Inservice Education: Who Should Pay?

Abstract

Americans are ambivalent about universal public education. We increasingly see schools as the primary means of socializing our children, but we want a freedom of choice and a degree of quality which seem to be incompatible with mass education. Our ambivalence is especially evident when we are asked to pay not simply for teaching but for improvements in teaching—e.g., inservice education. Since it is almost impossible to measure the real benefits (or to define the ultimate beneficiaries) of inservice education, we judge its worth by measuring outcomes of secondary importance and by defining its apparent beneficiaries. By so simplifying the complexities of teaching and by then arguing about who should pay for inservice education on the basis of our simplifications, we tend to misconstrue or discard one of the few means available to us to achieve our real objective of good schooling for all children.