September 18, 2006
Arthur Levine gets a B in teacher education history
Arthur Levine's Educating School Teachers report is out today, with responses already from NCATE's Art Wise, Alexander Russo, and Jenny D., thus far. It's sure to get other press as well.
I haven't had time today to read the entire report in-depth, but I did look at the section on the history of teacher education and in the footnotes. Good stuff: Levine's read one of the old classics on schools of ed, Clifford and Guthrie's Ed School and one of the sure-to-be-classics on normal schools, Chris Ogren's The American State Normal School. Levine entirely missed Jurgen Herbst's classic And Sadly Teach as well as David Labaree's more recent The Trouble with Ed Schools, and those omissions may explain some blinders in both Levine's treatment of the history and an amazing inconsistency in the general approach to reforming teacher education.
To condense the historiography into a nutshell: Clifford and Guthrie looked at elite institutions and the status competition within elite institutions. Herbst looked instead at the broad reach of teacher education institutions, not just those at the top, and found both how status competition affected teacher education and also how many institutions were local resources. Ogren looked at the normal schools that often became teachers colleges and then regional state universities over the course of approximately 80 years. Labaree also discusses status competition (a common theme in his books) and points out (as does Herbst) that part of the institutional position of teacher education is related to its connection to women's work and social service.
Levine's focus on the story at elite institutions misses the broad use of teacher education institutions for more than teaching teachers. In the late 19th century, educational institutions were far less specialized than their names often implied. Often as not, a state normal school would be the local tertiary school that local residents could access. So they were as filled with general education as with teaching specific skills. The historical irony of state normal schools is that their success in providing access to general education helped many rise in that common institutional trajectory upwards into college and university status. The tried-and-true example for education historians is Illinois State University, whose college town is Normal, Illinois. (You figure out how the town got the name!)
Is that omission important? I think so. Levine ties the dislocation of ed schools from practical effectiveness to a claimed historical shift to a more theoretical curriculum in the competition with disciplinary schools (such as chemistry and psychology). He specifically calls out two social foundations areas—sociology of education and history of education—as prime examples of such theoretical lacunae (see p. 23 of the report). There are several factual problems with Levine's claim. First, if there's any discipline that colonized teacher education, it was psychology, not sociology or history. Second, this story is true primarily for elite institutions, where the influence was largely with administrators, not the bulk of teachers. It isn't even true at some very important teacher education institutions, historically Black colleges and universities, which have never risen as high in institutional status as their historically white counterparts. Third, the only institutions where humanities and social-science perspectives on education dominate teacher education are in liberal-arts colleges with educational studies programs. My impression is that many schools and colleges of education attacked their social-foundations components in the 1980s, leaving many teacher education programs with the shells of disciplinary perspectives on schooling. Whether that has led us to better or worse teacher education is beyond the scope of this entry, but teacher education programs are more likely not to know what is the desired relationship of pedagogical knowledge to professional perspectives than to go off in search of the theoretical. Or, if my non-foundations colleagues are in search of the theoretical, it's less likely to be based in disciplinary fields than Levine implies.
The broader (nay, even theoretical) problem with this selective understanding of teacher education's history is with Levine's implication that the Search for Status has crippled teacher education by dividing faculty from the work of schools. The problem with Levine's narrative is that distance from schools is not clearly related to distance from teacher education. In some cases, the Search for Status may encourage faculty to leave teacher education for the loftier status of graduate and research education or (even better, for some faculty) mostly research. But there is nothing in that status competition that is related to "connection to schools." I know many colleagues who spend much of their time in graduate education and research programs who engage schools deeply. They design programs to be tested in real classrooms, encourage their graduate assistants to "get dirty" in real schools, and so forth. They're still isolated from teacher education but not from schools.
By contrast, I know many faculty who spend most of their time in teacher education but little time in schools. Some have spent plenty of time in professional development schools but found the work largely unrewarded by a university that promotes a relatively narrow view of research. Others are absorbed by their teaching assignments and barely eke out enough time for writing.
The pragmatic fact of life is that faculty can't Do It All. We only have 200 hours in a week, which is more than mere mortals (thanks to the colleges of education which declared in 1937 that they would operate by the Metric Week) but still less than what would be necessary for all of us to research our hearts out, write, engage in teacher education, do graduate education, and also have a life and stay alive past 45. The tensions and problems in teacher education units are very real, but they won't get any better by asking for academic speed-ups.
As I have written, I haven't had enough time to digest the entire report, and I'm sure there will be both provocative and useful observations in the rest of it.
Listen to this articlePosted in Education policy on September 18, 2006 8:10 PM |
