On Friday, I had the pleasure of listening to Bill Bennett forcefully (and repeatedly) make the case for Core Knowledge and the work of E. D. Hirsch. But the event was bittersweet. Not because of the political differences between Bennett and Hirsch—for me, those only increase the odds that this Hirsch guy is onto something. But because the event was commemorating a Nation at Risk, and Bennett’s remarks highlighted the fact that we’ve known how to provide children with a better education for many decades.
Make that many, many centuries. Confucius knew. Socrates knew.
Rigorous study of important, time-tested content is not only the foundation of an excellent education, it engages students. When teachers present difficult academic content in a supportive environment, students rise to the challenge.
So why haven’t we ensured that all children get a rigorous, supportive education?
This is a question I ask myself and others all the time. I think it’s more productive than merely asking “How can we?” Those who ask how without also asking why haven’t tend to waste significant amounts of time and resources “discovering” things that some already knew.
Okay, so I’ve partly answer the why question right there. Much better answers can be found in Diane Ravitch’s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, and Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
But still, those answers are not complete.
Right now, Kate Walsh and her team with the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) are adding to our collective wisdom—and potentially to our collective ability to act.
NCTQ is just a couple months away from releasing its review of teacher preparation programs. The results may not be shocking, but they are terrifying. Walsh provides a preview in the current issue of Education Next. In that preview, she reminds us of a study from several years ago that offers an insiders’ look at teacher preparation:
The most revealing insight into what teacher educators believe to be wrong or right about the field is a lengthy 2006 volume published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Studying Teacher Education. It contains contributions from 15 prominent deans and education professors and was intended to provide “balanced, thorough, and unapologetically honest descriptions of the state of research on particular topics in teacher education.” It lives up to that billing. First, the volume demonstrates the paucity of credible research that would support the current practices of traditional teacher education, across all of its many functions, including foundations courses, arts and sciences courses, field experiences, and pedagogical approaches, as well as how current practice prepares candidates to teach diverse populations and special education students. More intriguing, however, is the contributors’ examination of the dramatic evolution of the mission of teacher education over the last 50 years, in ways that have certainly been poorly understood by anyone outside the profession.
Studying Teacher Education explains the disconnect between what teacher educators believe is the right way to prepare a new teacher and the unhappy K–12 schools on the receiving end of that effort. It happens that the job of teacher educators is not to train the next generation of teachers but to prepare them.
Huh? Really? How exactly does one prepare without training? Walsh goes on to explain that. But the only way to prepare yourself to comprehend the teacher educators’ reasoning is to pretend like “prepare them” actually means “brainwash them into believing that in order to be a good teacher, you have to make everything up yourself.” Back to Walsh:
Harking back perhaps to teacher education’s 19th-century ecclesiastical origins, its mission has shifted away from the medical model of training doctors to professional formation. The function of teacher education is to launch the candidate on a lifelong path of learning, distinct from knowing, as actual knowledge is perceived as too fluid to be achievable. In the course of a teacher’s preparation, prejudices and errant assumptions must be confronted and expunged, with particular emphasis on those related to race, class, language, and culture. This improbable feat, not unlike the transformation of Pinocchio from puppet to real boy, is accomplished as candidates reveal their feelings and attitudes through abundant in-class dialogue and by keeping a journal. From these activities is born each teacher’s unique philosophy of teaching and learning.
There is also a strong social-justice component to teacher education, with teachers cast as “activists committed to diminishing the inequities of American society.” That vision of a teacher is seen by a considerable fraction of teacher educators (although not all) as more important than preparing a teacher to be an effective instructor.
Those last two sentences stupefy me. I suppose it’s obvious since I’m writing this for the Core Knowledge blog, but I’m quite certain that there is no such thing as an ineffective instructor who is diminishing the inequities of American society. I suppose there could be an ineffective instructor who diminishes inequality outside of school, by volunteering at a food pantry perhaps. But I don’t think that’s what these teacher educators have in mind.
They may have in mind diminishing inequities by teaching something other than traditional academic content (social activism maybe), but if so, they are missing out on a far more powerful approach. They ought to think carefully about the effective instructors all across this country who are diminishing inequities by narrowing the achievement gap.
Purely anecdotally, I think that the difference between a frustrated teenager and a young leader is rarely a social-justice mindset—typically, they both have that. The difference is a strong foundation in traditional academic content, content that can help a young person find an ethical path and provide examples throughout history that offer guidance and inspiration.
Of course, another difference is being able to read. Walsh points out that the teacher educators’ notion of preparation, as opposed to training, means not covering the research on how to teach reading:
Nowhere is the abdication of training truer or more harmful than in the course work elementary teacher candidates take in reading instruction. It is commonly assumed that teacher educators opt not to train candidates in scientifically based reading instruction, instead “training” them in “whole language” methods. Actually, no such training occurs, as whole language methods require no training. Whole language is not an instructional method that a teacher might learn to apply, but merely a theory (flawed at that) based on the premise that learning to read is a “natural” process. It is no coincidence then that the whole-language approach tracks nicely with a philosophy of teacher education in which technical training is disparaged.
The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has reviewed hundreds of syllabi from reading programs at more than 800 institutions across the country. What these programs most often teach is not to adopt the whole language approach but that the candidate should develop her own approach to teaching reading, based on exposure to various philosophies and approaches, none more valid than any other.
“None more valid than any other.” This is where my stupor gives way to fear. We have decades of research showing which methods of teaching reading are most effective. There is no justification for withholding that information from future teachers.
Based on my years as editor of American Educator—a quarterly magazine for teachers that endeavors to publish solid research on reading, mathematics, student behavior, pedagogy, and other core instructional concerns—I believe teachers are hungry for exactly the type of training that these teacher preparation programs are intentionally not providing. Many teachers expressed to me directly that they wished they had learned all this research during their preparation programs. Because they don’t receive research-based training, far too many teachers are forced to figure out what works through trial and error. While many do succeed, the process takes far too long; meanwhile, far too many children do not receive the benefit of instruction informed by our best research.