The federal Department of Education is proposing a
set of regulations for teacher education programs. There are about six weeks
left for the public to comment on these proposals. You can read the
Department’s November 25, 2014 press release here.
Some of the proposed regulations are reasonable
(graduates giving feedback to their teacher education programs) and some are
terribly wrongheaded, repeating the disastrous kind of thinking that shaped No
Child Left Behind: for example, teacher ed programs would be evaluated based on
the test scores of the children taught by the programs’ graduates. There are
logical and conceptual problems as well as technical ones with this proposal,
as I argued in Part One of these posts.
I am reposting the last of three pieces I wrote in
late 2013 and early 2014 on teaching and teacher education. They are relevant
to the current discussion of teacher education and to the proposed regulations
from the federal Department of Education.
One note. Since I originally wrote this post, which
contains a critique of the report issued by the National Council on Teacher
Quality, NCTQ has issued a second report, which I have not yet studied closely.
My assessment of the first report still stands.
***
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.
***
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.
You can share this blog post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Reader through the "share" function located at the top left-hand corner of the blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment