Accounting

Start with an impulse, a natural reaction to being in the world - "how am I doing?" Natural, because our bodies constantly monitor and control to stasis. When thing get whacked (hormones rage; injuries; too much or tool little food), the body responds to settle things. If we buy Erving Goffman's sociology, then people also adjust in infinite subtle ways to their environment. "How am I doing?" is another way to understand this micro-refinement.

Post Freud, this tacit, internalized question barged out with a loud voice. It is now a question of human consciousness, from which agency and autonomy, and being aware of oneself as a separate being, spill forth endless blood. "How am I doing?" needed more than spontaneous automaticity; it need proof, both subjective ("I feel fine") and objective ("My body is not injured, I have a job that pays me $75K working with special needs adults, my house has no visible foundation problems ..."). Put another way, measurements were needed. Solid, robust empirics and the tools they come by emerged.

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A note in the July 15 Education Week (link may be gated) announced how NCATE has redesigned its reaccreditation process. Ed schools seeking to reup had two options:

1. Document progress, and processes involved, from "acceptable" to "target," or excellence; or

2. Work with a local school district to develop and implement an Action plan.

Let's look at these in order, from a perspective that neither offers the kind of help ed schools need.

1. Document progress, and processes involved, from "acceptable" to "target," or excellence.

This plank seems progressive and common sense. Why wouldn't programs want to constantly strive for excellence? To ask this differently, though, a different question appears: what is excellence? Think back to our original impulse, "How am I doing?" When a natural response to world around us, a version of excellence is implied. For the body, stasis is excellence; for humans in society, our individuality seeks its own kind of stasis within a group which, if achieved, is the equivalence of a life good lived. Excellence has a nominal valence once "How am I doing?" becomes a live question, because humans have the capacity to posit excellence as something not as much natural as aspiration.

Ed schools find their vision of what education means, then create systems and hire faculty and recruit students to teach that value. The difference between excellence and what works is not so much a philosophical issue as it is a local one. What works in one classroom will be necessarily distinct from what works in another, even one next door. Ed schools, responsibly, assess their candidates on the minimum necessary for the teacher to develop what works in her own classroom, while leaving open the possibility that a candidates will demonstrate superior qualities during her tenure as a candidate. Thus a difference between "acceptable" and "target." Here, though, is where things err, in two ways.

First, excellence then, is a local phenomenon, while acceptable is a rather general one. Or rather, minimum competency is a general level of achievement that every graduate must meet. It is demonstrated through, following NCATE's structure, measurements of outcomes. We could say that, based on that measurement, acceptable is a minimum score while excellent is a higher score, but that misses the point: every candidate passes the minimum mark. Every candidate has what it takes to be a teacher. Ed schools are not predicting what kind of teacher their graduates will be, only that they will be able to succeed as teachers, not matter the context (well, hopefully no matter the context). These teachers will or will not be excellent, depending on how their eventual school districts define excellence.

And second, what is minimally competent for an ed school might change, for good reason. For example, if school A measures its candidates such that more and more are scoring at the excellence level, that could be due to better candidates (more teaching potential), better pedagogy (the faculty uses the NCATE process to improve) or gaming (aligning scores upward toward excellence). But no matter the case, an ed school would need to constantly monitor what the minimum level of outcome it should set. If too many candidates score excellence, perhaps the program is not pushing their students hard enough: better students and improved pedagogy prompt upward pressure on expectations; grade inflation requires downward pressure on evaluations.

The upshot for both, then, is that a focus on moving from acceptable to target/excellence does not by itself answer the question "how am I doing?" In fact, it can hide the question in the original standards adopted by the program. It could be that constant monitoring of the program against other programs would result in an answer of "pretty damn well," but that is not the NCATE model of measuring a program's effectiveness of achieving its stated goals internally. Any program worth crowing about should have already set its minimum expectations at a high level, such that completion of the program at this level is already a significant feat. Jamming up to excellent, without a reevaluation of what the minimum means, is just another potential act of gaming the system.

2. Work with a local school district to develop and implement an Action plan.

Strong ed programs develop teachers that can be successful in any context (within reason - this is not an uncontroversial claim, I realize). School districts have needs of particular kinds (highly mobile families; outsized second-language or poverty issues; massive overcrowding, for instance). Action plans therefore confuse what teachers need with what schools want.

The idea itself is brilliant: put emerging teachers into schools with a well-developed research plan of improvement. What great experience. But the needs of the teachers will always be greater than the wants of a school. Nothing wrong with integrating candidates into PLCs (or whatever), to achieve a similar affect. Linking ed schools to local districts makes a necessity (where else would the candidates get their students teaching) into the overriding focus. Again, a program worth its spine will set its minimum expectations at "higher" level, such that graduates will be successful in a diverse set of conditions. District action plans, though possibly of great range, will be narrower that the range of skills and knowledge needed to be successful wherever.