Education secretary Arne Duncan's recent public pronouncements about the effectiveness of teachers' colleges have riled many veteran educators. Mary Kalantzis, the dean of the College of Education and professor of education at Illinois, discusses teacher education and the Obama administration's educational reform strategy with News Bureau Education Editor Phil Ciciora.
Education secretary Arne Duncan recently called for major changes to schools of education based on what he sees as their two major flaws: not enough in-class training time, and a lack of data-driven decision-making. Is he right?
Secretary Duncan is not an educator so much as a change-agent. Of course, he is correct that on-site learning for teacher trainees and their capacity to make knowledgeable decisions is a vital aspect of their preparation, but when he makes sweeping generalizations about the flaws of colleges of education, it's for strategic purposes. On the whole, he's trying to motivate us to do something different in order to turn around entrenched underperformance in the school system. He is taking a typical
carrot-and-stick approach: If you want our money, you have to do certain things our way.
However, it also needs to be noted that significant dimensions of the reform agenda, including the $4 billion in Race to the Top funds, seem to be associated with alternative initiatives like the expansion of charter schools and alternate teacher certification, increased support for Teach for America, and private commercial entities that promise to innovate within the education system. Secretary Duncan is also using language that conservatives usually use about reform, and advocating methods that represent uneven progress at best. So it's a little confusing for people; it's as least as confusing as the health-care debate, which is a somewhat analogous situation.
But just as no doctor would be certified without high quality, formal training, no professional teacher should be either. Moreover, the majority of teachers will continue to be prepared by colleges of education in universities. Notwithstanding the acknowledged limitations of some teacher-education programs today, the huge investment in the system should not be sidestepped. Nor, on the other hand, should the waste represented by subpar teacher education be allowed to continue.
Radical reform to teacher education is needed, based not just on narrowly conceived evidence within traditional educational frames of reference, but on an imaginative exploration of new possibilities in teacher education that melds theory and practice, and demands persistent inventiveness as well as rigorous measurement of outcomes.
Serious, sustainable education reform is a complex task that must go beyond the redesign of our university programs and certification requirements. Blaming colleges of education for inadequate educational outcomes is too easy; and ignoring them as crucial partners in reform is shortsighted and self-defeating.
It's not easy being a teacher: The pay is low, career prospects are somewhat tenuous thanks to state funding gaps, and sometimes you're more social worker than educator. What incentives are there for our best and brightest to go into teaching?
People who go into education aren't usually motivated by the pay, that's for sure. They want to make a difference and they care about the future of this country. But the money is so low now that a lot of capable people can't even consider the profession. You can't support a family on a teacher's salary.
Research has shown that in countries where they pay teachers better, there's a dramatic improvement in student performance. The Obama administration has talked about increasing teacher pay, but only in terms of pay-for-performance. It's ill timed in that it's occurring when the state can't even pay the teachers it already has.
What we really need to do is re-think our heritage practice such as one-teacher,
one-classroom and existing timetables, which are somewhat anachronistic and no longer produce results in this age of networked learning. We need to have teams of teachers working with more flexible groupings in more flexible spaces, and really re-think the design of teaching and learning so that it aligns with the multiple ways in which meaning is made and knowledge is created in our more technologically driven world.
Ultimately, all leaders know that a good education and a good educational system are engines of economic development and social well-being. However, it's glaringly obvious that despite the rhetoric and all the resources governments put into education, there's less defensible disparity here in the U.S. than perhaps anywhere else in the world. The gap between the haves and
have-nots remains alarmingly large.
We need to prepare teachers for the complex realities of where they're going to teach and we need to foster school and community partnerships to address the challenges of uneven performance in our schools. This requires not only hard accountability mechanisms but more importantly, soft skills, such as building interpersonal trust, shared responsibility for learning, sustained commitment to capacity building, distributed leadership, ongoing teacher professional learning and fostering senses of belonging to a safe and creative learning community.
How successful have the education reforms of the "No Child Left Behind" era been?
President Obama has realized that aspects of the No Child Left Behind policy have cramped learning environments. His administration is now looking at ways to bring back more creativity and flexibility into the system.
He is, however, also mindful of the need for accountability so that means the testing regime that have been put in place by NCLB cannot be abandoned altogether. We do need to loosen the stranglehold that testing has over curriculum by refocusing on producing engaging curriculum, transformational pedagogical practices and raising performance expectations for all learners. There are richer and more effective ways of gauging performance that do not lean so heavily on filling in ovals with a No. 2 pencil.
It is our job to develop these and to contribute to the repositioning of teaching and learning so that it fulfils the promise of democracy.
It's a curiously interesting, ambiguous moment for all of us in education.