Rita Kramer is a free lance author who wrote Ed School Follies : The Miseducation of America's Teachers in 1991. She has written other books on a wide range of interesting topics. She travelled around the US to see various public and private teacher education schools. Ms. Kramer shared the history, the purpose of education and the rise of high school education since WWII. Her insights were valueable to me as a recently burned out defector.
In her research, she discussed how many teacher training institutions are inferior, spending way too much time on pedagogy and not enough time on practical knowledge acqusition. Ms. Kramer discusses the over-emphasis on politics in decision making choices within school systems. She wanted to find out trends for the future. Keep in mind that the book was published in 1991. She doesn't discuss nepotism in hiring practice. I plan to discuss this in a later blog post.
Kramer's basic premise is that there are too many HS graduates going into teaching that are not knowledgeable enough. Too many colleges accept these students, and they need remediation and the end product of an undergraduate program is a mediocre, unprepared educator.
She advocates for a liberal arts education with a graduate year internship (student teaching with a mentor) followed by a professional ladder and merit pay. She stresses that these are motivating reasons to stay in teaching long term.
The goal to equalize students is unrealistic. Too much time is spent on raising self-concepts and not on learning. I benefitted from knowing this topic is being discussed in educational circles. I would like to see teacher education programs improved and a universal core curriculum introduced nationwide.
Here's another opinion from Washington Monthly 1991 ( author unknown?)
" The Miseducation of America's Teachers. Rita Kramer. Free Press, $22,95.
In New York City's public schools, where I taught fourth grade this past year, every teacher is required to write a lesson's "aim," or objective--"To find the main idea of a paragraph," say--on the chalkboard before class begins. If a teacher forgets, the kids will shout out: "Hey! Teacher! What's the aim?" At some schools, a teacher who fails to supply the objective during a formal (often unannounced) observation cannot receive a satisfactory rating, no matter how well the lesson goes. In a system with very little accountability, knowing the aim provides two minimal assurances: that students know what they are learning, and even more important, that teachers know what they are teaching, I've seen classes in which neither has seemed quite certain.
For a year, Rita Kramer sat at the back of the class of America's schools of education and conducted her own informal observation of the lessons they teach. Her report, a scathing indictment of more than a dozen teacher preparation programs--from Michigan State University Michigan State University, at East Lansing; land-grant and state supported; coeducational; chartered 1855. It opened in 1857 as Michigan Agricultural College, the first state agricultural college. to Peabody College at Vanderbilt to Southern Texas University--reveals an educational establishment that has lost sight of the aims of its own profession.
Many of Kramer's complaints about ed schools are familiar: Undergraduate education majors, who end up learning more about how to teach than what to teach, graduate woefully ill prepared to impart even the basics of reading and math. Graduate programs, run by career academicians long removed from the realities of the classroom, pose unnecessarily high hurdles for those who'd like to enter the profession. Kramer concludes, "Everything [would-be teachers] need to know about how to teach could be learned by intelligent people in a single summer of well-planned instruction." As proof, she offers the success of New Jersey's alternate certification program, which requies a minimum of education courses and provides onsite training and support for first-year teachers once they've entered the classroom.
Kramer floats above the fray of the ed school classrooms she visits like Mary Poppins, pointing out absurdities with the tip of her black umbrella. Her attitude is invariably, in a nagging-nanny sort of way. The prudish air of Kramer's prose is unfortunate, for it undercuts the important argument that her accumulation of anecdotes makes. In classroom after classroom, Kramer learns that the professed aim of most graduating teachers is not to transfer knowledge or skills to their future students, but to foster "self-esteem." Because there are no objective standards of accomplishment, to assess achievement through tests or by observation, or even by less traditional means, is considered meritocratic--a pejorative in ed school parlance that suggests the oppressive, hierarchical society it is the teacher's job to undermine. Consequently, the "self," the only standard of reference, becomes a kind of educational prefix, attaching itself to more traditional aims. An art lesson, Kramer relates, encourages not expression but "self-expression." A math lesson illustrates not concepts but "self-concepts." A social studies lesson develops not awareness of the world but "self-awareness." A student gains not knowledge but "self-knowledge." As one professor at California State University at Long Beach explains to her students: "More important than content or thinking are the students' feelings. You are not there to feed them information but to be sensitive to their need for positive reinforcement, With all this talk of positive and negative feedback, education is getting short-circuited.
The aims of teachers, Kramer asserts, have gone fuzzy--as in warm fuzzy. Classes resemble encounter group sessions in which students are encouraged to share feelings, air grievances, and bandy about mostly unexamined ideas as if they were Nerf footballs. The more elite the university, the more egregious the fuzziness. Here, for example, is a typical exchange of non sequiturs from a lecture at Columbia's Teacher's College:
PROFESSOR: [W]hat if we could make a difference in human stuctures? There is a moral lack of care in this society.
A STUDENT: I sort of think we've got to make ourselves happy first.
ANOTHER STUDENT: Most business people have no real commitment.
ANOTHER STUDENT: We are a society notoriously bad about funding poverty programs because we link them with work.
THE PROFESSOR: I am disgusted by the reliance on philanthropy instead of federal and state government responsibility.
STUDENT: An artist should be paid for doing what he likes, even if it's sitting on the porch and playing the guitar.
ANOTHER STUDENT: Malevolent market forces ...
THE PROFESSOR: That's true. [She says this after almost every comment.]
As with most therapy, the discussions Kramer overhears seldom emphasize abilities, but instead focus on character. A class at Seattle Pacific University compiles a list of qualities a good teacher should possess. They include "patient, calm, praising, accommodating, sense of humor, trusting, firm but kind, flexible, cares about and loves each kid." As Kramer dryly notes, "There is not one mention of knowledge of any kind, or even of any special method of imparting knowledge."
To Kramer's claims for alternate certification, I can only add my own testimony. In the spring of 1990, I joined Teach For America . My reason for joining was simple: I had always wanted to teach public school in New York City and Teach for America promised to negotiate the labyrinthe Board of Ed for me. (I had never been able even to get the right person at the Board on the phone.) I would not be circumnavigating standard certification procedures, but, like thousands of teachers in the city, I would teach on a "temporary, per-diem" basis. To prepare us, Teach for America provided an intensive two-month training program at the University of Southern California. Corps members took courses in pedagogical theory and practice and student-taught for five weeks in surrounding neighborhoods. The theory was for the most part irrelevant to my subsequent experience in the schools. Far more useful were classes that addressed practical matters of classroom management--such as what to do the first day, how to write a lesson plan, tips on where to place troublemakers in a classroom. (Put them in the four corner desks of the room--not in the four corner desks of the room--not in the corner, but on the corners--so that they are out of eyeshot of the rest of the class.) Student-teaching was the most valuable preparation of all, although even that did not prepare me for my own classroom experience.
I eventually got a job teaching fourth grade to Dominican kids at the top of Manhattan. As in the New Jersey alternate certification plan, I was assigned a mentor teacher in my school. It was she who taught in my school. It was she who taught me most of what I needed to know. Education is in the details, and most of the challenges of my first year were peculiar to my particular school, which was on a "split session." Mine was the most overcrowded elementary school in the most overcrowded district in New York City. To accommodate all of the students, we were forced to have two full sessions of school every day. I had to share a classroom with another teacher who taught the morning session from seven a.m. to noon. I taught from noon to 5:30 straight. Tips from the summer about how to prepare my classroom before my students' arrival were now irrelevant. I couldn't enter the room until they did. I could not plan my lessons around natural breaks in the day, as I did as a student teacher, because there were no natural breaks--no lunch, no recess. Rather, it was my mentor teacher who showed me how to fill out the red roll book, who explained how to assess my students' skills, who demonstrated lessons and showed me what would and would not work with the class.
Obviously, the weak link in this system is the mentor teacher. Mine was excellent, but what if one's mentor stinks? Expectations for alternate certification should not be too great. As one administrator in the Los Angeles Unified School District told The New York Times about Teach for America members employed by that school system: "I don't think they did exceptionally well or any better than fully credentialed teachers." Perhaps. But, like those in New Jersey's alternate certification program, they did it at far less expense and wasted time. That, as Kramer's book insists, is defense enough. "
