Teacher Colleges : The Ghetto of Academe: Few Takers

It is called the academic ghetto.

Virtually anyone who wants to venture inside can do so. But most do not want to go near it.

According to campus lore, it is where some of the least-qualified students study some of the least-demanding subjects at the hands of some of the least-talented professors.

It is the university’s school of education.

Some say getting in is the hardest part. But, by most accounts, that is hardly an arduous undertaking.

Take Harvard. Despite vigorous efforts to recruit students in recent years, the Harvard School of Education still accepts two out of three of its applicants--a high figure for a university that overall admits only one in six undergraduates, one in nine law students and one in 18 medical students, lamented Harvard President Derek Bok in a recent report to the university’s Board of Overseers.

Like many university presidents and a number of prominent scholars, Bok has begun to take a look at the status of teacher training in American universities and does not particularly like what he sees.

“Why,” Bok asked in his opening remarks to the Harvard Board of Overseers, are teacher-training programs “relegated to the margins of the university, fighting for their existence at a time when they should occupy center stage in the national effort to improve our public schools?”

One explanation comes from Berkeley Dean of Education Bernard R. Gifford.

“What’s wrong with schools and departments of education today is very simple,” Gifford said. “Education suffers from congenital prestige deprivation.”

And that deprivation, almost everyone in the field agrees, has become a malady that permeates admissions standards and undermines everything that schools of education do--or do not do--to provide the nation with a supply of well-trained teachers.

Rating the Disciplines

“When one thinks of the hierarchy of a university,” said Alexander W. Astin, professor of education at UCLA and one of the country’s foremost education researchers, “there might be some dispute over what to put at the top: law, medicine, physics. But there is little dispute over what goes at the bottom: nursing and education.

“Education departments and schools of education,” Astin said, “do not have the largest budgets; they have the smallest. And they do not attract the best people. The teachers who teach teachers and the students who become teachers are, by and large, thought to be the worst in the university.”

Because education is such a low-prestige field, universities have “all but abandoned” their commitment to teacher training, said Patrick M. Callan, director of the Education Commission of the States and former head of California’s Postsecondary Education Commission.

In some ways, that is hard to imagine, given the number of programs. At last count, there were about 1,500 institutions in the United States from which would-be teachers can choose to get their teacher-training experience.

Yet it is not always the best American institutions that offer such training. Indeed, in recent years some very prominent universities have either curtailed their education programs or done away with them altogether.

Yale, Duke and Johns Hopkins are among those universities that have closed their education departments permanently. The University of Chicago has twice shut down its program. The University of Michigan has severely cut back its education faculty. Berkeley’s School of Education, for years under attack by the faculty of Arts and Sciences, was saved recently only by a last-minute reprieve from the chancellor.

By and large, most teacher training in the United States is left in the hands of hundreds of small private colleges and a few dozen large state universities. By far the largest of these is the California State University, which now trains 70% of all California’s primary and secondary teachers and 10% of the nation’s schoolteachers.

California Example

Size alone makes the California state university system quite significant, yet what has happened in California in general and at Cal State in particular, many educators agree, is representative of what has happened in teacher education throughout the United States.

By most accounts, Cal State’s 19 campuses, which are scattered throughout California, have grown to remarkable stature in a very short time. Once known as “normal schools” that offered limited vocational training to people who did not have college degrees, the campuses became formal teachers colleges in the 1920s. Their primary mission was to educate public-school teachers.

By the 1930s, however, the teachers colleges had expanded their mission. A “declaration of intention to teach” was no longer a prerequisite for admission; students could major in English, business and a host of other subjects.

By the early 1980s, the colleges were no longer just colleges; they had been elevated by the California Legislature to full-fledged universities, and together they made up the statewide system that became known as the California State University.

This pattern of advancement--mirrored by state teachers colleges throughout the country--would seem, on the face of it, to have been good news for teacher training. But, in fact, the changes may not have been an entirely happy development in the history of teacher education.

The rise in stature brought more varied academic offerings, stronger faculties and greater emphasis on scholarship, said E. Alden Dunham, author of a 1969 book on state colleges. But, he added, it exacerbated rather than alleviated the so-called prestige problem.

As they expanded their missions, Dunham said, former teachers colleges tried to emulate the institutions at the top of the academic hierarchy. But, in so doing, he concluded, many first-rate teachers colleges simply became third-rate universities.

Lack of Attention

What’s even more troubling is that teacher education seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle: The major research universities did not have the interest to pursue education programs in a vigorous way and the former teachers colleges did not have the resources to carry it out in a particularly impressive way.

This split between research and training is one that has caused turmoil within California for years. By law, the functions are divided between the California State University, which is primarily responsible for the state’s teacher-training efforts, and the University of California, which conducts all doctorate-level graduate training and research within the state’s system of public higher education.

To allow Cal State to enter into the graduate field would be a duplication of scarce resources, according to UC officials. State lawmakers have largely accepted that reasoning. But Cal State officials have countered that to separate graduate training and research in education from the basic training of teachers is but one of many reasons why whatever advances in education research are made at the universities are rarely translated into practical improvements within public-school classrooms.

While some research universities have done away with education programs altogether, many of those that still have departments or schools of education have tried to distance themselves from teacher training in a number of insidious ways.

Bok noted, for example, that many of the biggest and most prestigious education schools in the country are no longer concerned solely with the training of teachers, but have focused their attention on other settings in which learning occurs--at home, in the workplace, at church, in front of the television set.

Ironically, one of the most popular ways of boosting the caliber of an education department is to hire people who are not educators but who are trained in other disciplines such as psychology, sociology or economics, observed Astin, who was himself trained as a psychologist, not an educator.

“This development--which was probably prompted by a desire to achieve greater prestige and respectability within the larger academic community--has inevitably led to conflicts within education schools and departments,” Astin wrote in a 1985 book titled “Achieving Educational Excellence.”

“Most of the older faculty members were trained in education, are committed to teacher training, and have only a modest commitment, if any, to scholarship and research,” Astin wrote. “The newer faculty members identify primarily with the scholarly discipline in which they took their doctorates (psychology, economics, sociology, and so on), and have little or no interest in teacher training, are committed to research and scholarship, and may even tend to denigrate the field of education.”

Such conflicts are largely unknown to the universities whose original mission it was to train teachers. But their reason is not philosophical; it is financial. In the scramble for money, these institutions cannot even think of hiring anyone new at least until the 1990s, when many of today’s professors are expected to reach retirement age.

By all accounts, the Cal State campus at Northridge operates one of the most thriving teacher-training programs in the country, but even there financial constraints have created problems, Dean Carolyn L. Ellner said.

“It’s an aging faculty,” Ellner said. “People came here and stayed. That’s good and bad. There is a history of accomplishment. But there is not much motivation to change.”

“Even here education is the stepchild of the rest of the university,” said Bonnie Ericson, an assistant professor, who is one of the first new instructors to be hired in a tenure-track position by the university’s School of Education in the last 15 years.

Training Universities

Along with Cal State Northridge, Cal State Los Angeles trains many of the teachers who teach in the Los Angeles area. Yet Ray Terrell, former dean of that university’s School of Education, complained recently that the instructors who teach education classes had become so overworked that many are barely able to do the bare-bone essentials of their jobs.

For example, he said, student teaching is thought by many to be one of the most important aspects of teacher training. Teachers who are in training are placed in real classrooms where they are supposed to be coached and evaluated by university professors or supervisors.

But, Terrell said, the supervisors are asked to oversee so many students and their schedules are often so tight that their job “boils down to little more than a logistic nightmare of driving vast distances across a sprawling city and then trying to find parking places in overcrowded school lots. . . . There’s sometimes not a lot of time left for students.”

In many other ways as well, students in teacher training feel the combined effect of scant resources and low prestige of the teaching profession.

Some of the brightest and most energetic students never go near teaching programs, discouraged by what they see as too many bureaucratic hassles and a lack of rigor associated with many teacher-training programs.

While some states still allow students to major in education as undergraduates (a much-criticized practice), California requires that all candidates for teaching credentials have bachelor’s degrees in a subject other than education.

Even so, students who train in California do not have to meet particularly stringent criteria for admission. In 1986, Cal State established its first set of comprehensive admissions standards, which simply require that applicants have better-than-average grades in their major course of studies. The university waives that standard for as many as 15% of the students in an effort to accommodate older students, members of minority groups and educationally disadvantaged applicants.

Interviews and basic literacy tests are also required of Cal State applicants. But, university officials say, the tests and interviews are used as diagnostic tools rather than as a basis for turning away applicants who may not have the personal or academic qualifications to become good teachers.

Just as there have been no fully standardized requirements to get admitted to a teacher-training program, so there are no uniform graduation standards to complete one.

Even within the same state or the same institution, students may have very different experiences, despite a host of requirements imposed by legislators and state departments of education to standardize and upgrade the profession.

Even in California, which has some of the most detailed requirements of any state, stories abound of students with almost identical academic backgrounds having to take twice as long to get teaching credentials as their counterparts for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

Generally speaking, educators agree that public-school teachers should have a thorough grounding both in the subjects they are to teach and the best methods known for teaching those subjects. Most teaching programs have requirements that teachers also know something of the history and philosophy of education and that, once they have learned all or most of this information, they practice their teaching skills under the supervision of skilled university professors and experienced classroom teachers.

Some students find all of teaching preparation interesting; most do not.

To hear them tell it, one group of young teachers in Los Angeles who were just completing the requirements for their teaching credentials last year did not know for certain what they had just finished studying.

Asked to go through their college catalogues and review their notebooks so they could describe the classes they took, these newly trained teachers were just short of baffled.

“Social Foundations of Education,” said one graduate from Cal State Dominquez Hills, reading from a list of courses that she had taken one year before. “What’s that? That’s a good question,” she said, laughing. “I’ve taken it and I’m not sure.”

“Oh, you know,” chimed in one of her former classmates, “Remember that old geezer with his audio visual displays?”

“Which audio visual displays? And which old geezer?” a second classmate asked, also laughing. “That would describe most of them.”

In recent years, numerous reports, panels and conferences on the teaching profession have lamented that too many teacher-training courses simply are not very good. According to the criticism, students spend too little time learning about the fundamentals of human psychology and theories of group management. Instead, the critics say, they are taught the “busy work” of teaching--grading papers and keeping class ledgers. Perhaps the most often used adjective to describe these courses has been “Mickey Mouse.”

But not everyone agrees with that assessment.

As one young woman, who trained at Cal State San Diego and plans to teach in Los Angeles, put it: “I had some great courses. The ones that teach you the practical stuff, the methods courses, they were what were really helpful. You know, they showed you how to make a bulletin board be meaningful. And what side of the overhead projector to stand on so the kids can see what you’re writing. That’s what you need to survive in the classroom.”

Most educators, however, believe that teacher-training programs should do more than simply teach teachers how to survive. Yet one of the most daunting problems facing them--and one of the reasons they are accorded so little respect within the university--is that they cannot agree on just what it is that should be taught.

“There simply is no understanding, at least there is no agreement, on what it takes to teach a teacher how to teach,” said Judith E. Lanier, dean of education at Michigan State University.

In fact, most American scholars are unwilling even to grant that education is an academic discipline. Instead, it is seen as a hodgepodge of subjects, with no particular point of view and no clear methodology of its own.

“Unlike medicine, with its base of scientific knowledge, or law, with its analytic methods that contribute to ‘thinking like a lawyer,’ education is more noted for transitory fads and theories such as the open classroom, the child-centered school, and the ‘new’ math,” Bok wrote in his report to the Harvard governing board last year.

“Important as it is,” Bok said, “the lack of a distinctive body of knowledge is not enough to account for the low estate of faculties of education.”

Business schools also have the problem of having no clearly defined intellectual basis for their teachings. Yet within most universities, business schools have “achieved high status and attracted hordes of able students,” Bok said.

“The difference,” Bok continued, “is that education faculties, unlike business schools, serve a profession that has long been weak.

“Schoolteachers in America have never earned much money and can hardly support their professional schools at a level resembling that of businessmen or lawyers. Nor has their status been high enough, at least in this century, to attract large numbers of able recruits to join their ranks. Unable either to give financial support or to lure talented students, the teaching profession has lacked the strength to impose a model around which education schools could orient their efforts,” Bok concluded.

PRODUCING TEACHERS

WHERE U.S. TEACHERS WENT TO SCHOOL

Degree/Institution 1966 1971 1976 1981 1986 Bachelor’s Degrees Public Institutions 70.6% 76.3% 75.5% 78.1% 79.7% Private Colleges 29.4% 23.7% 24.5% 21.9% 20.3% Master’s Degree or 6-year Diplomas Public Institutions 66.1% 76.1% 79.8% 85.9% 83.0% Private Colleges 33.8% 23.9% 20.2% 14.1% 17.0%

WHERE CALIFORNIA TEACHERS WENT TO SCHOOL

Candidates for basic teaching credential programs, 1985-86

California State University 15,380 72% University of California 999 5% Private Colleges and Universities 4,875 23%

Trends among prospective teachers in California, 1985-86

Enrollments in basic teaching credential programs declined by 5% over 1984-85 but higher than 1982-83.

Declining most were single-subject (secondary school) teachers, with the largest declines in art, physical education and agriculture. Biggest increases were in business, history, and foreign languages.

Source: Calif . Commission on Teacher Credentialing and National Education Assn.