Kappan Home PDK Home
A New Reform Model for Teachers and Teaching By Chris Pipho Illustration © 1998 by Mario Noche

TEACHERS and teaching have been a central part of the reform movement since 1983, when A Nation at Risk put higher expectations for students and teachers on the front burner. While this initial reform message caused many states to enact laws creating programs of competency testing for initial certification, the reform messages since have become less focused.

On any given day one can find some reformers seeking to weed out the incompetent before they get to the classroom, others arguing that the problem is that tenure shields incompetent teachers, and still others suggesting that teachers should be evaluated by how well their students meet high academic standards. The most recent target seems to be university teacher training programs. The drumbeat running through all of this activity is the idea that someone or something is at fault and that anyone in the media business or in the public policy arena can, with very little thought or study, pinpoint the problem and suggest a solution. The disturbing part of this "quasi-conspiracy" theory is the assumption that educators ignore solutions that work in favor of pet theories that they supposedly learned in schools of education.

An Example from Public Television

"The McLaughlin Group," a weekly talk show on public television, aired a program in late November that needed only a few minutes to identify the problem and come up with a solution. The host, John McLaughlin, started with the questions "Why have public schools failed our children? Is it the teachers? Is it the students? Or is it something else? Answer: Something else, namely progressive education." The all-journalist panel went on to point out that this movement was fathered by John Dewey, and McLaughlin quickly summarized Dewey and the progressives' position as "Knowledge is not important; problem solving is."

The solution came in almost the next sentence, when the statement was made that "the largest most expensive education study ever completed, Project Follow Through, says that Dewey was wrong." Viewers were told that this study lasted 28 years, cost more that $1 billion, and followed more than 75,000 low-income students in 170 different K-3 school programs. The results of the study showed that child-centered programs didn't work but something called "Direct Instruction" did work. In short, "the best academic results are produced when the teacher leads the class, imparts knowledge, data, and information to a listening class."

Later in the program another participant circled back to the original question saying, "The education schools should be closed; they're incubators of bad ideas that have been infected by this John Dewey progressive education stuff, which is intended to build self-esteem and doesn't teach kids how to read or write properly."

All this "analysis" took only a few minutes, and then the group moved on to another issue -- "Christians meet gays" -- which I'm sure they solved just as decisively. One has to wonder if programs such as this one seed public opinion with simple notions that are impossible to counter. Even pointing out that Project Follow Through was not a study designed to debunk John Dewey leaves one looking like part of the problem.

Competency Testing of Teachers

Maybe the pinnacle of quick fixes came in 1984 when then-Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Gov. Mark White of Texas both backed a competency test for all teachers in their respective states. The rhetoric that sold the idea was easily understood on talk radio. With one easy-to-administer test, larger numbers of supposedly incompetent teachers and administrators could be identified and dismissed.

Both states made this issue a part of the reform packages approved by their legislatures, and both provided retesting for those who failed. The goal was the eventual loss of certification for the truly incompetent. When the dust settled, the numbers who failed were so small that the tests died a silent death after the first year. (For readers who store old Kappans, a full description of this episode can be found in the May 1985 Stateline.)

The lesson to be learned from this is mostly political: don't try to change the rules on an entire profession if you don't know what you are doing.

Alternative Certification

With the dearth of teachers willing to take jobs in "hard to staff" schools, with large numbers of teachers retiring, and with the widespread push to lower class size, some form of teacher shortage appears to be on the horizon. But where is the pool of new teachers? Can pay incentives and other perks attract qualified people into the profession? Large urban schools will probably be hit the hardest. In New York City, when chancellor Rudy Crew took over 40 of that city's worst performing schools last year, a 15% salary increase wasn't all that successful in restaffing these schools. Robert Riccobono, one of the five superintendents who lost a job in the takeover, says that it is difficult to change the neighborhood or find support for new teachers amid the cynicism of parents and existing teachers. The bottom line appears to be this: if they themselves wouldn't choose to live in a neighborhood, then parents and friends will convince even eager young teachers to seek more comfortable and safer surroundings.

Alternative certification programs might help attract new groups of college graduates to the profession, but bringing inexperienced people into full-time jobs and then loading them down with heavy training and mentoring schedules on evenings and weekends could prove to be a bad mix. And if the "day job" is in a "hard to staff" urban school, then the attrition rate could be high.

Nevertheless, the cry to scale back or abolish college-level teacher training programs and the political appeal of a quick fix could produce a lot of new policy activity on this topic in the current legislative sessions. Some of the push for changes in teacher certification and training could come from the federal level. In early December, Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) gave the Republican weekly radio address and said that he would sponsor legislation to give dollar incentives to states to help them fund alternative teacher certification programs. His goal is to loosen rules governing certification and allow professionals from other fields to enter teaching.

Teachers May Be the Solution

Sometimes a kind word of support for teachers can appear where it is least expected. William Moloney, Colorado's commissioner of education, wrote a "Guest Viewpoint" in the Colorado Education Association Journal last December. He spun out an interesting line of reasoning:

One of the difficulties of school reform is that it often involves nasty finger-pointing about what caused the "problem" in the first place. It is not uncommon for teachers to be thus victimized. This is not only unfair but is a wrong reading of where our educational problems come from. With the exception of our children, no one suffers more in dysfunctional classrooms than teachers. It is thus highly unlikely that they would be the cause of their own distress.

It is not the teachers who are responsible for the governance of schools. It is not teachers who undermined school discipline or weakened their own authority or diminished the student work ethic. It is not teachers who authored the blizzard of regulations, paperwork, and other constraints that have so eroded educational effectiveness. It is not teachers who designed the deficiencies of the education schools they were required to attend or the inanities of the credentialing process they were compelled to undergo.

As long as there have been schools, teachers have wanted the same thing: classrooms of well-behaved children working hard at demanding programs.

Meanwhile, Colorado's first-year governor, Bill Owens, has brought a mammoth reform package to the state legislature. Included in the package are yearly testing of students in grades 3 through 7, transportation vouchers for low-income parents, modification of teacher tenure for new teachers, and school report cards. It will be interesting to see if Commissioner Moloney's olive branch will extend to the Republican-controlled legislature as this plan is debated.

Scripting Teachers

"Direct Instruction" is in part the new model of uniform lesson plans for teachers being implemented in Chicago. Some would say these detailed prescribed lesson plans have gone too far when each day's work is numbered. The Chicago schools call these plans a "structured curriculum." Paul Vallas, Chicago's school chief, says this type of "preplanning" is a necessary extension of strong standards and that the plans "give teachers a model of quality instruction and curriculum so they'll feel supported in the classroom." He also encourages flexibility and says he hopes teachers will bounce around, fusing several days' lessons together and even dwelling longer on a subject if they feel a need to do so.

Critics, however, are not far away. They see the danger of creating robot teachers and even fear a situation that might cause teachers to say, "I followed the plans; it's not my fault that the students didn't learn."

"The McLaughlin Group" might really like this Chicago approach, but in the Chicago suburbs another experiment in using a form of inquiry-based teaching is catching on in fourth-, eighth-, and 12th-grade mathematics and science classes. Advocates use materials and methods designed to advance critical reasoning skills and feel that memorization of facts and drill don't produce a high-performing student.

Known as the First in the World Consortium, the program was started four years ago as a way to explore how schools could meet President George Bush's 1990 pledge to make U.S. schools "first in the world" in math and science by the year 2000. The program was written up in the Science and Technology section of Business Week (13 December 1999). Luckily the article didn't say that any of these ideas came from John Dewey.

Trust Teachers

Given the possibility that two different philosophical starting points for classroom instruction are alive in the Chicago area, what would happen if both proved to be successful? Maybe -- just maybe -- when teachers are comfortable with the approach they are using, understand it, and believe in it and when the administrators and parents also support the effort, success is possible with a variety of instructional approaches. Maybe it's time to take a new approach to improving teachers and teaching. Maybe it's time to give teachers control over their practice. Maybe it's time to trust teachers and let them create a new level of professionalism.

PDK Home | Site Map
Membership & Chapters | Kappan Magazine | Professional Development
Educational Research | Bookstore & Giftshop | Student Services
Last updated 2 February 2000
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kpip0002.htm
Copyright 2000 Phi Delta Kappa International