Self-Esteem Bottoms Out

While everyone from Middle American parents to the U. S. Secretary of Education are expressing a lack of confidence in the ability of ed schools to deliver qualified teachers to public schools, the deans of those institutions have no such angst. “Universities say we’re going to protect this because it is something we can do better than anyone else,” Dr. Sharon P. Robinson, president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) said at a lunch on June 18, 2010.

“Deans and department chairs were much more likely to believe that their students were prepared to teach than either principals or teachers believed,” a 2006  MetLife survey found.

“Teachers express less confidence in themselves than their deans do,” Dr. Robinson said in reaction to the Met Life study.

Robinson formerly worked with the National Education Association (NEA) teacher’s union. The event was sponsored by the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Willis Hawley of the University of Maryland elaborated on Dr. Robinson’s comments. Teachers express more confidence in themselves when training than when practicing, he averred.

Hawley is Professor Emeritus of Education and Public Policy at the University of Maryland and Director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Diverse Students Initiative. He claims he has done a study of 20 education schools and found few similarities among them.

“I will not be an advocate for teacher education,” Dr. Robinson said. “I will be a champion for what teacher training can be.”

Yet and still, she asserts that “It has gotten better.”

“We need to get out of defensive mode and into offensive mode,” she argues.

She thinks part of the problem stems from “education schools modeling themselves after undergraduate programs rather than after professional training.” Dr. Robinson was a past president of the Educational Testing Service’s Educational Policy Leadership Institute.

Dr. Robinson’s organization believes that the Obama Administration does not spend enough on teacher training. “Higher education supports competition for funding, as is currently required by the Teacher Quality Partnership Grants,” an AACTE handout reads. “Institutions of higher education also match federal funding for teacher preparation at 100 %.”

“This contribution would be lost in the Obama Administration’s proposal.” Dr. Robinson also has served as an assistant U. S. secretary of education.

Nevertheless, there is one federal instructional course for instructors Dr. Robinson is not wild about. “At Teach for America we continue to put them into assignments for which they are grossly unprepared, licensing them for jobs they have no intention of getting,” Dr. Robinson noted. “This is what their own commissioned research shows.”

The AACTE found that although fewer students are majoring in education, more are pursuing graduate degrees in the field in comparison to other fields. “Overall decreases were reported for both undergraduate- and graduate-level enrollments for students not majoring in education,” the AACTE reported in their April 15, 2010 report, An Emerging Picture of the Teacher Preparation Pipeline.

As we reported earlier this month, homeschoolers have discovered that despite the efforts to unravel their mysteries, what education schools do doesn’t really matter in the business of instruction. “Home schoolers scored 34-39 percentile points higher than the norm on standardized achievement tests,” the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) claims. “The home school national average ranged from the 84^th percentile for Language, Math and Social Studies to the 89^th percentile for Reading.”

“The study also found that whether or not parents were teacher-certified had no impact on these scores.” Now, replicating this example could kill an entire industry, if you define industry as anything that uses revenue rather than an organic entity that generates it.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.