This is the third and last of reflections
on teacher education programs. It appeared in Valerie Strauss's "Answer
Sheet" column in The Washington Post on January 13, 2014.
A number of people provided information
and advice for this series, particularly with the more technical aspects of the
analysis. Thanks to Tina Christie, Lisa Dillman, Yrjo Engestrom, Megan Franke,
Kris Gutierrez, Felipe Martinez, Ted Mitchell, Aaron Pallas, Jody Prisliac,
Rema Reynolds, Glory Tobiason, Noreen Webb, and LuAnn Wilkerson.
***
College and university-based teacher
education programs vary considerably by size, region, student body, nature and
focus of curriculum, talent of instructional staff, status within home
institution, balance of coursework and practice, relation with local district,
and more. Some are excellent, some are good and experimenting with ways to get
better, some are weak in some respects but decent in others, some are marginal
and poorly run. The language of the current criticism of teacher ed, at least
the most public language, doesn’t allow for this variability. Nor does the
dismissive rhetorical stance of the most vocal critics, the tone and attitude
running through their language. The bottom-line message: Teacher education is a
disaster.
I understand the use of heated
language to get the public’s and policy makers’ attention; in that regard it is
rhetorically effective. And I can also understand—and certainly have felt—the
exasperation with the slow pace of change that can lead to such language. But,
as I’ve argued before about the rhetoric of school reform generally, a sweeping
language of failure narrows the understanding we have of a problem and leads to
solutions that create problems of their own.
Let me provide examples from the two
reports I’ve cited in my previous posts.
***
The Language and Rhetorical Frame of the
Reports
The 2005 report by Arthur Levine, Educating
School Teachers, provides an example of the way an amped-up language of
failure misrepresents the current state of teacher education. In the preface to
the full report, Levine writes that though he was recently the president of
Columbia University’s Teachers’ College, Educating School Teachers is
not a “defense” of teacher ed programs, nor is it the “attack” that critics
hoped for: “The aim is to let the data speak for themselves and to allow the
chips to fall where they may.” This is an admirable position, but the
rhetorical frame and language Levine chooses undercut his goal. Here is a
sampling of the section titles: “The Pursuit of Irrelevance,” “Inadequate
Preparation,” “A Curriculum in Disarray,” “A Disconnected Faculty.” Sounds
awful, right?
When you read these sections,
however, what you often find is that the institutional, demographic, and survey
data Levine draws on reveals the kinds of negative findings that would support
the language of failure about 30 to 50 percent of the time. The other 50 to 70
percent of the data get much less attention and analysis. In a nine-paragraph subsection
of “A Disconnected Faculty,” for example, there is one sentence that quotes a
positive comment about teacher ed faculty’s connection to the schools, and at
the end of the discussion a brief mention of the four model programs described
in the conclusion of the report. Yet the survey data presented in the subsection
reveals that 30 to 45 percent of teacher ed alumni agree that “faculty are not
sufficiently involved with local schools.” The other 55 to 70 percent of more
positive alumni responses and comments are barely acknowledged. The Executive
Summary, which is the document all but the most thorough journalists read—if
anything beyond the press release is read at all—makes no mention of the
distribution of the data.
Arthur Levine is a major figure in
higher education scholarship and policy—I’ve admired and used his research on
the history of the undergraduate curriculum—so one wonders what is going on
with this reporting of data. I don’t know Dr. Levine, so this is conjecture,
but I suspect that he set out to grab the attention of his colleagues
nationwide and jolt them into action. Though he recommends closing down a
number of teacher ed programs, he is not writing a brief for alternative
credentialing programs “which offer far less preparation prior to entering a
classroom.” Educating School Teachers is a jeremiad, an angry cry to
fellow higher education scholars and administrators to change in order to
thrive. Unfortunately, the rhetorical purpose of the report, I think, leads to,
almost commits one to, a one-sided representation of data, and it ends up
providing powerful ammunition for those who have goals quite different from
Levine’s. As we’ve seen in K-12 policy, the language of failure takes on a life
of its own.
There is no need to speculate about
the stance of Kate Walsh, the president of the National Council for Teacher
Quality, for since her days as a senior policy analyst at the Abell Foundation
in Baltimore, she has been a fierce critic of teacher education and an advocate
for alternative credentialing programs. (Consider the title of a report she
wrote in 2001: Teacher Certification Reconsidered: Stumbling for Quality.)
If Arthur Levine’s report is a jeremiad, NCTQ’s is a polemic that in a
rhetorically effective way draws on the conventions of the research report.
Much has been written about the
problems with this report, particularly about the significant limitations of
its analysis, built primarily on one kind of information: syllabi, course
descriptions, and other program materials. Because of NCTQ’s well-known animus
toward teacher ed programs, only a small number of programs willfully complied
with requests for this information, so the Center filed open-records requests, litigated
where it could, searched the Internet, queried students and districts, and so
on—setting up a contentious dynamic that suffuses Teacher Prep Review.
At several points, the authors appeal directly to readers to pressure their
institutions to comply with NCTQ. The gloves are off.
The authors of Teacher Prep
Review make the case for the legitimacy of their analysis through a
language of science. They stress the rigor of their procedures, the many steps
involved, the use of a technical panel and an audit panel—and the report is
thick with tables and charts, further communicating technical sophistication.
But as I’ve argued in previous posts in this series, a study can be technically
sound but limited. Some ed school administrators have complained that they have
informed NCTQ about errors in the Center’s analysis, but to no avail. Still,
let’s assume that the analysts at NCTQ were methodical and detailed in their
examination of the materials they had. The problem is that what they had
provides a narrow slice of what comprises a teacher’s education. Good science
is good not only at the technical level, but at the conceptual level as
well—and the technical and conceptual deeply intertwine. It is at the
conceptual level—the level of understanding of teaching and teacher education
and how one might study them—that Teacher Prep Review falls short.
Without observing and interviewing
new teachers to get a sense of the fuller scope of their educational
experience, we can’t know what they did or didn’t learn about, to use the
report’s examples, teaching reading or managing a classroom. (Teacher Prep
Review has sidebar quotations—all negative—from five teachers and two
principals. These quotations could be from a survey, but there is no
presentation of the results of that survey, and I could find no mention of it
in the methodology section.) We are dealing here with the basic issue of
epistemology, how we come to know something. A related and fundamental issue is
our assumptions about what the something is. I’ll have more to say about this shortly,
but for now, let me pose a question: Would a reader of Teacher Prep Review—or,
for that matter, the authors of the document—want any entity that matters to
them (their business or professional institution, their church, their kids’
school) evaluated by one criterion only, by one kind of information?
The second conceptual issue to
consider is the fact that the authors have a strong point of view about what
should and shouldn’t be taught in teacher education—and how content should be
taught. In the case of Ms. Walsh, that point of view predates the production of
this report. It is certainly the authors’ right to have a strong perspective,
but it needs to be acknowledged as a potential source of bias, for it influences
their research and the rhetorical frame in which they present that research. Rather
than being an objective report on the current state of teacher education in the
United States, Teacher Prep Review becomes an argument for a particular
kind of teacher education and, de facto, for a particular definition of
teaching.
The authors characterize the entire
field of teacher education as eschewing training and practical advice, and
instead favoring a curriculum oriented toward exploration of novice teachers’
“prejudices…related to race, class, language and culture” and the development
of the “professional identities of teachers.” Though this characterization is
sweeping, the authors note that what they’ve done is find “programs throughout
the country bucking the reigning ethos and actually training their candidates
in crucial skills.” They view the publication of Teacher Prep Review as
a “turning point,” for “the consumers of teacher preparation—aspiring teachers
and districts—at last have the information they need to choose what programs to
patronize. Collectively, their choices will shift the market toward programs
that make training a priority.”
As I’ve been writing throughout this
series, my intention is not to defend traditional teacher ed programs as a
whole. Some of the issues raised by NCTQ—early reading, classroom management,
preparation for Common Core Standards—are significant ones, and it is surely
the case that some programs do better with them than others. But what concerns me
is the flawed model, the incomplete template being offered as to how we might
explore these issues. Of equal concern is the cloaking of ideology in the
objectivist language of science.
There is an important passage toward
the end of the methodology section of Teacher Prep Review where the
authors list the limitations of their work: “It is not the intention of Teacher
Prep Review to substitute for high-quality, on-the-ground inspections as
one might expect an accrediting body or government authority to perform…We
restrict our evaluation to only program elements that can be reliably and
validly assessed by readily obtained program documents.” This is an accurate
statement of limitations that the authors violate on a grand scale, for they
use their self-confessed limited analysis to condemn hundreds of programs—with
the stated intention of driving them out of business. Hundreds of other
programs are labeled “weak,” and “someone who wants to become a teacher would
be better off investing time and tuition dollars elsewhere.” Rather than a
restricted evaluation, Teacher Prep Review becomes an activist polemic.
***
The Potential Effect on Teaching
I want to bring these posts on
teacher education to a close by returning to my initial discussion of teaching,
what it is, and how it might be affected by the current criticisms of and
proposals for teacher ed.
Though I am concerned about the
possible negative consequences of the way the criticism is delivered by the
high-profile critics, I want to make clear that they raise some important
issues for the education of teachers in traditional or alternative programs
and, therefore, for the students these teachers will encounter. It should be
noted that people within ed schools have been raising these issues as well.
Does a particular program offer courses that are relevant to the work novice
teachers will soon be doing? Does that program strike the right balance between
coursework and work in the field, and are the two connected in a generative
way? And does the program have a systematic way to follow up on its graduates
and incorporate what it finds back into its course of study? The National
Academy of Education recently released a report, Evaluation of Teacher
Preparation Programs, that provides detailed guidelines on conducting an
evaluation that could answer these and other relevant questions.
One could grant my concerns about
the critics but argue that they (and the alternative programs some of them
lead) provide a necessary counterweight to the lapses or excesses of
traditional teacher education. Fair enough. My worry though is that the
correction they provide takes us too far in a reverse direction, replicating a
troubling pattern in American education of pendulum swings from one pole to its
opposite. One potential swing that I address in a previous post is the emphasis
on practice with a discounting of coursework in the history and philosophy of
education, theories of learning and child development, and the like.
A variation of this polar swing is a
focus on teaching skills and techniques over more philosophical and
social-cultural topics. This tendency is illustrated in Doug Lemov’s Teach
Like a Champion, a distillation of forty-nine techniques, from bringing a
classroom to order, to asking questions, to correcting bad behavior. Teach
Like a Champion is endorsed by some of the major players in the alternative
credentialing movement, and Lemov was a member of the National Council on
Teacher Quality’s technical panel. The book’s value lies in the detail with
which Lemov describes the techniques, down to counting the seconds saved by
phrasing a question one way rather than another. Though I would want to modify
some of the techniques and augment the behavior management approach that
informs them, I think Teach Like a Champion is a useful and
thought-provoking taxonomy (Lemov’s word) of pedagogical techniques for
classroom practice. The problem with the book to my mind is that it reaches
beyond its taxonomy to become a philosophical and definitional statement. Lemov
ends up equating good teaching with technique. “Artists, athletes, musicians,
surgeons…achieve greatness only by their attention to the details of their
technique…This focus on technique and its constant refinement is also the path
to excellence for teachers.” Furthermore, the techniques, Lemov claims, have a
direct causal link to achievement and “put students on the path to college.”
Techniques are vitally important,
but don’t work in isolation. The sequencing of questions, for example, is a
crucial skill, but is dependent on the teacher’s knowledge of the material
being taught and knowledge of how children typically respond to it, the kinds
of misconceptions and errors they make, the alternative explanations,
illustrations, metaphors and analogies that might help them. A teacher can’t
ask meaningful questions for long without this kind of knowledge. In equal
measure, the effectiveness of techniques, particularly for classroom
management, will be influenced by students’ sense of a teacher’s concern for
them and understanding of them. The touchstone of school reform for over a
decade has been the need for high expectations for all students. If we’re serious
about addressing “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” then there has to be
room in teacher education for novice teachers to investigate and reflect on the
limiting beliefs about cognition and ability that they, that all of us, inhale
in the cultural air we breathe.
To be sure, the quality of teacher
ed courses on the sociology of schooling, on culture, on linguistic diversity,
and the like vary widely, from the imaginative and dynamic to the routine and
disconnected. What I am arguing for is the place in teacher preparation,
traditional or alternative, for sociological and cultural topics and for the
occasion for philosophical reflection on this complex value-laden work new
teachers are undertaking. To teach well requires, among other skills and bodies
of knowledge, the intellectual tools to understand who your students are, where
they live, the history that precedes them and shapes them. Put another way,
will we help teachers develop the acumen to analyze what might be going on when
their techniques, no matter how refined, don’t work?
Kate Walsh of NCTQ and like-minded
critics pose an either/or question: Would parents rather beginning teachers
have a class in teaching skills or classroom management or take a class on
sociological or cultural topics? Imagine a different question in similar form:
Would you rather have your child in a classroom that is well-managed or a
classroom that conveys an understanding of your child and that fosters his or
her engagement in learning? My guess is that most parents of any demographic
category would say they want all these qualities, for in the good classroom all
are interrelated.
There is one more issue that emerges
in the teacher ed debates that is worrisome: the relation of poverty to
academic achievement. Let me again go to Teach Like a Champion for an
illustration. In the introduction, Lemov reflects on the teachers he’s observed
to develop the taxonomy of techniques: “These outstanding teachers routinely do
what a thousand hand-wringing social programs have found impossible: close the
achievement gap between rich and poor, transform students at risk of failure
into achievers and believers, and rewrite the equation of opportunity.” The
passage illustrates a tendency among some teacher ed critics that we see in
larger school reform debates: to pose schooling as the solution to poverty, the intervention that will work where
other interventions fail. Here again we have the reinscribing of a binary:
school versus social programs. (There is also an affirmation of technocratic
solutions—in this case, technique-driven teaching—to social problems.)
About fifteen pages later, however,
Lemov offers a moving anecdote that serves as a reminder of the ugly staying
power of inequality. He is telling the story of a former student of his, “the
bright and passionate son of a single mother with limited English” who made the
remarkable journey to Williams College. At college, though, the student’s
problems with writing dogged him and were reflected in a professor’s
unfavorable response to a paper he wrote on Zora Neale Hurston. Lemov tells
this story to stress the importance of teaching students standard written
English. But in my eyes, having worked in university programs that serve
students like this one—and having been such a student myself—this story
represents the intractability of inequality, that after the best teaching Lemov
and his colleagues could provide, this young man still needed assistance at
further points along the way. One hopes that Williams had the wisdom to provide
it. The student will also need people who understand what he must be feeling,
the crushing disappointment, possibly anger, and the deep cut to his
confidence. Schools like Lemov’s might be able to affect an achievement gap, the scores on district or state standardized
tests, but not necessarily single-handedly erase the achievement gap, which requires sustained help of many kinds,
including programs that Lemov dismisses as “hand-wringing.”
***
The current incarnation of school
reform has been with us for over a decade, and not only its detractors but its
supporters as well acknowledge its unintended consequences. The recent
criticism of schools of education emerges from the same reform principles and
techniques, and I’ve tried to tease out in my three posts some of the potential
unintended consequences for teaching and teacher education that could result
from this criticism.
There is a boldness to the criticism
and an entrepreneurial can-do spirit to the high-profile alternative
credentialing efforts that is appealing to Americans. The goal is to improve
our schools, close the achievement gap, and restore opportunity and mobility.
Powerful and laudable. But the criticism has flaws in it that should instill in
us a little caution, not to forego improvement of teacher education and develop
new ways to provide it, but rather to help us move forward on surer footing.
The criticism sometimes includes big claims based on hasty cross-cultural or
cross-institutional comparisons, on statistics that are picked out of larger,
more varied data sets, and on causal claims that are not empirically supported.
A language of science (“research based,” “evidence based”) suffuses the
criticism, but, at times, is not warranted by the facts or analytic procedures
underlying the language. Though some of the critics claim to be above ideology,
basic assumptions about learning, motivation, and the goals of education drive
their arguments—assumptions that might well have merit, but need to be clearly
articulated and investigated.
Finally, all I’m asking is that we
be a little more discerning in language and claims and not repeat past mistakes
or stumble into new ones as we educate our next generation of America’s
teachers.
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