Teacher Education and the Struggle for Social Justice

Kenneth M. Zeichner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135596699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

"… Clear, articulate, and cogent….[Zeichner] exhibits a commitment to a vision of social justice that rightly demands the very best both from society and from those of us who work in schools, communities, and teacher education institutions." -- Michael W. Apple, From the Foreword

In this selection of his work from 1991-2008, Kenneth M. Zeichner examines the relationships between various aspects of teacher education, teacher development, and their contributions to the achievement of greater justice in schooling and in the broader society. A major theme that comes up in different ways across the chapters is Zeichner's belief that the mission of teacher education programs is to prepare teachers in ways that enable them to successfully educate everyone's children. A second theme is an argument for a view of democratic deliberation in schooling, teacher education, and educational research where members of various constituent groups have genuine input into the educational process.

Teacher Education and the Struggle for Social Justice is directed to teacher educators and to policy makers who see teacher education as a critical element in maintaining a strong public education system in a democratic society.

Chapter 1
The Adequacies and Inadequacies of Three Current Strategies to Recruit, Prepare, and Retain the Best Teachers for All Students¹

In this chapter I discuss the research based on recruiting, preparing, and retaining good teachers for all of our children in relation to the different reform agendas that are currently being implemented in U.S. teacher education. Currently, there are three major agendas for the reform of teacher education being played out in teacher education programs across the country: (a) the well-publicized professionalization agenda, propelled by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) Report, National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and other groups; (b) the deregulation agenda, supported by the work of the Fordham Foundation and other conservative think tanks and foundations like the Abell Foundation, the Pacific Research Institute, and the Progressive Policy Institute; and (c) the social justice agenda, implemented by individual teacher education practitioners in their teacher education classrooms and supported by groups like the National Association for Multicultural Education, policy centers like Tomas Rivéra Center and Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, and grassroots organizations like Rethinking Schools in Milwaukee. There is a fourth agenda that Cochran-Smith (2001) has referred to as the overregulation agenda, which consists of efforts in some states to micromanage teacher education programs and the punitive Title II reporting requirements set by Congress. I am not going to discuss it here because this agenda is largely a reflection of aspects of both the professionalization and deregulation agendas.²

All three of the pathways to teacher education reform that I discuss acknowledge the gap between the rhetoric about providing all students with fully qualified and effective teachers and the reality of only some students having access to these teachers. Although advocates of these three reform agendas agree about certain things, such as the critical importance of teachers’ subject matter knowledge and the importance of providing a high-quality education to all students in a society that professes to be democratic, they propose very different solutions for narrowing the educational quality and achievement gaps in U.S. public schools. My basic thesis is that none of these agendas for reform is adequate by itself for achieving the goal of providing every child with a high-quality education. All of them offer certain benefits but also have certain limitations and weaknesses. There are also important aspects of the reforms which are needed, but are not addressed by any of the agendas.

In this chapter, I discuss the adequacies and inadequacies of each of these reform agendas and point to the need to come together to find some common ground across these often warring camps. This cohesion is necessary to more effectively educate teachers to provide a high-quality education for everyone’s children in our public schools and to establish the social preconditions that are needed for this quality of education to be realized.

I begin by briefly reviewing what has come to be referred to as the demographic imperative in teaching and teacher education and the gap that persists in the quality of education available to different groups. Following this, I sketch the central elements of each of the three reform agendas and discuss how each both contributes and fails to contribute to equalizing the quality of schooling for different groups. None of these three reform agendas is new. All of them are connected to long-standing traditions of reform in American teacher education that have been struggling with each other for the last one hundred years (Liston & Zeichner, 1991). In discussing each of the visions for teacher education reform, I identify its link to a long-standing reform tradition.

The Demographic Imperative

It has become quite familiar now to see discussions in literature and even in the popular press of the so-called demographic imperative in teaching and teacher education. Currently, about 47 million students attend public elementary and secondary schools in the United States. They are taught by about 3.3 million teachers and supported by thousands of paraprofessionals and administrative staff. Given a variety of factors, such as the aging of the teaching force, class size reduction initiatives, teacher attrition, and so on, it has been projected that at least two million new teachers will be needed by 2010 (U.S. Department of Education, 2001). Over the next four years, Illinois will need to hire about 55,000 teachers, more than one third of its current public school teaching force (Keller, 2002). This situation is similar in many other states. Noticeable aspects of this national situation are the large numbers of individuals who have not completed the minimum requirements for a teaching credential but who are teachers of record in a public school classroom and, among certified teachers, the large number of teachers who are teaching outside their fields of certification. This situation is more prevalent in certain fields, such as special education, ESL and bilingual education, science, and mathematics, as well as in certain geographical areas, such as urban and remote rural districts.

The situation in some states, such as California, is now reaching a point where the incentives for completing a teacher education program before assuming responsibility for a classroom are disappearing, and increasingly teacher education programs are serving students who are already full-time teachers of record. In a survey of California teachers with fewer than five years of experience conducted by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning in Santa Cruz, more than one half of those surveyed did some or all of their student teaching while working as the teacher of record in their own classrooms. At the time of this survey there were 42,000 classrooms in California headed by teachers who had not completed the minimum requirements for a teaching credential, which accounts for about 14 percent of the teaching force in the state. This represents an increase of 23 percent in under qualified teachers since 1997–1998 (Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, 2001).

Nationally, the situation is more variable with some states, such as Wisconsin, exporting teachers in nonshortage subject areas to other parts of the country. Other importing states are in situations that are moving toward the situation in California. Even in the exporting states, however, large urban and remote rural districts often have the same types of shortages that are found on a more widespread basis in the states that import teachers. For example, in the exporting state of Wisconsin, 320 teachers and about 20 percent of new hires in the city of Milwaukee were teaching with emergency licenses last year (Milwaukee Public Schools, 2002).

Another critical aspect of the current demographic imperative in teaching and teacher education is the growing disparity between the students who attend public schools in the United States and their teachers. Currently, about 38 percent of public school pupils are from an ethnic/racial minority group, whereas close to 90 percent of their teachers are not (U.S. Department of Education, 2001). In large urban districts, the percentage of pupils of color is more than 70 percent; overall, one in five children under 18 lives in poverty; and more than one in seven children between ages five and 17 speak a language other than English at home (but more than one third of these are considered to be limited English proficient) (Villegas & Lucas, 2001).

This cultural divide between teachers and their students is further complicated by the lack of sustained attention to preparing teachers to teach across lines of ethnicity/race, language, and social class in most teacher education programs. The typical response of teacher education programs to the growing diversity of P–12 students has been to add a course or two on multicultural, bilingual/ESL, or urban education to the curriculum, leaving the rest of the curriculum largely intact (Ladson-Billings, 1999a; Villegas & Lucas, 2001; Zeichner & Hoeft, 1996). The white, monolingual, English-speaking teacher education professors and staff who are responsible for educating teachers for diversity often lack experience themselves in teaching in culturally diverse elementary and secondary schools. The lack of diversity among faculty, staff, and students in many teacher education programs undermines efforts to prepare interculturally competent teachers.

The Gap in Educational Quality

The most striking aspect of the current demographic situation in our public schools and teacher education institutions is that the effects of teacher shortages and the provision of qualified teachers have been felt unequally by different groups. Kati Haycock (2000) of the Education Trust has argued, “Just under the surface is a system that, despite its stated goal of high achievement for all children, is rigged to produce high achievement in some kinds of children and to undermine it in others” (p. 1).

According to NCTAF reports (1996, 1997), the United States is producing enough teachers as a nation to fill all of the openings. The problem is that these graduates are not necessarily in the subject areas where they are needed, and they do not want to go to the schools where they are most needed.

What has been referred to as “leakage in the teacher education pipeline” or, more commonly, as teacher attrition, is partially responsible for the shortages of fully qualified teachers in classrooms (Ingersoll, 2001). The NCTAF report describes a national attrition rate of about 75 percent from the beginning of an undergraduate teacher education program through about the third year of teaching (NCTAF, 1996). The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning in California estimates that 40–60 percent of those who earn teaching credentials in the state do not seek employment as teachers (Gandara & Maxwell-Jolley, 2000). Also, as a result of teacher salaries and working conditions in much of the country and the general lack of public support for teaching as a profession, the percentage of teachers in urban schools who leave teaching within the first five years is generally about 30 percent, but can be as high as 50 percent (Gregorian, 2001). In 2001–2002, only 44 percent of teachers hired in New York City schools were certified (down from 53 percent the previous year), and only about one third of English language learners in California have a teacher who has earned a teaching credential of any kind (Gandara & Maxwell-Jolley, 2000). Only about one quarter of teachers who work with English language learners nationally have received any substantive preparation with regard to ESL teaching strategies and language acquisition theory. The preparation to teach English language learners consistently comes up as one of the lowest-rated items on follow-up studies of teacher education program graduates (e.g. Darling-Hammond, 2000b).

If one relied on a reading of the professional education literature alone, one might think that a lot has happened to alter this situation to provide the working conditions, mentoring, and professional development programs concerned with teaching diverse learners. One can pick up most education journals today and read about the professional development schools, teacher induction programs, and teacher-initiated professional development programs that are being implemented and producing wonderful results. These things are indeed happening, but unfortunately they are neither the norm, nor are they necessarily conducted in ways that contribute to the task of educating all teachers for diversity.

If one goes just a little further one can begin to see the stark reality that is currently confronting many states and local school districts. This reality threatens to undermine what progress has been made in recent years in providing more incentives to enter and remain in teaching and in enhancing teachers’ abilities to be effective in promoting student learning. For example, in the spring of 2002, Education Week reported that many urban school districts across the country were pursuing cuts in teaching and support staff, professional development, bus services, supply purchases, and summer school programs, among other things, to meet mounting budget deficits. The Detroit school system, which is featured in the article (Blair, 2002), needed to cut 70 million dollars from its 1.2 billion dollar budget. Houston was dealing with 50 million dollar budget cuts and Miami-Dade was seeking to trim 81 million dollars. Even in my own state of Wisconsin, which is relatively better off on some indicators than others, the governor recently proposed phasing out the entire budget of one billion dollars per year of state aid to cities by 2004. The loss of this money, which is used to pay for basic city services such as fire and police protection, would threaten to devastate urban areas in Wisconsin, including the city of Milwaukee, whose public schools are already in a crisis situation.³

A comprehensive new teacher licensing bill with provisions for a career ladder for teachers, teacher induction programs, and teacher-directed professional development went into effect this same year. Currently, budget estimates are being finalized to finance this new bill, which includes new responsibilities for colleges and universities in the new performance-based licensing system. There is little chance in my view that the state will be able to pick up the tab for this new bill, which includes most elements of the NCTAF agenda. Once again, we may be left with only the pieces that are self-supporting, such as the state content examination for teachers. The pieces that require additional funding, such as mentoring for beginning teachers, may go unimplemented unless federal funds are obtained. Even if federal funds are obtained in the short run to pay for some of the new mandated features of the law, such as mentors for beginning teachers, this is not a permanent solution to the state’s massive budget problems and its ability to support the professionalization agenda.

The effects of the shortages of fully qualified teachers are disproportionately borne by students who are in low-achieving schools, schools with high numbers of students of color, and schools with high numbers of students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. The Education Trust has clearly documented these inequities on a national level, and various groups, including Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, have illuminated the gaps in the California schools. For example, Kati Haycock (2000) of the Education Trust has concluded the following:

Large numbers of secondary teachers lack state certification to teach the subjects they are teaching. When certification data are disaggregated by the economic composition of the school, clear patterns emerge. Students attending high poverty secondary schools (>75% poverty) are more than twice as likely as students in low poverty schools (<10% poverty) to be taught by teachers not certified in their fields. Youngsters attending predominately minority schools are also more likely to be taught by teachers uncertified in their subjects. In fact students attending schools in which African American and Latino students comprise 90% or more of the student population are more than twice as likely to be taught by teachers without certification to teach their subjects.

An analysis of the 1999–2000 Schools and Staffing Survey data by the Education Trust (Jerald, 2002) confirmed their earlier analyses. This report concluded that “American secondary schools have unacceptably high rates of out-of-field teaching in core academic subjects, with classes in high-poverty and high-minority schools much more likely to be assigned an out-of-field teacher than classes in low-poverty and low-minority schools” (p. 4). In high-poverty schools, for example, classes are 77 percent more likely to be assigned an out-of-field teacher than classes in low-poverty schools. Also, classes in majority non-white schools are 40 percent more likely to be assigned an out-of-field teacher than those in mostly white schools.

It has been asserted by the Abell Foundation and others that teacher certification does not matter in determining a teacher’s effectiveness, but it is unlikely that these critics of the idea of teacher certification send their own children to high-poverty or high-minority public schools filled with unlicensed teachers. The numbers cited by Kati Haycock (2000) with regard to the distribution of certified teachers are similar to those that emerged when she examined the distribution of teachers with academic majors in the fields they are teaching, teachers with high verbal and mathematics skills, and experienced teachers. In each instance, students who attend high-poverty schools, low-performing schools, or schools with high concentrations of African-American or Latino students have less-qualified teachers than students who do not attend these schools.

In California, as one would expect, the situation is the most pronounced and the problem of the misdistribution of under prepared teachers has gotten worse in the last few years. The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning (2001) in Santa Cruz recently concluded in an analysis of the teaching force in the state in 2000–2001 that:

Students already exhibiting low academic performance, those most in need of investment and effective intervention, have a higher probability of being taught by an under prepared teacher …. On average, the lowest performing schools had 25% under prepared teachers. This is double the state average and five times the proportion of under prepared teachers at high achieving schools .… Schools with the highest percentages of students receiving free and reduced lunch … continue to have the highest percentage of under prepared teachers. A similar pattern emerges when examining schools by student minority level.

When we examine the data with regard to the achievement gap in P–12 public education, although there are some bright spots, such as the decline in the dropout rate for African-American students by 40 percent between 1972 and 1999 and a rise in college enrollment for African-American and white high school completers (U.S. Department of Education, 2001), disturbing gaps persist in the academic performance and educational participation among different ethnic/racial and socioeconomic groups. These gaps exist when children enter kindergarten and show few signs of closing throughout the grade levels (Lee, 2002; U.S. Department of Education, 2001).

One of the current major debates in the policy arena is whether teacher certification makes a difference in the effectiveness of teachers. Among others, Darling-Hammond and the Abell Foundation have issued detailed critiques and counter critiques of what the research that is often used in support of teacher certification means (e.g. Ballou & Podgursky, 2000; Darling-Hammond, 2000a, 2001; Darling-Hammond, Berry, & Thoreson, 2001; Finn & Kanstoroom, 2000; Goldhaber & Brewer, 2000; Madigan & Poliakoff, 2001; Walsh, 2001). Regardless of where one stands on this issue (in my view there are problems with both positions), it is hard to ignore the data on gaps in school achievement and the comments by teachers themselves about the variable quality of education that is available to different groups of students. The most recent MetLife Survey of American Teachers, for example, concludes the following:

The premise that all children can learn is a concept that has been embraced by policy makers and the public alike. What is harder to ascertain is whether all students have access to the tools, knowledge, and guidance they need to succeed. In many areas addressed in this survey, from teacher quality, to school building conditions, to challenging curricula and high expectations, many low income students and ethnic minority students and their teachers and principals constantly give responses that indicate these students do not have the same opportunities to learn, when compared to responses of those in schools with largely high income populations or in schools with a low proportion of ethnic minority students (Markow, Fauth, & Gravitch, 2001, p. 6).

There is also the issue of the continued unequal spending on the education of students in different school districts. The Education Trust recently released a report that asserts that in 42 states, school districts with the greatest number of poor children have less money to spend per student than districts with the fewest poor children (Education Trust, 2001). The “savage inequalities” in educational provision so powerfully documented by Kozol (1991) are still with us. The facts are hard to ignore. The question is what to do about the situation. The professionalization, deregulation, and social justice agendas offer very different visions for how to remedy the current situation of inequality and injustice in public education. I now briefly examine each of these three visions for reform and identify what I think are their strengths and weaknesses. I also address the things I think none of the reform agendas addresses but are necessary if we are to see things change for the better.

The Professionalization Agenda

The first reform agenda, the professionalization agenda (or the regulatory agenda, as it is called by its critics), is propelled in its current incarnation by the NCTAF reports of 1996 and 1997, as well as a host of related developments stimulated by such groups as the Holmes Group and Partnership, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), and NCATE. However, this agenda did not originate in the 1990s. The current wave of reform to professionalize teacher education and teaching, which has resulted in the near-universal requirement for performance-based assessment in teacher education programs, represents the current incarnation of what has been referred to as the social efficiency tradition of reform in teacher education—the quest to establish a profession of teaching through the articulation of a knowledge base for teaching based on educational research and professional judgment (Liston & Zeichner, 1991). In the twentieth century, performance-based teacher education was clearly the dominant reform impulse in American teacher education. It resulted in several major attempts on a national scale to replace course completion as the basis for initial licensure with a system that assessed teachers’ abilities to display certain knowledge, dispositions, and performances thought to be necessary for effective teaching (Gage & Winne, 1974; Zeichner, 2001).

Of course, what was going on throughout the 1970s and early 1980s was not exactly the same as what is happening now. In the current incarnation of performance-based teacher education, which some have referred to as performance standards-based teacher education (Valli & Rennert-Ariev, 2002) to distinguish it from its predecessors, there is no longer a focus on only behavioral competencies, as was the case in the 1970s. Contemporary statements of teacher standards are broader and attend to the cognitive and dispositional aspects of te...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Adequacies and Inadequacies of Three Current Strategies to Recruit, Prepare, and Retain the Best Teachers for All Students
• 2 Educating Teachers for Social Justice
• 3 Professional Development Schools in a Culture of Evidence and Accountability
• 4 Action Research as a Strategy for Preparing Teachers to Work for Greater Social Justice: A Case Study from the United States
• 5 Action Research: Personal Renewal and Social Reconstruction
• 6 Action Research in Teacher Education as a Force for Greater Social Justice
• 7 Beyond the Divide of Teacher Research and Academic Research
• 8 Connecting Genuine Teacher Development to the Struggle for Social Justice
• 9 Contradictions and Tensions in the Professionalization of Teaching and the Democratization of Schools
• 10 Reflections of a University-Based Teacher Educator on the Future of College- and University-Based Teacher Education
• Notes
• References