College Leaders Urged to Improve Teacher Training

In the cast of tweedy characters at most universities, those professors who train schoolteachers are the academic equivalent of Rodney Dangerfield--they get no respect.

So today marks a remarkable attempt to shake up traditional campus hierarchy, as the most prominent group in higher education urges 3,500 college and university presidents to make the improvement of teacher training a top priority.

“Teacher education has been for too long on the sidelines of most colleges and universities,” said Stanley O. Ikenberry, president of the American Council on Education. “We’re telling presidents to move it to the center, or move it out.”

The “action agenda” for university presidents being mailed today reflects a growing consensus among higher education leaders that they must play an active role in fixing public schools.

But college presidents have been stymied in figuring out exactly what that role should be. After all, public education is about the masses, about preparing generalists, while higher education is, by its very nature, more specialized and elitist.

Recently, though, a widening strand of research points out how universities can--and should--get involved. Educators now agree that the quality of classroom instruction makes a tremendous difference in how well students learn.

Improving the skills of teachers is one thing universities can do something about. They can recruit more top students to become teachers, improve the quality of the classes in schools of education, and require faculty members from across campus to assume responsibility for what teacher candidates know about math, history, English or other subjects.

These are actions underscored by the American Council on Education’s 10-point plan for college presidents. The action agenda, called “To Touch the Future, Transforming the Way Teachers Are Taught,” also calls for a rigorous campuswide appraisal of teacher-training programs and for presidents to speak out forcefully on improving teachers and public schools.

To do any less, the report says, will fail to remedy the problem that half of the nation’s schoolchildren are taught by unqualified math and science teachers--what it calls a “reprehensible form of public sanctioned malpractice.”

The action agenda was immediately applauded by educational leaders.

Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the reform proposals “right on target.” Arthur E. Wise, president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, welcomed the call for “coordination between the liberal arts and sciences and teacher-preparation faculty.”

Council Increases Its Advocacy Role

Kati Haycock, director of the Washington-based Education Trust, called it a significant step for the American Council of Education, an advocacy group made up of 1,800 college presidents. Last year, she noted, the group vigorously fought a new federal law that threatens universities with loss of federal dollars if too many of their graduates fail teacher licensing exams.

“Most college presidents don’t want to put this near the top of their list, because to their faculty this is not considered serious stuff,” she said. “Hopefully this will get their attention.”

Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the 22-campus California State University, was on the 35-member task force that drew up the action agenda. He called it “a wake-up call for college presidents.”

“The preparation of teachers is just as important in our society as the preparation of doctors and lawyers,” Reed said. “If we are truly interested in preparing a competitive work force, we’ve got to really mean it. That means putting more money in teacher education and less money someplace else.”

That’s easier for him to say than for other college leaders, because teacher preparation is part of Cal State’s primary mission. The Cal State system now produces 62% of the teachers in California and is steadily ratcheting up its numbers to meet the demand for 250,000 teachers over the next decade.

It’s more difficult to get such a strong commitment from Richard C. Atkinson, president of the nine-campus University of California. UC produces only 4% of California’s teachers, and has a wider array of competing interests, including five medical schools, three law schools and dozens of other graduate and professional programs.

Still, UC is doing its part, Atkinson said, committing to more than doubling the number of teachers it graduates, from about 1,100 now to 2,500, in the next few years.

“For the last 30 or 40 years, schools of education have been going downhill in their position in the university,” Atkinson said. “I don’t think that will be reversed quickly, but I think the idea of getting the whole university involved is a great idea.”

Carl A. Cohn, a former university professor and now superintendent of Long Beach schools, said that, for teacher training to become a priority, it must become a valued component of the reward structure on campuses.

As it stands now, he said, faculty tenure and promotion committees reward professors for publishing in peer-review journals, not for helping to raise academic standards in public schools.

The emphasis on teacher training has been gathering momentum in California, driven partly by Gov. Gray Davis’ concerns about the expected shortfall of teachers and the huge number of teachers lacking proper credentials. About 10% of California’s 280,000 teachers are in the classroom on emergency teaching permits; the percentage is twice as high in urban centers like Los Angeles County.

Summit for University Presidents, Chancellors

Atkinson has joined with Reed and Stanford President Gerhard Casper in calling for a Dec. 6 summit in Palo Alto on the teacher training for California’s college and university presidents and chancellors. So far, 53 out of 75 college leaders have agreed to attend.

In his letter of invitation, Casper wrote to his colleagues that, “while there is little formal connection between higher education and K-12 schools, colleges and universities have the responsibility to supply both the content and pedagogical training of teachers.”

Yet he noted the hard political reality: “Increasingly, lawmakers and the public are seeking to hold us accountable for these responsibilities.”

Ikenberry also stresses the need for presidents’ involvement now before the political climate changes. He has been staying up late to write personal notes to hundreds of university presidents.

What kind of reaction does he expect? “Positive, mostly.” Or, he said, “I’ll get a stream of letters saying this was an outrageous idea.”

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Times education writer Richard Lee Colvin contributed to this story.