The Intersection of Policy, Reform, and Teacher Education

Abstract

For over a decade, teacher education has been at the crosshairs of educational reform and policy mandates. At the conclusion of a report on the impact of the Holmes Group in the late 1990s, Fullan, Galluzzo, Morris, and Watson (1998) wrote, Never before has teacher education experienced such a massive outpouring of political and fiscal (p. 68). If teacher education was experiencing an outpouring of political and fiscal action in the late 1990s, then what we are experiencing in the beginning of the second decade of the 2000s must be a monumental flood. The impact of policy on the teacher education reform agenda has reached crisis proportions in 2011 and sent the profession into a reactive mode. The impetus for changing teacher education arises from many concerns, not the least of which is that teaching diverse learners in a highly technical and media-rich society requires the learning of new, highly sophisticated strategies (Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1999). Furthermore, teacher education exists in an environment where there are wide achievement gaps among diverse student groups. International comparisons continue to show that U.S. students are not competing at expected levels, especially in mathematics and science where we rank lower than some third world countries (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). Many students exiting classrooms are not prepared for success in postsecondary education and do not have the appropriate skills and abilities needed for today's jobs. The public outcry regarding the performance of our students and the quality of our schools has targeted teachers as one explanation for students' poor performance in schools and sparked a wide-ranging discussion about variation in teacher effectiveness. Because studies and reports establish the importance of individual teachers in student achievement, sources of variation in quality have been under scrutiny. One source of variation in teacher performance, teacher preparation, is a recent target. The ensuing debates about what experiences are necessary to produce high-quality teachers have permeated state and federal policy and mandates. The fact that research is not robust or is at best mixed about what produces a high-quality teacher only added fuel to the debates (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2009) and lead to calls for reform in teacher preparation at local, state, and national levels. Policy affecting teacher education evolves from a wide range of sources, including public perceptions and attitudes, federal initiatives, current trends in public schools and higher education, the visions and whims of politicians, and the profession's own initiatives. No matter how it emerges, it is not unusual for policy ebbs and flows to result in major reforms or restructuring of programs and curriculum as the teacher education community attempts to respond to federal and state political wishes and to the attitudes and perspectives of legislators and the public. At other times, policy emerges from educational reform and restructuring. A summary of the pressures currently buffeting the teacher education profession and a contrast of two disparate influential movements illustrate the intersection of policy, reform, and teacher education. Pressures on Teacher Education The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 and its efforts to define a highly qualified teacher were followed by Race to the Top (RTTT), which brought a renewed emphasis on accountability. The two large federal efforts that focused primarily on PreK-12 education serve as bookends to a series of federal and state pressures on teacher education. There were many ways that NCLB influenced and affected teacher education, but one feature of the policy fueled an already established political debate on teacher preparation (Kaplin & Owings, 2003). NCLB attempted to define highly qualified teachers by focusing on the subject matter preparation of current and future teachers. …