Ed School Follies

...to the question of how a teacher can encourage creativity, the correct answer was "Not to expect predetermined answers...

...Second, the priorities of the public school system have to be reordered so that teachers are expected primarily to teach, with "knowledge itself at the center of the educational enterprise...

...At the University of Washington, Kramer sat through a class on the teaching of history in the elementary grades...

...A stimulating class is of itself a palliative for emotional distress, allowing kids from troubled families stable and purposeful school hours...

...There were, to be sure, scattered instances of good sense...

...Finally, the teachers should be compensated with decent salaries, yes, but especially with decision-making power...

...The program requires an undergraduate degree in a real subject (i.e., not in education) and emphasizesclassroom experience over mindless courses in theory and methods...

...Again and again, Kramer ran into the same brain-numbing philosophy that places more importance on personal ad62 The American Spectator March 1992 justment and social change than on concrete skills and personal discipline...

...But the prospects are not entirely hopeless, and Kramer proposes three reforms that she believes can rescue America's ailing public education system from terminal inferiority...

...From SUNY to Seattle, Kramer found "a striking degree of conformity about what is considered to be the business of schools and the job of teachers...

...The quality of public school teachers would thus improve proportionately...

...the professor encouraged a genuinely critical habit of mind, pointing out specifically how textbooks change with the times (e.g., an emphasis of process over content was the rage in the 1970s, when the kids learned "no history, no geography") and how the teacher can select and supplement intelligently...

...But the honest teachers who still inhabit such colleges—the professors who haven't completely abandoned themselves to the mealy little corruptions of their system—would be doing a public service if they smuggled this book onto their required reading lists...

...At Austin Peay State University in Nashville, a professor lectured interminably on the "bottom line": that a teacher should not make himself the center of attention by lecturing...

...An overhaul of the entire education system is therefore needed, with "clear and testable norms" enforced grade-by-grade, and with "different channels of schooling for different students with different interests and abilities...

...In the fall of 1988, Rita Kramer set out on a year-long national tour of fifteen of these institutions—public and private, urban and rural, religious and secular...

...Near the end of her tour, Kramer examined New Jersey's Provisional Teacher Program, an alternate route to the teaching credential...

...The teacher should be a teacher, not a social worker and policeman and family counselor all rolled into one haggard professional drudge...

...The schools need a sensible curriculum of concrete subjects and a reliable system of accountability in the form of regular testing—but the teachers need ample room to use their own creative discretion in their efforts to raise students up to higher standards...

...But many of the New Jersey student-teachers Kramer talked to did not seem to know much more than the graduate ed students she had met inthe rest of the country...

...Instead of garnering useful techniques for imparting knowledge, the student-teachers were being exhorted to "foster life adjustment" and "cure a sick society...

...Kramer also found many student-teachers—particularly those of "guilt-free" working-class background or the older ones returning to school after some experience of the world—indifferent or passively hostile to the ideological blandishments of their professors...

...71 The American Spectator March 1992 65...

...At the State University of New York, a professor asked her students whether a good "education person" should be a conformist or a nonconformist...

...At Houston's predominantly black Texas Southern University, Kramer visited a methods class in which the professor and the students shared "none of the white liberals' illusions about the underclass...

...For all that, the bulk of what Kramer saw makes for pretty grim reading...

...Today's public school teachers work under a humiliating educational bureaucracy that stifles initiative and drives away talent...

...At the University of Houston, a professor ran through a list of questions with predetermined answers regarding the teaching of art in elementary school...

...I'm going to act real mediocre in my interviews...

...First, on the time-honored principle that students do better when they're expected to, standards have to be raised—not just in the education schools, but all the way from first grade through graduate school...

...At Eastern Michigan University, a young professor whose lecture was peppered with Marxist clichés told her students to watch out for "ideological bias" in social science textbooks...

...When you combine such obtuseness with the political clout of the National Education Association and the usual self-protective inertia of established institutions, the odds against decent reform, or even modest improvement, are formidable...

...But as the kids grow older, the teachers must be devoted primarily to a clear and interesting transmission of knowledge...

...The concerns were practical: how to run a classroom without disruption, how to set a responsible example for John R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...

...Over time, Kramer reckons, an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts would come to mean that the recipient truly knows something of language and (continued on page 65) The American Spectator March 1992 63 Date of change: ED SCHOOL FOLLIES (continued from page 63) literature, history and philosophy, mathematics and music...

...D espite the tedium, Kramer's visits were frequently rewarded by moments of unintended amusement...

...in lockstep response the students called out, "Nonconformist...

...The deans probably wouldn't notice...

...This means the depoliticization of the schools and an end to "the usurpation of the teacher's role by that of the so-called helping professions...

...they don't read much anyhow...

...With these and many similar stories, the impression comes through that the teacher-training professoriate is disproportionately burdened by a solemn stupidity: here we have a class of people in whom the simple recognition of irony is totally absent...

...By and large, the research alluded to can be expected to elucidate the trivial (research shows that unused computer stock makes good scrap paper for drawing), the obvious (research shows that children perform better when their parents are involved), or the politically motivated wrapped in the contradictory and the downright mendacious (research shows that standardized tests are "culturally biased," that class material should be less "content-oriented," that children need to be taught "multicultural perspectives" and "self-esteem" and "nonjudgmental attitudes...

...The professors, too, are largely New Age Grundies for whom the catch phrase "research shows" has replaced "the Bible says...

...In the lower grades, of course, nurturing is important, and teachers with strong character and skillful ways of ministering to emotional needs are suitable for the very young...

...Given its clear writing, good sense, and good humor, Rita Kramer's Ed School Follies is almost certain to be ignored or panned by representatives of the socially concerned American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education...

...ED SCHOOL FOLLIES: THE MISEDUCATION OF AMERICA'S TEACHERS Rita Kramer The Free Press/228 pages/$22.95 reviewed by JOHN R. DUNLAP Since 1839, when Horace Mann founded the first "normal school"—so called because it established norms for prospective teachers—the number of teacher-training institutions in the United States has grown to more than twelve hundred...

...In one school after another, the concentration was on social therapy rather than measurable learning...

...Most of the students who attend the ed schools are, to put it kindly, not what you would call first- or even third-rate intellects, nor is there much interest in the gray matter among the administrative bureaucrats who do the hiring...

...By 1989, twenty-two other states had adopted some form of alternate credentialing, a welcome development if for no other reason than that the ed school establishment has been intermittently apoplectic about it...

...troubled kids...

...Not surprisingly, much of this "research" is served up in the narcissistic jargon bequeathed by the human potential movement, itself part of what Kramer calls the "antinomian legacy of the 1960s...

...Most principals are interested in mediocrity," Kramer was told by an unusually bright teacher-trainee at Seattle Pacific University...