NCATE's big report “Transforming Teacher Education Through Clinical Practice” is now out and is eliciting the predictable hosannas. Its blue-ribbon panel event this week was hailed as a transformative moment. SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, a co-chair of the panel, said: “This is a seismic moment for teacher education.” I'm not sold.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I've got enormous respect for NCATE honcho Jim Cibulka and for the co-chairs of the Blue Ribbon Panel—Colorado's all-star state chief Dwight Jones (about to become supe of Clark County, Nevada) and Zimpher. But this panel of twenty-some members, including both NEA chief Dennis van Roekel and AFT chief Randi Weingarten, did about what I would’ve expected—they embraced the conventional wisdom of the moment and called for colleges and districts to embrace practices that sound perfectly nice but that won't amount to much at day’s end.
The report declares that teacher education needs to be “turned upside down,” with training shifting from a focus on academic preparation and course work and towards clinical practice that's “interwoven with academic content and professional courses.” Those are swell, reasonable sentiments. And I'm all in favor of teacher preparation programs finding cost-effective ways to do less mediocre course work and more quality clinical training. My own teacher prep experience at the Harvard Ed School would've benefited enormously from this kind of shift.
But, the truth is, I don't see much evidence of “seismic” thinking in this report. Nothing in it acknowledges, for example, that, if clinical preparation is the key, it may make sense to increasingly cut colleges and universities out of the preparation equation—and allow sites to use them on an as-needed basis.
The report does usefully note the value of creating new roles when it comes to mentoring and supporting faculty, yet it clings to the ideal of every teacher as jack-of-all-trades. I saw nothing acknowledging that teacher preparation for virtual instructors, online tutors, or Citizens Schools-style “citizen-teachers” might require new notions of specialization, or efforts to transcend one-size-fits-all preparation. Instead, I heard a call for a new “one best” approach to teacher preparation, unfortunately ill-suited for serving educators in new kinds of roles or for supporting more agile, cost-effective staffing models.
Meanwhile, crucial “implementation” challenges—like recruiting enough good classroom mentors or finding sufficiently qualified university supervisors—go unaddressed. The report doesn’t explain how to ensure that large-scale clinical programs won’t merely be diluted versions of today’s boutique efforts, bringing to mind far too many previous “seismic” edu-reforms that proved to be little more than fads. As someone who spent five years supervising student teachers, I’ve seen a whole lot of pretty awful practice-oriented teacher preparation. It’s not clear to me from this report how preparation programs can be counted on to guard against that or keep their “clinical” training from simply meaning that their students are wasting time in K-12 schools instead of on college campuses.
Finally, illustrating the ways in which the new budgetary picture still hasn't sunk in, the report ducks like crazy when it comes to “hard choices and cost implications.” In the worst tradition of mealy-mouthed consensus-style reportese, the panel says its vision “will require reallocation of resources and making hard choices about institutional priorities.” It acknowledges that “clinically based programs may cost more per candidate than current programs” but then simply asserts that they “will be more cost-effective by yielding educators who enter the field ready to teach.” The evidence for this assertion is, to be generous, lacking. In the current fiscal climate, to call for new outlays without proposing offsetting savings—or even giving some broad estimates of the anticipated costs—shows a troubling tone-deafness to the fiscal situation.
I’m going to be real curious to see how the eight states that signed onto the NCATE proposal—California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Oregon, and Tennessee—move forward. And I hope that this well-intentioned effort proves more transformative than I suspect. But that’s not the way I'd bet.
This piece originally appeared (in a slightly different form) on Rick’s Education Week blog, Rick Hess Straight Up.