Results Get Mixed Reviews : Studies, Reforms Keyed to Quest for Better Teachers

After 3 1/2 years of research and writing, the director of a 1970 Carnegie study on the “Education of Educators” reached a rather pessimistic conclusion about the prospects for improving the training of American schoolteachers:

“Teacher education . . . has been studied as frequently as the plight of the black man in America, and with as little effect,” said Charles E. Silberman, author of “Crisis in the Classroom.”

In the 18 years since Silberman made his observation, even more studies have been undertaken and, in their wake, any number of reforms initiated.

Blue-ribbon panels have decried the “rising tide of mediocrity.” They have accused American society of engaging in a process of “unilateral educational disarmament.” And they have warned that, unless the U.S. education system is rebuilt, this nation will face “a massive decline in our standard of living.”

Rebuilding the system, educators say, means massive changes not only in the way teachers are treated and compensated but in the way they are selected and educated.

To this end, admissions requirements to schools of education have been stiffened, course offerings have been altered and more stringent state credential requirements have been imposed.

From the Bank Street College of Education in New York to UCLA, innovative, model teaching projects have been launched. The Bay Area Writing Project, begun as an experiment in San Francisco a decade ago, for example, has dramatically altered the way teachers teach writing. Experiments under way at Michigan State University may one day alter the way teachers teach science.

People with backgrounds in science and mathematics who want to retire early from their jobs are the focus of a new teacher-training program at Harvard University. Minority students are the concern of Cal State Dominquez Hills, which has set up a program with schools designed not only to stimulate interest in teaching among black and Latino schoolchildren but also to help them develop early on the intellectual and social skills necessary to become successful teachers.

To weed out those students who probably should not go into teaching in the first place, Maryville College in St. Louis is using a personality test designed to tell students whether they have what it takes to be good teachers.

While some educators and public policy analysts are optimistic about what all these changes may do for public school teaching, many observers are hardly more sanguine today about the prospects for improving the teaching profession than the director of the Carnegie study was a decade and a half ago.

Nearly everyone has come to realize that “America’s schools are only as good as their teachers and that teachers aren’t nearly as good as they ought to be. But we don’t yet seem to have much to show for that realization,” said Patrick M. Callan, executive director of the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit organization formed in 1965 to help states develop policies to improve the quality of education.

Noting that “America’s dissatisfaction with its schools has become chronic and epidemic,” a report issued last year by the Holmes Group, a consortium of leading universities, complained:

“Many commentators admit that no simple remedy can correct the problems of public education, yet simple remedies abound.”

Like many education organizations in the last two years, the Holmes Group has called for a variety of not-so-simple remedies. What public education needs, the group has said, is a radical restructuring of the teaching profession, including less bureaucracy in the schools, more cooperation among schools and universities, higher standards of entry to the profession and more intellectually rigorous training programs.

The proposal for change on which many educators are pinning their hopes is a multi-year project sponsored by the Carnegie Corp. and being carried out by Lee Schulman and a team of researchers at Stanford University.

The goal of the project, Schulman admitted, is a tall order: to develop national standards for teaching and find ways to assess whether or not individual teachers have met those standards. Tests that are being developed to measure teachers’ competence under the project, he said, will range from standardized written exams to simulated teaching trials.

The assessments would be administered by a national certification board, which would, in turn, urge states and individual school districts to hire only those teachers that have met the board’s basic requirements.

Until recently, most states have not attempted to assess the qualifications of individual teachers but rather have left that job to state-approved training programs administered by universities. Having found that those programs do not always weed out unqualified, undereducated people, some states have begun to require passage on standardized exams prior to entering the classroom. A few states even have required teachers to pass recertification exams to remain in the classroom.

So far, most of these exams have measured only basic literacy. But, in doing so, they have uncovered some startling facts about those people who want to go into teaching and those who are already in the profession. In one state alone--Texas--a competence exam turned up about 5,000 to 6,000 functionally illiterate teachers. In California, there were such high failure rates on the state’s basic literacy exam that the California State University system began requiring applicants to take the exam before enrolling in training programs.

Some educators have criticized the tests in use on many grounds, not the least of which has been that the passage rates for minority teachers are often far below that of white teachers.

Whether the tests are culturally biased, as some critics charge, or minority teachers are on the average less well prepared in basic subjects than are their white counterparts, “the disproportionately negative impact on minorities couldn’t be happening at a worse time, as the minority student population in the schools is growing dramatically,” said Callan of the Education Commission of the States.

John McNeil, a UCLA professor of education, has been an outspoken critic of certification exams because of what they fail to measure. They do not show, McNeil contends, a teacher’s ability to inspire, to build character or any of a host of other characteristics that go into making a good teacher. The tests do little more than “glorify trivia . . . (and) trivialize the teaching expertise.”

Moreover, McNeil argues that the tests are far too costly, given the difficult financial situation facing most education departments and school districts. The Texas test, for example, has already cost about $5 million to implement. And in Tennessee, McNeil said, 79 tests have been developed at a cost of $70,000 each. “In this poverty-stricken state,” he concluded, “this money should go into the classroom, into teaching children, not into developing tests.”

One of McNeil’s colleagues at UCLA, James Popham, takes a very different view. Popham has been instrumental in developing competence tests and argues that some sort of basic standards must be required before a person, even a college-educated person who has completed an approved teacher-training program, is permitted to call himself or herself a teacher.

It may be true, Popham acknowledged, that a person can be literate yet not a good teacher. But it is hard to imagine, he said, that a truly illiterate person can function effectively as a teacher.

“If 5,000 to 6,000 teachers in Texas are functionally illiterate, children in Texas must be protected from them,” Popham concluded.

What is behind the testing movement and what the current reformers of teacher education would most like to do for their profession is what a 1910 Carnegie-sponsored critique of medical schools did for the medical profession at the turn of the century. That is, turn a disparate and disorganized set of practitioners into a group of elite professionals who work under a standardized set of practices and who are well compensated for their efforts.

To do this, various education groups, including leaders of some of the largest teachers’ unions, have endorsed the notion of a national certification board that would provide “board-certified teachers,” much as the medical profession offers “board-certified doctors.”

Like doctors, teachers would be required to complete “internships” while they are in school and undergo, after their course work is complete, much longer and more carefully supervised “clinical residences” than are now required.

Some reformers even believe that the school systems themselves should be reorganized to resemble the health-care industry, with highly paid master’s teachers, like doctors, designing programs, making critical decisions and supervising novice personnel, while a corps of lesser-paid technicians and other practitioners help to minister the needs of students.

Not everyone agrees that the model of medicine can work for education.

For one thing, many educators have noted, teaching, unlike doctoring, does not have a basic core of research on which its efforts can be based and scientifically standardized and monitored.

Another problem that makes some of the proposals for reform seem impractical is the sheer size of the teaching population in this country.

In this regard, said Gary Sykes, an education professor at Michigan State University, teaching is quite unlike any other white-collar profession. Whereas there are 250,000 doctors, 600,000 lawyers and a little more than 1 million nurses, there are 2.5 million teachers.

“Given those numbers, it is no accident that teachers’ organizations have operated out of an industrial model, not a professional model,” Sykes said. “They have necessarily had to see their members as workers, not professionals.”

Philip W. Jackson, an education and behavioral science professor at the University of Chicago, is one of the country’s most outspoken opponents of the medical-school model.

“I see no reason why we should not proceed to upgrade the quality of teacher education in our nation much as (the reformers say) we should, even though we lack the kind of knowledge (about how to teach teaching that the reformers) claim we have,” Jackson wrote in a recent issue of the Teachers College Record, a journal published by Columbia University.

“I cannot help wondering why we must tie (the reform efforts) to the promise of making teachers more and more like doctors. . . . Here my own cynical imagination takes over. I picture these teacher-clinicians moving about their classrooms, reading the charts at the foot of each desk, listening for the faltering heartbeat of knowledge aborning. Diagnosing, prescribing, prognosticating. See them bending low beside each pupil, dispensing bromides from their black bags of pedagogical tricks. Clinicians, indeed. More like a cheap adolescent fantasy, I would say.”

While Jackson would like to see more emphasis placed on courses in the historical and philosophical foundations of education, many reformers, ironically, would simply like to do away with many of the education courses taught in most university-operated teacher-training programs.

In place of education courses, the reformers have called for a far greater emphasis on traditional liberal arts subjects--language, literature, history and science. Such an approach to teacher training, they argue, would reduce the perception that teachers are badly educated. And a side benefit, they say, would be to retain many of the universities’ more intelligent students who have been turned off by the bureaucratic requirements and the so-called “Mickey Mouse” nature of many education programs.

In fact, many of the reform movements are calling on colleges to phase out undergraduate education majors altogether and make education a purely graduate or professional school function.

Under these proposals, prospective teachers would be required to major in a traditional subject such as English or mathematics or philosophy and then take a fifth-year of teacher training after they have earned their college degrees.

But no matter when they are offered or how they are organized, teacher-training programs must continue to meet two objectives: to teach students a subject and teach them how to teach it, said Judith E. Lanier, dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University.

“After all,” Lanier said, “if just knowing a subject were all that mattered, our universities would be filled with brilliant teachers, which we all know they are not.”

Indeed, there are many educators, particularly in California, who argue that the way to improve the education of teachers is not simply to do away with undergraduate degrees in education. For the last 20 years, California has required the so-called fifth-year program of all of its public schoolteachers. California was also one of the first states to produce, in the form of a study known as the Commons Report, a detailed proposal for reforming teacher training. And, in the persons of Bill Honig, the state’s superintendent of public instruction; W. Ann Reynolds, chancellor of the Cal State system, and David P. Gardner, president of the University of California, California has had some of the most outspoken and often-quoted advocates for reform of public education.

Despite all this, according to many experts both outside the state and within California as well, there is little if any evidence, either by way of the number of innovative teaching methods or the test scores of its pupils, that California is a particular leader in the area of teacher training.

In California, as is true elsewhere, the problem is largely one of money. The most common plea is for more support from taxpayers--funds to raise teachers’ salaries, funds to conduct research on teaching, funds to improve training programs.

Many university educators, however, admit that it is their institutions that are as much to blame as anything for many of the problems that face public school teachers.

Not only do many university scholars scorn teacher preparation as a task unworthy of their intellectual talents, university administrators have also been reluctant to step in and make the needed changes in their teacher-training programs. The reason, many suggest: Education programs have traditionally been money-making ventures for most universities.

Unlike biology departments and physics departments that require costly equipment and law schools and business schools that must hire high-salaried faculty, schools and departments of education are low-budget operations that generate large sums of money from tuition. The more students they enroll, the more money they bring in.

When the Holmes Group began its critical analysis of teacher education in 1983, the efforts were not “well received,” said Michigan State’s Lanier, who was one of the authors of the Holmes report. “Apparently, the business of teacher education in America has been a thriving one for higher education, and to even talk about initiatives that might disrupt its continuance or increase its costs threatened those profiting from the status quo.”

Despite such obstacles, education reformers of the last several decades believe that they have made some headway in improving teacher preparation.

For years, said Geraldine Jonchich Clifford, a historian of education at UC Berkeley, there have been “quiet revolutions” under way to raise standards and improve the education of schoolteachers. Seen over the long term, these efforts at reform have been a success.

“There was a time,” Clifford said, “when normal schoolteachers had only one or two years of college. Some weren’t even high school graduates. Now virtually all teachers have college degrees, and many have post-baccalaureate training as well. Not until World War II were state licenses issued. Now states closely monitor all teacher education programs even if they do not always examine the qualifications of individual teachers.”

There have also been more dramatic reform movements that have also met with some success, said James W. Guthrie, professor of education at UC Berkeley. In the 1960s, in the wake of the Soviet’s launching of Sputnik, for example, reform was aimed at improving teaching in the sciences for the upper quarter of the educational system. In the 1970s, reform came in the form of affirmative action and was aimed at the lowest quartile, the poor and the handicapped.

The reform of the 1980s, Guthrie said, is directed toward “the middle half.”

In effect, what is happening on an experimental level in the United States parallels much of what is standard practice in Japan. That is, efforts are being undertaken to make teaching a more attractive profession with better training and more rewards for outstanding work.

Among the many experiments under way, a number offer some promise.

One has been to try altering the age-old method of paying teachers simply on the basis of the number of degrees and courses they have taken and the number of years they have served in the classroom.

Instead, those who have done extra work or have demonstrated exceptional talent are being provided “merit pay” increases to their base salaries. Such a system, although highly controversial, especially with some leaders of the teachers’ unions, is providing a tremendous boost to the morale of teachers who have worked hard for years and have little in the way of thanks--or money--to show for their efforts.

Increasingly, schools are also establishing a system of mentor teachers who are given extra time and in some cases extra pay to guide novice instructors through the trials and rigors of beginning teaching. That system is also said to be providing an enormous boost to the morale of experienced teachers and is proving to be a boon to new teachers who might otherwise never come to understand how truly gifted teachers go about their work.

Whether these and other experiments will become standard practice in the profession is hard to predict, although most everyone agrees that if there are to be substantial changes, they will surely cost money to implement.

Unlike the earlier movements, there are no special interest groups to promote the concerns of the average student and the ordinary teacher, although increasingly lawmakers and other public officials are beginning at least to give lip service to education reform in political campaigns.

Is there any reason then to believe that the current talk of reform will ultimately make any difference--that money and changes will be forthcoming?

Borrowing two metaphors used by earlier educators, Michigan State’s Sykes likens the 1980s reform movement to a storm raging over the ocean and to the natural geological transformations of the Earth’s surface. During a storm, he said, there may be a great deal of activity on the surface of the ocean, but at the depths there is rarely little change. On the other hand, he said, each round of reform, each disturbance, invariably leaves some sedimentation.

“Already some reforms have made a difference,” he concluded. “Student standards are up, there are more courses, and, in some cases, there are better courses. But will these make better teachers? It’s simply too early to tell.”

LEAVING TEACHING JOBS

According to the National Education Assn., this is how the most common reported plans of teachers who leave their jobs have changed over the last 20 years.

Activity 1966 1971 1976 1981 Teaching elsewhere 39.3% 31.4% 30.7% 14.2% Attending school 11.7% 9.2% 10.2% 7.1% In military service 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.8% In nonteaching position 10.3% 13.7% 15.0% 18.9% Homemaking 20.0% 20.9% 16.5% 18.9% Unemployed, seeking work 2.8% 2.0% 8.7% 8.7% Retired 10.3% 14.4% 11.8% 13.4% Out of labor force and other 5.5% 8.5% 7.1% 18.1%

RACE AND TEACHER TESTING IN CALIFORNIA

One controversial aspect of teacher testing has been a reported disproportionate passing rate by race. Here are three years of so-called CBEST test results by race among first-time test takers in California.

1984-85 1985-86 1986-87 No. Percent No. Percent No. Percent Ethnic Group Tested Passing Tested Passing Tested Passing Asians 1,213 56% 1,125 62% 1,257 61% Blacks 2,287 33% 1,997 36% 2,111 34% Mexican-Amer. 1,720 49% 1,759 50% 1,961 59% Other Latino 653 41% 754 48% 833 51% Whites 32,110 81% 33,563 82% 37,088 81% Others 1,630 51% 1,421 49% 2,076 54%

Source: California Commission on Teacher Credentialing