A college president aims to bust some barriers

NEA Today, Jan 2000

How should future teachers be attracted to the profession and trained? How should public education be defended and improved? Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College in New York and the author of Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (Doubleday), is advocating some provocative new approaches.

What's wrong with how teachers are prepared to teach? Teaching has failed to gain respect partly because our education schools have defined their subject matter as pedagogy.

America organizes its teachers horizontally, according to the age of the pupils they teach. No other advanced industrial society trains teachers primarily in methods targeted at specific age groups.

Right now, a sixth grade English teacher works with a sixth grade math teacher more often than she does with first grade reading teachers, high school English teachers, or English professors. This method is justified by dubious precepts of ageappropriate educational science.

What's your alternative?

We ought to educate and organize teachers according to the subject matter they teach. The high school mathematics teacher and the elementary school math teacher should be taught by mathematicians and consider other mathematicians their colleagues.

But that isn't what's happening. Education schools are segregated from the rest of the university and looked down upon by other departments.

How can we recruit more good people into teaching?

We need real federal incentives. Years ago, I suggested that people who commit to public school teaching for a minimum of 10 years should be exempt from paying federal income taxes.

What role do you feel unions should play in educaton?

The rank and file have got to stand up and offer to police themselves. Teachers should decide who is qualified, not the state.

NEA should be setting the tone for the national debate on how public education should look in the next century-and address issues like the quality of teachers and classroom instruction and ways to reconcile excellence and equity.

Public education cannot be defended the way it was 30 years ago. Knowledge crosses state lines. It's part of interstate commerce. There is no federal constitutional barrier against spending America's resources on education nationally.

The unions must stand up for what they know is right. They should be striking on issues like class size, inadequate textbooks, and inadequate facilities.

For More:

Contact Bard College at 914/7587412.