Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary - save:

"to deliver from sin, to rescue or deliver from danger or harm; to preserve or guard from injury, destruction, or loss; to prevent an opponent from scoring and winning."

In the preparatory materials for this colloquium, Dr. Cheney used a 1997 report that was bought and paid for by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation to allege that Education Schools fail "to prepare teachers adequately."

While that report noted various flaws in teacher preparation programs, it also contended that education faculty were the "keepers of the flame" for public education and offered begrudging admiration for their efforts.

Of all the dictionary definitions Webster offers for "to save", the one that is most relevant is whether Education Schools can be preserved or guarded from injury, destruction or loss.

I want to assert, that while we are here this afternoon debating whether they can or ought to be saved, Education Schools are busy saving themselves! Visit a neighbor institution and you see evidence of faculty pushing the boundaries and adding courses and experiences to make programs both more meaningful and more helpful.

Talk about an exceptional program like Teach for American and you see in the background the resources and efforts of places like the other Fordham i.e., Fordham University and Johns Hopkins and the University of Houston and University of Southern California.

They and hundreds of other education schools are responding to new research evidence, adding more and more students, partnering with local schools, increasing the expectations for graduates in technology, meeting the needs of youngsters with exceptionalities, students for whom English is a second language, and knowing the range of methods available in teaching reading and mathematics.

The greatest dangers they face, aside from the horrendous budget cuts they are confronted with are the lowering of expectations for beginning teachers. That is the injury that could do them the greatest harm.

President Bush and Secretary Paige have made the phrase the "soft bigotry of low expectations" the premise or rationale for many of the accountability provisions in No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

I concur with their assertion that it is inexcusable for any adult to believe that not all children can learn. Not only can they learn, they must learn! (Incidentally, the Association I represent endorses the purposes and goals of NCLB and has worked hard for the past eighteen months helping teacher educators to leave no teacher behind.)

Now we are faced with another form of the "soft bigotry of low expectations." It is the soft bigotry of the "good enough" teacher philosophy that pervades this town.

It is the attitude that anyone can teacher - anyone with a bachelors degree and no criminal record and I presume, who has passed an assessment test, is good enough to teach our children. It is the notion that we can’t ever have enough really outstanding teachers and that we have to settle for the good enough teacher.

We are lowering our sights - our expectations - our needs in order to satisfy the political resource and ideological needs of some who define high quality away and call for quick fixes and simple schemes. We are in danger of succumbing to the "bigotry of low expectations" for the most vital part of teaching-learning equation - the teacher.

We need to be talking about our highest expectations for all teachers - those who teach your kids and my grandchildren - rather than be talking about the good enough teachers who have nothing more to offer than a year of academic courses in a particular subject as qualification.

That is the reason that I am skeptical of approaches that would let more "good enough" teachers into classrooms in this country. Where my colleagues on this panel and I disagree is not that every person in this room has the potential to be a great teacher, it’s how you should become a great teacher. What is bigoted is thinking that a college educated person can take a multiple choice paper and pencil test, absent any preparation, and know enough to teach 5th graders at an inner city school.

What is truly bigoted, I believe, is believing that an adult - whether 24 or 44 years of age - can be good enough in their first year of teaching to teach inner city 5th graders in the kind of high stakes testing environment we have created. Good enough teachers simply lack the skills, knowledge and dispositions necessary to do this work. There is a moral and ethical obligation to do more than just provide good enough teachers.

Content knowledge - and passage of a test of subject matter knowledge - is necessary but insufficient condition for making great teachers. Education schools support the use of such tests as one of many assessments for good teaching - of course, we would also like to see those who provided that content responsible for ensuring that teacher candidates learned their subjects.

Also, with more time, we could talk about all of the other things teacher have to know- and where they learn them. Learning to plan a lesson to reach every student, designing appropriate assessments, know how to communicate with all students (including non-English speakers) and how to motivate the most disengaged teenager, how to move every child to high levels of proficiency. These are just a few of the things one wants teachers to know before they start their first day of practice. High quality clinical preparation programs, housed in education schools but shared by the entire college or university, provide this and so much more!

One of the questions Dr. Cheney asked was whether education schools are doing the best job they can. I don’t think they are! By implication, Dr. Cheney says education schools are to blame for the ills of student academic achievement.

We are prepared to take a whole lot of the responsibility for the preparation and practice of beginning teachers. We have said so and worked to do so; but the fact that teacher education is often over-regulated and under-resourced ought not be ignored.

In a number of vicinities, state policy makers - not academics - set admission standards into teacher education programs (including background checks for criminal behavior), determine the number of courses in particular subjects to be taught, prescribe the kinds and frequency of practicum experiences, set the length of student teaching, prescribe the outcomes or standards for the program and hire the test maker to determine whether candidates learned the content.

Please note that enrollments in teacher education are higher than they have ever been - up this year alone by nearly 10 percent. We are recruiting better students from general education and arts and sciences with higher GPAs and better content preparation than ever before. Prospective secondary and middle school teachers bring subject matter majors (44 states require such a condition) to teacher education and more elementary teachers come with solid preparation in subjects related to K-4 schooling. Arts and sciences and fine arts programs are giving us better students than they ever have. The majority of alternative route programs are now located in and/or affiliated with education schools and these are attracting a variety different kinds of candidates.

As we debate whether education schools can save themselves, they are doing so. The danger is that in this time of uncertainty we will sacrifice the reforms that are underway and retreat to simpler schemes that cost less and get more people through quickly.

There is also a danger to brand all education schools as alike - if I were to suggest that all 100,000 elementary and secondary schools in this country are the same, I would be laughed at, yet there is a tendency to suggest that all of the more than 1200 education schools are the same. Yes, some are not doing all they can and ought to do and we are providing technical assistance and encouragement for them to do so. Let’s not focus exclusively on the anomalies -

Let’s dispense with the bigotry of low expectations as it applies to teaching. Let’s end the call for short cuts and truncated approaches, let’s get rid of the arrogance that suggests than anyone can teach, let’s get rid of the simple minded ways.

Let us commit to high quality teacher preparation -

- with candidates with subject matter knowledge they can demonstrate both on a test and in the classroom

- rigorous and extensive clinical preparation,

- candidates who have a thorough understanding of their subject and the children they will teach and who possess the right qualities and dispositions to work with your children and my grandchildren.

In short, I’ll be looking for my local education schools to provide those kinds of highly qualified teachers for the schools of my community. I encourage you to do the same.

Thank you.