Hiring is fraught with peril because of the uneven experiences that potential teachers have at college. Sadly, the current educational hierarchy has not been able to train teachers effectively. Many young teachers train themselves through trial and error. Theorists at prominent teacher colleges roll out one reform after another. Each one eventually fails and is followed with fanfare by the introduction of a new reform that soon fades. Colleges of education are not evaluated by outcomes and are never held accountable for their graduates. Are their graduates effective? No one can be sure, because prospective teachers are not tested for their teaching abilities.
Not only are departments of education not accountable but the current process for hiring professors is haphazard. Who teaches teachers? In my years in education, I have repeatedly seen weak teachers and unsuccessful principals hired to teach at the college level. There does not seem to be a pattern whereby the most talented teachers became faculty members in departments of education. Perhaps it happens sometimes but it is not the focus of hiring. (In a similar vein, I have been amazed by how poor-performing principals have attained powerful positions in New York City’s Department of Education. From these positions they spread their faulty notions throughout the system.)
One example of this pattern happened early in my career. When I was a new second-grade teacher, there was an early grade teacher down the hall from me who had received a very high mark on the city teaching test. And yet she was actually the weakest teacher on the grade. She “escaped” the classroom by going to graduate school, eventually getting a doctorate in education. Ultimately, she became a tenured professor, but nowhere in this progression did she learn the practical aspects of teaching that needed to be imparted to new teachers.
Two bottom-tier teachers at the school where I was principal (Patrick Henry School, P.S. 171 in Manhattan) left to teach at the college level. I remember that one of them would assign children to look up words they could not read and copy the definitions. This kept them busy and quiet but not meaningfully engaged. She later became a new teacher guide and mentor.
I observed the second one tell her class that King Arthur of the Round Table and Christ lived in the same time period. This happened even though my teachers were expected to research their texts in order to build student understanding of the story background. This teacher too was later hired to mentor and support young teachers. But here's the problem: if you cannot teach, then you cannot teach someone else to teach.
A few classes at Patrick Henry had great teachers when I took over as principal, evidenced by the better results that they attained. I made the decision to spend blocks of time in their classrooms, even if it meant ignoring or delegating my paperwork and other duties. I continued to do so until I understood what was happening there. I saw discernible patterns, behaviors, and outcomes. My study of teachers showed them to be the greatest contributing factor toward better student achievement. I told myself to sit there until I had a complete grasp of what was happening. Passing on this knowledge would become the first step in coaching new teachers. Today, I am reminded of the aspiring artists that I see at the Metropolitan Museum, copying the artwork of the old masters. I picked out the master teachers and my new teachers thrived by learning from them.
Much can be learned from training in objective studies in the social sciences. Ultimately, my background in anthropology helped me more than my educational and administrative coursework. In education, we must do research based on hypotheses that can provide testable empirical results. I believed then, and believe now, in an interdisciplinary approach. I felt like Margaret Mead, silently observing and perceiving patterns and relationships. I came to understand great teaching. Now the challenge was to reproduce it.
Often, teacher colleges and departments of education do not get much attention or respect from other branches of academia. Schools of education are not known as sources of rigorous and objective research, and the programs they advocate often lack in-depth research. The answers to our educational problems are unlikely to be found in education departments. There are of course a few exceptions. An extremely fine second-grade teacher I worked with ended up with a doctorate and a tenured position at Hofstra. More recently, I was training in a school in Brooklyn and asked a wonderfully gifted first-year teacher what she attributed her knowledge to, and she told me that her methods teacher at Saint Francis College was instrumental. Unfortunately, these instances are aberrations and not the norm.
Yet the quality of teacher preparation makes a huge difference. Early childhood programs, content-rich curricula, and parental involvement are also major factors in boosting the achievement level of inner-city children. If an inner-city student is “lost” in school for one year, the result might be an irretrievable slide into compensatory programs. Programs for failing students are costly and have low success rates. I strongly believe that failure can be averted with great teachers and great programs. But we still lack research-based training programs like those in Finland, a country that generally scores higher than the USA in international comparisons.
At Patrick Henry, we stopped relying on the colleges to prepare our teachers. Too many newly graduated teachers from these colleges flounder in their initial school assignments. We realized that it was pointless to have any expectations about what they might have learned in college. My master teachers were much more adept at training my new staff than the entire college hierarchy.
In future installments we will describe how we created and supported teacher greatness in one inner-city school.
