Between Scylla and Charybdis: Teacher Education's Odyssey

Abstract

I have been reading the Odyssey, the great story of a journey home, and thinking about teacher education as being on a very rough journey. Those who claim the privilege of educating teachers are currently encountering trials that share similarities with those of Odysseus. The Charybdis of privatization of education threatens to drain resources from public schools; the Scylla of high-stakes testing looms over certification gates. Sirens of cynicism beckon parents, educators, and administrators to abandon hope for the public schools; politicians, like the Cyclops, see only simplistic answers to complex questions. Some faculty members have been eating lotus blossoms that induce stupor and forgetting about schools and the teachers and students who toil there; and university administrators, foundations, and federal agencies, like the Olympian gods, have awakened from a deep slumber and decided to determine the fate of teacher education. It is not yet clear how schools, colleges, and departments of education (SCDEs) will navigate the rough waters of teacher education reform, whether we will reach some place we can call home, or how we will be changed by our journey. John Goodlad is one who, over many years, has taken the bearings of teacher education, recommended a new tack when necessary, and talked about overhauls and trimming for many decades. He has lived through the changes in the faculty who call themselves teacher educators, and those who do not. He has worried about the congenital malaise of teacher education and the inhospitable surround within which faculty struggle to prepare teachers. While fully cognizant of the impact of the university rewards systems, resource allocation, low status of teacher education within universities, and the poor (in status and rewards) conditions that those who enter the profession of teaching face, Goodlad has kept an unfaltering gaze on those who prepare teachers and the forces that shape teacher preparation. When almost 60% of prospective teachers failed the first administration of the state-mandated initial teacher test in Massachusetts, the syndicated columnist, William Raspberry (Laitsch, 1998) called it the Massachusetts embarrassment. The Massachusetts Educator Certification Test (MECT) is the result of Massachusetts 1993 Education Reform Act and a bill passed by the Massachusetts legislature that required candidates for teacher certification to pass a standardized exam in his or her subject field [and] a standardized exam of communication and language skill (Haney, Fowler, Wheelock, Bebell, & Malec, 1999). The test itself has come under heavy scrutiny, and the reliability and validity of the test as of July 1999 have not been demonstrated through published test statistics or common psychometric information. Educators (e.g., Haney et al., 1999), Massachusetts legislators, (e.g., Lane, 1999) and private citizen groups (e.g., Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, 1999) have called for an independent audit of the test. Nevertheless, the volume and vehemence of the teacher and teacher educator bashing rhetoric in Massachusetts caught the country's attention and made national news. The Commonwealth's Speaker of the House called teachers idiots (Laitsch, 1998). The then-acting governor called for testing all the teachers in the state, saying he would fire anyone who could not pass the test (he won the election), and the flamboyant John Silber, chancellor of Boston University and chairman of the State Board of Education, called education courses mindless (Lively, 1998, p. A28) and threatened to close his own school of education if 90% of its graduates did not pass the test. Another reason the Massachusetts test received national attention is that many states are struggling to improve educational standards, and testing figures prominently in most reform efforts. Ten years ago Goodlad (1991) wrote, State-mandated teacher education curriculums should be completely removed in favor of entry examinations designed to fulfill each state's responsibility for protecting the public against incompetent teachers and assessments to ensure that all the conditions necessary for high-quality teacher education are in place (p. …