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A Key Reason Why American Students Do Poorly: Subscribe - Sign in
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Oct 24, 2013,12:14pm EDT
Students holding report cards. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Although some young Americans graduate from high school with superb
academic skills, a great many leave high school with pathetic abilities in
crucial areas: reading, writing, basic math, and reasoning. One of the key
reasons why that’s so is that many of their teachers are not very good
themselves. Yes, they have their college degrees, but those degrees are easily
acquired by some of the weakest students colleges admit.
They’re right. The trouble with colleges of education, where most American
teachers receive their training (although that’s hardly an apt description) has
been known for a long time. Back in 1991, Rita Kramer’s book Ed School
Follies: The Miseducation of America’s Teachers showed that our ed schools
were giving the country a steady stream of intellectually mediocre teachers
who had been steeped in dubious educational theories, but often knew little
about the subject matter they were to teach. Since then, an avalanche of
criticism has come down on education schools, but the only changes have been
cosmetic.
But if the product of these schools is so poor, why isn’t there pressure for
serious change? The answer is that they are protected by state licensing laws
that make it very hard for public school officials to hire anyone who doesn’t
have the obligatory credentials. In short, the ed schools have a guaranteed
market and are shielded from competition. The professors and administrators
are happy with the way things are, and often express resentment at anyone
who suggests that their courses and philosophy do not lead to competent
teachers.
That observation dovetails with that of math teacher Barry Garelick, who was
already a good mathematician but needed to go through ed school to get the
credential he had to have before he could teach math in a local high school. He
wrote about his experiences in this piece published last August by my
organization, the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. Garelick summed
up his argument against the approach to math instruction favored by the
education establishment: “The ed school approach to teaching math seeks to
minimize ‘inauthentic’ learning by replacing it with so-called ‘authentic’
exercises. But presenting students with a steady diet of challenging problems
that neither connect immediately with their prior knowledge, lessons and
instruction, nor develop any transferrable skills results in poor learning.”
It isn’t just math where the ed schools flunk. The curriculum is saturated with,
as Nemko and Kwalwasser note, “endless discussions of theories about how
we learn—which won’t seem very relevant to a struggling first-year teacher.”
To get a good sense of the nature of classroom experience of students in our ed
schools, read Heather Mac Donald’s sharp essay, “Why Johnny’s Teacher
Can’t Teach,” which illuminates the “progressive” theorizing that is all too
common.
If you wonder why so few young Americans can write a coherent paragraph,
the ed schools have a lot to do with that. Under “progressive” educational
thinking, it supposedly dampens the students’ creativity and spontaneity to
insist on following fuddy-duddy old rules about composition and English
usage. Besides that, most of the prospective teachers are not very good at
writing themselves, having come through schools where they were taught by
teachers who were told that it’s bad to fuss over writing. We are caught in a
downward spiral of falling competence.
Nemko and Kwalwasser suggest two changes. First, don’t allow aspiring
teachers to major in education. Make them take a real academic major
instead. (That is the approach at one school, Hillsdale College, and the head
of Hillsdale’s education program discussed it in this article.)
That would be a good start. It’s worth noting that in Japan there are no
education majors, or even education schools. All prospective teachers must
take a real academic degree and then apply for a teaching apprentice position.
By all accounts, the Japanese system leads to highly competent teachers,
although fewer of them than in the United States. They get better educational
results with relatively large classes taught by experts than we do with small
classes that are often taught by teachers of low ability.
Secondly, the authors suggest that school districts be given the money and
authority to run their own teacher training programs. That would also be a
good step, since many local school officials are unhappy with the quality of the
teachers they have to choose from. A good example is Nancy Ichinaga, who
was the principal of an inner-city Los Angeles school. She told Lance Izumi
and Gwynne Coburn of the Pacific Research Institute, “Teachers who have
gone through the credential programs at the colleges come with baggage. They
think they know better because they’ve been brainwashed and those are the
teachers with whom we have trouble.” (Link to that paper available here.)
To those policy changes, I would add one more: abolish existing teacher
licensing requirements. Having gone through an ed school program is neither
a necessary nor sufficient condition for teacher preparation. We ought to allow
public school officials to set their own standards for hiring -- and just as
important, give them a free hand to fire teachers who prove to be incompetent,
even though that means a mammoth battle with the teacher unions. Private
schools succeed in employing excellent teachers and even those that operate
on very thin budgets get educational results that put their heavily funded
public counterparts to shame. We should allow public officials the same
freedom they have.
This is one more case where open competition would lead to much better
results than government regulation and control.
George Leef
I am a law school graduate who went into teaching rather than legal practice and then began to see
how badly government has mangled education at all levels. Since 1999, I…
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