Ed Schools: The Real Shame of the Nation

The Problem

The heading for Anemona Hartocollis's article on education in the 31 July 2005 New York Times said it all: "Who Needs Education Schools?" It has become increasingly clear that education schools as they now function are a major part of the problem and not the solution to improving public education and narrowing the gaps in student achievement. Indeed, they are responsible for three major problems facing the public schools.

To begin with, education schools supply far too many teachers with an inadequate background in the subjects they are licensed to teach. As one school administrator discovered when she examined her teachers' college transcripts while preparing a proposal for a Teaching American History grant, "fully one-third of our middle school social studies teachers had zero hours in college history courses." Another 53 percent had fewer than ten hours of any college history, probably "survey courses, freshman level," she guessed. And this administrator was talking about licensed, not temporary, teachers. As every school district has found, most of their K-8 teachers require continuous professional development in the knowledge base for the subjects they teach. This is remediation, not enrichment or updating-which is what nurses, librarians, social workers, and other professionals undergo.

Second, education schools no longer supply public schools with enough academically qualified teachers for the subjects that must be taught in the secondary school. The usual excuses are starting salaries and the small number of academically proficient undergraduates interested in teaching, especially high school mathematics and science. But a healthy dose of skepticism is in order here. The number of strong liberal arts graduates applying for admission to the Teach for America program continues to increase every year. And in Massachusetts , the single biggest source of new secondary mathematics and science teachers from 1999 to 2002 was an accelerated program funded by the legislature for individuals changing careers and academically strong college graduates. In an independent evaluation of the program conducted for Massachusetts 's department of education, most of these new teachers said they would not have considered going into teaching if they had to enroll in a traditional teacher preparation program.

Anecdotal evidence also supports a skeptical stance. A charter school for grades 6-12 specializing in mathematics and science which opened in September 2005 in the Boston area received fifty-eight replies to its first advertisement for teachers in February 2005; twenty-one had master of science degrees, another thirteen had Ph.D.s. By law, charter schools do not need to hire licensed teachers or graduates of approved training programs. And because I serve on this school's advisory board, I know that the salary at this charter school is not the attraction. Thus, contrary to "common knowledge," it seems that a growing number of academically competent adults are interested in teaching in the public schools, and greater opportunity to enroll in an accelerated preparation program or to teach without having to take any education courses at all might attract even more of them.

Third, education schools do not train prospective teachers how to teach. Instead, they arm new teachers with a host of pseudo-teaching strategies like small group work and with the philosophy that students should "construct their own knowledge" and are more capable of shaping their own intellectual growth than teachers if they are sufficiently motivated by "inquiry." Education schools have been especially remiss in preparing new instructors with research-based knowledge for teaching beginning reading and arithmetic, two areas of professional training completely under their control. The funds now invested in professional development to train our current teaching force how to teach beginning reading and arithmetic are staggering. "Reading First," a K-3 program that is part of the No Child Left Behind Act, is a major federal initiative to increase students' reading skills by improving the ability of K-3 instructors to teach reading using curriculum materials and pedagogical strategies that reflect a sound research base. To implement the program, elementary schools are not required to partner with an education school. I will explain why below.

Attempts at Solutions

State legislators have been in a quandary for decades about how to strengthen the academic qualifications of those who enroll in traditional undergraduate licensure programs, still the training ground for most new teachers, as noted in a June 2005 report on teacher education by the American Educational Research Association. In fact, a July 2005 report issued by the National Center on Education Statistics corroborated earlier reports that college graduates who go into teaching after completing undergraduate licensure programs are apt to have lower SAT and ACT test scores than those who don't go into teaching . They are also apt to have higher undergraduate GPAs, which sugges ts that education courses are easier than other courses. This gap covers up a more serious problem . Studies of trends over time, as described in an April 2005 report by the Progressive Policy Institute, all show a sharp decline in teacher quality since the 1960s.

In a desperate attempt to increase the academic competence of prospective teachers, many states have enacted laws that require them to major in the arts or sciences discipline they plan to teach. One might think this would take care of the problem. Yet, there is no evidence this requirement has led to more academically competent teachers. Indeed, one could make the opposite case for prospective elementary teachers, as the Massachusetts department of education concluded from the results of a 2000 survey. This requirement was one of the provisions of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, an impressive piece of progressive legislation. But the undergraduates chiefly affected by this requirement were not those aiming to teach a core subject in the secondary school-they already tended to major in the liberal arts-but rather those seeking to become preschool, kindergarten, elementary, or special education teachers, undergraduates who would otherwise have majored in education. The survey found that from 1995 to 2000 a majority of the undergraduates in Massachusetts's elementary licensure programs majored in psychology, another social science, or a cobbled together "liberal studies" program, and not in a subject they would teach, such as science, mathematics, or history. Largely because many colleges continued to require an education major or did not change course requirements for their licensure programs, these undergraduates were compelled to take as many education courses as before, which left them even less time for academic electives. Ironically, such students probably began their teaching careers with a weaker academic background than they would have ended up with under the old regulations. A teacher educator reported the same trend at Rutgers University after the passage of a similar requirement in New Jersey . The phenomenon is clearly not confined to higher education institutions in Massachusetts .

It is no easy matter to address this new wrinkle through legislation, however. To eliminate the smorgasbord of irrelevant majors its future elementary school teachers were choosing, Colorado decided in 2001 to specify the majors they could take, possibly the only state to do so. Not surprisingly, the decision was opposed. Prospective elementary teachers are considered a "cash cow" at most state colleges and universities, and as is the case in most higher education institutions, the greater the number of students with a particular major, the greater the number of faculty positions to which that department is entitled. In large part, because the facts on elementary school teachers' majors had been gathered and reported on by an independent organization, vested interests were unable to trump the public interest in Colorado . Not so in Massachusetts . In 2000, when its department of education sought to enact such a requirement, Massachusetts 's private and public colleges spoke out strongly against requiring undergraduates planning to become elementary teachers to choose from a pre-selected list of appropriate liberal arts majors. The most the department could get into its revised regulations was a compromise measure requiring that these undergraduates take thirty-six academic credits in the basic subjects they would teach (a requirement later extended to prospective special education teachers). Even this requirement was opposed by some teacher educators on the grounds that it violated their undergraduates' "academic freedom."

Many educational policymakers now think that licensure tests of teachers' skills and subject matter knowledge are the solution to inadequate academic training. Yet, in 2003 a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research found no evidence that state teacher testing requirements increased teacher quality as measured by educational background. This is not surprising. Most current tests do little more than weed out grossly incompetent candidates for a teaching license because of their low cut scores. In fact, a growing number of teacher training programs use the skills tests to screen students seeking admission to a licensure program, and the subject matter tests to screen students before they do student teaching. These practices let education schools off the hook: there is no need to strengthen their academic requirements if their students have already passed their licensure tests before they can enroll in or complete their training programs.

Many educational policymakers also believe that they are solving the second problem-the shortage of academically qualified teachers in several major high school subjects-by (1) creating alternative routes to licensure, (2) permitting school districts to run initial licensure programs, and (3) letting individuals without a license teach in charter schools. Unfortunately, these policies do not satisfactorily solve the second problem, even if the result is a larger number of academically qualified teachers in the public schools. These policies were designed as end-runs around our education schools; they don't reduce or remove their influence on pedagogy for core subjects or beginning reading. Most of the teachers enrolled in alternative programs are still a captive audience for the teaching philosophy promulgated by our education schools, even if they take an alternative route like Teach for America . First, alternative programs tend to employ people for their faculty who teach in education schools or were trained by faculty in education schools, and who therefore serve up the ideas promoted in education schools. Second, in order to qualify for a higher salary or a higher level of licensure in many if not most public schools in the country (except possibly for charter schools), teachers still need to get a master's degree. The only master's degree program they can easily fit into a full-time teaching schedule is a master's of education degree program- an academically impoverished set of courses touting a body of "professional" knowledge that has little, if any, support from credible research. Only those teachers who come directly from an undergraduate liberal arts program or have made a career change to a charter school ( or to a private school) escape the anti-teaching philosophy of education schools.

With respect to the third problem-the failure of education schools to train prospective teachers how to teach-no solution has been proposed by lawmakers to date. To my knowledge, no one has suggested that education schools should be held accountable for the academic achievement of the children their graduates teach once they are employed in the public schools. If anything, our lawmakers seem to think that the solution is even more professional development, whether in reading, mathematics, or science pedagogy. That is the message reaching them from education schools. No change needed in their preparation programs, just a stronger dose of their pedagogical ideas prescribed for all teachers.

Most legislators do not understand that the central problem we face in providing effective reading instruction and a sound reading curriculum in our public schools stems not from the absence of a research base but from our education schools' willful indifference to what the research has consistently shown and to a theory that has been repeatedly confirmed. Scientific evidence has consistently supported a stage theory in reading, as implemented by a pedagogy emphasizing explicit instruction in skills and mastery to the point of becoming automatic. Scientific evidence has also consistently supported the superiority of highly structured teaching for children deemed "at risk." Reading instruction is one of the very few areas where it is not the case that "more research is needed." We have had the theory and supporting evidence to guide the implementation of effective reading programs from K-12 for decades, as Jeanne Chall noted in her last book, The Academic Achievement Challenge , published in 2000.

One of the nation's foremost experts on reading research, Chall ended The Academic Achievement Challenge with the hope that scientific evidence would come to be more respected by educators. But she did not note that scientific research in education has itself been consistently disparaged as "positivistic" and irrelevant by the proponents of the whole language approach to beginning reading since the early 1970s. They have cleverly argued from the start that their theory and recommended pedagogy cannot be assessed by scientific methods that entail comparing an experimental group with a valid comparison group and replicating the results.

Moreover, the advocates of a "reading process" were joined in disparaging experimental research very early on by educators emphasizing a holistic writing process for teaching writing in the elementary school. In 1980, Donald Graves dismissed writing research as "exercises for students to apply statistics to their dissertations." In his view, most experimental research "wasn't readable and was of limited value." He, his disciples, and education school colleagues across the country helped to convince teachers that stories about children learning to write, not the results of sound experimental research, would tell them how to teach writing.

The proponents of a "process" approach to teaching writing were allied with proponents of a "process" approach to teaching reading by more than a dismissal of "conventional" research and their common assumptions about the nature of development in each area. They also did not believe in teaching reading skills directly at any educational level and claimed they could be taught through the writing process.

Educational policy makers are in an unenviable position. Many if not most of the faculty in our education schools who prepare new teachers and retrain experienced ones do not accept the results of scientific research on the nature, development, and teaching of reading or writing or arithmetic. They do not accept the results because they have declared sound research irrelevant. They thus mistrain those who are preparing to teach in costly licensure programs (sometimes in newly developed "professional development" or "laboratory" schools) and continue to mistrain them in even more costly professional development programs. Rational argument is not possible with those who maintain that evidence does not matter-or that evidence may be an opinion (or the "right" opinion) about an issue or an appealing anecdote.

Our society cannot afford to continue supporting teacher training institutions whose educational philosophy promotes a bankrupt theory and its associated pedagogy in the name of social justice-or "inquiry"-in order to disguise their own intellectual bankruptcy. The $64 question is how to overhaul the current system of teacher preparation to (1) ensure that prospective elementary teachers learn how to teach beginning reading, writing, and arithmetic, (2) stop the endless flow of academically underqualified teachers into the public schools, and (3) eliminate all of the empty if not anti-academic education courses required in approved training programs. Education courses have enjoyed such a dismal reputation for so long that they repel academically strong college graduates with an interest in teaching before they even take one. These individuals tend to want some pedagogical preparation; they just don't want courses in education schools, as the success of the Teach for America program strongly suggests.

To answer this $64 question, I propose a number of reform measures that address the source of these problems. Their roots, philosopher Sidney Hook suggested in 1958 in "Modern Education and its Critics," lie in the early part of the twentieth century in the institutional separation of teacher training programs from the scholars and researchers in the discipline the prospective teacher must master. In Hook's eyes, scholars and researchers abandoned the training of public school teachers and forsook grappling with the problems of "mass education in a democratic society." With the founding of education schools, prospective teachers were now isolated from the scholars who should have been responsible for the level of academic knowledge they brought to their first jobs. And teacher educators were now isolated from the scholars who could have worked with them to orient K-12 pedagogy and resolve K-12 curriculum questions in ways appropriate for the discipline. These eight suggestions attempt to correct problems created almost a century ago. It's never too late.

The Solution

1. Transfer accountability from education schools to the academic departments that teach the knowledge base prospective core subject teachers must learn. The relevant academic departments should be held responsible for their preparation and at the graduate level . States should require prospective teachers of grade 5 and higher to complete either a (1) master of arts in teaching (MAT) degree program in the subject they plan to teach, which typically includes an apprenticeship in the schools as well as real graduate work in the subject; or a (2) master of science (MS) or master of arts (MA) degree program in the subject (a common requirement for secondary school teachers in Europe), followed by an apprenticeship in the schools.

Why a MAT program? MAT programs came into prominence in education schools at our major universities in the early 1960s. They were and remain a well thought-out solution to two problems: how to train strong graduates of liberal arts colleges who want to become public school teachers and need a license (something not required by private schools), and how to make a post-baccalaureate teacher preparation program academically attractive and respectable. Most MAT programs were and remain no more than a year and a summer in length. They are designed, like programs in law or medicine, to include academic coursework as part of the training program (usually at least half the courses are supposed to be in the arts and sciences in the subject the student plans to teach) as well as coursework in pedagogy and a student teaching experience. For liberal arts graduates who majored in a subject not taught in the public schools (sociology or anthropology, for example), the requirement that half the coursework for a MAT program be in the field of the license sought would address possible content deficiencies. In retrospect, this has been one of the major strengths of the MAT program. As Samuel Wineburg, professor of history education at Stanford University , noted in a February 2005 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times , almost one-third of the students applying to Stanford's MAT program to become history teachers have never taken a single college course in history.

2. Require approval of these MAT programs by the university's own internal procedures for master's degree programs in the arts and sciences, by a professional organization for the discipline such as the American Mathematical Society, or by the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), rather than by a professional educational organization using chiefly pedagogical criteria, in order to maintain the integrity of their academic content. International standards as well as a state's K-12 standards in that subject should serve as one set of criteria for accrediting these MAT programs. Does the program offer coursework that gives prospective teachers the academic knowledge needed to address state and international standards, especially in science and mathematics? Presently, most of the professional educational organizations that help the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) to accredit education schools are inherently incapable of making these judgments-they do not include recognized scholars in the discipline as reviewers.

3. Attach discipline-specific pedagogical faculty (ideally, effective high school teachers) to each department offering a MAT program. Their home base must be the academic department, not an education school. The intellectual benefits for these educators would be enormous. They would collaborate with their academic colleagues in designing pedagogical coursework and supervising student teaching. They would also attend some of the graduate courses that future teachers of the subject take, in order to keep current. These faculty would see that their affiliation with a specific academic department also benefits the discipline. At department faculty meetings, they could report on the teaching or learning problems in that subject they encounter in secondary classrooms. Those responsible for the content of the discipline could then help prospective teachers work out content-relevant ways to address these problems through curriculum or through pedagogy.

4. Under no circumstances count undergraduate education courses toward an undergraduate or graduate degree for core subject teachers of grade 5 and above. Allowing undergraduate education courses to count for either degree turned out to be one of the major flaws in the five-year training programs implemented after the release in the mid-1980s of the Holmes report, Tomorrow's Teachers , which intended to reform teacher preparation. Many prospective teachers ended up taking more education courses than before instead of capping a four-year liberal arts education with a master's degree in education. That loophole must be eliminated.

5. Require all pedagogical training to take place in the real world-the classroom. In charge, as they should be, would be experienced master teachers, the local school board, and parents-not an out-of-touch faculty in a pedagogical ivory tower promoting such pseudo-teaching strategies as cooperative learning groups, "reader response" in the literature class, and "invent-your-own-algorithms" during mathematics. Recommendations for licensure would be submitted to the state's licensing bureau by the school in which the student teacher apprenticed-after evaluations by the cooperating teacher, the principal or subject area supervisor, and two supervisors from the academic department: a content expert and a pedagogical faculty member.

6. Make full licensure and renewable five-year contracts available to beginning teachers after three years of satisfactory evaluations by a school supervisor. No need for education coursework of any kind or a formal performance assessment for full licensure. Just frequent observations and a recommendation by a school supervisor-a process similar to the one used in British schools today. Salary increases should be contingent chiefly on graduate coursework in the arts and sciences completed during the summer. How much content is there apt to be in a mathematics education course for professional development credit entitled "Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice"?

7. Put federal teeth behind such state regulations (and prod states to adopt them) by classifying core subject teachers for grade 5 and above as "highly qualified" only if they have completed a master's degree program in the subject they teach. There should be no other professional meaning for this phrase today. Legislators might classify as "qualified" those teachers without a master's degree (for instance, those having changed careers) who were hired to teach a core subject, passed an appropriate subject matter test to obtain their provisional license, and passed a performance assessment within two years. These teachers will eventually want a master's degree for better salary increases and should be expected to complete the academic coursework for a MAT degree. To implement such a policy for all new core subject teachers with loud fanfare, say, in 2010, would encourage local school administrators to begin looking at the academic credentials of prospective employees now and give academic departments whose foundations lie directly in the K-12 curriculum time to develop the appropriate MAT programs.

8. Train future teachers of preschool to grade 4 in two- or three-year pedagogical institutes, approved by a state department of education or office of early child care, as they are in many countries around the world. Four years of post-secondary education capped by a university degree are not necessary for teaching at this educational level, especially if we want to upgrade the diverse staff serving as paraprofessionals in elementary schools or preschools, or enrolled in associate in arts (AA) programs in a community college. Education courses for future K-4 instructors should focus on beginning reading, writing, and arithmetic pedagogy, and these prospective teachers should be expected to pass two subject matter tests for licensure: in arithmetic and beginning reading pedagogy. If we restructured education schools as three-year pedagogical institutes and made faculty accountable for children's achievement in literacy and numeracy in their graduates' classrooms, we would place accountability precisely where it belongs and start to reduce the deficiencies in those who teach the crucial beginning years of education.

Concluding Remarks

Requiring a true graduate degree for future core subject teachers from grade 5 on would accomplish several goals simultaneously. First, it would guarantee that all new core subject teachers have a strong background in the subject they teach. As it is, the weakest undergraduate students tend to go into undergraduate licensure programs today.

Second, eliminating all undergraduate licensure programs in core subjects would enable future teachers to spend all four undergraduate years on academic coursework and free them from having to spend one-fifth to one-half of their time on intellectually empty education courses, as the Massachusetts department of education found in a 2002 survey of the state's undergraduate licensure programs. Given the fact that a majority of the states draw on the services of NCATE for accreditation, it is unlikely that there are vast differences nationwide in the percentage of education credits undergraduate licensure programs require, The loss of this much time in academic study in undergraduate licensure programs undoubtedly contributes to many teachers' weak academic knowledge today.

Finally, requiring a master's degree for entry into the profession would free new teachers from completing a master's degree in education to obtain salary increases while working full-time and allow them to concentrate on improving their classroom management skills. Whatever the MA, MS, or MAT degree cost would be offset by not having to incur the cost of obtaining a master's of education degree while teaching. The federal or state government might also give stipends to the students in a MA, MS, or MAT program who commit themselves to teach for five years, especially in subject areas with shortages and in hard-to-staff schools. Policymakers worried about adding an additional year or two to a future teacher's education may not realize that an increasing number of teachers today complete their initial licensure program in a post-baccalaureate program.

The eight recommendations outlined above would totally restructure teacher education in a way that would ensure that new teachers in the public schools are academically competent. Needless to say, these recommendations cannot cure all the staffing issues in K-12. Keeping new teachers in the public schools for longer than three to five years is a different challenge. The reconstruction of school discipline and teachers' (and principals') moral authority, as well as raising the ceiling for teachers' salaries and improving professional working conditions, must also take place if the public schools are to attract and retain a much higher number of academically competent teachers than they now do. But none of these measures can substitute for the long overdue restructuring of our current system of teacher education.

Sandra Stotsky was senior associate commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999 to 2003 and supervised the revision of the state's regulations for teacher licensure and program approval. Some of the ideas presented here were originally developed for an essay that appeared in the Summer 2005 CommonWealth magazine.