September 28, 2006--The Fourth R: Rightousness
The NY Times reports about the most recent study, "Educating School Teachers,” that exposes how poorly teachers are being trained. A product of the Education Schools Project, it comes to virtually the same conclusion as all the other studies that have been issued during the past decade—first, that teachers in training get much too little education in the subjects they will be expected to teach and, second, because student teachers have been such poor students themselves they attend second-rate colleges and universities where they allegedly get an inferior education. (Article linked below.)
For many years poor student achievement in our public schools was attributed to inadequate parenting and “the culture of poverty,” which in combination meant that when students showed up at the schoolhouse door they were “not ready to learn.” Later, blame for low achievement scores shifted from the children and their families to the schools themselves. This included the “discovery” that teachers were ill prepared to teach a more and more heterogeneous student body.
To solve this problem, states were pushed to raise the standards they employ to certify teachers. This included much of what the Education Schools Project recommends, minus the tweak at the poor quality of the student teachers. As a result certification standards have been raised around the country and yet our lowest-income students are still floundering. What to do? Our teacher educators say, “More of the same.” Literally—pour it on, require more and more study of, say, mathematics, before someone is allowed to be turned loose to teach a math class.
In New York State, as a not untypical example, this means that as an undergraduate you must take Calculus I, II, and III, plus Differential Equations, Advanced Statistics; and then earn a masters degree before being licensed to teach math in middle or high school. And earn $32,000 a year to start.
Simple question—where is the hard evidence that any of this is necessary to being prepared to teach Algebra successfully to 9th graders in the South Bronx? There is none. And yet these reports, saying the same thing over and over again, roll off the presses, all of them funded, year after year, by the same foundations.
One of the sad ironies about this report is that its author is Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University. In spite of its name, Teachers College is not noted for its undergraduate teacher preparation programs. Its primary purpose is more the business of educating the teachers and supervisors of teachers. So he is hardly the ideal person to be pontificating on this subject since TC has, through the years, done a poor job of even that. Just look at the results—the dysfunctional public school system in New York City where so many TC graduates go on to ply their trade.
No one seems to learn anything. And I’m especially not only talking about the children
For many years poor student achievement in our public schools was attributed to inadequate parenting and “the culture of poverty,” which in combination meant that when students showed up at the schoolhouse door they were “not ready to learn.” Later, blame for low achievement scores shifted from the children and their families to the schools themselves. This included the “discovery” that teachers were ill prepared to teach a more and more heterogeneous student body.
To solve this problem, states were pushed to raise the standards they employ to certify teachers. This included much of what the Education Schools Project recommends, minus the tweak at the poor quality of the student teachers. As a result certification standards have been raised around the country and yet our lowest-income students are still floundering. What to do? Our teacher educators say, “More of the same.” Literally—pour it on, require more and more study of, say, mathematics, before someone is allowed to be turned loose to teach a math class.
In New York State, as a not untypical example, this means that as an undergraduate you must take Calculus I, II, and III, plus Differential Equations, Advanced Statistics; and then earn a masters degree before being licensed to teach math in middle or high school. And earn $32,000 a year to start.
Simple question—where is the hard evidence that any of this is necessary to being prepared to teach Algebra successfully to 9th graders in the South Bronx? There is none. And yet these reports, saying the same thing over and over again, roll off the presses, all of them funded, year after year, by the same foundations.
One of the sad ironies about this report is that its author is Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University. In spite of its name, Teachers College is not noted for its undergraduate teacher preparation programs. Its primary purpose is more the business of educating the teachers and supervisors of teachers. So he is hardly the ideal person to be pontificating on this subject since TC has, through the years, done a poor job of even that. Just look at the results—the dysfunctional public school system in New York City where so many TC graduates go on to ply their trade.
No one seems to learn anything. And I’m especially not only talking about the children
posted by Steven Zwerling at
11:42 AM
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