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.
(Page 6 of 6)
In order to teach seventh- and eighth-graders to type, for example, one needs to have had a college course in typing. To teach the same subject in the ninth through twelfth grades, one needs to have had that and 24 hours of “business education.” Imagine, if you will, what a college course in typing would consist of. Then try to determine how much shorthand and bookkeeping a person would learn in a full year of “business education.” Why shouldn’t a school district judge for itself whether a prospect types well enough to teach? Included in Bulletin 753 are copies of the forms sent out by the TEA to tell persons applying for “permanent provisional” certificates why they are deficient. A prospective teacher of vocational education may be lacking in any of 25 specific categories, plus “Other.” Besides the required courses in Texas and federal government, some of those specific areas are “Aims and Objectives of Vocational Education,” “Development, Organization, and Use of Instructional Materials,” “History and Principles of Vocational Education,” “Human Relations for Vocational Teachers,” “Methods of Teaching Vocational Subjects,” “Methods and Media for Teaching Vocational Subjects,” “Occupational and Educational Information,” “Group Procedures in Vocational Guidance,” and “Shop and Classroom Organization and Management.” Had enough? Then imagine yourself to be a practical-minded and idealistic youth interested in teaching high school shop.
Such tedious, detailed requirements have two fairly obvious intentions: keeping education professors in work and making sure nobody can take his or her training outside Texas, which amounts to the same thing. A more fiendishly efficient program for insuring mediocrity could not be designed.
What about testing for literacy on a statewide level, as Florida will do, starting next year? Mrs. Magnolia McCullough, who is in charge of the TEA Division of Teacher Certification, did not want me to think she was ducking the hard ones, but she passed me along to her boss, Dr. Jim Kidd, who is in charge of both education and certification. Dr. Kidd is very much aware of the problem of competency. Most of our discussion, though, was a waltz around what I came to call privately the chicken and the egg—the chicken being the what of teacher, the egg being the how. Like all Educationists, however, he prefers talking about eggs to talking about chickens. Current orthodoxy holds that no “paper and pencil test”—a phrase that pops up again and again in talking to Educationists—can determine whether a person will be a good teacher. Now, such a conclusion ought to be obvious. If one could determine a person’s ability to succeed in a pragmatic art by administering a written exam, Howard Cosell would wear a helmet instead of a toupee and play cornerback for the Dallas Cowboys.
But if Howard Cosell thought a touchdown was scored by letting the air out of the football, or that a field goal was worth fourteen points, I think one could safely say his usefulness to the Cowboys would be limited. Yet the Tea does not believe in examining applicants for teacher certification because, as Kidd says, “there has been no progress in testing that can establish any positive connection between success on a test and success as a teacher. . . . We could require a B grade average but I’m not sure that would be valid or even desirable.”
I did not have the University of Houston figures on hand when I spoke to Dr. Kidd, so I was not able to counter properly. After a few trips around the henhouse we did finally agree that there is probably a connection between sheer ignorance and the inability to teach, but when I left his office I did not get the impression that the TEA would be moving forward on teacher licensing exams anytime soon. The truth is that the education departments have long since carried the day, politically speaking, and that the TEA is not about to begin a pecking party it would surely lose. Despite the odd glimmer of hope here and there—the education school at UT-Austin will start examining the competence of students before they enter the major—the system is too far gone to reform itself. Change will have to come from the outside.
Between 1967 and 1972 the TEA required the National Teacher Examination of those who planned to certify, never as a condition of certification, but as a fairly valuable indicator to anybody thinking about hiring a given individual of whether he knew what he was supposed to have learned in college. Like the SAT, GRE (Graduate Record Exams), LSAT (Law School Admission Test), and several other tests of their kind, the National Teacher Examination (NTE) is made up, administered, and scored by the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey, a nonprofit organization that maintains regional offices in Austin. Some educators will tell you, although not for attribution, that the NTE was given up because blacks and Mexican Americans did so poorly on it. TEA officials deny that, insisting that the instrument was dropped solely because no positive correlation could ever be established between the NTE and classroom success.
As it happens, blacks and Mexican Americans as statistical groups do tend to score worse on the NTE, although as was the case with the DISD’s Wesman test, individual members from all groups place from the very highest to the lowest categories. It is a fact of life that blacks and Mexican Americans score lower on all standardized instruments as a result of historical discrimination. But historical discrimination is no reason to exempt contemporary students from basic educational requirements, which, after all, are not really very difficult if insisted upon. More and more blacks and Mexican Americans are rejecting the notion that basic standards constitute cultural bias. They realize that the contention can be a form of self-imposed racism as destructive as bigotry. To use the crutch of cultural bias is to load up the schools with incompetents who cannot teach, are fearful of speaking up for themselves and their students, and who validate white superstitions about minority incapacity. The only incapacity really being protected is the Educationists’. Entrance to other professions—medicine, law, architecture, accountancy—is achieved only after passing licensing exams. Why not teaching?
When other states tried licensing exams, the National Education Association’s response was predictable. It sued South Carolina for using the National Teacher Examination as one of a number of guidelines for approving or disapproving the certification of teachers. Fortunately, the NEA lost: the U.S. Supreme Court rules in January 1978 that the NTE creates classifications on permissible bases—knowledge, skill, and ability—and that they are not used with any intent to discriminate.
The attack on the Educationists’ monopoly over the public schools may have already begun. The recent session of the Texas Legislature restored the pre-John Hill authority to disapprove, as well as approve, college teacher-certification programs. The Legislature also partially heeded teachers’ pleas to give the profession, not the TEA, control over certification; a new advisory board dominated by teachers will in the future make recommendations on certification programs to the TEA’s publicly elected governing board, which still has the final say. Maybe teachers, who covet the status enjoyed by professions like law and medicine, will try to institute licensing tests. Maybe. Experience suggest, however, that they are more likely to seek even more protection than they already have. But Texas teacher organizations have not—as the Classroom Teachers of Dallas’ resistance of the NEA position on competency testing shows—grown as defensive as teacher unions elsewhere. Indeed one of the most articulate and forceful critics of the current setup I spoke to was Harley Hiscox, a full-time organizer for the Dallas Federation of Teachers and an AFL-CIO man all the way. “I taught for twenty years in California and had a life certificate,” Hiscox says, “and I couldn’t get a job anywhere in Texas. I’d have to go back to school for a year at least—full time. I would need the equivalent of another MA. My wife taught fifteen years in Canada and it is taking her a year to certify. The purpose is not to get better teachers, it’s to get more money, more contact hours, and bigger buildings for the colleges.”
The monopoly of the education schools must be broken; there must be other paths to certification. Since teaching is a pragmatic art best learned by experience, school districts should establish apprenticeship programs for people who can satisfy the literacy requirements and show a command of subject matter. This isn’t 1910, when Texas comprised thousands of tiny rural school districts that needed whatever guarantee of teacher quality the education schools could provide; this is modern, urban Texas, and the school districts are much more sensitive to demands for competence than Educationists who pick their way to class through fields of bikinis. The education schools will never improve substantially without competition. Opening up the profession would not only save money that now sustains the Educationists’ empires, but could also help bring into the public schools considerable numbers of persons who chose an education over certification to begin with. It might also go a long way toward restoring the dignity of what is, after all, one of the most decent of professions. Indeed, it is only because there are so many more talented and committed public-school teachers out there than one could possibly expect from the system that produces them—so many who have gritted their teeth and persevered—that one can propose apprenticeship programs over what we have now. Every high school teacher I know at all well, and I know quite a few, would be just as appalled at the goings-on in Education 3330 as I was.
Like all proposals for reform, mine might not work as I envision it. The TEA could subvert literacy standards by setting them so low as to be meaningless. Or salaries could remain so low that schools continue to be outbid for talented people and have to fill slots with whatever they can get.
But I am sure of one thing. We have to do something. I believe in public schools, having never attended any other kind at any level. My elder son attends a black-majority urban public school and his younger brother will join him in the fall. Unless I grow convinced that either or both is suffering irreparable brain atrophy, I intend to keep them there through high school. I do not wish that they consort only with children whose parents can afford private schools and whose skin is the same shade as theirs. I also believe that the very future of American democracy is at stake. An illiterate or semiliterate person in our society is a kind of peasant. Peasants may or may not be happier than tax lawyers, but they cannot make intelligent choices in the world we inhabit. Another generation of the same old thing, and even the most egalitarian advocates of the public schools in Texas will come to feel as just about everybody in New York City who can afford private tuition and many who cannot do: public schools were a nice idea for their time, but not for their children’s.
My Library
