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Elementary & Secondary EducationQuick Links:
THE NON-ALTERNATIVE ‘ALTERNATIVE’ ROUTE TO TEACHING (A shorter version of this article, titled "Some
Alternative," was published in City Journal, Autumn 2000) The New York State Board of Regents’ new alternative certification program for public-school teachers purports to short-circuit the onerous traditional path to teaching, teacher-education degrees pursued in schools of education. The plan has been hailed as a magic bullet for solving the teacher shortage and improving teacher quality. New York City schools chancellor Harold O. Levy, for instance, claims it will "inject desperately needed new blood" and draw "genuinely gifted people" into teaching. Indeed replacements will be needed for the roughly 46,000 teachers in the state who, over the next five years, will retire or lack the certification soon to be required of all who teach. Requiring these replacements to be certified might be justified if certification guaranteed quality. But it does not; in fact, one national study recently concluded that students of fully certified teachers learn no more than students of teachers with only partial or emergency certification. While current certification rules may prevent some incompetent would-be teachers from teaching, they surely let other incompetent teachers in, contributing to the disgracefully low reading and math scores of our fourth and eighth graders, especially in large cities. And this haphazard screening comes at a very high price: it discourages many academically talented individuals from pursuing teaching in the first place. Alternative programs that make teaching a true option for capable individuals would be welcome. But the Regents’ alternative program is itself onerous, and it preserves nearly all the failed elements of traditional teacher training. The plan’s only real improvement upon the traditional route is to loosen the timeframe for entry into the field by non-traditional candidates, that is, career-changers and recent college graduates with a bachelor’s degree in the subject they wish to teach but no training in education schools. They are now to be permitted to start in the classroom after 200 hours of training and then to work toward "professional" or permanent certification in evenings and summer classes, and on weekends. In fairness, however, it should be noted that the alternative route also preserves certain positive, albeit belatedly adopted, elements of traditional teacher training. To wit, the Regents to their credit recently added requirements that new high school teachers have an academic major, and that new teachers pass content exams before they begin teaching (rather than within 5 years of starting to teach). Even so, the path these new teachers must plod is strewn with too many of the same requirements demanded of traditionally trained teachers. This same tedious process is widely reputed to discourage talented people from entering teaching while doing little to ensure that those who complete it are of high quality. First, they must study pedagogy that typically amounts to 18 to 24 hours of education courses. Although some of these may focus on core skills, such as classroom discipline and student evaluation, others are widely thought to concentrate on "progressive" education theory. These "child-centered" or "constructivist" pedagogies are commonly criticized as having more to do with ideological bias than with teaching the basic three R’s or managing an unruly class. They are described by experienced teachers as "useless," and critic Jeanne Chall has shown that they fail to boost student achievement. (It is virtually impossible to know from available information the extent to which these courses dominate teacher education. Higher education trustees or legislators should mandate that campuses disclose more detailed information about them and indeed all their academic offerings.) Second, and guaranteed to exacerbate the teacher shortage, they like all teachers generally must get master’s degrees in their first four years on the job. Although these degrees could be taken in demanding subjects such as science or English, it is widely agreed (again, there is little hard data) that most teachers specialize in education itself, generally considered to be significantly less demanding than more traditional subjects. Although the Regents have recently begun to require some additional training in the content area in an education master’s program, most of a teacher’s subject-matter training will typically have occurred at the undergraduate level. A typical math teacher’s graduate degree will unfortunately deal less with trigonometry and more-advanced math than with quick and simple "math education" or the "sociology of education." Third, they must be mentored by both a colleague in their school and an instructor from an education school. Whereas effective mentoring by an experienced teacher should be part of teacher training, this particular approach invites more red tape and, in any case, requires a structure and funding that do not presently exist in colleges. Fourth, they must take the same two tests – the liberal arts and sciences test and the content specialty test – administered to all new teachers. A third test, an assessment of teaching skills, must be taken before the end of the 4-year initial certification period. In truth, this is not much of a requirement. At a majority of teacher education institutions in New York, 95 percent or more of students pass the liberal arts and teaching skills tests, and about 90 percent pass the content tests. Evidence from other states and from national studies suggests that these high pass rates are a reflection on the exams themselves, rather than on the abilities of the exam takers. Often it is possible to pass teacher certification exams while getting less than half of the answers right, and this may be the case in New York as well. Even then, the questions may not be hard. For example, exam preparation materials suggest that some questions on New York’s liberal arts exam can be answered simply from a careful reading of the question, without referring to any outside knowledge. (Equally unreassuring, teachers are allowed to re-take these tests as many as four or five times.) Even though these new teachers are to be prepared in nearly the same way as traditional teachers, some educationists have reacted defensively to the alternative program. Thus Janet MacDonald, dean of the School of Education at Pace University, laments that it is "insulting to the profession...[because it] says to a student...don’t bother to go to a teacher preparation program." The way in which the program must be administered also augurs more of the same unsatisfactory results associated with traditional teacher training. Unlike most of the other forty states that, before New York, adopted such a plan, this one is to be run by colleges and universities, not by school systems or the state. School systems wishing to participate must pair with teacher training schools which, on a voluntary basis, are to provide the new teachers with their required training. Some of SUNY’s 16 education schools, for example, plan to offer such training in the fall of 2001. The linking of the management of New York’s program to ineffective education schools makes one wonder what Arthur E. Levine, president of Teachers’ College at Columbia University, could possibly have had in mind by suggesting that the plan somehow substantially departs from "the conventional route," shakes up the "monopoly on training teachers," and offers training that is not "cookie-cutter." Perhaps Levine has misunderstood this new program, for he has in the past encouraged genuinely open alternative routes and urged education schools to be less insular and more responsive to criticism. On the contrary. Loaded as it is with conventional requirements, this plan is part and parcel of the Regents’ relentlessly regulatory approach to education. How this strategy might affect the teaching crisis was predicted in a 1999 manifesto titled The Teachers We Need and How to Get More of Them: "Every additional requirement for prospective teachers - every additional pedagogical course, every new hoop or hurdle - will have a predictable and inexorable effect: It will limit the potential supply of teachers." Whether or not these requirements for non-traditional teachers will actually limit the potential supply of teachers, relative to the rules previously in place, it is likely that they will not help much to incrase the supply. Indeed, according to education officials, states with similarly top-heavy alternative programs, such as Connecticut, have already failed to attract significant numbers of new teachers. To ease the teacher shortage, the Regents should follow the example of Massachusetts and adopt a much faster route to certification. Through the Massachusetts Institute for New Teachers, or MINT, would-be teachers complete only a summer of teaching and classes. After a year in the classroom, their school principal or a state official decides whether they have earned full certification. The MINT plan points the way to the more radical change of course needed to solve New York’s education woes, once and for all. The system must be de-regulated, de-centralized. Rather than tinker with process, the Regents should focus unremittingly on results, whether students are learning. To this end, they and our legislators should do away with most requirements for teacher licenses, with the exception of ensuring that teachers know their subject matter well (which to their credit they are already trying to do) and putting in place a system for measuring schools’ academic performance. Aside from this oversight, the state should hand over to school principals the authority to recruit and to reward well qualified people in all fields as well as to fire teachers whose students do not learn as measured by their performance on rigorous tests. The State Education Department could help principals in this job by putting in place an information system that links the performance of students to the teachers who taught them. Presently such a system simply is not available in any useful form at the state level. This approach will give New Yorkers a real alternative, the one they deserve, able teachers and success at last in the classroom. Candace de Russy, Ph.D. (Dr. de Russy is a SUNY trustee. She chairs the Board’s Academic Standards Committee.) Guiding Principles for the Improvement of SUNY’s Teacher Preparation Programs. Questions and Comments of I commend the Advisory Council on Teacher Education for the work it has done to create a framework for the strengthening of teacher education at SUNY. This is a conversation about the welfare of our children; it is here that this Board must show its true leadership. Although I will raise a number of questions and offer some critical comments in this memo, I hope they will be received in the spirit in which they are offered, a common effort to refine and strengthen our work in teacher preparation. First, let me express strong support for a number of the recommendations of the Council. In Recommendation 3 (pp. 13-14), the Advisory Council has stressed a key component of teacher excellence--assuring excellent clinical experiences for pre-service teachers. Practicing teachers affirm that student teaching was the most valuable part of their pedagogical training. Thus, opportunities for more carefully supervised student teaching will strengthen teacher preparation. Before making funding decisions, the Board will need more data on the cost-effectiveness of the initiative being considered (Appendix C) to replace adjunct supervisors of field experiences with full-time faculty; its recommendation to improve the relationship between teacher preparation programs and the schools that host student teachers, however, is excellent. The commitment shown in Appendix H to cost-free retraining of newly graduated teachers who show professional weaknesses is quite in keeping with the national movement towards greater accountability in education. The Advisory Council is also to be commended for its commitment to service to the State of New York evident in Recommendation 5 (pp. 16-17): Recruitment of candidates in high need academic areas and for high need geographical regions, especially our cities. This Board should energetically support emerging market-based strategies that offer incentives to teachers who pursue certification in mathematics and science, areas that show a shortage of qualified teachers, and who elect to teach in schools challenged by socioeconomic problems. The Advisory Council has perceptively focused on a potentially fruitful partnership in Recommendation 6 (pp. 17-18), which calls for facilitated transfer from community colleges to four-year universities. It is to be especially commended for seeking to ensure that the programs will be designed to allow students to complete their degrees in four years, rather than subjecting them to the additional financial and opportunity costs of a longer completion time. The challenges facing the urban educator call for SUNY’s collaboration with the New York City Board of Education, as noted in Recommendation 8 (pp. 20-22). We need to produce teachers who not only understand the challenges of urban education, but also know how to use the resources of the city to provide a world-class education for every public school student. Our benchmarks for the success of the proposed Urban Education Center should be cutting-edge training of urban educators, with a focus on high proficiency in the subjects they will teach, demonstrable improvement of student-learning, and effective alternative certification programs. I particularly commend the Council for its bold thinking in emphasizing the role of a Regents Accreditation Option in Recommendation 9 (pp. 22-23). SUNY is a public institution and its teacher education programs should be accountable to the public, with input from the public. This is best done through the Regents Accreditation Option. Individual institutions may elect to seek accreditation from TEAC (Teacher Education Accreditation Council) or NCATE (National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education), but they must remain accountable to New York. As many here are aware, NCATE has sought to be the sole accreditor in the states, though there have been many charges that it has not been a guardian of teacher quality. I particularly call the Board’s attention to the research of University of Missouri economist, Michael Podgursky, who has documented very poor licensure exam results at a number of NCATE-approved institutions. I note in appendix B some budgetary considerations based on combining Regents and NCATE regulations. This is disturbing, in that it appears to presuppose that SUNY needs to align its standards with those of NCATE. NCATE "state partnerships" seek to harmonize the statutory approval procedures of the state with its accreditation procedures. It makes more sense to develop state requirements which are both mandatory and more rigorous and to bring NCATE procedures for accreditation into line with them if NCATE is to be invited at all. The other recommendations of the Council, however, raise many issues and concerns. We need to remember that the state and national context in which we address these issues is one of grave and widespread skepticism concerning the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs. Among the many indicators of governmental and public concern, we might note the following: ***Title II, Section 207 of the 1998 Amendments of Higher Education Act of 1965 includes a federal demand for disclosure of each teacher preparation program’s certification test results. Failure to submit an Institutional Report Card on Quality of Teacher Preparation carries a $25,000 fine, according to the legislation. No other sector of higher education has been so singled out for scrutiny. All colleges of education need to be aggressive and pro-active in examining their standards and performance. ***A widely respected survey organization, Public Agenda, found that the educational goals of parents and often school teachers themselves differed widely from those of professional educators. In Different Drummers: How Teachers of Teachers View Public Education, Public Agenda found that only 37% of the professors of education saw maintaining discipline and classroom order as "absolutely essential" skills for aspiring teachers. Only 19% considered correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling to be "absolutely essential" values for prospective teachers, while 72% believe it is "absolutely essential" for new teachers to have high expectations of their students. 86% of the professors of education believe that it is more important to struggle with the process of finding the right answers than to know the right answer. 57% of the professors of education believe that training children to use calculators from the start improves their problem solving ability. Only 10% of the general public and 23% of the public school teachers themselves agreed. ***In a 1996 survey conducted by the National Center for Education Information teachers themselves reported that what was of greatest help to them was their preparation in academic content areas and their student teaching, not their professional education courses. The results were stunning: 92% ranked their own teaching experience as "very valuable." 73% ranked courses they took in subjects to be taught as "very valuable." Only 37% ranked the education methods courses "very valuable." Only 17% ranked the college of education faculty "very valuable." Please note that most teachers did not find their professional education courses or their education professors nearly as important as their own experience and their content preparation. ***The National Council on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF), an organization that is an advocate for the teaching profession and its professional organizations: the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), has called for the closing of teacher preparation programs that do not meet high standards. Thus we need to look carefully at the following recommendations, given that the federal government, the public, and the teachers themselves are telling us that there are serious weaknesses in our existing system of preparing teachers. The Advisory Council appropriately invites us to examine SUNY’s teacher education programs. In order to do this responsibly as a Board of Trustees, we need detailed information about the current operations and performance of SUNY teacher education programs, and only then can we make appropriate decisions about the recommendations the Council offers. This first report provides a framework for discussion and analysis that must go much deeper than the arguments presented in the report.
Recommendation 1: Teacher education students must take a major or program whose content constitutes a "central content area" to be taught in the classroom (pp. 11-13). The principle articulated here is excellent, but this crucial quality measure needs clearer language. The Report (p. 12, paragraph 1) reads, "For all secondary education programs...a major should be required in the specific content area to be taught." Why the elastic word "should," rather than "must"? Moreover, all of the requirements for the arts and sciences majors must apply to teachers who aspire to teach those subjects, including advanced and capstone courses, whether they be laboratory projects, senior thesis, or seminars.
It is worth quoting the Holmes Group’s position for the guidance it provides SUNY: Competence in subject matter requires that education students
experience first-rate learning in the liberal arts. Some colleges and
universities still offer prospective educators watered-down studies in
the arts and sciences, especially at the upper levels. Sometimes they
segregate education students from others studying the same discipline or
provide them with less challenging content or don't give them the chance
to study with leading professors in the disciplines. Prospective
educators taking a content course in English or chemistry or mathematics
should sit alongside liberal arts majors even at advanced stages.
Education credentials should not be printed with shoddy ink. Recommendation 4 (Combined BA/Master's Degree). We have reliable research that shows increased student performance in math and science associated with teachers who have master's degrees in those content areas. This is not true for teachers with a master's degree in education. David Grissmer’s Report, prepared for Rand , Improving Student Achievement: What NAEP State Test Scores Tell Us , and Harold Wenglinsky’s Educational Testing Service Report, How Teaching Matters (October 2000) both note that neither M.Eds nor more coursework in pedagogy is associated with increases in student learning. I quote Grissmer: "Other things being equal, states with …a higher percentage of teachers with master's degrees do not have higher scores...." Teacher knowledge of subject matter is the only teacher input variable associated with increased student learning. Thus it is incumbent on SUNY to provide joint degree programs that allow for MAs or MSs for secondary school teachers and to provide M.Eds that require coursework in relevant academic disciplines as well as in content-based pedagogy.
Recommendation 7 (Programs for "career changers"). This is a crucial initiative as we face the possibility of teacher shortage, but its potential to help will be virtually eliminated if "career changers" are faced with an excessive burden of requirements. Strong alternative certification programs have appeared throughout the country, with notable success in New Jersey, Texas, California and Massachusetts. Connecticut has recently announced one, which is very significant, since CT has stringent standards for traditional certification. Many of these programs feature an intense summer orientation lasting from two - four weeks, followed by a year of apprentice teaching with an available mentor and possibly some further course work. The Massachusetts program (MINT) provides a 7 week program, followed by regular classroom teaching responsibility with a great deal of support. It has been warmly received by principals. Mature mid-career professionals who wish to be teachers do not need two summers of intense methodological courses, to judge from MINT’s experiences. A post-doctoral biochemist who might well consider being a high school biology teacher, having already served as a teaching fellow for some time, is very unlikely to join the proposed SUNY program. The Advisory Council should study the best practices in alternative certification noted above and craft recommendations for SUNY based thereon. Appendix E, which gives more detail about the career changer
program, contains a suggestion to use the standards developed by the
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). As basic
pedagogical guidance, these standards are acceptable, but the Board
needs to be aware that NBPTS has over-emphasized pedagogical skills at
the expense of content mastery. For example, it explicitly tells the
evaluators who grade candidates’ portfolios to ignore errors in
spelling, punctuation, and grammar. While the Advisory Council is
correct to develop a matrix of teacher competencies that all educators
need to demonstrate, we must be cautious not to invoke NBPTS as a
standard by which to measure "career changers." Recommendation 10 (Research on the performance of teacher education programs). This is the most serious concern in the Council’s report. Education
policy has suffered from a dearth of reliable research, and it is
crucial that SUNY be above suspicion. Such a research initiative will
have limited credibility if left in the hands of the same SUNY education
programs that would naturally have an interest in demonstrating that
they are already of "consistently high quality" but suffer
because "the general public served by SUNY may not recognize the
value added to school classrooms..." (Recommendation 11, p. 24-25)
If teacher educators are serious about research on teacher
effectiveness, they must have objective research and analysis conducted
from outside the system. There are excellent resources on which to call,
e.g. the CREDO Institute (Center for Research on Education Outcomes) at
Stanford University, William Sanders at the SASinSchool (formerly at the
Value-Added Research and Assessment Center at University of Tennessee),
RAND. The recommendation needs to articulate a governance structure for
the proposed Education Research Center that makes clear its relationship
to the Provost and the SUNY Board, and that includes greater
representation of arts and sciences faculty than of education faculty. SUMMARY: The Advisory Council has clearly identified key areas for reform. But in addition to responses to the concerns above, the Board of Trustees needs more information on several crucial details if we are to improve teacher education in New York. I recommend that we remand this report to the Council for complete answers to the concerns above and to the following questions:
How can alternative routes to certification be structured to attract more career changers to teaching but with appropriate safeguards? HILLARY’S RADICAL EDUCATION
AGENDA Hillary Rodham Clinton nebulously represents her three-decades-plus involvement with education as a long "re-imagining" of education. Although she has no voting record to offer New Yorkers in this area, her present plan for, and past roles in, school reform are anything but nebulous: she has consistently advocated the radical expansion of government’s power over schools, at the expense of parental and local control. One of Mrs. Clinton’s proposals is the creation of a national teacher corps which, as even the Washington Post warily acknowledges, "would plunge the federal government into areas of education where it has not gone before," including the recruiting, licensing and payment of teachers. For this and other new federal forays into education Mrs. Clinton advocates spending $175 billion over the next 10 years. But for more than three decades Big Brother has spent more than $150 billion on 760 "education" programs – in reality self-serving employment programs for educators who are among her staunchest supporters – which have done virtually nothing to raise academic performance of disadvantaged students. She vowed recently that she and Al Gore would finish implementing all the programs begun in her husband’s administration. This would include extending the already powerful influence of the three 1994 federal laws strongly endorsed by President Clinton: Goals 2000, School-To-Work, and the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This legislation set up an insidious system of state standards based, not on academics, but on attitudes and beliefs as well as merely training children for specific jobs. As these laws have worked their way through state education departments to the local level, schools have increasingly adopted ideological and vocational curricula while abandoning knowledge-based truths found in traditional literature, mathematics and history. Mrs. Clinton’s enthusiasm for controlling how other people’s children should be educated and what careers they should choose pre-dates her husband’s presidency. In the late 80s and early 90s, she promoted the "Workforce Skills" program of the then Rochester-based National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE). This think tank aims at integrating education into a federally controlled, German-style system labeled "human resources development" – a "seamless" system for nationalizing education, training and labor policy. The NCEE’s workplace plan provided the basis for the Clinton administration’s School-To-Work Act, which, in the view of Rep. Bob Schaffer of Colorado, "has gone tragically awry." Students, he explains, have been "forced…into the program, required to leave the classroom to job-shadow and…to work in menial, entry-level jobs"; they have been disconnected from their "dreams, goals and ambitions." This same readiness to use government for molding others’ lives was also apparent when Mrs. Clinton headed education reform while her husband was governor of Arkansas. Together "Billary" or the "know-it-alls," as Thomas Sowell notes, inaugurated programs for "gifted" students that subjected them to a curriculum biased in favor of pacifism, homosexuality, "animal liberation," and a roster of other left-wing causes. This substitution of indoctrination for academics (combined with the undermining of their own teacher-testing reforms in face of opposition from the teachers’ unions) did not improve Arkansas schools: students’ scores on the American College Test for students in Arkansas dropped after Mrs. Clinton’s reform blitz, and fourth-graders there perform poorly to this day on national reading tests by comparison with most other states. (Her pandering to unions, by the way, continues unabated: the teacher competency testing she is currently trumpeting in the name of "accountability" is a sham; 90 percent of new teachers pass this lax, already state-required exam.) Mrs. Clinton’s earlier leadership roles reveal more of this same appetite for control via centralization. In the late 70s and early 80s she helped run the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), an organization that "defends" children from their parents. Like her, the CDF sees childrearing as less a parental prerogative than that of a "village" of government-directed teachers, pediatricians and social workers. In Hell to Pay, Barbara Olson cites many of her earlier articles that reflect this same utopian, quasi-socialist vision. Mrs. Clinton rejects the belief, for example, that "families are private, nonpolitical units whose interests subsume those of children." She recommends intervening in "family…decisions [involving minors] that could have long-term…effects…." "Decisions," she writes, "about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetics [sic] surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others…should not be made unilaterally by parents." In light of such convictions, Mrs. Clinton’s vehement dismissal of school vouchers as "gimmicks" is entirely logical. Besides, giving needy children a way out of failing public schools would alienate her union backers. Yet she herself reserved the right to choose a school for her daughter, as does most of the educational and political elite for their children. Mrs. Clinton’s education platform and record leave little doubt that her election to the Senate would greatly advance her and her fellow social engineers’ educational "imaginings." And what of after, after their grand scheme immeasurably harms even more children and society, what then might she have to say for herself? Alas, one can well imagine a response akin to her recent description of how she feels about the failure of her 1993 plan to nationalize health care: "I would rather refer to it as a learning experience." Candace de Russy chairs the Academic Standards Committee of the SUNY Board of Trustees. SUNY Board of Trustees
Meeting As you my colleagues here well know, the item before us is of gravest import. K-12 education is in dire straits. As the Preamble to the New Vision in Teacher Education acknowledges, "the effective preparation of teachers is key to enhancing [its] overall quality." Disadvantaged children in our cities, in particular, deserve better than the failed and broken educational fads of the past. They need teachers who are masters of the subjects they teach, and teachers who use proven and effective practices. The dynamics of Board action are such, furthermore, that once we pass the New Vision Plan, we will not revisit the issue in a systematic way. Any action we take should therefore ensure that every SUNY-educated teacher is superbly prepared, academically and clinically. The Plan before us unfortunately falls well short of these aims. It is, as now presented, a 50% solution: it offers half-way reforms, while reinforcing the mistakes of the past – when clearly more comprehensive and radical reforms are needed. In addition, the Plan has only the vaguest reporting requirements that would warn the Chancellor and this Board when it goes astray. This too is insufficient for the gravity of the problem. I will note only a few of the issues that need to be addressed – all of which have been explained in detail in the memos that I have provided to you over the course of the last three months.
The children of New York State, and especially those in our urban schools, deserve better than this – and indeed a better plan than the one now before us. I therefore reluctantly vote no – and no it is for all the reasons I have expressed today and in the past months. N. Y. Schools: The Data Deficit The New York Post, October 10, 2000 New York State Comptroller Carl McCall recently had the wise idea to try to find out if the educational programs used in low-performing schools and costing taxpayers $9 million in consultant fees are actually helping students. But when his auditors looked into the matter, they discovered that the State Education Department and New York City Board of Education do not analyze whether the programs boost student performance. Similarly, the Board’s new report on the academic performance of students with little or no English does not even attempt to quantify whether a prolonged course of bilingual education produces better results than immersion in mainstream classes taught in English, with a shorter course in English taught as a second language (ESL). What a wasted opportunity to determine which method is more effective, given that almost one-half of the 150,000 non-English-speaking students in city schools take part in bilingual education programs while the balance is enrolled in ESL. This omission keeps a multitude of students committed to bilingual education, which in other venues has been repeatedly demonstrated to be ineffective. Just days after the report’s release, California test scores showed that the end of bilingual education there has resulted in strikingly improved reading and math scores for a million Spanish-speaking students. In addition, there is a dearth of the basic data needed to reverse the decline of teacher quality. As noted in Teacher Preparation, a 1999 study by the State University of New York’s Rockefeller Institute: " … we have been surprised … [that] even voluminous data files often do not contain information that would be useful. For example, … the State Education Department … does not know [teachers’] academic majors in college and it does not know their SAT scores. This makes it very difficult … to answer questions such as: … What kinds of teacher characteristics are associated with good student outcomes?" The Department also fails to tie the test scores of individual students to the teachers who instruct them. Without this analysis there can be no solid basis for teacher evaluation. In a recent op ed titled "Why the Best Don’t Teach," New York City schools chancellor Harold Levy "demand[s] … more accountability and better work from an improved teaching force." This well-intentioned sentiment is doomed absent such information. We cannot hope for absolutely empirical answers to improving our schools, nor, of course, should we be slaves to data. But reliable, quantifiable information is critical to intelligent research, sound policy, effective management, and fair teacher compensation. For a variety of reasons, however, educational and political leaders have not in the past demanded it. In the future they must ensure that the state’s boards of education, Education Department and institutions of higher education collect and combine relevant data and make it available for public analysis. Relevant to what? Helping students to succeed in school. SUNY Trustee Candace de Russy chairs the board’s Academic Standards Committee. WHY NEW YORK'S KIDS CAN'T READ Abstract:
THOUSANDS of New York City schoolchildren are starting the new school year in the same grade as last year because they've failed remedial reading tests. There's plenty of blame to spread around, but a good part of the fault rests with the schools themselves - specifically, with how reading is taught. Teaching effective reading is no great mystery: Abundant research - cognitive, linguistic, educational, and now neurological and eye- movement studies - clearly shows the teaching of alphabetic principles, beginning with early "phonemic awareness" (manipulating speech sounds), to be the necessary route to reading mastery. Sadly, too few teachers have been trained to teach such alphabetic principles ("explicit phonics") adequately; too many have been taught to rely on non-phonic methods which are unreliable, inefficient, and cannot be practiced to automatically. (The most notorious alternative is "whole language," the "look-say" method of guessing words by looking for "clues" in surrounding context.) But, like the quiet at the eye of a hurricane, there has been a strange silence among education leaders regarding the reading curriculum. The latest pedagogical vogue is called a "balanced approach," an unsystematic hodgepodge of whatever a teacher might be inclined to do - disorganized eclecticism. Unfortunately, the state Education Department seems to have given its imprimatur to this notion: Commissioner Richard Mills says, "Good teachers make use of all these tools." Some of the state's most recent reading standards clearly reflect this point of view. Some of its reading curriculum literature is overly voluminous, vague to the point of providing no clear direction, and smacks of an attempt to placate factions of every stripe. There is no excuse for this. The Heritage Foundation's Casey Carter points to last year's reading scores of New York state students on the California Test of Basic Skills. The highest sixth- grade reading scores were those of the Mamie Fay School, PS 122 in Astoria; the second-highest were those of the Crown School, PS 161 in Crown Heights - even though 70 percent of the children at Mamie Fay are of low-income background, as are 95 percent of the children at Crown. Both schools explicitly teach phonics -and incorporate rich literature in the classroom. Charles Richardson, a founding trustee of a leading Manhattan literacy organization, states that combining phonics and whole language in some illusory "balance" can result in a "cognitive dissonance" that carries a potential for emotional disturbance. At the request of local principals and teachers, his colleagues are guiding phonics instruction in 19 city schools, whose numbers will rise next year to 24. "We are, in effect," he says, "teaching phonics as a subversive activity." It's high time to put the children first. Our education leaders must stop pretending that all practices are equal. Let there be an end to the posturing "reading wars," and an awakening to the magnificent might of the alphabet. Candace de Russy is a member of the SUNY board of trustees. SUNY’S TEACHER PREPARATION
REFORMS: Candace de Russy, Trustee of the State University of New York and Chair of the Academic Standards Committee Michael Poliakoff, President of the National Council on Teacher Quality This is the story of SUNY’s "New Vision in Teacher Education," an urgently needed education reform with some great ideas. It has high potential to be a paradigm for the nation and a model for trustees of other colleges and universities to follow. But its beginning will ultimately not prove nearly as important as its progress. How it proceeds at this critical juncture will hold some vital insights into the life-cycle of education reform. Today’s well- intentioned reforms at SUNY could be an engine for service to the taxpayers who fund the universities. Or the implementation of these great initiatives could create only the semblance of reform, a façade that masks an unacceptable status quo. The "New Vision in Teacher Education," as it is now called, grew from efforts beginning in 1998 that Candace de Russy undertook in collaboration with SUNY’s provost, Peter Salins, to improve the preparation of new teachers and to deepen SUNY’s commitment to improving public education in New York urban schools. SUNY deliberations included consultation with a number of advocates for complete redesign and restructuring of teacher preparation, including Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, Rita Kramer, and Michael Poliakoff. The "Advisory Council on Teacher Education" formed by the Provost in May 2000 delivered its report to the Board in March 2001 with recommendations for a well-defined set of reform strategies and objectives:
The challenges facing this comprehensive teacher quality strategy lie in the details for its implementation. In the sections that follow, we critique and analyze the plan: the issues that SUNY faces illustrate a number of the general points discussed in ACTA’s Trustee’s Guide to Improving Teacher Preparation.
TRANSPARENCY AND PUBLIC TRUST The Trustees – who have the fiduciary responsibility to represent the interests of the taxpayers of New York know remarkably little about the quality of SUNY’s 16 teacher education programs? The public knows even less. The list of missing information at SUNY is a long one. Trustees need data on the academic qualifications of students admitted to teacher training programs. Trustees need data on grade distribution in education courses. We know that grade inflation is rampant in education programs - federal data shows this all too clearly - making teacher preparation a magnet for the academically underqualified. And whether the results are good news or bad news, the Trustees need to have the average licensure exam score for every teaching field at every campus every year. In other words, they need a campus-by-campus report card based on academic achievement benchmarks and upon which they can craft informed policy. Since this information wasn’t available through the System office, we did some of our own informal investigations, which revealed plenty of things that should be of concern to Trustees. At the SUNY New Paltz campus a few years ago, an institutional study showed that 71% of the grades awarded in elementary education classes were "A’s" – compared with an average of 33% in other courses throughout the campus. Furthermore, not every future teacher is above average – or even minimally qualified – at some SUNY campuses. Whatever the overall SUNY averages might be for teacher licensure tests, some education programs show appalling results. In 1999-2000, eleven of the twenty-three graduates who prepared to be high school mathematics teachers at SUNY-Oswego failed their NY State mathematics exam. The test for high school English teachers seems to have had disastrous results as well: only five of the thirteen graduates who took it managed to pass. The Trustees have not examined even sample questions from these licensure exams – if they did, they would find that they are anything but rigorous. Stated simply, we have a relatively easy test that proves a significant barrier to graduates of some of our campuses who aspire to teach in New York public schools: And at SUNY’s Old Westbury campus, the average score for its education students on the most general (and easy) of the licensure tests, the Liberal Arts and Sciences exam, was 23 points below the state average. But information like this should not come piece-meal to public cognizance: it belongs in an annually published data book readily available to every taxpayer and studied by every Trustee. Some of SUNY’s teacher education programs may be such chronic underperformers that that they should be closed. Certainly the weak results we uncovered demand at very least close public scrutiny. Terminating a program is an unnerving thought for university administrators and politicians, but it is the fiduciary responsibility of the Board of Trustees to protect the interest of the public over the interest of institutions and their faculty. The lesson here for Trustees at other institutions is self-evident. Start with the data. It is the prerequisite for crafting policy. WHO OWNS AND WHO WATCHES TEACHER EDUCATION? Accountability is the watchword of the day, and reporting requirements for teacher preparation programs are built into both the 1998 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.. SUNY’s "Action Plan" for implementing New Visions properly promises that "as a System and through the work of its faculty" it will conduct research on best practice. SUNY, moreover, will survey the school systems that employ its graduates and use this information to improve its programs. But external, objective review needs to observe the same strictures against conflict-of-interest that we expect of business and government. SUNY’s Advisory Council’s report already expressed high confidence in the "consistently high quality" of SUNY’s teacher education programs even before the reforms were to go into effect. It is unclear whether it is appropriate to use SUNY faculty to craft best practices policies and audit the performance of the programs. To rely on accreditors – particularly the National Council on Teacher Accreditatiohn (NCATE) – to ensure program quality is to lean upon the proverbial bruised reed, a very poor substitute for trustee oversight. (For the unreliability of NCATE’s quality control, see ACTA’s Trustees’ Guide to Teacher Education). An institution that is serious about research on teacher effectiveness, needs unquestionably objective research, transparently reported to Trustees and the public. Teacher education programs throughout the country have – for good reason – been the object of scrutiny; federal Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) funded studies, moreover, have challenged the validity and design of the majority of research on the effectiveness of teacher education. Particularly given the signs of academic weakness we noted above, it is crucial that trustees have an unimpeachable plan for performance audit. SUNY is vague about how these studies will proceed; this is a danger sign. A serious effort to ensure that new teachers are themselves fully proficient in the academic subjects they teach demands a paradigm shift away from the education school. The programs that have tolerated weak or inconsistent licensure exam results and ineffective pedagogies like whole language (see below), are not likely to themselves be the most effective watchdogs or the most effective engine for reform. BEST PRACTICE OR MALPRACTICE Trustees need to be proactive in monitoring what lies behind a pledge to improve pedagogical practice. Although SUNY as a system is clearly committed to the evidence-based practices called for in the new No Child Left Behind Act signed by President Bush this year, that is no guarantee that the programs themselves will follow suit. Some SUNY campuses have yet to catch up with the National Reading Panel and still proudly and confidently train their aspiring teachers to use not systematic phonics, but the same whole language methods that resulted in an avalanche of failures around the nation. At SUNY’s Oneonta Campus, its NCATE-approved School of Education offers the following description of its Reading Program: The Graduate Reading Program is firmly committed to the philosophy that reading is comprehension and that reading comprehension is a dynamic transactive process of constructing meaning as the reader brings prior knowledge to the text within the context of the reading situation. Reading is now regarded as an active search for meaning rather than a mechanical translation of the written code. Behind this jargon is a well-documented recipe for ensuring that many children will not gain the skills they need to sound out unfamiliar words and become confident, independent readers. Behind this jargon is the recipe for building a permanent underclass of Americans with low literacy skills. Best practice in teaching reading is called phonics. In fact, it is the only acceptable practice in teaching reading, and the evidence for that has been clear for decades. The potential for harm from whole language is high for all schools, but bad instruction in reading does its worst damage in high poverty schools. For SUNY to bring such methods to an Urban Teacher Center would be an injustice to the city and its children. An education school professor should have no more "academic freedom" to train teachers to use whole language methods than a medical professor has to train doctors to apply leeches for hypertension or prescribe ice-water hosings for a patient with depression. SUNY’s Urban Teacher Center cannot be used as a laboratory where whole language and phonics methods can be tested to avoid offending faculty committed to the former. Education schools that want to help urban children escape from low-literacy and poverty must look to the children’s interests. MORE TEACHERS AND BETTER TEACHERS, OR MORE REVENUE? Like most states, New York badly needs a fast-track program to facilitate the entry of skilled professionals into public school careers. Efficient, streamlined alternative certification programs have appeared throughout the country, with notable success in New Jersey, Texas, California, and Massachusetts. Many of these programs feature an intense summer orientation lasting from two to four weeks, followed by a year of apprentice teaching with an available mentor. These programs have encountered resistance from education schools, who fear that their enrollments will decline if aspiring teachers are not compelled by state regulations to take their courses. SUNY must take the bold step of developing alternate routes that that rely on short, intensive orientation programs rather than education school course credits – a track fully within the vision and regulations of the New York Board of Regents. It needs more than the vague language of the Action Plan, which specifies that SUNY leadership "will work with individual campuses or groups of campuses to develop alternative certification programs." SUNY could find itself with an alternative certification program that requires mid-career professionals to endure "a summer session with an intense set of didactic graduate level professional education courses and field observations" during their first year, then spend 25% of their time during the following school year receiving further "instruction in teaching methodology," then sit through another summer to "complete a second set of intensive campus-based courses," and finally devote another 25% of their time to receiving more teaching methodology instruction. This ludicrous attempt to gain education school enrollments and tuition revenues is not unique to SUNY: several association of teacher educators advocate "alternative certification" programs that are merely repackagings of traditional education school degrees.. Across America, there are thousands of children who need bright and knowledgeable teachers fast. When there are senseless requirements and regulations in the way, Trustees need to tear them down. Most states and school districts put significant pressure on teachers through regulations or financial incentives to earn a Master’s degree. The New York Board of Regents requires all New York teachers to gain a Master’s degree within three years of initial employment. There is solid research evidence that shows increased student performance associated with teachers who have Master’s degrees in academic content areas, but no student growth associated with teachers who gain master’s degrees in education. The Master’s in Teaching has been a revenue enhancer at universities around the country. The degree allows teachers to jump to a higher salary scale at their schools, and hence it is a very popular degree. But the low level of academic challenge and limited relevance to teacher’s academic needs makes the degree near worthless for student learning gains. The moral should be evident that education programs that want to be on the cutting edge - at SUNY and elsewhere - need to provide Master’s degree programs for teachers that are based exclusively on the academic disciplines the candidates teach. But the language of SUNY’s "Action Plan" is so vague that almost any program will be admissible: The assertion: "coursework credited toward the Master’s degree will sustain balance among study in the subject matter to be taught, discipline-specific pedagogy, and clinical experience, simply sounds too much like the status quo. WHAT’S IN A MAJOR? What is in your institution’s academic catalog? Rhetoric aside, what are the stated requirements that students must fulfill to achieve a degree in a given program? The college catalog is at least as important a document for trustees as the annual budget, for it is the actualization of the school’s mission. And, as we found at SUNY, it can contain some real surprises. SUNY’s Action Plan states as its first objective, "Assuring that students are thoroughly grounded in the subjects they teach." The plan has some stellar ideas, but the details do not always support the stated intention. Future elementary school teachers, according to the Plan, will complete a "major or concentration" in a subject directly related to the elementary school curriculum. So far, so good – in fact, it is very good to ensure that the academic program directly prepares the teacher for the elementary school curriculum. But the Action Plan then opens the door for the weasels. And anyone who has been on a college campus knows that they will come. The Plan allows future teachers to craft their "concentrations" with "at least 18 credit hours at the upper division level" – but drawn from an unspecified number of majors. Future teachers need coherent and rigorous upper level coursework, the kind of academic experience that develops intellectual maturity and depth. The last thing future teachers need is the opportunity to water down – and dumb down – a "concentration" by drawing upper-level courses from a plurality of majors, arguably choosing the easiest course from each. At SUNY’s Cortland campus, for example, a future teacher could presumably stay within the rules and construct a science major with such upper level courses: SCI 304 "Plants and People," SCI 330 "Science and the Public," SCI 325 "Biotechnology and Human Aging," SCI 310 "Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control," and SCI 300 "Science and Its Social Context," for much of the required 18 credit hours. None of these courses has prerequisites. Would the future teacher get the same intellectual benefit from these as she would from taking, for example, 18 credit hours of advanced biology and/or chemistry? The answer is almost certainly, "no," and SUNY needs to close this loophole, or Elementary Education will become the major of choice for college students who wish to avoid rigorous upper-level coursework. SUNY, like hundreds of other institutions, must terminate all arts and science courses currently designated as courses for education majors. The prestigious Holmes Group called for the elimination of such tracking over a decade ago, but it persisits. Many of SUNY’s campuses have created special courses that segregate education students: " Physics for Elementary Education Majors," "Mathematics for the Elementary Teacher," "Geometries for Elementary and Middle School Teachers," "The Joys of Geometry" - whose course description reads, "For MS in Education degree students only." The strong signal such courses send is that education students need to be protected from the more competitive standards of their peers in baccalaureate majors. We will never have teachers who walk the walk of academic excellence if we continue to tolerate this separate tracking. CONCLUSION Changing the culture of education schools is not an easy task, and SUNY deserves credit for facing the task. It has embarked on a path that other institutions have not yet begun. But a culture change will certainly not happen if we maintain the fiction that all teacher preparation programs need is some fine-tuning. The Urban Center, a centerpiece of the SUNY reforms, is a brilliant idea. Real reform – the sort that will build an Urban Teacher Center on solid principles of academic excellence - will need to set and enforce quality measures that do not allow loopholes for evasive reporting and low-challenge courses. We wish SUNY’s bold beginning success that will invigorate New York’s schools; it will need much further effort to get there. And the best hope for reform at any college or university – SUNY included - is vigilant Trustees who will visit classrooms, study syllabi, and require systematic reporting of academic quality measures. Trustees are empowered and uniquely equipped to do this. It is simply a matter of will. TOWARD A SOUND by Candace de Russy, Ph.D., SUNY Trustee Remarks at the ATHENA Roundtable, sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (February 16, 2001, Washington, D.C.) Hearing Chester Finn talk about the way this country prepares teachers reminds me of Einstein’s definition of insanity – something to the effect of applying the same failed formula over and over again and expecting intelligent results. And so it goes with teacher-education colleges. For more than a generation they have miseduated prospective teachers, many of whom have in turn gone on to mis-educate their students. Miseducation in, miseducation out. The teaching profession is now in such ill repute that it no longer surprises us to hear of soon-to-be math teachers in Pennsylvania unable to answer 5th grade-level math questions (an example recently cited by State Education Secretary Eugene Hitchcock). Higher education trustees can break this senseless cycle of mis-education by taking a hard look at the performance of their education programs and aggressively reforming them. The SUNY leadership – I refer to the board and a systemwide advisory council created by Provost Peter Salins – is scrutinizing its own 15 teaching colleges. Although this is very much a work in progress, I can relate the policy issues now on the table and the tenor of the debate surrounding them. (My own role in this process, I might add, has been greatly facilitated by consultation with Michael Poliakoff, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. My thanks to you, Michael.) First and foremost, there is consensus in the SUNY ranks that strengthening our teaching colleges depends on obtaining data about their standards and performance. Now given the astonishing lack of such data, it follows – and is generally acknowledged – that we must have a research plan. It is this plan that remains to be defined. Of course this initiative could be placed under the control of those educational constituencies in whose interest it is to demonstrate that they are already performing well, but then we know what would happen. Instead, to obtain truly objective, credible data, this research should be conducted from outside SUNY by researchers independent of the teacher training establishment. Specifically, the Board and Provost should exercise their hiring authority to contract with an outside reviewer who can help design and implement a robust research plan, and this reviewer should be answerable to the board. Only in this way can SUNY, a public system, ensure what has come to be known as "transparency." Secondly, it is now universally accepted that the teachers we educate should have high proficiency in the subjects they will teach. Prospective secondary education teachers will be required to major in the content area they teach. Our graduates who become high-school teachers of math, for example, will no longer have majored in sociology. Moreover, there seems to be agreement that all the more rigorous requirements that apply to non-education arts and sciences majors must also apply to education students. Beyond this, however, there is need for more deliberation on our curricular policy for prospective elementary and middle school teachers. Whereas it may be appropriate for these students to pursue integrated majors or concentrations, we must also ensure that these too are academically rigorous. Elementary education majors should take mathematics and science courses side-by-side with BA/BS majors. There should be no more courses with titles such as "Mathematics for Elementary School Majors" (which is to be found in the Penn State catalogue). On these points I am pressing for stronger (more precise and binding) language pertaining to curriculum structure, rigorous testing, and the like. A similar outstanding issue concerns language to ensure that education master’s and joint (that is, combined BA/Master’s) degrees at SUNY are also content-based. This is a crucial point. In the countries – and it is a long list – that outperform American students, from Slovenia to Korea, a higher percentage of teachers have in-depth training in the subject matter they teach than is the case in the United States. Their teachers – as you here well know – do not have degrees in education. In short, we must put an end to diluted studies in the arts and sciences for future educators. In the words of Will Rogers – whom Michael is fond of quoting – "You can’t teach what you don’t know." Third – and this in one of the thornier issues – SUNY’s policy should at the least specify that a range of pedagogies be taught. The word "war" has with good reason been used to describe this problem, that is, the teaching methods that hold sway today in our education schools. The most fashionable of these pedagogies (for example, peer teaching and education geared to self-esteem) have not been demonstrated to enhance student learning, and such pedagogy that has been shown to be effective (such as systematic phonics instruction or direct instruction) is scorned by many education schools. Clearly, absolutism about teaching methods is indefensible. Equally clearly, we must no longer permit children to be the victims of faddish methods. (I commend to you, by the way, Sandy Stotsky’s book on this subject.) How can this be achieved? Here some innovative thinking is required: some way must be found to tie financial resources received by education schools to the demonstration, in their hiring practices, of methodological breadth and of an associated concern for outcome evaluation. At the same time SUNY itself should strive to establish a common examination system for graduates of its separate education schools, so that the quality of outcomes of these schools themselves can be gauged, and SUNY can reap some of the benefits of competition. Fourth, at SUNY there is consensus about the need to assure excellent, well-supervised clinical training for student and other pre-service teachers. Teachers in the field report student teaching to have been the most valuable part of their pedagogical training. But what is being recommended to date is the use of full-time faculty to supervise this clinical experience. To this I have responded that the board must seek data on the cost-effectiveness of this initiative. We should also explore what will surely be a controversial idea (which Sandy has drawn to my attention), that is, the contracting out of this pre-service training to an independent source of well-trained classroom supervisors. Fifth, it is agreed that, in face of a possible teacher shortage, we must provide alternative programs for "career changers," that is, mature professionals without traditional teaching preparation. What remains to be decided is what kind and amount of preparation SUNY should require of these "career changers." Ideally, of course, they should not be loaded down with excessive requirements. A post-doctoral biochemist considering becoming a high school biology teacher, for instance, would likely be deterred by an alternate program consisting of two summers of intense methodological courses taught by a bunch of failed sociologists. Such streamlined, successful programs exist in Connecticut and Massachusetts. At the same time, however, trustees such as we at SUNY must not allow "career changers" to be judged according to low standards. Let us be wary, for example, of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which tells its evaluators to ignore candidates’ errors in spelling and grammar. Let us think of using the machinery of "testing out" in this connection (but then only after we have instituted real system-wide independently graded tests). Sixth, regarding the accreditation of our education colleges, there is at least in principle agreement that they should be encouraged to choose to be affiliated with an accreditation body with rigorous standards. (These colleges traditionally decide this matter on their own, choosing from options statutorily provided to them by New York State.) We anticipate that the state itself will provide strong, mandatory accreditation standards (in what it has titled the "Regents Accreditation Option") that would help make our programs truly accountable for teacher quality. Trustees should encourage their colleges to elect such rigorous accreditation arrangements. At the same time they should dissuade these colleges from electing to be accredited by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), which is widely charged with being a poor custodian of teacher quality. Economist Michael Podgursky has documented very poor certification exam results in a number of NCATE-approved institutions. Seventh, SUNY is rightfully committed to encouraging our education colleges to recruit candidates in high need academic areas and for high need geographical areas, especially our cities. It follows that we should support incentives for teachers who, for example, seek to teach mathematics and science, disciplines that show a shortage of qualified teachers, and who choose to teach in schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Reforms such as these would restore good sense to teacher preparation. Pro-active trustees are needed to lead this reformation. ACTA can help by informing trustees on this issue and stirring them to action. Together we can break the cycle of miseducation that Einstein would have called insane – a cycle that has made American schools a laughing stock in Korea. TEACHER MERIT-PAY: A "LOOSE-TIGHT" PLAN The current hot debate about teacher pay in New York City has revealed the education establishment’s worst nightmare. What it dreads most is for the public to catch on to the connection between good teaching and student success. As this self-evident but revolutionary insight dawns on people, they will demand a merit-pay system with teeth – one that holds teachers to account for student learning. To head off support for such accountability, Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, is falsely claiming that evaluating teacher performance in light of student achievement is too mysterious a process to measure; therefore, she would have us believe, merit plans should not be performance-based. This self-serving piece of disinformation has surfaced as part of her attack against Mayor Giuliani’s bold plan to make merit pay for teachers the sole basis for raises. The UFT’s own pie-in-the-sky version of merit pay also begs the question of student needs and outcomes. The merit "differentials" it advocates for city teachers, consisting of financial rewards on top of significant hikes in base pay, are conveniently divorced from classroom results. Nor does student achievement figure in the union’s demand for more layers of professional certification boards, which would decide who is or is not a "master teacher" and thus deserving of merit pay, and which typically are not known for rigorous standards. To whip up a sense of urgency about raising salaries and adopting toothless incentives, Ms. Weingarten and her allies have been simultaneously wailing – as if on cue – about the "huge crisis" at hand if the teacher shortage is not filled. Joining this chorus have been interim Chancellor Harold Levy and deputy Chancellor Harry Spence, who did seem to get the irony of Ms. Weingarten’s warning that education would be "in jeopardy" without massive new hiring and financial lures. (City schools of course have long passed the point of mere jeopardy. Absent a merit-pay system geared to results, no amount of new hires and money will reverse their deterioration.) The perversity of this latest gambit by champions of the status quo is striking. Who among us would choose a heart surgeon without calculating his or her actual success in mending hearts? Who would even select a deodorant just because it is given a stamp of approval by a claque of deodorant providers? Should not such minimal common sense all the more apply to evaluating and rewarding those entrusted with educating our children? Fortunately, voices of common sense are also beginning to be heard. For example, in a report titled The Quest For Better Teachers: Grading the States, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (based in Washington, D.C.) encourages the states to empower school-level administrators to make personnel decisions bearing on teachers and to end pay scales based on seniority rather than performance. Schools then should pay outstanding teachers more and create sanctions for poor teaching. Teacher performance, the report adds, should be based primarily on measures of student achievement on solid standards-based tests. Contrary to Ms. Weingarten’s assertion, how much individual teachers contribute to student learning can be determined. Indeed, a method for making such a determination has been created by William Sanders of the University of Tennessee. A similar point of view has recently received a hearing at the State University of New York. A study on teacher preparation by SUNY’s Rockefeller Institute (commissioned by the University’s Provost, Peter Salins, and vetted by the Board’s Academic Standards Committee) favors a "results-based" strategy for teaching. It also approves of a "deregulatory" approach involving less heavy-handed teacher-certification procedures. This so-called "loose-tight" plan to improve teaching ("loose" when it comes to government regulation, "tight" with respect to performance standards and rewards) strikes at the heart of union-dominated education politics. As results-based teaching tightens up our schools, it will inevitably loosen up union control. Better sooner than later. Candace de Russy, Ph.D., is a Trustee of the State University of New York. She chairs the Board’s Academic Standards Committee. January, 2000 School Choice (AN ADDRESS AT MANHATTANVILLE
COLLEGE, PURCHASE, NY - 5/31/97) LAMAR ALEXANDER ONCE SAID THAT "THE LACK OF SCHOOL CHOICE IS THE BERLIN WALL OF DOMESTIC SOCIAL POLICY." WELL, THANKS TO CHARTER SCHOOLS AND OTHER BOLD EXPERIMENTS IN SCHOOL CHOICE, THAT WALL IS TUMBLING DOWN - AT LONG LAST. FORTUNATELY, MORE PEOPLE NOW SEE THAT THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM IS A MONOPOLY - A LARGELY UNACCOUNTABLE MONOPOLY. FEWER OF US ARE WILLING TO TURN OUR BACKS ON THE MANY CHILDREN - ABOVE ALL, POORER CHILDREN - WHOM THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE FAILING. AND, TO ESCAPE FAILING SCHOOLS, MORE AND MORE PARENTS ARE DEMANDING SCHOOL CHOICE. IN NEW YORK CITY THERE WAS RECENTLY A STARTLING EXAMPLE OF THIS PENT-UP DEMAND. PRIVATE DONORS MADE AN OFFER OF 1300 PRIVATE-SCHOOL SCHOLARSHIPS TO POORER FAMILIES. THE RESPONSE WAS OVERWHELMING: CLOSE TO 23,000 FAMILIES APPLIED. NOW THE CHARTER SCHOOL IS ONE AMONG SEVERAL CURRENT INNOVATIONS IN SCHOOL CHOICE. OTHERS INCLUDE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE VOUCHERS, TUITION TAX CREDITS, AND HOME SCHOOLING. AS FOR CHARTERS, THEY ARE FLOURISHING. IN 1992 THERE WAS ONE LONE CHARTER SCHOOL - IN MINNESOTA. LAST YEAR, THERE WERE 480 ACROSS TWO DOZEN STATES. MOREOVER, MOST OF THE EXISTNG CHARTER SCHOOLS HAVE WAITING LISTS. HERE IN NEW YORK STATE, HOWEVER, IF GOVERNOR PATAKI’S CHARTER PROPOSAL OF LAST WEDNESDAY IS ADOPTED, THERE MAY BE NO WAITING LISTS. THIS IS BECAUSE THE GOVERNOR’S PROPOSAL SETS NO LIMITS ON THE NUMBERS OF POSSIBLE CHARTERS. JUST WHAT ARE CHARTER SCHOOLS? TO BEGIN WITH, THEY ARE PUBLIC. THAT IS, THEY ARE TAXPAYER-SUPPORTED SCHOOLS. HOWEVER, THEY ARE ORGANIZED BY TEACHERS (SUCH AS OUR COLLEAGUE HERE, ELAINE YOUNG), PARENTS, FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES, COLLEGES AND OTHER GROUPS. AS A MATTER OF FACT, AS ONE CHARTER-SCHOOL HEADMASTER REMARKED, SOME CHARTERS HAVE EVEN BEEN "STARTED AROUND KITCHEN TABLES." AND HOW DO CHARTERS WORK? THEY MUST BE, FIRST, AUTHORIZED BY THE STATE. SECONDLY, STUDENTS APPLYING TO THEM ARE SELECTED AT RANDOM AMONG THE POOL OF APPLICANTS. AND, THIRD, A SCHOOL DISTRICT THEN ALLOCATES THE FULL COST OF THESE STUDENTS’ TUITION TO THE CHARTERS CHOSEN BY STUDENTS. BUT HOW ARE CHARTER SCHOOLS HELD TO ACCOUNT? IN EFFECT THEY MAKE A COMPACT WITH THEIR LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS - A COMPACT BASED ON RESUTS. WHICH IS TO SAY, IF THEY DO NOT DELIVER A CERTAIN LEVEL OF ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE, THE STATES MAY REVOKE THEIR CHARTERS. AND MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT. CHARTERS CAN FAIL. INDEED, IN MY VIEW, THEY WILL FAIL IF, AS MANY PUBLIC SCHOOLS NOW DO, THEY 1) NEGLECT THE ACADEMIC "BASICS," 2) ARE UNSUCCESSFUL IN UPHOLDING FUNDAMENTAL DISCIPLINE, AND 3) FAIL TO NURTURE MORAL CHARACTER. BUT, TO CONTINUE. THE DEFINING FEATURE OF CHARTER SCHOOLS - THEIR SINE QUA NON - IS FREEDOM FROM EXCESSIVE GOVERNMENT REGULATION - FREEDOM FROM BURDENSOME BUREAUCRATIC MANDATES. THUS THE ONLY MANDATES CHARTERS SHOULD HAVE TO COMPLY WITH RELATE TO SAFETY, HEALTH AND NON-DISCRIMINATION. THIS FREEDOM IS ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL. THE MORE FREE CHARTERS ARE FROM STIFLING REGULATION, THE MORE LIKELY THEY ARE TO SUCCEED. ONE EXAMPLE OF SUCH FREEDOM CONCERNS TEACHER HIRING AT A SUCCESSFUL CHARTER SCHOOL IN SAN DIEGO. THERE TEACHERS ARE NOT BOUND BY THE USUAL UNION RULES. THEY HAVE NEITHER SENIORITY NOR TENURE. INSTEAD THEY ARE RETAINED ON THE BASIS OF HOW WELL THEIR STUDENTS PERFORM. NOW, YOU MIGHT ASK, HOW CAN WE GUARANTEE CHARTERS’ FREEDOM FROM ONEROUS REGULATION? HERE - AND I TREAD ON MY FRIEND PETER MURPHY’S TERRITORY - IT IS CRUCIAL THAT STATE LAWS SETTING UP CHARTERS EXPLICITLY PROVIDE FOR, AND SPELL OUT, THEIR INDEPENDENCE. FINALLY, IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE THAT SOME PUBLIC SCHOOL UNIONS AND OTHER SPECIAL INTERESTS ADAMANTLY OPPOSE CHARTER SCHOOLS. AND UNDERSTANDABLY SO: UNTIL CHARTERS CAME ALONG, THE ONLY COMPETITION THESE VESTED INTERESTS FACED WAS FROM RELATIVELY EXPENSIVE PRIVATE SCHOOLS. ALSO, THERE ARE THOSE WHO OPPOSE CHARTERS FOR FEAR THEY WILL PAVE THE WAY FOR EVEN MORE RADICAL SCHOOL CHOICE - CHOICE IN THE FORM OF VOUCHERS ISSUED DIRECTLY TO STUDENTS, NOT SCHOOLS. SUCH FEARS ARE IRONIC. AND WHY? BECAUSE GIVING PARENTS FREEDOM TO CHOOSE WHERE AND HOW TO EDUCATE THEIR CHILDREN WILL SET OFF A BENEFICIAL CHAIN REACTION. POORLY PERFORMING PUBLIC SCHOOLS WILL BE FORCED TO RAISE STANDARDS SO AS TO HOLD ON TO THEIR STUDENTS. THUS PUBLIC SCHOOLS WILL ONCE AGAIN OPERATE FOR THE BENEFIT OF STUDENTS AND THEIR FAMILIES RATHER THAN FOR THE EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENT. MORE SIMPLY STATED, THE SCHOOL CHOICE MOVEMENT WILL SAVE THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. I THEREFORE URGE YOU TO SUPPORT CHARTERS AND OTHER FORMS OF SCHOOL CHOICE. IT IS NO EXAGERRATION TO SAY THAT THE EDUCATION OF THIS AND FUTURE GENERATIONS OF AMERICANS HANGS IN THE BALANCE. AFTER ALL, EDUCATION IS, AS C.S. LEWIS HAS SO ELOQUENTLY PUT IT, NO LESS THAN THE PRECIOUS "SOUL OF A SOCIETY AS IT PASSES FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER." AND IT FALLS OF COURSE TO US - EACH OF US - TO ENSURE THIS PASSAGE. THE BENEFITS OF AN HONORS CHARTER COLLEGE October 23, 2000 Remarks by Candace de Russy, Ph.D., SUNY Trusteeat a conference of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education New York City I have been a strong supporter of charter schools at the elementary and secondary levels. Our board’s leading role in approving charter schools is one of the most significant responsibilities we bear. As a result of that experience, we have seen up close the benefits of the charter concept – academic innovation, true budgetary autonomy, and much higher levels of accountability. We have tried to move in the same direction since the adoption in 1998 of Rethinking SUNY: setting broad academic standards (in our case, general education standards), but giving campuses much greater autonomy over the own affairs. The replacement of the University’s archaic Resource Allocation Methodology, known as RAM, with a new simpler funding method based more on performance is an example of the new direction we have set. But we should be honest, and I think the campus presidents here today would agree with me, that much, much more needs to be done to make them simultaneously more free and more accountable. What would a SUNY charter college look like? Well, it could take many forms:
With respect to SUNY, the "charter" that the charter college would receive would – as with K-12 charters – be issued by the State University Board of Trustees. The charter would stipulate a number of performance outcomes (say graduation rates, or student results on tests of their knowledge and skills), and commit the University to providing either per pupil funding or a flat amount of money. The length of the charter could be anywhere from 5 to 10 years, with the State University having the authority to revoke the charter if the charter college did not meet the performance standards it promised in the charter. The charter application would outline the academic vision of the proposers, just as with a K-12 charter school. If the proposers:
then, they would receive a charter to open their proposed charter college. As my fellow trustees and I think through this concept, we would be very interested in draft proposals from faculty, students, and campus presidents on how they would suggest moving forward with charter colleges in general and how they might implement a specific charter college. Personally, I am very interested in proposals that use the charter college concept to start a new "honors liberal-arts college." The honors college I favor – perhaps along the model of St. John’s Annapolis or St. John’s Santa Fe – would help restore to undergraduate education at SUNY a sense of high purpose by providing a broad and rigorous liberal arts education second to none. As its student body, this charter college would draw the top students from across our great state – without regard to ability to pay. Any top student who met the grade would be able to attend, regardless of the income of his or her family. I suspect that such a college would help us encourage top students to stay within New York and also become a magnet for private philanthropy. In my view, much of higher education has become
too vocational and narrow. Thus the curriculum of this honors charter
college would include the intensive study of the Great Books of Western
Civilization, and also some of the Great Books of Eastern Civilization –
as is the case at St. John’s Santa Fe. (Presentation in a debate on education reform sponsored by the Young Republicans’ Club, New York City, 4/27/00) Public education is not cracked but broken. The current government-monopoly system should be replaced by a choice-based system. This new system would foster accountability and fuel public-education reform. All schools should be held to account for clear academic results, that is, demonstrable student achievement. Inadequate spending is not the cause of broken schools. The United States spends more than 8.2 percent of its gross domestic product on education – a total of $664 billion. While per-pupil spending in schools over the last two decades has increased nearly 100 percent after inflation, pupil performance has deteriorated and stagnated. And what are the people getting back for these ballooning costs? Nearly 40 percent of all the nation’s 4th graders read below the basic level on national reading tests. 58 percent of low-income 4th graders cannot read at all. 67 percent of low-income inner city 8th graders cannot meet basic math standards. On international tests, the nation’s 12th graders rank last in advanced physics compared with students in 18 other countries. Fully one-third of all incoming freshmen have to enroll in a remedial reading, writing, or mathematics class before taking regular courses. The conclusion of the now historic 1983 study, A Nation At Risk, holds true today – and I quote: "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people." But the education establishment obdurately resists change. This resistance stems from the government control of schools. Led by the teacher unions, this monopoly has forgotten that children are its reason for being; it now permits its own needs to take precedence over the needs of children. School boards, and the many political leaders dependent on union campaign contributions, have done a poor job challenging this monopoly. This backward, self-serving system must give way to one that encourages a multitude of providers. The current experiments in vouchers, charter schools, tuition savings accounts, tuition tax credits, and for-profit education – all are auspicious signs that the monopoly is breaking down. A choice-based education system will expand educational options for families by empowering parents. Parents, not government, have primary responsibility for and authority over their children’s education. To judge by the great popularity of charter schools, for example, parents are eager to exercise this prerogative. Seven out of ten of the now approximately 1700 charter schools nationwide have waiting lists. As for the demand for scholarships, the Children’s Scholarship Fund claims that 1.25 million low-income parents would attend a private or religious school if given a choice. Moreover, a poll taken in 1999 by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies shows support for school choice among African-Americans at an all-time high of 60 percent. A choice-based system will expand employment opportunities for and reward good teachers, who are under-appreciated and underpaid by the current monopoly. A new group of teacher-activists – the Teachers’ Advisory Board to the Children’s Scholarship Fund – has endorsed the school choice movement. A choice-based system will also drive public-education reform by spurring competition among schools. There will be a free flow of ideas within the new education marketplace, and the best approaches to learning and teaching will have a chance to flourish. Indeed choice-based education has much to do with freedom – the freedom of parents to choose a school that best serves the needs of their children, and the freedom of teachers and administrators to educate unburdened by the dead weight of federal and state controls. Washington now administers over 760 largely ineffective programs that intrude upon the control of schools by localities and states. Having cost the taxpayer more than $150 billion, these one-size-fits-all programs show little if any correlation with high academic results. According to seven major national studies, the federal government has largely failed in its principal goal of closing the achievement gap for disadvantaged students. So it is time for devolution. It is time for Washington to grant more fiscal and legal autonomy to the states. The states in turn should decrease centralized control and empower local school principals to make the decisions affecting their schools. Principals and other appropriate school leaders should have complete authority over personnel decisions affecting teachers. School leaders should be able to remove incompetent teachers at reasonable cost and within a reasonable period | ||