ONE SMALL STEP

"...the education of teachers must be turned "upside-down"

PART ONE

On November 16, 2010, a Blue Ribbon Panel formed by an organization you've never heard of - the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), which has been the accrediting agency for all college education departments and Schools of Education since 1954 - released a report that did not make the front (or back) page of your newspaper or TV's Evening News. Yet the report is revolutionary.

it explains in 40 pages exactly what has been wrong with American education for forty years and why public schools in America have been failing - despite all the money and a long list of efforts to save it.

The report states authoritatively that teacher education in America is completely inadequate and must be reformed - "turned upside down" throughout the country by putting clinical practice (which means classroom management and performance) at the center of teacher preparation instead of some half-hearted effort at the end where it has been for decades.

This new vision demands an entirely new approach to teacher education and will require that partnerships be built in which teacher education becomes a shared responsibility for all schools from K-12th grade, higher education - colleges and the Schools of Education - and policy makers and funders (government and tax money).

With very formal language, complete with educational jargon, this report was not prepared for you or me or teachers or the public-in-general. It was prepared for the Schools and Departments of Education, for school district Boards and for policy makers and politicians who will design the program changes for every education school and for every classroom in the country and who will vote the money to support these changes.

This new approach is a huge undertaking which cannot and will not be accomplished overnight. The new approaches will involve significant policy and procedural changes within each State. It means the revamping of longstanding theories and practices for teaching teachers - policies that NCATE states are no longer suited to today's needs. The changes called for require that state education officials, Governors and state P-12 Commissioners of Education and Schools of Education begin working together now to remove policy barriers and create supports for this new vision of teacher education.

The report totally ignores and so completely dismisses such long-discussed 'reasons for failure' as large classes, old schools, the absence of direct parental involvement, etc. It makes absolutely no mention of the value of charter schools (only 15% of which do any better than local public schools), the need for constant testing - and the newest 'answer' - evaluating teacher performance - and all of the other forty year old explanations for the failure of public schools.

It puts direct responsibility for the now accepted failure of American public education on the teaching of teachers, by claiming that teachers have not been taught "what to do" when they enter the classroom making it impossible for them to make their teaching or their schools successful.

The report and its recommendations have been adopted by eight states - California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee and New York.

Despite intermittent efforts to establish a primary role in education, it wasn't until the George W. Bush era and "No Child Left Behind" that the Federal Government actually took the lead in what had otherwise been (and still is, when applied) the State Government's role in setting educational standards and policies.

Working very closely with Senator Edward Kennedy's staff on the Senate's Education Sub- Committee, the Bush Administration with the enthusiastic approval of Congress and the sweetener of available Federal money (which in most cases was not delivered) the Federal Government essentially turned education in America into a test-taking procedure using the idea of teacher accountability and 'standards' as its key motivating factors. Soon American students were focusing on language arts and math and eventually little else. Teachers began 'teaching to the test' and the entire concept of a full curricula devoted equally to science, history, civics and current events and the arts was all but abandoned.

During his election campaign, Barack Obama rarely mentioned education, other than to suggest that "No Child" was not working because our standing in education among industrialized nations was falling rapidly - most obviously in high school graduations and college attendance.

Upon election, President Obama named the Chicago Superintendent of Schools Arne Duncan as his Secretary of Education. During his essentially brief tenure in Chicago, Duncan headed the worst big-city school system in America.

Duncan, who is leading the effort to change the ground rules of "No Children..." with his "Race To Success" (which we have discussed in a previous article on education) has taken a very active role in attempting educational reform in the nation. His comments about the state of affairs in education - the high dropout rates, the falling graduation rates, the test scores that indicate that America is falling far behind other industrial nations, the state of teacher capabilities and the enthusiastic acceptance of the major changes in teacher education adopted by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), makes his statements and plans worthy of consideration. We want to share some of his thinking with you so that you can put into perspective the serious problems that exist and the very difficult solutions that must be applied.

Duncan is calling for a national effort to hire more than one million new teachers in the next five years as Baby boomer' aged teachers head towards retirement, the new teacher dropout rate continues to rise, the nation suffers from a severe shortage of science and math teachers and the quality of many teachers presently working in schools comes into question in school districts across the country.

As he calls for this major recruitment, he must be clearly aware that the education new teachers will be receiving in Schools of Education, will not properly prepare them to succeed in the classroom; that the dropout record of new teachers in America within fire years of beginning their careers is now an admitted 50% and probably closer to 60%; and that the reason for this unprecedented number is that teachers come into the classroom unprepared to teach and so quit.

This disconnect between the recruitment of one million new teachers and the potential failure to properly prepare them for their new jobs is difficult to accept. Perhaps he has high hopes for quick School of Education reforms. If so, he should know better.

On November 4, 2010, in a speech given 12 days before the NCATE call for a massive reformation of teacher education, Duncan said "One-quarter of U.S. high school students drop out or fail to graduate on time…one million students leave our schools for the streets each year…the Armed Services report that three-quarters of young Americans between 17 and 24 are unable to enlist in the military in some part because they have failed to graduate from high school. America's youth are now tied for ninth in the world in college attainment…other folks have...passed us by and we're paying a huge price for that economically. Incremental change isn't going to help us…we've got to be disruptive...you can't keep doing the same stuff and expect different results."

Duncan said "We have to reward excellence...we cannot treat everyone like interchangeable widgets throwing a kid and a teacher in a class and expecting good results. If a teacher is doing a good job with students, we can't pay them enough.

"We have to systemically create the environment and incentives to attract new people into the profession. Three countries that outperform us - Singapore, South Korea and Finland - don't let anyone teach who doesn't come from the top third of their graduating class. In South Korea, they refer to teachers as 'nation builders.'"

Duncan has established a new website - teach.gov. - to assist those interested in teaching to join the profession. His goal is to hire 1 million new teachers in the next five years. He is going to concentrate on hiring African American and Hispanic men and teachers of science and math.

"We have to elevate the status of the teaching profession...we have to get the best and the brightest."

Nothing on the website indicates any new ideas or programs that would attract anyone other than those currently going into teaching. Speak to a young woman in teacher training today and she will tell you exactly why she is becoming a teacher: because a woman can have a life, can be a wife and a Mom and be home with children at a decent hour and have vacation-time - and also excellent health and retirement benefits. And this is true in every community across America; teacher salaries and benefit packages may differ in areas of the country as they do in every other profession - but the 'lifestyle benefits' of teaching are the same.

Twelve days later, Duncan was congratulating the nation's top teacher education accrediting agency, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, for accepting the report of a Blue Ribbon panel calling for turning teacher education 'upside down'.

Duncan said: "In today's knowledge economy it is no secret that education is the new game-changer…it is the new engine of economic growth and American prosperity... it must be the new equalizer, the one global force that can consistently overcome differences in background, culture and privilege.

"The days when a high school dropout could land a good job are gone forever. Even high school graduates can no longer depend on a number of good jobs being open to them...there must be college and other secondary education.

"And we know that when it comes to teaching, talent matters tremendously. The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers and so every aspect of school reform depends on highly skilled teachers for its success.

"In my own state of Illinois, the basic skills test for college students who want to become teachers are geared to an eighth grade level and even worse, teacher applicants get five attempts to pass this skills test. Speaking as a parent of two young children in elementary school, it is hard for me to imagine any parents wanting their children to be taught by a teacher who failed a basic skills test four times. States across the country have a crazy quilt of 1,100 different tests of basic skills, subject matter and teaching knowledge for teachers to become licensed. In many States the entry bar for becoming a teacher is set far too low…the worst of both worlds: too complicated, bureaucratic and combined with dummied-down standards.

"In 1998, Congress added provisions to the Higher Education Act that required postsecondary institutions to publically report the pass rate of program graduates on state licensure exams...and to identify low-performing teacher preparation programs. Many states and post-secondary institutions subverted the intention of the provisions resulting in a phony, intellectually dishonest pass-rate on state licensure tests of 100 percent at a slew of teacher prep programs and did not report low performing teacher prep programs.

"NCATE has now called for an end to the insidious practice of accrediting university-based preparation programs in the absence of rigorous evidence of the impact graduate teachers are having on student- learning in the classroom. For decades, teacher preparation programs have had little or no accountability for turning out effective teachers...but today that accountability gap begins to close."

That last thought by Sec. Duncan may be very hopeful - but perhaps not very realistic. It's going to take more than a little time for that accountability gap to close. First, only eight states have accepted the challenge of turning their teacher education programs 'upside down'. Further the expectations of 'upside-down 'calls for School of Education faculty members who may clearly not know everything they need to know to turn anything 'upside-down'.

Briefly, the normal course of events in a School of Education is that the preparing teacher learns some content - usually from within the school itself rather than from a super-professor at the Liberal Arts or Science/Math school. Then there is the theoretical work about the essence of education - offered in most instances to test a potential teacher's interest and patience levels - or perhaps simply their stamina. And finally- literally finally - there is the classic "student teaching" where the fledgling teacher goes to a local public school to spend sometime in the classroom with real students - whether he or she interacts much with them or not.

According to NCATE plans, turning this classic School of Education approach 'upside-down" means that courses for would-be teachers would concentrate heavily on working in real classrooms with real students - called in education jargon - clinical practice. There would be serious attempts at teaching subject (academic) content and there would be professional theory courses. This is an educational experience that is literally upside-down compared to what has existed for more than a century of preparing teachers to teach.

Making any change in an academic environment is not only a challenge but perhaps a declaration of war as anyone in the university world will tell you. More importantly, the faculty involved may have less than the required experience to train and mentor student-teacher in classroom behavior. It would be nice to know how many professors and assistant professors in a School of Education have ever actually spent any time as a classroom teacher in any public or private school at the elementary and secondary level. And yet it is this very same faculty which will now be asked to teach a model based heavily on preparing teachers in a classroom setting…one they may know little about.

The key to the entire "upside-down" agenda of teaching reform is that teachers must learn what to do in the classroom; they must know the content of the subjects they are teaching and they must know how to manage their classes to get maximum performance from the students.

The report includes all teachers - not just those preparing to teach - but those already in all the classrooms across the country. Not a single sentence of the report deals with improving the performance of those now teaching but it is apparent that steps be taken because this must be a joint effort between Schools of Education and School Districts in every community in the country.

Among the key points of interest are these:

Teacher-training programs must attract a more academically prepared and more diverse groups of students.

In countries like Finland, Norway, France and South Korea no student is permitted to pursue teaching as a career unless he or she is in the top third of the class. In America, with so many different roads to follow - like medicine, law, business and finance - our teachers often come from the middle of the class academically or more often, from the bottom third of the class.

There must be more rigorous accountability for and accreditation based on how well Schools of Education and school districts address the needs of schools and how much improvement is actually taking place.

The report calls for timelines for change and the setting of standards well beyond test scores - which aren't even mentioned. School districts will be given more authority in designing and implementing teacher education programs within their schools

There must be clinical internships in school settings that are structured and staffed to support teacher learning and student achievement.

Clinical faculty - drawn from school districts and schools of education - must be present in all schools to provide the necessary supervision, mentoring, and effective practice standards.

These faculty members will have an important say about whether teachers and teacher candidates are either doing their jobs or are ready to enter a classroom to teach based on their performance in the classroom and on student outcomes.

The list of changes necessary goes on to describe the roles of Schools of Education and School Districts in making this complete alternative to how teachers are taught to teach part of a brand new system.

The report sees the training of physicians as the model for teaching teachers to teach.

"Because teaching is a profession of practice, teacher education must focus on preparing expert practitioners who know their students, their subject-area content and how to provide it, in much the same way that a family doctor must master the knowledge base of medicine as well as be able to understand patients and their symptoms to deliver a course of treatment that can achieve the best possible outcome.

"...mastery and fluency of content and hands-on experience, comes in large part through robust opportunities to develop as practitioners via expertly mentored experiences in the field and through …designed approximations of actual practice such as case studies and simulations, while the teaching candidates study and observe practice and test their skills in controlled situations."

In simpler language, the Report suggests that teaching candidates be schooled as doctors are schooled - and begin immediately working in classrooms as doctors begin working in hospitals and with patients - right from the start of their education.

"That portion of preparation that is practiced and demonstrated in real schools with real students helps ensure that candidates will be ready for the students with whom they will work and the schools in which they will teach This is critically important in preparing teachers to be successful in hard-to-staff, low-performing schools and is useful in all teaching environments..."

All of this means that those who teach in Schools of Education must be able to transfer their knowledge and experience of working with children in K-12 to their students. In that area alone, Schools of Education as we know them today, face an enormous problem: the majority of those teaching teachers to teach have little or no classroom experience at the primary or secondary school level.

The challenges to the present system are enormous. It must be remembered that Schools of Education not only grant diplomas to their graduates but also award them Certificates to Teach - licenses that make them immediately eligible for jobs. In no other professional field does a school provide such certificates and licenses to practice upon graduation - not in law, medicine, accountancy, architecture, engineering etc. etc.

And because Schools of Education fail to prepare their students to teach, we now acknowledge that 50% of those new to teaching are leaving the field before the end of five years. That has been true now for almost 15 years - we believe that number has risen to almost 3 out of 5 teachers leaving. And still nothing has changed.

This report indicates that changes will have to be made because the rules of providing accreditation to Schools of Education will change. Unless reform exists, accreditation will be denied- effectively putting those institutions 'out of business'. In the world of universities, where Schools of Education have become 'profit centers', that will not be allowed to happen.

In 1999, we offered a policy paper (to be found in the Archives of this website) which called for a change in the way teachers were taught to teach in America's public schools. Our theme was that teachers are unable to teach today's children. That paper came after three years of working everyday on the problem and of having had access to the Waco, Texas public schools as the director of a multi-million dollar family foundation headquartered in Waco. The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation committed itself to finding answers to the problems that plagued all schools in America and Waco was to be the "laboratory" for its findings.

In subsequent years, we've continued to point to the continuing problems analyzing the "next magic bullet" and always finding it wanting. We've continued to support our position with additional material offered to explain the problems and challenges that faced the entire nation.

We called the increasing failure of the schools to teach children a national epidemic which had reached every public school in every big city, small town, suburban community and rural village in New York State and in the whole country. And the reason for the problems remained the same: teachers weren't being taught to teach today's children

Now at last, the very group that has the power to make change, has adopted a report which clearly states that the education of teachers must be far better or our children will continue to fall further down the scale of countries in the world with public education programs.

Some years ago in a chance meeting on a street in the Westchester suburbs, a visitor from Kansas who taught public school there said simply "We are boring our children to death..." In our next report on this matter we will show you how that happens and what that has meant to the lack of education and thinking skills that now exists throughout our nation.

Martin I. Hassner
Executive Director
Website Managing Editor

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