Dear Mr. President-Elect Week 2: On Teacher Preparation

In response to your request for recommendations and feedback regarding your stated plans for programs to be enacted during your presidency, I offer you the second in my series of reflections on your education platform. This week, I have undertaken to examine in detail the implications of your proposals related to the problem of teacher preparation. Though teacher preparation is undeniably a critical factor in ensuring quality education, and though almost certainly improvements could be made to teacher education, the proposals offered by the Obama-Biden platform, as published on your transition website, have very little chance of effecting substantive improvement either specifically to teacher education or public education in general. Your published platform offers these promises for reforming teacher preparation:

Prepare Teachers: Obama and Biden will require all schools of education to be accredited. Obama and Biden will also create a voluntary national performance assessment so we can be sure that every new educator is trained and ready to walk into the classroom and start teaching effectively. Obama and Biden will also create Teacher Residency Programs that will supply 30,000 exceptionally well-prepared recruits to high-need schools.

I will address the accreditation and Residency Program recommendations on another occasion. For this week, I would like to consider in detail the assumptions underlying your idea that a voluntary national performance assessment will increase teacher readiness and ensure that every new educator can start teaching effectively from day one of his or her career. Seen in its worst light, this recommendation implies that a significant number of teachers are not being properly prepared for teaching, that schools of education are certifying as prepared teachers who are not, in fact, prepared, and that the problem is widespread enough that there is a need for a mechanism which will set a higher standard of readiness, allow the government to monitor actual achievement, and give government the authority to ensure that the judgment of readiness is not left in the hands of those professional educators who have, evidently, left to their own devices, been operating unreliable teacher education programs. I don’t, in fact, believe that such a level of distrust in teacher education is warranted; however, even assuming that it were, or taking the recommendation in its best possible light, as an effort to standardize all teacher preparation at a minimum high level of readiness, implementation of a national examination to determine teacher efficacy is fraught with problems that render it useless.

Taking in turn four flawed assumptions implied by the recommendation:

Assumption 1: The preparation of teachers to begin teaching effectively day one of their career can and should be accomplished solely within the confines of the programs provided by schools of education.

Such a goal is fruitless, as much of what needs to be learned in order to be a truly effective teacher can only be learned on the job, and your stated intention in another plank of the platform to provide mentoring to beginning teachers acknowledges this. My statement, as much as yours, of course, depends on the definition of “teaching effectively” as envisioned by each of us. I have no idea what your concept of effective teaching from day one entails, other than that you suggest it is something testable in a concrete way. I could, of course, speculate at length about what you consider to be the set of skills and knowledge requisite for effective teaching, but whatever I guessed would be only that, a guess, and as such not very useful for analysis. A detailed understanding of your concept of effective teaching is not really necessary, however, because whatever your beliefs on the subject, your proposed solution stands very little chance of helping solve the problem, for the simple reason that the assessment of teacher readiness is already part of the function of teacher education programs. Assuming that the skills you intend your national assessment to assess are those quantifiable skills related to content area knowledge, knowledge of pedagogical theory and practice, knowledge of state law governing education, and the demonstration of the possession of a battery of teaching strategies that can be employed in a variety of learning situations, then these skills are already thoroughly assessed by colleges of education through a variety of measures: exams, papers, research projects, student teaching evaluations, portfolios, and so on. Unless you do intend to posit that those programs regularly certify, willy-nilly, teachers who have failed those assessments, or unless you posit, instead, that the schools of education are incapable of accurately identifying and assessing those skills, we have nothing to gain by adding an additional layer of assessment before certifying teachers to teach.

If the problem is the former, then it is possible that a test administered by an external agency would, in fact, uncover fraudulent or incompetent certification practices on the part of teacher preparation programs. I find it extremely difficult to believe, however, that the practice of knowingly certifying unqualified teachers is widespread enough to warrant, in and of itself, national systematic testing intended to counteract it; nor do I believe that many or most teacher education programs are ineffectual. If, however, we do, in fact, believe that a significant number of our teacher education programs suffer from entrenched and systematic ethical violations or rampant incompetence, then the solution is not the implementation of an external assessment, but rather a direct action involving those schools to weed out incompetence and fraud, and to rebuild those programs from the inside. In such a case, leaving inadequate programs intact and counting on a test to catch the unready teachers and weed them out would be unconscionable, if only for the massive waste of time, energy, and resources that would occur if we allowed ensuing classes of students to graduate from mediocre or bad programs, knowing that the test will eventually prove them to be unprepared and thus consign them either back to school or on to another profession.

Frankly, I believe the proposition is absurd. I believe that, just as in our public schools the vast majority of teachers are doing their level best to deliver quality education, in the vast majority of our teacher preparation programs the professors are struggling mightily to ensure that every student learns content, masters skills, and dedicates him or herself to doing a good job. A barrier test will not resolve or eliminate the problems that keep teacher preparation programs from being able to accomplish those goals.

If the problem is not rampant fraud, but rather a matter of the difficulty of determining the degree to which any given teacher candidate has mastered the skills needed to be an effective teacher, then the likelihood of a national test-making agency’s being able to accomplish, working outside of the educational system, what colleges of education have failed to accomplish in the centuries of their existence, seems very small.

If, on the other hand, the set of skills you envision are NOT those skills already being purveyed and assessed by teacher preparation programs, if, instead, the skills you are talking about are those more nebulous abilities to manage classrooms, to establish working relationships with students, and to motivate, then those skills are not likely to be measurable in any quantifiable assessment such as the sort of thing that might be implemented as a national test, which leads me to the next assumption that underlies this proposed solution to our problems of public education:

Assumption 2: We can define and quantify the concept of “effective” teaching sufficiently well that “effectiveness” can be assessed by a concrete assessment.

While there is certainly an identifiable set of skills and knowledge necessary for a teacher to be effective and which should be mastered prior to entering the classroom, truly effective teaching requires a whole complex of abilities derived from experience that cannot be developed by the time a teacher starts teaching—at least not within the existing time frame for teacher preparation. As an English teacher, for instance, I must certainly be able to write well, to interpret literature with insight, and to use language precisely. I must know a considerable amount of content in terms of literary theory, grammatical terminology and function, baseline familiarity with plot, theme, and historical significance of a range of works of literature from a variety of cultures and time periods, and so on. I must also have knowledge of pedagogy for teaching writing and the reading of literature: use of writing workshops, current theory on writing process, strategies for revision, application of narrative theory, critical thinking development, pre-reading strategies, structure of analysis, and so on. I must also have some knowledge of strategies for managing a classroom—effective seating arrangements, strategies for dealing with difficult and non-compliant students, strategies for diffusing confrontation, strategies for communicating with parents and so on. Another set of skills and knowledge involves understanding of legal obligations regarding Special Education students, students with particular health problems, sexual harassment, and child abuse. These skills can be assessed via any of a variety of instruments.

One difficulty, however, for anyone trying to create such an instrument to use as a national assessment of teaching readiness, is determining how much knowledge of this type anyone needs in order to be “effective” from the beginning of his or her career. Another is trying to determine exactly which set of facts, theories, skills and so on are needed. Do I need to know all of Shakespeare’s plays? Or just those I am likely to have to teach? Do I need to know The Canterbury Tales? The Odyssey? The poetry of Derek Walcott, a Caribbean writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1992? The collected works of Richard Powers, the 2006 National Book Award winner? If I know the six steps of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, is that sufficient, or do I need a working knowledge of a critical thinking framework, such as that provided by the Foundation for Critical Thinking, so that I can implement critical thinking strategies as an active part of instruction and assessment? Can I teach effectively right from the start if I am familiar with Cooperative Learning but not with Howard Gardiner’s Multiple Intelligences? In part, the answers to these questions will depend upon what my teaching assignment for that first day actually turns out to be: if I get assigned to teach British Literature, then Shakespeare is more important than Powers, and if I get assigned to a 9^th grade genre study course, then knowledge of the Freytag model of plot structure is likely to be more important than knowledge of the sympathetic, supernatural, and actant functions of setting.

The difficulties of determining which of these skills are necessary for which teachers are legion; a fact which is not suggested by the simplistic statement on the platform.

Assumption 3: A national one-size-fits-all assessment can be designed that will effectively identify those teachers who are ready to be effective from day one and those who are not.

I have shown that the idea that we can develop a single test to ascertain readiness to teach in the whole range of possible teaching assignments is a flawed proposition right from the start; thus, any national assessment would actually have to be a range of assessments, each one designed for a specific working situation—elementary school, high school math, middle school science, and so on. New versions of each test would have to be developed and tested every year, so that test security is not compromised. Implementing a national assessment for teaching readiness would not, therefore, be a matter of a one-time developmental process, but rather the creation of an industry that would be able to develop, field test, administer, and score the assessments on an ongoing basis. The proposed project would actually require something on the scale of an entire new division of the Educational Testing Service.

Those problems of identification and scale are only exacerbated when we try to add to the calculation the less quantifiable skills I mentioned above. Truly effective teaching requires an ability to assert one’s authority without being repressive. Truly effective teaching requires an ability to make accurate assessments about the legitimacy of student complaints, so that one can determine whether one’s requirements are, indeed, unreasonable in some way, or whether, contrariwise, the students’ objections are a sign that the demands being made on them are appropriate, and generating complaints because the students have been pushed out of their comfort zone and into the arena of real learning, which is always difficult and which most students will naturally resist because it’s hard. Truly effective teaching requires a pretty thorough understanding of human psychology, so that the teacher can read her students’ behavior and determine whether the student’s failure to perform is due to a home situation, a learning disability, a lack of understanding about what is required, ineffective preparation from previous classes, or one of any number of other possible causes, so that some determination can be made as to whether a given student will respond better to pushing or to coaxing, to cooperation or to competition, or whether the student needs help from a school psychologist, social worker, or other professional to resolve significant extra-curricular problems before learning can begin to take place.

Truly effective teaching requires that the teacher be alert, insightful, hard-working, endlessly patient, imaginative, patient enough to repeat herself over and over, self-confident enough to be able to put student learning ahead of her own desire to be liked, and the ability to admit when she is wrong so that she can start over again with a new strategy. Students know instantly when a teacher tries to scam them into believing that the teacher knows something she doesn’t actually know, or when the teacher asks her students to do something that she can’t or won’t do herself. A teacher who has shown herself a fraud has no influence on students, regardless of whether she can articulate a cerebral knowledge of facts, figures, theories, and strategies. These personal skills develop over time and only in the context in which they are needed.

This reality is reflected in the existing exemplary model for assessing mastery of the wide range of skills needed for teaching: National Board Certification. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) has already developed sophisticated and broad standards for teacher excellence, and they have implemented a complex assessment procedure to determine which teachers have met those standards. The assessment of effectiveness takes the best part of a year, and involves a range of assessment instruments, including written analyses with supporting documentation of claims, video taped lessons with accompanying analysis, and timed written content examinations. Research has substantiated the correlation between teachers who earn National Board Certification and student achievement; thus, the National Board assessments already function as a successful means of identifying those teachers who are most likely to be effective in the classroom. The NBPTS has implicitly acknowledged that teachers require significant time to learn to function effectively in the classroom before they can possibly establish themselves as master teachers, and teachers are not permitted to undertake these exams until they have taught for three years.

We might extrapolate, then, that if we want to use a sophisticated system similar to the National Board Certification process in order to ensure a high level of teacher effectiveness before the teacher enters the classroom, we must add a three-year full-time apprenticeship to the teacher preparation program. Since the stated objective in the platform is that all teachers are effective from the beginning of their career, then it follows that we would not charge these teachers with full responsibility for a classroom until the end of the three-year apprenticeship, which means that we must pay for a master teacher to bear the full responsibility of the education of the students in the apprentice classrooms. Requiring teachers-in-preparation to extend their education an additional three years, postponing the attainment of full professional status and authority, and possibly even postponing marriage and family until full independence is achieved, would necessitate a correspondent increase in salary. If we are going to demand of teachers the same level of professional preparation and qualification as we demand of doctors, for instance, we must pay them the same as well.

If we are unprepared to do that, and if we cannot expect teachers in preparation to achieve mastery of their craft prior to beginning their teaching career, and I do not see how such an expectation is even remotely reasonable, then we must acknowledge that “effective” teaching happens at a level somewhere below “mastery.” This of course means that we can absolve ourselves of the problems of trying to develop a national assessment that will have the capacity to determine whether prospective teachers have developed these skills to the level that will allow us to call them “masters” from the beginning of their careers, but it also means that we must define “effectiveness,” so far as this recovery strategy is concerned, to mean something less than truly effective, and settle for subject area and pedagogical competency, all of which takes us back to the original point that an additional assessment can provide nothing but the appearance of an effort to raise standards; it cannot in and of itself actually ensure substantive improvement in teacher readiness.

Assumption 4: Since the proposed assessment is voluntary, but the goal is to ensure that “every new educator is trained and ready to walk into the classroom and start teaching effectively,” the assumption is that all teacher candidates will voluntarily participate in the assessment.

Widespread participation in a voluntary assessment might be presumed to occur only if successful completion of the assessment carries with it substantive reward, or if the assessment becomes so powerful that failure to take it, or failure to pass it, becomes a barrier to getting hired. In the former case, we have again the model of National Board Certification as a guide to predicting the likelihood of that happening. In my state, for example, the monetary incentive for achieving National Board Certification is substantial: $30,000 over the ten-year life of the certificate. Despite this, only a relatively small percentage of teachers has so far volunteered to undertake the certification process. As of the 2007-08 school year, for example, 412 Virginia teachers have earned National Board Certification. There are approximately 90,000 full-time teachers in Virginia, so only about half a percent of teachers have earned National Board Certification. Since approximately half of those attempting NBC earn it, we can estimate that approximately 1% of teachers in Virginia have attempted National Board Certification (NBC). The percentage would be higher if we consider those actually eligible, by virtue of having taught for at least three years; nevertheless, it is clear that the cadre of willing participants is small. This is in part due to the cost, which is significant, $2565, and which often must be paid by the candidate.

Taking the NBC model as an indicator, we can forecast that a similarly small percentage of prospective teachers will voluntarily undergo an assessment of their skills, even with the promise of financial reward for achievement at certain levels. This would be true unless the national teacher readiness assessment acquires sufficient prestige that teachers who haven’t taken it cannot get hired. In that case, however, the assessment would be de facto a mandatory assessment, and calling it voluntary would be merely disingenuous. A proposition to implement a mandatory national teacher assessment would bring with it a whole different set of assumptions and problems, none of which it is my intention to address at this time, since such a proposal has not been made.

A claim that the implementation of a national assessment of teaching qualification can ensure that all teachers are effective from their first day on the job is at best an overly simplistic representation of the real situation. My questions for you, therefore, are:

• What skills do you expect teachers to have developed by day one that will qualify them as “effective” right from the beginning?
• What will this assessment need to comprise in order to assess the qualities that you named above? Can those skills be demonstrated in a written test? Or will the assessment need to include a variety of activities in other formats?
• If the test is not merely a written test, but rather includes a demonstration of skills in some format (video-taped lessons, portfolio of lesson plans, interview with teacher candidates, direct observation of candidates and so on), who will develop the standards of assessment, identify and train the examiners, and certify consistent application of those standards to the assessment?
• How will this assessment be scored? Who will score it? Will the judgment of readiness be left to the individual teacher preparation programs which have a stake in finding that their students are qualified? Or will there be some sort of independent body that develops, administers and scores the assessment to ensure lack of bias?
• What will be the effect of the implementation of such an examining system? If it is rigorous enough to ensure actual accomplishment, what percentage of those undertaking it are likely to fail?
• What potential is there for the test actually reducing the number of qualified teachers rather than increasing it? If that potential is realized, what other solutions will be enacted to ensure that a more qualified set of candidates undertakes teacher education so that sufficient people DO pass the test that we can keep our schools supplied with the teachers they need?
• What will the program cost, both for development and implementation of the testing and to the candidates themselves? Who will pay those costs? Is the problem the solution is designed to solve significant enough to warrant that cost?

As described above, we could probably develop a whole series of national tests that would accurately identify whether prospective teachers have developed a set of minimal competencies; however, as we have seen with schools’ efforts to prepare students for minimum competency testing in their efforts to comply with NCLB, when a minimum competency test becomes the driving force in any educational program, it becomes the focus of that program and so, in effect, it becomes the maximum standard of achievement for that program. If we impose a national standards assessment for all teachers and that assessment proves to have the kind of accountability teeth that one assumes you intend it to have, that test will also become the target toward which all teacher preparation programs aim. Since the assessment must be general enough to account for the baseline needs of a variety of educational situations, it will necessarily not reflect nuanced or sophisticated knowledge or skills, which may very well mean that we will find that although we are able to identify teachers who do and do not meet those minimum competencies, we not only do not identify those who can vastly surpass that minimum level, but we will also effectively discourage teacher preparation programs from expending energy on pushing students to develop more specialized and complex skill sets, because the stake in ensuring that their candidates passed that national test would be extremely high.

Implementation of a voluntary national teaching readiness assessment would amount to implementation of a process that mirrors the NCLB requirements for students. The thinking is the same: there is a set of identifiable skills in every arena that can be tested through a single assessment (or a series thereof), and passage of that assessment (or the series) will ensure that the person taking the test has mastered all the skills needed in order to function effectively in the next phase of one’s academic or professional career. The only difference is that you are calling your teacher assessment voluntary, while the student assessments, such as the Virginia Standards of Learning (aptly and ironically known as the SOLs), are mandatory. Even that won’t save the program from sinking under the unwieldy burden of all the same problems students and schools struggle with as a result of the de facto reduction of all schooling into the items on the test; if the assessment you envision is significant enough to force change, it will represent very high stakes for all teacher preparation programs, which will, inevitably, reshape their programs so that their students can pass the test, and the test will in turn inevitably become the driving force for teacher preparation in this country, just as state testing programs under NCLB have become the driving force of public education. No test is sufficient for such a burden.

This point of your education platform dealing with teacher preparation is particularly disappointing in that it compresses of a massively complex undertaking into a statement that glibly suggests that a simple solution awaits. The recommendation appears to be the result of insufficient thoughtful consideration of insufficient information. You and your transition team have garnered much praise for the Obama administration appointments you have made so far. One main reason for the high praise is that, unlike your predecessor, you are making for yourself a reputation of not wanting yes-men, of preferring, instead, to surround yourself with people who will offer you insights and information that you do not already have, so that you can make better informed decisions. I would like to urge you to take care to do the same in your appointments to the Department of Education. Choose, among your appointees, people who do not see the problem of education in this country in the same simplistic light as those who advised you on the development of the education platform for your campaign appear to have done. Choose people who will help you see where your assumptions and understanding are insufficient, and who can, therefore, help you to develop improvements to our educational system that will result in lasting and substantive change.

My letters to you regarding your education platform are published weekly on my blog, and can be read in their entirety there (http://my2sense2008.blogspot.com/).

Respectfully yours & etc.