Is the Team All Right? Diversity and Teacher Education

As an avid sports fan, I have sat through an incredible number of athletic contests watching the efforts of finely tuned athletes in competition. The athletes are supported by coaches, equipment, facilities, and of course, their fans. In high-profile sports such as football and basketball, the fans are encouraged by the enthusiasm and choreography of cheerleaders. As a teenager, I remember a call and response cheer that started with the cheerleaders yelling, "What's the matter with the team?" The fans would respond with an enthusiastic, "Oh, the team's all right!" We yelled this response to reassure our team that we were sticking by them despite their being down at any particular point in the contest. In this article, I am thinking aloud about whether the team I know as teacher education is, indeed, all right. As I think about the challenges facing our society, I recognize that one of the powerful determiners of how we respond to challenges is economic. In times of economic downturn, we come to expect layoffs, job losses, reductions of services, budget cuts, and criticisms. Teacher education is not immune to these manifestations of economic uncertainty. During the past decade, teacher education has confronted a number of economically spurred challenges including the closure of one major school of education, the consolidation of several others (with programs in human development, public policy, liberal arts, or information sciences), and increased competition from alternative certification programs based in school districts, online colleges, and state departments of education. Along with these cutbacks and consolidations have come criticisms about teacher education. These criticisms focus on the perceived lack of intellectual rigor and content knowledge in certification programs (Kramer, 1991). I want to suggest that the real problems facing teacher education are the disconnections between and among the students, families, and community and teachers and teacher educators. These disconnections emanate from differences in race, class, cultural background, and socioeconomic status. In this article, I discuss the demographic and cultural mismatch that makes it difficult for teachers to be successful with K-12 students and makes it difficult for teacher educators to be successful with prospective teachers. Much of the discussion surrounding the challenges of teacher education focuses on the external attacks from politicians, federal bureaucrats, and educational "entrepreneurs" who have a vested interest in the dismantling (or at least the severe curtailing) of teacher education programs. However, this article is designed to be an examination from within. As a member of this community, I find a number of practices within the field disturbing, and I will direct my comments to the specific issue of diversity. Unlike our external critics, I do not want to destroy teacher education, I want to strengthen it; and I do not believe this can happen until we look honestly at what we are doing. SURVEYING THE LANDSCAPE Today's schools are called on to serve a more ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse student population, representing about one third of the school population. Less than 50% of the school population in two states--California and Texas--is White. Students of color compose at least half of the population in the largest 25 cities in the United States (Applied Research Center, 2000). Population projections suggest that our student population is increasing and that the nation's population of children age 18 and younger is approximately 70.2 million. Higher birthrates and increasing immigration in the Latino/Latina-Hispanic and Asian Pacific Islander populations guarantee a rise in the numbers of students of color. At the same time that we are experiencing increasing diversity among school-aged youngsters, the nation's teaching force is becoming less ethnically and culturally diverse. …