To the Editor:
Colleges of Education are often maligned by various interest groups in the U.S., but history professor Erik Gilbert’s “How Ed Schools Became a Bastion of Bad Ideas” (The Chronicle Review, November 29) was especially vitriolic.
Gilbert parroted several misconceptions about Colleges of Education (e.g., that K-12 education is “anti-scientific”, that literacy educators “resist phonics”). However, his primary rant was about assessment and top-down mandates. These unfortunate developments are not creatures of Colleges of Education; they are ideas imposed on public education by politicians and wealthy businessmen (and I do mean men) with no experience in education. The heavy-handed top-down administrative structures, mania for data, and insistence on standardization that have plagued K-12 teachers for many years are concepts from Colleges of Business, not Education. It was the U.S. Congress that enacted No Child Left Behind in 2000, launching the era of high-stakes testing that has caused a decades-long panic and narrowing of curriculum in K-12 schools. No sane education professor is in favor of these unfortunate developments.
Colleges of Education, with their predominately female faculties, are easy targets for otherwise frustrated faculty and venture capitalists. Are there some bad ideas and sloppy thinkers in K-12 education? Yes, just as there are in every discipline. For example, Gilbert describes a personal anecdote, then a “poll” of education majors in one of his classes, then proceeds to generalize his “findings” to all Colleges of Education. He makes a claim — that public high schools are mediocre — with no supporting evidence, apparently relying on the “everyone knows…” line of reasoning.
College of Education faculty have a great deal of knowledge, experience, and insight that would benefit higher education in the coming years as business and free-market paradigms further encroach on university practices. Lesson one is the importance of collaboration. Perhaps we could work together to ensure that curriculum and pedagogy remain in the hands of professors, rather than demonizing other disciplines.
April D. Nauman
Professor of literacy education
Northeastern Illinois University
