Education Overhaul Offers Radical Shift for Teachers

“A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century,” was greeted as front-page news when it was released by the Carnegie Forum on Teaching as a Profession.

The blue-ribbon report, directed by IBM chief scientist Lewis Branscomb, was hailed as the second wave of education reform. It is a welcome follow-up to the first wave, “A Nation at Risk,” which asserted that because American elementary and secondary education is in serious trouble, so is the nation.

This alarmist proposition resonated with most Americans who care about education. Test scores have been falling, performance has been declining, incivility has been increasing and demoralization has been on the rise. “A Nation at Risk” confirmed everyone’s worst fears.

But it was reportorial and descriptive, not analytic and prescriptive. It told us that we had a problem, not how to solve it.

Wave One of reform, then, was the hand-wringing phase. Wave Two promises more than rhetoric. The Carnegie report doesn’t just talk about reform, it proposes to do something about it. If anyone doubts the seriousness of the undertaking, rest assured that the Carnegie Forum means business--the recommendations include something to offend everyone.

For example, the report proposes that different levels of teaching responsibility be identified with corresponding titles and levels of pay. Under this scenario, lead teachers could earn as much as $70,000 a year. Now that would be a real change. The reason for it, however, is as important as the recommendation. The members of the Carnegie study group--which included the presidents of the two national teachers’ unions, Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers and Mary Hatwood Futrell of the National Education Assn.--convinced themselves that the nation is not prepared to pay all teachers high salaries but will pay a limited number very high salaries. Perhaps.

I am not convinced that this view is supported by the evidence, nor am I convinced that it is good public policy. But in all honesty I am not convinced of the contrary, either. Whether you agree with it or not, it is precisely the kind of provocative recommendation that the education community needs to shake its lethargy. Real debate about real issues is a necessary precondition of reform.

The idea of lead teachers is only one of the many other intriguing reform proposals in the report. It includes such things as eliminating the undergraduate education major and creating a medical or clinical model of teacher preparation, complete with internships and residencies supervised by experienced practitioners. Another challenging idea is the suggestion that some teachers might have the temerity to run their own schools.

By my lights, however, one proposal stands out as more important than all the others combined--”board certification” of teachers. A deceptively simple idea, it is borrowed from medicine. Doctors, beginning with ophthalmologists in 1914 and now including each major specialty and sub-specialty, certify themselves. The emphasis here is properly on the word themselves , not certification . Today most doctors take their own professional preparation seriously, and go beyond state minimums for licensing.

If teachers were to do the same thing, it would be a breakthrough as important for their profession as it was for doctors. There are strong parallels--some perverse but all illuminating. It was not until the late 19th Century, for example, that Harvard began to award the degree of medical doctor, and the university’s president had to force the idea on unwilling faculty members who thought that medicine was more “art” than science. They believed that medicine should not be dignified with a degree. Sound familiar?

Unhappily, in education the issue was resolved in precisely the wrong way; there was too little resistance to conferring the title doctor --a classic case of too much of a good thing. As a consequence, a doctorate in education is a degree without distinction or status. But that woeful shortcoming could be remedied by board certification. If standards were high, real status and prestige could be restored to teaching.

If teachers are serious about securing high status and high pay, they are going to have to do it the old fashioned way--earn it. Prestige is not conferred; it is acquired by diligence and demonstrated accomplishment.

The Carnegie recommendation that teachers develop “board certification” for themselves, in addition to state licensing, represents a major break with the past and a powerful symbol of commitment to a future of higher standards. Like so many good ideas, the recommendation would be only an interesting curiosity except for one thing: Carnegie is putting its money where its mouth is, with a grant of $817,000 to Stanford University to begin to systematically explore the practical and technical implications of board certification.