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.”