David Berliner is one of the most accomplished education scholars in the nation. A list of his accomplishments would fill a couple of pages so I will say only that the Regius Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University.
Berliner shared his thoughts about the current efforts in red states to destroy the teaching profession:
My Incredibly Short Career as a Brain Surgeon and Some Thoughts About Teaching
When I was an undergraduate psychology major at UCLA I studied physiological psychology, particularly neuroanatomy. During my Masters’program at California State College at Los Angeles I landed a job as a research assistant at the UCLAbrain research center. There I did some fascinatingstudies of brain functioning. Well, more accurately, my job was to get some rats drunk and then test them. I gave the rats a little alcohol, then I had a little alcohol, then they got a bit more, and then I…. well, I am sure you get the picture. I continued to read my physiological psychology textbooks, and in addition have found the works of Oliver Sachs and A. S. Luria to be wonderful reading. In fact, it was Sachs’ engaging “The man who mistook his wife for a hat”that inspired me to write essays such as this.
I note also that I frequently buy and avidly read whatever popular science magazines come out featuring stories about the brain. I am up on CAT scans and fMRIs and the latest techniques for stroke victims, and much, much more. Just as important as all the technical knowledge I posses is the fact that I also have a flair for carving, a skill attested to by anyone who has had thanksgiving dinner with my family.
Naturally, with such interest, such knowledge, and such skills, I have always thought that I would make a great brain surgeon. My secret fantasy was to become the greatest brain cartographer in modern times, locator of Berliners’ spot, or the Berliner bundle. I secretly dreamed I could eventually locate and describe how memory works–a goal of every psychologist.
Then, out of the blue, the most wonderful opportunity arose. I discovered that there was a chance that I could get to be a brain surgeon after all. I might actually be able to practice my real vocational love. This wonderful and exciting change in my life, one that I had dreamed about for so long, was suddenly within my grasp because that day, my newspaper ran a feature story on the scarcity of surgeons at the hospitals serving the most needy members of our society. One of our largest State supported big-city hospitals complained that it was short neurosurgeons all week. Furthermore, on weekends, in the emergency rooms, they never had a specialist on whom to call.
My local newspaper, for many years, took a conservative, free market approach to the economy.So, over the years, it has often been in favor of deregulating just about everything, particularly teaching. On the day I was reading about the shortage in the emergency room my newspaper ran an editorial on socialism in the United States of America using the “inefficient public school system” as their model. They cited someone who believed that “government schools” were founded on Marxist-Leninist principles. America’s schools, the paper continued, were failures when measured against the rest of the world or against the results of private schooling. The newspapers’ solution was more free enterprise, including vouchers for children, having schools compete with each other, and the closing of the useless schools of education. They, and one of our many Arizona governors who ended up in prison, eventually argued that anyone with a bachelor’s degree could teach because teaching wasn’t all that complicated.
Our newspaper was then owned by the Pulliam family. That is the family that gave America the well-known intellectual Vice-president Dan Quayle. It was he who said, among other things, that his goal was to have as few government regulations as possible. Quayle’s views, the news from the hospital, and the editorial seemed to provide the perfect set of conditions for propelling me into the career I always wanted. I actually shivered with hope and excitement.
It was time for people with my kinds of skill to step in and serve where clear social needs had been identified. I thought, “let a thousand points of light shine!” I thought it was time to get government out of trying to do everything. What we needed was a resurgence of volunteerism to renew the spirit of America. I thought of John Kennedy and I asked not what my country could do for me but what I could do for my country. And so I went to the hospital that had reported the shortages and volunteered to take the neurosurgery rounds on weekends.
I told them I hold a doctors’ degree (well, actually, I really do have three doctorates, but I thought they would rebel if I asked them to call me Dr. Dr. Dr.). I informed them that I have a high level of knowledge about brain functioning and understood perfectly the technologies that existed to examine brains, and, with false modesty, I also told them that I really could carve quite well. While the hospital administrator was weighing my offer, I thought: “By golly, this is it, my big chance. I may be able to change careers over night and make my dear mother posthumously ecstatic, by becoming a “real” doctor.”
I sat there waiting, thinking that if computer programmers can become high school teachers of mathematics overnight; if oil company geologists can become earth science teachers overnight; if mothers of two with bachelor degrees in either home or international economics, choose to enter the classroom when their youngest goes off to school and can get a job immediately, without any training beyond their life skills; and if military personnel of all kinds can get jobs in schools, and even jobs to run schools,immediately after they serve our nation; then I, with my skills and interest in neuroanatomy, should prove to be a great catch for the field of medicine. I knew I had what it takes and now here I was getting ready to demonstrate my talents. It was so exciting!
Alas. My hopes were quickly dashed. The administrator of the hospital informed me that they had no openings at that moment, but that one of their other physicians, a psychiatrist, would like to see me. I left quickly. I could tell he did not believe that I had enough knowledge and skill for the job, and I think that I sensed correctly that I could never convince him otherwise. I was crushed.
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I don’t know why, but for some strange reason people think that medicine is hard and teaching is easy. But let’s look a little closer at that. A physician usually works with one patient at a time, while a teacher serves 25, 30 or in places like Los Angeles and other large cities, they may be serving 35 or more youngsters simultaneously. Many of these students don’t speak English well. Typically, anywhere from 5-15% will show emotional and/or cognitive disabilities. Most are poor, and many reside in single parent families. There is also another important difference in the motives of patients and students. Most patients seek out their physicians, choosing to be in their office. On the other hand, many students seek to be out-of-class, preferring the streets to classrooms thatcannot engage them, and in which they often are made to feel inadequate.
I always wonder how physicians would fare if 30 or so kids with the kinds of sociological characteristics I just described showed up for medical treatment all at once, and then left 50 minutes later, healed or not!And suppose that chaotic scene was immediately followed by thirty or more different kids, but with similar sociological backgrounds, also in need of personal attention. And they too stayed about 50 minutes, and then they also had to leave. Imagine waves of these patients hitting a physicians’ office five or six times a day!
In addition, teachers are usually away from other adults for long segments of the day, with no one helping them, which makes possession of a strong bladder one of the least recognized attributes of an effective teacher. Physicians, on the other hand, often have a nurse and secretary to do some of the work necessary to allow them to concentrate on the central elements of their one-on-one practice. Andthey actually have time to relieve their bladdersbetween patients, which helps improve their decision making skills!
That so many teachers and schools do so well under the circumstances I just described shows how undervalued the craft of teaching is, and how little respect there is for pedagogical knowledge. In fact, much of the knowledge needed for teaching and for successful medical treatment is clinical knowledge, or tacit knowledge, not easily described, and hard to teach to someone else. That’s why physicians have grand rounds and a lengthy apprenticeship. Their prolonged apprenticeship is what gets them started learning what it means to be a practicing physician—not a competent student of biology, chemistry, and pharmacology. Every clinician (psychologists, physicians, social workers, and teachers alike) knows that book learning can only teach a little slice of what it means to be a success in practice. The recognition of this fact is the quite sensible reason behind the requirement that teachers need to take teaching methods courses such as how to teach mathematics, how to teach phonics and comprehension skills, how science is learned, and so forth. Course work in mathematics, English literature, and science have no more to say about the teaching of mathematics, literature, and physics than books on organic chemistry prepare a physician for their medical practice. Lengthy residencies are needed in medicine to learn to be a physician and extensive student teaching is needed to become a competent teacher. Fields of complexity, with a strong element of art infusing their practice, and with much of their knowledge base tacit, require prolonged time for learning the minimum, and much longer for learning to be competent on a regular basis.
They won’t let me be a brain surgeon because I have none of the tacit knowledge needed to go along with my book knowledge, interest, desire to serve the public, and of course, my superb carving skills. I can accept that. But why the hell would anyone think it’s different in education?
Please—let’s keep untrained but good-hearted people out of classrooms until and unless they get some training in how to do that complex job well. Classroom teaching is hard work, noble work, and in some way, the life and death of our nation in a global economy depends on having competent people doing such work. The physician is literally, rather than figuratively dealing with life and death. This gets them higher status, respect, and remuneration then our teachers get, but it is no more complex work, no more arduous, no more important to our nation, and certainly no more noble!
Let’s be clear: Those who come into teaching from other fields have much to contribute. But not if we count their other experience as equivalent to studying about teaching methods, and not if their other experiences excuse them from anapprenticeship such as student teaching, which most regularly certified teachers have experienced. Regularly certified teachers usually take 12-16 weeks of supervised student teaching. Those coming in to teaching from non- traditional routes, say those whoenter teaching through the program called Teach for America (TFA), experience much less practice. The bright, young, highly motivated, recent college graduates who join TFA, ordinarily have 5 weeks of teaching experience with students who are not likely to be similar to those they actually end up teaching. Listen to Matt Brown one of those bright, committed TFA recruits:
“when I walked in that door to my trailer, I didn’t have a freakin’ clue. I had been a 1st grader teacher for five weeks [the training period] and …I had never taught more than two hours in a day. I didn’t know how to set up a classroom, manage racial tensions, work with co-workers who weren’t thrilled I was there, deal with parents, unit plan…really ANYTHING. I was eaten alive right from the start, and never really found my footing.
….The stresses of the constant failure of my work began to change me in ways I’m not so proud to admit. I started to find myself snapping at my students, punishing them to prove a point, or yelling more and more (in real life, I never yell…and seldom actually get angry). I used to get extremely stressed during certain parts of the day (say, when a troublemaking student would be in my room for an hour), but I gradually began to feel that way during the whole day…and then on my ride to school, and then even when I woke up on a weekday. Some days, I got to school two hours early, only to sit in the parking lot with the music on full blast, and my sunglasses on…so nobody would know I was crying. Other days, I threw up before going to school. Often, a particularly bad event at school could keep me upset for two days straight.1
My former student and colleague, Dr. BarbaraVeltri, provides much more documentation from other first year underprepared teachers, all backing up Matt’s story about the failure of so many TFA recruits in their initial year. That’s why Veltri titled her oft citedbook “Learning on other peoples’ kids.”2 These are the poor, of course, the throw away kids: the kind of kids one learns to teach with. These are the ones on whom lots of mistakes are made, before moving out of the profession or on to schools with easier to teach children. By the way, it’s really no different in medicine. Had I gotten my job as a brain surgeon I am sure that I would have been working on the poorest people, where my “mistakes” would not have mattered as much! Our society does identify “lesser” humans, mostly the poor, and therefore frequentlyracial minorities, where inexperienced physicians andteachers are allowed to develop their skills. Higher rates of mistakes are permitted to be made with poor people, so that lower rates of mistakes will occur when dealing with “people of more substance!”
Perhaps the recognition of their incompetence, and their impotence in dealing with the overwhelming problems of poverty, are what drive many, like Matt (above) to leave the profession before their two-year commitment is up. It is certainly likely that Matt didn’tknow, and his coaches didn’t either because they lacked experience and were not scholars in education, that teachers have been found to make about .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching!X Another researcher estimated that teachers’ decisions numbered about 1,500 per day.XDecision fatigue, is among the many reasons teachers are tired after what some critics call a short work day, forgetting or ignoring the enormous amount of time needed for preparation, for grading papersand homework, and for filling out bureaucratic formsand attending school meetings.
In fact, it takes about 10 years for teachers to hit their maximum ability to produce the most learningfrom their students.X But about the time the TFA dilatant teachers start to get competent in their job, around their fourth year,
64% of the TFA recruits have left the profession, a much higher rate than among regularly certified teachers.
To be fair, however, the 36% of TFA recruits who stay longer in the field then they originally committed to, are most welcome additions to the profession. But as they gained in competency, they may have hurt a lot of poor children during their apprenticeship by fire!
Lets face it: People who want to practice medicine or education without sufficient training are ignorant, arrogant, or both. And those that would let them do so will only allow them to work with throw-away humans—the flotsam and jetsam found in many urban hospital emergency rooms, and the powerless poor in the impoverished schools of rural America, or in the the same urban neighborhoods as many of our “teaching” hospitals.
In education, we might think of legislators and accrediting bodies that allow untrained personnel to enter classrooms as traitors. Yes, a harshpronouncement, I know, but the term fits. Persons who betray their country, are correctly called traitors. The legislators, accrediting bodies, and chambers-of-commerce that endorse putting untrained or minimally trained teachers before poor children are hurting America, betraying the principles that Jefferson explicated 200 years ago. Jefferson, a slave-holder and not nearly as democratic as we might have wanted one of our founding fathers to be, did help to persuade his fellow founders of the nation that the poor have talent in equal degree as do the rich. Thus,the poor deserved the same education as the rich, in order to cultivate those talents, so they can be used in service of the nation. He believed that the best way to preserve an ever-fragile democracy was a system of free public schooling. Those who would allow unqualified teachers to enter the classrooms of the poor are traitors to Jeffersonian principles.
So for me, advocates of an “open market” in teacher certification are deliberately hurting America, and that, to me, is a traitorous act, especially since the research shows that teaching credentials do matter, and do actually lead to higher student achievement3. On top of that, most advocates for a free market in credentialing would never allow their own children to have an untrained novice, or an inadequately trained teacher, nor would they allow their children to attend schools that rely heavily on such teachers. The hypocrisy and traitorous actions of legislators, business leaders, and policy analysts whoadvocate allowing anyone to teach in a school that would have them as teachers, ensures that social class social membership will remain as it is—difficult to modify. Moreover, the children most likely to be assigned teachers who have little, or no training, are children of color. So, on top of all my other charges, we might want to raise the issue of racism with the advocates of little or no credentialing for teachers. Traitors? Preservationists of the class structure? Racists? Wow! This is tough language for describing some of America’s most noted politicians, business people, and columnists. But until they put their own children in classes whose teachers are inadequately trained, I think it is fair to charge them with deliberately harming our nation. I’ll apologize to these anti-teacher-credentialing group when they let me operate on their family either as a teacher to their children, or as a surgeon on their brain!
-End-
1. Retrieved July 22, 2010, from: http://relentlesspoa.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/why-i-quit-teach-for-america/
2. Veltri, B. (2010). Learning on other peoples kids. Charlotte, NC: Infromation Age Publishing.
3. Clotfelter, C. T., Ladd, H. F., & Vigdor, J. L. (2010).Teacher Credentials and Student Achievement in High School: A Cross-Subject Analysis with Student Fixed Effects. Journal of Human Resources 45 (3), 655-681.
4. D-H.
5. *Researchers Hilda Borko and Richard Shavelson summarized studies that reported decisions perminute during interactive teaching.
6. *Researcher Philip Jackson (p. 149) said that elementary teachers have 200 to 300 exchanges with students every hour (between 1200-1500 a day), most of which are unplanned and unpredictable calling for teacher decisions, if not judgments.
Agreed about Berliner. A brilliant, brilliant guy.
I wonder if he has ever said, like Kennedy, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Of course, as my German teacher pointed out nearly 50 years ago, that could have been interpreted as Kennedy saying he was a particular type of sausage. I think his audience did not take it that way.
I think it means “I am a jelly doughnut.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_(doughnut)
Actually, this is really overblown. Correctly it would be “Ich bin Berliner.” By adding “ein”, which could be translated as “one” or “of”, it technically was incorrect. But not a single person misunderstood nor laughed “he said a jelly doughnut.” Only Americans obsess about this. In my entire life, I’ve never heard one German snicker about his use of that one word.
Thanks for the elucidation of this, Greg! It’s still kinda funny.
Greg: my German teacher explained this, of course. What better humor than language humor
“Only Americans obsess about this. In my entire life, I’ve never heard one German snicker about his use of that one word.”
On the other hand, lots of Germans — including former German Chancellor Angela Merkel — laughed uproariously whenever Trump said “I am a president”
As Carl Sagan once said, “the fact that some stable geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Donald Trump”
I am a jelly donut. Tear down that croissant!
Love Berliner!
Thanks for this one, Diane.
On the other hand, one cannot teach well unless one has the knowledge. You need knowledge AND method. And lots of mentoring and practice.
Practice and empathy are the keys. If teaching in ‘high school’, knowledge is very necessary. Method? not so important. One of the lessons a school teaches is that different students need to deal with different teaching ‘styles’, and different personalities. Remember, the goal is ‘education’, not ‘indoctrination’. Unless, of course, one wants an ant colony.
“Unless, of course, one wants an ant colony.”
Extremely well said.
Yes, Bob.
Support was key for Veltri’s work with TFA newbies. She saw how the were floundering and went to work as a master teacher, sharing what she knew and spending a lot of time with them. Support! Its what almost every new parent needs as well. That I remember well.
David
If you haven’t mastered the method, Daedalus, it’s impossible to impart the knowledge.
Kinda like many who work at the university level.
What a nicely crafted essay. Thanks for amplifying these ideas.
Unfortunately, being a good teacher takes the ten years referenced in the above essay (on average, I would say. Some people take longer. I refer to myself here.). We do not behave this way as a society. We behave as though the prospective teachers exit training schools ready to be professionals. This is a farce, albeit less of a farce than the private school belief that anyone can teach if they have graduated from a college with some ivy planted near the entrance.
In fact, I can recall doing a lot of harm to students when I was younger, both with my methods and my attitude. Far better it might have been if I had been apprenticed to various teachers who had themselves learned in conjunction with a similar experience. Of course, it is expensive to train someone for several years. I get that. And there is, of course, that inconvenient thing about the effect of poverty and neglect. Still, we owe it to our communities to fill school with teachers who make a life-long commitment to the profession by being willing to enter it with the same idea other professions accept participants. This includes a high degree of professional autonomy over a period of a career, a just compensation for services rendered, and a chance to grow in knowledge of subject and technique throughout the tenure of occupation.
When I think of my first years of teaching, I’m pretty horrified, though I did have one great idea back then. I was the new person on staff, so I was given ALL of the remedial preps (bizarre, right? talk about being thrown to the wolves!). I had one class that consisted entirely of 11th-grade remedial boys. I was called on the carpet by the principal because he had seen us, several days running, in the parking lot, looking under the hoods of cars. Here’s what I was doing: I had that class work on preparing (and then selling) a manual on home car repair. Those kids wrote, edited, laid out, had printed, and sold their own manual, which covered things like doing a tune-up, changing a tire, changing oil and filters, replacing wipers, and so on. These kids who usually HATED school and paid ZERO attention to it, threw themselves enthusiastically into that project. They argued about matters of format and organization and content and grammar, usage, spelling, and mechanics. They did an amazing job, and the final product was outstanding. So, while I mostly failed, back then, this was one great success.
And that success suggests an important truth about teaching: There are no standard kids, so there should be no standardized curriculum, pedagogy, or assessment.
Thanks Bob–I too struggled at first. But in the university setting, my first courses were “lecture” so I had no problems until I discovered the number of students sleeping in the back of the room. My Lectures changed quickly to a more discursive format, and even then it took a few years to master my trade.
“I had no problems until. . . .” Hilarious, the way you put that. Thanks for the laugh this morning!
Bob,
I often found my ‘remedial’ classes to be some of the most rewarding, some of the most open-minded kids, and the ones who could teach me the most.
I agree. And that you say this speaks very highly of you, Daedalus, in my book.
But in this particular case, I was a brand new teacher. This was my first position. I had five separate remedial preps, and many of my students were latch-key kids from very poor homes with lots of issues of alcoholism and drug addiction and criminality. So, I had my hands full, and I was NOT up to the task. I would do better now, after many years of experience, but this would still be quite the challenge.
“They argued about matters of format and organization and content and grammar, usage, spelling, and mechanics.”
Nothing more dangerous than mechanics arguing about mechanics. Hopefully, there were no wrenches thrown.
Haaa. True that!
Thanks for Berliner’s insightful essay. Unfortunately, the conservative mindset has captured many states’ attitude toward public education. The right suffers from ossified thinking that facts and reason cannot change. They spew endless lies and misinformation about public schools and teachers at every opportunity. “Conservatives” are determined to destroy the democratic institution that has contributed so much to this nation. Believing that anyone can teach is another lie from the right and even from some on the left as well. Since teaching is an overwhelmingly female profession, the attacks are all part the the prevailing misogyny that is common today in the culture wars.
Thanks for your kind words and support. We do live in precarious times–antidemocratic ideas abound. Lets hope we can get past them, eventually.
David Berliner
Thank you for standing up for teachers David. If anything, it just feels good to be understood. As a public school teacher about to enter my 27th year in the classroom, I appreciate it.
YES
We will get past them, Dr. Berliner, but there will be a rough, rough time between now and then. Turbulence ahead. Buckle up.
I have a friend who was forced to use the public hospital dedicated to caring for anyone who could not afford to pay for care. There are many dedicated doctors who choose to serve in under-served communities, but he was lucky he didn’t lose a foot before he “got on his feet” and obtained insurance that allowed him to receive treatment at a top notch hospital.
I look back on my own early teaching experience (70s) in a private school for multiply handicapped children, which was code for public school rejects. With an undergraduate degree in psychology and some volunteering with special needs children one-on-one, I had no business being in a classroom. We came a long way in improving the education for students with special needs and their teachers. It sometimes seems like we have spent the last 20 years undoing that progress.
Yup to all of it. Traitor fits!! Sadly, the treason has bipartisan embrace. As I’ve written many times, the only antidote is the tough work of multiracial organizing for democratic equitable education.
Amen, Arthur!
A wonderful read. It goes on the syllabus asap!
The past year was a high mark – and tip of the iceberg – of the teacher shortage. Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse with Teachers-R-Us (TFA), then came along the “Accountemps” of teachers.
I give these substitutes credit for their desire and in many instances, true dedication and wanting to help. Many had degrees, some not. Many had book knowledge on content. And, most liked kids.
When classroom management was not an issue (rare), at best teachers were following the script, kids did a lot of copying and regurgitation. Learning? Barely.
I’m old school. Teachers are born. (Maybe brain surgeons, too)?
For those not – if they are talented with empathy, joy, more empathy, individual perception, listening, patience, communication skills, sincerity, and mission – they can succeed with training, practice, and support.
And, the leverage point in all of this is “support.” Ask those leaving the profession – and those who are attempting to replace them what they needed and need: Understanding. Showing up. Support.
And respect, including professional autonomy. Not some moron coming into one’s room with a checklist to give demerits because the Word Wall is in the “wrong place” or the Bellwork is listed on the board above the Essential Question or whatever bureaucratic drivel is being enforced by little Napoleons in a given school.
Training helps prepare teachers for education’s many challenges. A good teacher should have some training in child development, psychology and a solid academic background in the subjects that are to be taught. I live in northwest Florida in Matt Gaetz’s district which is 80% Republican. The local TV station took a poll on DeSantis’ plan to allow former military, police, fire fighters and EMTs teach in public schools. 69% of those that responded were against the DeSantis’ plan.
Great to hear!!!
Nice to know there is still some sense in Florida–Hope those 69% can help reform the GOP.
Satire and irony are the highest forms of humor! I’ve nearly had tears rolling down my cheeks over this essay. Thanks, Dr. Berliner for raising my spirits today!
I told you so. You didn’t believe me.
Thanks. Glad you folks liked it–now we all need to work at undoing the damage that so many have done to public education.
Best,
David
Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education.
Thanks Greg.