Obama wants better data on teacher preparation programs

[Omaha Steve]

Source: USA Today

Aamer Madhani

WASHINGTON -- President Obama is calling on the Education Department to come up with a plan to overhaul how teacher preparation programs are evaluated.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Obama wants his department to come up with the outlines of a plan by this summer that builds off of successful reporting efforts that are already being used in several states.

Under Obama's timeline, the Education Department will issue new regulations this summer, which will then be open to public comment, before issuing a final rule within the next year.

"At virtually every school I go to, I ask teachers, were they prepared when they entered that school or entered the profession," Duncan said in a call with reporters to preview the president's directive, to be unveiled Friday. "There is often a fair amount of nervous laughter … and sadly, it's often a majority of teachers that say they weren't prepared."

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/25/obama-teacher-preparation-overhaul/8121401/

[theaocp]

1. and thus dies TFA...

RIGHT??? RIGHT??? RIGHT??? RIGHT???

5 FUCKING WEEKS? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??? FOLLOW THE MONEY!

[Nanjing to Seoul]

2. Arne, you told us we scrape the bottom of the barrel for our teachers

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024338994

Go fuck yourself, Arne!

[iemitsu]

3. Leave us alone Obama.

Why don't you provide us with evidence that your Constitutional Law program provided you with a rigorous Ethics course to guide you through your term of public service.

[callous taoboy]

4. He's right: I wasn't prepared for today's draconian system.

I received a masters in curriculum and instruction in 1991 from a program that was based on child-centered, hands-on, REAL learning. During my first 7 years of teaching, before NCLB and the death of creative thinking, the classroom really was a magical, wonderful, inclusive, and sane environment. Back then, the term "developmentally appropriate" was what drove instruction.

Arne Duncan and Race to the Top: The weakest link in the Obama administration.

[iemitsu]

5. No program, worth its salt, would or could prepare prospective teachers

for the conflicting regulations that have been thrust upon the teaching profession since Obama took office.
He is worse than Bush was for education and educators.
If a corporation wants something Obama is there to be sure they get it.
I first noticed the retrograde interference of the feds when the Gates Foundation attempted to take over the schools in my town (during the Bush era). Things have steadily gotten worse.
Before then teaching was fun and student growth was evident. Today school is depressing for both students and teachers

[roody]

6. There is only one way to learn to manage

20 or 30 kids. That is to manage 20 or 30 kids.

[wickerwoman]

23. Yes this.

And it's true about basically any professional job.

In my field, you get a two year masters degree but it takes at least 5 years of on-the-job experience to be at least competent at your job. 7-10 to be good at it. There's no classes you could take to cut down on that 5 year appenticeship period either- you just have to wade out there and try to do it with some supervision and support.

If you ask someone in my field just starting work if their degree prepared them for it, they would also shuffle their feet and mumble. It's not because the formal education component is insufficient. It's that learning continues well into the early years of their career.

[ebbie15644]

7. To me, this is still an attempt to "blame" the teacher

Fine do a better job of preparing teachers, all for that. But when are we going to look at the real problems. School funding formulas, parent involvement, community support, poverty.

[bob27]

8. Teacher preparation courses should be abolished.

And all colleges of education should be closed. Teachers should have a degree in some real subject, e.g., English, math, biology, etc. Then they should go straight to a practicum--in class teacher training.

Any good teacher will tell you that the ed courses they took in college were a complete waste of time. The way you learn to teach is by teaching, with observation and feedback from someone with more experience.

[alp227]

9. Abolish? Not quite.

Big differences in Finnish and Norwegian teacher education

The author, Hilde Wågsås Afdal, found that while teacher education policies in Norway are controlled by politics, Finland leaves the development of teacher education policies to researchers and educators in the academic fields of education and pedagogy.

Norwegian students have underperformed in science subjects for years, compared to students from other highly developed countries. This has resulted in several educational reforms, and improving schools is still high on the political agenda. But in Norway, the policy changes are governed by politicians.

The curriculum committee was also politically appointed, and in both cases the trend is that the decisions are largely made by politicians who are advised by individuals with lofty positions in higher education, such as department deans, and while many have strong research expertise, few are directly involved in teacher education.

This results in a large gap between policy makers and academics who work in the field of teacher education and who are, arguably, the people who know best about what actually works in a classroom.

And most of all, let's have teachers get as much training as doctors or lawyers and boom. Improve the profession greatly.

Finnish teachers have also spent more time training as teachers. While most teacher education programmes in Norway last four years, Finns need a special five-year master's degree to teach. Admittance to teaching programmes is also much more competitive in Finland than in Norway, which is reflected in the job's strong social status in Finland.

[bob27]

11. I disagree with almost everything in your post.

You seem to want teacher education to be left to "researchers and educators in the academic fields of education and pedagogy."

That's what we have in America now. The so-called researchers of education and pedagogy have ruined American education. Their questionable pet theories and pre-packaged curricula have made good teaching almost impossible. Many of them have never taught a class or corrected a homework assignment.

At the college and university level, professors are given no teacher training at all. They are put into the classroom and critiqued by their colleagues. The result has been the finest system of higher education on earth.

The same model would improve primary and secondary education. Give teachers a chance to develop their own style with curricula of their own choosing. This would work wonders for teacher morale and teacher performance.

There may be all sorts of reasons why Finnish students perform better on the international standardized tests. For example, it's so g-ddam cold in Finland that students may spend most of their time studying.

[alp227]

14. "professors are given no teacher training at all"

Maybe they do, not in the same sense as K-12 educators.

[bob27]

15. I know this for certain.

The only "training" they get is feedback from senior colleagues who visit their classes to evaluate them for contract renewal or tenure.

[alp227]

16. Most professors have doctoral degrees.

A doctorate is a certification that one has the highest level of knowledge of a certain topic, so a doctorate is essentially the "teacher training" for people who teach at a collegiate and above level. Lecturers on the other hand usually have just a master's.

[hsueh-li]

18. No.

Ph.D. students do not get instruction on how to teach, which is the kind of teacher training we are talking about.

[wickerwoman]

21. It depends on the subject.

I got teacher training to be a TA which most PhD students do at some point in the humanities unless they can pay their own way. It's probably less common in disciplines where doctoral students are funded by grant money and don't have a teaching component to their degree.

[hsueh-li]

24. I was a TA, too.

But I never got any advice or training from any faculty member. This was true of all my fellow TAs and all my colleagues ever since grad school. The first visitation to my class by a faculty member was when I already had a job, and was being evaluated for contract renewal, and later, tenure. This all happened in the US.

There is a HUGE difference between working as a TA to learn how to teach by teaching, and taking 30 credits worth of courses in how to teach from education professors.

[wickerwoman]

26. Again, I think it depends on the discipline and possibly also the university.

We had to a take a full semester course that included education theory and curriculum design before we were allowed to TA and then for the first semester we had a mandatory support group to talk about classroom issues and grading.

Before and after that I took some classes from education professors and didn't find the content any different from the prep course offered for TAs.

Again, I think after you learn the basic theory, the only way to get better as a teacher is to teach. The important thing it to have a support network to go to when you have problems and to take continuing ed classes.

I think teaching is an art form and what works for one person won't work for someone else. That's why you need an actual class to trial things out in as opposed to parking your behind in a seat and listening to someone lecture on theory for four years.

[hsueh-li]

28. What field were you in?

[TBF]

17. I have a masters in education -

I can tell you with certainty that the problem in this country is not researchers & educators - it is business people and corporations who (1) want to break the teacher's unions and (2) make money any way they can off education - whether it's by lowering teachers salaries, turning schools into for-profit entities, and/or making money off the testing of students.

Nice try.

[hsueh-li]

19. Congratulations.

The factors you cite--union busting and curriculum profiteering--are a big part of the problem. But so, alas, are the worthless courses in teacher ed.

[TBF]

20. Back so soon?

That may be a record.

[hsueh-li]

25. Sorry, I don't understand.

[Euphoria]

27. Absolutely! n/t

[wickerwoman]

22. You're confusing education researchers

with the textbook and testing industries.

Education professors at universities don't develop pre-packaged curricula.

I agree that a huge part of the problem is deprofessionalisation of teachers but that is a result of education and testing industry pressure on politicians to wade in and tell teachers how to do their jobs by forcing them to teach to pre-packaged curricula and tests provide by the... ding, ding, ding... education and testing industry.

[alp227]

10. by the way, please read this article about colleges of education

Dumbing Down Teachers: Attacking Colleges of Education in the Name of Reform

(Arne) Duncan has expanded the reach of his educational reform policies and is now attempting to rewrite curricular mandates. Emphasizing the practical and experiential, he seeks to gut the critical nature of theory, pedagogy and knowledge taught in colleges of education. This is an important issue to more than just teachers who are denied a voice in curricular development; it also affects whole generations of youth. Such a bold initiative reveals in very clear terms the political project that drives his reforms and what he fears about both public schooling and the teachers who labor in classrooms every day.

Within the last year, Duncan has delivered a number of speeches in which he has both attacked colleges of education and called for alternative routes to teacher certification.[6] According to Duncan, the great sin these colleges have committed in the past few decades is that they have focused too much on theory and not enough on clinical practice; and by theory he means critical pedagogy, or those theories that enable prospective teachers to situate school knowledges, practices and modes of governance within wider critical, historical, social, cultural, economic and political contexts. Duncan wants such colleges to focus on practical methods in order to prepare teachers for an outcome-based education system, which is code for pedagogical methods that are as anti-intellectual as they are politically conservative. This is a pedagogy useful for creating armies of number crunchers, reduced to supervising the administration of standardized tests, but not much more. Reducing pedagogy to the teaching of methods and data-driven performance indicators that allegedly measures scholastic ability and improve student achievement is nothing short of scandalous. Rather than provide the best means for confronting "difficult truths about the inequality of America's political economy," such a pedagogy produces the swindle of "blaming inequalities on individuals and groups with low test scores."[7] This is a pedagogy that sabotages any attempt at self-reflection and quality education, all the while providing an excuse for producing moral comas and a flight from responsibility.

And really, "Any good teacher will tell you that the ed courses they took in college were a complete waste of time"?

[bob27]

12. Well, I read it.

It doesn't really address my point, which you can see in my response to your previous post.

And yes, I have worked closely with teachers at both the primary and secondary level, and all of them have nothing but contempt for the ed courses they took to get their licensure/credential.

[Jefferson23]

13. I can presume this means Mr Duncan won't be replaced. n/t

[Skittles]

29. how about holding the people who start sensless wars accountable?

how about THAT?