Institutional
inertia is a well-known phenomenon. Here are some clues to understanding why
educational institutions so often give the impression of being moribund, and why
improvements and changes for the better are so difficult to achieve. Much talk
and little action is the common pattern. While rosy expectations of great things
to come are discussed, the methods used don’t change, and so great things do not
(usually) eventuate. (“if you always do what you’ve
always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”) Steiner here outlines the ideological
bias that stifles critical thinking and prevents much needed reforms from even
being discussed. Parents may need to do a crash course in educational theory for
themselves if they are to act to help their children. This web site is a start.
They could usefully follow up with what Chicago parents have put together to
self-educate themselves, by reading up on the IllinoisLoop.com site. But do not think you can currently
obtain useful answers from the present establishment. And do realize that
teacher quality is a vital key to the educational attainments of children and
students. Moreover, campus faculties of education charged with the training of
teachers are an absolutely central institutionalized brick wall upon which you
should resist the temptation to bang your head (Read Ravitch and Hirsch
instead.) GS
The New York
Sun, May 27, 2004, Editorial & Opinion, p.8
David
M. Steiner asks if current progressive education policies best serve our
children
David
M. Steiner Mr. Steiner is the chairman of the Department of Administration,
Training, and Policy Studies at the School of Education, Boston University
Are
you forever grateful to that teacher who stood out from the rest? Your gratitude
is well founded: Research confirms what common sense tells us: that even a
single talented teacher can make a profound difference.
Small
classes, modern facilities, and equipment, and all the other things we look for
in a school, have much less effect on student achievement than the quality of
the teachers. Even poverty becomes less important when good teachers are placed
in the classrooms of disadvantaged students.
What
distinguishes a good teacher? Here, too, research confirms common sense.
Teachers who are smart, highly literate, and know their subject well have the
greatest effect on the achievement of their students.
Yet
we all have known teachers who had all of these qualities, but were dull and
uninspiring in the classroom. We know, too, that our public schools, especially
those in the inner city, pose particular challenges to teachers.
Imagine
yourself standing in front of a classroom: two-thirds of your students do not
speak English as a first language; half come from homes with a single parent
struggling to make ends meet; over the course of the year, there is a steady
stream of students departing your class and joining it. You know your subject,
but can you teach it?
This
is where our nation’s 1,400 schools of education enter the picture. Their role
is to provide the link between knowing your subject and teaching it effectively.
At the undergraduate and/or the graduate level, these schools offer a sequence
of courses that has been approved by the state as the route to a teaching
certificate. While there are other paths to teaching (“alternative
certification”), the great majority of public school teachers are prepared for
the classroom in a school or department of education.
What
are students taught in these education programs? Surprisingly, almost nobody in
the last 20 years has examined the coursework that education schools, as well as
states, require as a preparation for teaching. Doing so is not easy: Some
schools put their syllabi on the Web, some do not. Many have extremely complex
programs — determining what students are required to take as part of their
professional preparation often requires considerable detective work.
Nevertheless,with the help of my research assistant, Susan Rozen, I decided to
try.
We
reviewed syllabi in 16 schools of education, 14 of which were ranked by U.S.
News and World Report in the top 30 in the nation. We looked at the sequence of
courses required in each school for the initial teaching license, only reporting
the results when we were able to obtain the syllabi for all of these courses.
By
analyzing the required readings, the assignments, and the instructors’ stated
intentions for their courses, we were able to offer a first portrait of what
future teachers are studying in schools of education. Our work has been
published in “A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom?”(Harvard Education Press).
By
noting what readings were commonly required and what were generally absent, and
through an analysis of the requirements for the student-teaching experience, we
raised questions about the rigor, the ideological balance, and the thoroughness
of these programs.
A
brief explanation: There is a deep division among those who engage in and write
about teacher preparation. One school of thought, represented by such figures as
Eric Donald Hirsch Jr. and Diane Ravitch, argues that teachers should focus on
the basics.
Like
piano teachers who stress the discipline of scales and finger technique before
encouraging deeper interpretive performance of demanding music, Mr. Hirsch and
Ms. Ravitch argue that the best education — especially for the least advantaged
— requires direct teaching of the three R’s and the other elements of cultural
literacy (to borrow Mr. Hirsch’s term).The attainment of such knowledge and
skills should then be assessed through state tests.
By
contrast, another school of thought stresses what is called “constructivism” and
“progressivism.” Broadly speaking, constructivism is the view (drawn from the
work of John Dewey and Jean Piaget) that the teacher should not be a “sage on
the stage” but a “guide on the side” encouraging children to discover and create
according to their natural impulses. Progressivism is the idea that teachers
should focus on the particular voices and experiences of repressed minorities,
tailoring instruction accordingly.
In
educational theory today, these two ideas are often fused into one view —
constructivist-progressive — that is opposed to high-stakes testing and
state-mandated, standardized school curricula.
Given
the divide between “back to basics” and the “constructivist-progressive” models,
one would expect education schools to expose students to both points of view.
Our research (which covered 165 syllabi of required courses in the foundations
of education, the teaching of reading, and teaching methodology) strongly
suggested, however, that at many of our highest ranked schools of education, the
constructivist-progressivist arguments are being taught to the almost complete
exclusion of the other, direct instruction model.
We
found that texts by Mr.Hirsch and Ms. Ravitch and other likeminded authors were
required readings in only one or two compulsory courses in all of those we
examined. Yet in the majority of programs that required any philosophy of
education, education policy, or educational psychology, readings from John
Dewey, Henry Giroux, or Howard Gardner were prominently featured.
We
also found noted problems in the courses where students gain teaching
experience. Only three out of 59 such courses we reviewed, in 11 different
schools, used audio or video recordings of students’ practice teaching.
Moreover, schools of education generally use adjunct appointees, not regular
faculty, to supervise and evaluate student-teachers.
Finally,
we found very little evidence in any of the programs we reviewed that teachers
were being prepared to teach in a high-stakes testing environment.
A
first study is never definitive, and the very difficulty of getting the relevant
data should provoke reasoned discussion about our research. Naively perhaps, we
were not prepared for the outright denunciation of our work by education
faculty. Some professors of education argued that course syllabi should not be
taken seriously — to which our response is to wonder whether they say as much to
their students when they hand out syllabi at the start of a semester. Others
said our standards for reviewing required readings were personal and political.
Our judgment that future teachers should be exposed to both sides of the major
educational debate is, however, no more personal or political than the practice
of restricting that exposure to only one viewpoint. Most strikingly, however,
has been the reluctance — to date — of our critics to offer an affirmative
defense of what they teach future teachers.
If
the courses we analyzed are typical of those required at the great majority of
schools of education, we confront a paradox. At the same time as states are
putting in place high-stakes testing and accountability regimes for students and
schools, they are authorizing teacher-preparation programs that teach distrust
and even opposition to this same regime.
While
it is an open question whether the preparation of teachers should be governed by
prevailing national and state education policy, is it right that state mandated
programs teach largely criticism of that policy? It is hard to see how such an
incoherent approach best prepares teachers to help our children succeed in
school.