Taking Stock in 2004: Teacher Education in Dangerous Times

In an article about culturally relevant approaches to teacher assessment published a few years ago, Ladson-Billings (1998) asserted that those were "dangerous times" for teachers of students of color because new evaluations of teacher competency that did not account for culture could actually perpetuate teaching practices that did not serve children of color and children living in poverty. Borrowing Ladson-Billings' language, this editorial suggests that these are dangerous times for teacher education. Taking stock as the new year begins, the editorial posits that three major developments are currently driving practice, policy, and research in teacher education: an intense focus on teacher quality; the emergence of "tightly-regulated deregulation" as a federally mandated reform agenda for teacher preparation; and the ascendance of science as the solution to educational problems. (1) Although none of these necessarily or alone makes this a dangerous time, their convergence is pushing us dangerously close to a technical view of teaching, a training model of teacher education, the isomorphic equating of learning with testing, and an educational system in which "winner takes all" in terms of opportunities, resources, and outcomes. INTENSE FOCUS ON TEACHER QUALITY Over the past several years, a new consensus has emerged that teacher quality is one of the most, if not the most, significant factor in students' achievement and educational improvement. In a certain sense, of course, this is good news, which simply affirms what most educators have believed for years: teachers' work is important in students' achievement and in their life chances. In another sense, however, this conclusion is problematic, even dangerous. When teacher quality is unequivocally identified as the primary factor that accounts for differences in student learning, some policy makers and citizens may infer that individual teachers alone are responsible for the successes and failures of the educational system despite the mitigation of social and cultural contexts, support provided for teachers' ongoing development, the historical failure of the system to serve particular groups, the disparate resources devoted to education across schools and school systems, and the match or mismatch of school and community expectations and values. Influenced by the new consensus about teacher quality, some constituencies may infer that "teachers teaching better" is the panacea for disparities in school achievement and thus conclude that everybody else is off the hook for addressing the structural inequalities and differential power relations that permeate our nation's schools. There is another danger here as well. Although we now appear to have consensus about the importance of teacher quality, there is no parallel consensus about how to define it: how to conceptualize teacher quality in ways that account for the complexities of teaching and learning, how to identify which characteristics of teacher quality are linked with desirable educational outcomes, how to decide which educational outcomes are desirable in the first place, and how to recruit, prepare, and retain teachers who provide rich academic learning opportunities but also prepare their students for participation in a democracy. Absent opportunities for discussion about what could or should constitute our definitions of excellent teaching and teacher quality, these are being defined primarily in terms of test scores--K-12 students' test scores as well as prospective teachers' test scores. For example, Sanders's (1998; Sanders & Horn, 1998) value-added teacher assessment model, which is widely cited as the empirical basis for the teacher quality agenda, is explicitly designed to differentiate teachers by sorting them into quartiles according to the test scores of their pupils. The equating of teacher quality with test scores is also apparent in the new transportable teacher test being developed by the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE), which is funded by a $45 million grant from the Department of Education. …