Why Teachers Can’t Teach
Because they don’t know anything. Teacher education is a massive fraud. It drives out dedicated people, rewards incompetence, and wastes millions of dollars. Our taxes pay for it all, but our children pay the real price.
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Most education majors come from lower-middle- or low-income backgrounds and often from families in which they are the first generation to attend college. I mean no condescension here: I am such a person myself. Those are the facts. Another fact is that entrance requirements at the schools that prepare the largest number of teachers are quite low. To matriculate at Southwest Texas State, for example, one need only to graduate from high school and score 13 on the ACT (American College Testing Program) test, a figure corresponding roughly to a 750 combined score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)—far below the average of all high school seniors, and ranking in about the 35th percentile nationally. Anyone who still can’t meet what are loosely called the “standards” may attend junior college and transfer to Southwest Texas or any public four-year college after two years of maintaining a C average.
A statistical profile of the Southwest Texas freshman class of 1977 shows that entering freshmen who declared education as their major had the lowest mean test scores of any entering group. Their ACT scores corresponded roughly to an SAT score of 825—still quite below the national average. Reasonable people disagree about whether the ACT and SAT tests measure intelligence or achievement; they probably measure a little of both. What nobody denies is that they are good predictors of academic success.
It is easy to say that higher scores and better grades should be required, but the situation is more complicated: many educators believe we are headed within a decade for the worst teacher shortage since the early sixties, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. Short of unforeseeable and quite unlikely changes in the relative economics of the teaching profession, such a tightening of entrance requirements would eventually be self-defeating.
But one needn’t be a Phi Beta Kappa to teach elementary school, nor a Rhodes scholar to do an adequate job in a high school classroom. Persons of normal intelligence who have had halfway-decent schooling to which they have applied themselves at all should have nothing to fear from such a test as the Wesman and ought to be able to produce a paragraph free of barbarisms. Unfortunately, most college education programs are even less rigorous than the entrance standards. A recent study at the University of Houston reported that during the spring semester of 1977, the secondary education department awarded A’s to 76.5 per cent of the students in its courses. Another 13.5 per cent received B’s, 1.4 per cent C’s, and the rest were incompletes or withdrawals. No grades of D or F were recorded the entire semester. To show the direction things on campus are headed, in 1966 the grade breakdown for the same department was 23 per cent A’s, 46 per cent B’s, and 22 per cent C’s—not exactly rigorous, but at least defensible.
Think that’s an isolated case? Then compare elementary education for the same 1977 semester: 70 per cent A’s, 23 per cent B’s, 3 per cent C’s. But wait: there was one D handed out. (One hesitates to think what that poor solitary kid must have done to deserve such ignominy.) Nobody failed. Nobody failed. Not one student in elementary or secondary education was too dumb or too lazy to pass. Nobody failed to show up for an exam, nobody failed to hand in his work, nobody just up and disappeared without a trace. Maybe this was a particularly worthy crop of aspiring teachers; maybe they will emerge to reverse the decline of learning in the public schools. But I think I am justified in being skeptical. Nor is there any reason at all to believe the University of Houston is more lax than other schools; it merely had the courage to gather and release the data.
What is the cause of grade inflation? It is simple: all public colleges, and all their divisions and departments, get their operating budgets from the state according to formulas based almost entirely upon the number of students enrolled. Is it any wonder that elementary-education students at Southwest Texas State are allowed no electives whatsoever in four years? The departments get more money by getting bigger, less many by getting smaller. Sufficient shrinkage can lead to loss of jobs. In this atmosphere, academic rigor that caused students to drop out or transfer to a less demanding field of study would be a financial liability. Grade inflation is built into the system; it is a matter of survival.
This is also the key to understanding the puffed-wheat curriculum and the self-perpetuating nature of the Educationist empire. Consider the following examples selected from among the 361 separate education courses listed in the catalog at Southwest Texas. There it is possible to earn three hours of college credit by taking “Materials for Rhythmical Activities,” “Administering Leisure Delivery Systems,” “Motorcycle Safety and Rider Education,” or my personal favorite, a graduate course called “Administration and Supervision of Driver Education.” School administrators are drawn almost entirely from the ranks of true believers or hypocrites who will sit in such courses placidly taking notes while fools dissect, categorize, and elaborate upon the perfectly obvious. If you don’t believe me, come along to Southwest Texas State University, though stand forewarned that unless you are already quite familiar with what goes on in education departments, much of what you are about to read will seem so far removed from your concept of learning that it will seem a transmission from an alien planet.
I chose to visit Southwest Texas simply because the most teachers are trained there. Among school administrators in Central Texas, where most of its graduates end up, it is regarded as a cut above average, something I had to keep reminding myself as I toured the campus. Walking around on a sunny spring day, I could not help but be struck by the juxtaposition of the institution’s monolithic new architecture—hermetically sealed buildings looking as though they were designed to withstand nuclear attack—and the fact that every inch of unshaded grass was covered with roasting young women in bikinis. Judging from what students told me, maintaining a 2.0, or C, average at SWT, which is what is required for entry into the teacher-certification program, seems to be no harder than at the University of Houston or any of the other schools that produce the vast majority of Texas’ teachers.
The School of Education contains five departments: physical education, industrial arts, psychology, education, and special education. It offers 27 different undergraduate and graduate degrees, most of them with specialized options that make a student’s choices seem almost exponential. It is now possible—indeed, to get certain kinds of jobs it is mandatory—to secure a degree in elementary education with an emphasis in a specialty like geography, though why an adult would need to specialize in order to stay ahead of a class of third-graders is not explained in the catalog. Since identifying the folly of a semester-long graduate driver education course would be no more difficult than finding a drunk in a roadhouse on Saturday night, I decided to stick to undergraduate classes required of everyone hoping to become certified.
Education 3320, “The Elementary School: Principles and Curriculum,” is required for certification and has several sections. The one I attended was team-taught by professors Bob Williamson, director of elementary education at SWT, and Hal Blythe. Both men have doctorates in education administration, and both have been elementary-school teachers and principals.
I asked Blythe whether all, or even the majority, of Southwest Texas State elementary-education majors emerge into their junior-level courses fully literate in basic areas of knowledge. “No, they don’t,” he said, but added, “By the time they get this far, you can hardly do anything about it.” He went on to relate a tale of how, in his first year at the college, he attempted to prevent a student of his who was functionally illiterate from receiving a degree and the automatic teacher certification that goes with it. “Pressure came down from above,” he said, “and I was on the griddle. It turned out that he already had a job.” Blythe gave the clear impression that he had learned a rueful lesson about the realities of academic power and would be quite reluctant to climb onto the griddle again. He did say the continuing certification of incompetent teachers was, in his words, “a cop-out,” but confessed that when the time came to fail or fire those who deserved the fate, “We—and in this case I’m talking about all of us—simply don’t have the guts to do it.” At the same time, however, both he and Williamson spoke with eager concern about the necessity that elementary teachers, especially, have what the two professors call “human-relations skills,” and about their frustrations as former principals with “teachers who could pass paper and pencil tests but who could not relate to people.”
Elementary Education 3320, which has no textbook and seems to require no original written work, is clearly aimed at human-relations, not paper and pencil, skills. On the day I attended, the class of 40 (38 of them young women) was divided into three groups of roughly equal size in a large, open classroom. Two of the groups were seated at large tables taking notes from, or drumming their fingertips to, separate recorded lectures of what I took to be a vaguely inspirational nature. The third group was seated in front of a television monitor watching videotape cassettes of themselves and other members of their group teaching each other various elementary-school lessons. As they watched, they were filling in evaluative forms to be presented to the individual for her private edification. Blythe and Williamson stayed behind them, filling out identical forms and occasionally coming forward to whisper a private note of criticism or encouragement to the student on the screen: face the class, summon students to the blackboard instead of calling for volunteers, involve the quiet students as well as those with their hands always in the air, smile.
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