Dr. Gerald Sroufe,
American Educational Research Association

Author Arthur Levine has avoided the Biblical peril resulting from putting new wine in old wineskins. Instead, he has provided a fresh package for addressing familiar ideas about how to address familiar issues. This approach has proven hugely irritating to the teacher education profession – with friends like these who needs enemies? – and it remains to be seen if it will attract constructive interest among its intended audience: education policy makers. The two components of the new skins of this additional report on the education of teachers are a journalistic style of writing and use of comparative data for emphasis, and a fledgling effort to assess the contribution teacher education programs to student achievement to make the case for reform.

The book virtually pulls on one’s sleeve insisting to be read. It is chatty and wonderfully accessible, essentially engaging the reader in stories and vignettes about some of the key issues in the education of teachers. While all engaged in teacher education will have discussed the problems and solutions described in the report ad nauseam, they (the problems!) remain intractable. Levine’s analysis offers fresh illustrations of many of the problems and a fresh telling of the conventional solutions, and may attract the attention of generally inattentive policy makers.

Regrettably, one aspect of journalistic writing is to provide two views of each issue. Levine states that he want to be seen as a constructive critic but too often is unable to resist presenting familiar and titillating stereotypes of teacher education: offering a supportive statement on one hand and withdrawing it on the other, occasionally on the same page. For example, along with a nearly quantifiable statement such as, “in general, most of the deans were positive about NCATE accreditation,” Levine adds the hoary shibboleth: “Historically, relatively few of the top schools have participated [in NCATE accreditation],” and cites, “we heard stories . . .” without attribution or documentation – as journalists are wont to do. The result of this style of presentation is a report that is accessible, quotable, and often schizophrenic.

Levine’s next report is to be on education research. This is ironic because the research presented as the second aspect of this most recent package of teacher education issues is the weakest portion of his report. While many deans, faculty, alumni, and principals were surveyed, many fewer responded to the questionnaires (ranging from 34 percent of alumni to 51 percent of the teacher education faculty.) There is no discussion of the characteristics of either the respondents or non-respondents which, given the importance attributed to type of institution and their accreditation status, is regrettable. More importantly, there are no N’s reported on any of the tables reporting survey data, all of which are in percentages. There are no cross tabs in the analyses of surveys. For a journalist such matters are not of great consequence and, one must keep in mind, some of the survey findings are deeply troubling even if the participation rate was low. For example, if only 3 percent of the deans included in a survey report that their teacher education program provides for mentoring, and only another 3 percent aspire to do so, Levine has called attention to a significant problem independent of his casualness in reporting research.

(This may be a good point to call attention to the new Standards for Reporting Empirical Social science Research in AERA Publications. Adopted by the Council in June, the Standards are now available on the internet at www.aera.net.)

The use of the U.S. News and World Report ranking of graduate schools of education as indicative of quality measures related to teacher education is unfortunate. The U.S. News ranking is of education graduate schools, not programs of teacher education. Much of the ranking is based on institutional indicators appropriate to graduate schools, such as the amount of external research funding, that bears little relationship to a school’s teacher education program.

There are also some irritating aspects in the reporting of research. A table extracted from and ETS report on GRE scores by intended field of study for college seniors heads a column as “analytic,” but the ETS heading is actually “analytic writing.” Except for those in the know, this is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug. Also, ETS does not report national means for the table cited in the report, and the national means presented would be impossible to attain from the means shown for the selected fields (i.e., accounting through sociology), and must have come from another source.

Levine’s major research bumps, however, are with regard to the most innovative aspect of his study: an effort to equate teacher education programs to student achievement by use of an existing achievement data set provided by the North West Evaluation Association (NWEA). Only two tables are provided based on the achievement data, one aimed at comparing achievement of students of teachers in accredited vs. non-accredited schools on reading and math, the other making the same comparison on the basis of Carnegie type.

How were the achievement scores (net growth) and teacher attributes attained for the study? The achievement data was available to NWEA through its data base; teachers in schools who have contracted to use the NWEA assessment system were asked to volunteer to complete a background survey. It is hard to determine the representativeness of the sample of teachers as the frame of reference shifts between the number of schools in the population and the number of teachers in the sample. Volunteer teachers were sought from 6000 schools (120,000 teachers?), but fewer than 3200 teachers were involved in the study, and even fewer are included in the data tables. There was obviously some difficulty in securing volunteers: the study began by offering a lottery of $100 gift certificates, but in the last week a $20 gift certificate to each volunteer “to increase participation.”

The data analyzed by NWEA include about three times as many teachers from NCATE accredited schools than non-NCATE schools and, apparently, the NCATE teachers had considerably more experience. The two achievement tables presented control for length of time teaching, but provide no information about results without this control and no justification for introducing it. While controlling for “length of time teaching” certainly is a reasonable thing to do under some circumstances it is the only variable for which controls are established from the many factors that might effect student achievement.

But all this effort to relate achievement to teacher preparation is of little consequence in any event. Levine dismisses the importance of the research reported:

The real issue is not whether the graduates of NCATE-accredited schools or their students score higher on standardized tests. It is that teacher education accreditation does not assure program quality.

As Emily Litella would have said about the analysis of achievement data, “never mind.”

The report lists only five recommendations, but there are many more implicit in the text. Recommended is: more clinical practice, mentoring, higher admission standards, integrated curricula, five year programs that begin with work in academic disciplines and then move to pedagogy. The notion of what might be termed “designing teacher education backwards,” starting with achievement of students is a useful recognition of changing expectations and political realities. The main problem with these well traveled recommendations is that they do not address the agency required to implement them. For example, should weaker programs be closed? No doubt. But the blueprint for how this might come about is not provided. Nor is there any mention of teacher salaries included in the familiar comparison with the professional training and accreditation in the medical field.

The report includes four case studies of exemplary teacher education programs. Interestingly, all are accredited and only two are doctoral/research institutions, an apparent contradiction to the general argument of the report and illustrating once again that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” However, the case studies are informative and the programs described worthy of study and emulation.

One important conclusion of the study comes early in the report in a sidebar:

Weaknesses in teacher education are not the primary reason we do not have more and better teachers. Schools and government bear a larger responsibility.

How to create conditions where schools and governments might take on their challenging responsibility, apart from scolding, will have to be the subject of another report. The report, Educating School Teachers, and its predecessor, Educating School Leaders, can be read on line at the Education Schools Project: http://www.edschools.org/.