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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With their locomotive rolling along so well, the Educationists never stop to ask if it might be on the wrong track. Ask them about the problem of literacy and they will either deny that there is a problem or that they have any responsibility for or ability to change it. All those I talked with at Southwest Texas State are sure their graduates could not be among those teachers failing basic literacy tests. No one, however, has tried to find out. In that Southwest Texas is not unique: DISD assistant superintendent John Santillo told me that no one from any teacher-training institution in Texas has contacted him to find out how its graduates have done. Several faculty members in education at SWT professed never to have heard anything about the Dallas or Houston competency tests, which must not only place them among the minority of literate Texas adults but, more to the point, shows how little concern or connection they have with how their theories are faring in the outside world. And no wonder: “You’re talking about my job.”
The self-deception can go to astonishing lengths. In the SWT School of Education’s report to the TEA I learned of a school policy that all prospective teachers must be grounded in “what is [sic] regarded as the basic areas of knowledge.” An accompanying letter from the chairman of the English department, which is responsible for twelve hours of this basic knowledge, assures the TEA that Southwest Texas has “put more emphasis on literate writing for all students who are graduated from the University by helping to reinstate a committee maintained by our faculty senate to caretake writing proficiency.” Passing over the subject-verb agreement problem in the policy statement and the fact that the chairman of the English department employs a verb, “to caretake,” that does not exist in the English language, I decided to go to the English department to see if they thought all SWT graduates were indeed literate.
The watchdog committee so proudly described by the department chairman as insuring the literacy of SWT graduates turns out never to have met. Three separate complaints about any given student are required before action can be considered. Outside the English department, I was told, the odds are that a junior or senior student at Southwest Texas will not encounter three professors who require written work, much less three willing to turn in a student to a faculty committee for inability to do same. In any event, the committee has had no reason to meet, because no one has ever been referred to it.
At the English department I asked Professor Lois Haney, the department’s liaison with the School of Education, how students are able to get through twelve hours of English without ever learning about such arcana as basic punctuation. Her answer was something I had heard before: “It is a matter of self-preservation,” she told me, “not just for the profession as a whole, but for the individual teacher. I’m teaching a methods course for students who will be teaching high school English in a year or two. If I flunked seventy-five to eighty per cent of them, what would happen to my job?”
Haney told me a story about a student whose practice teaching she was assigned to oversee in an area high school. When it came time to prepare a unit on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the young woman found herself in some difficulty, as she had never read so much as a line of Shakespeare in high school or college, and when she tried, found she could not make heads or tails of it. She gave in to tears and changed her career plans, a heartening conclusion, actually. Supervising teachers I spoke to in Dallas told me of protracted conflicts with education professors determined not to allow a mere teacher to prevent their young charges from scoring high on their nine weeks of practice teaching, even when the prospects were so ill-educated that the brighter high school pupils reacted with incredulity and derision.
The Teacher Education and Teacher Certification divisions of the Texas Education Agency occupy two identical examples of file-cabinet architecture located along the Colorado River in South Austin, about a mile from the Capitol. Considering that Texas has been investing in public education since 1854, it is a relatively young agency, created during an overhaul of the Texas school system in 1949. In that year the Legislature abolished the statewide elected office of Superintendent of Public Instruction in a futile attempt to divorce politics from education, and created the TEA to oversee both public schools and teacher education. In theory the agency is charged with making sure the colleges produce teachers capable of transmitting knowledge in a classroom. In practice, the TEA is composed of career Educationists who shuttle between the college education departments, the school districts, and the TEA. In terms of being able, or even wanting, to do very much more about teacher competence than shuffle paper, the TEA might as well be in charge of regulating and keeping track of the genealogy of armadillos. Not only does the buck fail to stop here, it doesn’t even slow down.
A case in point: the TEA is supposed to set the guidelines for, and approve, every teacher-certification program at each of the state’s 63 teacher-training institutions. It uses on-campus visits, interviews, and institutional documents the colleges call “self-evaluations” in its deliberations. But the TEA has never rejected a program and never will.
In fairness to the TEA, its futility is not entirely self-imposed. Back in 1974 the agency was showing some faint stirrings of life before then attorney general John Hill handed down one of the more peculiar rulings to come out of his office. Hill decided that while Texas law clearly allowed the TEA to approve teacher-education and -certification programs, it did not let the TEA disapprove them. I leave the legal merits of Hill’s opinion to learned students of the bar; practically, it left the TEA shorn of power, albeit a power it had never chosen to use. The opinion notwithstanding, I have a hard time envisioning the TEA on a crusade against teacher-certifications programs. Dr. Tom Walker, director of the TEA’s Division of Teacher Education, told me frankly, “As long as you have decision-making in the political arena, political pressure can determine the decision.” Shutting down a college of education would draw the same reaction from the local legislator as shutting down an army base draws from the local congressman—except that the Pentagon packs more clout and once in a while gets its way.
In reality the TEA visitation is an elaborate charade in which the Educationists from the agency visit their soulmates in academia and almost invariably come away agreeing that the only thing wrong with teacher education on any given campus is that further specialization and grander architecture are in order. The TEA visited Southwest Texas State, for example, and presumably could have seen what I saw. It could not, however, have learned anything useful from reading the 1977 Institutional Report to the Texas Education Agency, a two-volume work containing 1037 loosely bound pages of self-praise. I cannot claim to have perused every word of this weighty document, but I have read a good deal more of it than might be believed, and if there is anything wrong at the School of Education that is perceived by the administration or faculty, it does not surface in the text. The TEA likewise sees, hears, and speaks no evil. On a previous visit to Southwest Texas, the TEA found that the School of Education needed not a spanking (or better, dismantling) but a new main building, a new art building, a new student center, a new industrial arts visual aids facility, a new driver-training range (San Marcos streets apparently being inadequate), a new gymnasium, and improvements to the university farm, along with several renovations to existing structures. Total cost: $10 million. No substantive fault was otherwise mentioned by either party to the evaluation.
If the TEA can do nothing to the colleges, you say, perhaps it can see to the competence of individual teachers? Perhaps it can. At this time, however, the TEA does not have that authority and the people in charge do not want it. All graduates are assured Texas certification by law so long as they have completed the specific education courses required. Those requirements are listed in detail in a publication of some 243 8½-by-11-inch pages called—and this will give you some idea—Texas Education Agency Bulletin 753, Guidelines for School Personnel: Certifications, Allocations, and Records, Section I—Certification, Change 2. Inside are the courses and degree plans required to earn certification in the many fields in which it is offered; as you can no doubt guess from its bulk, the matter is complicated to a degree one can only describe as insane. In general, the lower the grade level, the more education courses required. Nobody else on campus can pretend to offer the subjects taught in second grade; the Educationists have expanded into the vacuum. The same expansion has taken place in any area in which the traditional academic departments on campus have no turf to protect.
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