Educating our teachers

Academe, Jan/Feb 1999 by Schrecker, Ellen

AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION IS IN BAD TROUBLE-OR SO THEY say. After more than twelve years of elementary and secondary schooling, our students show up in class unprepared, uninvolved, and often unable to do college-level work. Obviously, we can't blame all these problems on the inadequacies of the nation's schools. Like so many other institutions, they are the victims of the current assault on the public sector. As the sociologist Robert Bellah argues in this issue's lead article, the commodification of higher education has turned students into consumers who refuse to pay a high intellectual price for their credentials. The rhetorical campaign against American education further feeds the crisis; by destroying confidence in the system, it makes it hard for educators to win the public support and resources they need.

Nonetheless, it is clear that something is wrong with our schools. As usual, scapegoats outnumber solutions, but the prime suspect is poor teaching, the result, so it is claimed, of the weak preparation that many teachers receive. Most critics call for higher standards. From Texas to Massachusetts, states are raising the requirements for prospective teachers and threatening sanctions against schools of education whose graduates do not make the grade. More thoughtful observers look beyond test scores, seeking substantive reforms that will revamp the way the nation's teachers are trained.

As the men and women who teach those teachers, academic professionals are implicated in the teachers' fate. We are, as American Federation of Teachers president Sandra Feldman puts it, "joined at the hip." Yet most college professors, however concerned they may be, actually know little about how teachers are trained. To facilitate communication between teacher educators and the rest of us, Academe asked several experts in the field to tell us what's going on.

As one might expect, their answers provide both hope and consternation. The picture they paint of teacher education, while hardly rosy, is not as bleak as that emanating from external critics and the media. We are not floundering in the dark. Despite their poor reputation, education schools have been on the job for years and know quite a lot about how students learn and how teachers can facilitate that learning. Good teachers, it turns out, are not born, but made. And good schools of education can make them.

Some already are. In hundreds of collaborative programs around the country, school systems and universities are using the latest educational research to train new teachers. Both Feldman and Linda Darling-Hammond, the director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, believe that these programs and others like them will ultimately transform the profession by giving future teachers the same combination of rigorous coursework and clinical experience that medical schools provide for future M.D.'s.

If these reforms are to succeed, the academic community will have to embrace them. But, as Frances Maher, Mary Kay Tetreault, and David Labaree warn us, teacher educators have so little prestige that few college professors pay serious attention to what they say. Moreover, even if the academy does overcome its prejudice against pedagogy and against the often messy and unsystematic knowledge accumulated by the men and (mostly) women who work in that field, many teacher training programs are already so demonized that they may be unable to find the resources to upgrade the curriculum or add another year of training. In short, although some changes will almost certainly take place, whether they will improve the schools remains to be seen.

-ELLEN SCHRECKER