Education's Iron Triangle

This recent defense of traditional education programs, written by an expert from one such education program, highlights one of the fundamental problems in American education. In the present case, we have Dr. Thomas Brady purporting to offer an impartial and academic analysis of a system in which he and his institution hold a major financial stake. How can we possibly trust education schools to provide reasoned analysis our credentialing system, when it offers the only rationalization for their continued existence?

Though it gets less attention in Intro American Politics than the defense industry does, this dirty little triangle is a major impediment to reform. We have our powerful interest group - teachers unions - our trusted overseers - education schools - and our regulators in federal and state departments of education. Unions send a steady stream of their future members through ed schools, whose programs provide steady cash to their home institutions. These ed schools, in turn, provide intellectual support for a basically indefensible teacher certification system. This certification system, in turn, provides a raison d'etre for our sprawling education bureaucracy. How can anyone connected with this system have real incentive to blow the whistle on its inefficiencies?

Update: Okay, so I'm not the first to use the term for education. Though these folks and I seem to be speaking to different issues.

Why All This Fuss About Teacher Certification?!

This came out a while ago, but it has interesting findings where this blog is concerned. Richard Ingersoll looks at teacher certification and the debates surrounding it. He points out that US teacher certification standards, though aggravating, are actually relatively light compared to both other professions and other countries' certification standards (full text here).

The basic question, according to Ingersoll, is not whether these standards are a problem, but why we care so much about teacher certification standards when lawyers, doctors, social workers and countless other professionals all face similarly burdensome requirements to enter their respective lines of work.

My main answer to Ingersoll is that teacher preparation programs are uniquely bad. Linda Darling Hammond recently put the number of high quality teacher preparation programs at "probably a quarter [of all programs]." Indeed, I have yet to meet a single teacher who has anything positive to say about their time in education classes. Lawyers and doctors certainly face similarly high bars to entering their professions, but their preparatory educational experiences are undeniably more positive.

New York Private School to New York Public School: A Teacher Certification Travesty

There was a time when I was a happy but angst ridden private school teacher. Teaching is teaching and kids are, ever and always, just kids. And so, guilt about the injustice of it all aside, I was quite happy meeting the daily challenge of trying to offer a genuine education. Still, the years passed, and my guilt grew, and I decided that enough was enough - I needed to become a public school teacher.

At this point, I had a BA in History from a top college, four years of successful teaching at an accredited private school, a newly acquired MA in Teaching from Teachers College, and the enthusiastic support of all of my supervisors. So it was with great disappointment that I left my first meeting with the certification specialists at the New York Board of Education, having been informed that I was deficient in several ways:

• I needed 3 more credits in the teaching of reading
• I needed 3 more credits in basic math
• I needed written proof that my MA in teaching was, in fact, related to teaching
• I ALMOST needed 3 credits in music, but I was saved by the recorder lessons I had taken on a lark during my junior year at college
  

I was, like I said, angst ridden in the private school world, and I had gone to the trouble of the Masters. I certainly was not going to let these last obstacles stand in my way. And, so, in addition to the nearly 30K I had shelled out for my masters, I invested in the following:

• Approximately $500 for credits by examination in basic math
• Approximately $500 for credits by examination in basic reading education
• $40 for written evidence of my success, as a high school senior, in BC calculus

And so it was that, after 6 years of higher education, 4 years of successful full-time teaching, and a handful of post-graduate credits at top notch online universities, I found myself worthy, in the eyes of New York State, of a preliminary teaching credential.