are in liberal-arts colleges with educational studies programs. My impression is that many schools and colleges of education attacked their social-foundations components in the 1980s, leaving many teacher education programs with the shells of disciplinary perspectives on schooling. Whether that has led us to better or worse teacher education is beyond the scope of this entry, but teacher education programs are more likely not to know what is the desired relationship of pedagogical knowledge to professional perspectives than to go off in search of the theoretical. Or, if our non-foundations colleagues are in search of the theoretical, it's less likely to be based in disciplinary fields than Levine implies.

The broader (nay, even theoretical) problem with this selective understanding of teacher education's history is with Levine's implication that the Search for Status has crippled teacher education by dividing faculty from the work of schools. The problem with Levine's narrative is that distance from schools is not clearly related to distance from teacher education. In some cases, the Search for Status may encourage faculty to leave teacher education for the loftier status of graduate and research education or (even better, for some faculty) mostly research. But there is nothing in that status competition that is related to "connection to schools." I know many colleagues who spend much of their time in graduate education and research programs who engage schools deeply. They design programs to be tested in real classrooms, encourage their graduate assistants to "get dirty" in real schools, and so forth. They're still isolated from teacher education but not from schools.

By contrast, I know many faculty who spend most of their time in teacher education but little time in schools. Some have spent plenty of time in professional development schools but found the work largely unrewarded by a university that promotes a relatively narrow view of research. Others are absorbed by their teaching assignments and barely eke out enough time for writing.

I'm not sure at this point how Levine's report fits into all the other reports on teacher quality and teacher education. But if I were to grade him only on the passage referring to the history of teacher education, he'd get a B: he knows part of the literature, and he has an interesting (but factually wrong) argument.

How Colleges Are Failing: Let Us Begin to Count the Ways

Posted to Schools Matter:

With the Spellings Commission Report ready for release, the media bombing campaign against colleges and univerisities is already underway, as evidenced by today's piece in the NY Times featuring the "failure" of higher ed to graduate more minority and poor students at a faster clip. According to a study from last spring by Maggie's sisters at Education Trust, large numbers of students are not graduating within six years of entering college.

We now take that fact, do no analysis of the underlying causes (or put them far down into the article), blame the colleges for not making it all better, and introduce a mantra into the media echo chamber that spills out that colleges are failing, colleges are failiing. Like I said, the bombing campaign has begun.

Here are a couple of variables that are ignored in the current round of handwringing:

• The worst graduation rates cited in the study are in the poorest areas where large numbers of the students are enrolled half-time or less. Why? Some started families early, and most cannot afford to go full time, family or no family. Of course, Pell Grants have remained flat over the past five years and billions have been cut from student assistance programs, while tuition costs continue to go up.

• Other factors? Many of these students come from poor families, who attended poor schools in poor communities. It doesn't take a seer like Margaret Spellings to know that these students are behind academically, and that they often need remediation and/or reduced course loads. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the NCLB charade to change the reality of childhood poverty that is the underlying root of this saddest of social realities.

• Another factor: The Ed Trust study conveniently ignored to track or account for students who transferred out to other colleges from which they began or students who graduated after transferring in from other colleges: "Dr. Daniel also said that conventional methods for calculating graduation rates significantly understate how many students actually earn degrees. Universities calculate how many freshmen who enrolled as full-time students six years earlier have graduated. Students who transfer to other universities do not count as graduates, even if they graduate from another institution. Nor do students who transfer into the university and eventually graduate. About half of the undergraduates at both universities have transferred in from other institutions, primarily community colleges, officials said."
  

Are these facts likely to stop the drumbeat against colleges that are "failing students," particularly the poorest students that right-wing conservatives are so concerned about? This rhetoric is just more of the NCLB cynical hokum graduated and moved on to college.

It is interesting to hear NCLB advocates like college database entrepeneur, Kevin Carey, of Rotherham's sludge tank now offer this misplaced critique against colleges:

Kevin Carey, the research and policy manager at the Education Sector, a nonprofit research organization, said governors and legislatures could make it clear that the presidents’ continued employment hinged on improving graduation rates. “That’s what businesses do,” he said.

“When you have a system where virtually everyone fails, how is that different from designing a system in which the point is for people to fail?” Mr. Carey added. “No one can look at that and say this is the best we can do.”

No, he is not talking about NCLB, even though the critique fits perfectly. This new round of corporate-inspired madness is looking more like NCLB dumped down another rabbit hole.