Teacher education and social justice. (Introduction).

When progressive people today think about teacher education, they often focus on the discrepancy between the ideals of radical teaching and the realities of contemporary public schools. The articles on teacher education in this issue and the next confront these contradictions in various ways, both by examining aspects of the current situation and offering approaches to dealing with these issues in our classrooms. On one hand, examples of transformative pedagogy, the need to respect and encourage the voices of students, curriculum which critiques popular culture and analyzes social inequality are invaluable to prospective teachers. Moreover, progressive programs educating prospective teachers need to include both models of progressive pedagogy and curriculum and courses exploring the historical and contemporary politics of education, to give prospective teachers tools of analysis and action. On the other hand, calls for liberatory teaching can appear to ring hollow notes in underfunded and inequitable public s chools, where knowledge and teaching practices are increasingly standardized and monitored through high stakes testing. Analysis of the political context of teacher education is essential to an informed practice of teacher preparation.

As numerous educational researchers have documented, existing schools are profoundly unequal, stratified by race and class, and increasingly driven by the standardized testing of students and teachers and the deskilling of teachers through the introduction of packaged curricula geared to standardized tests. The "marketization" of education is dominant at both the federal and state levels, with free-market educators calling for the privatization of schooling through a variety of means--vouchers, for-profit charter schools, the commercialization of school spaces and forced dependence on advertising. Examples of the latter include the widespread presence of Pepsi or Coke machines in school buildings, with a cut of the profits used to pay for otherwise unfunded student programs, or Channel One, which provides schools with free TV sets but in return requires students to watch commercials during school time.

The changes that are taking place at both the state and national level reflect the interests of groups like the Business Roundtable, who see public education as both the source of "trained" (as opposed to educated) workers and a potential opportunity for private entrepreneurs. In one version of the free market vision, education would be restructured along the lines of national defense, with private business gaining access to public funds through a system of government contracts. Despite what it usually feels like to public school teachers, there is a great deal of money in public education, in the form of funds currently controlled by local communities and public officials. If education is restructured along the lines of the defense industry, private companies could make enormous profits from these public funds.

Needless to say, the lives of children are of very little interest in this scheme. Knowledge, however, may be even more dangerous than missiles. Conservative school reformers are not only interested in the possibilities of profit in restructuring schools; they are also concerned with control over what is learned in the schools. Encouraging students to think critically about the structure of their society and its values is not a priority for those who are now benefiting from the current arrangement. Thus, controlling knowledge through standardized tests is yet one more way of making sure that public education serves to reproduce the status quo.

In such a climate, progressive teachers and teacher educators quite naturally wonder what can be done to counter what seem like inexorable forces of reaction. How can a new generation of activist teachers be encouraged? How might teacher education programs be constructed to give student teachers knowledge and skills that can help them teach critically and progressively in the public schools?

Despite the momentum of the marketization and standardization of education, talented and dedicated teachers continue to work with students in original and critical ways. Their own continual questioning of their own and their students' difficult positions in the beleaguered contexts of today's schools helps them teach their students about real struggles and real possibilities for intellectual growth and political change. Yet in order to serve their students in these ways, radical teachers need to do more than simply apply progressive and student-centered pedagogical techniques. They need to be able to study past educational struggles, to become acquainted with progressive critiques of public education, and to reflect on the underlying political meanings of so-called "education reform." They need to be able to help their students grow as people with race, gender, class and cultural identities that position them unequally within and beyond their classrooms and schools, and equip them with the language and histor ies of struggle and possibility. Their students need to learn about both the promise of the American Dream through education--and the political forces--both today and in the past, that seek to minimize and restrict that promise in the name of economic efficiency and social control.

Most teachers on the university level, like most citizens, hear about the "crisis" and "reform" in pubic education either from the sidelines or as parents. However, unlike most university professors, teacher educators are on the front lines of the campaign by the state and corporations to control the content of knowledge and the process of teaching. Teacher testing and the standards movement, as described by several articles below, are attempting to control the content of teacher education courses and programs. At the same time, radical teacher educators can challenge prospective teachers to learn about and reflect on the broader context of schooling in this country, namely the persistent and continuing struggles over educational access and equality. In these two issues of Radical Teacher we therefore present articles that describe and analyze the current conditions facing teachers and teacher educators. But we also include articles describing innovative programs seeking to challenge prospective teachers to r eflect on the issues we face, think about their own practice, and become radical teachers.

The first two articles in this cluster address the impact of the ongoing school reform movement on teacher education. Frinde Maher situates high-stakes teacher tests in the context of other schemes to create a two-tiered system of public education in her article "The Attack on Teacher Education and Teachers." Teacher education programs are encouraged to abandon students who cannot pass these tests easily, reducing the diversity of the student teacher population and exacerbating the already crisis-level teacher shortage. The tests perpetuate a desire to b1ame, rather than support, teachers in dealing with the problems of public education. The article suggests that a deep societal misogyny and distrust of women as intellectuals lies behind and helps to justify this attack on teachers and this substitution of testing for any real school reform.

In "Educating Teachers in California," Ann Berlak provides an account of what school reform means on the ground for teachers and teacher educators. California, as all other states, has become obsessed with standardized testing. The high stakes testing of students is used to determine curriculum content and to judge classroom teachers and individual schools; results are widely publicized and are used, among other things, to raise or lower real estate values. In order to guarantee that teachers are prepared to teach this and only this content, teacher education programs in California are to be evaluated by state investigating bodies to make sure that university courses reflect the state-mandated content. A faculty member in the School of Education at San Francisco State University, Berlak describes her own experiences as her department struggles to meet the state's demands (necessary for the certification of their program) while remaining true to their own commitment to teaching for social justice. This local s tory is representative of what is happening to teacher education programs across the country. As Berlak points out, the extraordinary level of state control of knowledge and the punitive vision of teaching and learning in California mirror the new federal requirement for annual testing of all children in grades three through eight in the 2002 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. At both state and national levels, the extent of state surveillance and control of public schools continues to expand.

Despite the destructive nature of the current trend toward standardization and marketization, progressive teachers and teacher educators continue to struggle to teach in socially responsible ways. The next two articles in this cluster describe specific programs and approaches. In Polly Attwood and Jimmy Seale-Collazo's article, "The Toolbox and the Mirror: Reflection and Practice in 'Progressive' Teacher Education," two advisors of student teachers reflect on being caught between the "arrogance of theory" that can characterize university teacher education programs and the "arrogance of practice" with which public school teachers can view the ineffectiveness of theory in "real" classrooms. Seale-Collazo and Artwood describe their negotiations of theory and practice in support of three student teachers, looking for the frameworks and questions that will enable student teachers to first see, then think and act beyond, their concrete political positions in their classrooms and their schools. In this article, the identity issues that come up for all beginning teachers, as they develop a teaching "self," are given a specifically political context. The authors describe the complex ways the personal and political come together for student teachers entering public schools.

In "Re(in)forming the Conversations: Student Position, Power, and Voice in Teacher Education," Alison Cook-Sather describes a program designed to bring students and student teachers together from across the hierarchical divisions of public schools. High school students and student teachers write letters to each other and meet together over the course of a semester. By making this temporary collapse of institutional boundaries a central part of student teachers' initiation into teaching, the program seeks to make audible, to student teachers, voices often silenced in schools. By bringing student teachers together with a wide range of high school students, who act as their conversants and sometimes observers during their student reaching, the program encourages student teachers to connect their own identity issues to the issues faced by students. Among the issues that these students force their student teachers to confront are grading and classroom management policies and the issues of tracking and inclusion, a ll from the students' point of view.

Finally, in "An Annotated Bibliography: Essential Resources for Radical Teachers," Kelly Hayek, Nikola Hobbel, Emily Meixner, and Tracy Wagner share a list of resources to support critical teaching. The bibliography comes out of their collaboration in the teacher education program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Through this rich and varied list of books, magazines, and articles, they invite other teachers and teacher educators into a conversation about radical practice that provides inspiration, practical ideas and a badly needed sense of community for radical teaching practice.

CONCLUSION

The notion of an irreconcilable "theory-practice" divide has often been used to attack radical and progressive educational approaches. Long before the current trends towards further standardization and privatization, critics have decried as "nice in theory but impossible in practice" the ideas of listening to children's desires and needs, of using classrooms as settings to explore societal diversities and inequalities, and of making schools laboratories for creating models of more democratic communities. Such practices, we are always told, would not "work" in the real world of overcrowded classrooms and a curriculum to be "covered." The current attacks on schoolchildren, particularly working-class children, and their teachers are indeed designed to make such democratic classrooms less possible. But these current policies underscore the importance of the real lessons that we can draw from the articles above and those we include in the next issue. While they articulate these themes in different ways, all our au thors stress the importance of teachers confronting politically the complex contexts that they inhabit. Teachers and teacher educators cannot just close their classroom doors and teach "progressively;" they need to be aware of the historical and political bases of the current struggles over the schools. They need to talk to their students and their colleagues in new ways, and see their schools and communities as well as their classrooms as places for these dialogues. In some ways the current discussion of our educational "crisis" and "reform" provide excellent opportunities for this; everyone is talking about education these days. We hope these articles, and the ones in the next issue as well, will help promote these necessary conversations.

FRINDE MAHER is a professor of Education and Women's Studies at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. She is co-author, with Mary Kay Tetreault, of The Feminist Classroom, Dynamics of Gender, Race and Privilege (2nd Edition, Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and of numerous articles on women's education and feminist pedagogies. She can be reached at [e-mail].