“The dirty little secret about schools of education is that they have been the cash cows of universities for many, many years, and it’s time to say, ‘Show us what you can do, or get out of the business.’” Nothing terribly controversial about those words, unless you consider the source: Katherine Merseth, director of the teacher education program at Harvard University.
Merseth was not bad-mouthing her own program, according to U.S. News’ Eddy Ramirez, who quoted her in a recent blog post. However, Merseth said that of the 1,300 graduate teacher training programs in the country, about 100 or so are adequately preparing teachers and “the others could be shut down tomorrow.”
“It’s high time that we broke up the cartel,” said Merseth. “We need to hold graduate schools of education more accountable.”
One of the problems facing the credibility of these teacher training programs is their faculties. Can anyone really take seriously an instructor from one of these schools, there to train teachers who have never been a public school teacher themselves? Or if they ever taught in a public school it was only for a very brief time? Some of these graduate schools actually have people teaching teachers who went directly from an undergraduate degree to a doctoral program and from there directly into a higher ed teaching position. How is anyone coming from that path even remotely qualified to train teachers? Talk about insane. Do these schools even have a clue?
The question is not “are they cash cows?” Everyone knows they are. The question is, “What’s your plan for training 4% of the entire US workforce to teach effectively?
Whose, Tom? Mine or Harvard’s? Harvard has a loooooong history of making plans.
My history methods teacher in ed school admitted to us that she became a professor because she couldn’t hack it as a high school teacher. Among the gems she shared with us is that it’s great to read children’s books aloud to high school history students. (She was also on the interview committee that almost rejected me from the certification program because I seemed too bookish to be a public school teacher. After my initial rejection letter, I went in and argued with them. They relented, but my gadfly ways probably made them regret that decision.)
My ed school was a disgrace –despite my skepticism, it implanted in me harmful ideas (e.g. that lecturing is bad) that hobbled my first eleven years of teaching. I am resentful.
What should we have instead? Perhaps abolish the ed schools and add special courses in the science, history, English, etc. departments that deal with adapting the subject matter to younger minds. Or, even better, creating a special history (or chemistry, English, etc.) track that parallels the k-12 curriculum but at a much higher level. Then teaching would be largely a matter of simplifying what one learned in college.
Robert,
My post was directed at Harvard Graduate School of Education. They’re too focused on “research” good and/or bad. While they have a teacher training program, it’s not a primary focus of the school. The time I spent at Harvard (mid-80’s) I let it be known that the faculty was mildly disappointing because of their lack of public school experience.
If you think that it is important that good teachers have a broad base of knowledge, then teachers-in–training need to have exposure to and understanding of psychology, history, sociology, ethics, motivation, assessment, child & adolescent development and so on — subjects often taught by experts such as myself who have not taught K-12 but who know a good deal about schools, teaching, and students because we study these things intently and intensively.
I’m curious how Leon Botstein’s program is faring at Bard college a few years back, Botstein, the President of Bard, announced the school would prepare teachers by having them study the subjects they would teach. At the time he said the most remarkable thing. “The education schools in the United States have had an unfortunate stranglehold on teacher training,” he told the New York Times, “and they have created a pseudoscience in pedagogy and wasted the time of future teachers by not deepening the knowledge that future teachers need.”
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MC Smith,
I wonder how many schools of education assign Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:A Century of Failed School Reform in their history of education classes? If they did, prospective teachers might see that much of the pedagogy they’re learning has a LONG track record, and it’s not good. One of the striking things about my ed school faculty (with a few exceptions) was their Bolshevik-like groupthink and imperviousness to empirical evidence. (Is there a single ed school in America that espouses Core Knowledge, or ANY perspective other than progressive ed? Or that at least gives even-handed treatment of different perspectives?) I remember a reading methods class that, as usual, had turned into a seminar on multiculturalism. I pointed to a statistic in an article we were reading that showed Haitians outstipping many other ethnic groups in academic achievement and wondered how that fit with the thesis that “institutionalized racism” accounts for blacks’ poor scores. Why weren’t black Haitians suffering the baleful effects of this powerful evil? The professor had no answer, but he was clearly unhappy that I’d deviated from the script. I was supposed to submit to the indoctrination, not make up my own mind. My ed school consisted of little more than indoctrination –indoctrination in PC, and indoctrination in the discredited pedagogy favored by careerist ideologues who knew nothing about good teaching.
I agree with Botstein –most of these schools are wasting the time of future teachers.
Why is it that there is such homogeneity in these schools? You’d think there’d be at least one or two that offered something substantially different.
Why is there so much homogeneity in the ed schools and PDs combined? Why do they dislike subject matter so much? I love the idea of studying actual subjects for teacher preparation. I have advocated that idea many times–including in ed school.
The problem is, they think a lot of this pedagogy is subject matter. If you have even a snippet of a poem, or show a video of kids experimenting with cereal, you’ve got “content,” and everyone should be appeased.
That goes back to Robert’s recent post “The Slippery Slope of Content.” That really is the core of the problem. If ed schools think you can just sprinkle allusions to subject matter into your pedagogical courses and call that “content,” then they will continue doing just that.
As for M.C. Smith’s list of necessary subjects, I agree about the importance of history. Ethics? I favor it if it’s taught as a challenging philosophy course, not as fluff. Psychology? Maybe, if it’s not fluff. Motivation, assessment? As courses, no way. I’d much rather study literature, history, science, math, languages, logic, philosophy, art, and music.
Oh, I forgot. They don’t teach those things in ed school.
I’m glad Diana thinks it important to teach teachers about history. As for me, I must live and work in an alternative universe. In my world, professors in the college of education where I teach seem to do a pretty good job of teaching literature, history, science, math, languages, logic, philosopy, art, and music — and the non-fluff version of psychology (how I earn my paycheck). They call my world “reality.” Where do you live?
Well, the island of Samos is “reality” too. A beautiful place it is. I have never been there, but I hope to go one day.
Likewise, I hope that one day I may see, up close, a college of education that offers logic, philosophy, literature, history, and more.