http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.17688/news_detail.asp
Can
Education Schools Be Saved?
By John Stone
Posted: Monday, June 9, 2003
SPEECHES
AEI event on education (Washington)
Publication Date: June 9, 2003
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Since the sixties, I have taught educational psychology at 4 universities. I
have been in the College of Education at East Tennessee State University since
the seventies.
ETSU was founded as a normal school in 1911. It now has 12,000 students--800
of which are in the College of Education. It is much like James Madison and
George Mason Universities that are closer here to Washington.
As to whether the schools of education can be reformed, frankly, I am not optimistic.
In my view, they are out of touch with the public. The
training received by most teachers is based on teacher education's vision of
a better world, not on the public's aims.
BTW, my view isn't unique. The same complaint has been voiced by numerous observers,
most recently by the teachers surveyed in Public Agenda's new report: Stand
By Me.
If you are interested in learning more about the opinion of education professors,
there isn't a better source than Public Agenda's Different Drummers (1997).
I suppose that I never fully appreciated the gap between
what professors think and what parents want for their children until my children
went to school.
In the early nineties, our local campus school adopted a number of innovative
practices. It had been an excellent school. There wasn't
any need for change as far as the community was concerned. The vast majority
of parents were opposed. But the changes were installed anyway.
It was an object lesson for me. It showed me why training
founded on the pedagogical enthusiasms of professors is so dangerous:
Teachers are entrusted with future of the country yet they may have been taught
practices based on nothing more than theory and speculation. Parents who cannot
afford private schooling can only hope that the experiment won't go badly.
Public school policies are decided through democratic processes. In theory,
there is fair and open discussion. In fact, parents, school board members, and
the lay public get only one side of the story--the side that school leaders
want them to hear. Almost everything comes from sources that are loyal to the
education community.
This observation spurred me to found the Education Consumers ClearingHouse (www.education-consumers.com)--an
online, subscriber-supported service for parents, policymakers, and taxpayers.
It is founded on the belief education's consumers need facts and expert opinion
that are not compromised by conflicting loyalties and interests.
We are a kind of Consumers Union for the consumers of public education. We
market ourselves to consumers exclusively. We serve the consumer interest unambiguously
and unapologetically.
So, that's my point of view in what I am telling you today.
What the Public Wants
Here's what I mean when I say that the colleges of education are out of touch
with the public. In my view, they have been entrusted with the responsibility
to train teachers in a way that respects the public's aims; but from 30 years
of faculty meetings, I can tell you that when the public's
aims are thought of at all, they are typically viewed as a nuisance.
Education's consumers want a variety of things from the public schools. Their
top priority, however, is that all students will have the knowledge and skills
necessary to get a job or get into college.
Public education is strongly supported precisely because everyone recognizes
that if kids grow up unprepared for college or the workplace, it is bad for
the community and it is devastating for the individual.
Schools have a broader mission than just teaching the basics, but the
basics are the top priority. Failure to teach the basics is considered
unsatisfactory no matter what else a school is said to produce.
What Professors of Education Want
On the surface, education professors agree with the public--but there is a caveat.
For a variety of reasons--many having to do with their desire to promote equity,
diversity, and social justice--professors believe that
students who have memorized facts and gained skills through recitation, drill,
practice, and the like, have been shortchanged.
Education professors contend that students who learn "the basics"
through systematic, step-by-step methods, will lack the ability to integrate
and creatively apply what they have learned. In other words, they will lack
"thinking skills"--skills that the professors say must be taught through
"hands-on" interaction with the real world. Presumably,
they are saving our children from becoming nerds and bookworms.
So instead of urging teachers to teach the basics and then add thinking skills,
education professors tell teachers to use so called "best practice"
teaching, i.e., teaching that blends the basics into student-led, collaborative
learning experiences that are designed to produce thinking skills as an incidental
outcome. Professors urge teachers to be a "guide on the side, not a sage
on the stage."
And there is the nub of the problem. For nearly 100
years, teachers have tried to bring about student achievement by using what
professors call "best practice," and it just hasn't worked.
Except in the cases of students who are unusually well prepared, highly motivated,
and well behaved, it does not produce the knowledge and skills expected
by the public; and it doesn't do so because it is built around a different set
of educational priorities. Students end up with all kinds of gaps and deficiencies
in their education.
Professors are aware of this shortcoming but they reject the idea that their
theory is flawed merely because it fails to produce what the public wants. Instead,
they see the public's aims as the problem. In their view, just
because the public furnishes the children and the money it doesn't mean that
the public is entitled to get the kind of schooling it wants.
They believe that they, not the public, should decide which methods are best.
Sidebar:
If you think I am exaggerating, I urge you to read an article that won the American
Educational Research Association's "Review of Research" award last
year. It discusses what teachers face when trying to use "constructivist"
teaching practices. Here is quote: "Teachers not
only feel pressure from the standards movement, but often feel they must 'tune'
their instruction to expectations from parents and students."
See: Windschitl, Mark (2002). Framing constructivism in practice as the negotiation
of dilemmas: An analysis of the conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political
challenges facing teachers, Review of Educational Research, 72(2), 131-175.
Idealism and Fads
Some of education's most egregious fads have been attempts to make this "best
practice" teaching, work as advertised.
Let me cite two quick examples: The open classroom
and self-esteem movements.
The open classroom concept was designed to enhance the student-led, collaborative
learning. The idea was that multiple teachers, multiple classes, and multiple
subjects would all be taught in one large room. Unlike most fads, it required
a change in school architecture--namely large open-space classrooms. You may
have noticed the round schoolhouses?
Almost immediately, teachers found it unworkable. Disruption
and distraction were nearly continuous.
The cost of correcting the problem was enormous. Prince George's County had
to go back and spend millions on building interior walls. And there is no way
of knowing the human cost in lost student learning.
The movement to boost student self-esteem was premised on the notion that collaborative,
student-led instruction would be more effective if students were made more self-confident,
open-minded, and willing to take risks.
It was supported by research showing that self-esteem is correlated with high
achievement, but it never worked. It turns out that
high achievement promotes positive self-esteem, but boosting self-esteem doesn't
necessarily increase achievement.
These two are among thousands of examples that could be cited, and they perfectly
illustrate why I say that the colleges of education are out of touch with the
pubic.
People no more want their children subjected to experimentation at school than
they do at the hospital; yet over the years, teachers have been trained in thousands
of untested, faddish practices by colleges of education.
What is the point of accredited teacher training and teacher licensure if it
doesn't prevent this sort of thing?
Why Regulation hasn't Worked
Teaching is a massively regulated profession, yet educators
are largely immune from the consequences of faulty practice. There
are few regulatory penalties. Most malpractice suits have been thrown out. And,
most importantly, there are no market consequences
for failure. Schools that do a bad job typically get more money,
not less.
Teachers can be trained and licensed in pedagogical
nonsense and there are no consequences for either the teachers or the professors
who trained them.
Once again, the problem is that unlike medicine, engineering, and most other
professions, there are no market forces to put teeth into the regulatory process.
For example, if a medical school turns out quacks, patients, lawyers, and journalists
will eventually expose the problem; and consumers will flee.
Everyone from medical school faculty, to the licensing and accrediting boards,
to other members of the profession will want something done. By contrast, educational
quackery has been found time and again, and everyone ignores it.
Lay oversight bodies and state education agencies exist
to defend the public's interest but they rarely investigate the causes of educational
failure. Instead, they typically seek help from the very agencies that misadvised
them in the past.
Oversight boards have a changing membership, and they rely on professional staff
that have a revolving door relationship with the schools and colleges of education.
Any educator working for a board or a state agency knows that he
or she may need a job after the next election--so they are not inclined to stir
controversy.
These conflicting loyalties are generally under everyone's radar but they result
in policy that reflects the education community's agenda, not the public's.
BTW, your packet contains an article from this week's Chronicle of Higher Education
that discusses this issue [Stone, J. E. (2003, June 6). Buyers and sellers of
educational research. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B12.] It argues that
education policymakers are misled about educational research for much the same
reason that Enron's investors were misled by the brokerage houses.
In closing, I would like to offer 3 recommendations for policymakers:
1. As you make decisions about teacher training and certification, bear in mind
that colleges of education have a vision of teaching and learning that is at
odds with the public's educational priorities. They have revised and reformed
themselves many times over the decades, but the outcome has always been the
same--another permutation of the same basic doctrines.
2. The ability of a teacher to produce achievement is not something that the
colleges should be trusted to judge for themselves. If policymakers want colleges
of education to respect the public's priorities, they will have to independently
audit the student learning gains produced by newly minted teachers. Contrary
to what is often assumed, it is possible to fairly and objectively judge this
outcome. Tennessee has been doing so for the past 10 years.
3. The colleges of education need competition. Their virtual monopoly on training
and certification has not well served the public. I think the Department of
Education's emphasis on the subject-matter preparation of teachers is a step
in the right direction. The key issue, however, is to allow individuals to become
teachers without having to undergo training in the untested and often fanciful
practices that are too often taught in schools of education.
In conclusion, I would like to see the schools of education preserved but only
if they are reformed. For too many years, I have seen what goes on. In my opinion,
they need to be reigned in or replaced.
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