The results of the Massachusetts teacher exam in June were a wake-up call about the disastrous state of public education in America. 

Many knowledgeable observers have pointed to the schools of education and their programs for teaching how to teach as the obvious source of the problem.  These programs have steadily grown in number and power over the course of the century, and their power received a tremendous boost in the 1960s when teacher unions gained control over school policy. 

The Chairman of the State Board of Education, John Silber, is the most prominent advocate of the view that poor-quality teacher-training programs are a central problem in the state education system.  Dr. Silber has the evidence of almost a century of history to draw on to make his case, since scholars and journalists have for decades been crying out against the poor quality and disastrous ideas that go into and come out of teacher training programs. 

The source of the perpetual crisis in college teacher ed programs dates to the establishment of teaching as a discipline, particularly with its elevation of method over content in the earliest twentieth century.  This belief that what really mattered in teaching was not the knowledge of what one taught (usually called “content” or “subject matter”), but the way in which you taught it (“method,” or “pedagogy”) was the center of the “progressive education” movement in the early twentieth century.  Progressive educationists believed that pedagogy was a science, a discipline as substantive as philosophy or chemistry.  Although frequently associated with the philosopher John Dewey, this view was in fact propounded by his colleagues and successors at Columbia Teacher’s College,  particularly William Heard Kilpatrick. 

While even opponents concede that progressive education did some good—its innovative spirit swept away some of the worst rote methods of nineteenth century schooling—by the post-World War II period it was clear that it had run amok.  “Progressive education in this country, if it has done nothing else, should be forever honored and given thanks for insisting on genuine, hand-to-hand teaching, as against the giving out of a predigested hokum.”  So wrote Jacques Barzun, the renowned Columbia University historian, in his 1944 classic, Teacher in America.  Barzun went on to spend a considerable part of the rest of his career battling the excesses of progressive education. 

Over fifty years ago it was clear that the attempt to turn pedagogy into a legitimate discipline had failed, with dangerous reverberating consequences.  The “research” that aspiring professors of education carried on in their doctorates “cover such a wide range of indefinite subject matter that they have been repeatedly and deservedly ridiculed,” Barzun observed.  The doctorate in education, or Ed.D., continues to be regarded as far inferior to Ph.Ds in traditional academic subjects, and scholars took to calling 120th Street, which separated Teachers College from the rest of Columbia University, as “the widest street in the world.” 

“Since education as a field is nothing if not scientific, and since it is not scientific in any intelligible sense… the reader can draw his own inference,” Barzun quipped.  Later Barzun noted that there was a large element of fraud in the proliferation of educational programs in America, and in the educators’ claims that they could do so much with so little, which would make it such a tempting “issue” for ambitious politicians to promote.  “Millions want it and commend it, and all are busy about it, at the same time that they are willing to degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.” 

The expansion of educationism’s aims soon eclipsed their original academic concerns. Even at this early stage it was evident that schools had become therapeutic rather than academic, places to make students feel good rather than think well.  Though educationists today often complain that schools are called on to do too much, they were the ones who made every imaginable non-academic project part of their agenda. 

One of the principal reasons why the pedagogues had expanded so much was that the scholars, as disdainful as they might be of schools of education, did nothing to stop them.  “They despise—instead of reforming—the department of education in their own university,” Barzun noted.  And it followed that the diseases of secondary schools were beginning to infect colleges. 

Another prominent historian, Arthur Bestor, spent much of his life sounding the tocsin about what he called Educational Wastelands:  The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools (1953).  He reiterated the point that schools had lost their prime purpose—intellectual attainment. 

Bestor passionately denied the most common reaction of pedagogues, frequently heard in contemporary debates:  that efforts to raise academic standards and improve schools were really attempts to destroy public education by antidemocratic, inegalitarian reactionary elitists.  Bestor contended that low academic standards were the gravest threat to democracy and equality imaginable, and that liberals should be the first to condemn them.  “The way to perpetuate an aristocracy is to give sound intellectual training to a minority and offer people generally a cheap and shoddy substitute.”  And it was the educational establishment—what Bestor famously called “the interlocking directorate of professional educationists,” composed of teacher colleges, school administrators, and state education officials—that created and maintained mediocrity in public education. 

Progressive education’s initial reforms had done much good, but soon after they altered the ends rather than just the means of education.  Pedagogy had expanded far beyond its useful bounds.  Methods were useful in the elementary grades, but had little application after that.  Bestor wrote, “Professors of education doubtless know a good deal about the way in which a child passes from the state of counting his toes to the state of doing arithmetic sums in a notebook.  They know next to nothing of the process by which a man moves from analytic geometry to differential calculus.”  He identified the heedless expansion of the old “normal school” or teacher-training academy, that was the problem, when “the narrow vocationalism of the pedagogues… began to imagine themselves colleges, and … began to erect in miniature the normal schools in the universities themselves.”  Effort to improve teaching had run amok, “The pedagogical locusts have devoured the harvest.”  The result, Bestor concluded, was “the enslavement of the classroom teacher,” left unprepared, misguided, and defrauded by the interlocking directorate. 

Recognizing the role played by scholarly neglect (they were at least "accessories after the fact"), Bestor concluded that the first thing higher education must do was to establish the academic standards for secondary school teachers through rigorous exams—as Massachusetts has almost a half century later only begun to do. 

These warnings in the 1940s and 1950s did not reverse the trend, or even slow it down very much.  Although some of the best universities did abolish their pedagogy departments in the late 1950s, more were created elsewhere, and the crisis fully exploded in the 1960-70s.  All of the pathologies of the colleges of education were exacerbated by the concurrent rise of teacher unions--their theories could be put into place through raw political power.  Since the early 1980s there has been a rediscovery of the same problems, now more acute than ever. 

One of the most interesting exposes was by Reginald Damerell, a businessman who began teaching in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst ed school in the 1970s.  In his book, Education’s Smoking Gun:  How Teachers Colleges Have Destroyed Education in America, he described that institution’s anti-intellectual hostility to literacy and numeracy.  He saw the program’s utter hypocrisy and vacuity in its conferral of a doctorate on Bill Cosby, whose dissertation was on his “Fat Albert” cartoons. 

Echoing Barzun, Bestor, and others, he warned:  “The education field is devoid of intellectual content, has no body of knowledge of its own and acts as if bodies of knowledge do not exist in other university departments.” Damerell claimed that the atmosphere at U Mass was so anti-intellectual that the only way to survive was to “suppress my intellect.”  The emotional strain of this suppression triggered alopecia universalis, causing all his hair to fall out. 
 
Damerell was particularly concerned about the collapse of academic standards in urban public schools.  Schools which had done so well in educating previous generations of immigrants were now in the hands of the pedagogical establishment and failing to teach black migrants, instead using the children’s problems to further the establishment’s own interests.  “Educationists made blacks and other minorities their stalking horses,” getting more money for bogus nonacademic programs while failing to teach the basics. “Educationists made it impossible to do for black migrants what had been done for white immigrants.”  The interlocking directorate’s great trick was to turn its own failures into successful bids for more support. 

Front-line teachers who were as much victims of the educational establishment as the students. “Classroom teachers will remain low in status for as long as schools of education exist, will never be considered experts in what they do.”  Teacher improvement had to based on the belief that “High qualifications attract the highly qualified.” 

This long-documented problem also came as a “revelation” to journalist Rita Kramer after she visited 1300 teacher ed colleges and told a similar story in Ed School Follies:  The Miseducation of America’s Teachers (the very title of a similar 1963 book by James Koerner).  The attitude she discovered was “The job of the teacher, the function of the school, is not to impart knowledge, at least not of the testable kind.  It is not primarily a mater of the skills which are attained through a mastery of language, symbol, and abstract thought.  It is to foster life adjustment—to treat, as it were, the whole child.  Here at Teachers College teaching is thought of as one of the helping professions, akin to social work-— kind of social therapy.”  The primary goals of the classroom are not increasing knowledge, but raising self-esteem. 

In some programs she found “the substitution of indoctrination for education,” and the “antinomian legacy of the 1960s, in which education was supposed to move away from the teacher as authority and the student as experiencer.”  They promoted methods like “cooperative learning,” in which “no one has to learn all about anything,” but which is “easier for the teacher.”  And all of these dubious methods were buttressed by their own specious “research.” 

Ed schools take mediocre students and make them even less capable of teaching, wasting course time on pedagogy instead of intellectual disciplines.  As a result, teachers routinely end up teaching subjects they are ignorant of.  “Their ed courses train them to be social workers rather than to develop the meager intellectual skills they bring with them to graduate study and beyond, to the classroom.” 

The poor quality of teacher ed majors degrades academic quality throughout the college, and helps explain higher education’s complicity in the perpetual ed school crisis.  Myron Lieberman, an expert in the economics of education, notes, “Many academic departments, even entire institutions, often depend on prospective teachers to sustain their enrollments.  Imposing higher standards for teacher education programs would lower their enrollments and threaten their survival.  The incentive to keep standards low is very strong indeed.”  Union controls and racial group demands prevent the improvement of the teacher corps by money incentives—it is impossible to pay for quality in a system that depends on mediocrity. 

So the first answer to the question of why better students do not choose to become teachers is:  the poor quality and reputation of ed schools.  And it is crucial to understand that ed schools prefer to keep the bright students away.  The vested interest that ed schools have in low standards was well described by Thomas Sowell.  As he concluded in Inside American Education, “The biggest liability of the American public school system is the legal requirement that education courses be taken by people who seek careers as tenured teachers.”  The chief effect of pedagogy courses is to deter bright students from seeking to become teachers, thus leaving the field to the dull.  Observers have known about the vapidity of ed programs for decades, Sowell noted, but “the education establishment has been very effective in blocking or deflecting attempts to raise the intellectual content and level of American education.  Nowhere has it been more successful than in blocking all efforts to end the monopoly of schools and departments of education as the gatekeepers of the teaching profession.” 
 
The chief effect of the revival of concern about academic standards in the 1980s was to re-focus the debate from “inputs” (how much money we spend on education) to “outcomes” (what results).  But it was the great triumph of the education establishment to turn outcomes into “outcomes based education” (OBE), a redefinition of academic success that further lowered academic standards in the name of equality. 

The effect of outcomes based education and other educationist innovations, said journalist Charles Sykes, was Dumbing Down Our Kids.  In this 1995 book he put OBE in the long line of progressive education nostrums that extended back to the 1910s, with each failure leading to more money and power for teacher ed gatekeepers.  “The debate over education philosophy essentially has remained unchanged…. Between those who believe that education should concern itself with intellectual discipline and those succeeding waves of innovators who offer the ‘child’s interest’ or the well-adjusted personality, self-expressiveness, or self-esteem as more attractive alternatives.” 

Educationists employed a successful strategy to mask failure or turn it into success—denying problems exist, redefining achievement, and vilifying critics.  After turning out a generation of illiterates, the ed establishment uses the mess it created as the proof that more money and programs are needed.  Among the latest and fastest-growing is “learning disabilities.”  In schools, what the civil rights movement was to the 1960s, the “LD” movement has been to the 1990s.  A huge market has been created to serve students with syndromes like “attention-deficit disorder,” which have no agreed-upon definitions or diagnoses.  Gerald Coles concludes that learning disability has become a sophisticated synonym for simple underachievement. 

The most recent and comprehensive analysis of the teacher-ed/progressive ed crisis came in E.D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Deserve. The “reforms” recommended by the ed establishment in the 1990s are nothing more than a rehash of generations of ailed progressive ideas.  It is the near impossibility of thinking outside of the confines of ed-school orthodoxy, the deeply ingrained “thoughtworld” of pedagogical-progressive philosophy that justifies the entire teacher-ed establishment, that is the most serious problem facing American schools.  It is the intellectual monopoly, even more than the political or market monopoly of public education or teacher unions, that must be broken. 

One thing is clear from the history of the chronic ed school crisis:  the establishment bas been fabulously adept at using its own failures to augment its powers.  This downward spiral rapidly accelerated after the teacher unions gained control over public education in the 1960s.  The Massachusetts teacher-test debacle may be the sign that the situation has become so acute that it is time to do something about the perennial teacher-ed crisis that we know so well. 
                    

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