WASHINGTON
Lobbyists for teacher-education programs have few kind words for Representative George Miller of California. Then again, he doesn’t have much nice to say about them, either.
In recent hearings on the Higher Education Act, the Democratic lawmaker has called university teacher-training programs “cash cows,” accusing them of “fraud.”
“They are perpetrating a fraud on the public because they are graduating teachers who aren’t prepared to teach,” he says. “And they are also, in some instances, perpetrating a fraud on the people they are enrolling. Because they are suggesting that if you come here, and you graduate, you will be prepared to teach. And the evidence is, that is not always true.”
Mr. Miller is engaged in more than name-calling. He is pushing fellow lawmakers to support an amendment to the Higher Education Act that would strip federal student-aid dollars from education programs that fail to produce large numbers of students who can pass the state teacher-licensing exams.
A bill to renew the Higher Education Act, which was overwhelmingly approved by the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce last month, will be considered on the House floor within a few weeks.
Lobbyists for teachers’ unions and colleges are mobilizing supporters to defeat the amendment. But even if they are successful -- and they expect to be -- they acknowledge that they will have a much harder time repairing the image of teachers’ colleges, which Mr. Miller has done so much to tarnish lately.
“Teachers’ colleges are serving as a convenient scapegoat for the many ills of public education,” says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice-president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. “That’s not to say they can’t do a better job. But in an effort to find someone to blame, teachers’ colleges are faulted more than they deserve.”
Mr. Miller knows he is an anomaly, a liberal Democrat taking on teachers’ unions and college associations, groups to whom he is supposed to be a friend. (Some of the amendment’s strongest supporters are Republicans.)
But Mr. Miller sees no contradiction in his efforts. He is, he says, simply trying to protect needy children from bad teachers. The best teachers, he says, are swept up by affluent school systems that offer better pay and attractive neighborhoods to live in.
“But poorer schools need warm bodies, so we end up putting the least qualified teachers with the children that need the most support,” he says. “So we have poor children being matched up with poor teachers, and that’s just a recipe for disaster.”
Mr. Miller has seen some of those problems first hand. The Congressman spends one day a week teaching public policy at two high schools in his Congressional district in northern California, each of which has large numbers of disadvantaged students. One of the schools, Olympic High School, serves only students who have dropped out previously. Many of the students there, Mr. Miller says, come from broken homes.
“These students put a lot of value on their educations, even when they know they have not gotten a very good one. And in fact, they sometimes are a little angry about the educations they have received,” he says.
Low-income parents in his district have also complained to Mr. Miller that their children were victims of incompetent teachers.
The concerns that Mr. Miller heard from students and their parents were echoed in a report by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, released in September 1996. The commission, a panel of state and federal officials, college presidents, and teachers’ union leaders, concluded that poor teacher preparation is a major obstacle to school reform.
The commission reported that one in four teachers in the nation’s public schools was not fully qualified to teach in his or her subject area. The number is even higher, the report says, in schools in high-poverty urban and rural areas.
The panel also reported that many universities were using their schools of education as “cash cows” whose excess revenues are “spent on the training of doctors, lawyers, accountants, and almost any other students than prospective teachers themselves.”
The report’s conclusions outraged Mr. Miller. “Students who enroll in schools of education bring with them almost $2-billion in federal grants and from the interest subsidy on student loans; we are entitled to get back some excellence out of that system, not mediocrity,” he says.
Mr. Miller’s amendment would cut off aid to teacher-education programs at which fewer than 75 to 85 per cent of the graduates -- Mr. Miller has not decided where to set the bar -- pass state teacher-licensing exams each year. The programs would have four years, from the date of the law’s enactment, before they could lose aid funds.
The amendment is coming under heavy attack from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the American Council on Education, the National Education Association, and some other Congressional Democrats.
They say they agree with the goal of improving teacher-education programs. But they warn that the amendment would penalize institutions that go out of their way to recruit disadvantaged students to the teaching profession.
“I am worried that schools would be discouraged from enrolling those who they think won’t be able to pass the exam,” Representative Robert C. Scott, a Virginia Democrat, says.
Michelle Buehlmann, a program associate at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, says it is impossible to know how many institutions would lose their eligibility for student aid because test results are confidential. She says that Mr. Miller chose the cutoff rate arbitrarily. “That’s a bad way to make public policy.”
Charles Barone, Mr. Miller’s legislative director, says that argument is spurious. While the Educational Testing Service, an organization responsible for designing many of the exams states use, must keep test scores confidential, he says, many states make public the overall passage rates of their students. Several states, including Florida, New York, and Texas, have approved laws allowing them to remove certification from education programs in which fewer than 70 to 85 per cent of the graduates -- it depends on the state -- pass state teacher-licensing exams each year. In Texas, for example, 19 of the state’s 90 teacher-preparation programs failed to meet the proposed standards this past year, Mr. Barone says.
Mr. Miller’s amendment may not have enough support to win. Many Democrats oppose it, and some Republicans are reluctant to support any proposal that is championed by as liberal a lawmaker as Mr. Miller. But he has already made an impact.
The House committee bill would provide new money to help improve teacher training at universities. However, the measure includes a provision, drafted by Mr. Miller, that would prevent teacher-training programs from receiving grants unless they can show that they are producing teachers who are sufficiently knowledgeable about the subjects they teach.
The panel’s bill also would forgive the loans of some prospective teachers, but would do so only for those who have majored in the subject they are assigned to teach.
That’s a start, Mr. Miller says. “It’s not enough to just keep saying, ‘The school system is falling apart,’ if you haven’t done anything to try and correct it.”
