Some in the mainstream media have given credence to the report of the National Council on Teacher Quality about teacher preparation. They should have talked to some of the institutions that were graded before venturing an opinion.
In this post, Dean Michael Feuer of the George Washington University School of Education explains how far wrong the report was about his school, its programs, and its students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
It seems that there is no shortage of assaults on teachers in the US, and all things related, for you to have to defend and argue against in your blog.. This is a sad time to be a teacher, or to even think about being a teacher, and in the case of this horrid report, a teacher educator such as we are. Very sad indeed.
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D*mn
Teachers go to work everyday and teach test after test after test amidst all of this negative.
They truly do not care that the so-called mumbo jumbo research inundates the news with the negative
The teachers take it in stride as they chuckle that if these people would just come into the classrooms for a week, though most would not last the day.
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I hope there will be more of these articles. Articles where schools defend their programs, and discredit the report. Please keep posting them, I would like to read the articles that discredit the NCTQ.
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I participated in the report survey and the questions asked of me were very fair. It is a shame that this report has its faults – but those programs that ranked well should be highlighted.
I am incredibly proud of how my program was rated because it is a small program that does teacher prep differently. The focus is on practical skills and being in the classroom as much as possible- starting freshman year. It follows up with its grads every year and has a high rate of retention ten years out. It is not a big name school that has lots of money and big name professors – it has former teachers who offer insight, support, and share personal realities faced in the classroom. There was no doubt when I graduated that I was ready to be in front of the classroom. At the same time, I was aware (thanks to my university) that the best people to continue my education were the other teachers I was about to encounter.
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We had this type of program at Berea back in the 70’s, why so many large programs use only the senior semester to introduce potential teachers to classrooms is beyond me. From the 2nd week on, we were put in classrooms, often not in our discipline, and observed, graded papers, helped with lesson plans and implementation of those plans. This immersion continued throughout the 4 years of the program
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I would like to read the articles that discredit the NCTQ report front page and in the national media.
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Aaah…Michael Feuer.
I find it a bit difficult to reconcile Feuer’s defense of the teacher training program at George Washington University -– which fared poorly in the NCTQ “study” of teacher training, and where he is dean -– with his comments defending the current state of “reform” in public education.
In the wake of the huge cheating scandal in Atlanta and the indictment of former superintendent Beverly Hall, and amid increasing reports of cheating scandals elsewhere (like in the DC schools under former chancellor Michelle Rhee), Feuer wrote a piece in EdWeek titled “It’s Not the Test That Made Them Cheat.”
Interestingly, Beverly Hall served on Louis Gerstner’s Teaching Commission, which issued several reports on “the teacher quality crisis” that (1) revived the spectre that public education was responsible for a lack of American “economic competitiveness,” (2) bashed teacher training and evaluation programs, (3) lauded “leaders” in education like the Broad Foundation, Teach for America, Joel Klein, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and Haley Barbour (Haley Barbour??), and (4) recommended “reforms” like value-added assessment and merit pay for teachers based on student test scores, and streamlining entry into teaching.
[Note: you can read the 2006 report Teaching At Risk here:
http://www.nctq.org/nctq/images/ttc_teachingatrisk.pdf ]
Michael Feuer’s piece in EdWeek was far more sloppy thinking than hard hitting.
Feuer is a guy who wrote that the Reagan-era screed, A Nation at Risk ,was an “enormously effective wake-up call, which alerted Americans to impending calamity if action was not taken to shore up our educational foundations.”
But researchers at the Sandia National Labs investigated the claims made in A Nation at Risk and found them unsubstantiated. The Sandia report concluded that:
* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
* “The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
Feuer says that “the pillars of the contemporary reform movement in American education — goals, national standards, accountability, testing, performance measurement — were erected in the aftermath —of the publication of Nation at Risk.”
These “pillars” were embedded in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, and those two significant and education-altering pieces of legislation were spear-headed by two sitting presidents.
The result? As Nichols and Berliner (2005) note, “high-stakes testing
in the United States is more widespread than ever before, and our nation apparently relies on ability and achievement testing more than any other nation for making important decisions about individuals and schools. We live in an era and in a nation where there is strong support for public policies that use test results to compel changes in the behavior of students, teachers, and school administrators.”
So, there was no education “crisis” but “pillars” of reform got rammed up the collective rear end of American educators through federal legislation that required massive amounts of testing, and all Feuer can say about it is that there’s a “benefits side of the argument” that gets ignored in “the popular frenzy against testing.” Say what?
Feuer is a guy who seems to like it both ways. He believes “moving toward higher and common standards is a good thing for American education.” And though he’d like a “sustained discourse based on empirically sound evidence,” Feuer also says that “if the only way to move the country onto a path of genuine improvement in its education is to indulge occasionally in bombastic rhetoric, that may be a price worth paying.”
Um, I don’t think he’s saying that about the “bombastic rhetoric” in the NCTQ “study.”
Feuer seems to grasp that there is no STEM (science, technology, engineering, math)crisis. But he writes that even though “the aggregate supply of future STEM professionals is adequate,” we may as well emphasize and promote STEM courses because that “will not only address the equity problem but will also contribute to our overall economic condition.” Meanwhile, as Beryl Lieff Benderly points out in the
Columbia Journalism Review:
“Leading experts on the STEM workforce, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students…according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.”
Feuer acknowledges that the U.S. has a serious poverty problem, especially child poverty, that is compounded by increasing economic inequality. That inequality is the direct result of federal tax and financial policy. The effects of both are pernicious.
A technical report from the American Academy of Pediatrics on the damaging effects of toxic stress in children – the kind of stress found in high-poverty urban areas – finds that such stress involves “activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis and the sympathetic-adrenomedullary system, which results in increased levels of stress hormones, such as corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), cortisol, norepinephrine, and adrenaline. These changes co-occur with a network of other mediators that include elevated inflammatory cytokines and the response of the parasympathetic nervous system, which counterbalances both sympathetic activation and inflammatory responses.”
The result is that “toxic stress in young children can lead to less outwardly visible yet permanent changes in brain structure and function….chronic stress is associated with hypertrophy and overactivity in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, whereas comparable levels of adversity can lead to loss of neurons and neural connections in the hippocampus and medial PFC. The functional consequences of these structural changes include more anxiety related to both hyperactivation of the amygdala and less top-down control as a result of PFC atrophy as well as impaired memory and mood control as a consequence of hippocampal reduction.”
Feuer recognizes that “poverty and inequality constrain the pace of growth in student achievement.” Nonetheless, he writes, they “ should not become an excuse for abandoning or even postponing reforms and insisting on holding schools to high standards of management and teaching.” The example he cites often is that Massachusetts, with a child poverty rate of 12 percent, “is now one of our top-performing states.” But a coalition of Massachusetts researchers and professors recently noted that the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) testing “has not significantly reduced disparities in achievement or eliminated gaps, thus the negative consequences of the high-stakes tests fall disproportionately on the groups that most need help…The fact remains that Massachusetts has placed the most severe accountability on the backs of its most disadvantaged students.”
In the wake of the Atlanta cheating scandal –– which is only the tip of the cheating iceberg in the U.S. –– Feuer says that some of the reactions and comments “have been surprising, if not scandalous.”
He can include his own remarks.
Don’t get me wrong, The NCTQ “study” is rife with flaws (as Linda Darling-Hammond points out). But criticism of the NCTQ “study” coming from Michael Feuer is seriously compromised.
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The Feuer EdWeek piece is here:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/04/09/28feuer.h32.html?tkn=TNQFAbFY2viL3zBM7ZyyhNdrepN3UA2PcX7z&cmp=clp-edweek
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Cut it out, democracy!
Where’d you learn those “critical thinking” skills? Public education? Impossible, as those union thug public education teachers (trained in those commie pinko socialistic schools of education) only serve to indoctrinate the students, not like all American (sic) TFA which, obviously in five weeks, instills in its “graduates” a sense of total excellence in teaching.
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“‘Feuer recognizes that “poverty and inequality constrain the pace of growth in student achievement. Nonetheless, he writes, they ‘should not become an excuse for abandoning or even postponing reforms and insisting on holding schools to high standards of management and teaching.'”
Well, let’s give him credit for “holding two opposite” points of view at the same time, eh! Not!
But I couldn’t care less about “growth in student achievement” because that relies on two of the most logically baseless concepts in education today: educational standards and standardized testing . These two educational malpractices serve to bastardize/corrupt the teaching and learning process and causes much harm to too many students. Until the “true teachers” stand up and refuse to participate in the mangling of a child’s opportunity to learn as much as he/she can then the same old shit will keep happening with many students being denied one of the most basic duties our society has to its members-providing them with “the knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people. . .” (MO Constitution).
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I have the same misgivings about d ravitch. Now that she has switched sides, are we to forgive her former rants that supported checker and the other so-called ed researcher reformers? What brought about her new insights? While I am curious and a bit leery, waiting for the “but”, I am more willing to accept her change in attitude than I would be willing to believe that jp greene and peterson of harvard had found that charters/choice did not improve student achievement 🙂
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I attended one of these NCTQ sessions in Los Angeles, and I felt as though the questions were leading, manipulative, and led to predetermined “alleged reform” answers. My particular session had under ten participants, and when a conversation veered a certain way, the facilitators made sure our discussion came back to a “solutions-oriented” conclusion.
This panel didn’t feel anything close to scientific at all.
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Come on folks, how hard can teaching be these days? All teachers do is give prepared worksheets, or direct the students to the computer to do canned programs, then they give prepared tests and run them through a scantron or the the computer grades them. Repeat and continue ad infinitum. That doesn’t take any serious training and education now does it? No, five weeks of “training” probably is just the right amount to do that function in society, isn’t it? No need for schools of education anymore why waste the monies?
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