George Cunningham throws down a gauntlet at the feet of state policy makers in an interview with Michael F. Shaughnessy of ednews.org, noting that ed schools are effectively thwarting standards-based education and accountability.
A former professor in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at the University of Louisville, Cunningham, recently issued a paper critical of teacher training at education schools in North Carolina and nationwide. While the public and policy-makers demand greater accountability, ed schools “do not think that academic achievement is an important purpose for schools,” he says. “They are committed to the achievement of a set of non-academic goals such as diversity, technology, critical thinking skills, and social justice.”
In plain but powerful terms Cunningham describes the disconnect between the accountability message being preached by the public and policy-makers and what new teachers are bringing to their jobs. “Newly minted teachers come out of education schools either with no awareness of the importance of academic achievement tests or with an acquired hostility towards them,” he notes, calling the situation “unsustainable.”
“Since education schools are operating in a way that undermines state accountability policies, in a rational world, it might be expected that the state educational agencies would take some sort of action,” he notes. “After all, most education schools are state funded and all schools must be accredited by a state agency.”
Not surprisingly, Cunningham also finds much left to be desired in student-centered pedagogy preached at ed schools, and its concomitant focus on hands-on assignments, projects, cooperative learning, authentic assessments and portfolios. “The problem with learner-centered techniques is that they are not effective in increasing academic achievement and may actually impede its development,” says Cunningham, channeling E.D. Hirsch. “If the goal of education is to increase student academic achievement as measured by academic achievement tests, prospective teachers need to employ the teacher-centered approaches of direct instruction. This is particularly important for disadvantaged students.”
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The fault lies not only with ed schools. School systems embrace “cooperative learning,” “brain-based pedagogy,” “project-based learning,” and so forth, and teachers are evaluated according to their implementation of said principles–often in the absence of a curriculum. In many cases ed school prepares teachers for the schools they enter. Unfortunately, many teachers find themselves at odds with groupwork mania and so forth, but have little say in the matter. Constructivism is more or less mandated.
I tend to lean toward the “instructivist” school, with one reservation. It seems sometimes that the “constructivist” and “instructivist” schools go to such ends to deride or dismiss each other that we end up with a rather dismal choice between “student-centered learning” and “scripted curriculum.” A scripted curriculum (not the mainstay of instructivism, but one of its interpretations) may be effective, but it may also be deadly to an educated teacher with a passion for the subject matter and ability to teach it without a script. Some sort of synthesis of constructivist and instructivist schools–not a compromise or middle ground but an enlightened integration–seems possible and desirable, if only each side would recognize the elements of truth in the other.
This is one of the reasons I find Core Knowledge so appealing at this juncture. It appeals to my desire for instructional substance, coherence, and rigor, yet it does not squelch a teacher’s initiative or contributions. From what I’ve seen of the curriculum, it’s lively, rich, and challenging. It makes me envious of the students in such a program, not to mention the teachers! In this context, a teacher can be creative (in the true sense) while delivering challenging and structured lessons that fit into a larger plan. I am not trying to flatter CK–I am genuinely heartened by the existence of these schools.
Schools exist not only to bring students to new levels of achievement. They exist also for the beauty of the subject matter. There is nothing like a teacher who joyfully shows different ways of looking at a theorem, or who takes students into a Faulkner novel, the patterns of grammar, or a sonata. These beautiful things give meaning to the teaching. This is a far cry from “facilitating” student “discovery”; and just as far a cry from boosting achievement alone. Achievement of what, for what? Not only for a job, I hope. Most jobs are stressful and dreary, even high-paying ones. A good education gives us the kind of internal life that makes life just a bit more interesting wherever we are.
This ideal is not far-fetched. This year, in addition to my regular teaching, I taught ESL to parents for 10 weeks in the fall and winter. At the outset I asked them what they wanted to learn most. They had no strong preferences, but tended toward the practical. Most of them worked long hours and didn’t have much time for reading. I gave them a combination of dialogues (based on situations they themselves had encountered), grammar, discussion, poetry, and song. On our last day, we read “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” They laughed gently over the lines “He gives his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake.” In that moment I felt that I understood the lines better than before. One parent told me afterwards that her favorite part of the course was the poetry. She said it helped her match sounds with spelling in a way that she could remember. Thus the poetry was both practical and beautiful.
We must not lose teachers who come (at least in part) for the beauty of the subject and the desire to bring it to others. Extremes of constructivism AND instructivism run the risk of driving such teachers away. We have a severe teacher attrition problem, at least in NYC, and I doubt it’s all because of the chaotic school environments or poor training. Stressful environments wouldn’t be so bad if schools honored subject matter and teachers were expected and trusted to teach it.
Either we develop a bigger educational vision, one that embraces both the practical and the beautiful, or we continue with partially successful movements that insist on themselves and therefore cannot succeed beyond a certain point.