Life on the Margins

One puzzle about the politics of teacher education in the United States is that teacher educators exert so little influence in this arena. (1) On the face of it, you would think that we would take a leading role in setting policy for teacher education and informing the public alike about the issues in this field. After all, we are the ones who run the programs that prepare teachers and who carry out the research that informs these programs. But things have not worked out the way we would have liked. We offer a lot of advice about teaching, learning, and learning to teach, but most of it is easily shrugged off. During the past 100 years, our most consistent piece of advice has been that teaching should become more progressive. Drawing inspiration from John Dewey and William H. Kilpatrick, we have argued relentlessly for a kind of teaching that is child centered; that fosters learning to learn instead of acquiring a fixed body of knowledge; that engages the interests of the whole child in a process of personal discovery; that marshals the activity of the child in self-directed, cross-disciplinary projects; and that promotes a democratic community in the classroom. In one way, at least, we have been quite successful in pushing this progressive agenda, because our vision has come to provide the language with which Americans talk about education. As Lawrence Cremin (1961, p. 328) pointed out in his classic history of progressive education, by the 1950s, American educators in general came to talk about their field using phrases such as the whole child, social and emotional growth, intrinsic motivation, teaching children not subjects, and real life experiences. And today we find that teacher educators, teachers, administrators, and educational policy makers continue to use this kind of progressive language. However, although progressive rhetoric is everywhere, progressive practice is much harder to find. Ellen Lagemann (1989) has argued this point with admirable precision: In the contest during the 20th century regarding who would have the greatest impact on the practice of teachers in schools, "Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost" (p. 145). Others agree. In his extensive study of 1,000 American classrooms, John Goodlad (1983) found that in most of these classrooms pedagogy was teacher centered, learning was passive, and control was centralized. Larry Cuban's (1993) historical examination of How Teachers Taught during the early and middle parts of the century finds that teaching practices at best displayed a hybrid of progressive and traditional practices, that these hybrids drew primarily on the more formalistic and easily adapted elements of progressivism, and that they were largely confined to the lower grades. Although many critics--such as Jeanne Chall (2000), the Fordham Foundation (Public Agenda, 1997), and the Manhattan Institute (Barnes, 2002)--have argued that the progressivism of teacher educators has succeeded in ruining American schools, the actual evidence they present shows the dominance of progressivism over teacher talk rather than teacher practice. These days, we in teacher education are more likely to use the term constructivism instead of progressivism (Richardson, 2003), but we mean the same thing. However, although we are as committed to the progressive agenda as we were in the past, educational policy is moving in the opposite direction. Instead of reforms that promote child centeredness and inquiry learning, we have the standards movement, with its stress on strict curriculum guidelines and teaching to the test. Instead of efforts that would reinforce teacher education programs for inquiry learning (as urged by pro-teacher education organizations such as National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, and National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education), we have reforms that sidestep these programs by encouraging alternative routes into teaching. …