Starting An Ed School
Posted: July 16th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 11 Comments »
I started this blog a couple years ago. Existentially, it poses a few questions.
1. Is it possible to prep rookie teachers better?
2. Should new Ed Schools be permitted?
3. What are some ways the new ed schools are different?
4. Even if these new Ed Schools are permitted to exist, are they a “good idea?”
Let’s pick these off one by one.
1. Is there a better way to prepare new teachers than the traditional ed school model?
Most scholars think so, from all stripes. Many Ed School deans, practitioners, policymakers, and teachers union leaders have called for change. In surveys, many teachers say some version of “I wish my prep was better/different.”
A blue ribbon national commission, called CAEP, is examining right now how to “turn teacher prep upside down.” The commission includes many notable establishment names, so it’s not likely this is an outsider critique.
2. Should new Ed Schools be permitted?
The alternative could be to only allow changes to the existing Ed Schools. But this horse may already be too far out of the barn. New Ed Schools are being permitted. Online, for-profit ones in particular. The top 3 masters-in-education granting institutions in the USA are online (or mostly so): U of Phoenix, Walden, Grand Canyon.
According to data that Alexander Russo just posted, these 3 online programs alone issued about 13,000 masters degrees last year. A masters degree might cost $22,000. There are others. They’re growing fast.
In a very different category, there are a few brand new “in-person” graduate schools of education. For example, in California, the High Tech High Graduate School of Education (HTH) was founded 5 years ago. Their creation of a new Ed School inspired us and others. Tuition is heavily subsidized by philanthropy, to keep cost low for teachers, and to allow for a lot of personal attention to each grad student. Enrollment is much lower, by orders of magnitude. Ours is < 100, for example.
3. What are some ways the new ed schools are different?
The for-profit online ed schools teach a traditional Ed School syllabus. They offer it mostly online. They have fairly open admission policies.
The small “in-person” new Ed Schools like High Tech High’s and ours have a very different view of what it takes to help new teachers be effective.
• First, while all Ed Schools have a mix of theory and practice, we lean more towards practice.
• Second, we each operate in partnership with existing charter schools, to more closely link the theory and the practice.
• Third, many instructors are skilled schoolteachers and leaders, rather than scholars.
• Fourth, because a lot of people apply and we’re quite small, we end up being highly selective.
(This is relevant later, when we’re evaluated. If we’re able to produce teachers that are judged effective, it will be hard to disentangle the effect of our selection from the effect of our coursework and practice).
• Fifth, the vision of what we’re preparing teachers to do, and what type of school they’ll ultimately work in, is more narrow and specific. For example, our friends Larry, Ben and Kelly at HTH have masters programs that prepare teachers for project-based learning, and to ultimately teach and lead in schools that support this vision.
By contrast, our new school prepares teachers for a type of college-prep charter school like KIPP et al. Ours hasn’t even opened yet. We were approved in March by the state’s Board of Higher Education. It will be called the Charles Sposato Graduate School of Education.
Now does my support of “teacher choice” to choose small new Ed Schools like HTH and ours extend to my supporting the online U of Phx? Here I’m mixed.
I’ve blogged about my mixed feelings about online charter schools, for example. I have some similar thoughts about U of Phx. Though I readily admit I know almost nothing about it — never “visited” their virtual classrooms, never spent time with their alums or team, etc. So can’t really opine yet.
4. Even if these new Ed Schools are permitted to exist, are they a “good idea?”
It’s totally fair game to ask questions. What courses. What theory. What faculty. What vision. What tradeoffs. What bar to get in. What bar to get out.
Sometimes the questioning is sought by us. We have Ed School deans — from all sorts of Ed Schools like U Michigan, Penn State, and Harvard — visit and exchange ideas on these key questions. We also get pushed by Ed School professors….critical friends. Kay, a mentor to Orin and me, always pushes us in particular on how to help teachers create classes where the thinking asked of kids is ever-higher in complexity. Similarly, at a recent informal gathering that we arranged, a professor at a nearby grad school (Hey Scott) asked whether a particular lesson design (intro of new material, guided practice, independent practice) is less likely to lead to “deep understanding” of math than other approaches.
Sometimes the questioning is not sought by us. We just got our first zinger, which is here. It’s a little intimidating when the critic is a leading national voice.
A friend reached out to me after reading the critique, cautioning me:
She is Goliath in ed policy, well-known, many readers. Your team = David. Same slight build, but not even a slingshot. Don’t respond. I know your nerdy and coalition-building ways. You think you can engage, find some common ground, maybe get an intro from Randi W, one day have a Beer Summit, etc. Forget that. If you say anything, you’ll get hit 100 times harder. Just let it go.
Well, he may be right in the asymmetry of power/readership (hers very high, ours very low). But the questions she poses are legit.
I’ll tackle them and many others here over the coming weeks, while hoping to avoid a blog war.
Hi, Mike,
It seems to me that some of what Ravitch is responding to is the fact that both you and Relay are approved as GRADUATE SCHOOLS of education. She and many others in higher education have particular views about what a graduate school should be as opposed to a trade school or training program.
Underlying several of her rhetorical questions, however, are some important questions about what sort of knowledge and what mix of knowledge (theoretical, practical) students in professional schools ought be trained in. This is a huge issue not just in education but in law and other fields. Much of the training lawyers receive in law school does not directly prepare them to practice law. Indeed, most grads have to take additional coursework to cram for the bar exam after spending $150,000 getting a JD. I was a pre-med history major and my sense was much of the pre-med curriculum, such as organic chemistry, had very little utility in terms of practicing medicine (unless you are interested in medical research, that is). Unless, that is, one argues that there is certain foundational knowledge that is useful for professionals to have even if it isn’t practically useful because it may help them think understand more deeply the nature of education and what it is they are embarking on.
I also think, Mike, as we’ve talked about before, there is always this question of how much to optimize training for what a novice needs to know to do well on Day 1 vs setting them up for a long term trajectory of growth. How much to you optimize your training for the type of teaching a novice can implement well and how much do you want to introduce them to picture of the type of more complex teaching they should aspire to after they’ve mastered the basics? Does optimizing for former without holding out the vision of the latter give some teachers a stunted vision of what truly accomplished teaching is? I really don’t know, but I think these are questions we need to periodically ask ourselves or push each other to consider.
Ed totally agree. What is role of grad school is another key question. I think I had that mentally billed as “many others” in “I’ll tackle them and many others”
But it’s clear from survey work by Steve Farkas that Ed School professors diverge here. Some want a masters in teaching to prepare folks for real life teaching of kids who desperately need, if not great teaching, good teaching. Deborah Ball describes this with great urgency, as you know.
Others describe themselves wanting instead to expose future teachers to various ideas. I’ll write more about that, and you/I will continue our conversations on this matter….
Mike,
Totally with you that exposing teachers to ideas is not enough. Higher ed folks place too much faith in ideas, mainly because they are in the ideas business. Now, I’m a total ideas guy, but I think too many higher ed folks assume that ideas drive practice, when in fact, practice often influences ideas. We make a mistake when we assume that beliefs have to change before teachers will change their practice. Sometimes this is absolutely the case. Other times it goes the other direction. People form/change beliefs or accept ideas only after trying something out and witnessing it working or not working.
I find the work around instructional activities and routines to be really exciting. I think this is an interesting “grain size” where we can bring together theory and practice around concrete practices that teachers need to learn how to orchestrate.
I see this as certification v. master’s.
That is, the practical aspects are the things that should be required to be certified. Ideally, certification could come after or along with any undergraduate degree. That way elementary teachers might have majored in…anything. They might have chosen child development or psychology or mathematics or a foreign language or annnnnything. Or even education, but it would be about the field, doing research, etc. not the watered down and often ridiculously fake lesson planning that has nothing to do with a real classroom.
EVERYONE would undergo a practical program for certification. That would be what you’re doing — classroom management, teaching techniques, knowing what does and doesn’t work, designing lessons that work for actual classes, rather than a college classroom of your peers.
A Master’s degree could be more like the equivalent of National Board certification (practice taken to a truly graduate level, after some years of experience) or a specialization in a subject area or an in-depth look at education theory, the reform process, etc. It would be meta — critical analysis for teachers.
It would be a real graduate program and it needn’t be for everyone. Everyone needs a good degree and a certificate program. Only some people need a master’s (or Ph.D.).
folks assume that ideas drive practice, when in fact, practice often influences ideas.
That’s important. Too many PDs try to give ideas and hope that practices will change somewhat magically. Showing the practice, practicing the practice, seeing the results — that’s what creates change.
Jen, yes, you argue for a reality that in one way it’s equiv to many MBA programs. They basically say “Don’t show up until you’ve worked for a few years. We can help you think about bigger ideas, but your ability to process those ideas will be much better if you have some practical experience.”
Ed, just curious, before you got your doctorate, did you do a separate masters program in teaching? And if so, was that before or after you were a schoolteacher?
Both Sposato and Relay need to address how they intend to go beyond training teachers in the ways of getting students to achieve high test scores — because that seems to be the perception they’re up against. Having read this blog long enough, I know this isn’t how you would define successful teaching — at least not exclusively. I think what many of us in the traditional ed school camp are waiting for is a more nuanced explanation of how either Relay or Sposato define building “better” teachers beyond maintaining order in the classroom and getting their students to score higher on state standardized tests. These would be good topics to address in future posts.
As Ed notes, Ravitch’s critique is specifically directed at the fact that Relay and Sposato are now accredited graduate schools of education, and thus represent challenges to the traditional paradigm of what an graduate school of education can and should be. That’s why Ravitch wants Relay’s and Sposato’s teachers to be highly prepared in practice — and the theory (and history, and sociology, and economics) that informs that practice. Teachers coming out of a graduate program in education should be able to, at any time, explain what they’re teaching their students and why — without having to resort to saying, “Well, it helped them score better on the ANet.” Thus, the teachers are not JUST getting great results; they are ALSO critical practitioners. If we think teaching is a question of ethics and equity — of what kind of education students, regardless of zip code, should be entitled to, then ed schools’ mission needs to be broader than developing unusually effective teachers; it also needs to be about developing unusually reflective teachers.
When teacher education decides to punt on the big questions of what teaching is, what knowledge is (and whose knowledge is it), what equity is (and who gets to define it); how education interacts with society, and the historical background from which our (temporary) answers to these questions have emerged, then we should ask how the teachers who graduate from these programs are supposedly “better” than those of traditional teacher ed programs. Because their students tend to produce higher test scores? Relay and Sposato need to get out ahead on these sorts of critiques, because Ravitch simply represents the first salvo.
As someone who both achieved within and yet chaffed against the pressures of a high-stakes no excuses classroom, I felt increasingly alienated and frustrated by the ways in which I felt hemmed in by teaching students to think in a particular way that suited a test-based logic with each successive year in the classroom. By my last year, I felt like I was bumping up against the limits of the test-based achievement model. By narrowly defining the problem as raising test scores, my performance was chiefly evaluated on the extent my students were test-score achievers. This mean hours spent poring over data reports on why Hernando bubbled B instead of A and what it must mean. While this data-driven approach meant that kids (and I, by extension) came out looking good at the end of the year, I didn’t necessarily feel those scores reflected the myriad other non-tested ways kids needed to be prepared for high school, college, or beyond. Their MCAS victories rang increasingly hollow with each successive year.
So I worry when I read the suggestion that there’s a stark divide between theory and practice and that ed schools can choose to focus on one at the expense of the other. I worry because when I think about the minute-to-minute life of a teacher in a classroom, in which hundreds of decisions are constantly demanded, the focus on practice could quite easily mislead that well-intentioned teacher into believing the job is simply one of following the recipe of hook, I-do, we-do, you-do, and exit quiz. Firm voice. No opt out. Right is right. And on and on. Rinse and repeat. That’s the danger in providing teachers recipe books of agreed-upon “best practices” instead of challenging those teachers to reflect upon what makes some practices labeled as “best” in the first place, and how any set of “best practices” can change depending on the schools’, communities’, parents’, and teachers’ goals for their students. These are not just “various ideas,” as you called it; this is, instead, the crucial function of theory. It also means taking seriously their role as a middle class white authority figure of primarily poor children of color, and understanding the socio-cultural ramifications of this relationship. This sort of deliberative, reflective, critical teacher is unlikely to emerge from practice-heavy approaches to teacher education.
To recap, teaching is not easy. Never will be. Never should be. Talking about theory and practice together challenges teachers to reflect on what they take for granted about learning, thinking, knowledge, society, and power, and helps them see possibilities and limits inherent in any model of education they intend to practice. To marginalize the sorts of questions provoked by discussing the relationship between theory and practice is to lobotomize teaching. That would seem to be antithetical to any education — graduate-level or not.
Hi Chris,
All good questions. I promise to get to a more nuanced explanation of building “better” teachers beyond order and tests.
One Q for you. You’ve described before how you felt increasingly alienated as a teacher. A number of our teacher friends at Excel describe themselves of very proud of their work.
How do you process that? Is it along the lines of “They should be proud to a point, but they haven’t realized, as I have, the limits of what they do?”
This is off-topic, I suppose, on the Ed School question. Better to pick it up on email. I ask b/c it’d probably help me to better understand where you’re coming from.
I’m just always struck by how down you are on what I’ve always thought from afar to be a remarkable team of teachers and a school that, while of course imperfect, does so much good for kids.
While I agree it’s better to talk about specifics of Excel over email, you referred to my relationship to the school and its teachers, so I want to respond here. It might also clear up some misconceptions about where I’m coming from with my critique of teacher education.
Contrary to your suggestion, Excel is where I first engaged in critical conversations (with both teachers and instructional leaders) about how they’re grappling with bigger picture questions of what students’ success might look like beyond test scores and how best to prepare them for the intellectual and cultural challenges of college prep high schools. These theoretical and reflective questions became central to each of our daily practice. Our attempts at answering those questions drove school-wide instructional initiatives and motivated many of us to read research, seek out part-time coursework at ed schools, and visit a range of public and independent high schools. The goal was to avoid applying the logic that as long as low-income students achieve proficiency on narrowly defined measures we were satisfied that the achievement gap had been closed, and that they were receiving the same quality of education as more affluent students a few zip codes away.
Yet, as I said in my first post, the school’s charter, the state accountability mandates, and a host of other factors required that we prioritize our focus and efforts on our students achieving high test scores. That constrained a lot of other things that I, as a teacher, wanted to do. That does not mean that I am or ever was “down” on the school, the teachers, or all the ways they go above and beyond for the kids who go there. I think Excel is a great place staffed with a fabulous group of teachers, many of whom I count as good friends. The conversation I’m having with you is a variation of ones I’ve had with many of them over the years.
This rambles…sorry!
You write:
“Similarly, at a recent informal gathering that we arranged, a professor at a nearby grad school (Hey Scott) asked whether a particular lesson design (intro of new material, guided practice, independent practice) is less likely to lead to “deep understanding” of math than other approaches.”
I would argue the answer is yes – which is why I bristle at every mention of this strategy. It’s not all bad, but I only turn to it when I need to teach a particular, hard skill and don’t think the underlying conceptual material is important to a) being able to do the problems, b) remembering over the long-term, c) understanding how it connects to other concepts. It’s pretty rare in my classroom.
Unfortunately, I see the I-we-you strategy being discussed all the time in relation to high (testing) achieving charter schools, and I think it’s sad. The reason I say this is that it seems to me that this technique has two benefits. First, it’s simple so even a first year teacher can do it. Second, when teachers do it well, their students can do reasonably well on standardized tests like MCAS. Feedback loop: teacher uses technique, kids do well on short-term assessment (ANet, MCAS, etc), teacher gets praise, teacher thinks he is the bomb-diggity, repeat next year.
But I think it leads to the teacher/school being complacent and not truly keeping the eye on the real prize which is college and beyond. I think kids who are not given the opportunity to really THINK about the math they are doing and understand how everything links together is being short-changed intellectually, and is losing out on a real shot at college. Knowledge needs to be hung on the intellectual frameworks of big ideas or else it tends to get lost.
Of course, now I’ve gotten away from the real question that you posted here – whether new grad schools are a good idea. I tend to think that Chris K and Jen are really onto something in their push for a balance between theory and practice, and the necessary split between certification and Master’s degree.
Because really, you’ve always said that your goal was to turn out firecracker first year teachers for high poverty, no excuses charter schools. I think this is an admirable goal. But I don’t think that your newly minted first year teachers should be considered masters of anything except being first year teachers. (Just like I don’t think someone who graduates from a traditional ed school before teaching is a master either).
[Aside: I did the Simmons-City on a Hill program years ago, which aimed to be tailored a little more towards our jobs. Not the most successful or engaging program, but there was some good stuff. Really, though, I was there for the paper. I think if I could be considered a master teacher now (and not sure that I could), it would have come from working where I do.]
I think I’ve asked this before, but does Sposato feel like it should have a role in preparing its trainees for grappling with the big issues during/after years 1 and 2? Or does that get left to the schools they work in and/or their own intellectual engagement with the field. If you’re not going to do that work, then I think they need to be prepared to think about it later. But if they are instilled with “this is good teaching” for year 1, and then their administrators dig it because the scores are good, will they ever branch out and push themselves and their kids to reach more of their intellectual potential? This is why I am forever pushing back on curric in a box, I-we-you, etc. – because I fear that they might think that great teaching is all about these pretty basic skills (which granted, need to be mastered), and not then realize that it can be so, so much more. I worry for our field that too many administrators and teachers are too short-sighted in this regard.