Between 1900 and 1940, America’s normal schools, noncollegiate teacher-training institutions with an emphasis on practical education, gave way to university-based teacher education. Today the nation is moving in the opposite direction.
The first of the public normal schools, educating primary-school teachers, was established in 1839. By 1900 there were more than 330 normals, public and private, enrolling over 115,000 students. Their programs, originally a year long and later longer, included academic subjects but emphasized pedagogy and in-school training.
The rise of the high school and the advent of accreditation and education-professional associations in the late 19th century brought the normal-school era to a close. Higher education determined that the preparation of secondary-school teachers, which required mastery of subject matter, should preferably occur on campus, and so colleges and universities began to create their own teacher-education programs.
At the same time, to meet accreditation and professional-association standards, normal schools converted themselves into colleges—lengthening their programs to four years for high-school teachers, placing greater emphasis on the liberal arts, reducing the number of vocational courses, and adding arts-and-sciences faculties. Most private normals closed; the publics became state teachers’ colleges. By 1960, 20 percent of those former normals were offering doctoral degrees.
There were some real advantages to the shift. Universities increased admission standards over those of the open-door normals, which frequently enrolled students after they completed eighth grade. Graduation requirements were raised; students commonly had left normals as soon as they found jobs, before finishing the programs. The shift strengthened academic rigor and students’ mastery of subject matter in the fields they would teach. It enriched the faculty by adding content expertise and specialists in learning to the practitioners staffing the normals.
Today the university-based teacher-education programs that replaced the normal schools are being broadly criticized. Critics say the modern programs have lost touch with practice. Teacher education is a low-status field in universities, even within education schools. Too often, admissions and graduation standards are weak. Too many professors lack recent teaching experience and have insufficient contact with schools. Academic instruction is removed from clinical education, and clinical faculty are treated like second-class citizens. A majority of the nation’s principals say universities are not producing the teachers they need.
Increasingly, the response from policy makers, philanthropists, and some educators has been to eliminate or reduce the role of universities in teacher education and to move to shorter, more practical, and more clinically based programs.
Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia have now established alternative routes to teaching, most of which involve universities but which substantially decrease state requirements for licensure, reduce the length of time and amount of coursework necessary to become a teacher, and permit students to teach full time while studying. From 1986 to 2009, the number of people entering teaching via alternative routes rose from 275 to more than 60,000 a year, producing a total of almost a half-million teachers. In New Jersey, 40 percent of hires are products of alternative routes.
Across the country, from San Diego to Boston, we are also witnessing the growth of teacher-education programs created by schools and school districts, sometimes with universities as significant partners, often without. They either grant their own degrees or have universities grant degrees for their programs. These graduate-level programs tend to emphasize practice over theory, clinical education over academic instruction, pedagogy over content, and faculties of expert teachers over university professors. At the moment, they are largely hothouses preparing small numbers of teachers for their own schools or districts, but their numbers are growing.
And there are for-profit and not-for-profit organizations that have entered the teacher-recruitment-and-preparation field. The best known is Teach for America, which recruits high-ability college graduates, provides a five-week intensive summer training program, and places them in high-need schools as full-time teachers. In 2010, Teach for America inducted 4,500 new corps members.
Together these initiatives and others like them constitute the new normal, the re-embrace and revival of the normal-school model of teacher education. The problem is that, historically, university-based teacher-education and normal schools have been mirror images in their approaches to teacher education—one too removed from practice, the other too narrowly vocational. It doesn’t make sense to choose one over the other. It’s the classic Goldilocks dilemma: The remedy for too soft is not too hard. It’s just right.
It would be more desirable to marry the university and normal school—to create teacher-education programs that blend theory and practice, integrate academic and clinical instruction from the earliest days of the program, combine pedagogical and content education, and employ a faculty consisting of both practitioners and professors, each accorded equal status. This would require four actions:
- The nation’s university-based teacher-education programs, which still prepare more than 90 percent of all teachers, must be retooled. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has found that universities with support and determination can and will create clinically based teacher-education programs, co-developed by the universities and school districts and taught by practitioners and academics, that merge content and pedagogy and provide intensive mentoring. So we know that universities have the capacity to develop programs that blend the best features of the new normal and the university. They should be encouraged to do this by their faculties and administrators, their accreditors, and the states. A panel convened by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education has recently called for these changes.
The greatest challenge for universities is to achieve the selectivity associated with a number of the new normals. Part of the problem is misperception: Teacher-education admission standards are not as low as commonly perceived. Today, college students preparing to become secondary-school teachers are comparable academically to their peers in other fields; it is only future elementary-school teachers who are weaker. Another part of the problem is scale. Universities are responsible for producing nine times as many teachers as the new normals, which necessarily reduces selectivity. The universities also prepare too many teachers—at least twice as many as the country needs—and sizable numbers of those are trained in already overstaffed fields, while too few are prepared in high-need subject areas.
One more problem: The worst of the nation’s teacher-education programs, those that produce failing teachers who will staff failing schools, drag down the rest.
The latter two problems are remediable by universities’ reducing and being more selective in teacher-education enrollments and by states’ closing failing teacher-education programs.
- The new normals must adopt the features that are strengths in university-based teacher education. This would mean supplementing practical education with the theory and research on which it is based, enriching pedagogical instruction with subject matter in the areas in which the students will teach, and supplementing expert teachers with specialists in a given field of study.
- The boundaries and heated rhetoric that divide university and non-university providers of teacher education must disappear. Accreditation should extend to good-quality institutions in both sectors, and the states should have common standards for program approval for each.
- Finally, we must use the proliferating numbers of providers, the variation in their approaches, and the partnerships among them to study what really works.
The research makes one thing clear: With three strong teachers in consecutive years, students’ achievement soars. This is the challenge—and the opportunity—that faces our states, teacher-education professional associations, universities, and non-university teacher educators. Each can make the promise a reality for some children. Together they can make it a reality for all children.
