[Reading-hall-of-fame] 2nd of three messages

[Ken Goodman]

7/29/2013



Dear Hall of Fame Colleagues:



The National Council on Teacher Quality has issued a report which blasts
teacher education. They bullied Deans into sending their course syllabi.
Then they applied narrow criteria as you can see with the attached excerpts.

Instead of looking objectively at what they taught they labeled them as
acceptable or not on the basis of explicit teaching of the 5 items in the
NRP summary.



So 60 of the members of the hall of fame have books on the bad list. A few
have acceptable books but some of those get split reviews (some books OK
and some not)



Ignoring the report of the failure of reading first, the authors claim to
be shocked that they could approve so few of all  the reading texts they
looked at.



And many of you may be surprised as I was at the wide-spread teaching of
whole language the NCTQ evaluators claimed to find. Clearly their
definitions are not mine or I suspect yours.



I believe this is a new chapter in the long campaign to privatize our
schools and narrow the curriculum. The report makes a big point of a shift
away from “training teachers” to “preparing teachers”. That means, they
say, that we’re foolishly concerned about issues of race, class, language
and culture instead of teaching our students the one true scientific method.



Bob Calfee, Yetta and I have a book in press with a collection of articles
on “Whose knowledge Counts in Government literacy policies?” with chapters
by Hall of Fame members and others. (All royalties go to the Reading Hall
of Fame)



Perhaps the one thing that has come out of these attempts to substitute
pseudo-science for serious research and marginalize expertise is that it
has made us all realize that however much we disagree with each other we
all profit from open and vigorous exploration of the issues in our field.



Please join me in signing the statement. I believe it could make a
difference for embattled teachers and teacher educators. Note the
disclaimer that we are signing as individuals and not behalf of the Hall of
fame



 I’ve attached excerpts from the report.

If you questions or suggestions for revision let me know

Ken Goodman

































































For your information: Selections from Report on Teacher Prep (2013)

Teacher Prep Review (2013) is available on the NCTQ website.**

*Early Reading (Standard 2):*



We were able to score only 692 elementary and special education programs on
this standard, 54 percent of the elementary and special education programs
in our sample; the remaining institutions did not share the relevant syllabi or
syllabi were too unclear to evaluate.

Note (from Ken) The president of the University of Missouri refused to
supply syllabi claiming that they are intellectual property of the
professors. Last week the courts upheld his view.



Results



Based as they are on the findings of the landmark National Reading Panel
study, the indicators of our *Early Reading Standard *are not onerous. They
simply require that coursework candidates be provided with adequate
instruction in each of the five components of effective reading instruction.
The low threshold for “adequate instruction” in each component is only two
lectures with an assignment to determine teacher candidate understanding. Y
et, 13 years after the release of the National Reading Panel’s authoritative
delineation of these five components, and with more than half of the states
(26) passing regulations that require programs to teach this approach to r
eading instruction. Only about one-quarter (29 percent) of elementary and
special education programs actually do (see Fig. 12).







. 12. Distribution of scores on Standard 2: Early Reading (N=692 elementary
and

special education programs)



[image: Text Box: 29% 11% 59%]





Behind the numbers



The problem here is not that some other single competing theory of reading
instruction is being provided to teacher candidates.  This is amply
demonstrated by the fact that the courses in our sample require *866  differ
ent reading textbooks, compared to only 1 elementary content textbooks used
in mathematics courses *The problem is that in most programs, *no *theory is
being taught. It is basically a free-for-all, with each instructor providing
his or her own unique mishmash of content, and teacher candidates being
encourage to develop their own “personal philosophy of reading.” (See the
discussio on p. 93 for how this problem of “personal philosophies” permeate
all of teacher preparation.)



NCTQ Teacher Prep Review* **p 93***

* **Conclusion** **                                    *



Why isn’t teacher preparation delivering for teachers and students?



Many times over the course of the *Teacher Prep Review *as well as the 10
pilot studies that preceded it, we have asked ourselves what might explain
the chaotic nature of the field of teacher preparation. Frankly, our
earliest theories were simply wrong, and it was only late in the process
that we stumbled across evidence that the field decided it was not its job
to train teachers but to *prepare *them.65 Though those two terms—train and
prepare—seem interchangeable, they are not. This word choice is a deliberate
one on the part of teacher education (“training” is never used) and connotes a
conception of its mission very different from what PK-12 educators believe
or need it to be. By abandoning the notion that teacher educators should arm
the novice teacher with practical tools to succeed, they have thrown their
own field into disarray and done a great disservice to the teaching pr
ofession.66



Teacher educators now view their job as forming the *professional identities
*of teachers. They aim to confront and expunge the prejudices of teacher
candidates, particularly those related to race, class, language and
culture. This
improbable feat, not unlike the transformation of Pinocchio from puppet to r
eal boy, is attempted as candidates reveal their feelings and attitudes thr
ough abundant in-class dialogue and regular journal writing. Once freed of
their errant assumptions, teachers can embark on a lifelong journey of *
learning*, distinct from *knowing*, as actual knowledge is perceived by
teacher educators as too fluid to be achievable and may even harden into
bias. The goal is for each candidate to develop his or her own unique
philosophy of teaching, no matter how thin the ground is underneath.



Back in the late 1970s, when the leaders of teacher education decided to
abandon training, many fundamental educational questions were still open to
debate, and the turn toward “preparation” may have made a certain
degree of sense.
The “reading wars” remained mired in a stalemate that would only come to an
end with the publication of the National Reading Panel report in 2000. We
had only sparse data on how well our students performed in math compared with
their peers in other countries and why those other countries’ students might
be outperforming our own. And the fundamental link between how much a person
already knows and what a person can *learn *and *understand *was not widely
grasped.



But now these and many other questions are largely settled. Leaving the
practice of teaching up to individual discretion denies novices access to *
what is actually known *about how children learn best.



Nowhere has this approach proved more damaging than in the coursework
elementary teacher candidates must take in reading instruction. It is
commonly assumed that teacher educators choose to train candidates in
“whole language”
methods rather than scientifically-based reading instruction.

P94

 Actually, little such training occurs, as whole language is not an
instructional method that a teacher might be trained to apply, but merely a
theory (flawed at that) based on the premise that learning to read is
a “natural”
process.67  The whole-language approach tracks nicely with a philosophy of
teacher education in which technical training is disparaged.

Compounding the deleterious impact of the rejection of training is the
principle of academic freedom run amok. Academic freedom lets professors
decide what to teach, but only insofar as the content of their courses is
backed by solid evidence. Physics professors, for example, aren’t “free” to
teach that the earth is the center of the solar system, nor are history pr
ofessors “free” to teach that the Declaration of Independence was never
signed. Academic freedom only works if a field is willing to police itself on
what constitutes acceptable content, but teacher education has neglected to
do so. The fact that 866 different reading textbooks—the majority of which a
re partly or wholly unscientific—are used to teach the seminal skill needs
by elementary and special education teachers is a testament to this
abdication of responsibility, an abdication that has very real consequences
for our nation’s children.



What then is to be done? While the field as a whole is in disarray, we have
found and highlighted instances of programs throughout the country bucking
the reigning ethos and actually training their candidates in crucial skills.
It is on these building blocks that the field can and must rebuild its
foundation. Far from diminishing the prestige of the field, the embrace of
training will raise the stature of teacher education within the academy and
beyond. What could be more worthy of respect than regularly graduating
teachers who are ready for the rigors of the classroom from day one?


Teacher education is at a turning point. With the publication of the *T
eacher Prep Review*, the consumers of teacher preparation—aspiring teachers and
districts—at last have the information they need to choose what programs to
patronize. Collectively, their choices will shift the market toward programs
that make training a priority. Policymakers, too, will raise their
expectations of teacher preparation in the wake of the *T**eacher Prep
Review*, and will imple- ment new accountability mechanisms to ensure that
more new teachers get what they need to help their students succeed. By pr
oductively engaging with these developments, teacher educators can

-- 
Ken Goodman
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