… 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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