Finding the Culprit: Federal Policy and Teacher Education

Abstract

Attention to teacher preparation has long been part of the federal portfolio of programs. This article reviews federal teacher education policy in the second half of the 20th century and concludes that resulting legislation generally has been driven by a need to identify a culprit when schools do not meet public expectations. This framework is used to consider reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in 1998 and the impact on that reauthorization of the National Commission on Teaching & America's Future. The effect of policies based on competition as a strategy to improve teacher education is considered.

The Flunk Heard Round the World

“…The real sting of the teacher test, then, was the continuous and excoriating public commentary that constructed teachers and teacher educators as the culprits in what ails American schools and, in a larger sense, American society. This perspective is consistent with the market lens we utilize in the following analysis, a lens that, as Penelope Earley and others have pointed out, is based on competition, choice, winners and losers, and ® nding culprits (Earley, 2000;Engel, 2000;Labaree, 1997).…”

“…Similar stories were carried in newspapers in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Poor scores on the Massachusetts test fanned the debate about teacher quality and teacher preparation that was already going on in the United States Congress in response to proposals of the National Commission on Teaching and America ' s Future (1996;see also, Darling-Hammond, 1997) and in light of proposed stipulations for the reauthorized Higher Education Act (Earley, 2000).…”

“…Engel (2000) bluntly makes this point: ª Market ideology and democratic values in school are mutually exclusiveº (p. 6). Earley (2000) is also explicit: ª Market approaches to school reform and public policy are anathemic to the core values of teachingº (p. 35), whichÐ we would assumeÐ include a commitment to democratic life and a commitment to individual students. A market-policy lens, however, is based on ª competition, choice, winners, and losers, and ® nding culprits.…”

Teaching for America's Future: National Commissions and Vested Interests in an Almost Profession

“…In the debates over the Federal Higher Education Act (Earley, 2000), the divisions within the teacher education community (the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, for example, lobbied against a provision to encourage accreditation as a means of accountability) ultimately contributed to the heavy-handed imposition of governmental accountability measures based on tests that bear little relation to teaching that are now a source of concern. Even more damaging to children was the education establishment's inability or unwillingness to take on the issue of alternative certification, which was inserted into legislation originally intended to improve preparation and which instead legitimized funding to low-quality proprietary programs offering little training and less quality control for teachers who will teach low-income and minority children.…”

The Unforgiving Complexity Of Teaching

“…(p. 35) Policies intended to improve teaching quality can only be as good as the underlying conceptions of teaching, learning, and schooling on which they are based. Unfortunately, as a number of critics (including myself) have argued (Cochran-Smith, 2001;Earley, 2000;Engel, 2000), many current policies and policy recommendations share narrow-and some would say impoverished-notions of teaching and learning that do not account for the complexities that are at the heart of the educational enterprise in a democratic society.…”