Meanings, Silos, and High-Stakes Advocacy

Abstract

ISSUES OF MEANING Consideration of the politics of teacher education must begin by establishing what is meant by teacher education. Looking at the past five decades of teacher education, Cochran-Smith (2004) suggested that the enterprise might be viewed in three ways: as a training problem, as a learning problem, and as a policy problem. Using this scaffolding, she created three definitions of teacher education recognizable to most education professionals: teacher education built on process-product research; teacher education informed by a constructivist knowledge base; and teacher education framed by how teachers are measured on their students' performance. These extremely useful categories help teacher educators view the strengths and weaknesses of the field with the passage of time. Yet this structure presents only part of the political picture. For most local, state, and federal policy makers, the substance of teacher education is less important than its instrumental nature. In the heat of policy debates, it is common for teacher educators to lament that decision makers think just because they were in school for 12 years, they understand teachers and teacher preparation. Although there may be an element of truth in this lament, it only hints at a more basic issue: In general, decision makers do not care how teachers are prepared or about definitional matters that are important to the profession. Instead, they see teacher education as a tool to achieve broader, presumably more important policy goals and consequently, they are unconcerned with research in the field unless it offers evidence that a more expansive policy expectation is being advanced. As an example, teacher education often is seen as a mechanism to lever employment policy; that is, to lower unemployment by enticing individuals with certain skills to particular job markets. In addition, in many states and localities, teacher education is thought of as a device to promote certain academic or community values: patriotism, support for diversity, classroom discipline, democratic understandings, religious beliefs, high examination scores, teaching to the test, and the like. It should be noted that using aspects of the education system to advance a singular policy purpose is not unique to teacher education. Post-World War II federal policy to expand access to higher education was based on the need to find ways to occupy the time of returning servicemen and servicewomen until the postwar economy could generate jobs for them. As another example, the federal school lunch program was designed to provide a market for American agricultural products, not just to ensure that children have healthy meals. In this article, it is suggested that in regard to teacher education, the policy community has not moved beyond the assumption that its principal if not sole purpose is to help implement other, more important, policy options. To the extent that this perspective is shared by some K-12 advocates and leaders, the efforts of teacher educators to effect policy based on professional standards is hampered. Conflicting expectations for teacher education are further muddled by lack of agreement about the role of schools, the purpose of education in the United States, and the influence of personal and collective values on the curriculum and how it is taught. For the most part, descriptions of the role of schools and purpose of education are retrospective. That is, historians have studied the system and then established useful categories to analyze events at a particular time (Lucas, 1997; McMannon, 1995). It is less obvious or certain whether, in the nation's history or in contemporary times, there has been a serious national conversation about the purpose of public education and schools. Arguably, in the second half of the 20th century, there were several points when the country stepped close to but never consummated a national debate on education. During the 1950s, when the nation felt its national security was threatened, the Congress enacted the National Defense Education Act amid controversy about whether there should be any federal involvement in elementary and secondary education. …