Ignoring the policy makers to improve teacher preparation

I think it is time for those of us in teacher education to consider ignoring the educational policy makers that are undermining our efforts to develop thoughtful, autonomous, and effective teachers. Current federal teaching and learning policy is more likely to undermine teacher quality than improve it (Cochran-Smith, 2002; Darling-Hammond & Youngs, 2002). Federal and state mandates on standards and testing are narrowing the curriculum and are focused on the lowest levels of learning (Elmore & Rothman, 1999; Hillocks, 2002; Paris & Urdan, 2000). Federal efforts to establish so-called "proven" programs as the mandated curriculum (Allington & Nowak, 2004) work against filling classrooms with powerful teaching provided by engaged, expert teachers. In addition, each of these policies flies in the face of what the research says about effective teaching and learning. I suggest that it is a rare policy maker that shares my understandings of how we might best foster expertise and personal professional accountability in teachers. It is even rarer to find a policy maker who cares one whit about what the research says (unless it supports personal views or the findings are reflected in polling data). Federal and state policy makers routinely ignore the research evidence on improving teaching and learning and offer, instead, grand schemes that simply cannot be expected to achieve the meritorious goals suggested in the bipartisan advocacy for the federalization of teaching and teacher education (Allington, 1999, 2001, 2002). I have watched as federal and state policies concerning improved reading instruction have been enacted across the nation--policies that often have little base in research and little credibility among those who work in the complex organizations we call schools. I have watched as educational research has been savaged and redefined as a narrow set of quantitative schemes. I have watched as the two states where I have recently worked (Florida and New York) have crafted tighter and tighter regulations for teacher education, often with the support of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), while at the same time deregulating entry into the profession for those who have never set foot in a college of education. It was during my first NCATE/Florida Department of Education accreditation review, as I watched faculty expend enormous time and effort sitting in meetings to learn the process developing matrices, targeted assessments, standardized course outlines, and such, the college expended substantial funds for consultants and lots of administrator and support staff time, that I began to wonder if the irony of the process of earning accreditation had occurred to others. As far as I can tell, the whole point to accreditation, as now conceived by NCATE and state education agencies, is to homogenize teacher preparation, usually in the direction of the lowest common denominator. We are pressed to accept statewide course syllabi, assignments, and assessments, even statewide college textbook adoptions. Our students are pressed to develop standardized electronic portfolios (seems oxymoronic to me), to prepare to take standardized group achievement tests of professional and content knowledge, and to elect as their undergraduate majors one of five or six core disciplines (but child development, linguistics, and sociology are not among those majors suggested). Art Wise (1979), now NCATE executive director, wrote some years ago about "goal reduction" as one outcome of bureaucratic rationalization and centralization. Goal reduction evolves as an unintended effect of rationalizing education. Setting goals results in minimal expectations and the exclusion of some goals (those on which not everyone would agree or those not amenable to group standardized testing). Preeminence is given to goals that seem to address pressing social problems versus individual goals (national economy vs. …