Fixing Teachers
Dr. Sandra Stotsky published a book in March of this year titled, “An Empty Curriculum: The Need to Reform Teacher Licensing Regulations and Tests”which both explains how we got to a place where our teachers can barely pass a certification exam, and provides a pathway out of the mess. Michael Poliakoff wrote a great review of her book on The American Council of trustees and Alumni’s website. Excerpts are provided below.
Dr. Stostky has devoted her entire career to maintaining high standards in American education, particularly in the training of teachers. As Senior Associate Commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education, she directed the revision of Massachusetts’ K–12 curriculum standards, as well as the regulations for teacher licensure and licensure testing. Together, these formed the essential elements of the “Massachusetts education miracle.” Since 2007 she has been a senior professor in the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform. Most recently, she has travelled the nation sounding a warning about the harm that coercive implementation of the Common Core standards will do to both K–12 and higher education. Many in the world of education find her message inconvenient, but it will be to the nation’s great harm not to listen to it with careful attention.
In March 2015, Rowman and Littlefield released Dr. Stotsky’s new book, An Empty Curriculum: The Need to Reform Teacher Licensing Regulations and Tests. It is a relatively short book, as welcoming to the non-expert as it is replete with insights for the veteran, but it is also an uncompromising book that leaves the apologists for poorly trained teachers no room to hide.
Starting on the first page of the book, Dr. Stotsky explodes the convenient and comforting belief that state regulations are a reliable assurance that teachers are “academically competent to teach the subjects they were legally licensed to teach.” These tests, she shows, are often set at a standard well below reasonable expectations for a college student, much less a college senior or college graduate (pp. 105–107). And the percentage of correct answers required for a passing score is shockingly low in many states—what constitutes a passing score is a decision left to each individual state. And adding to all of that, Dr. Stotsky reminds the reader that the passing score is compensatory, i.e., a candidate for a teaching license can get entire sections of the exam wrong but still pass on the strength of other parts of the exam (see esp. pp. 18–20). Nor does accreditation provide any reasonable quality assurance. Dr. Stotsky cites the report of former president of Teacher’s College Columbia, who recommended closing most of the nation’s 1200 education schools and excoriated the system of accrediting education programs for its failure to ensure teacher quality. ACTA publicly—and successfully—opposed the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) for its ideological focus on the “dispositions” of teacher candidates regarding social justice. Dr. Stotsky points (p. 126) to the failure of this organization and its successor, the Council for Accreditation of Education Preparation (CAEP), to ensure that prospective teachers actually know the subjects they will teach.
How did we get into this mess? Chapter 4 of An Empty Curriculum provides a window into the sorry history of how, in a process underway by the end of the Second World War, teacher licensure tests moved away from a serious assessment of intellectual skills, general knowledge, and command of the subject the candidate aspired to teach. The question of the capacity of a licensure exam to predict the effect a teacher would have on his students’ achievement is legitimate. It quickly gave rise, however, to a system in which faculty from education schools would evaluate proposed questions for the licensure exam on the basis of whether each question corresponded to something covered by Fixing Teachers » Missouri Education Watchdog:
