Education is not a competitive choice for the nation’s most able young people
Several years ago, I was part of a group that a philanthropist had assembled to review his foundation’s education agenda. In the course of a two-day meeting, the conversation turned negative only once, when education schools were discussed.
The philanthropist said he had given up on education schools, preferring to work with business schools or organizations outside of colleges and universities. A former governor who was known to be a thoughtful education-policy leader chimed in, calling the flagship education school in his state largely irrelevant. A major school-system superintendent reported having told the two education schools in his area that if they were unable to turn one of his high schools around, they should go out of business. Dismissively he said that only one of the education schools was even trying. A union leader nodded in agreement, something the superintendent had rarely experienced.
This is an age of finger-pointing. As profound demographic, economic, global, and technological changes rack the country, all of our social institutions — created to serve a disappearing world — perform less well than they once did. As they try to adjust to a society in motion, they appear to be broken and unable to fix themselves. Thus we say the government is broken. The American family is broken. So it is with the education school.
The response by the public is to withdraw. As it does, we increasingly see the institution in distorted caricature, and we develop unrealistic expectations for what it should be able to accomplish. We blame the institution for all of the problems in its field and deem its inability to change willful.
That is what is happening today when critics hold education schools responsible for many of the problems of underprepared students who fail at the transition between school and college. But the expectations for education schools are misplaced: They are being asked to carry out activities that they were never intended to perform and that they lack the capacity to achieve. For example:
Education schools are blamed for admitting weak students who will become poor teachers, ill equipped to prepare their students for higher education. But they cannot raise the quality of the population entering the education professions. They can’t attract top college graduates to the teaching profession, even if they were to commit all of their resources to doing so. The real problem is that teaching pays low salaries, has low status, and offers poor working conditions. Education is not a competitive choice for the nation’s most able young people, for whom law, medicine, and business — fields that pay median salaries two to four times as large as those in education — are far more appealing.
Parents, classmates, and professors advise top students not to become teachers. In focus-group interviews that I conducted, candidates enrolled at the most-selective education schools reported having been told, “You are too smart to become a teacher” and feeling as if “I would probably end up living in my parents’ basement with my wife and children.” On another occasion, even a foundation executive who worked in urban-school reform told of having to bite his tongue when his son, who attended a top college, announced with pride that he was going to become a teacher. The executive was about to say, “Is that all you are going to do after all the money we spent on your education?”
Education schools do not determine the salaries, the status, or the working conditions of teachers. Only states, localities, and school systems can change the pool of people entering the education profession.
Education schools are asked to turn out “finished products.” That makes no sense. Teaching is one of the few professions in which brand-new professionals are expected to know everything on the first day. Schools take them and immediately place them alone in a classroom and say, “Teach.”
Yet upon graduating from medical school, new doctors are not rushed into the operating room and asked to oversee open-heart surgery. Instead they go through an internship and a residency, gradually gaining knowledge and experience under the guidance of experienced practitioners. New lawyers who join a law firm do not enter a courtroom right away to serve as lead counsel in a murder case, but work for a partner and get experience and increasing responsibility. New journalists are not assigned to interview the president, and the new M.B.A. is not asked to direct a corporate division.
What is also different about the teaching profession is where the “finishing” is expected to take place. Law firms do not say to law schools, and corporations do not say to business schools, “We just hired your graduate, so we expect your school to stay with her for the next year or so to complete her training.” They want to train their new hires in their own way.
But the teaching profession fails to assume that role — only 15 states currently require and support induction programs in the schools for new teachers. The profession turns instead to education schools, which are being unfairly asked to compensate for the shortcomings of elementary and secondary schools in educating and socializing their new hires. Education schools are expected to provide, at no charge, full-blown mentorship and continuing-education programs for new teachers during their first years in the classroom.
Education schools are expected to rescue failing school systems. They can’t. When Enron went under, no one said the University of Texas business school should resurrect the corporation or close its doors. Nobody assumes that an agriculture school will save the family farm or that schools of government will bail out bankrupt cities. Why do we expect education schools to do similar things for educational enterprises? Education schools and public schools differ in purposes, scale, staff expertise, and resources. The largest school systems have budgets in the billions of dollars and faculties in the tens of thousands. In contrast, the largest education schools have budgets in the tens of millions of dollars and faculties in the low hundreds. It is a complete mismatch.
No urban-school system in America has ever been successfully turned around. It makes no sense to expect an education school to do what other educators, specifically trained for this purpose, have been unable to do. If after seven years, an urban school system has not made substantial progress, it is not time for the local education school to close its doors. It’s time to fire the superintendent.
It would be a relief if the problems of education, including those involving student readiness for college, could be ascribed to a single source: education schools. But they can’t.
Education schools are just one of many professional schools that focus on a single career area. Education schools provide instruction throughout a graduate’s career. Like other professional schools, they are rooted in a specific social institution. For law schools, it is the courts; for medical schools, the hospitals. For education schools, it is the public schools. And like other professional schools, education schools engage in research on crucial issues in the profession and the application of that research to improve the profession.
While professional schools do create laboratory schools, teaching hospitals, and agricultural lab stations, however, the purposes of those demonstration projects are teaching and research. They are not management companies designed to run the institutions affiliated with their professions; rather, they are vehicles for educating students and sites for applied research.
What schools of education should do is educate well-prepared professionals for the schools, conduct research on how to improve schooling, and provide the expertise to assist school systems in applying the research. They can conduct research on why male attendance at colleges and universities is falling, or how to attract and prepare more female and minority students in the sciences. Or they can study how to ensure that all students who want to attend college take gateway courses like algebra.
The possibilities are numerous. Lucy M. Calkins, a professor of English education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, for example, has translated her research on the teaching of reading and writing into professional-development programs for thousands of teachers and principals. She has worked with entire schools on curriculum redesign in a field that has historically proved to be a barrier to college attendance and success.
To expect schools of education to carry out a litany of other activities is irresponsible and unfair. It is looking for someone to blame rather than solving the real problems that we face: the low salaries and status of teachers; the failure of school administrators and their boards to turn around failing schools; the absence of induction programs for new teachers, and, in the end, the disconnect between high schools and colleges that leaves many students adrift. We can do better.
Arthur Levine is president of Teachers College of Columbia University.
http://chronicle.com Section: School & College Volume 52, Issue 27, Page B53
