Peter Greene read a new report about how to fix teacher education. Written by two experienced think tank desk jockeys who worked in the Obama administration, the report pretends to be progressive, but it is in fact reactionary.
The key, say these non-teachers, is to judge the quality of teacher education institutions by the test scores of students taught by their graduates. Just what you would expect from two guys who never taught.
The authors, David Bergeron and Michael Dannenberg, suggest several scenarios in which their plan could be imposed. The easiest and cheapest is just to buy the accrediting agencies and change their rules.
Greene writes:
“But really– what a perfect neo-liberal reformy solution to a problem. If something stands in your way, just buy it, and bend it to your will.
“Enter the Golden Era
“Once the New Reformster Accreditation Board was open for business, reformsters could put their stamp of approval on any number of bogus “Schools of Educaytion.” In fact, the paper notes happily, ESSA opens wide the door for all manner of “alternative providers of teacher preparation” as long as they can have their results validated by a USED-recognized authority, which– hey , we just made one of those a few paragraphs ago!! Yes, there’s some pesky law from 1965, but the Secretary can waive (aka “ignore”) that if she’s a mind to.
“The writers characterize the old system as the fox guarding the henhouse; they would like to replace the old fox with their own brand new reformy charter-loving test-driven fox. They are also fond of the same language used by choicesters to attack the public ed system– the current teacher prep system is a “cartel” that needs to be broken up, because these new guys want to cash in, too, and it’s not fair that they have to play by rules that they don’t like. Let a hundred sad versions of Relay GSE bloom. Let charter operators crank out fake teachers from “fully accreditated” fake teacher factories.
“And most of all, let’s base the entire structure of BS Test scores, one more terrible idea that refuses to die.
“It is the last building block in the grand design for a parallel school system, where schools are staffed by substandard teachers trained in only test prep, and therefor providing a substandard education, cranked out by substandard teacher prep programs set up to prove to a substandard accreditation board that they meet the substandard standards.
“Look, I am one of the last people to defend the current system of teacher prep. My solution is simple– replace every single person in the accrediting agency with a classroom teacher. My solution is certainly not to stage a coup to impose a ridiculous standard by which college programs are judged by second-hand results on a third-rate test.
“In the end, I can’t decide if these guys are cynical, arrogant, greedy, or dumb. I mean, it takes some balls to say, “The whole foundation of the teaching profession is wrong. We should rip it out and replace with our own unverified untested unproven results– by force if necessary.” It takes some serious greed to say, “If we just gutted and upended the system, we could redirect so many public tax dollars to private corporate pockets.” It takes huge cynicism to think either, or both, and just not care about the consequences. At this point, it just takes plain old boneheadedness to think that PARCC and its ilk can be used as a measure of educational success. But then, I’m cranky today. These guys have been around several blocks, have done respectable work in other areas. I’m honestly confused– how do people end up pushing such terrible ideas?
“The only good news I see here is that this is not a plan Betsy DeVos is likely to jump on. It comes from so-called progressives, and it involves more structures and institutions and rules. While I suspect that DeVos sees the same problem (“People have to jump through all these stupid hoops to become a teacher and all these dumb rules to run a teacher prep program”), I suspect her solution is much simpler (“No more rules for anyone! You can call yourself a teacher training program, and you can call yourself a teacher training program, and you can call yourself a teacher training program, and anyone can operate a so-called school and hire anyone they want and we’ll shovel money at all of them!”)
“So call it one more reminder that “progressive” doesn’t equal “friend of public ed” as well as a reminder that there are no limits to the huge badness of some reformster ideas.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There’s no need to worry about more Relay GSE. Just let the charter schools certify their own teachers! That’s the ticket! I know it’s the best way ever because the SUNY Charter Institute told me that it was and they are well-known for always putting the interests of children above the interests of adults. As long as they are the right children. And as long as the interests of “the right children” coincide with the interests of the billionaires whose donations underwrite the politician who appointed them.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
What an absurd thought process…evaluate teacher colleges by the by the result of the students being taught by teachers that graduated from a “college of education”.
So how would that work for Teacher for American since they are not a college or university?
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They wouldn’t need to be evaluated. TFA is THAT GOOD!
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Yes…that was my point…lol
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What an exciting new concept! Why, we could have non-lawyers, non-doctors, no-psychologists, non-dentists,…certifying who is worthy of practicing their chosen profession. Perhaps we should extend that to MBAs as well as, I suspect, a number of these eager beaver progressives rate their own business degrees as essential to their ability to tell everyone else whether they are “career ready.”
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We may laugh at this, but I have a feeling that all professions and all jobs are actually up for a low-paid Walmartized remake. No one can really believe that this has happened so quickly to the teaching profession: Once technology takes over, who needs actual lawyers, actual doctors, actual psychologists?
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No laughing matter intended. Inroads, I know, have been made into the medical profession as well particularly into how hospitals are run. Lawyers would be more difficult to Walmartize since they don’t all work in the same arena. That makes them less vulnerable but it also makes them an potentially effective counterforce. The problem could be that they have been trained to advocate for anyone who employs them. The rest of us may be coerced into following the company line; lawyers are TRAINED to debate whatever position their owners profess. I am sure I am being unfair to lawyers and really have no basis for what I am saying but my own piecemeal knowledge. Perhaps a few lawyers could comment. I am really very tired hearing about innovation when what they really mean to produce is cookie cutter worker bees who are easily replaced no matter what the profession.
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I like your last sentence: can I post it on my facebook page?
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Be my guest although I think it is a bit redundant. Worker bees are probably pretty uniform without the cookie cutter qualifier. 🙂
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ciedie aech,
You are absolutely right: to the extent possible, all but the most elite managerial jobs are going to be “rationalized” so they will lose whatever craft or professional autonomy they once had. it’s the logical extension of Samuel Winslow Taylor’s Scientific (not!) Management ideology of the early twentieth century.
The legal field has already been “rationalized,” with all but the most elite, income-generating lawyers increasingly to being to contract/contingent labor. in academia, the disappearance of tenured faculty and the rise of adjuncts represents much the same. Even doctors are no longer protected from this kind of thing.
Taylor focused on machinists, tradesmen who had acquired a huge store of craft knowledge that kept them relatively independent of the worst managerial intrusions into their work. But rationalizing every step of the process was a way for management to control it, and with it the labor force.
The well known management consultant and author Peter Drucker famously said, “That which can be measured can be managed.” Thus it’s no surprise that, at a time when teachers are facing all sorts of hare-brained intrusions into their practices and classrooms, it all purports to be based on “data.”
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“The writers characterize the old system as the fox guarding the henhouse; they would like to replace the old fox with their own brand new reformy charter-loving test-driven fox.”
This is exactly true. They can set this up if they want but they shouldn’t pretend they have some kind of inherent moral superiority that makes them “objective” and other providers “self serving”. That’s just arrogance. PEOPLE are sometimes self-serving. No one is exempt from that.
When ed reform started in Ohio we were told they would get rid of the icky low class “teacher union” lobbyists and all would be pure as the driven snow- just science and clean objective data!
That did not happen. Instead we just got a whole new, additional set of lobbyists.
Their lobbyists aren’t any purer or more noble than labor union lobbyists or teacher college lobbyists- that’s just conceit.
You saw it in the Obama Administration. The President packed his administration with charter promoters. He did that for a reason. The charter promoters in the Obama Administration were no more pure than another hire who would have preferred public schools. They just thought they were. They all left that administration and immediately all got on ed reform payrolls – was the self-serving, or self-sacrificing and morally superior? Are they inherently better people than public school supporters? Why is that?
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These schemes are all part of the deprofessionalization of teaching. Not only are public schools under attack, the institutions of higher education that prepare public school teachers are under attack as well. The privateers will attempt to discredit and bash their work in order to defame them and denigrate their efforts. The hostile takeover tactic is directly from the hedge fund playbook. They will exploit every way to gain financial control of legitimate certifying agencies to destroy them so they can be “reinvented” on the terms the hedge funds dictate.
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do these guys ever even try to share these “ideas” through academic journals, or present their proposals for reform at conferences attended by teachers and teacher educators? or are all of their ideas self-published and self-promoted, and then expected to be taken seriously as “scholarship”?
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That’s the nature of think tanks. They seldom publish peer-reviewed articles. They let their employees write whatever they want, then throw it out into the air to see if it flies.
Who listens and reads? Congressional staff looking for new ideas. Especially the 20-somethings that inhabit the same closed universe as the think tank denizens.
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These people don’t know how to do legitimate research.
Why do you think they work as tanker wankers?
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The “research” would rarely/never survive in a traditional academic setting, because peer review would reveal it to be the ideology/interest-driven garbage it is.
These are hired guns, given their positions because it’s known they will produce the ideology-premised “scholarship” their patrons demand, which is then provided to a credulous/monopolized media, which will dutifully report the endless variations on, “Study Shows Free Market Omniscient, Omnipotent…”
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You point out correctly that the so-called refers are really reactionaries. They need to be called out on this over and over again, as a mantra. Simplify and repeat the truth the way others do with blatant lies. We let Reaganites get away with it, the reactionary Reagan Revolution and we have allowed them to continue misusing the idea.
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reformers
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Given Obama’s past, I thought you meant “reefers”
That might actually be an alternative explanation (other than dumb, greedy, arrogant and/ or cynical) — ie, they are smoking some good stuff.
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“In the end, I can’t decide if these guys are cynical, arrogant, greedy, or dumb.” In the parlance of the tests these reformers adore, the answer should be “All of the above.”
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Where does the incompetence end, and the malice begin?
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Those two things, just like standards and testing, are just two sides of the same coin.
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Its a Malbius loop
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Taken to its logical conclusion:
The depletion of Certified teachers will result in a bidding war between the wealthier school districts whose students do well on the so called assessments due to their socioeconomic status.
The needy urban and rural district will get the leftovers, most likely teachers trained at these quick fix institutes. While some of these teachers might work out, most will use this job as a stepping stone to the next part of their careers resulting in high turnover and a subpar education for their students, many of them minority or ESL.
We are starting to see these results already.
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What would happen if non-experts selected think tank “experts”?
Oh, wait…
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Peter does a great job of ridiculing the report: “New Colleges Of Education – A Path For Going From Concept To Reality. ”
I am not sure that he has made a couple of points clear.
The point of the proposal is persuade members of Congress and Betsy Devos that all teacher accreditation programs should be targeted for takeover and replaced by an accreditor “consecrated” by the US Department of Education.
“USDE that has the ability to consecrate an accreditor that in turn authorizes provider eligibility to participate in federal financial aid programs, including the federal student loan program.”
The whole scheme is based on the premise that the teacher accrediting agencies are non-profits, and financially weak. They are easy targets for a buyout and takeover by people who will focus on outcomes only and continuous improvement with value-added measures, for example ( cited four times in the report).
Accreditation matters because that is a requirement under ALL current federal regulations that allow students to enroll in a teacher education program using federal loans for their education.
If you replace the current accreditors and put your own people in place as a “commission” you can recruit teachers and redesign teacher education at will.
Here is how the proposed “new colleges” of education would be created.
Get your hedge fund hats on.
—–Create a group composed of school districts, states, and teachers and a philanthropy with sufficient resources (e.g., Gates, Walton, Bradley, Arnold)
—–Identify the financially insolvent accreditor (or a portfolio of these); enter into the buyout agreements. For some accreditors, this might be inexpensive-five figures in some cases.
—–Rewrite the organization’s governing documents (charter, by-laws) so the takeover group has control and the accreditation mandate is for outcomes only metrics with continuing improvement (e.g., VAM, value-added is mentioned four timesis ).
—-Establish a commission to oversee the accreditation process and seek a WAIVER from the US Department of Education to operate as an approved accreditor. Only a waiver will allow a program to scrap a lot of the federal requirements for accreditation that matter for student loans. Read the take-over process on pages 10 and 11.
On page 12 you will see that the report is killing off standards for teacher education “inputs” as federal law now requires. What no longer matters under this “buyout the accreditors and waive the federal requirement scheme” are peer reviews and indicators of the adequacy of teacher education……
1. Curricula ( anything goes);
2. Faculty (no qualifications need to be considered);
3. Facilities, equipment, and supplies ( anywhere can be a teacher ed program);
4. Fiscal and administrative capacity as appropriate to the specified scale of operations ( hide the money and don’t report who gets it for what);
5. Student support services (teachers to be need grit)
6. Recruitment and admissions practices, academic calendars, catalogs, publications, grading, and advertising (obscure, nonexistent, quixotic is ok);
7.Measures of program length and the objectives of the degrees or credentials offered ( not just TFA five-week wonders, make that a week and you get a badge, maybe);
8. Record of student complaints received by, or available to, the agency (no record or recourse for fraud);
9. Record of compliance with the institution’s program responsibilities under Title IV of the Act, based on the most recent student loan default rate data provided by the Secretary ( this one might be hard to waive),
10. The results of financial or compliance audits, program reviews, and any other information that the Secretary may provide to the agency; and
11. Success with respect to student achievement in relation to the institution’s mission, which may include different standards for different institutions or programs, as established by the institution, including, as appropriate, consideration of course completion, State licensing examination, and job placement rates.
The aim: Eliminate any semblemce of professionalism in teaching and in teacher education.
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