I have heard repeatedly in the past few years that teachers don’t want student teachers in their classrooms. The teachers are so focused on raising test scores that they can’t take the time to mentor the younger generation, and they are afraid to lose ground if they let a student teacher try a practice class. Consequently, the opportunities for the would-be teachers to get student teaching experience are closing up. This is not a problem for Teach for America, whose recruits get five weeks of training, but it is a huge problem for those planning a career as an educator and eager to get classroom experience before they enter into the profession.
This comment from a reader confirms the stories:
I am currently enrolled in a MAT program in Chicago, and I have been following your blog closely for quite a few months. One side of the story that I think is missing is how all these corporate reforms and testing have a negative impact on preservice educators. With teachers held to such high accountability, it seems that less are willing to have us preservice teachers come observe or work with them. With isat testing going on, my classmates and I have had very little success setting up observation times at schools. This is something that we have all been struggling with (even when testing is not happening). These observation hours are required for our degree. Also, I have heard anecdotes from a student teacher a year ahead of me about how the teacher is so concerned with testing that she would not let the student teacher teach.
I doubt that “reformers” and proponents of accountability think about how these high stakes measures make it difficult for preservice educators to learn the craft of being a teacher. The time spent observing, helping, interviewing students and teachers, and teaching are invaluable experiences for us and teach us so much about being teachers, but current reforms make these experiences hard to come by. I think a shared sentiment among my classmates and I is frustration. We want to be successful, prepared educators, but it feels like we have to jump through hoops and beg for time in schools. If we really cared about preparing quality educators, it should not be so difficult to get into schools, to see. feel, and experience the real deal.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is a mistake to think reformers care anything about children or quality teaching. They don’t. All they care about is getting taxpayer money that is supposed to go to public schools and apparently they will lie, cheat, and steal to get it.
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You are right on, Golden.
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Golden,
There is also a social/political control aspect of education reform: by making employment as a teacher a tenuous, high-risk endeavor, reformers insulate themselves from traditional consequences for policy misuses/abuses. The revolving door between political office and industry insider will continue to turn and the once powerful unions have been reduced to more damage control, less activism.
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Can’t blame the seasoned teacher! Life depends on high test scores. I also would have ethical struggles exposing a student teacher to the hurtful insane practices in current public schools. Participating in practices counter to what education needs to be, creates a conflict for me as an educator, and I would not want to involve a budding newcomer to teaching in this way. I would be tempted to talk the student teacher into another career path.
Huge dilemma. The EdReformers could care less. There are always TFAtypes – Temps.
I can’t even recognize my chosen career.
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I’m with you on this H.A.Hurley – I don’t want to teach teachers how to teach to a test… it’s sickening enough feeling compelled to do it… and I see new teachers coming into teaching and thinking that this is what it’s all about. The results are competitive, NON-collaborative types… new teachers become rather cut-throat… and it’s quite ugly.
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I ran into another scripted math lesson as a substitute in a special education class. The teacher’s manual does not even include a facsimile of what the students are looking at in their books. The students were memorizing an algorithm and had absolutely no understanding of why it worked or what it meant. I understood their frustration and was just glad it was the teaching assistant that was leading the lesson. I can’t “teach” that way.
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We are also seeing pre-service teachers arrive who are the product of NCLB. Some of them only care about the grades they get in their coursework, and are not able to think more deeply about the learning involved. When they begin to take over various aspects of the classroom, they judge their progress on superficial means and dismiss the cooperating teacher’s attempts to push them to look deeper. It’s a double whammy.
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They have been trained like Pavlov’s dog. Sad.
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This is a great point. It means that we are facing three crises for new educators all at the same time: They can’t observe good teaching, they themselves have been taught poorly, and people with the skills, desire, and understanding required to be teachers are not majoring in education because the perks of teaching are gone or are in the process of being taken away. If you were deciding on your college major, why would you choose teaching with annual contracts, test mania, stagnant and terrible salaries, extended hours including people like Duncan advocating getting rid of summer breaks, decimated benefit and retirement plans, union busting, demoralization, media that disparages teachers, and worst of all, children who have grown to hate school due to this pile-on of Rhee-forms. This is not exactly a welcoming environment! If I spoke with them, I would definitely tell them not to go into teaching even though I know that that will lead to many more problems. I just couldn’t in good conscience encourage someone to become a teacher.
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At our school, there were fewer an fewer requests for student teacher for 4th grade becaus of Ohio’s restrictive licensing. More people are interested in teaching k-3 than 4-8, it seemed. Most student teachers didn’t request 3rd grade either.
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Who would want to teach middle school if they learned what we had to deal with. I teach in a high-achieving school, and we still have to jump through hoop after hoop. I wonder how long my eighth grade Shakespeare program is going to last. After all, we do the play in spring when all plays are done, and the New York state tests occur. One may defeat the other.
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I think this is a feature, not a bug. If the lack of student-teaching opportunities means that traditional teacher ed programs aren’t able to properly prepare their students for teaching careers, the Corporate Reformers can use that in their efforts against the college/university ed programs. And they have had college/university ed programs in their sights for a while now.
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Teaching seems to be an ever eroding, joyless profession that even the younger teachers are seriously looking to flee. Little wonder, more a sign of being in touch
with reality and the forebodings of a deepening corporate malaise destroying what once was a fulfilling, meaningful profession. The draconian “reforms” are Orwellian speak for siphoning money from public funds to enrich the corporate jackals hiding in the bushes (no pun intended, but then…). I taught in three states, public and private institutions and had to leave what I loved because the trauma of abusive administrators. I’ve been out for three years, and my friends who still hang on, tell me of the dire, stressful working conditions that each year are more draconian than the last. Chris Hedges wrote a rare, truthful assessment of where education stands today and why. He pulls no punches and one would think he worked in the fields which are infested with Gatesian garbage, posited as well meaning reforms…and Custer loved the Indians.
I sadly see no reprieve from the charter school, cuckoo nest scenario that is kicking out
the golden egg of rationality and dropping the rotten one of fictitious facts, laughable
utopias that would bring educational nirvana, if only the jackals (Bush, Rhee, Gates) could control every aspect of public education and bring it crashing down to the
level of charters whose only goal appears to be turning the youth into acog making, human factory that will produce mute workers, devoid of any skills to evaluate the flotsam and jet-some that spew from the machinations of corporate America. 1984 may seem tame, by comparison.
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I absolutely agree with this! I just finished my student teaching a few weeks ago, but I remember the struggle trying to get observation hours in. Even when I could find a teacher who would let me observe, many times they would not be teaching their subject (I was observing band teachers). Instead, it would be required reading time or writing time or testing time. None of this is all together bad, but it would definitely be more useful for my learning to see the teacher teaching, you know, their subject. Or whatever.
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