Improving Teacher Training

With a tip of my hat to Joanne Jacobs, Linda Darling-Hammond has proposed a Marshall Plan for Teaching in Education Week. Darling-Hammond leads off:

Views about the No Child Left Behind Act are currently as divided as Berlin before the wall came down. But whatever one thinks about the 5-year-old federal law, it’s clear that developing more-skillful teaching is a sine qua non for attaining higher and more equitable achievement for students in the United States. Without teachers who have sophisticated skills for teaching challenging content to diverse learners, there is no way that children from all racial and ethnic, language, and socioeconomic backgrounds will reach the high academic standards envisioned by the law.

Now with all the requisite polemics out of the way, Darling-Hammond gets down to brass tacks.

The problem with the single most important resource in schools is that skilled and knowledgeable teachers are inequitably distributed in American schools. Teachers with teh least amount of training and skill serve the children with the greatest need, while the most experienced and skilled teachers teach middle and upper class students, exacerbating an achievement gap that has been proven time and again.

But the United States is vastly different than its peers and competitors on the world education market.

Most of the higher-achieving countries we consider peers or competitors now provide high-quality graduate-level teacher education designed to ensure that teachers can effectively educate all of their students. Preparation is usually fully subsidized for all entrants, and includes a year of practice teaching in a clinical school connected to the university. Schools receive funding to provide coaching, seminars, classroom visits, and joint planning time for beginners as well as veterans. Salaries are competitive with those in other professions and include additional stipends for hard-to-staff locations.

Of course, Darling-Hammond's ideas are far from new. I know of two bloggers, Jenny D and myself, and obviously many others, who have advocated for a graduate level preparation of teachers. I have argued for a professional school approach, similar to law or medical school, complete with difficult, multi-day testing for licensure.

Darling-Hammond proposes all of these and a little more, spending significant sums along the way. Yet the expenditure of money will do little more than line the pockets of some institutions and create a group interested in keeping the money flowing, with little regard to substance. Darling-Hammond's proposals cannot be achieved until we do something even more important--establish a body of knowledge, tested and verified, of teaching knowledge and skills.

Other professions, such as law and medicine, have a defined scope of knowledge. Certainly medicine is more objective, but the law is something of a "squishy" subject matter, constantly evolving and changing. But there are still common core principals that are learned by all law students and lawyers. Teaching is the same in that, while teaching math is different form teaching reading, there are core principals involved. But there seems to be little scholarship in these core areas that can lead to the developement of a proper professional education on par with law or medicine.

Admittedly, we may be talking about a chicken/egg argument, whether we need to develop a professional educaiton model or a body of knowledge, when in fact the two will develop in parallel. But just a procedures and institutions are important, so too is the knowledge and mindset of the practitioners. Point in fact is that most practitioners of teaching do so largely on their own and until a more collegial and collarborative environment is created among the teaching profession, all the programs to build better teachers will not improve the teaching profession. Mutual support and learning moved the medical and legal professions to their stature today, becaue the practitioners saw not only a personal stake in the view of their professions, but a moral imperative as well, one based upon garnering the trust of the community they served.