www.elibrary.com \doc\web\99\04\teaprep.txt TEACHER PREPARATION:DALE BALLOU & MICHAEL PODGURSKY ( Congressional Testimony ) Training and Licensing the Nation's Teachers: Why We Should Not Follow the Recommendations of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky [1] Introduction In the last two years the system by which the nation trains and licenses its public school teachers has come under attack by an organization called the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF). In a 1996 report entitled What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future, the commission charged that public schools employ large numbers of "unqualified" teachers, largely as a result of inadequate and poorly enforced standards for teacher training and licensing. The report was greeted as a "scathing indictment" of the current system and was widely publicized by the media. What is the NCTAF? Its name notwithstanding, the NCTAF holds no "commission" from any elected official. It is a private organization, funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. Although the NCTAF claims that its report is not the work of education insiders, the largest block of members comes from major education organizations and education schools, including the two major teacher unions, the NEA and AFT. Remarkably, for a body that claims to represent the public interest on issues of education policy, the commission also includes leaders of private organizations that have a direct and substantial financial stake in the adoption of the commission's recommendations, among them the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. [1] Department of Economics, Thompson Hall, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003 and Department of Economics, 118 Professional Building, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65203, respectively. The NCTAF Plan The commission blames current conditions on state education departments and many teacher education programs: Because most states do not require schools of education to be accredited, only about 500 of the nation's 1200 education schools have met common professional standards. States, meanwhile, routinely approve all of their teacher education programs, including those that lack qualified faculty and are out of touch with new knowledge about teaching. (WMM, p. 28) As a remedy, the NCTAF offers a sweeping plan to 'professionalize" teaching, shifting control of accreditation and certification from local school boards and state education agencies to private education organizations. These groups of education professionals would be empowered to set standards for how teachers will be trained, tested, hired, and promoted. A key element of the commission's program calls for all teacher education programs to meet "professional standards" or be closed. By this, the commission means obtaining accreditation from the aforementioned accrediting body, NCATE. The commission also calls for establishing an independent professional board in every state to set standards for teacher licensing. The commission's proposals extend to the assessment and compensation of experienced teachers as well. The NCTAF calls for states to establish goals and incentives for National Board Certification in every state and district, with the aim of certifying 105,000 teachers in this decade as master teachers, one for every school in the United States. What's Wrong with the NCTAF Plan? As economists who have studied labor markets for public and private school teachers, we have serious doubts about the direction in which the NCTAF proposals would take public policy. [2] We summarize our concerns in four observations. [2] A longer critique of the NCTAF report has been published by the Government Union Review. It can be downloaded from http://www.psrf.org/doc/v174-art.html. 1. Organizations that would be entrusted with professional self-regulation have demonstrated little if any capacity to improve teacher quality. The commission argues that requiring accreditation of teacher education programs by the NCATE would do much to ensure that teachers are carefully selected and receive instruction in state of the art pedagogical methods. According to the commission, graduates of NCATEaccredited programs will be better prepared for the challenges of the classroom and that their rate of attrition will be lower as a result. They will exhibit a higher degree of professionalism in their relations with students and colleagues. The NCTAF's 1996 report offered no evidence to support these claims. As far as we can determine, they are not true. Using data from surveys conducted by the Department of Education, we have compared NCATE to non-NCATE teachers on a number of dimensions related to professionalism and career commitment [3]. There were no statistically significant differences between the two groups. Perhaps more revealing, there is no evidence that those hiring new teachers think so either. The percentage of non-NCATE applicants who found a teaching job was as high as among NCATE applicants. The jobs they received paid as well. [3] New teachers were asked how long they intended to remain in teaching, whether they would still have chosen to become teachers had they the choice to make again, whether they were so discouraged by their experience that they sometimes felt their efforts were a waste of time, whether they moonlighted after school hours, and how much time they devoted to lesson preparation and grading. NCATE has accredited teacher education programs in some of the least selective institutions of higher education in the country. Indeed, the academic ability of students graduating from a teacher education program plays virtually no role in determining whether the program will be accredited.[4] While NCATE requires that a program use a test to screen applicants for admission, it does not specify the test to be used or the passing score. [4] Thirty percent of the teachers who completed NCATE approved programs attended colleges that were rated less than competitive in Barron's Profiles of American Colleges. In fact, the "competitive" category is not in fact very selective. Between 75% and 85% of applicants are accepted; median SAT scores were between 450 and 525 on the old scale. Thus, whatever the requirements for NCATE accreditation, rigorous admission standards are not among them. This is further evident in responses to the Baccalaureate and Beyond Survey: thirty percent of the newly trained teachers who graduated from NCATE approved programs had SAT or ACT scores in the bottom quartile of college graduates, the same percentage as those who complete nonNCATE approved programs. Many schools and departments of education have shown by their decision to forgo NCATE accreditation that they do not believe this stamp of approval is of great value. The list of NCATE-accredited colleges suggests that politics are more important than educational quality in determining whether a school is accredited. Where governors have led, colleges have sought and obtained accreditation. Thus, every college in North Carolina offering a teacher education program has obtained NCATE accreditation. In Arkansas, all but two have it. By contrast, New York has 103 state-accredited programs, but only three accredited by NCATE (Canisius College, Fordham, and Hoftra). Massachusetts has 61 state-accredited institutions of which only 8 hold NCATE accreditation. All are non-selective institutions (e.g., Bridgewater State College). The state's selective private schools, such as Harvard, BU, Brandeis, Smith, and Mt. Holyoke, are not NCATE-accredited (NASDTEC, 1996). The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The NBPTS attempts to recognize teacher excellence by bestowing a "National Board Certificate" on worthy applicants. Teachers seeking this recognition submit portfolios for evaluation to the board (located just outside Detroit). The portfolios include videotapes of their teaching, lesson plans, and samples of student work. These materials are reviewed by "experts" -- moonlighting teachers trained by the board. Teachers are also required to take a test at a regional site. It is not clear what practical good will come of the board's activity. The NBPTS does not claim to make anyone a good teacher, only to identify those who are already superior.[5] Whether it even does this is open to question. The process by which the board assesses teacher quality is highly artificial, relying on a small selection of lesson plans and student work which the teacher culls from his or her practice. There is no input from administrators or parents who have interacted with the teacher on a long-term basis. Indeed, even as the Clinton administration proposed to defray the cost of board certification, it acknowledged this uncertainty by contracting out research to determine, among other things, whether teachers certified by the National Board are more effective. [6] [5] In fairness, the board reports that participating teachers find the reflection and self-scrutiny involved in submitting an application useful. But for obvious reasons, the board makes no effort to ascertain whether an equal investment of time and money in some other activity would not be still more valuable. [6] Incredibly, the National Board itself belongs to the consortium of education organizations that received the contract for this study. The NCTAF and the principal organizations allied with it also belong. Moreover, the research proposal leaves no doubt that they expect to find board certified teachers are better, since elsewhere it stipulates that they are to investigate the training, mentoring, or other professional development activities of board certified teachers, in order to disseminate to the broader education community information on these correlates of "success." Of course, it may well be that board certified teachers are more effective, not because the board's methods of assessing teachers are particularly discerning, but because for the most part only superior teachers have so far applied. Whether this would remain true if high stakes were attached to board certification is another matter. There have been suggestions that board certification be used as a basis for higher salaries. For example, North Carolina proposes to increase the compensation of board-certified teachers by 15%. This raises the prospect of fraud. National Board certification relies heavily on portfolios of student work and videotapes of teacher performance, all supplied by the teacher. The board does not verify the authenticity of these materials. In these circumstances there are many opportunities to select or edit the materials to present teacher or student performance in a more favorable light. With substantial sums of money at stake, there will inevitably be cheating. Students will be coached on how to behave when video camera is on. Only the best work will make it into the portfolio, and so forth. The Board has not explained how they can maintain the integrity of the process when the opportunities to cheat are so pervasive and the returns to cheating are substantial. 2. The organizations that would be responsible for professional self-regulation espouse dubious reforms that have met public resistance and stirred controversy among educators. By entrusting the accreditation of teacher education programs and the standardization of licensing requirements to professional organizations, the NCTAF expects to enhance the training prospective teachers receive in pedagogical methods. Such training will reflect "state-of-the-art practices", "incorporating new knowledge" and an evolving "knowledge base for teaching" that makes clearer than before just what teachers should be doing in the classroom. Language of this kind is disconcertingly familiar. Public education in the U.S. has been marked by numerous waves of enthusiasm for newer and better methods that turn out to be passing fads. The succession of these fads does not inspire much confidence in the ability of education schools to ground their curricula in a reliable research literature. Indeed, the organization that the commission would entrust with the accreditation of teacher education programs -- the NCATE -refers in its manual to "evolving standards," suggesting that this pattern of swinging one way and then the next may not stop with the adoption of the NCTAF proposals. Indeed, organizations that belong to this accrediting body have issued standards that are highly controversial and of dubious educational value. Two of the constitutent members of the NCATE are the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. These organizations have been strong proponents of whole language instruction for reading in the primary grades -- a teaching strategy that has come under withering attack from other educators and is being rejected by parents across the nation who are demanding that their children receive instruction in phonics. A similar process of rejection seems underway for the guidelines recently issued by the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics -- another NCATE constitutent organization. These guidelines, like whole language learning, reflect the enthusaism of teacher educators for student-centered, constructivist learning. Textbooks and curricula inspired by these guidelines have appalled parents and educators who have described the results as "warm, fuzzy mathematics" and "rain- forest algebra." More telling, the constructivist model has itself come under sharp attack. Eminent educators like E.D. Hirsch have written persuasively that much of what passes for progressive pedagogical practice in our schools of education is fundamentally wrong and damaging to children's efforts to learn. Requiring accreditation of all teacher preparation programs could put NCATE in a position to insist that all reading and mathematics teachers be trained in methods that much of the public has rejected and that remain controversial among educators. Simple prudence would suggest that this is not a wise policy. Ongoing controversies about curriculum and teaching methods are a compelling reason not to grant monopoly powers to a national accrediting agency. Such an agency could actually lower teacher quality over the long term by stifling innovation and preventing competitors with superior ideas from having a chance to demonstrate their merit. 3. The commission's reforms would raise barriers to entering the teaching profession, deterring capable individuals who have attractive career options. The NCTAF leaves the details about curricular reforms to the councils and professional organizations it would entrust with the accreditation of teacher education and licensing of instructors. Nonetheless, the discussion throughout What Matters Most leaves little doubt that it anticipates an increase in the coursework to be taken by prospective teachers before they will receive a license (certificate) to teach. The commission writes approvingly of five-year programs (as opposed to the conventional four-year undergraduate degree) and year-long clinical internships. It applauds states that require a master's degree for a license. It disparages reforms that reduce the amount of pre-service training in order to streamline entry into the profession. By raising barriers to entering the profession, such measures will discourage some persons who might have become teachers. Unfortunately, those discouraged are more likely to be the kind of high-ability students with attractive career options that the nation needs as teachers. Indeed, certification as practiced today already deters too many talented individuals from entering the profession. Prospective teachers are required to make an up-front investment of a year or more completing college courses and student teaching before they are licensed. This investment competes with other programs of study for students' time and money. Raising the requirements for teacher education will therefore deter students who are undecided between teaching and other careers with significant academic prerequisites, since additional teacher training leaves less time for the courses that make them more marketable should they pursue other options. Enactment of the NCTAF proposals would tend to screen out (by their own choice) prospective teachers with the interest and ability to pursue other careers, leaving the applicant pool to those who never thought of themselves as anything but teachers. Notice that this would have precisely the opposite effect of other policies that are intended to improve the quality of the teaching pool -- for example, raising salaries. Those who advocate higher pay for teachers do so with the express hope of attracting individuals who are now choosing more remunerative careers in other professions. By contrast, expanding preservice training discourages such persons and leaves teaching to those who won't or can't do anything else that pays as well. The same argument applies with still greater force to persons already in the work force who are contemplating a career change to become teachers. The practical experience and maturity of many of these individuals make them attractive candidates for teaching. Yet for many the cost of giving up their current employment to return to college is prohibitive. Precisely for this reason many states have adopted alternative certification routes that relax the standard requirements for certification, facilitating the entry of such persons into the profession. Yet the NCTAF, while nominally endorsing the concept of alternative certification, is opposed to programs that would reduce pre- service training. The model of alternative certification that NCTAF supports would have career-changers spend at least a year in a master's program before they begin to teach. Advocates of expanded pre-service training recognize that some teachers will be deterred by these requirements. However, they consider it a reasonable price to pay, pointing to what they take to be an analogous situation in medicine. Doctors spend years in pre-service training and must pass difficult examinations to acquire a license. Why should we expect less of teachers? However, the analogy is ill-founded. The training doctors receive and the examinations they must pass to obtain a license are based on well- researched medical protocols: the efficacy of medical interventions is determined by careful, controlled study of patient outcomes. This is simply not the case in education, where much research into "teaching effectiveness" continues to rely on assessments by classroom observers whose notion of which behaviors count was itself shaped in schools of education. Clear superiority of particular pedagogical practices based on objective, measurable outcomes is rarely demonstrated.[7] [7] The much-touted Praxis examinations developed by the Educational Testing Service show how far we have to go in this respect. The Praxis I test, given to beginning teachers, was validated by soliciting the opinions of teachers, education school faculty, and other education professionals in focus groups. These groups were asked what proportion of "minimally qualified" teachers would be able to answer a particular test item correctly. No studies were undertaken to correlate scores on the Praxis with student learning or, indeed, any other measures of teaching performance. According to one ETS official, opposition of teacher unions figured among the reasons for this decision (Ballou and Podgursky, 1997). In short, American education would be improved if there were less, not more, regulation of the teacher labor market. Federal policy should therefore encourage states to experiment with innovative means of recruiting and training teachers. Schools need the opportunity to hire from a broader set of applicants, including instructors who have not fulfilled traditional certification requirements if they are sufficiently promising in other regards. Proponents of stronger licensing requirements often react to this statement as if it is tantamount to the claim that anyone can teach. This is absolutely not so. No one is guaranteed a public school job simply by holding a teaching license. Nor should they be. At best, a license indicates only that its holder has met a minimal level of competence. The best way to ensure that the classroom instructors are effective (if not excellent) is first to make certain that hiring decisions are entrusted to good administrators familiar with the needs of their schools and accountable for the education of the children who attend them. Once this condition is met, it should be the goal of policy to untie administrators' hands on hiring decisions by giving them a broader choice of teachers than they now have. The role played by administrators is a second reason the analogy between teaching and medicine breaks down. The case for medical licensing rests on the premise that consumers are unable to make well-informed decisions about the quality of physician services: there is a complex body of specialized medical knowledge that consumers do not possess. By contrast, many consumers are able to assess the efficacy of the schooling provided their children. Moreover, they are not asked to do it alone. Parents do not hire teachers -- administrators do. When administrators are accountable for student learning -- when they must answer for educational outcomes -- there is far less reason to restrict the decisions they make regarding educational inputs. The appropriate goal of policy is to make sure administrators know what they are expected to achieve, hold them accountable for those results, and empower them to make the managerial decisions necessary to achieve those ends. This anticipates our final criticism of the commission's recommendations. 4. The Commission's proposals reduce local accountability and increase the control of organized producer interests over public education. The NCTAF report has arrived at a watershed in American educational policy. Major experiments are underway to deregulate public schools while enhancing their accountability. The rapidly expanding charter school movement is a case in point, though states are experimenting with other incentive and accountability systems as well. Such efforts require that local administrators have the authority to make critical personnel decisions, otherwise they cannot realistically be held accountable for results. By restricting hiring decisions and tying pay and promotion to outside assessments of personnel, the "professionalization" plan proposed by NCTAF would reduce the authority and accountability of local administrators. One model for deregulation is, of course, the private school sector. Our research on personnel policy in private schools has turned up no evidence that such credentials as National Board certification or NCATE accreditation are widely valued in the private sector. Indeed, private schools, particularly nonreligious schools, often bypass schools of education entirely to hire large numbers of non-certified teachers. During the 1987- 88 school year, for example, only fifty-five percent of all teachers in non-religious private schools held state certification in their primary teaching area. This percentage dropped to just 35 percent in secondary schools. [8] Private schools use this flexibility to tap the very large pool of liberal arts majors for capable, knowledgeable instructors. [8] More extensive data on teacher recruitment and personnel policy in private schools may be found in Ballou and Podgursky (1997, Chapter 6). The behavior of private school administrators indicates that when schools are accountable to the public through consumer choice, little or no value attaches to the kinds of credentials the NCTAF promotes. Indeed, these schools hire many instructors who have had no formal training in pedagogical methods. The burden of proof is on the NCTAF to show why public schools must be compelled to submit to regulations that do not apply to private schools and that would impair the efforts of the latter to supply the educational services demanded by the parents who support them. That burden has not been met. We do recognize the legitimate concern that wider managerial authority might be abused. Proponents of strict licensing standards point to nepotism, political patronage, administrative incompetence, laziness, and bureaucratic red-tape as factors that lead to poor hiring decisions. But the best way to meet these concerns is not to erect barriers that discourage talented people from entering the profession and limit districts' choice of teachers to graduates of teacher education programs. Indeed, the notion that teacher licensing is an appropriate way to deal with poor administration is rather extraordinary. Licensing does nothing to rid school systems of these administrators; it simply boxes them in with respect to hiring decisions. But experience has shown that this is not enough to prevent them from exercising poor judgment in personnel matters (among other things). Poor administrators need to be removed. Enhancing accountability is a means to this end. But it is also clear that mechanisms for removing poor principals and superintendents are imperfect, and that there will remain some role for state regulation to protect the public from the worst abuses of incompetent or corrupt administration. This role should be a limited one, aimed at screening out incompetent teachers rather than putting obstacles in the way of promising ones. The best way to reach this objective would be to test teachers for basic skills and knowledge of the subjects they teach. By contrast, enacting the NCTAF agenda would strengthen the position of education producers vis-a-vis consumers in a sector where producer interests already carry inordinate weight with policy-makers. Behind the NCTAF and NCATE are the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, whose interest in restricting teacher supply is so obvious that it is astonishing that anyone would contemplate giving these organizations the right to determine who will be allowed to teach. Of the current thirty-one member NCATE executive board, seven are union-appointed, including the president, vicepresident and secretary-treasurer of the NEA and the president and vice- president of the AFT. Teams of examiners that visit colleges include at least one teacher drawn from a pool selected by the NEA and AFT.[9] The president of NCATE, Arthur Wise, is also chairman of the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education, an organization created by the NEA to tilt school reform efforts in favor of public school teachers' interests. Unions also provide financial support for the professional organizations that would be empowered under the NCTAF proposals. The NEA's 1997-98 budget contains $366,600 for NCATE. The same budget contains $306,550 to support the certification through the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards and $213,765 to support efforts "to make licensure ... a process controlled by the profession."[10] [9] From the NCATE web site and NCATE (1996). [10] National Education Association (1997, p.32). NCATE itself has refused to release budget information. It is important to keep in mind that for all the discussion of higher standards and improved training, the NCTAF's recommendations are fundamentally about control. The NCTAF would turn over the accreditation of teacher preparation programs to NCATE. Licensing examinations would be prepared by the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), another private professional organization. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards would decide who qualifies as a master teacher. Overseeing and guiding all of this activity would be independent professional boards whose members would be drawn, not from the public's elected representatives, but professional education organizations. It is naive to think that the impact of these changes would be limited to improving the training teachers receive (if it would even accomplish that). These organizations have a vested interest in opposing charter schools and other forms of school choice, and in oppposing alternative certification programs that bypass traditional teacher training. The prospects for such reforms will be much bleaker if power is taken from parents and elected officials who are increasingly responsive to the public's demand for more choice and genuine accountability, and conferred instead on the education organizations aligned with the NCTAF. Conclusion The NCTAF agenda is a continuation of failed policies that American education has been following for decades. The central premise of these policies is that the problems of American public schools can be solved by focusing on inputs to education. With regard to teacher quality, this means regulating the labor market. The NCTAF would have us believe that the right kind of training will make graduates of teacher education programs the effective teachers our schools need. They claim that they know what this training needs to be, and seek through legislation to impose their views on all institutions that prepare teachers and all districts that hire them. This is simply the wrong approach to education reform. For too long policy has focused in just this manner on inputs, an approach that has often been turned to the advantage of producers and suppliers of educational services. It is time to start holding public schools accountable for educational outcomes. We need to make sure administrators know what they are expected to achieve, hold them responsible for those results, and empower them to make the managerial decisions necessary to achieve those ends. This means, among other things, giving them more freedom to hire promising teachers, whatever their prior training. It is more than a little curious that the NCTAF, which believes so strongly that its way of preparing teachers is best, seeks to impose its agenda through legislation. If the commission's views are right, the commission and the educators allied with it should welcome the opportunity to demonstrate their superiority in a competitive market place. We should all welcome it. The direction for policy is therefore clear. Let us make sure that administrators have appropriate incentives to seek the very best teachers for their schools, and then let us get out of the way so that they can hire them. COPYRIGHT © 1998 BY FEDERAL DOCUMENT CLEARING HOUSE, INC. Posted for educational and discussion use only TEACHER PREPARATION:DALE BALLOU & MICHAEL PODGURSKY., Congressional Testimony, 02-24-1998.