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U-Minn backs down on teacher ed plan

December 23, 2009 By

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities has promised not to enforce a “political litmus test for future teachers,” FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights) proclaims.

The College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) is redesigning admissions and the curriculum to focus on “cultural competence.”

. . . The proposal, initiated by the college’s Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group, sought to require each future teacher to accept theories of “white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression”; “develop a positive sense of racial/cultural identity”; and “recognize that schools are socially constructed systems that are susceptible to racism … but are also critical sites for social and cultural transformation.” They were to be judged by their scores on the Intercultural Development Inventory, a test of “Intercultural Sensitivity.” In one assignment, they were to reveal a “pervasive stereotype” they personally held and then demonstrate how their experiences had “challenged” it. They also were to be assessed regarding “the extent to which they find intrinsic satisfaction” in being in “culturally diverse situations.”

In response to a letter from FIRE, General Counsel Mark B. Rotenberg promised that “[n]o University policy or practice ever will mandate any particular beliefs, or screen out people with ‘wrong beliefs’ from the University.”

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Teacher ed: Dump the American dream

November 25, 2009 By

Future teachers will be required to repudiate the American dream — “the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits” == at University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus, writes Katherine Kersten in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

According to a task force’s proposal, American dreamers will not be recommended for licensure on the grounds they lack “cultural competence” to teach non-white students.

The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the “overarching framework” for all teaching courses at the U.

. . . The first step toward “cultural competence,” says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize — and confess — their own bigotry.

The task group recommends requiring prospective teachers to prepare a report on their prejudices and stereotypes with points for admitting to bias.

The goal of these exercises, in the task group’s words, is to ensure that “future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.”

. . . In particular, aspiring teachers must be able “to explain how institutional racism works in schools.”

Finally, future teachers would be required to analyze the “myth of meritocracy in the United States,” the “history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values, [and] history of white racism, with special focus on current colorblind ideology.”

Those who resist would be subject to a “remediation plan.”

I envision prospective teachers who think students of all colors, creeds, classes and sexual orientations are capable of learning, if they’re taught well and do the work. But the time they might have spent learning how to teach reading, writing, math, science or history has been devoted to faddish drivel.

In a letter to the university president, FIRE argues the plan — which includes denying admission to applicants with the wrong beliefs — is unconstitutional, “a severe affront to liberty and a disservice to the very ideal of a liberating education.” Here’s FIRE’s analysis.

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Getting tough on teacher ed programs

November 7, 2009 By

Texas will judge teacher-training programs based on graduates’ effectiveness in the classroom, reports the Houston Chronicle. Poor programs could lose state accreditation. Till now, programs have been judged only by the percentage of graduates who pass the teacher certification exam.

The biggest change to the accrediting rules — and potentially the most controversial — involves linking a teacher’s ability to improve student test scores to that teacher’s training. In theory, the state, which still is working on a formula and a long-range data system, should be able to determine which programs produce graduates whose students make the biggest — or smallest — gains.

. . . The programs also will get graded on how often and how well they follow up with teachers during their first year on the job. In addition, school principals will get to weigh in on the programs through evaluations of the new teachers they hire.

On Education Gadfly, Stafford Palmieri thinks the “fortified walls” of teachers’ colleges are ready to crack, battered by “the development and refinement of value-added assessment, the widening use of data-based decision-making in education, and the improvement of state and district data systems,” plus the growth of alternative certification programs.

A growing number of charter schools, as well as the overwhelming majority of private schools, don’t even require certification. A few districts, such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, and some charter school operators, like High Tech High, simply train their own.

More than 90 percent of California principals say teachers from alternative certification programs are as good or better than other beginning teachers, according to a survey conducted by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CCTC) and California Teacher Corps.

The American Federation of Teachers hates the new SMHC report on “strategies for attracting, developing, and maintaining an effective teacher workforce,” notes Teacher Beat.

Among the recommendations, the report says states and districts should raise entry requirements for teacher preparation; institute a tiered licensure system requiring teachers to complete an induction program and demonstrate teaching effectiveness before receiving tenure; and overhaul professional development and evaluations to be standards-based and to provide pathways for teacher improvement.

AFT President Randi Weingarten complains that “the proposals don’t pay enough attention to the context in which teachers teach, and that accountability for student outcomes is focused too heavily on teachers, and not on the administrators and other environmental factors that affect working conditions. And finally, there is not enough focus on developing reforms in collaboration, with unions.”

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Oppressive pedagogy

April 29, 2009 By

In Pedagogy of the Oppressor in City Journal, Sol Stern takes on Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which has become a staple in teacher-training programs. It’s not actually about education, Stern writes. There’s no mention of  “testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students.”

This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies.

. . . His idiosyncratic theory of schooling refers only to the growing self-awareness of exploited workers and peasants who are “unveiling the world of oppression.”

A Marxist professor in Brazil, Freire “organized adult-literacy campaigns for disenfranchised peasants” to get them to elect radical candidates.  After the 1964 military coup and a stint in jail, Freire was exiled to Chile.

Freire believed that all education is political and that teaching academic subject matter “serves to rationalize inequality within capitalist society,” writes Stern.

One of Freire’s most widely quoted metaphors dismisses teacher-directed instruction as a misguided “banking concept,” in which “the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing and storing the deposits.” Freire proposes instead that teachers partner with their coequals, the students, in a “dialogic” and “problem-solving” process until the roles of teacher and student merge into “teacher-students” and “student-teachers.”

Progressive educators in the U.S. loved it.

Freire’s rejection of teaching content knowledge seemed to buttress what was already the ed schools’ most popular theory of learning, which argued that students should work collaboratively in constructing their own knowledge and that the teacher should be a “guide on the side,” not a “sage on the stage.”

But political, content-free education hasn’t proven liberating for poor and minority students learn, writes Stern. The “pedagogy of the oppressed” keeps them poor, uneducated and easily oppressed.

Check out the debate in Core Knowledge’s comments about whether Freire is still influential.

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