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Illinois School Board Journal
May/June 2007

by Connie Goddard

Connie Goddard of Evanston, Illinois, a historian of education with a particular interest in teacher preparation, has also written about education for numerous local and national publications. This is the first in a two-part series on teacher preparation.

School districts and colleges of education — the consumers and producers of new teachers — will need to collaborate more if there is to be any real improvement in teacher quality, or so suggests the latest report on teacher preparation.

A few years ago, when Illinois colleges of education began to pressure school districts to supply a growing demand for student teacher placements, some district officials set up barriers, including:

1. elevated grade points for potential student teachers;

2. limits on numbers of observers per department or school;

3. and moratoriums on placements for an entire school year.

To the colleges' dismay, districts often acted as though welcoming teacher candidates was a favor rather than a responsibility.

In response, field placement directors in Illinois formed a task force to address the challenge collectively. They had burgeoning enrollments and accrediting institutions demanding that teacher candidates receive more practical experience in schools prior to certification. But several placement directors declined to join. "My dean would never go along with this," one commented, even though she, too, was challenged by the scarcity of available placements. "She'd be afraid our students would be barred from neighboring districts."

Fear of retaliation may have been unwarranted, but it does demonstrate the dysfunctional relationship between colleges of education and school districts, a longstanding problem not just in Illinois, but around the country.

This same dysfunction is noted in the most recent report on teacher education nationwide, Educating School Teachers by Arthur Levine. Levine is the former president of Teachers College at Columbia University and now head of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in New Jersey.

The September 2006 report focuses primarily on the disarray in the field — limited agreement on what should constitute teacher education; low standards; irrelevant research; and poor quality control. But it also supports the widely held assumption that college faculty are too disconnected from the work of schools.

The discordant relationship between school districts and colleges may soon feel pressure to change if recommendations from the report are seriously considered by the Illinois State Board of Education or the General Assembly. Among these recommendations: that marginal teacher preparation programs face closure and that field-work intensive programs replace the plethora of pre-certification courses.

The report's vision of teacher-preparation is that of a five-year, post-baccalaureate program similar to the professional preparation currently undertaken by lawyers, the clergy, physicians, dentists and clinical psychologists.

But even Levine admits — as he did at a discussion of the report held in Chicago late last year — that he's not too optimistic that marginal programs will be forced to improve or that the five-year model will actually replace the large-enrollment undergraduate programs at state universities that currently produce the majority of new teachers.

Though its chief recommendations are unlikely to be realized any time soon, the report does offer advice and insights useful to state and district officials. Among those insights:

• the limited impact superintendents and principals have on college of education curricula;

• their differing opinions about responsibility for improving aspects of those programs;

• and a set of criteria that can be used to evaluate existing programs.

The report also analyzes virtues and limitations of current programs nationwide by type of institution, from large research universities to small liberal arts colleges. It then suggests that the largest supplier of new teachers — the regional state universities, most of which were originally established as teachers colleges — are least well prepared to certify the sort of teachers that urban schools in particular so desperately need.

That said, one such program — Emporia State University in Kansas — is one of four the report describes as exemplary. Another is a four-year program offered by Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The two other model programs are at the University of Virginia and Stanford University in California.

No institutions or individuals in Illinois appear in the report, despite the fact that Illinois was at the forefront of teacher education a century ago — nationally recognized leaders in the field directed programs at Normal, DeKalb, Urbana-Champaign and Chicago — and that ISBE and the Southern Illinois University-based Illinois Education Research Council have in the past decade sponsored some useful research on who teaches and where.

Most of the criticisms Educating School Teachers makes — irrelevant curricula, disengaged faculty, useless research, academically marginal students — have been made before. But Levine contends that the stakes are higher now for several reasons: pressures the economy places on schools have changed, society is recognizing its debt to students in historically underserved schools, and the federal government is connecting financial assistance to evidence of teacher quality.

Further complicating the issue now is the ideological battle underway between those who insist that teaching is a craft best learned on the job and those who contend it is a profession requiring post-baccalaureate education.

If Levine's contentions about a changed environment are right, pressures to improve teacher education will intensify. State-supported institutions and other not-for-profit universities may find themselves facing growing competition from commercial or district-sponsored teacher certification programs. And if state boards and national accrediting agencies incorporate the report's insistence that teacher preparation be far more practice-based into their own requirements, district officials will have to be far more involved in the process than they are now.

Educating School Teachers is based largely on extensive national surveys of education school deans, faculty members, school principals and education school alumni. But it also includes a brief history lesson useful for anyone wanting to understand why school districts and colleges of education often regard the other as being in a different enterprise altogether.

A century or more ago, teacher certification was largely the responsibility of local boards of education. But as normal schools and then universities took over teacher education — the report claims that a century ago, a third of all college students were teachers in training — the divide between districts and colleges, between superintendents and deans of education, became the norm. College faculties, according to the report, "switched their reference group from school people to professors on campus. [Colleges] hired faculty whose credentials were more academic and less practice-based."

As a result, when college faculty and teacher education programs were evaluated, academic scholarship became more important than connections to school districts.

Thus, the report's finding that school boards, superintendents and principals are least likely to be consulted on matters of teacher education curriculum, while startling, is no great surprise. Those with the most influence on curriculum are state governments, accrediting agencies and college faculty. And the discrepancies are huge. According to the report, deans of education claimed they consulted various constituencies at the following rates: School boards, 1 percent; school principals, 3 percent; and superintendents, 3 percent.

The rate at which deans consulted teachers unions, program alumni, and the federal government were similarly low, also varying from 1 to 3 percent.

On the other hand, 64 percent of deans said they consulted accrediting agencies and 50 percent consulted state governments. More than that, 69 percent of deans said they consulted their own faculty more than either of those groups.

Though this is not particularly surprising, it is a case of the organist speaking largely to the choir in selecting hymns.

Figures like this are also subject to all sorts of interpretations: How representative was the sample? How were the questions phrased? What where alternate responses?

One could also argue that state agencies would take superintendents' advice into consideration when determining certification standards. Similarly, the deans reported consulting teachers at a rate of 22 percent, and their commentary, too, could include advice superintendents and school board members might offer.

But no matter who is talking to whom, the reality is a disconnect that exists between the colleges preparing teachers and the school districts that will employ them.

Editor's note: Ideas for improving the system will be discussed in Part II in the July/August issue of The Illinois School Board Journal.