The attack on teacher education and teachers.

This essay is adapted from a talk given at a conference on the right-wing attacks on our education system last fall, co-sponsored by Radical Teacher and Teachers for a Democratic Culture. Topics at the conference included the privatization and corporatization of both public and higher education, and this talk was about how the field of teacher education is being transformed by these same forces.

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 of qualified teachers, especially to working class and minority schools, another excuse for not dealing with what schools need, and a blaming of the female victim, in this case teachers and teacher educators, for school problems rooted elsewhere.

Title II requires all institutions that prepare teachers to report the "Pass Rates" of their own "Program Completers" on state certification exams to their states. The states in turn are required to report this data annually to the federal government. Although Title II requires institutions to demonstrate that their programs meet standards by reporting their pass rates on certification tests, it does not require states to demonstrate that their tests meet national standards for testing. Each state is allowed their own testing policy. (1) Absent validation by independent experts, it is not clear what it means to achieve specific pass rates on these tests. The Massachusetts test has never been professionally validated, and the governor of Massachusetts has twice vetoed funding for the validation process.

Many states use different tests, and even states that use the same test impose different passing levels, or "cut scores." Thus, according to the National Research Council (NRC), "It is virtually impossible to make meaningful comparisons of passing scores across states when states use their own tests." Furthermore many institutions will simply require every student to pass all requisite tests before entering their education programs, giving themselves an automatic 100% pass rate. But 100% pass rates attained in this manner are meaningless because, as the Tide II reporting guidelines note, they "do not reflect how well the institutions have prepared all the students enrolled in their programs to pass state assessments." Nevertheless, Title II requires that states rank their institutions according to pass rates, without taking this issue into account. 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.

But that's not all. Title II will also decrease the supply of quality teachers. Institutions which adopt the 100% strategy--and many will--inevitably force their students to take state certification tests early in their college careers. This will prematurely push out of teacher preparation those students who, with hard work and good teaching, would pass these tests later in their college career. Furthermore, the national teacher shortage is already dire in some states. For example, this year Texas needs 30,000 new teachers, but its colleges of education produced only about 16,000 graduates.

When superintendents and principals are compelled to choose between placing a warm body and no body in a classroom, they invariably select the warm body--even if that warm body has not passed all required tests. Two thirds of the states have waiver policies which permit schools to hire college graduates who have not passed their tests. Title II seeks to discourage such waivers by requiring states to report how many they grant. 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.

Consequently, instead of having a fully licensed reaching force, we will get a two-tiered one. There will be a fully-licensed cohort for more privileged schools and a temporary, unlicensed and undereducated teaching force for the students in large urban districts, students who get the fewest educational resources already. Finally, Title II is threatening the very existence of institutions dedicated to working with under-prepared and first-generation college students over their whole four years. Some institutions will respond by adopting the 100% strategy and quietly abandon their mission. Others will stay, and risk being labeled as low-performing or even closed. The results: high turnover, teachers with poor or no training, and the chance to blame teachers and teacher educators for school failings.

All these factors mean that Title II increases obstacles especially for people of color who wish to enter teaching. It will thus exacerbate the current trend of a predominantly white teaching force teaching more and more students of color. (Demographics show that all schools, suburban and urban, will become increasingly less white over the next 20 years.) Furthermore, the teacher tests do not address issues of teaching across cultures, or culturally relevant pedagogies. Thus, we will have more and more teachers teaching students unlike themselves in many ways, with less and less preparation to do so. This is of course especially bad news for minority student achievement.

What are the reasons for these toxic policies? Teachers and teacher educators know what they need to produce good teachers. Teachers need firm liberal arts backgrounds, a grounding in theories and practices of pedagogy, and supervised and mentored work in the field with experienced practitioners. They need all these things, and none is a substitute for any of the others. (This leaves aside the richer and more interesting questions of how to encourage the development of progressive and anti-racist, anti-sexist teachers; see the other articles in this issue.) 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.

* Universities on the whole have little interest in, concern for, or knowledge about the problem of teacher education and therefore have not been mobilized to do anything: teacher education is a "basement" offering and a cash cow at most institutions.

* Even schools of education prefer to concentrate on educational research, of which research about classrooms is only a part. For years, research on educating teachers has lagged behind other topics, although with "education reform' more attention is being paid now to this sub-field.

Why this blindness? I have been thinking about this issue for a while and doing a lot of reading, and it seems to me it has to do with race, class and gender. For many years now pedagogy, and the field of teaching in general, has been associated with women (specifically white and middle or working-class women) and with the underlying assumption that women are intellectually inferior beings. Scholarship, research, and intellectual work have been considered masculine enterprises--demanding, rigorous, and concerned with the furtherance of human knowledge; but pedagogy, as a study of mere process divorced from content, is a feminine specialty. In an essay exploring the low status of teacher education, Dan Liston tellingly compares it to the domestic labor of the housewife; a set of mundane, invisible "private sphere" activities that support the highly visible public sphere work of research and knowledge production. Teaching is not what men do in the ivory tower, but what women do--in schools.

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. As is often the case, women are to blame: they are castrating welfare mothers, or they are pregnant teenagers, or they are incompetent teachers. This demeaning of women, whose natural feminine qualities were traditionally invoked to relieve the need for specialized training, serves again as a convenient foil for systemic failures. And again, the recent efforts to raise the so-called quality of the teacher pool by imposing rigorous tests substitute punitive barriers for the substantive program improvement and financial supports needed for the complex work of educating competent teachers. Such policies especially shut out the teachers of color who are most badly needed in the school systems at risk.

How to change this situation? What would genuine teacher education reform look like? Here are some ideas (combinations of which have been put forward again and again by professionals in the field), that might merit attention were these sexist (and racist and classist) blinders to be removed.

* If indeed reaching were to be understood as an intellectually demanding and culturally central profession, then necessarily substantial financial and academic resources would be devoted to emphasizing the training of teachers as a central mission of higher education.

* All teacher education programs would impose rigorous standards for academic subjects and provide the opportunities to learn them. Programs would include pedagogical training and extensive work in the field, juxtaposing educational theory and classroom practice. They would be made financially and educationally accessible to a wide variety of potential students.

* Standardized teacher tests, if used at all, should be only a small part of assessing teacher competence. They should be accompanied by portfolios, videotapes and other means of demonstrating the range of abilities called for in classroom reaching.

* Teachers should be paid as professionals whose public responsibilities merit professional salaries as well as professional training.

* The widespread policy of hiring teachers who have had no training and whose only qualification is a BA degree and/or a passing score on a currently meaningless teacher test, should be phased our. School-based mid-career training programs could work with recruits from other professions. All schools should sponsor mentoring programs for first and second-year teachers, to help insure that they will stay in teaching.

* Teacher education programs should be designed with a full range of student populations in mind. They should reward rather than penalize (as is too often the case) the "local knowledge" about their students and communities carried by candidates from diverse backgrounds. Such candidates must also be given the full financial support they need.

* All teacher education programs should emphasize cultural, racial, gender and class diversity, and all program curricula and teacher tests should include substantial and substantive multicultural knowledge in every field. Education courses should be devoted to helping students understand peoples' encounters with public education in America, the struggles for the American dream, and the power dynamics of our society as they are played out in the schools.

Were all these criteria met, teachers would be equipped nor only to serve all their students, but to become change agents, working beyond the isolation of the classroom to challenge their schools and their communities' commitments to student progress.

However, as noted, such reforms as these would be expensive. More importantly, they would require a different kind of societal commitment. Such a commitment would require a fundamental rethinking of the teacher role and of the naturalized assumptions about its fundamentally gendered character. As one educator notes, "the flexibility, the knowledge and the judgment required to carry out the job of teaching are not the outcome of instinctive, innate capacities in women. They are the result of thought, planning, experience, discussion with others, and--very importantly--a collection of competencies which must be capable of developing productively over time." (2)

Until we see the activities of pedagogy and the skills of teaching as constituting a socially valuable profession, worthy of substantial societal investment and itself central to the enterprise of education from kindergarten to graduate school, we will not accomplish the structural reforms necessary for improved student learning at all levels. The deep-seared societal prejudices against women (and particularly non-elite women) as incapable of intellectual competence nor only ignores the challenges of a job that many perform successfully day after day. It also functions as a deeply harmful excuse for not fully committing to the education reform efforts in our public schools--and trusting teachers themselves to be centrally involved in them. We also need to make the process of learning more central to the whole educational enterprise--by investing more resources in our schools and bringing departments of education in from the margins of the academy where their association with women has traditionally relegated them.

(1.) See Ann Berlak's essay in this issue. For example, California so far has not committed to any standardized paper and pencil test.

(2.) Miller, Jane, School for Women, London: Virago, 1996, 106.

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].