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October 22, 2009
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Ed school accountability
Our ed schools are terrible. Even the folks who run them can and do admit that, when pressed. And to its credit, the Obama administration is calling them out. Arne Duncan is speaking at Columbia Teachers College today--and Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews says his talk "goes further than any other I can remember from an education secretary in ripping into the failure of education schools to ready teachers for the challenges of the day, particularly the demand for academic growth in all students."
Excerpts:
"[B]y almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.""For decades, schools of education have been renowned for being cash cows for universities. The large enrollment in education schools and their relatively low overhead have made them profit-centers. But many universities have diverted those profits to more prestigious but under-enrolled graduate departments like physics--while doing little to invest in rigorous educational research and well-run clinical training."
"Now the fact is that states, districts, and the federal government are also culpable for the persistence of weak teacher preparation programs. Most states routinely approve teacher education programs, and licensing exams typically measure basic skills and subject matter knowledge with paper-and-pencil tests without any real-world assessment of classroom readiness. Local mentoring programs for new teachers are poorly funded and often poorly organized at the district level."
"Our best programs are coherent, up-to-date, research-based, and provide students with subject mastery. They have a strong and substantial field-based program in local public schools that drives much of the course work in classroom management and student learning and prepares students to teach diverse pupils in high-needs settings. And these programs have a shared vision of what constitutes good teaching and best practices--including a single--minded focus on improving student learning and using data to inform instruction."
It's a good start. Something else I'd like to see--ed schools losing some of their gatekeeping monopoly for who can teach in public schools. There are lots of people out there who could bring an awful lot to a K-12 classroom, but aren't about to sink a couple of years and thousands of dollars into a credentialing process that is in many ways a waste of time for them--retired people come to mind, as do ex-academics, who have PhDs and lots of teaching experience but no teaching credential. The credentialing process, it should also be noted, has abused its prerogatives very badly in recent years--just read the horror stories surrounding how "dispositions" evaluation led the accreditor NCATE and a number of schools to impose unconstitutional ideological litmus tests on prospective teachers.
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Comments:
The "dispositions" political litmus tests were scandalous, and it was great that they were called out. However, I don't believe the ideologues are going to go away anytime soon -- the thought policing will go on through some other means.
Unfortunately, Ed schools are often the worst on any given campus when judged on the basis of student ability and academic rigor, and many are entire colleges, with numerous p.c. fiefdoms such as teacher education, educational leadership, higher ed, and so on. How to solve the problem? I would shrink these colleges into departments, require students to also major in subject areas such as English, Math or a foreign language, and have the department offer the necessary methodology courses and the student teaching experience students will need to teach and manage classrooms successfully.
Erin,
I wonder if you have seen this article.
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_hirsch.html
I'd rather be teaching high school students right now.
Instead I'm teaching college students because I absolutely refuse to submit months of my life to being "taught" how to teach by someone who is so far my intellectual inferior that it's difficult for me to take them seriously as a human being, much less as an instructor or an authority.
Ah, Pride. The best sin.
Grimwort - Look into private high schools. They will love your background, and it will be a plus that you haven't been stamped out by an ed school. There are some really marvelous schools out there. And there are excellent placement services -- Carney Sandoe, Southern Teachers Association, ERG (I'm not sure if they are still alive, but they were the best that I worked with). It's surprisingly easy to do a job search for private teaching jobs.
The legendary physicist Richard Feynman had a great take on the ed schools. The following from a commencement speech in 1973. He's been talking about historical superstitions and comparing them to current superstitions.
"I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading
methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into."
That was more than 35 years ago and the test scores still haven't gone up. Maybe it's time to try something different. Padlocking the ed schools would be a start.
