Et Tu, Arne?

Both educators and politicians have been bashing schools of education for the past couple of decades, complaining that ed schools are not doing an effective job of preparing new teachers for the classroom. We have had innumerable reports detailing what is wrong with teacher training, despite serious and continuing efforts to remedy the problem. Now Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has entered the fray with a couple of attention-getting speeches critical of colleges of education.

Two weeks ago at the University of Virginia he called ed schools “the neglected stepchild” of higher education, as Kelly Field reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Then he spoke Thursday at Columbia University, moderating his tone a bit and citing some positive examples of good work by universities in training teachers. Nevertheless, he accused universities of using their teachers colleges as “cash cows” and attacked states for setting the bar too low for certifying teacher training programs and licensing teachers. His position is that new teachers “need the knowledge and skill to prepare students for success in the global economy.” Since “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 21^st century classroom,” our “university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change — not evolutionary tinkering.”  Welcome to the bash, Arne.

What do we need to do?  Secretary Duncan clearly thinks that the primary task is “to prepare today’s children to compete in the global economy.” To that end, the teachers will need to “master the content of the subjects they teach” and have “well-supported field-based experiences” throughout their teacher training. The goal is to focus on “student achievement.” Of course. Now , if we all agreed on what the content and measure of “student achievement” were, the task would be straightforward. But we do not, any more than we agree that “competition in the global economy” is the be-all and end-all of K-12 education. Arne Duncan attended John Dewey’s Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, where I doubt the term “global economy” was ever uttered in the teacher’s lounge. At the Lab School he attended the teachers were more interested in straightforward content mastery as a way than in workforce training. Though of course they were doing a fine job of training a workforce. 

Thoughtful educators are generally doubtful that university based schools of education are doing the best we can do. Alas, most of the arts and sciences professoriate looks down upon our colleagues in the schools of education — and our undergraduate students know that we do. There have of course been numerous foundation and federally funded attempts to induce arts and science faculty to work more closely with professors of education. When I taught at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s I was part of such a program, aimed at “the training of teacher trainers” (TTT). Later I worked on a Carnegie Corporation effort called Project 30, a network created to bring teachers of disciplinary knowledge into collaboration with educations colleges to improve the content mastery of student teachers. Each of these efforts had some short-term effect, but they were not transformative. The underlying problems persist — and they are exacerbated by the fact that too few of the best undergraduates are drawn to teacher training. Until we make the profession of teaching more attractive to elite students, we simply cannot succeed, no matter how we improve ed school quality.

My own strong feeling is that our greatest need is to reconceptualize the role of the schoolteacher in such a way as to make clear that society fully values them as educators and will reward them as such. Telling them that they must “race to the top” is a terrible first step in meeting that challenge. And in any case the federal government is unlikely to be the herald of the revolution that the Secretary is advocating. It is the universities that must convince themselves that teaching training is central to their mission of educating a democratic citizenry. It’s the old Pogo problem — we have met the enemy and he is us.