The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal has just released Blueprint for Reform: Teacher Preparation, a thoughtful overview of the state of teacher preparation, with succinct, useful recommendations for policymakers who wish to improve education policy so as to get better-prepared teachers into the classroom. It’s very much worth reading—and I’d say so even if it didn’t include a few shout-outs to model legislation produced by the National Association of Scholars (NAS)! But I want to focus on the phrase “teacher preparation.” The assumption of the phrase is that what matters is how teachers are educated and not the teachers’ own characteristics. That assumption is worth examining.
Broadly, that assumption is true. But what that assumption builds upon is the presumption that most would-be teachers are—OK, middlin’, neither excellent nor terrible. In other words, they are human and vary in quality as people do in every different job. They are not mostly dedicated saints, lazy incompetents—those who can’t do, teach, as the old saying goes—or even radicals hell-bent on preaching revolution in the classroom. They’re just people trying to do their job. And reform of teacher preparation is meant above all to help the ordinary, middlin’ teachers to do their jobs.
There’s a lot of truth in that presumption. It explains a good deal of many of NAS’s approaches to teacher preparation, as well, I presume, of the Martin Center’s. Would-be teachers have limited time—and tuition dollars—to learn how to teach, so they should be taught properly the first time around, via content-rich subject matter courses rather than useless or counterproductive courses in pedagogy, which at best they will have to take the time to unlearn. Novice teachers need lucid catalogues of the factual information they need to convey to their students—and that is why we created our model content standards of American Birthright (social studies) and Franklin Standards (science) precisely as such lucid catalogues of factual information. We also propose reforms to undergraduate general education requirements so as, informally, to increase the supply of properly prepared teachers—because teachers aren’t some caste of selfless saints, but young people thinking about what job to take, and trying out the possibilities their classes have prepared them for. Our education reform proposals largely presume that teachers are reasonably competent, reasonably dedicated, and mostly trying to do a job as best they can.
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Alas, that’s not the only truth about teachers. Whether it’s because they’re formed by radical education schools or whether there’s self-selection, there are far too many teachers who think their job is teaching for revolution. Worse are the larger number who aren’t entirely aware of how much politics have been bundled into what they teach and whose desire for professional autonomy blends a reasonable desire for pedagogical freedom with an unreasonable desire to impose politicized teaching on students. There are enough of these teachers that “teacher preparation” can only be part of the needed range of education reforms.
We propose bills for academic and financial transparency because school teachers and administrators have displayed marked tendencies to conceal their radicalism. We propose a variety of bills to prevent politicized instruction because, alas, such laws are necessary. We support alternative teacher certification routes, which allow teachers to bypass education schools and education departments, not least because these are factories to radicalize teachers. Perhaps most importantly, we support the growth of new teacher education systems, such as those provided by schools of classical education, to ensure a proper supply of un-radicalized teachers.
Then, too, there are aspects of our public schools that select for characteristics that are not just ordinary, middlin’ teachers to do their jobs. Public schools, bluntly, are bureaucratic monstrosities, compounded by an utter lack of school discipline. They select teachers who can endure choking bureaucracy and chaotic classrooms. We propose reducing bureaucracy and eliminating the radical regulations that destroy school discipline so that schools will attract the full range of teachers—and not just those who have the stone skin you need to endure utterly dysfunctional schools.
So, there is more to education policy than teacher preparation—as the Martin Center knows, of course, since it has published many other Blueprints for Reform in addition to its latest one on Teacher Preparation. We cannot just assume that teachers are ordinary people trying to do their jobs. Yet many or most are, and we propose our policies for them.
We make our education policies thinking that most teachers look an awful lot like the guy we see in the mirror—a Joe who just wants help to do his job.
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Image: “Teacher Training at MOCHA” by Fabrice Florin on Flickr
