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

[tonysam]

A new book is coming out about education and the crisis in values. This long excerpt is about the deprofessionalization of teaching by going after colleges of education. After all, any slob off the street can teach, and good ol' Arne is right out there in the forefront pushing this crap. He's carrying out what the World Bank wants in education:


From part way down this long excerpt:

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.

By espousing empirically based standards as a fix for educational problems, advocates of these measures do more than oversimplify complex issues, they also remove the classroom from larger social, political and economic forces and offer up anti-intellectual and ethically debased technical and punitive solutions to school and classroom problems. In addition, Duncan's insistence on banishing theory from teacher education programs in favor of promoting narrowly defined skills and practices foreshadows the preparation of teachers as a subaltern class who believe that the purpose of education is only to train students to compete successfully in a global economy. This model of teaching being celebrated here is one in which teachers are constructed as clerks and technicians who have no need for a public vision in which to imagine the democratic role and social responsibility that schools, teachers or pedagogy might assume for the world and future they offer to young people. Drew Gilpin Faust, the current president of Harvard University, is right in insisting, "But even as we as a nation have embraced education as critical to economic growth and opportunity, we should remember that , colleges and universities are about a great deal more than measurable utility. Unlike perhaps any other institutions in the world, they embrace the long view and nurture the kind of critical perspectives that look far beyond the present."<8>

Another part:

Given the crucial importance of public school teachers in providing students with the knowledge and imagination they will need to further the ideals, social relations and institutions crucial to an aspiring democracy, the Obama-Duncan view of educational reform must be steadfastly rejected. Many teachers, students, workers, and many others feel an acute sense of betrayal and moral indignation as the social state is dismantled, the moral compact dissolved, politicians scramble to protect the privileged, wealthy and mega corporations are provided with massive bailouts, while the burden for the current economic recession is placed on the working and middle classes. The formative educational culture necessary for creating both critical citizens and a robust democracy is under major attack in the United States. And this is most evident in the assault that Duncan is waging against public schools, teachers and colleges of education. The Obama administration's educational policy appears to favor an education system and a broader cultural apparatus that are utterly commodified, instrumentalized and dominated by private rather than public considerations. Curiously, despite some skepticism regarding market-driven values being expressed by those involved in the financial sector in the United States, debates over education seem to be one of the few places left where neoliberal values are asserting themselves in an entirely unreflective way.

Lots, lots more

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. This guy makes me crazy!

[robinblue]

5. Giroux nails it on the head. Great essay.

[charlesg]

2. The FAA supports airlines, the USDA aids farmers, the DOJ worships cops, while the Dept of Education

badmouths educators

[tonysam]

3. +1,000,000,000 n/t

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. I never thought I'd live to see the day

when pedagogy and child development was no longer important.

Maria Montessori, Piaget and my father (my first education mentor) are spinning in their graves.

[robinblue]

6. I studied these folks in grad school-a grad school with an

early childhood area. Great professors.

[tonysam]

7. Same here

n/t

[proud2BlibKansan]

12. Undergrad for me. They wouldn't let us in a classroom until we had this.

In fact I studied Piaget in high school. His work has had a huge impact on me as a professional. To ignore this and pedagogy now is blasphemous, IMO.

[robinblue]

8. Running Government Like A Business (education)....a post here...

There are links to the stories she sites at the site.




http://susiemadrak.com/?p=2852

Running Government Like A Business

May 26th, 2010 at 11:04 am by susie

I am sick at the privatization of our public schools – and under a Democratic president, no less. Jane Hamsher:

A couple of weeks ago, Dave Dayen wrote about a special tax credit that has been allowing hedge funds to make enormous profits from building charter schools. Which, of course, takes money out of public offers and puts it in the pockets of Wall Street profiteers. Juan Gonzalez has been covering this at the New York Daily news, and as he told Amy Goodman, “The result is, you can put in ten million dollars and in seven years double your money.”

Paul Rosenberg wrote a very good post about the practical and philosophical reasons that underpin the conservative desire to dismantle public education:

1. The attack on public education itself is a prime example of the attack on social democratic ideas and institutions…this serves to discredit public education, take money away from the public education system, and take money and jobs away from public employees and their unions.
2. The siphoning off of certain students into separate learning environments is part of the conservative agenda for inscribing hierarchical differences in society.
3. The creation of lucrative money-making opportunities funnels public money to more wealthy members of society.
4. The creation of private governance structures further strengthens the power of unaccountable conservative elites, weakening democratic control.
5. The private governance structures in turn empower crony networks that can also serve as organizing foundations for further consolidation of conservative power.

The government has set up a series of financial incentives that are loaded in the direction of dismantling public education (as well as the teachers’ unions). The ability of public schools to provide quality education will decrease with additional teacher layoffs, even as hedge funds are financing campaigns for the expansion of charter schools, which they are making a killing from.

The destruction of the public education system has been a long-term ambition of the Heritage Foundation. They are, predictably, opposing the money for teachers’ salaries.

http://susiemadrak.com/?p=2852

[tonysam]

9. And a "Democrat" is implementing it.

It's more a World Bank phenomenon than it is Heritage Foundation, as this is a worldwide trend.

[robinblue]

10. yes, I have lots by Nikalos Rose who writes about neoliberalism

or advanced liberalism (terms mean the same). It has been up and coming since about the 1950's and gets worse each year. Now we have a Dem that supports it.

[tonysam]

11. It's actually Friedmanism as in Milton

Obama, of course, taught at the University of Chicago, which is all I need to know about him.

[robinblue]

13. yes Milton. Rose does analysis of neoliberalism.

[Dinger]

14. Kickin' (nt)