Time to reconsider teaching of teachers
Most of us can look back fondly on teachers in grade school or high school who had a gift for imparting knowledge and inspired us to learn and expand our horizons. At the same time, we can no doubt recall some who made us wonder how they had ever gotten a teaching certificate and seemed to be only slightly more proficient in their fields than those of us who were supposed to be learning from them.
According to a new study, a lot of teachers who fit into that second group are being turned out by the nation’s education programs.
The National Council on Teacher Quality, a group formed more than a decade ago to prod education reform, found that teacher-training programs are doing an incredibly poor job and, at the same time, are producing nearly three times the number of graduates needed. The group, which includes education officials from the Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, looked at more than 1,000 programs, and the findings weren’t pretty.
“Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the review finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms,” the report said.
And if these teachers aren’t thriving in classrooms, neither are their students.
Also, according to the report, the education programs are very often taking advantage of prospective teachers.
“A vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars,” it said.
Predictably, many of the schools that are educating our educators and the unions that represent teachers are shooting the messenger, primarily by questioning the methodology of the study. Perhaps it’s telling that only about one in 10 of the institutions reviewed cooperated with the study. Some even obstructed it. One can imagine deans of education departments pulling the shades and cowering behind their desks. It seems a bit disingenuous to hide your work from researchers, then claim their research was incomplete.
A major finding of the council – one we agree with wholeheartedly – is that more should be done to screen candidates for education programs.
“You just have to have a pulse and you can get into some of these education schools,” Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, a former official in the federal Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement, told the Associated Press. “If policymakers took this report seriously, they’d be shutting down hundreds of programs.”
That’s probably something that should be done, but it’s highly unlikely to happen. So perhaps it’s best to focus on who is entering the programs.
One supporter of the council’s efforts, Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, recently put his signature on a law requiring students entering education programs in that state to have a 3.0 grade-point average in high school or reach certain standards on college-entrance exams before they can be admitted.
Other states should be following Delaware’s lead in this regard, perhaps making the requirements even more stringent. It may be harsh, but there’s an old saying, “Garbage in, garbage out,” that applies here. Taking a mediocre high school student of average or below-average abilities and trying to turn that person into a top-notch teacher is something even the best education schools would be hard-pressed to accomplish. Couple a lackluster student with a bad school, and the results are even worse.
We can talk all we want about setting high standards for our youngsters and requiring them to meet certain testing benchmarks, but if the people teaching them aren’t up to the job, it’s all a bunch of hot air.