It's just a brief news item in Education Week, but it caught my eye:? Yale is ending its masters degree program in urban education.
?Officials said completion of the undergraduate education program had fallen off,? reports Ed Week.
Not to be too harsh, but when considering the program's ?vision,? which I checked in on, one feels some sympathy for the students who are not lining up at the door.
Recent research and evidence (Weiner, 1993, 1999; Ayers et al. 1998) ? make the case that preparing for urban teaching is different. In particular, candidates need to develop stronger competencies in initial enactment, an initial sense of navigating a more complex organizational context and a better sense of their students' assets. Pedagogical knowledge also plays an important role as teachers need to be able to reframe from a variety of directions concepts that students initially struggle with (Ma, 1999).?
Finally, it is important for candidates to develop a ?critical orientation? (Feiman-Nemser, 1990). This orientation ?combines a progressive social vision with a radical critique of schooling. One the one hand, there is optimistic faith in the power of education to shape a new social order. On the other, there is a sobering realization that schools have been instrumental in preserving social inequities.? Cochran-Smith (1991) calls this ?teaching against the grain.? Much of the theory from sociology is specifically targeted at understanding schools as organizations, and in understanding the ways in which a school's context shapes the work of students and teachers alike.
Seriously, though, this shows signs?of the kind of muddled thinking that makes Fordham's new report, Cracks in the Ivory Tower? , so timely ? even if it's too late for the Bulldogs.
As Checker, Mike, and Janie point out in the Foreword to?Ivory Tower, it's not for nothing that Doug Lemov's Teach Like A Champion is a bestseller. ??Americans now demand that new teachers hit the ground running?and continue running, dodging all obstacles in their path, so as to boost student achievement and help schools realize their learning objectives.?
It is possible that the proverbial pendulum will swing back to favor the initial enactment crowd, but for now schools of education might?do well to teach teachers how to teach rather than how to ?shape a new social order.
?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
