June 2003
Can Education Schools Be Saved?

For years, colleges of education have been criticized for failing to prepare teachers adequately. Are the criticisms justified? Can education schools be reformed? Should we find alternatives? On June 9, 2003, AEI hosted a seminar examining teacher preparation and what role colleges of education should play.

Lynne V. Cheney
AEI

Those in charge of education schools counter that they are being maligned. They argue that education schools do not represent the status quo, and that those who administer them also have reform agendas to advance. David Imig, President of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, recently wrote, "I know that virtually every education school is doing a commendable job."

Whether or not this is true, efforts have been made to circumvent education schools, alternative certification being a case in point. The idea is that there should be other paths into the classroom, but unfortunately, those paths have come more and more to resemble that for which they are supposed to provide an alternative. Observing the way that reform, rather than changing anything, tends to be co-opted in the education world, one wag suggested to me that the title of today's gathering might more appropriately be, "What is the education school secret to eternal life?" Our four panelists will take up the question of why education school criticisms persist and what can be done to remedy them.

Lisa Graham Keegan
Education Leaders Council

Can education schools be saved? Should they be saved? The bigger issue for the Education Leaders Council is: what are we doing to prepare teachers?

Education schools have become almost the sole route to teaching that is considered acceptable within the industry, and they aren't working well. The problem is that most of the colleges of education have not wholly embraced the imperatives of knowing subject matter and correct pedagogy. So how do you get people who are prepared to teach to come into the classroom?
Although not everybody can teach, many thousands of people have been prepared to teach by nontraditional routes. As in other professions, there is a requisite set of skills that any teacher needs in order to begin: knowledge of what one is going to teach (subject matter), knowledge about how to impart information (pedagogy), and a high expectation that the children one is going to teach are capable of acquiring a nonnegotiable skill set.

Subject matter is plain on its face: one must know something in order to teach it. The body of knowledge about pedagogy says that children need explicit instruction-to be told specifically what it is you want them to learn. The third issue is one of expectation. The system has been poisoned against children with disadvantaged backgrounds by the idea that traditional approaches cannot work with today's diversity of students. This idea sets the expectation that children cannot achieve even before they walk into school. Of course children have different abilities, but we know that explicit instruction and high expectations result in their success.
Under No Child Left Behind, it is a national aspiration to know where everybody is. We will know how our instruction is working, and we will expect that every child, regardless of background, can learn those things that he or she needs to know in order to move to the next grade. To do that, we must have vehicles to prepare teachers, like the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, that allow a state to accept as a full route to certification an assessment that says the teacher is prepared in subject matter, in pedagogy, and in his or her expectations for students.

With the success of ABCTE, we hope that other routes will spring up with the message that prepared individuals can teach, and that their effectiveness will be determined by the achievement of their students and nothing else. These methods will answer the need for quality teachers.

George Cunningham
University of Louisville 

I know why schools of education have such great survival rates: they are the most profitable schools you can have in a university. Schools of education have lots of students, aren't expensive to maintain, and bring in lots of external funds. No university president is going to get rid of a school that does those kinds of things. The more important question is, can schools of education be relevant?

There are two educational philosophies with different purposes and different beliefs. The first is
supported by the public, state legislatures, governors, and now by the federal government in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. It says that the most important thing that can happen in schools is academic achievement.

In every state except Iowa, there is now a program of standard-based education reform, mandated by NCLB legislation, that requires a state to define a set of academic standards, adopt an assessment, set performance standards, and establish an accountability system that provides rewards for performance. There's a concerted message coming from this
point of view that says academic achievement is important.

The second point of view is espoused by schools of education and a group of national organizations that support schools of education, including the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the main accrediting body for education schools. This point of view says that the most important thing that occurs in a school is "learning." By "learning," these groups refer to a child-centered, progressive philosophy that encourages teachers to create environments in which students can construct their own meaning. "Learning," unlike academic achievement, does not require an examination of what is happening to students, but is evaluated in terms of what the teacher is doing.

If a school undergoes an NCATE review and emphasizes the importance of preparing teachers to raise student academic achievement, it can get into trouble in terms of its accreditation. The Interstate New Teachers Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), which works hand-in-hand with NCATE, has published a set of new teacher standards laced with references to learning but devoid of mentions about academic achievement. Another ally, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), certifies practicing teachers who have mastered the INTASC standards at a higher level than those required for initial licensure. The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) ties these together, requiring that teachers graduate from NCATE accredited schools, promoting INTASC standards, and encouraging teachers to attain NBPTS status. Ironically, states simultaneously demand increases in academic performance and reward compliance with the requirements of these organizations.

States also report and rank the results of teacher exams, usually the PRAXIS test. But the PRAXIS test for elementary school teachers focuses on pedagogy, and the pedagogy that they've chosen to reward is that of the education schools. Therefore, professors like myself who are teaching students are forced to teach either that which will earn them good scores on the test or what we think are the most effective instructional methods. The gap between the cross-purposes of academic achievement and learning must be resolved if states are going to meet their performance goals.

Mary E. Dilworth
Remarks on behalf of David Imig
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education

While we are here this afternoon debating whether education schools can or ought to be saved, education schools are busy saving themselves. Visit an institution and you see evidence of faculty pushing the boundaries and adding courses and experiences to make programs both more meaningful and more helpful. The greatest danger they face, aside from the horrendous budget cuts they are confronted with, is the lowering expectation of beginning teachers. That is the injury that could do them the greatest harm.

President Bush and Secretary Paige have made the phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations" the rationale for many of the accountability provisions in No Child Left Behind. They are correct in believing that it is inexcusable for any adult to believe that all children can't learn-they can learn and they must learn. But it is also bigotry of low expectations to take the attitude that we can't ever have enough really outstanding teachers, and that we have to settle for the "good enough teacher." The "good enough" teacher, possessing only content knowledge and passage of a subject matter test, simply lacks the skills and disposition necessary to teach in an inner-city school. There is a moral and ethical obligation to give our children more than this-to provide great teachers.

I don't think education schools are doing the best job that they can. Teacher education is often over regulated and under resourced. In a number of vicinities, state policymakers, not academics, set education school admission standards, set the number of courses per subject, prescribe practicum experiences, set student teaching requirements, and hire the test maker. Yet enrollments in teacher education are higher than they have ever been. There are forty-four states that now require a subject matter major for middle and secondary school teacher education. The majority of alternative route programs are now located in or affiliated with education schools and are attracting a variety of candidates.

As we debate whether education schools can save themselves, they are doing so. We should not sacrifice the reforms that are under way and retreat to simpler schemes that cost less and get more people through quickly. Let us commit instead to high-quality teacher education-to candidates who can demonstrate subject matter knowledge both on a test and in the classroom, and who have extensive clinical preparation, a thorough understanding of those they will teach, and the right dispositions to work with our children.

John Stone
East Tennessee State University

I'm not optimistic that education schools can be reformed or saved. In my view, the training received by most teachers is based on teacher education's vision of a better world and is out of touch with the aims of the public.

Colleges of education have been entrusted with the responsibility to train teachers in a way that respects the public's priorities, the topmost being that all students have the knowledge and skills necessary to get a job or to get into college. Public education is strongly supported precisely because everyone recognizes that if children grow up unprepared for college or the workplace, it's bad for the community and devastating for the individual. Failure to teach the basics is considered unsatisfactory in schooling no matter what else a school is said to produce.
Professors believe this with a caveat. They believe, for a variety of reasons having to do with philosophical and social reform, that students who have memorized facts and gained skills through things like drills and practice have been shortchanged. Professors say such students will lack the thinking skills that can only be taught through interaction with the real world. So instead of urging teachers to teach the basics and then add thinking skills, education professors say that best practice teaching blends the basics into student-led collaborative learning experiences that serve both purposes.

For nearly one hundred years, teachers have tried to bring about student achievement by using this "best practice" teaching and it hasn't worked. It does not produce the knowledge and skills expected by the public because it's built around a different set of educational priorities. Professors are aware of the shortcoming but see the public's aims as the problem. They try to remedy the problem with educational fads-the open classroom and self-esteem movements being good examples-which subject students to experimentation and fail to boost their achievement.

Regulation has not been able to curb these practices because educators, without regulatory penalties or market responses, are largely immune to the consequences of faulty practice. Lay oversight bodies and state education agencies that exist to defend the public's interest rarely investigate the causes of school failure. Instead, they typically seek the help of the agencies that misadvised them in the first place.

I offer three recommendations for policymakers:
First: Know that colleges of education have a vision of teaching and learning that is at odds with the public's educational priorities and that the result of reform has always been another permutation of the same doctrine.  

Second: The ability of a teacher to produce achievement is not something that the colleges should be trusted to judge for themselves. If policymakers want education schools to respect the public's priorities, they must independently audit the student learning gains produced by new teachers.

Third: The colleges of education need competition. Individuals must be allowed to become teachers without having to undergo training in the untested and often fanciful practices that are too often taught in schools
of education.

AEI Research Assistant Elisabeth Irwin and AEI Intern Sarah Runnells prepared this summary.