The Ed School Disease: Part One

Bill Rhatican spent nine years teaching government and history at West Potomac High School in Fairfax County, Va., before he retired in June. He had been a journalist before that, and learned the power of getting his students' papers published in some form. Seeing their words in print lent an excitement to their research and writing that they could not get enough of.

But when Rhatican showed off the book full of 20-page high school essays he published each year, some professional educators, victims of the nose-in-the-air education school disease, shrugged off the result as it were just another teacher huckster gimmick. The student-written book was "non-academic," they said.

Rhatican told this story in an e-mail taking my side in the evenly-divided debate over a column " Learning From the Masters " I wrote for the Washington Post Magazine on Aug. 6. I asked why our education schools did not teach the many practical and effective methods of teaching in the inner city developed by our best instructors. I cited examples from the playbooks of four nationally renowned educators, Rafe Esquith, Mike Feinberg, Dave Levin and Jason Kamras. Each of them had much more experience with low-income kids than the average ed-school professor, and their methods -- none of them learned in ed school -- had helped produce exceptional gains in student achievement.

I focused on their most unusual and provocative approaches, the ones least likely to reach the ivory towers of our best teacher-training institutions. Kamras, Feinberg and Levin, for instance, had success making unannounced visits to inner city parents who could not be reached on the phone or by e-mail. Esquith invented a system that paid low-income Los Angeles fifth graders virtual dollars based on their work and boosted their understanding of math, economics and geography. Kamras gave his D.C. students quick feedback on homework by only grading a few of their answers. Feinberg and Levin required students to call their teachers at home if they had homework questions.

Many of the education school people said that as interesting as such methods were, they could not teach them until they had been verified by research. I protested that researchers usually chewed such lessons into indigestible mush, with conclusions too vague or too controversial to help beginning teachers.

At least half of readers said much of that column was wrong. Willis D. Hawley, professor of education and public policy at the University of Maryland, said he thought the unannounced visits were more likely to offend than please parents. When he checked with Kathy Hoover-Dempsey, chair of the department of psychology and human development at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, she shared his view, although like the good social scientists they are, both acknowledged they have seen no research yet on the issue.

O. Cleveland Hill, retired dean and associate professor of education at Nicholls State University in Louisiana, said, "You insinuate that a first-year teacher who has just left a school of education should be able to walk into a classroom, after just four or five years of study, and impact student learning similar to that of a veteran teacher. That simply is not fair."

Dan Napolitano, director of education at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, said it was not the teaching tips that made the difference, but the veteran teachers' instinct for responding to the particular needs and talents of their students. The new approaches might not work in all classes. What was important was that new teachers kept looking for what did work.

But several teachers said they shared my impatience with the ed school love of theory and research. One ed school instructor said she was told to stop using several practical methods in her class because her supervisors felt the students weren't ready for them. This was after she heard from several students that it was the most valuable course they had taken.

Mary-Ellen Seitelman, president of Advocacy for Gifted and Talented Education in the New York City area, said ed schools were particularly adverse to giving rookie teachers practical advice on how to deal with gifted students. Constance Nichols, chair of the education department at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, said, "The primary mission of too many teacher education programs has become to survey current research and sell textbooks written by faculty authors, thus ignoring what is really working for achievement." Like Nichols, Lynn G. Beck, dean of the Benerd School of Education at the University of the Pacific, said she endorsed the veteran teacher practices described in the column because "they seemed to be contributing to good learning outcomes."

Leila Christenbury, professor of English education at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Education, put her school in a more common position -- somewhere in the middle. She said she and other faculty members taught some of the practices recommended by the inner-city experts, but only in a limited way. For instance, they recommended that teachers have classroom rules, but not that they require students to memorize them as Kamras does. Their novice teachers were not taught to create after-school programs, which the inner city teachers said were crucial, but were aware of them and "often participate . . . when they are established."

Education students at VCU "are taught to be available to parents," Christenbury said, but the Feinberg and Levin practice of giving fifth- to eighth-graders their teachers' cell phone numbers and requiring that they call with homework questions "is not mandated nor explicitly taught." One method she said she did teach without reservation was the sort of mini-economy in a classroom used by Esquith.

So are the ed schools right to keep their distance from the ideas of the most effective inner city teachers, at least until their methods are proven by research? Or should they do everything they can to make sure our teachers in training know exactly what works for the best veteran instructors?

Next week I will discuss a surprising new book that looks at the ed school disease from an different angle. It was written by a thoughtful ed school professor who thinks what he and his colleagues give students is pretty weak, but not likely to do as much damage as many people think.