… as everyone outside, and almost everyone inside, schools of education knows. This blog has followed the sickening absurdities of professional organizations like NCATE (scroll past the first post, and read the subsequent ones), designed to dismiss intelligent, independent-minded people from the profession, but there’s so much more to be said about the deadheads running the show.
Some of it gets said in the pages of the New York Times today by a variety of observers. Excerpts:
Nothing shows how downright phony the game is than the Ed.D.s — the Doctors of Education. I have seen administrators who have had trouble writing clear letters home to parents and who murdered the English language in public go about brandishing their degrees and insisting on being called “Doctor.” On the other hand, the two best principals in my high school — T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va. — never bothered to get “doctorate” degrees; in fact, one did not even have a master’s when he was first hired. Both were appointed by wise superintendents who knew natural leaders when they saw them.
The credentialing game is even worse when it comes to teachers, because bureaucrats, obsessed with rules and numbers, would rather hire a mediocre but “fully certified” prospect than the brightest, most promising applicant who lacked the “education” courses.
[W]hat we have now [is] a charade that confuses taking mind-numbing education courses with being a “highly qualified” teacher and has ended up filling schools with tenured mediocrity the kids don’t deserve.
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This system lacks quality control and too often encourages universities to offer quick, low quality graduate programs in order to attract those teachers who may be more interested in salary bumps than professional development.
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A master’s degree in most subfields in education (especially reading — or what they like to call “literacy” — early childhood education, teaching and elementary education) adds little or nothing to students’ knowledge or practical skills.
Indeed, a master’s degree in most education subfields further stamps in the “progressive,” “child-centered,” “constructivist,” “developmentally appropriate,” postmodernist, pseudo-liberationist baloney that infects the undergraduate curriculum, and which leaves graduating ed students unprepared to provide their own students with coherent, logically sequenced instruction.
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August 17th, 2009 at 8:21AM
Full membership in Arthur Koestler’s Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Dead Horses.
August 17th, 2009 at 8:39AM
To be sure, francofou. Problem is, they’re dead, but they’re trampling our children.
August 17th, 2009 at 9:18AM
Once again, universities are not about education, but very expensive certification machines, with very few exceptions, managed by people who have no idea was education is.
I once had a student who surprised me by saying that she would be teaching French the following autumn. "But, Debbie, you don’t speak French well enough to teach it." "I know, but by that time I’ll have my degree." She went on to a fine career.
Sorry, but I am beyond cynicism.
August 17th, 2009 at 9:33AM
If it’s good enough for our next president, francofou, it’s good enough for French teachers.
August 17th, 2009 at 10:50AM
Schools of education are bad (no exceptions, really – Stanford seems sort of OK) for a number of reasons, but one of the most important is indeed credentialism. EdM recipients, in general, already have jobs and are looking to get an automatic raise/promotion. The same is true of EdDs, at http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?cat=112least in the sense that those hiring an administrator don’t care about his/her research. (The same applies to most degree programs in, e.g., criminal justice, and to just about every graduate program at the for-profit schools like Phoenix — as well as most on-line offerings.)
Because what matters is the credential, students will choose their programs based on cost, convenience, and ease. Sometimes markets do work, even in academia!
August 18th, 2009 at 7:56AM
OK, so what do we in academia do about it? As the NYT roundtable indicates, there are plenty of powerful entrenched interests who like things just the way they are, thank you very much. When whole colleges are intellectually bankrupt, what do we do?
Not quite as sexy as tilting at football programs though, is it?