Michael deCourcy Hinds, Carnegie Corporation of New York
2002
Michael deCourcy Hinds wrote this 17-pager as part of the "Carnegie Challenge 2002" series, intended by the Carnegie Corporation of New York "to lift up ideas and issues in a way that we hope will elevate them to the national agenda." This one wants the national agenda to begin treating teachers "as modern clinical professionals." It's based on Carnegie's assumption (built into its multi-million dollar "Teachers for a New Era" initiative) that the way to do this is by transforming colleges of education into "schools of modern clinical practice." The basic strategy is to solve America's teacher quality problem by fixing its ed schools - which Carnegie seeks to do by pumping money into them. Two-year "residency" programs for new teachers are a key element of this strategy, as Carnegie continues its decades-old effort to make teaching more professional by making it more like medicine. Though the foundation can legitimately claim some ancient credit for having helped to strengthen medical education in America, by supporting Abraham Flexner's influential 1910 critique of medical schools, it remains to be seen whether this can be done for a field that rests so lightly on science and so heavily on hunch, ideology and preference. Flexner, it may be recalled, wrote that "...The curse of medical education is the excessive number of schools. The situation can improve only as weaker and superfluous schools are extinguished." That is surely not Carnegie's view, at least not its public view, of teacher education. We wish them well, though. It's surely worth trying multiple routes to better teachers in U.S. primary-secondary schools. We wish, however, that the Carnegie crowd were more tolerant of those who would try different routes-and committed to having their programs evaluated by people who don't start off with a predisposition to like them. You can find this paper on the web at http://www.carnegie.org/pdf/teachered.pdf.
