A leading teacher-educator says most teachers get poor training from colleges of education
Arthur E. Levine's latest study says American teacher preparation is in a poor state and needs a major overhaul and new accreditation standards.
Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University until recently, is now president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
This is the second of four reports on the broad subject of American public education. The first report, issued in March 2005, criticized the nation's preparation of school leaders and administrators.
Levine claims that most future teachers are in low-quality programs and relatively unprepared for classroom teaching. Universities bear much of the blame, he says, for paying too little attention to their schools of education, other than to treat them as convenient cash cows.
He also maintains that today's licensing and accreditation processes don’t pay enough attention to actual student achievements.
“As many as three-quarters of the programs that prepare the nation’s future teachers have inadequate curricula, low admissions and graduation standards, faculty disconnected from the K-12 schools, and insufficient quality control.
Educating School Teachers, the new 140-page report, is part of the Education Schools Project, an independent initiative supported by the Annenberg, Ford, Ewing Marion Kauffman, and Wallace Foundations. The project’s team of researchers conducted a five-year study of education schools, based on broad surveys of deans, alumni, and faculty, as well as public school principals.
The report offers six primary recommendations:
• Transform education schools into professional schools focused on classroom practice.
• Close failing programs, expand quality programs, and create the equivalent of a Rhodes Scholarship to attract the best and brightest to teaching.
• Make student achievement the primary measure of the success of teacher education programs; create state data systems that gauge student progress from the start of school through graduation, enabling universities and states to associate student achievement with their teachers’ preparatory programs and thereby judge the effectiveness of education schools.
• Make five-year teacher education programs the norm, requiring every future teacher to complete a traditional arts and sciences baccalaureate degree followed by a master’s degree in subject-specific pedagogy.
• Shift the training of a significant percentage of new teachers from master’s degree granting-institutions to research universities.
• Strengthen quality control by redesigning accreditation and by encouraging states to establish common, outcomes-based requirements for certification and licensure.
Education Week
Prominent Teacher-Educator Assails Field, Suggests New Accrediting Body in ReportBut others finding fault with Levine’s conclusions, methodology.
Comments (1)
If you look closely at Levine’s study, he admits that the real reason he did the study is that “there is a real danger that if we do not clean our own house, America's university-based teacher education programs will disappear.” In other words, his own words suggest his top priority is merely protecting the existing, and failing, teacher-training establishment.
He does at least admit that today’s teachers were mis-trained — taught to focus on process, rather than content and results — in direct contravention of what the American public has been demanding for decades. But he avoids admitting that the failing process-oriented schooling is identical with the so-called “best practices” that teacher educators have been promoting for decades and always find new excuses for.
All Levine recommends as a corrective is really the same-old-same-old. Though he says teacher education’s big accreditation body — NCATE — should be reconstituted, he suggests that pretty much the same players who have been in charge all along should be in charge of the reforms.
Levine, when all’s said and done, remains part of the problem.
Posted by WarrenX | October 15, 2006 2:44 PM