For at least a week now, I've been receiving breathless emails from the folks promoting NCATE's new report that calls for teacher education to be ?turned upside down.? The message was clear: this is a big deal, a turning point, a ?seismic moment.? Unfortunately, as my friend Rick Hess so aptly put it, not so much.
The report's main argument?that teacher preparation needs to be based in practice, in ?clinical experience??is surely compelling. It's long been thought that teachers learn most of their skills on-the-job, and find their ed school courses to have little lasting value. In fact, even ed school profs acknowledge the limits of university-based instruction, according to our recent survey (Cracks in the Ivory Tower?). To wit, seventy-three percent of those surveyed felt that most professors of education need to spend more time in K-12 classrooms.
But as Rick points out, if you truly believe that teachers develop most effectively by spending time in schools, learning from mentors and reflecting on their practice, then you start to question where universities fit into the picture at all. What can an ed school offer an aspiring high school teacher (like myself, 15 years ago) that couldn't better be provided by a school district or a non-profit? (The situation might be different for an aspiring kindergarten teacher, as there actually is some science to be learned in terms of how to instruct kids in reading. Not that you'd actually find that science in most ed schools. But I digress.)
Right now ed schools benefit from a bizarre economic model: Young people who want to get a college degree take their parents' tuition dollars, and their student loans, and sign up for ed school. They even end up paying for ?student teaching??free money for the university if there ever was one. And at the end, the students get a college degree and a teaching certificate, school districts get trained teachers that come to them ?free,? and universities pocket a lot of cash. Blowing up that economic model is going to take more than exhortations from ?blue ribbon panels.? Honestly, I'm not sure what it's going to take. But if we want teachers to learn on-the-job, the last place to start is with a report from a bunch of ed school types.
-Mike Petrilli
