Innovator Vol. 38 No. 1 - Fall 07: RE-IMAGINING TEACHER EDUCATION
Return to contents Even as public schools have taken on a host of jobs that once belonged elsewhere – providing meals, caring for students before and after classes, teaching social skills – it seems as if they have been blamed for everything from the country’s global disadvantage in mathematics and science to the spread of colds and runny noses. The only things that have grown faster than the tidal wave of criticism from foundations, politicians, think tanks, and academics are the demand for teachers (in large part due to the profession’s attrition rate) and the height at which the bar has been set for teaching practice. Teachers are now challenged to take full responsibility, to ensure that every child in their classroom learns, or at least performs well on measures of standardized achievement.
Among the prime targets for critique are the places that prepare the teachers who face these challenges: the nation’s 1,206 schools, colleges, and departments of education. Schools and colleges of education are assailed for failing to connect with either the institutions in which they are embedded or the schools their graduates serve, for a lack of coherent and data-based standards for assessing their graduates’ performance, and most damning of all, for producing practitioners who don’t know their subjects well enough and/or don’t know how to do the work of teaching well enough, and who tend to desert the profession in droves.
PROBLEMS APPARENT; SOLUTIONS LESS EVIDENT
“The problems are pretty clear,” says Donald Freeman,
the University of Michigan School of Education’s new director
of teacher education. “People have been naming them for
quite a while.”
The solutions are less clear. While the diagnosis that schooling could be significantly improved is pretty unanimous, there are almost as many remedies proffered as there are critics. Fierce debates rage over what teachers need to know, how best they can come to know it and, in some quarters, whether what they need to know can be taught at all.
Perhaps no other branch of the academy has had to justify its existence as long and as chronically as education. The nation’s first permanent chair in education was established in 1873. By 1915, a majority of colleges provided at least some coursework in the field. Somewhere in between, questions about the field’s value began to be raised. And as recently as 2002, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, a former school superintendent and education school dean, wrote in his annual report that there “was little evidence that education school coursework leads to improved student achievement.”
He recommended that teachers be hired on the basis of their subject matter knowledge and verbal ability; education school course work should be made optional and student teaching should be eliminated as a requirement for new teachers.
Even the existence of the Teach for America corps, comprised of outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools, is an implicit critique of teacher education.
One reason the drumbeat is so loud is a keen sense of what is at stake. As Arthur Levine expressed it in his 2006 report, Educating Teachers, “The quality of tomorrow will be no better than the quality of our teacher force.”
EDUCATION ON THE CHEAP
Ironically, the rhetoric about the crucial role of education in our society is rarely accompanied by a proposal to, say, raise teachers’ salaries. “It’s a little bit shocking how America tries to get away with spending so little on education,” says U-M School of Education Dean Deborah Loewenberg Ball, “when of all public goods, it probably has most to do with growing a better society. We’re costing ourselves a lot by trying to do things on the cheap.”
Which brings us, indirectly, to the problems that better teacher preparation can’t fix: inadequate pay, little opportunity for advancement, low prestige. They are the province of state and local governments, and the communities they reflect. As Dean Ball has said, “Education issues are irreducibly political and bound up in conflicting social purposes and values.”
One result is a crazy quilt of inconsistent and counterproductive state certification standards. Another is that 47 states and the District of Columbia have established alternative certification routes that put teachers in classrooms on the basis of subject matter mastery rather than any demonstrable pedagogical skills.
The certification standards themselves – and, for that matter, program accreditation standards as well – are based on process (classes taken, time spent student teaching, etc.) rather than on results. Admittedly, we are still a long way from linking components of teacher preparation to student outcomes in any meaningful way. Thus, for the most part, novice teachers have not been trained to teach as much as to pass courses, write papers and get grades. As Levine puts it, “Neither the states nor the accreditation process has been able to assure minimum quality standards in teacher education programs.”
AIMING TO REINVENT AT U-M
While it’s understood that teacher training is only part of the question, finding answers that deploy its unique resources and discharge its mission is the raison d’être of the School of Education’s Teacher Education Initiative, a comprehensive collection of coordinated projects aimed at nothing less than reinventing teacher education at the University of Michigan.
“What happens in a lot of schools of education is people talk about teaching but they don’t get really close to the actual work that teachers learn to do,” says Dean Ball. “We have a virtually dysfunctional system of preparing teachers in this country, and schools of education, especially in research universities, really have a responsibility to step up.”
That perspective was a large part of his new job’s appeal, says
Freeman. “It’s very exciting to find a major school of education
that is really focusing on the core activity,” he says, “which is
how do teachers learn to do what they do, and what are the
various supports, interventions, and sources of experience
and knowledge that are going to enable them not just to be
immediately successful but to sustain a professional life.”
As one critic put it, “The challenge facing education schools is not to do a better job at what they are already doing, but to do a fundamentally different job.” It’s a challenge the University of Michigan School of Education is tackling right now.
Story by Jeff Mortimer
