Perhaps you read the editorial in the New York Times a few days ago, blasting teacher education programs and approving John King’s new regulations to judge them by the test scores of the students who graduate from them. The editorial cites the Gates-funded National Council on Teacher Quality’s claim that 90% of teacher education institutions stink. NCTQ, you may recall, publishes rankings of teacher education programs without ever actually visiting any of them. It just reads the catalogues and decides which are the best and which are the worst, based in part on their adherence to the Common Core and scripted reading programs.
I agree that the entry standards for teacher education programs must be higher, and I would love to see online teaching degree programs shut down. But King’s new rules don’t address entry standards or crummy online programs. Their main goal is to judge teacher education programs by the test scores of the students who studied under the graduates of the programs. They will discourage teachers from teaching in high-needs districts. They will allow the U.S. Department of Education to extend its test-crazed control into yet another sector of American education. This is federal overreach at its dumbest.
John Merrow, who knows much more than the Times’ editorial writer on education (the same person for the past 20 years or more), has a different and better informed perspective.
He writes that the problem is not teacher education but the underpaid, under-respected profession.
The federal government thinks that tighter regulation of these institutions is the answer. After all, cars that come out of an automobile plant can be monitored for quality and dependability, thus allowing judgments about the plant. Why not monitor the teachers who graduate from particular schools of education and draw conclusions about the quality of their training programs?
That’s the heart of the new regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Education this week: monitor the standardized test scores of students and analyze the institutions their teachers graduated from. Over time, the logic goes, we’ll discover that teachers from Teacher Tech or Acme State Teachers College generally don’t move the needle on test scores. Eventually, those institutions will lose access to federal money and be forced out of business. Problem solved!
Education Secretary John B. King, Jr., announced the new regulations in Los Angeles. “As a nation, there is so much more we can do to help prepare our teachers and create a diverse educator workforce. Prospective teachers need good information to select the right program; school districts need access to the best trained professionals for every opening in every school; and preparation programs need feedback about their graduates’ experiences in schools to refine their programs (emphasis added). These regulations will help strengthen teacher preparation so that prospective teachers get off to the best start they can, and preparation programs can meet the needs of students and schools for great educators.”
Work on the regulations began five years ago and reflect former Secretary Arne Duncan’s views.
John Merrow says that the Department is trying to solve a problem by issuing regulations that will make the problem worse. Teacher churn and attrition are at extraordinary high levels. The regulations will not encourage anyone to improve teaching.
He writes:
Strengthen training, increase starting pay and improve working conditions, and teaching might attract more of the so-called ‘best and brightest,’ whereas right now it’s having trouble attracting anyone, according to the Learning Policy Institute, which reported that
“Between 2009 and 2014, the most recent years of data available, teacher education enrollments dropped from 691,000 to 451,000, a 35% reduction. This amounts to a decrease of almost 240,000 professionals on their way to the classroom in the year 2014, as compared to 2009.”
Merrow writes, in the voice of wisdom, a voice that has been non-existent in Washington, D.C., for the past 15 years:
I am a firm believer in the adage, “Harder to Become, Easier to Be.” We need to raise the bar for entry into the field and at the same time make it easier for teachers to succeed. This approach will do the opposite; it will make teaching more test-centric and less rewarding.
This latest attempt to influence teaching and learning is classic School Reform stuff. It worships at the altar of test scores and grows out of an unwillingness to face the real issues in education (and in society). While it may be well-meaning, it’s misguided and, at the end of the day, harmful.
Listen up, New York Times editorial writer!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
Your words: John Merrow says that the Department is trying to solve a problem by issuing regulations that will make the problem worse. Teacher churn and attrition are at extraordinary high levels. The regulations will not encourage anyone to improve teaching.
EXACTLY! TRUE!
The regulations strangle we teachers and our students and in the end this country.
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The regulations not only do not encourage anyone to improve teaching, they actually stifle creative energy and thus stifle effective teaching altogether.
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I’m currently in an education graduate school program at a well regarded school. The students are smart. The teachers are smart. What they are telling the student teachers to do is the problem. More students will graduate high school, but all students will learn less.
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EdWeek just reported that the high school graduation rate just reached a record high of 83%, and should the Obama administration take credit. More diplomas, less education
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The graduation rate may be higher but I offer the theory that more kids are being pushed out the door just to make the numbers look good rather than earning it.
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“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Albert Einstein
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Well, if they continue to kill the profession, then their point is moot. After all, unlicensed / uncertified teachers are all the rage now. All thos e engineers can teach in tough neighborhoods for $28K salaries. And they’ll never leave, right? 30 year careers.
If anything, they’ll have to continue to lower the bar just to get enough people to fill classrooms. Besides, how hard is it to teach according the the Gates / NCTQ way? We just started doing our new evaluation system that gives us “autonomy” under the guise of cookie cutter limited best practice options. If Gates had his way, we’d all teach the same lessons the same way, yet it would somehow still be personalized.
Sorry, that was rambling but the collective stupidity of the powers-that-be is impressive.
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I think revisiting Finland and their view of the education profession, as an education professional, might be of interest. I do fully agree that current MAT are terrible when looked at in isolation (little focus on actual professional practices.) I would suggest a more universal model of at least three years as part of Professional MAT: 1-2 year of prior experience, a full academic year, then an internship in a school for at least a year with a final project/license. 4 quarters for a MA and license is a joke! Ryan Collay Education by Design 541-343-2399 ryan@createug.com
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The biggest suppliers of masters degrees in education today are online “universities.” What a sham. Congress should withdraw accreditation. You can’t learn to teach without human contact with other professionals and living children, not avatars.
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Thanks for posting this. I am going out, but will cross post it later.
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There are a few things going on here.
First, teacher churn is a feature, not a bug, of so-called education reform. The intention is to de-skill the profession, and turn teaching Into temp work. That is the entire reason for Teach For America’s existence, for example.
Second, the traditional teacher education programs are to be discredited in service of the new snake oil, so-called reform credential programs, such as Relay, intended to institutionalize teaching as temp work performed with scripted (by Pearson, et. al.) lessons.
Third, the traditional teacher training programs are being attacked and discredited because, despite their many shortcomings, they still largely maintain the traditional humanism of the profession, which so-called reform will do absolutely anything to eliminate.
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The logic beyond John King’s proposal to judge teacher ed programs based on the tests scores of students of graduates is insane. Aside from the problems of validity of said tests, it is illogical and narcissistic to judge a program based on teachers straight out of that program. Would you rather have a doctor straight out of med school operate on you or someone who has been practicing for 20 years? There is no room for growth for teachers and no long-term perspective, and those impossible metrics of “be perfect now” are a large contributor to teacher burn-out along with many other factors.
I have worked with teachers who went through online teaching programs, and they were, across the board, difficult to work with and they had difficulty in the classroom. It is illogical to do an online program and then expect to be able to teach a classroom of real people.
I would love to see not only the online programs done away with but also the short-cut “career change” programs scrapped, too. There is no way that someone can be prepared to be a competent teacher in less than two years. Teacher education must consist not only of practical methodology, but it must also be grounded in a strong foundation of pedagogical theory and an understanding of child development. A good teaching education also includes a lot of observation hours. One must spend time observing in a variety of schools and classrooms. All of this takes time, as it should.
The professionalization of teacher education programs has less to do, in my opinion, with tougher entry standards into the program and more to do with making sure that students actually complete a program that provides a solid foundation in theory, a wide variety of methodology, sufficient time for reflection and processing field observations, and an ample amount of time for being a student teacher.
Furthermore, it is erroneous to use graduates’ performance as a direct reflection of a school’s program. Schools are not machines, and students are not products. I’m sure that we all have examples of terrible people who graduated from not-terrible schools. John King has degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and Yale. He seems to have a woeful lack of logic or depth, so does that mean that Harvard, Columbia, and Yale are terrible schools? Of course not.
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Ok, so will the professors in the teacher education programs be held personally responsible for their graduate students who are becoming teachers??? I can’t wait until it’s decreed that college professors will be held accountable and possibly lose their jobs because of their students’ scores on some test – probably made by Pearson. Will those college professors quietly submit to this??? Who in the world will want to educate the people of this country??? The idea is so insane. As I’ve said before, I think the “best and brightest” will use their smarts to decide NOT to go into teaching.
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All this is silly. Our rising problem is not how we train our teachers but whether anyone will want to teach at all. Evaluation rubrics (that is an evil word in and of itself) notoriously make it difficult to earn a compliment for any behavior outside rigorously narrow parameters. Politicians on both sides of the aisle regularly blame teachers for the failings of their own policy and their constituents’ laziness. Many parents pull their kids out of school, citing unreasonable expectations of teachers.
I know of a school where vacancies are still unfilled after a quarter of the year is over. The shortage of teachers is upon us and we are behaving as if we will skate along on the thin ice developed over the past 20 years. I say twenty because in 1996, Bob Dole stood and blamed the teacher’s unions for all the ills in America. Soon everybody was piling on. Now after all this time, people are pulling out of teaching. I have a ten year old daughter. I worry that she will be taught by people who are comfortable with being browbeaten instead of confident and creative spirits.
Want to train teachers better? Give young teachers lighter loads and far more time to plan. Give them more time to calaborate on lessons. Let them grow into their jobs gradually.
Of course his will require investment. Someone will have to pay. That is why I despair of ever getting anything substantive done. The citizens here do not want more money spent. The extended school administrations want more positions for people who never see a kid. Money wasted. In order to fund programs we have to employ grant writers. Money wasted. Billionaires want some part of the pie because they cannot remember how to make and sell things. Money wasted. Who can blame the taxpayer?
Let us agree that we need to invest in people. People who see kids every day and care whether they are learning. That is the basic stuff.
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NCTQ? From this blog, 6-24-2013—
[start posting]
Aaron Pallas is a sociologist at Teachers College, Columbia University, who is one of our nation’s best scholars of education. He is quick to spot Bunkum.
He said this about the report on teacher preparation programs by NCTQ:
“To be sure, few of us relish being put under the microscope. But it’s another matter entirely to be seen via a funhouse mirror. My institution, Teachers College at Columbia University, didn’t receive a summary rating of zero to four stars in the report, but the NCTQ website does rate some features of our teacher-prep programs. I was very gratified to see that our undergraduate elementary and secondary teacher-education programs received four out of four stars for student selectivity. Those programs are really tough to get into—nobody gets admitted. And that’s not hyperbole; the programs don’t exist.
“That’s one of the dangers of rating academic programs based solely on documents such as websites and course syllabi. You might miss something important—like “Does this program exist?”
Pallas noted that the Washington Post published an editorial praising the report. He commented: “I look forward to the Post instructing their restaurant reviewer, Tom Sietsema, to rate restaurants based on their online menus rather than several in-person visits to taste the food.”
[end posting]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/06/24/aaron-pallas-the-trouble-with-the-nctq-ratings-of-ed-schools/
To go to the original posting by Aaron Pallas, please click on the above link.
Doesn’t exist?!?!? But “studies show”…
😎
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“I am a firm believer in the adage, “Harder to Become, Easier to Be.” We need to raise the bar for entry into the field and at the same time make it easier for teachers to succeed.”
So this, together with earlier posts about Finland, seem to mean the following advice
K-12:
Ease up on the students, America: less home work, less class time, more play, more time with friends
College:
Be more selective, study harder, America: churn out more credit hours, add a year or two to learn a profession well.
After college, work:
Ease up, America: make it easier for young people to succeed, to love their job, don’t kill them with overwork.
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I recently completed an online teacher credentialing program for my 3rd credential because it was the most cost effective option. I can barely afford a 1 bedroom apartment on a teacher salary, so going $15,000 in debt was not an option for me. Who can afford to be a teacher these days? I would never advise someone who relies on their income to become a teacher. Where do these reformers think they will find teachers to meet their standards? Right now positions are being filled by anyone willing to do the job. As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for!
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I read the article in Sunday’s NY Times Business section on Wal-Mart’s new approach to their employees. Employees are getting paid more and they are also getting more predictable hours, better training, clearer paths to promotions. Yes, the employees are happy for the money, but they are just about as happy with the other aspects of the change and the greater feeling of being respected in their job. The boots-on-the-ground managers like this change. It makes it easier for them to attract and retain good employees. However, the shareholders see that it costs more money (although still gaining a profit and MUCH better customer satisfaction grades.)
This reminded me a lot of what is happening in the education field. I live in a urban district where teacher pay is quite decent. In fact, teacher starting pay is similar to that of many entry-level attorneys and dentists in our area, and it can rise to the level of being in the top fifth of wage earners. Yet, still, our teacher turnover rate is extremely high. Some of this is due to the tough situations of our kids, for sure, but much of it is due to lack of autonomy, second guessing by non-educators, being under receivership, and all sorts of micromanaging by the State. I’m sure most principals would like to change things, but those up above, our “shareholders,” are looking at the short-term numbers, not the long-term plan, just like at Wal-Mart.
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Walmart will never permit unions.
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Diane, I feel the need to share this with you because it sickens me.
I am in a Principal training program now after over a decade in the classroom. It is a respected program (I won’t say which) and does require teachers to have several years of classroom or pupil personnel experience before being accepted – it isn’t a program for the faint of heart because of how much is packed into a small time frame.
What I am learning though makes me gag because the answers they want me to produce are not the same ones supported by research. The texts they give us espouse how not enough students score high enough on the NAEP without ever explaining the difficulty of the scoring bands (you know your writing on what proficient really means) and even you are cited, though it is work of yours from 1992. The assumption is “not enough proficient means a failure to compete”.
Granted the certification of the program doesn’t reflect changes in ESSA so they still need to cover AYP and some other outdated concepts, but what was so offensive to me was how much they continue to emphasize NAEP and international test scores as the justification for reform (in fact the first thing we read is about reform and the need for it, and systems theory! e.g. top down change).
I swore I would never let myself lose sight of my students or the injustices perpetrated on them on a near daily basis, yet, my introduction to leading them feels like it demands me looking too much through the reformer lens so I can nod my head, play along, and eventually get to a place where I can make a difference in a school community.
What shocks the conscience though is how this is a state certified program that seems to actively push the reform agenda – and it makes me wonder if all state certified leader programs for the past decade have been forcing leaders to look at education this way..the preferred way being that failure to close achievement gaps have been massive failures necessitating a total systems overhaul.
I thought it was an interesting experience worth sharing, I hope you are well.
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M: “I swore I would never let myself lose sight of my students or the injustices perpetrated on them on a near daily basis, yet, my introduction to leading them feels like it demands me looking too much through the reformer lens so I can nod my head, play along, and eventually get to a place where I can make a difference in a school community”
Under the present circumstances, this is the best that can be done.
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M,
This is akin to going into a medical training program and learning how to apply leeches.
Could you give the teacher or director of this class a copy of the newly revised “Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.”
It is absurd that the program is stuck in time, ignoring mountains of research and experience.
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M, resist the dark side!
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Duane,
I am not going to become a reformer or espouse privatization anytime soon. I just frown a lot when we share readings on what reform means and why it’s important and occasionally share things from this blog which are generally rebuffed because they are outside the readings we are being asked to look at.
It isn’t an indoctrination tank the way one might imagine – it isn’t like say Relay with inexperienced uneducated teachers giving Masters degrees to the other people who are uneducated or inexperienced.
This is far more subtle and while the focus is actually leadership, these snippets of info about how dire of situation education is in, how long it’s been going on for, and how important it is to fix it today, and how a pseudo-scientific theory could “right the ship” if we could only do change big enough and fast enough, they creep in, I suppose to motivate us to want to dream big for our kids.
Given what I know after years of following Diane, and I do believe Diane goes beyond partisanship to sharing what is truly best for our students regardless of politics, I can actually find the sentences that for someone who hasn’t developed an ear for the language or the assumptions made with the data, that it makes it sound like Public Education destroyed America.
I hope that is enough resistance for today!
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M,
I wasn’t talking about becoming a “reformer”, I was talking about becoming an administrator, of which 99.99% do the bidding of the reformers by instituting educational malpractices.
I too got a masters in ed admin and was certified to be an administrator. Although I got a few interviews I never told the interviewers what they wanted to hear. The powers that be wanted yes men/women who would institute malpractices without question and cheerlead hard for those malpractices. I couldn’t do that and made a conscious decision to not seek an administrator position (again not that I would have gotten one anyway-too outspoken) and to remain in the classroom where I enjoyed working with the students. Guess I was more of a teacher than adminimal at heart.
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