Alternate Path for Teachers Gains Ground

Not long ago education schools had a virtual monopoly on the teaching profession. They dictated how and when people became teachers by offering coursework, arranging apprenticeships and granting master’s degrees.

But now those schools are feeling under siege. Officials in Washington, D.C., and New York State, where some of the best-known education schools are located, have stepped up criticisms that the schools are still too focused on theory and not enough on the craft of effective teaching.

In an ever-tightening job market, their graduates are competing with the products of alternative programs like Teach for America, which puts recent college graduates into teaching jobs without previous teaching experience or education coursework.

And this week, the New York State Board of Regents could deliver the biggest blow. It will vote on whether to greatly expand the role of the alternative organizations by allowing them to create their own master’s degree programs. At the extreme, the proposal could make education schools extraneous.

The commissioner of New York State department of education thinks colleges of education devote too much class time to abstract notions about the role of school in democracy. Fire him. Or bring back the medieval custom of tar and feather.

When I was looking to qualify for an emergency teaching credential and took education courses at Hunter night school decades ago, the professor taught us how to hand out paper, insisting it would prove to be the single most important pedagogical principle of our careers. I certainly would have welcomed some talk about the importance of the role of school in a democracy. Years later, I wrote about the professor's paper-passing mania, and a lawyer from D. C. insisted he was in my class. Ha. He took the course a decade later.

And how about this 2007 course? Was that during Commissioner Steiner's tenure at Hunter?

I am probably more practical-minded than most. I've written close to a dozen books on ideas for classroom activities. I know first hand about teachers' worries about "what to do on Monday." I work hard at laying a foundation of good pedagogy underneath the recommended activities. And my article most reproduced in college texts is On Stir-and-Serve Recipes for Teaching, written way back in 1985. It is still current. In fact, I think it's more true today than it was then.

You could become unique in the world and buy Who's In Charge: A Teacher Speaks Her Mind. It is an essay collection and includes "On Stir-and-Serve Recipes for Teaching." It doesn't do my finances any good to tell you this, but you can buy a used copy for $.01 at Amazon.com.


Critics of schools of education insist that prospective teachers would profit more from observing good teachers at work than from taking impractical courses on pedagogy. Maybe so. But what are those novices going to see? Is one observation is good an another? After all, a person can look at Guernica and not see it, listen to the Eroica and not hear it. E. H. Gombrich says that every observation we make is the result of the questions we ask. And where do novices get the questions? How can they ask intelligent questions without knowing something about the subject? Can anyone really see a classroom without some theoretical, historical, developmental savvy? . . .

Teaching, like art, is born of a schema. That's why we need the professors with their satchels of theory, as well as our own observations and practice. Those who hope to be effective teachers must recognize that teaching is a craft of careful artifice; the profession reuires more than a spontaneous overflow of good intentions or the simple cataloguing and distribution of information. It is possible, I suppose, to have an inborn talent for teaching, but I am sure that those teachers who endure and triumph are made--rigorously trained--and not born. Mea culpa. Rigor did not carry the oppresive weight when this essay was written that it does now.

In a prime example of Orwellian logic, Arne Duncan's corporate bosses have declared that the best way to getting test results in the poor schools that need the most highly qualified teachers is to lower the standards for teacher education by offering more "alternative certification" programs. By supporting corporate indoctrination programs that are backed by Goldman Sachs and Microsoft like Teach for America, which dumps selectively recruited white female missionaries who have had 6 weeks of teacher training into some of America's poorest schools, corporate education reformers now envision the total containment and segregation of America's poor children within the crumbling urban cores of America.

The fact that the research shows that TFA's Ivy League temps are less effective or equally ineffective in churning out higher test scores than the weakest teachers in America matters not to ideologues like David Steiner, Commissioner of Education for New York. After all, Steiner's goal is about dismantling those left-wing ed schools where balanced literacy approaches get in the way of choking down the gospel according to the phonics freaks like Reid Lyon and the direct instruction disciples of Zig Engelmann. Steiner would rid the nation of those ed schools where teacher ed candidates learn how today's penal pedagogy model is a further elaboration of school as the instrument of social and economic reproduction:
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David M. Steiner, who became commissioner of the New York State Department of Education last year, insists that as much as he wants to introduce “new actors” into the realm of teacher preparation, he also wants to encourage education schools to reform themselves. Dr. Steiner, who in 2003 published a paper critical of the required reading at 16 elite education schools, says that colleges still devote too much class time to abstract notions about “the role of school in democracy” and “the view by some that schools exist to perpetuate a social hierarchy.”