Choosing to Matter More

The other day, a friend of mine asked a rather provocative question. "Why," he asked, "is teaching the only profession whose members--indeed, whose leaders--seem so dedicated to proving that they don't make a difference? " Certainly, like many policy people, my friend painted with too broad a brush. Many teachers, teacher educators, even whole teacher education programs ascribe to quite different views about the efficacy of our profession. But I want to argue in this invited article about the politics of teacher education, that our failure to fully turn that corner--the corner, if you will, from a "can't do" to a "can do" profession--is at the core of our inability to be seriously heard in the policy arena and even more important, of our inability to get sufficient traction in school reform more generally. Although many readers undoubtedly join me in wishing it were otherwise, many among us still cling to the belief that socioeconomic status--rather than what we do as educators--is the most important determinant of student achievement. And the impact of this view on future teachers is profound. Far too many regard the demands of accountability as capricious and unfair because their students are too damaged by poverty or family problems to learn. Our colleagues' voices ricochet in the policy world as well. By suggesting, over and over again, that teachers and schools simply cannot significantly improve the achievement of minority and poor children--by branding as "ridiculous" and "unworkable" the gap-closing agenda that is so strongly embraced by both policy makers and the American people more generally--they unintentionally give fodder to the very forces they most worry about. It is not, in other words, the rabid Right alone that is marginalizing teacher educators in the policy arena; they are getting a lot of help from teacher educators themselves. THEN OR NOW? During the past two decades, many teacher educators have worked very hard--often without much support--to get better at preparing future teachers to teach effectively the astounding variety of children who fill today's classrooms. Certainly, too, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, and other professional organizations have made this a high priority. As a result, most future teachers undoubtedly encounter at least some courses designed to acquaint them with the range of cultures they may encounter, with techniques for aiding students with limited proficiency in English, and with strategies for dealing with students at many levels of achievement. Many, too, do at least some of their student teaching in multiethnic settings. These changes are important. For if my own 4-year stint in an education school 16 years ago was at all typical, we had a lot of work to do. The messages to us were devastating. We spent a lot of time on the Coleman Report and the many reanalyses of the Coleman data. In case that was not enough, we were assigned some of John Ogbu's early work. Even research purportedly about other things seemed always to include a wholly gratuitous reference to the overwhelming impact of race and economic status on student achievement. The message was clear: What we were going to go out and do did not matter much. Socioeconomic status was the primary determinant of what our students would learn--not us. Although the changes in educator preparation since that time have been well and sincerely meant, I worry that we have not fully turned the corner--that the same old message is still powerfully, if more subtly, present: * Even in the courses designed to help teachers succeed with their ever-more-diverse students, we sometimes unintentionally reinforce stereotypes about who can learn and who cannot. Indeed, Education Trust staff members have watched in horror on many occasions while university professors lead teachers through an exercise of making a particular assignment more "culturally relevant"--and then fail to notice, much less act, when the products of those teachers' efforts took all the rigor out of the assignment. …