A couple of weeks ago, Bill Keller wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in which he asserted that colleges of education were largely responsible for our national education woes. Leave aside the fact that he knows nothing about the national education issues, but focus instead on his claim that whatever is wrong must be the fault of the ed schools.
Bruce Baker was outraged, as was I.
I have never been a champion of ed schools, but like Baker, I recoiled at Keller’s simplistic thinking. Plenty of smart teachers went to ed schools; are there some bad courses there? Sure. Are there some bad courses in liberal arts colleges? Yes. My own view is that teachers should be solidly grounded in whatever they expect to teach, but they should also learn about how to teach, about child psychology, about how children learn, and about the politics, history, and economics of education. The combination is powerful. But that doesn’t mean that everyone with that combination will be a great teacher.
Baker writes:
But there’s actually a simpler logical fallacy at play here which lies at the root of many reformy arguments regarding causes and consequences – failure to acknowledge that the U.S. has a wide range of elementary and secondary of schools that are both high performing and low performing and that the defining features differentiating higher and lower performing schools are not found primarily in their teachers or the preparation programs they attended – or whether they attended any at all – but rather in the communities they serve, the resources available to them and the backgrounds, health and economic well-being of the children and families they serve.
This is not about the poverty as excuse argument. This is about the simple point that our highest performing public schools also employ teachers from traditional public college and university preparation programs and in many cases, teachers from the same – or substantively overlapping – college and university preparation programs as teachers in our lowest performing schools in the same region.
If that’s the case, then how is it possible that teacher preparation programs are the problem?
It would be wonderful if the New York Times elevated someone to the op-ed page as a columnist who actually knew something about education, like Michael Winerip. Winerip used to have a great weekly column, but was then mysteriously assigned to cover baby-boomers. At present, every columnist on the New York Times opinion pages takes his turn saying absurd things about American education, either because they think they have found a miracle school (which isn’t) or because they have found the ultimate scapegoat (which they haven’t).
Maybe they could hire Bruce Baker and really enlighten the world.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Keller (not for this first time) has made a fool of himself by grossly oversimplifying a problem is clearly does not understand. Blaming Ed. Schools for problems in education is like blaming crime on police academies. Or blaming illiteracy on Librarian MA programs.
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Perhaps one of the problems that Keller refuses to acknowledge, no doubt because it might undermine the neoliberal assumptions underpinning the outlook that keeps him employed at the Times, is that many of the shortcomings of education schools – at least among private colleges – is that they are essentially run as profit centers, since they are committed to using adjuncts and teaching assistants to instruct future teachers. These part-timers, many barely older than the students in their classes and with minimal classroom experience, are so exhausted by the demands placed upon them that it requires almost superhuman effort on their part to provide students with what they need.
I received my Master’s degree in TESOL in 1997 from NYU, a real estate development company with a higher education subsidiary (sorry, Diane, I know you work there, but it’s the truth). Of the fourteen classes I took, not counting an observation class and my student teaching, only two were taught by full time tenured faculty, who were superb scholars and teachers. And this was graduate school! The other classes were taught by adjuncts or TA’s who ranged from OK to dreadful.
The labor relations policies in higher education, with a small and ever-shrinking cohort of privileged, tenured full-timers largely indifferent to the plight of adjuncts and TA’s working for poverty wages, without benefits or job security, are a desired end for K-12 among so-called reformers.
Keller’s ignorance and his elite platform are useful on two levels for the so-called education reformers: it makes easier the introduction of bogus “alternative certification” programs started by charter parasites such as KIPP and Harlem Village Academy, and further smoothes the way for teaching to becoming temporary, at-will employment, one of the brass rings of so-called reform.
So many useful idiots like Keller in the world of education, and so many assets to smash and grab; no wonder we see such bipartisan accord, since so much corporate focus is on extracting existing wealth from consumers and the public sector.
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Few ever mention the fact that the wonderful teachers at the incredible private K12 schools which “reformers” send their own kids to were also trained in Ed Schools.
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The single greatest influence on a child’s education is the wealth of his parents. The second factor is the teacher.
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John, you are right that family income and education are the greatest determinant of children’s academic achievement. Study after study has shown this as a very strong correlation. There will of course be poor kids who break the mold and rise to the top, and some rich kids will do poorly on tests. But standardized tests are a mirror of socioeconomic status.
The economists who study these issues say that the influence of the teacher accounts for about 10-15% of the variation in test scores. A teacher can change a child’s life, but his or her influence is dwarfed by factors like family income, poverty, living conditions, health, etc. There are social obligations that cannot be wished away or neglected.
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I thought the level of the mother’s education was also right up there in the top 3 factors . . . . .
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I have lost total respect for Bill Keller, whose article is fraught with generalities, vaguaries, and just plain, shallow journalism. His simplistic statement that opened with “acording to one respected study . . . ” is beyond belief. .. . How can the intellects at the times allow such poor writing and thinking?
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Baker’s analysis is data driven but hardly addresses Keller’s admittedly squishy arguments. He simply points to the fact that teachers in what appear to be high performing school districts and low performing districts come from the same Undergrad schools. However, Baker’s analysis makes little of the fact that the distribution of teachers from these institutions are in fact not comparable. 29% of Lake Forest and Naperville full time instructional staff come from ISU, NIU and UI Champaign compared to 11% for the low performing districts of Chicago and Aurora East. Moreover, it is entirely unclear whether the school districts are selecting the same type of grads from the same type of schools. The analysis proves little and Baker acknowledges this in his response to the more incisive comments to the original article. Note that Dave’s arguments are not that different from Keller’s.
“Dave
October 22, 2013
I always admire the thoroughness of your analysis, but a some factors seem to be missing about teacher training and where teachers are employed. One would be the quality of the graduate, not based on the institution attended, but on the grades received during their training. Graduates from the same program may be very different in the knowledge, drive, and skill they bring to their job in a classroom. The other factor is whether some districts in your analysis can be more selective about who they hire; again not based on where applicants trained, but the quality of the individual applicant. Are better qualified teachers being hired and then being placed in schools with better reputations or which are located in more affluent communities? The large affluent county where I taught for several years receives thousands of applicants each year and can be very selective about who it hires. In turn, those new hires, when given a choice among the dozens of schools in the county, can to some degree, self-select into those schools with a better reputation. The less affluent large county, where I also taught for many years, had a much smaller pool of applicants from which to pick, some not fully certified who then struggled for several years to become certified.
The NYT piece is ludicrous, but at the same time maybe the US should move toward a model of teacher training more like that of Finland. The perception of teachers as being something less than professional because of the way they are trained is tough to overcome without some significant restructuring of that training. But the nation has to be willing to pay for that. What student will be able or willing to pay $200K out of pocket to earn a Master’s Degree to enter a profession offering $35K or less starting salaries?
schoolfinance101
October 22, 2013
Certainly agree with pretty much every point you make above.”
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In the late 1970s when I began my masters degree at Bank Street College, the two year education program (NOT training) consisted of courses in the following:
science, math, reading, art, child development, music, observation and recording, literature, block play, philosophy of education, group dynamics, and of course included a carefully monitored internship. (This is a partial listing, there were electives as well.) In subsequent years I have had student teachers in my school library (yes, another degree was required for this position), and all went through rigorous course work that covered many subject areas. My point is that quality schools of education EDUCATE teachers, not train them, and cover many subject areas. Someone who emerges from a quality school of education still has many years ahead of her/him to develop the skills and emotional depth to respond to each student’s needs as well as keep abreast in new discoveries in many fields and new technologies to support each student. This can’t be learned in five weeks (the TFA model) or even two years. Just like doctors, lawyers, professors, pharmacologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, etc. learn by years of practice, so do teachers. All get the foundation in education, all get the depth and breadth in the field.
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