Devoted Reader Tracy A. uncovered a humorous effort to discredit the meme that schools of education are biased and intellectually lopsided. It seems that the Teacher College Record wasn't too happy about David Steiner's investigation of the bias evident in education programs nowadays, and has published a rebuttal from one Dan W. Butin.
From Steiner's report:
What are students taught in these education programs? Surprisingly, almost nobody in the last 20 years has examined the coursework that education schools, as well as states, require as a preparation for teaching. Doing so is not easy: Some schools put their syllabi on the Web, some do not. Many have extremely complex programs — determining what students are required to take as part of their professional preparation often requires considerable detective work. Nevertheless,with the help of my research assistant, Susan Rozen, I decided to try.
We reviewed syllabi in 16 schools of education, 14 of which were ranked by U.S. News and World Report in the top 30 in the nation. We looked at the sequence of courses required in each school for the initial teaching license, only reporting the results when we were able to obtain the syllabi for all of these courses. By analyzing the required readings, the assignments, and the instructors’ stated intentions for their courses, we were able to offer a first portrait of what future teachers are studying in schools of education...
By noting what readings were commonly required and what were generally absent, and through an analysis of the requirements for the student-teaching experience, we raised questions about the rigor, the ideological balance, and the thoroughness of these programs.
A brief explanation: There is a deep division among those who engage in and write about teacher preparation. One school of thought, represented by such figures as Eric Donald Hirsch Jr. and Diane Ravitch, argues that teachers should focus on the basics. Like piano teachers who stress the discipline of scales and finger technique before encouraging deeper interpretive performance of demanding music, Mr. Hirsch and Ms. Ravitch argue that the best education — especially for the least advantaged — requires direct teaching of the three R’s and the other elements of cultural literacy (to borrow Mr. Hirsch’s term). The attainment of such knowledge and skills should then be assessed through state tests.
By contrast, another school of thought stresses what is called "constructivism" and "progressivism." Broadly speaking, constructivism is the view...that the teacher should...be a "guide on the side" encouraging children to discover and create according to their natural impulses. Progressivism is the idea that teachers should focus on the particular voices and experiences of repressed minorities, tailoring instruction accordingly. In educational theory today, these two ideas are often fused into one view — constructivistprogressive — that is opposed to high-stakes testing and state-mandated, standardized school curricula.
Given the divide between “back to basics” and the “constructivist-progressive” models, one would expect education schools to expose students to both points of view. Our research (which covered 165 syllabi of required courses in the foundations of education, the teaching of reading,and teaching methodology) strongly suggested, however, that at many of our highest ranked schools of education, the constructivist-progressivist arguments are being taught to the almost complete exclusion of the other, direct instruction model.
No real surprise there. And it's no surprise that those who defend constructivist-progressivist education would defend it, and that they'd be very silly in doing so. Here are a couple of excerpts from the Butin rebuttal (in italics), with Devoted Reader Tracy's comments in bold:
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Steiner’s study was seemingly straightforward: a content analysis of course syllabi in order to determine whether prospective teachers are adequately prepared to become good teachers in the public schools. Buried within such an articulation, though, are a host of questionable assumptions of causality.
Specifically, the following causal connections are presumed: between what is written on a syllabus and what is taught in the classroom; between what is taught in the classroom and what is learned by students; between what is learned by students and what is retained by students upon the completion of a specific course; between what is retained by students upon the completion of a specific course and what is accepted as legitimate by the student; between what is accepted as legitimate by the student and how the student is able to transfer such theory into practice; and, finally, between what a student is able to transfer into practice and its subsequent effectiveness as measured by student performance.
Put simply, there is an extremely loose coupling between what is written and what is taught, between what is taught and what is learned, and between what is learned and what is subsequently enacted in an efficacious way.
As I read this I had to chuckle. This seems to argue that you can't prove anything by the course syllabus because that's no way to determine that the teacher actually taught anything from it, that the student learned anything by what actually was taught, or that the student was ever able to use anything that was taught. If that's supposed to make me feel better about schools of education, it most certainly fails.
I agree, as does Butin's insistence that Seiber's sample was skewed because he examined only the elite schools, and everyone knows that the elite schools produce only researchers, and not those people who actually teach. It's nice to know that even defenders of schools of ed insist there is a gap between those who develop the theory and those who learn from it.
Here's another passage that had me scratching my head -
In regards to the fourth criterion, Steiner’s call for “ideologically balanced” content is a political and theoretical minefield. One teacher’s critical justice emphasis is another teacher’s disdain for rigor and clarity. Steiner’s target here was obvious. He highlighted the usual suspects of the intellectual left – Freire, Giroux, hooks, Ladson-Billings – that seemed to take precedence over other seemingly relevant content by, e.g., E. D. Hirsch, Diane Ravitch, and Chester Finn.
This is a legitimate complaint. Yet the social foundations of education field has reframed this issue long ago. As the Standards for the foundations field articulate (Council of Learned Societies in Education, 1996), the “purpose of the foundations study is to bring these disciplinary resources [of the humanities and social sciences] to bear in developing interpretive, normative, and critical perspectives on education, both inside and outside of schools” (p. 4; emphasis mine). Put otherwise, the political left, right, and center can all engage in deep analysis, explicitly articulate specific morals, and critically examine the assumptions and implications of normative stances. Steiner’s criteria of “balance,” in other words, focuses on the wrong agenda: he seems to want particular names included in syllabi, whereas the social foundations Standards emphasize tasks and skills.
Excuse me? Ideological balance isn't necessary, only the ability to engage in "deep analysis, explicitly articulate specific morals, and [to] critically examine the assumptions and implications of normative stances." It would seem that if all the critical thought you read is written from a single or a limited ideological perspective, you are not really grasping the concept of critical thought. It does remind me of concepts that fit very well within the definitions of propaganda and brainwashing.
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I can't really improve on Tracy's comments (and boy do I love it when my readers do the hard work for me. )
Posted by kswygert at July 29, 2004 07:23 PM