Relay “Graduate School of Education” is not a real graduate school of any kind. It has been accredited in a few states to award “master’s degrees” even though it has no one on its faculty with a doctorate, engages in no research, has no library, and has no relationship to the advancement of knowledge in education. It was created by charter operators to teach future charter teachers how to control classes and how to raise test scores. Its “faculty” consists of charter teachers, mostly from Teach for America, some of whom claim that they raised test scores more than anyone else in their city. Its deans do not have doctorates in any field of study, although a few say they are working towards earning a doctorate. I admit my own bias; I earned my Ph.D. at Teachers College, where my mentor was Lawrence A. Cremin, the greatest historian of his generation, and where every faculty member had a doctorate. Research and the advancement of knowledge was one of the goals of graduate education. Then. It was expected that graduate students would learn about the sociology, economics, history, and politics of education. Then. They would conduct research and earn a degree based on the quality of their research. Then.
Here is Laura Chapman’s observation:
Here is another sad thing about Relay. NY state was the first to accredit the program and President Obama/Arne Duncan approved of it as a model for other to follow.
A colleague once attended McDonald University in order to show the public exactly what the training methods were. He did not last long. They kicked him out, but not before he got some insight into the cult of standardization and cost-cutting.
Relay is the educational equivilent of McDonald University. It is a franchise operation for charter schools that want fully standardized cost effective education achieved by processing children through a mental meatgrinder to have the same puppet-like response to the teachers questions, on time, and with the right posture, gait, hand placement. Before McDonald and Relay the guru of this version of training was B.F. Skinner.
http://www.relay.edu/blog-entry/doe-recognizes-relay-federal-plan
Diane Ravitch's blog 
More like Trump U …
Relay train its teachers in classes like this…
So that those newly-trained Relay-ites can then subject their students to this:
This is the educational equivalent of a old-style Soviet gulag. It represents the death of childhood, and the endof education that has any real human value.
Seriously, if Campbell Brown and her allies think this garbage is so great, then why do they send their own children to schools (Heschel… for Campbell Brown) that are run in way that is diametrically opposite of the video above?
It’s basically one type of education for the elite 1%, and one for the rest… you know, what the 1% views as “other people’s kids.”
OMG.
Is the first one really from a Relay class?
Yes, indeed, Jon.
Gaining accreditation may not be all that difficult for anyone in the growing for-profit education sector, because in recent years the six traditional accreditation organizations that have been around since the late 19th century—more than a hundred years—have been or are still being swallowed up by one private sector company, a company that accredited the Success Academy charters in New York City.
AdvancED
http://www.advanc-ed.org/
“AdvancED was created through a 2006 merger of the PreK-12 divisions of the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement (NCA CASI) and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools on Accreditation and School Improvement (SACS CASI)—and expanded through the addition of the Northwest Accreditation Commission (NWAC) in 2011.”
And a private-sector, privately owned company called Advance Education, Inc. out of Sacramento, California owns AdvancEd.
“Advance Education, Inc., “AdvancED” is committed to operating its Internet services in a manner that is committed to, recognizes and respects the privacy and security of its online users. We appreciate that your use of our site and the sharing of your personal information requires your trust in our ability to deliver a quality Internet experience in a safe and secure manner.”
Visit the site and look around. This recently combined accreditation organization that is replacing the six traditional non-profit organizations reads like it is part of the corporate education reform movement.
You are correct about the proliferation of “private” accreditors. The online education industry wants stackable credentials and “badges” for demonstrated competency, which usually means passing one or more tests and completing modules of instruction. The approach has been around for some time in vocational education, but it is migrating to higher ed and graduate education
At least McU doesn’t pretend to be teaching anything other than how to run a McD’s.
Another great blog on Relay. . . it’s horrible!
http://www.pegwithpen.com/2015/09/relay-graduate-school-indoctrination.html
It indeed is, as it’s written by an insider. But watching the video from the article is enough to say it all, and make me say WTF. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FQZH4QWYDU
Do you know the exact relationship, between Relay and Uncommon Schools? Is the video used by Relay?
wierdlmate, three charter chains combined to create Relay: KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools. They are all “no excuses” schools. They need their teachers trained in a specific way to run tightly controlled classrooms. It is hard for me to understand how so many TFA, who are coming from relatively privileged backgrounds and attended relatively progressive schools, are able to be stern disciplinarians. It has to be taught.
Dianne,
As the song goes, “They have to be carefully taught”.
Thanks so much for your effort and concern for the people.
It seems fitting that organizations that produce faux teachers can get their equally faux training from Relay or any other bogus institution. When they are done, they can lead their faux reform in their faux “public” schools.
What is disturbing to me is that the President and his secretary are standing behind this nonsense. I would think that the AFT and NEA should both cry foul on this approval since acceptance of McDonalds U training cheapens the degrees of those of us that went to school for many years to get them. It is an insult from Washington. Each state has certification laws to ensure that teachers meet minimum standards of training. The government is promoting a parallel system of education that is violating its own minimum standards. This has not been done to other professions, only teaching. They should be called out for this injustice, and the damage they are doing to the profession.
Giver them time. First, they came for the teachers, but I was not a teacher so I remained silent.
Reblogged this on Exceptional Delaware and commented:
How much is Delaware’s contract with Relay? McDonald’s University indeed!
When I was an undergraduate, I dreamed of holding, one day, a full professorship in English at a prestigious university. I worked very, very hard toward that goal. I vowed at sixteen that by the time I was twenty-two, there would not be a young person in the country who had read as widely in the classics of English literature and continental philosophy as I had. I vainly think that I came close to that goal. And then, I applied to graduate programs, and I got into good ones, but at the time, even the best universities in the country were not placing their newly minted PhDs into positions worth having.
I had a young family. I didn’t want to put them through waiting for me to incur a lot of debt. I didn’t want to put them through watching me bounce around from one crummy position to another in hopes that I might land on a tenure track. So, I skipped graduate school and went to work in publishing. I earned good money and raised a family.
And all my life, I continued to study, assiduously, in my field, with excursions, as fancy took me, into related fields. I have been and am what people sometimes call an independent scholar. I can hold my own at the table with learned men and women with advanced degrees from major universities. But whatever my level of learning, I would not be considered for a position at a university because I don’t have that piece of paper.
This saddens me. And it makes me applaud efforts to create mechanisms whereby people might prove their merits via alternative pathways. I like the idea that I might take a test to show people that I know my Shelley and Blake, that I might submit to examination by a committee of my knowledge of the history of hermeneutics, that I might write and submit a dissertation without having had had my butt planted at a university for several years (which would not even close to equivalent to what I’ve actually done, which to have spent a lifetime working, every day, to advance my learning).
I like, very much, the idea of certificate programs whereby one might demonstrate one’s learning, piecemeal, over many years, for I am very much committed to the ideal of lifelong, intrinsically motivated self-education.
It’s important, however, that alternative pathways be credible. The proliferation of questionable alternatives cheapens and debases. Of course it does. And that we must guard against.
Oops. A poor edit in the third paragraph, above. Oh for a correction feature on WordPress! LOL
Fourth paragraph. Yikes
Bob, I would take a university class from you any day (although I would have to work up to it!).
never2old, I would not so presume, but thank you.
Bob, because of family poverty and alcoholism I never got to do the traditional route of college. It took me fifteen years to get my BA! So I understand where you’re coming from. I attended a very prestigious public high school but anything advanced beyond that was impossible because of my family situation.
You are right that there should be alternative programs for people who choose or are forced down non-traditional paths. These should be credible and respected, but also accessible. Not everyone has the same chances in life, no matter how hard they try.
Bob,
I’d also take a class from you any day.
There are not many (if any) who could Shakespeare David Coleman the way you did
“You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!”
“You starvelling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish–O for breath to utter what is like thee!-you tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!”
I could not agree more.
But you did leave one out
“You Colemanalien!”
God forbid, an education school that actually trains teachers how to do their job, rather than alternating between mindless projects (“make a poster about yourself!”) and abstruse theory that never helped any teacher actually teach anything.
Next thing we know, there might be a ballet academy that actually offers ballet lessons with accomplished ballerinas, rather than desk work and philosophy lessons under the tutelage of PhD’s who haven’t danced in 30 years (if ever).
Read Bob S above and get back with us.
W.T.
Relay train its teachers in classes like this…
So that those newly-trained Relay-ites can then subject their students to this:
(try playing those simultaneously… i.e. hitting the PLAY arrows at the same time, or as close as possible to the same time… I swear you can hear a satanic voice loop with an almost Barry White-like bass voice”
*** “Eli Broad is the Devil… Kneel before Satan and Eli… You cannot resist the power of Eli and Satan…” ***)
This is the educational equivalent of an old-style Soviet gulag, or perhaps a Scientology RFP camp. It represents the death of childhood, and the end of education that has any real human value.
Seriously, if Campbell Brown and her allies think this garbage is so great, then why do they send their own children to schools (Heschel… for Campbell Brown) that are run in way that is diametrically opposite of the video above?
It’s basically one type of education for the elite 1%, and one for the rest… you know, what the 1% views as “other people’s kids.”
SCARY, SCARY, SCARY! This is NOT an education. Wow…Hitler’s schools.
They (Relay) don’t teach, they train. They indoctrinate. They send their “teachers” out, predominately to charter schools, where they then drill, ondoctrinate, and train students to take tests. No higher level thinking or reflection. No teachable moments. No differentiated instruction. No building of relationships. It does nothing to elevate the profession of teaching, but reduces it to a job in which its “graduates” are equipped with a set of techniques and an expectation those techniques will be followed with fidelity.
Don’t take my word for it. Do the research like I did, watch the video clips, follow the money. It opened my eyes.
If it is so except able to run a “graduate school” like this, in which the faculties have little or no background in education, I think I will open my own graduate school of Medicine. We need good doctors, and I have visited doctors and doctors’ offices all my life, I have friends who have done the same, and friends who have science backgrounds. Surely I could be successful with this venture, don’t you think?
“The Relay Race”
The Relay race
Is run in place
And never will progress
The Relay pace
Is one that pays
For those who run the jest
I don’t see a problem with higher leadership not having PhDs or EdDs considering the school does not offer doctoral programs. Even if they did offer doctoral programs, many “traditional” institutions of higher education are leaning toward having deans that have more “real world” experience than academic. So many college students graduate without any practical knowledge and career skills. I don’t see a problem in having this as one of many options for people who want a master’s degree. I wouldn’t want to see traditional programs go away but this can be a good complement.
how can a graduate school of education have not a single faculty member with a doctorate? name one. Veterinarians? Dentists? Social workers? Architecture? Please identify one.
I am not saying it is common or has even happened before, I can’t say for sure as I’m not an expert on every non-traditional higher education institution. All I am saying is in some disciplines I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with it. I don’t think veterinarian or dentist is a fair comparison, because to practice in those fields you have to hold a doctorate. But for a social work or an architecture program, I don’t see a problem with those courses being taught by people with master’s degrees. I think a master’s degree with the right amount of experience can in some cases be just as, if not more, valuable in the classroom than a doctorate. I myself am an EdD student, so I don’t mean to trivialize the importance of doctorate degrees in certain settings, I am just saying I don’t think having a program like Relay as one of many options is a bad thing.
Do you really think an advanced degree from Relay should carry the same weight as one from a more traditional program?
@2old2teach I would have to look more in depth into their curricula to answer that but on a surface-level, I would have to say given how much all master’s programs vary across the country at all types of universities, yes. As someone who went through a rigorous (traditional) master’s program which culminated in research only slightly less extensive than that of a dissertation, I sometimes get bitter at some of the things people at plenty of other traditional programs get away with (presentations, position papers, etc.) but I have realized over time that some schools are more focused on practical application and some are more focused on research and everyone has to pick a program that works for them and aligns with their goals. I think sometimes people are too critical of programs like Relay because they don’t like the fact that they are different than what we are used to. I don’t think it’s fair to criticize Relay just because a lot of their employees used to work at charter schools or TFA. I also don’t think it’s fair in this post to compare a PhD to an MAT or an alternate route to certification. The two things don’t have the same purpose or goals, especially not in the field of education.
Yeah, my masters program differentiated between MS and M. Ed degrees. MS candidates completed an administrative tract that included a thesis and a couple of courses geared to administration. I opted for the M.Ed. since I had no intention of being anywhere but in a classroom. Other than those differences, we all completed the same program which did have a more practical focus than theoretical although the theoretical was not ignored. I’ll admit to not having other than an anecdotal understanding of Relay, but I do question a program that has no one with academic qualifications “teaching” the program. It smacks of a overblown PD for praprofessionals rather than advanced professional preparation program.
Call Relay a professional development program for charter school teachers. It is not a graduate school.
Given that there is zero evidence that graduate degrees in education have any benefit to students — and even some evidence that teachers with masters’ degrees do *worse* in the classroom! — it may not make sense to be such a hidebound conservative about the traditional structure of such programs.
* Helen Ladd, no friend to education reform, published a paper noting that the effect of masters’ degrees was, if anything, negative: http://www.caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/1001058_Teacher_Credentials.pdf
WT, do you have a proposal for teacher education? How about letting high school graduates teach elementary school? That was a big success in the early 19th century. No, I take it back. They weren’t high school graduates. It was sixth graders teaching fifth graders. Evidently you don’t believe that teaching is a profession. Let anyone do it. Maybe a good job for vagrants.
Putting such a fetish on useless masters’ degrees taught by PhD’s (rather than expert mentors) isn’t the sign of a “profession.”
WT, I am happy to say that all my professors in graduate school had a doctorate, which meant they were deeply knowledgeable and I learned from them. I have a real degree. What about yours? did you get it from Relay or online?
After all, everyone knows that PhDs spend their days gazing at their belly buttons when they are not called to teach to teach the next useless generation of advanced degree holders.
But you were training to be an academic in a university, not to work in a classroom of 6-year-olds. There is absolutely no evidence or reason to think that PhD academics are the only or the best means of training people to be good first grade teachers. There isn’t even any evidence or reason to think that PhD’s are any good at training first grade teachers. They might be *worse*, as Helen Ladd’s evidence suggests.
Handling a classroom of first graders is an interactive performance every day. It’s more like being a musician or a ballerina than like being an academic who writes long articles/books after spending months in the library. Again, there is no reason to think that the typical education school professor with a PhD can even remotely begin to help first-grade teachers at doing their actual job, any more than someone with a PhD in ballet history but little-to-no dance experience is the best at teaching ballerinas how to actually dance.
Which is why, an internship/student teaching is such an important part of the training. Any profession requires some method of combining the theoretical and the practical. I was one of those who went directly into the classroom with almost no experience, theoretical or practical. (I had a BA in psychology.) There is no way I could have become any more than a competent paraprofessional without getting a masters in special education. The public schools had enough sense to require some minimum demonstration of competency, so I worked in a private school for multiply handicapped children that the public schools could not/would not educate.) Teaching takes a hit because there is no way a teacher can prescribe and guarantee a certain outcome for each of the 20-35 (for high school, 125+?) students in their classroom. To contend that education beyond a BA is useless because it doesn’t guarantee higher test scores is silly.
I went through an urban residency teacher training program where I was placed in a 5th grade master teacher’s classroom in a community with extremely high rates of poverty in addition to dangerous street gangs and worked full time for one full school year there. I also had to take those classes in the late afternoons that studied Bloom’s taxonomy and B.F. Skinner and the other lab rats.
What I learned from my master teacher was a thousand times more valuable than all the theories from the experts who published books on the results of their studies. My master teacher taught me how to control the learning environment and deal with difficult kids who didn’t care a hoot about what I was teaching and had no interest in learning anything. After I started teaching, I quickly forgot about Bloom and Skinner and all the other lab rats, but I never forgot what Ms. Stepp, the master teacher, taught me.
You know, Lloyd, when I was on the floor teaching, Skinner did not enter my mind. He did enter my mind when I was “encouraged” to use the district’s positive behavior token system. The reaction of the high school students was less than “positive.” Having spent college in a department that was enthralled by behaviorism, I knew where the program went wrong. I knew I wasn’t training a lab rats to run a maze. Fortunately, I also had “subversive” professors who approached human behavior in a more humanistic fashion. I drew on that knowledge to frame my own professional stance on that and many other issues. As you may have noticed, I rely heavily on anecdotal evidence when making a point. I defer to those on the blog who have the research skills to backup my anecdotes. The academics informed my practice and vice versa.
You are not alone relying on anecdotal evidence.
Lloyd, who are the “other lab rats” you are referring to?
Interesting that you should challenge me with such a question 40 years after I took those classes that I have totally forgotten all the details about. There’s an old saying that goes like this “Use it or lose it.” I didn’t use any of that theoretical stuff, for instance, from Bloom and Skinner, in the classroom—-not once did I consider any of that, in my opinion, waste of time crap that filled up credit hours required to earn a teaching credential.
For instance, when I was honorably discharged from the Marines in 1968 and went to college on the GI Bill, I had to take all of those required math courses that I should have had in high school if I had been on a track for college—-but because I was labeled in my student record file way back in 1st grade as retarded I was never scheduled into those college prep classes.
After the Marines and fighting in Vietnam, In my first two years at a community college on the GI Bill, I had to take more than one class of algebra, trig, geometry, and calculus. Since I never used anything that I had to learn in those classes to be qualified to graduate from college, I forgot everything just like I forgot all the “crap” (my emphasis) I had to take in education classes to earn my teaching credential.
I repeat, while the theories based on that lab-rat learning is interesting as a footnote, teachers who work with large numbers of children who live in poverty and/or have learning disabilities will benefit MUCH MORE from a teacher training program like an urban residency.
@DianeRavitch, ” I have a real degree. What about yours? did you get it from Relay or online?” – are you now saying that even online programs are not “real degrees,” in addition to Relay?
“are you now saying that even online programs are not “real degrees,” in addition to Relay?”
In general, no, they are not.
Folks, please don’t bring up some heroic individual stories about selfeducated people, or people who did better with their online degrees than those with regular degrees.
These are exceptions. In the vast majority of cases, a regular degree (masters’, phd) beat an online one by a large margin. How many employers say “As long as you have some kind of engineering degree, it’s fine with us.” ? How many says “Ah, cool, you have a modern, online degree and not some old fashioned degree from Stone Age College.” ?
Bill Gates, for obvious reasons, is trying to convince people that online education is the modern, 21st century way to wisdom.
No, the ideal way of education people hasn’t changed since Socrates: pupils and teachers get together in small numbers and learn from each other and figure out, discover things together.
Anything else is a compromise. Even lectures in big lecture halls are compromises.
Gates wants to convince the masses that we have to make the next compromise, which is online education.
Online education is for very few people. How few? Gates advocated Massive Open Online Courses. Statistics: at most 2% of those who signed up for an MOOC finished it.
Yeah, more and more people can be forced to take online courses, but this fact doesn’t mean at all that they are more beneficial to people than regular courses. Like kids taking standardized tests: just because many (most) of them are forced to do it, doesn’t mean, it’s beneficial for them.
I wonder if there has been a study that compares the job-hire ratio of college graduates from on-line schools verses traditional brick and mortar colleges with old fashioned classrooms and real people teaching and learning. And I’m not talkign about if they end up with a job after graduation but a job that requires a college degree in that major. It would also be nice if that comparison revealed starting wages.
Can you imagine a High School hiring someone without a college degree?
As a teacher, one needs to be a step or two ahead of the students, if only to recognize extraordinary talent or accomplishment and encourage its development instead of fearing it. Not that all traditional degrees mean all that much, however, at a higher level. After all, at some point scholars need to be colleagues, not pegs in a hierarchy.
But, both teachers and students in these clips are being taught to be pegs. “Education” means a drawing out. These clips show a “stuffing in”, a Procrustean solution. This is not a model of education. Instead, it is a model of indoctrination, the exact opposite of education.
I appreciate this viewpoint. I think the recognizing talent/need to be colleagues and not pegs in a hierarchy is a better argument than the other ones that have been made in this thread. I hadn’t really thought about it that way. It doesn’t necessarily make me fully change my mind but it does give me some food for thought, so thank you!
“Even if they did offer doctoral programs, many “traditional” institutions of higher education are leaning toward having deans that have more “real world” experience than academic.”
“Academiic” has been turned into a dirty word; it now seems to mean “nerdy, unrealistic”. But this understanding of academia is not in the real world, it’s in the minds of people who want to privatize higher education, hence they need to discredit and even demonize professors in the public’s eye.
Of course, some people listen to this nonsense, and repeat the mantra of Gates and friends, believing them without doing their own research.
A Master’s degree or PhD in education is given to people who, one way or another, contribute something new to education. In some cases, a Master’s degree has been watered down to “understand education at a higher level”. Even in this watered down case, a Master’s degree will enble you to understand the real world (education) better, but normally, a Master’s is given to people who not only understand education at a higher level, but contribute something new to it.
So where does unreal real world fit in here?
And in what sense does Relay give a higher understanding of education as they teach classroom (largely discipline) techniques?
I didn’t mean to be offensive with the real world/academic comment. I just didn’t know a better way to put it; all I meant was I have seen traditional universities over the past few years opt for hiring deans with a lot of experience in their field of work, but not necessarily a terminal degree. As I mentioned in previous posts, I myself went through a rigorous master’s program and am in an EdD program now, so I by no means belittle or trivialize the more traditional routes or the importance of those types of programs for some jobs. I just don’t think anything is wrong with having other options out there.
As far as your last question about Relay, as I mentioned in another post I would have to look more closely into their curricula to answer that question. I meant to more so defend the idea of a program like Relay and try to discuss another point of view in terms of the lack of doctorate degrees. I don’t consider myself an expert in the specifics of Relay by any means.