Genuine Teacher Education Reform
How do high stakes testing, school choice, voucher schemes and low funding work together? If you privatize and "outsource," if you make individual schools, parents and teachers solely responsible for their kids' progress with fewer resources to go on, then there has to be a bottom line, a measure of "who wins" in the educational market. Tests allow comparisons between schools so we know who wins and loses, and can blame teachers, kids and their parents for their failures. The notion of public responsibility for education, even the assumption of the need for public and civic spaces and communities, is eroded, but administrators and teachers and parents and children scrambling for their own places on the ladder may hardly notice.Where does teacher education fit into this picture? Concern about higher education's capacity to prepare quality teachers has reached unprecedented proportions. Federal policy makers have responded by passing Title II of the Higher Education Reauthorization Act of 1998, which purportedly seeks to improve teacher quality by requiring states to report institutional pass rates on certification exams and denying federal aid to institutions that lose state certification. The result: a decrease in the supply o
The public will not know whether an institution attained its 100% pass rate by educating all, or by screening out some (perhaps many), of its students. ) Aside from the right-wing and mainstream attacks on our educational institutions, and the many reasons for them, here are a few aspects of the thinking behind the substitution of tests (which often do not even test pedagogical skills at all) for genuine teacher education reform:* Concerns raised by educators and teacher educators in particular are considered "special pleading" and ignored by policy makers. Some institutions will respond by adopting the 100% strategy and quietly abandon their mission. Moreover this mostly white and female teaching force is being widely blamed, almost as if they are bad mothers, specifically for failing to educate student populations whose chronic poverty and inability to advance is laid either on themselves or on the schools rather than on deeper social structural barriers. This is of course especially bad news for minority student achievement. Nevertheless, by pressuring schools of education to prepare fewer teachers in order to achieve higher pass rates, Title II will increase the numbers of waivers offered. However, as noted, such reforms as these would be expensive. (1) Absent validation by independent experts, it is not clear what it means to achieve specific pass rates on these tests. * All teacher education programs would impose rigorous standards for academic subjects and provide the opportunities to learn them. Such candidates must also be given the full financial support they need. Each state is allowed their own testing policy. * Standardized teacher tests, if used at all, should be only a small part of assessing teacher competence. For example, this year Texas needs 30,000 new teachers, but its colleges of education produced only about 16,000 graduates. As is often the case, women are to blame: they are castrating welfare mothers, or they are pregnant teenagers, or they are incompetent teachers. School-based mid-career training programs could work with recruits from other professions.
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