Baines, Lawrence, Wade Carpenter, and Gregory Stanley. “Generic Engineering: The Standardization of Teacher Education.” Journal of Thought, Summer 2000: 35-44.

Generic engineering:
The homogenization and standardization of teacher preparation

Teacher education programs have become targets of a great deal of harsh criticism. On many college campuses, a substantial percentage of faculty believe that teacher education is a prime case of academic featherbedding, designed only to provide continued employment for education professors. The maxim usually goes something like this: "Any competent graduate in _____ can teach _______. " Any college wishing to revise or strengthen its teacher education program has to confront this sentiment along with the antipathy of skeptical liberal arts and sciences faculty at their schools. The perception of teacher education graduates as underqualified, bland distributors of gold stars has been difficult to shake. Added to this burden are the myriad accrediting agencies along with the mind-numbing number of state certification agencies. One sometimes wonders if these bureaucracies are part of the solution or part of the problem. It often seems that they do little to enhance the definition of teacher much with their checklists of generic minimal competencies rife with uncompromising, politically correct neo-behavioristic outcomes. At times, reforming a teacher education program feels much like trying to bail out a sinking ship with one very small, very cracked teacup.

Destroying the village in order to save it
A major difficulty in redesigning a teacher education program comes from the many powerful public officials who seem to think that the most worthwhile preparation for prospective teachers should include no course work in education at all. This campaign to abolish departments of education is now so pervasive that it has become integrated into the platform of many politicians. Even newspaper columnists and some former secretaries of education, most notably William Bennett, have proclaimed their allegiance to this paradoxical "we must destroy the village to save it" ideology.

To be truly efficient, college students might give serious consideration to forgoing teacher education programs altogether. In the state of Alabama, for example, a prospective teacher can either enroll in a rigorous teacher education at an institution of higher education or take the alternative route of finishing a bachelors degree in any field and then taking 12 hours of course work over a period of three years. In Texas, a student can choose an accredited teacher certification program lasting four or five years, or simply get a bachelors degree in any field, then take a few classes the following fall, and be in the classroom as a fully-paid teacher by spring.

Responding to an increasing demand for teachers, legislators and state certification agencies have begun to open the back door of alternative certification ever wider. At the same time, they are holding teacher education programs to increasingly higher standards of performance and especially, accountability. The states of Washington and Oregon have already decided to track the performance of the graduates of teacher education programs. Most ominously, they key on the performance of the students in the classes of these freshly-minted teachers.

Not only does such accountability create additional pressures for the prospective teacher who will likely earn a first-year annual salary well under $30,000, but the cost would seem to be exorbitant in relation to the amount of insight that will be gained. While a teacher can have a powerful influence on a child's life, there are clear limits on what mortals can accomplish during an academic year. Such assessments fail to consider the school environment, the community, the administration, and most importantly, the children themselves. Will anyone be surprised when the students of first year teachers in well-heeled suburban districts outperform the students in poorer or urban districts?
At the graduate level, some states such as Virginia still require no professional development in pedagogy for teachers. Even if a teacher decides to go through the ordeal of admission into graduate school, there is no incentive to enroll in a particularly challenging program. To be sure, in most school districts, a teacher would receive the same credit by taking a course via postal service through Walden University or via Internet through Lincoln Memorial University as they would for enrolling in the graduate schools at Berkeley, University of Texas, or Yale. As a result, schools of education that take the preparation of teachers seriously run the risk of becoming so serious that they eventually chase away most of their prospective charges. The practice of shopping around for the easiest and cheapest program available is all too common in the teaching profession. Indeed, every institution of higher education in the country seems to be in the business of preparing teachers, regardless of the institution's track record or reputation. Yes, everyone is welcome in teacher education, as long as the tuition check clears.

A veritable cottage industry has sprung up in the teacher education village thriving upon offering non-rigorous certification upgrades. These businesses offer painless degrees with lures of no required papers, no classes to attend, and no involved reading. Pay your fee and get your B. To remain competitive, respectable schools of education have to find some way of competing with these anti-intellectual cut-and-paste outfits. Certainly, establishing a well-regarded, rigorous program is one way to differentiate a real program from the rabble, but frankly, it might not be enough to ensure the program's survival.

The formidable challenge of preparing teachers well
Today no one questions that doctors should train medical students. Likewise, if attorneys teach aspiring law students, it raises no eyebrows. Two centuries ago, this was not the case. A person became a barrister by observing for an unspecified time at the Inns of Court. A person became a doctor by simply claiming that he or she was one. This method of training did not yield superlative results and so by the late 19th century, both medicine and law adopted more stringent standards for the people in their professions. Yet, if professors want to teach aspiring teachers, they are often treated as academic lepers by others in the academic community.

Apparently, Robert Hutchins' acclamation that "All that is needed to be a teacher is a good liberal education" still seems to carry great weight, despite the reports of increasing child poverty, fatherless families, drive-by shootings, and students' mediocre performances on standardized tests. It is doubtful that Hutchins would have said that all the training a neurosurgeon might need is a good liberal education and some practice with a scalpel.

Yet unlike teachers, most doctors practice within narrow specializations. The K-12 teacher cannot afford this luxury. The teacher has to be a fairly adept Renaissance Man or Woman, and it is no use to expect a renaissance in learning if we don't have anyone capable of leading the movement. The teacher must be a perennialist one minute and a social reconstructionist the next. With one kid the teacher must take on the role of "tough love" drill sergeant, and with another, a nurturing care giver. The teacher might have to be a reading diagnostician one period, and a Shakespearean scholar the next. In the middle grades, a teacher may be assigned to teach any subject to any batch of students in grades 4-8, a schedule which may include six classes containing an average of 35 students each, or 210 students per day. A teacher also must act as all-around handyman, as they are often required to repair broken desks, the copy machine, unhinged lunch boxes, and whatever computer gear that they might be fortunate enough to have in the classroom. Being a scrounger helps considerably as well, as most schools and departments have fixed, small budgets for paper, desks, and other "extras," such as new textbooks.

The challenges for professors of education at the close of the twentieth century have never been greater. They must prepare twenty-year-olds to engage the hearts and minds of sometimes unruly children who have never known life without MTV. Professors of education must also teach future teachers how to translate mastery of a subject area into stimulating, understandable lessons for students, how to navigate through the mazes of state and district-level bureaucracies, how to deal with parents, and how to integrate cutting-edge teaching tools in schools that might be somewhat behind the technological curve. Of course, any prospective teacher today should also know something about the subtleties of law and should be familiar with a litany of emergency procedures, such as the steps for taking a weapon from the hands of an overwrought teenager.

Unfortunately, some wounds of the teaching profession are self-inflicted. Sometimes, professors of education set fire to the huts in their own villages. No other learned profession would take the training of its own members so lightly. In no other profession would the term "out-of-field" have meaning. No college dean would dare tell a French professor to teach economics, no foot specialist would perform heart surgery, no tax lawyer would take on a child custody case. Yet many high school teachers are routinely told to teach subjects in which they have little or no training. In some states, the chances that a child might get a teacher out-of-field are actually better than getting a teacher who is actually certified to teach in a certain subject area. The results have been deplorable. Is it any wonder that high school students do not know when World War I was fought, that they write incoherently, that they fare poorly in international tests of science and math? Unfortunately, their teacher may be teaching out of field, trying to stay one chapter ahead of the students.

The professor of education as leper
Unfortunately, at the national level, professors of education have failed miserably at constructing a positive public image. The perception remains that a dissertation in the liberal arts or sciences represents real scholarship, while a dissertation in education represents an anti-intellectual, paint-by-number exercise. Yet, one often wonders if counting the number of gender-biased pronouns in the novels of Henry James while citing pithy post-postmodern feminist theory should really be considered more vital than studying ways to quell adolescent violence or analyzing the intellectual development of first-graders.

To be sure, professors of education sometimes have a difficult time being taken seriously. The "New Scholarly Books" section of the Chronicle of Higher Education routinely includes many times more books about archaeology than education, while publications such as Lingua Franca post promotions, deaths, and retirements of professors in all fields except education, which is not even listed.

While new campus buildings for science and business are often the objects of campus-wide celebration, student recruitment, and alumni development, schools of education are more often simply moved to some other discipline's former building. In fiscal terms, many colleges of education are perceived as "cash cows" by administrators, who relish the combination of low overhead (no costs for high magnetic laboratories or primate experimental labs), lower faculty salaries, and healthy tuition charges for the students' numerous off-campus experiences in public schools. Although citing such evidence may sound like whining, many Americans still consider colleges of education to be at best, inconsequential. And the ugly truth is that they are right far too often.

The problem of accreditation
At the turn of the twentieth century, the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association worked mightily to professionalize their fields. Similarly, a host of accrediting agencies has also arrived on the scene to save teachers from themselves. Among the many standards-generating organizations such as NBPTS (the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards) and INTASC (Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support System), the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education has no rival. On the positive side, NCATE can be a powerful mechanism for getting stingy trustees to shell out for improvements to buildings so those bound by wheelchairs can actually get through the door, for forcing departments to offer logical degree plans, and for forcing professors to examine what they say they are doing, what they are really doing, and what they should be doing. Nothing, however, comes without a cost.

NCATE standards have become "performance-based" and the standard already has been set in three key areas: what a teacher should know, what a teacher should be able to do, and how a teacher should act.
What else is there?

When NCATE dictates the content, methodology, and even the nature of interactions between student and teacher, the university is forced to take on the role of line boss whose main function is one of maintaining quality control through scrupulous comparison of the final product to the company ideal. As well intentioned as they might be, when the NCATE Board of Examiners visit an institution, they have as their one true goal not the quality of instruction, but the degree to which The College of Education's thick paper-trail adheres to the company plan.

As any veteran of the NCATE accreditation visit well knows, no other event in academic life can rival the experience with regard to paperwork, posturing, shrill political correctness, and ponderous navel-gazing. While NCATE may be shrugged off as a tedious, but necessary evil by some, the opportunity-cost to students seems greatly underestimated. It would seem that college students stand no chance of becoming teachers if they do not meet the NCATE definition of high quality, which essentially means satisfactory marks on standardized tests, relentlessly perky personalities, and the ability to dazzle co-workers with vacuous platitudes such as "I believe all children can learn" and "I'm a learning facilitator."

Cited in the NCATE Elementary Teacher Standards document is the work of Kennedy (1997), who warns that "teacher educators need to address and alter teacher candidates' strong desire to control student behavior, for the desire to develop management routines that keep students on task and in line is frequently a stumbling block to implementing conceptual approaches to teaching." Then, without flinching at the paradox, she writes a paragraph later that "changing the conceptions" of the prospective teacher is "the central task of teacher learning." In other words, we are to think it commendable that Kennedy is willing to expend the effort to indoctrinate the great unwashed mass of prospective teachers. However, if these same teachers might attempt to tell Billy to stop shouting and start paying attention, then we are supposed to become aghast at the insensitivity.

On the subject of what to do with teachers who defy Kennedy's (and NCATE's) conception of the ideal, who like square pegs, do not fit into NCATE's round holes, the standards are unequivocal--square pegs must be expunged from the classroom. Increasingly, accomplished and promising teachers who don't fit the mandated cookie-cutter model are either leaving the profession or getting kicked out.

We know a teacher of English who happens to be an obnoxious ogre. However, he is also a brilliant writer and a phenomenal teacher, who is unafraid to get up in a student's face and tell him/her, "This is the worst piece you have ever written." The antithesis of the NCATE model, he is not cute nor is he trendy. When asked if he believed "All children can learn," he said, "Of course they can. But, some students forfeit their right to learn when they continually interfere with the education of others." Despite his shortcomings as a NCATE teacher-model, his students respect him and they learn how to write with eloquence and panache.

A second teacher we know was born in a black community that has one of the highest poverty and lowest literacy rates in the nation. She possessed an ironclad stability, could handle all manner of insult, had fabulous connections throughout the community, spoke persuasively, read voraciously, and had an unbridled enthusiasm for teaching English. Unfortunately, she failed the math portion of the Florida Teacher's Exam by two points, so could not teach in Florida. In the current factory-model mindset, there is no place for exceptions to the rule, no extenuating circumstances, no way to get around the numbers.

A third teacher was a kid-saver, one of the best we've ever seen. In a way, she served as the Mother Theresa of a troubled big-city high school. The principal regularly sent her the hard case delinquent, under the reasoning that if she couldn't fix the kid, nobody could. She usually fixed them. But one year, she was shaken by an evaluator's assessment of her teaching under a new, highly prescriptive "one best system." Because she ended class by saying, "Have a nice day," rather than the required "Class dismissed," her effectiveness ranking dropped from superior to average. Most persons would have laughed off the rating and snickered something nasty about the evaluator when he wasn't listening, but she was the sort of super-conscientious teacher who took such evaluations seriously. She worried about what the deduction might do to her permanent file, but more importantly, she worried that she somehow fell short of the ideal that she had worked so many years to attain. The teacher left education at the end of that year. Meanwhile, the evaluator remains employed in education, still chastising every square peg he encounters.
If NCATE and state accreditation agencies have their way, the standardized exam will become an integral component of the "one best way" for admission into and graduation from teacher education programs. Already, the failure rate for black prospective teachers was four times the failure rate of whites in the last assessment of the PRAXIS II in Georgia. Thus, the demand for satisfactory scores on standardized tests will likely make the already insufficient pool of minority teacher applicants even smaller.

Relying upon numeric data as the lone signifier of success is a practice common in business that has always seemed out of place in education. Yet, NCATE goes about its business of requiring elaborate multi-volume sets of data and charts as if each school held a distinctive corporate identity and the accreditation process were some annual report by which debits must be weighed against credits. This is not to say that there is no value in keeping track of numbers and doing some sort of regular assessment, but only to point out the absurdity of assessing the value of Picasso by making the artist sit for PRAXIS II.

Despite the adherence to a faux business model, a good learning experience still feels more like a complex work of art than an assembly-line product. Yet in their accreditation visits to colleges and universities, NCATE purports to understand programs in five days from the vantage point of the document room in a local hotel. We are not arguing that teacher education should once again embrace a seat-of-the-pants, anything-goes curriculum that has historically made it an academic laughing-stock, but we are arguing against going to the other extreme-the banishment of creativity, individuality, and academic freedom.

One of the greatest evils on the assessment horizon is the possibility that teacher pay will be linked to student performance. If this trend (already in vogue in some districts) becomes widespread, then teacher flight from high poverty and urban schools will escalate dramatically. Teachers will quickly realize how the cards are stacked in pay-for-performance situations. They will not likely choose to work in schools that house great numbers of special education or at-risk children. Much in the same way that some federal initiatives designed to help the nation's most disadvantaged people actually wind up hurting them, the policies of accrediting agencies often damage the plight of poor schools and minority teacher candidates in spite of their glowing, pro-diversity rhetoric.

We join with the urgent voices from various sectors of American life in proclaiming the need for better education for our children. But opening the doors wider to alternative methods of teacher certification will not improve schools. Tracking the achievement of the students of newly-minted teachers will not improve schools. Mandating what a teacher should know, do, and think will not guarantee progress in our schools. The assembly-line approach to teacher preparation will only yield teacher clones who act, think, and teach in prescribed ways. The complex, dynamic, and highly stressful work place of the public school would seem to invite a more sophisticated, more humane response.

Ideally, professors, state education agencies, principals, and even NCATE teams could work together to support teachers rather than punish them. Together, they could request that students in public schools adhere to acceptable standards of decorum and decency, and declare a moratorium on bureaucratic bean counting and bogus "bandwagon du jour" activities that hinder classroom teaching. Accrediting agencies could speak out in favor of more teacher education, more teacher support, and less teacher bashing. Unfortunately, these courses of action hardly seem compatible with the reductionist model of teacher preparation now being promulgated. With the support of legislators and the powerful bureaucratic lobbying of accrediting agencies, the new factory model of teacher education has become a Juggernaut, despite having absolutely nothing to do with children or the art of teaching.
One problem with becoming fanatical about standards is that everything tends to get standardized. Standardization is for widgets, not human beings.