Ed Schools: Officially Part of the "Problem" Narrative?
Justin Bathon on Monday, February 15, 2010 at 7:48AM Reading my latest edition of Time Magazine this week, there was a story on school turnarounds and the likely components of NCLB. The article was really neither good or bad, but this struck me:
Of course, the education establishment (i.e., the teachers' unions and ed schools) likes to remind critics that children are not cogs and what works for companies may not necessarily work for schools.
How flippant, that combo of teachers' unions and ed schools. Are we to be demonized the same way as teachers' unions historically have been? Are we now officially part of the "problem" narrative in the media and amongst politicians? I have been noticing an uptick in the blame associated with ed. schools lately and this seems to be just the latest evidence in our eroding respect.
This is unfortunate. Education schools can be natural allies for change in education, but attacking them in the way teachers' unions have been historically attacked is likely to have an entrenching effect. If you call them the enemy of change ... they might actually become the enemy of change. And even though there are a ton of problems in education schools (anyone that works with me knows how frustrated I can get with some of our arcane rules), folks like me are trying our best to change ourselves at the same time that we help change our schools. I literally lose sleep at night trying to work through all these issues.
Now, as in the article, are we naturally skeptic of the corporatization of education ... of course. There is no data that shows that Arne Duncan's corporate turnaround efforts in Chicago worked ... and, yes, we actually care about the data. The last administration demanded that we be scientific in our efforts and only commit to changes that show positive outcomes in data ... and we went partially down that path, but now we are being attacked as impediments to rapid, data-deficient change.
I also get that we are somewhat defenseless, and thus easy targets. So, we are going to take some of the heat, rightly so, for the issues in our education system. But, taking heat and being typecast are two totally different things. I'm fine taking heat and working toward change, but I am not fine with being typecast as the evil empire of education.
Reader Comments (3)
Justin,
I think you're completely right that we (ed schools) shouldn't be lumped in with unions, and that ed schools can actually help address serious social and educational problems if we're properly integrated into the policy process (though, I'm not exactly sure what that would look like).
But as you also note, we have some serious problems ourselves. I completely agree with you that we're against corporatization of education (for the most part). And many of us care about the lack of data on this issue. But in my experience, this isn't always the case - part of the opposition from ed schools stems from a deep and unchangeable ideology that supports public schools at all costs. In other words, support for public schools in ed schools isn't always (or even often) based on data or well reasoned arguments, and this is a serious issue too.
All of this is to say that I don't know the way out of this problem either. The only thing I can think of is to become increasingly rigorous with the kinds of claims we make and evidence we use. This is academia, after all....
I agree with you Ben - and I agree with your assessment of unfailing support for public schools perhaps taking precedence from time to time over unfailing support for learning. But, that's also far too broad a generalization when most of the top ranked Ed. Schools are actually private institutions themselves (I am not saying your making that case, just showing how crazy it is to typecast us all as central to the problem).
I also think that Ed Schools lose credibility with the critics--and perhaps more importantly, with those of us working in the trenches of public education--because much of their "research" appears to be qualitative, subjective, and inapplicable to what we see daily (i.e., ethnographies, critical theories, etc.). As an educator, I often feel that much of the research and discussion that occurs in Ed Schools is simply for Ed Schools' sake and is not value-added for K-12 educators.