Beyond “Tinkering”

Abstract

The present issue of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) contains a group of articles quite distinct in their focus, scope, and methodologies. Despite this diversity in approaches and in r eported findings, we see a resonance across these pieces. This resonance reflects a set of issues that are significant to us individually and collectively as scholars and that we think are of critical importance to the field of teacher education. In this editorial, we consider how the current emphasis on content-focused standards and accountability--from individual teachers' classrooms to entire states and the federal government and even the global community--is positioned within broader sociopolitical contexts such that it is far too easy to lose sight of the ways that teaching and learning are affected by knowledge, skills, and practices that may not be measured by these standards. We argue that scholarship can and should be used to combat increasing pressures to reduce teacher preparation to standardized coursework that privileges subject matter, often to the exclusion of other important knowledge and practices. We also argue that the increasingly prominent role that accountability plays in the lives of individuals and the workings of systems as complex as schools, school districts, and state governments has the potential to discourage innovation and silence those whose voices are already rarely heard in classrooms and in broader society. The current emphasis on content-focused standards is evidenced in the widespread support and adoption of national standards. For example, whereas some states are reviewing their position on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for Mathematics and Literacy (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010), 42 states have adopted the CCSS (Bidwell, 2014; Ujifusa, 2015). Also, 40 states have shown interest in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; Achieve Inc., 2013; National Center for Science Education, 2013). As of November 2015, 16 states have adopted the NGSS (Heitin, 2015) and several more are considering somewhat edited versions. In addition, the Council of Chief State School Officers (2015) currently is drafting and social studies standards for the CCSS. Together, these events above point to the instantiation of educational policy through what may be the most profound and widely distributed educational reform activity in recent history (Koestler, Felton, Bieda, & Otten, 2013, p. v). These national standards and the movement toward their adoption, such as education more broadly, are situated within broader sociopolitical structures and systems of privilege and oppression that influence how such policies are framed and taken up. Careful consideration of these broader sociopolitical structures is critical, however, if the efforts of national standards are to move beyond rhetoric toward real change in students' learning (Apple, 1992). How the CCSS and NGSS are positioned and framed in the current sociopolitical climate suggests that they are grounded in global competitiveness and conflated with market interests (Eppley, 2015; Gutstein, 2010; Koehler, Binns, & Bloom, 2015). In this way, the CCSS and NGSS are positioned as part of a larger, neoliberal narrative disconnected from the experiences and realities of students from non-dominant communities (Eppley, 2015; Gutstein, 2010; Lee, Miller, & Januszyk, 2014; Parsons & Dorsey, 2015). In fact, the CCSS Mathematics have been critiqued for being part of a neoliberal agenda; lacking an explicit focus on race, class, and gender; and neglecting a connection between policy and practice (Bartell et al., in press; Gutstein, 2010). Similarly, the NGSS have been criticized for paying little heed to the needs of racially and linguistically diverse students, the very learners who make up an increasing proportion of the U.S. population (e.g., Buxton & Lee, 2014; Rodriguez, 2015). …