David Berliner Tells Arne Duncan How to Do Teacher Education Right

Improving Teacher Education

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Obama administration want to improve teacher education. Me too. I always have. So I went to the president of the university I was then working at and showed him university data that I had collected. I informed him that a) we were running the cheapest program on campus, even cheaper to run than the English Literature and the History programs; and b) that some of our most expensive programs to run, computer science and various engineering programs, produced well-trained graduates that left the state. But teachers stayed in the state. I told my president he was wasting the states resources and investing unwisely.

I told him that with the same amount of money as we spend on the students that leave the state I could design one year clinical programs so every teacher does clinical rotations in the classrooms of schools with different kinds of students, rotations modeled on medical education.

I said more money was needed to pay the teachers recognized as expert, say Board certified teachers, so I could place teachers in training to observe the regions’ best teachers. I said that more money would also allow me to design video labs for viewing great teaching and for doing micro-teaching so that future teachers could experience, in safe environments, how to teach. In such micro-teaching classroom they would receive feedback on how they taught from the students they just taught and from supervisory teachers who work in the laboratory. I modeled my proposal for a lab on the then newly outfitted kinesiology laboratory of which the university was quite proud.

I said that more money would allow me to buy a five bedroom house in the lowest income community and have teachers who volunteered to spend two weeks there under the tutelage of the communities leaders — their priests and ministers, their concerned parents, the social workers there. The teachers would be the guests of the community and we would pay the community leaders to feed the teachers, to take them on tours around the neighborhoods so they can learn about the strengths of these communities, not their deficits.

I said more money would allow me to provide a one-year support system for all new teachers placed in our region. The support would be provided by clinical professors of practice that visited each new teacher from our university about every ten days. Their job would be to help the new teachers emotionally (teaching requires a great deal of emotional labor), to help them schedule time (teaching requires enormous time commitments) and to provide instructional support. I estimated that would cut the rate of teachers leaving the profession by half. A savings of significant amounts of state and local monies.

The president listened to my proposal and when I was through, he politely threw me out of his office! Charles Baron policy director for Democrats for Education Reform, quoted in the New York Times said it well: “I think you need to wake up the university presidents to the fact that schools of education can’t be A.T.M.s for the rest of the college or university.” Although so much is wrong with the policy recommendations of Democrats for Education Reform, in this case they sure have it right!

David C. Berliner
Emeritus Regents' Professor
Arizona State University

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The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the official position of Arizona State University.

Arizona Appeals Court Rejects Charter School Lobby's Claims

A Maricopa County (Phoenix) Superior Court earlier rejected arguments by the charter school lobby that they should receive per pupil allocations equal to those of the traditional public schools. I wasn't present when that issue was argued in court, but I can imagine how lame the arguments for equal funding must have been. Charter school students are funded at an amount about $1,300 below the funding of traditional public school students. Differential funding of charters is common in most states.

The plaintiffs argued that the Arizona Constitution requires a "general and uniform" system of public education. "Uniform" to them meant same dollars. The argument must have sounded pretty hollow to the court when it is obvious to all that charter school offer greatly reduced programs, seldom hire support staff, usually provide no transportation, and pay teachers below scale — all the while overpaying school directors and favored staff (like relatives).

So when the plaintiffs appealed the lower court's decision to the Arizona Appeals Court, they got the same reception: lower court decision upheld on November 18, 2014. The plaintiffs had no case, but they had plenty of chutzpah.

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Gene V Glass
Arizona State University
National Education Policy Center
University of Colorado Boulder

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The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent the official position of NEPC, Arizona State University, nor the University of Colorado Boulder.

Are Charter Schools Greenhouses for Innovation and Creativity?

The rationale for the charter school movement went something like this: "Public education is being crushed by bureaucratic regulation and strangled by teacher unions. There is no room left for creative innovation; and tired, old, traditional educators have run out of energy and ideas. Let free choice reign!" It sounded good, especially to people who were clueless about how schools actually run. How have things actually worked out? What new, revolutionary ideas have come out of the charter school movement that can teach us all about how to better educate the nation's children?

Recently I had the pleasure of traveling to a southwestern state to spend a day discussing 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America's Public Schools with a large group of teachers, school administrators, school board members, and college of education faculty. These occasions are always enlightening for me, and I always come away from them with an enhanced sense of confidence in professional educators.

Among the audience were two young people who took advantage of one of the breaks to initiate a private conversation with me. They had read the 50 Myths book and felt that my co-author and I had dealt unfairly with the charter school topic. To put it bluntly, Berliner and I had written that in our opinion the vast majority of charter schools were underperforming traditional K-12 public schools and that the charter school industry was shot through with fraud and mismanagement. I don't think that the fraud allegation applied to these two young people, and I doubt that the mismanagement charge did either. And they clearly felt that I was uninformed.

The young man graduated just a few years ago from Yale with a degree in history. The young woman was a UCLA alumna with a sociology degree. He was Academic Director of a pair of local charter schools serving poor, urban children; and she was Director of Research and Assessment. Both had left positions with KIPP very recently. I didn't ask why. They felt they were doing great things in the inner-city. I advised them to leave the charter school industry and work in the public schools. They said that charter schools are public schools. I said that I doubt it.

The afternoon session wound up with a free-wheeling "open mike" audience discussion about "50 Myths." My young charter school friends took one more try.

Young Man: "You seem to ignore the fact that charter schools offer parents 'choice." And 'choice' is what they are asking for."

Me: "Why is 'choice' an unconditional good? A crack addict chooses drugs. Consumers make bad selections all the time, and unregulated markets are notorious for offering people options that are not in their best long-term interest."

Young Man: [Silence]

Young Woman: "Charter schools are places where we can innovate and create new ways of doing things. That freedom will let us all learn how to run better schools."

Me: "Give me one specific, concrete example of what you have created that we can learn from." Young Woman: [Silence]

Young Man: "I'll give you one. We are adopting the International Baccalaureate for our two schools. Every kid will get an IB diploma."

A woman in the front row turned in her seat to address the young people who had just spoken.

Educator: "We introduced the International Baccalaureate in your district ten years ago. Families can choose to enroll their children in it if they wish. We have had to carefully counsel them because the IB is not a curriculum for all students."

So much for innovation and creativity in the charter school industry.

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Gene V Glass
Arizona State University
National Education Policy Center
University of Colorado Boulder

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The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent the official position of NEPC, Arizona State University, nor the University of Colorado Boulder.

What Have Charter Schools Taught Us About Education?

Of course, the theory — if you care to call it that — behind the charter school movement is that if you take off all bureaucratic regulations and allow the free market to operate there will be unleashed a tsunami of energy and creative innovation in the charter sector that will teach all of public education how to do a better job.

Incredibly, the Rupert-Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal still believes such nonsense.

What have charter schools taught the true public school sector?

• You can raise test scores by discouraging poor or special needs kids from enrolling;
• You can raise test scores by pushing out kids who do poorly on tests;
• You can make yourself look desirable by lying about "waiting lists";
• You can manage your public image through marketing & public relations;
• You can run an economically efficient school by hiring inexperienced, uncertified teachers.

But the charter school movement hasn't shown anyone how to run a better school.

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Gene V Glass
Arizona State University
National Education Policy Center
University of Colorado Boulder

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The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent the official position of NEPC, Arizona State University, nor the University of Colorado Boulder.