When I was a college student in the 1960’s, school-of-education courses were notorious for their lack of academic rigor. Professors in other departments mocked them, and liberal arts students looking for easy credits took them as electives. "Mickey Mouse” was what everybody called them.
Although I never enrolled in an education course, years later, as a professor and supervisor of student teachers at three universities, I did sit in on several that my students were required to take, and I saw for myself that the disparaging things said about them were largely true. I recall, for instance, one three-credit course on how to ventilate a classroom, arrange bookshelves and operate an overhead projector. The widely held notion that public school teachers go into teaching because they are incapable of doing anything else, no doubt originated with former college students and professors in other fields who remember those "Mickey Mouse" courses. And from what I hear, things have not changed much.
Back in the 1960’s, and in the good old days before that, the level of instruction dispensed by school-of-education-trained teachers in the U.S. may have been good enough for the majority of students who upon graduation from high school could readily find steady and life-long employment in semiskilled trades. Many did not even need to graduate. A rudimentary knowledge of the three R’s, if that, was all then required. But that, clearly, is not the case in today’s global, high-tech job market. Modern-day teachers steeped in the traditional school-of-education “Mickey Mouse” pap—time to start telling it like it is—lack the intellectual heft to adequately serve our students. And the same goes for the principals, administrators, counselors, and the slew of specialists running our public schools. .
The problem is especially dire at the elementary level. In his best-seller, The Conspiracy of Ignorance: The Failure of American Public Schools, (1999) Martin L. Gross notes that elementary school teachers have to take so many education courses--40 percent of their total undergraduate credit hours--that most come out of college no better educated in the core academic subjects than community college graduates. Less gracious critics claim that on the average the educational level of elementary school teachers is no higher than that of a middling high school sophomore. Most, to be sure put in long hours nights and weekends preparing classes and do a great job decorating their classrooms. But intellectually speaking, very few measure up.
Consider the trouble so many American high school students of normal intelligence are having learning math. On average, only 25 percent of seniors score at a proficiency level on national tests, and that despite all-out effort by schools to teach them, not math, but how to take the test.
School officials attribute this mass failure to the fact that many public schools nowadays serve a disproportionate number of disadvantaged students A lame excuse. The root of the problem really lies in the fact that most elementary school teacher does not know his or her math well enough to their students the foundation and encouragement they need to master the subject in the higher grades. With few exceptions all the ones I have met over the years openly confess that the reason they majored in education (as their low SAT and GRE math scores reflect) was they were never any good at math. They so fear and hate math that they subconsciously, or perhaps deliberately, project their bias to their students by watering down the subject under the guise of making it “fun.” Predictably, by the time their students reach middle school a good many likewise fear and hate math.
And pretty much the same holds true for science, (only 18 percent of high school seniors in the U.S. score at proficiency level) and, though to lesser degree, for language arts and social studies as well. It’s a no-brainer that if elementary school teachers were better versed in the core academic subjects, many of the learning problems and educational deficiencies plaguing school students today would not exist.
School bureaucrats have tried to patch up the problem with "resource teachers," specialists to whom students are sent for instruction that their regular classroom teacher cannot provide them. Thought this is better than nothing, it's not good enough, for much of the kids’ school time is wasted day shuttling back and forth between classrooms. Most of those resources teachers, moreover, are not all that knowledgeable, having received but a superficial, cursory training in how to teach their subject, rather than taking legitimate college-level courses in the subject itself. .
That as many as 40 percent of engineering and science students enrolled in American are foreign born and educated because our high school graduates lack the interest or cannot make the grade, is not only a national shame, but a major detriment to our economic competitiveness and, possibly, to our national security. Some of those students will remain in the U.S and become loyal citizens but many others will return to their home country, taking their skills with them.
American public education system needs fixing, and soon, lest the nation continue on its downward spiral vis à vis the rest of the world. But the fixing cannot be entrusted to those who created the mess in the first place and covertly have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The so-called improvements they serve up every couple of years are but rehashing of failed policies and strategies harking back 60, 70 years under a different jargon.
I therefore hold with Martin L. Gross and the growing number of critics who advocate scrapping the undergraduate education program and requiring the new generation of teachers to earn a bona fide B.A. or M.A. degree. The art of how-to-manage a classroom—crowd control, really—can best be learned on the job and through informal consultation with experienced colleagues. “Operation Phoenix” would be an apt name for the radical change needed.
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