Another Education Myth Collapses

Along with supposedly beneficial small class sizes, another constant refrain of American education officials is that there is a teacher shortage in the United States. “The data give a little support to this but there is no shortage of social studies teachers,” Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania said recently at the American Enterprise Institute.

Moreover, “Half the schools don’t have shortages,” Dr. Ingersoll claims. He is a professor of education and sociology at Penn.

The “shortages” are frequently cited as the reason why only a third of math teachers are qualified and much computational instruction is given by pedagogues working “out of field.” “When I taught high school, there wasn’t a semester that went by in which I wasn’t called upon to teach math, sex education, you name it,” the former social studies teacher remembers.

“Actually, principals do it to save money,” Dr. Ingersoll learned of the out-of-field assignments. “But under No Child Left Behind that is no longer legal.”

“The data tell us that the problem is not ‘out there’ in the education schools but ‘in here’ in how high schools are managed.” Dr. Ingersoll is the author of Who Controls Teachers? Power and Accountability in America’s Schools, a book published by the Harvard University Press.
Thus, one would expect that the law change under NCLB brought the substitute math teacher subterfuge to a grinding halt. As it happens, in the study he is currently undertaking, Dr. Ingersoll “found little change under No Child Left Behind.”

“Policymakers will use research to attack the aspect of the problem they can have an impact on,” Lorraine McDonnell of the University of California at Santa Barbara says. “In the case of out-of-field teaching, legislators can do little about school administrators but they can control teacher training standards.”

Both Dr. Ingersoll and Dr. McDonnell may have a bit more faith in education schools than the evidence warrants. He labels as a myth the conclusion that “Education schools are inadequate.”

“Totally inaccurate,” he asserts. “Teachers have teaching degrees.” But even some of the institutions that confer them, most notably the Teacher’s College at Columbia University, question their value.

One of the more contentious education reforms of recent decades actually gelled outside of education schools. “Whole language theorists used professional organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of English (NCATE),” Harvard’s James Kim reports. Editors of education journals, conversely, found “whole language unresponsive to empirical evidence.”

“Since whole language became widely used, it got blamed for declines in reading,” Kim notes. What he does not mention is that observers such as E. D. Hirsch point out that the only gains in the No Child Left Behind education reforms of the Bush Administration have come in 4th grade reading scores that feature a heavy phonics component.

At least one education policy expert who was present at the creation of NCLB might dispute this. For his part, Reid Lyons of the Best Associates Whitney International University seems to downplay the benefits of phonics.

“Ask the question, which works better, whole language or phonics, for which student under which circumstances and by what tests,” he advises. He advised the President on Child Development issues during his first term.
In a way, he might be right. On our website, reporter Matthew Hickman showed that many NCLB gains came courtesy of Sylvan tutors not paid with government funds.

This would leave NCLB’s one definitive accomplishment as the result, not of the billions of dollars Congress voted to fund the program, but of the private sector in education using no taxpayer subsidies, save for, arguably, the out-of-pocket expenses of parents. Along with homeschooling gains and higher private school test scores, the Sylvan-induced test scores would seem to point towards privatization as the only education reform that actually works.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.