Educating teachers in California - or drowning in alphabet soup

Radical Teacher, Fall, 2002 by Ann Berlak

In January, with great fanfare, President Bush signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the so-called "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001. Among other provisions it requires students across the nation to take math and reading achievement tests yearly in grades 3-8. The passage of this act was only a minor blip on my radar screen given the high stakes testing system already in place in California, where I have been teaching teachers for the past twelve years. I had already grown accustomed to my students' queries about how they were supposed to build curriculum upon students' interests, teach culturally responsive lessons, and promote critical thinking, social justice and reading for meaning, as I was urging, when the first order of business in the schools in which they were observing was raising performance on state tests, as calculated in the "Academic Performance Index." The API is a numerical school rating based entirely on students' scores on standardized tests. API ratings are high-stakes because they are used to reward and punish teachers, schools and administrators, and, incidentally, to boost real estate values. Displays of API rankings are an annual ritual across the state.

I and the other teacher educators in the Department of Elementary Education at San Francisco State University are unable to respond to our students' dilemmas because they mirror our own. We are overwhelmed by our own set of standardizing mechanisms emanating from the state. Below I tell a story of how our department is responding. It is but one instance of what is happening to teacher educators in California and in other states across the country.

In January we were in the early stages of revising our entire teacher education program to bring it into compliance with four sets of criteria mandated by the California State Legislature in Senate Bill 2042, passed in 1998: the California Standards for the Teaching Profession (CSTP), Standards of Quality and Effectiveness for Professional Teacher Preparation Programs (known as the Program Standards), Teacher Performance Expectations (TPEs) and Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) procedures. Members of our department were anticipating a day-long retreat during which we would continue the revision process.

Our courses had already been designed to conform to a set of state standards approved by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing and thoroughly documented in a two-inch thick compliance document. However, passing courses was no longer deemed a satisfactory indication of credential students' competency. The TPE/TPA package was a missing piece in the "Master Plan" designed to reform the State's entire education system.

The Teacher Performance Expectations mandate that teacher educators prepare credential candidates to teach the K-12 Academic Content Standards in every subject area. For example, TPE Al states that candidates must "demonstrate the ability to teach the state-adopted Academic Content Standards for students in History-Social Science." (1) The content standards for History-Social Science are so detailed that no state legislator could pass a test on the information fourth graders are expected to know. For instance, History-Social Science standard 4.3 requires fourth graders to 'explain economic, social and political life in California from the establishment of the Bear Flag Republic through the Mexican-American War, the Gold Rush, and the granting of statehood." (2) In its drive to demand an overwhelming command of historical detail, this standard does not require students to learn how Anglo settlers came to dominate a territory formerly populated by Native Americans and Mexicans. Nor is there a Teacher Performanc e Expectation that teachers demonstrate their ability to prepare their students for active citizenship. It's not by accident that the standards for what used to be called social studies are now called "The History-Social Science Standards."

The Standards for the Teaching Profession, the Teacher Preparation Program Standards and the Teacher Performance expectations were written under the auspices of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC). Fourteen of the fifteen voting members of the CTC are appointed by the governor. The fact that the governor appoints members of the Commission is not inconsequential. At a meeting of a statewide teachers' union, the California Teachers Association, I learned first-hand of the contempt Governor Gray Davis has for teachers when I heard him tell 800 union representatives that he was well aware of our opposition to the high stakes accountability system the state had imposed upon teachers, but that he knew better than we did what was best for children and schools.

In a study of how California came to adopt the State Framework for History-Social Science (the precursor to the State Content Standards for History-Social Science), as well as the Houghton-Mifflin elementary level social studies textbook series in the late eighties, Dexter Waugh, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, revealed how appointments to the Curriculum Commission and the State Board of Education charged with overseeing the writing of the framework and the selection of the texts were influenced by corporate and Euro-centric perspectives and interests. (3)