Responding to the Federal Department of Education’s Proposal to Rank Teacher Education Programs: “Thoughts on Educating Teachers When Teacher Education Is Under Attack” (Reposted from 12/12/13)

The federal Department of Education is proposing a set of regulations for teacher education programs. There is a 60-day period 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 will argue in my upcoming posts.

Over the next five weeks or so, I am going to repost 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.

Here is the first.

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Smack in the middle of the fiery debates about teacher education is the troublesome fact that we lack a fitting and consensual definition of teaching itself. In his blistering 2005 report on teacher education programs, former president of Teachers College, Arthur Levine, noted the “schism [in] teacher education between those who believe teaching is a profession like law or medicine, requiring a substantial amount of education before an individual can become a practitioner, and those who think teaching is a craft like journalism, which is learned principally on the job.” Levine may well be capturing a significant ideological or rhetorical distinction in the current debates about how to educate teachers, but the distinction illustrates our problem, for teaching has elements of both profession and craft, as Levine defines them—and even that fusion of the two terms doesn’t fully capture a teacher’s work.

            Teaching done well is complex intellectual work, and this is so in the primary grades as well as Advanced Placement physics. Teaching begins with knowledge: of subject matter, of instructional materials and technologies, of cognitive and social development. But it’s not just that teachers know things. Teaching is using knowledge to foster the growth of others. This takes us to the heart of what teaching is, and why defining it primarily as a craft, or a knowledge profession, or any other stock category is inadequate. I’m not sure there is any other work quite like it.

            The teacher sets out to explain what a protein or metaphor is, or how to balance the terms in an algebraic equation, or the sociological dynamics of prejudice, but to do so needs to be thinking about how to explain these things: what illustrations, what analogies, what alternative explanations when the first one fails? This instruction is done not only to convey particular knowledge about metaphors or algebraic equations, but also to get students to understand and think about these topics. This involves hefty cognitive activity, as any parent knows from his or her experiences of explaining things to kids, but the teacher is doing it with a room full of young people—which brings a significant performative dimension to the task.

Thus teaching is a deeply social and emotional activity. You have to know your students and be able to read them quickly, and from that reading make decisions to slow down or speed up, stay with a point or return to it later, connect one student’s comment to another’s. Simultaneously, you are assessing on the fly Susie’s silence, Pedro’s slump, Janelle’s uncharacteristic aggressiveness. Students are, to varying degrees, also learning from each other, learning all kinds of things, from how to carry oneself to how to multiply mixed numbers. How teachers draw on this dynamic interaction varies depending on their personal style, the way they organize their rooms, and so on—but it is an ever-present part of the work they do.

As is the case with any of the helping professions, teaching is value-laden work. Society has a host of expectations about what education should be. And, though prospective teachers may be attracted to the work for lifestyle reasons (schedule, benefits), many want to teach because they are drawn to helping young people grow, or are passionate about a subject, or want to contribute to the creation of a just world. They commit to do this work in institutions, so they have to figure out how to navigate the institution’s demands, balancing their beliefs with institutional strictures. And either in their day-to-day-encounters with students or in their role as institutional beings they will face difficult decisions, ethical conundra, be, at times, pushed to the limit of their psychological and spiritual resources.

So teaching Hamlet or The Bluest Eye, the internal combustion engine, photosynthesis, or the League of Nations involves knowing these topics and bringing them into play in one of the more complex cognitive and social spaces in our culture. I don’t see this representation of teaching in any of the major reports or national debates on teacher education. That is one big reason, I think, why our discussions of teacher quality and teacher evaluation tend to be reductive, and why the assault on teacher education programs—even for those of us who desire big improvements—feels rigid and one-dimensional.

There are a number of ideas in the air about teacher education: what’s wrong with college and university programs, what alternative programs should do, and the qualifications of those entering the teaching force. These ideas come from federal and local governments, from reports and advocacy groups, and from the opinion pages of our major newspapers. Some of these ideas, though they may be well-intentioned, run the risk of reducing teaching to knowledge delivery or technical craft. I want to consider these ideas in this and subsequent posts.

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Balancing Course Work and Practice

            Preparing people to teach, as I just described it, is a tall order, for at its best it requires an effective blend of acquiring knowledge, opportunities to practice what’s learned, and reflection on that practice. Most kinds of complex work in our society—from law enforcement to surgery to fashion design—require this blend and typically begin with some form of classroom-based instruction, though the length of that instruction can vary considerably.

A major source of the criticism education programs have drawn over the years—both from within and outside of its ranks—has to do with the sequencing of the elements of this blend and the emphasis given to each. To be sure, faculty vested interests, institutional inertia, and plain old ineptitude can affect the curriculum—and recent critical reports have focused on these sins—but there are also intellectually legitimate differences of opinion about sequencing and emphasis. (A classic educational question is how much preliminary instruction you provide before setting someone loose on a task, from using a power tool to writing a poem.) There are ethical considerations as well—when is the right time to move a novice out into a real setting, even with supervision? These questions can be found not only in ed schools but also in police academies, medical schools, and fashion programs across the country. The current criticism makes it sound like teacher ed programs are one big static mess, but the fact is that a number of them have been working and reworking their curriculum, trying to get the right balance for their students and their region. I saw this experimenting going on twenty years ago in several small, semi-rural colleges I visited, and I see it today in large universities such as UCLA, where I teach.

            A statistic that you’ll hear in this discussion of coursework and practice is drawn from the Levine report I mentioned earlier. Fifty-eight percent of teacher ed alumni on average reported that their programs prepared them “very” or “moderately” well for the classroom; forty percent of principals thought their teachers were prepared. These are not great numbers, though I do want to say more about such surveys in a later post. But for now, let’s agree that many young teachers could be getting better direct experience with students and the complexities of running a classroom—something alternative programs promise.

            I think, though, we need to be clear-eyed about something: Even when programs provide substantial opportunity for pre-professional practice, the transition to autonomy and full responsibility is difficult, even daunting. Since the medical school is often held up as a model of educating for practice, consider the fact that there is a decent-sized research literature on how hard young physicians find the transition from medical school to their first year of residency. There are common reports of depression, anxiety, feeling overwhelmed, and struggles to convert what one has learned into practice. And unlike teachers, the residents have on-call support from team members and supervising physicians. It is also the case—thinking back to those unsatisfied principals—that supervising physicians frequently express dissatisfaction about the preparation of their residents. My point here is not to discount the need for more hands-on classroom experience—not at all—but to urge a little humility about how difficult the transition from student to autonomous professional can be.

            One thing that concerns me about the current debates is a tendency on the part of some advocates for alternative teacher education to downplay or dismiss teacher ed coursework. I certainly don’t want to defend this course work en mass. I went through a teacher education program—an early alternative one—and know how lightweight or irrelevant some courses can be. They certainly don’t reflect the richness of teaching. But we have to be careful to not strip away what the worthwhile courses contain: bodies of knowledge about everything from learning, to culture, to the very definition of what it means to be educated.

It’s not that prospective teachers should master, let’s say, texts by Piaget, Vygotsky, and Jerome Bruner, or commit to memory the results of a long history of experiments on the transfer of training from one domain to another. Rather it’s that studying and discussing and writing about all this, if done well, helps young teachers deepen their understanding of cognition and learning, provides a way to think about the lessons they’ll teach, the assignments they’ll give, the many, many moments when their students will say or do something that vexes them.

            To be sure, prospective and practicing teachers can acquire knowledge about cognition and learning in settings other than formal teacher ed courses, settings closer to and integrated with their work in the classroom. (Though colleges and universities house people who have a command of the educational literature.) Whether in a standard program or an alternative setting, the challenge is to forge substantial connection between—to stick with our example—a tradition of research on learning and helping the young people before you learn. To separate the literature on learning from classrooms is to condemn it to irrelevance. But to minimize the importance of that literature is to minimize the conceptual content of teaching, and we have a troubling, century-old institutional case study in Vocational Education of what can happen when the conceptual and theoretical dimension of work is diminished. Education is reduced to narrow, entry-level job training.

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Determining Effectiveness: Techniques, Best Practices, and Test Scores

            Another criticism of teacher ed programs is that they do not demonstrate the effectiveness of their graduates in improving student achievement—with achievement typically defined as an increase in standardized test scores, currently in reading and math. Many alternative credentialing programs claim that they can or will be able to demonstrate effectiveness in this way.

            There’s a legitimate and important question in this criticism: Is a training institution doing a good job of preparing students for their work and careers? One way teacher ed programs answer this question is through pass rates on licensing exams. Some programs also survey their graduates, and some have connections with their districts or target schools and receive formal or informal feedback from them. But overall, teacher ed programs could do a much better job of getting information on their graduates—and some people within teacher ed have long been calling for better data collection. In a mild defense of teacher ed, let me note that building better data systems and mechanisms for more detailed feedback is not easy and is expensive, especially for large metropolitan programs whose graduates might disperse far and wide. As a point of comparison, most medical schools don’t do any better: They tend to rely on pass rates on licensing exams and satisfaction surveys of their graduates.

            The evaluation mechanism that many critics advocate—judging a program’s effectiveness by the test scores of the students taught by their graduates—seems like a fairly straightforward proposition, but, in fact, presents a host of conceptual and design problems. To be honest, I’m a little surprised that it’s being promoted with such gusto, given recent history. Recall the multiple problems that arose with NCLB’s use of standardized tests to define achievement and determine a school’s or district’s effectiveness, and there are the more recent debates about the technical complications in assessing teacher effectiveness through value-added measures. It bespeaks of either social amnesia or technocratic enchantment that we would rush to a model driven by the standardized test score and, to boot, insert one more complex variable into the chain of efficacy: now we have a putative causal chain that goes from the student test score to the teacher to the teacher’s training institution. Imagine judging business schools by the amount of money their graduates generate for their employers. Consider the variables: There are the individual characteristics and behaviors of the graduates, not only personality traits, but also events that can affect their careers—marriage, family disruption, illness. Then there are all the variables related to the place of employment: the nature of the business, its economic status and organizational health, the relationships among co-workers. As well, social and economic conditions beyond the business affect it, and thus the performance of its employees. As is too often the case with contemporary school reform, what seems simple and straightforward is anything but. Teacher education programs, traditional or alternative, need to adopt models of evaluation that rely on multiple measures and that account for the complex nature of teaching and the varied institutions where teachers work. Otherwise we’ll put in place a strong incentive for teacher ed programs to reduce teaching to test prep.

            There is another significant component to this call for demonstrating effectiveness: Do teacher ed programs instruct prospective teachers in “research-based” teaching techniques and “best practices.” These terms have become part of our reform vocabulary. And, again, who can disagree that we should be passing onto young teachers the best of what we know how to do? The problem is that “research-based” and “best practices” are often defined in narrow ways.

           

            “Research-based” means the demonstration that a particular practice is shown to increase a standardized test score—the gold standard being a randomized control trial in which a treatment group of randomly selected students receives the best practice and a control group does not. Other models of research and study, in the eyes of the more technocratically oriented reformers, are of much less value. But there are other systematic ways that we come to know the truth or legitimacy of something, as is evidenced in pursuits as different as astronomy or moral philosophy. And even if we adopt the critics’ definition of research, we have to contend with the fact that a randomized control trial—or its second cousin, the quasi-experimental design that does not involve random assignment to treatment or control—are elaborate and expensive to conduct. And given the way they work, we might, if we’re lucky, get an effect, but it typically will be a small one (practice x results in a point or two advantage on a standardized test), and it gains statistical significance because of the large numbers of students involved in the study. The further wrinkle is that a second (expensive and elaborate) study might yield different results. So we end up spending a ton of money to get little yield, money that would be better spent helping teachers improve their knowledge of subject matter and various ways to teach it and assess whether students are learning it.

            The other related problem is a tendency in policy and reform documents to present best practices as though they were factory-tested electronics components, applicable off the shelf to a wide range of settings and circumstances. There is a mechanistic and acontextual cast to all this that is at odds with the definition of teaching I offered earlier.

            The best practices approach is also being promulgated in medicine, but with a telling difference. A particular practice is recommended for particular conditions (a certain drug and treatment regimen for type II diabetes, let’s say), but the physician is required to consider the context (the particulars of the patient’s case and his or her life circumstances) and make a judgment as to whether to use or modify the best practice. In education, the focus seems to be on training the teacher to implement the best practice exactly as the developer intended—so we have talk of “fidelity” of implementation. Context and judgment are downplayed.

            It is probably the case that in particular alternative teacher certification programs, the work on the ground is more nuanced and creative than the sense one gets from documents and pronouncements from advocacy groups and talking heads. But I do worry about a policy nexus of test scores, a focus on technique, and a rigid notion of best practices that leads to a definition of teaching and teacher education that is thin on creativity and judgment, human relation and values.

            Recently I visited two adjacent classrooms in a school serving a low-income population. Both teachers were in the middle of a math lesson, and while both teachers were excellent, they couldn’t have been more different, at least on that day. In the first room, the teacher had a series of related problems on the board and was guiding her students through them in systematic fashion. She would present one problem, put her index and middle finger to her lips indicating she wanted the class to say the technical term for an element of the problem, then had the students discuss the problem amongst themselves. After a minute or two, she rang a little bell, and the children looked forward, and she called on them. All the while, she was touching a child on the head or shoulder, checking in on another, connecting something said earlier to a comment made now. Then on to a new problem, a rhythmic flow of activities, the teacher moving like a choral conductor.  

            In the room next door, the teacher had his students sort themselves into groups by the answer they gave to a problem posed in the last class: “Which number is greater, +5 or -5?” He told them to take a few minutes to think of two reasons why they gave that answer. Once in groups, the teacher engaged the students in discussion, asking why they chose the answer they did, asking follow up questions, referring one student to another. At the break, some of the students went to recess still talking about the problem. If the first teacher reminds me of a conductor, this one brings to mind the facilitator of a seminar. Two different approaches, but masterfully executed, caring, thoughtful, intellectually rich. By every sign I could see, the students in both rooms seemed engaged. We need teacher education programs, wherever they are housed, that help people develop into these kinds of teachers.

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Seeing the Invisible Poor

            Following is an interview published in the Fall, 2014 issue of The Hedgehog Review. If you are not familiar with this fine magazine, you might want to give it a look. It comes out of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and bills itself as offering “critical reflections on contemporary culture.”

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The Hedgehog Review: You’ve written very eloquently about the challenges facing people who live and work at the bottom of our socioeconomic ladder, and one of the things you’ve noticed—something you claim is greatly complicating their plight—is how many, if not most, of them are becoming invisible to the rest of society. What do mean by this? How did it happen, and is it getting worse?

Mike Rose: Well, they’re not literally invisible, of course—there are at least forty-five million people in the United States living at or below the poverty line. But they are close to absent from public and political discourse, except as an abstraction—an income category low on the socioeconomic status index—or as a negative generalization: The poor are dependent on the government, the “takers,” a problem. Consider Congressman Paul Ryan’s recent comments about generations of men in the inner city “not even thinking about working.” Neither the abstractions nor the generalizations give us actual people trying to live their lives as best they can.

Because of the various layers of segregation in our society—from work to schools to places of worship—those of us who are relatively socially mobile have few opportunities to live and work closely with people who are at the bottom of the income ladder. We don’t know them. And because we don’t know their values and aspirations, the particulars of their daily decisions, and the economic and psychological boundaries within which those decisions are made, the poor easily become psychologically one-dimensional—intellectually, emotionally, and volitionally simplified, not quite like us.

THR: Despite the growing gulf between the poor and “the rest,” you’ve been pretty successful in staying in touch with what might be called the invisible class. What’s given you this access, this connection?

MR: Well, I wouldn’t want to claim any exceptional access or broad-scale knowledge. There are many poor communities—most, really—that I don’t know much about at all. I grew up poor—my father was chronically ill and my mother worked long hours as a waitress—so I have a personal, intimate sense of economic hardship and insecurity. And a significant amount of work I’ve done over the years, both my own teaching and mentoring and my research, has involved people who are behind the economic eight ball. That work has taught me a lot. It has also enabled me to develop some relationships in which people have opened up parts of their lives to me. And I suspect the knowledge I gained from my family’s own difficulties helps foster those relationships.

THR: How do we almost reflexively diminish the capacities, ambition, imagination, and determination of the poor—and thereby add to the distance that separates the well-off from the less well-off?

MR: It’s a complicated business, to be sure, but I think our separation, our increasing economic segregation contributes to the diminishment. With segregation comes ignorance and apprehension. Part of the way we establish our shared humanity is by what we imagine goes on inside the head and the heart of others. If we are separated from a group not only physically but psychologically, then it becomes all the easier to attribute to them motives, beliefs, thoughts—an entire interior life—that might be deeply inaccurate and inadequate. And it’s from those attributions we develop both our personal and public-policy responses to poverty.

THR: How do we even begin to break down barriers, or bridge the gulf, between the poor and the rest of society?

MR: There are so many structural impediments, from residential patterns that have developed partly out of housing policy to income inequality and the shredding of the social safety net. So, for starters, if we want to address the isolation I’m talking about, we need to do things that simply help poor people live a decent life: a higher minimum wage, tax credits, jobs programs, childcare, housing and transportation assistance. It’s hard to participate in society when you’re scrambling for your next meal or being booted out of your apartment. I’m not optimistic, given the focus on austerity and the terribly ungenerous cast to so many public policy deliberations.

We also need opportunities for people to develop and grow: educational and cultural programs, apprenticeships and job training, civic organizations. I’m thinking about places or occasions where poor people become more fully present actors on the societal stage, where their thoughts and feelings play out in ways that can have a positive effect on the direction of their lives. Social movements for civil rights or economic justice provide such a space. Cultural projects do as well—in churches and community centers, women’s shelters, prison art programs. And, in my experience, second-chance educational programs and institutions—literacy centers, adult schools, many community colleges—can also play this role.

But these are complex institutions. Given the intricate relation in our country among social class, educational resources, and academic achievement, the adult school and community college reflect educational inequality and can contribute to it. A lot of students never complete a certificate or degree. Some institutions do better than others with similar populations, so the quality of governance, services, and teaching matters. These institutions are among the few places in mainstream society where poor people can become more publicly visible and display to their advantage multiple dimensions of their lives.

THR: Can you tell us how some of your own experiences in these places led to new understandings of the poor and their various plights?

MR: Let me give you a recent one. I spent several years studying a community college that serves one of the poorest populations in Southern California. Many of the students are older, coming back to school once their children are grown, or after a series of dead-end jobs, or having spent time in prison. Those coming straight from high school typically went to underperforming schools. Most students have to take remedial English or math. The majority of students are on financial aid and are burdened with health, housing, or transportation problems. They’ve got a lot on their shoulders.

One of the things that struck me—and it happened in stages, as I saw one example, then another, then another—was the powerful desire being at the college unleashed in these students. Parents wanted to improve their economic prospects and do better by their kids. People who hadn’t been in a classroom in decades spoke passionately about wanting to learn math this time or to become better readers and writers. Burly, trash-talking guys in a welding class were complimenting each other on welds being “beautiful” or “pretty,” and, in their math class, were arguing about the correct solution to a problem. From physics to fashion design, students were beginning to redefine themselves, to envision a future of possibility. As one young woman said, “You will grow in a way that you never in your mind would imagine.”

Of course, not all students at the college are affected so powerfully, and too many leave out of discouragement or because of financial burdens. But to witness repeatedly the mental vitality, the hope, the redefining of one’s sense of self, makes you realize what is possible when the conditions are right.

THR: So, in addition to its practical economic value, college for these students yields other benefits as well?

MR: Absolutely. Even for the most occupationally oriented students. One of the things that concerns me about current education policy aimed at students like these is its strict economic focus. We need to get more people into college to enhance their economic prospects and to secure the nation’s economic future. Fine and true enough. The students want an economic boost, too. As one guy said bluntly in an orientation session, “I’m here because I don’t want to work a crappy job all my life.”

But so much else typically happens along the way. Students comment on how good it feels to learn new things, or to overcome old insecurities, or to have new intellectual and social as well as occupational avenues open up to them. If we don’t acknowledge and try to foster this rich dimension of their education, then we’re just repeating a long and troubling tendency in American education policy. Working-class students get a strictly functional education, heavy on job training and thin on everything else.

THR: Could you say something about another important, but often overlooked, institution that is important to people with relatively few resources? I mean the public library.

MR: When I was visiting public schools in small rural communities, I was struck by the role played by the local library. In addition to housing books and some films and music, it’s an information resource, a meeting place, an Internet outlet. And in places where the population is sparse and widely distributed, the traveling library is a godsend. I spent a week at a one-room schoolhouse in Montana’s Beaverhead National Forest , and there was a tiny library attached to the school, the only library around. It was the place kids got their books—and there were several intense readers in the class of fifteen, always hunched over a book. What a resource!

Rural or urban, libraries are a national treasure, and it’s easy in these days of connectivity and constantly streaming media to forget how important they are to so many who can’t afford all the technological bells and whistles. It’s shocking, I think, that libraries are being forced to reduce hours and staff and close local branches. And this is at a time when two-thirds of the nation’s libraries provide the only free Internet access in their communities—and when government and employment information and forms are increasingly going online.

THR: There’ve been many debates over the touchy subject of intelligence, what it is, how we measure it, and how such conceptions and measurements affect life chances and opportunities.  How does what you call “a reductive view of intelligence” stand in the way of appreciating the inner lives of individuals who are often dismissed as society’s less able or less gifted—and who are undercompensated as a result?

MR: As a country, we seem to be obsessed with intelligence, with measuring it, with boosting our kids’ intelligence through products like Baby Einstein, with getting “smarter” workers into the new “smart” workplace. But the odd thing is that we tend to rely on a fairly narrow way of determining intelligence: We identify it with a score on a standard intelligence test and with the traditional school-based task.

If one does well on an intelligence test or in school, that clearly indicates some kind of cognitive competence. But if one doesn’t do well—and, historically, poor performers include many low-income people—then the meaning of the score is much less clear. To do well tells us something about intelligence—and, usually, schooling—but not to do well provides much less information about intellectual capacity… though that poor performance may speak volumes about educational opportunity.

What struck me as I did the research for The Mind at Work was the number of instances of reasoning, of problem solving, of learning and applying that learning, that fell outside what gets assessed in an intelligence test or the traditional school curriculum. There is the waitress at rush hour prioritizing on the fly a number of demands from customers, the kitchen, and the manager. And the plumber diagnosing a problem by feeling with his hands the pipes he can’t see behind an old wall. And the hair stylist figuring out the style a customer wants through talk and gesture. This kind of brainwork surrounds us, yet might not be considered when we talk about intelligence.

THR: You’ve talked about some of the ways the lives of the poor are made harder by their growing “invisibility,” but how is the rest of society, including the better off, made worse—and even impoverished—by the “disappearance of the poor”?

MR: Poverty represents a society’s moral and civic failure. It also constricts our collective intelligence and creativity as so many people’s potential is squelched. Thank goodness the notion of an “opportunity gap” is finally making its way into public discussion. That gap hurts all of us.

One more thing. The marginalization poverty begets keeps from the mainstream entire categories of experience and points of view that can enrich our culture and the way we understand and try to solve a whole range of problems. I don’t want to romanticize the kinds of students I spent time with at that community college or claim that as a group they have superior gifts or insights. But some of them, because of their backgrounds, ask different kinds of questions, draw on fresh illustrations, come at problems in unusual ways. Nurturing that kind of intellectual and social diversity benefits us all.

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