Who Will Teach The Teachers?

Teaching holds as much claim as any other field to the title of the oldest profession, but teacher education – the systematic training of teachers in universities-is relatively new. And for as long as American colleges have offered teacher education, formidable critics have blamed “the educationists” for what author James Koerner called “the miseducation of American teachers.”

Among other charges, schools of education have been accused of wasting students’ time with “Mickey Mouse” courses that require little effort; of focusing far too much on methodology (teaching techniques) at the expense of content; and of drawing teacher candidates from among the least capable students on campus. The sternest critics go so far as to claim that education has no proper subject matter, that teaching is a bag of tricks anyone can learn on the job and that prospective teachers should spend time on the subjects they plan to teach rather than in courses on education. Recently, the National Commission on Excellence in Education repeated some of these charges, adding the shocking assertion that half of newly employed mathematics, science and English teachers aren’t qualified to teach those subjects.

According to a recent in-house survey of more than 6,000 Dallas teachers, the DISD draws one-third of its faculty members from East Texas State University (ETSU) in Commerce and North Texas State University (NTSU) in Denton. The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), Prairie View A&M and SMU prepare another 20 percent of Dallas teachers. Teacher educators at these universities accept some criticisms of their field, reject others and point to efforts on their campuses to deliver better teachers to the public schools than ever before.

“We have the same excellent students we once had,” says Dr. Charles Funkhouser, director of the Center for Professional Teacher Education at UTA. “We just don’t have as many of them.” Funkhouser is disturbed by accusations that teacher-education programs are responsible for the alleged poor quality of teaching in the public schools. “We only give them 18 hours of education courses [for a secondary-education candidate] out of 130 hours of college work,” he says. “How we could possibly destroy the intellectual ability of anyone in 18 hours defies logic.”

Dr. James Williamson, dean of the College of Education at ETSU, concedes that there has been a quality drain among teacher candidates. “All the scores have declined,” he says. “We know we haven’t been getting our share of top-quality students.” But Williamson denies that education courses are by definition “snap” courses. “I could make that same charge about English, history or journalism courses,” he says. “There are atrocities in every field.”

Williamson says that modern education has a substantial knowledge base that prospective teachers need, but that universities lack the “life space” in which to impart that knowledge, since secondary-education candidates are required to take only 18 hours of education (12 hours of classroom courses and six hours of student teaching).

At NTSU, Dean of Education Dr. James Muro says that teacher educators must shoulder the blame for some deficiencies in their product, but not for all: “If we have a teacher who’s a poor disciplinarian-who knows nothing about classroom management – that’s our fault. If a teacher uses a poor approach in the classroom or knows nothing about testing, that’s our fault. But if teachers don’t know math or English, that’s not our fault. We don’t teach pure math or pure English courses in the College of Education.”

Formal teacher training is only one factor that goes into the failure or success of a teacher, according to Dr. Clifton Harris, director of the Office of Teacher Education at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). “We’re the preparing agent for the beginning teacher, so it’s assumed that if we prepare them well, they teach well,” Harris says. “But we don’t have control over the conditions under which they teach.” Harris says that many chefs stir the educational broth, including state agencies, the state Legislature, local school boards, teacher and administrator groups and the federal courts. He says that until two years ago, Texas schools labored under some 22 different mandates from the state ordering them to teach career education, patriotism, free enterprise and kindness to animals. “We have overburdened the schools,” Harris says. “In this environment, we couldn’t possibly succeed, and people became highly critical of the teachers.”

UTA’s Funkhouser agrees: “We can give what the National Commission on Excellence wants, but that’s not what the public has been asking for. Read the goals of the DISD or the Arlington schools. You see a lot of talk about preparing kids for jobs and worthy use of leisure time. The state board of education almost added ’parenting’ to all the crap we’re teaching now and shouldn’t be.”

What’s to be done? That question was asked and answered last year by the University of Texas Task Force on Teacher Education, which called for the stiffening of general education requirements for teacher candidates. The task force also recommended that prospective teachers pursue an academic major in their teaching fields (traditionally, elementary-education majors have concentrated on education courses). “Less-than-rigorous” programs in education should be identified and phased out, the task force said.

Feeling the pull of public opinion, the Texas Legislature has taken steps to ensure quality control among future teachers. Beginning in 1984, teacher candidates will take a standardized test of basic skills before entering an education program. By 1986, prospective teachers will have to pass a proficiency test in their teaching fields to gain certification. Presumably, those failing the tests will not receive teacher certification.

Without waiting for the political winds to shift, most Dallas area universities have been quietly working to improve teacher education. SMU, for example, has opted for a quality-over-quantity approach. The graduate program in education has been dropped, and SMU produces fewer teachers now than 10 years ago. But Dr. Dale Davis, director of the Center for Teacher Preparation, says that SMU’s teacher candidates today are superior to many that the school graduated when its education program was larger. In the past, SMU secondary-education students were required to take only 24 hours of course work in their major teaching field; that requirement has been increased to 30 to 36 hours. At ETSU, where 30 percent of all degrees granted are education-related, students must take a teacher-education admissions seminar during their freshman or sophomore years. The course is a “real-world” introduction to job opportunities, professional ethics and professional requirements. “This is a funnel through which all must pass,” says Williamson, adding that many ETSU students change their minds and drop out of the program after taking the seminar.

Prospective teachers at UTD already defy the stereotype of the future teacher as an academic weakling. Last year, UTD’s prospective teachers compiled a 3.25 (B-minus) grade-point average, compared to a 2.98 (C-plus) for students outside education.

Amid the growing political furor over education, it’s easy to forget that teaching begins with ideas born in the quiet of libraries and laboratories. According to Dr. Douglas Brooks, an associate professor of education at UTA, teacher education has been largely ineffective during its brief history because “we weren’t observing successful teachers and making sense out of what they were doing. Instead, we imposed theories on them from studies done outside the classroom.”

Brooks, an educational researcher specializing in teacher effectiveness, says that teacher education tends to lurch from one dominating idea to another. During the late Sixties, Brooks says, the “interactive” model of group dynamics was the rage in education. Teachers were urged to interact with students at all times and to avoid traditional lectures in favor of group discussions. Later, under the influence of behavioral psychologists such as Harvard’s B.F. Skinner (author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity), teachers were told that behavior modification (“be-mod,” in academese) was the long-sought panacea. Behaviorists taught that any behavior not given “positive reinforcement” from the environment would be discarded, so teachers were to ignore student misbehavior in the classroom and wait for the unrewarded student to mend his ways.

“That works in a rat maze because rats aren’t watching each other,” Brooks says. “In the classroom, kids see each other’s bad behavior, and it has a ripple effect on the class.”

Today, Brooks says, teacher education is turning to what he calls an “ecological-structural” model emphasizing classroom management. “It does no good to hold up a visual aid if the kids are throwing things at it,” he says. When Brooks began to study effective teachers in the classroom, he was surprised to find that very few studies had been done on the teacher’s all-important first day with a class.

So Brooks began videotaping new teachers on their first day. He quickly discovered that many of his subjects knew nothing about gaining the respect of a class and creating good working relationships. Now, Brooks tapes new teachers five times during their first month on the job and shows the films to his education classes. His students are often shocked to see teachers completely lose control of their classes during the first week of the semester.

Brooks’ findings have made him skeptical of critics who equate high SAT scores with good teaching. “The business of teaching school effectively requires more than just being precocious in an academic discipline,” he says. “The prospective teacher may have a 97 percentile score on an SAT, but may not have the interpersonal skills needed to function for 183 days with the same children. Patience, for instance, is pretty hard to measure on a test.”

One of the most exciting developments in local teacher education is the NTSU/ Meadows Foundation Excellence in Teaching program, which aims to produce a corps of master teachers to serve Texas schools. The program began with Dean Muro’s attempts to create scholarship programs for teacher candidates. He approached most of the state’s charitable organizations and was politely refused. Then, Sally Lancaster of Dallas’ Meadows Foundation invited Muro to come and talk about his plans. To his surprise, Lancaster asked him to create an ideal teacher-education preparation program.

“My wheels never touched the freeway all the way home,” Muro says. “In essence, she had told me to go home and dream. Nobody tells you that.”

Muro’s dream, coupled with an $850,000 grant from the Meadows Foundation, will bring 38 highly qualified education majors into the NTSU program each year. The future teachers must have a B average on 90 hours of college work before they can enter the program – and that course work must feature a solid liberal-arts core including six hours of Spanish, six hours of college math and courses in logic and science, regardless of a student’s chosen teaching field.

But nothing in the world of education happens overnight. It will take at least two more years for the NTSU/Meadows program to bear fruit. Most of the Meadows students are now sophomores and juniors; they will not begin taking education courses until they are seniors. They will spend a full semester as teacher aides and another full semester as student teachers (currently, the state requires only eight weeks of student teaching). That field experience, Muro hopes, will help the Meadows teachers close one of the largest gaps in academia – that between the theory and the practice of education.

“People coming into education courses don’t usually have the experiential base to know what we’re talking about,” Muro says. “If I’m talking about a kid swearing at a teacher in class, the students have never envisioned that from the other side of the desk. They hear, but they don’t understand.”

The Meadows teachers will combine theory with practice by working in multicultural schools with gifted or handicapped students or with slow learners. They will emerge from the program with a master’s degree in education.

Muro says that none of the Meadows money will be used to supplement faculty salaries or to hire new instructors. Instead, Meadows graduates who choose to teach in Texas will receive $2,000 stipends during their first year of teaching and $1,000 their second year. With the master’s degree and the stipend, a Meadows teacher in Dallas would sign on at $18,000 – not quite what new engineers were making five years ago, but a start.

“This program isn’t going to solve the problem of education in America, but we’re going to have an impact,” Muro says. “We’ll experiment, and we’ll make some mistakes. I don’t have all the answers, but we’re going to give it a try.”