Very
few Kansas school teachers are going back to school this
summer to update their knowledge. Medical doctors, nurses
and other professionals are required to regularly return
for what is sometimes called “in-service training.” Such
professional development is an important concept in the
professions where new equipment and new discoveries need
to be rapidly integrated into practice. For all practical
purposes, professional development of teachers in Kansas,
has been removed from the university campus.
In
2003, when the Kansas State Board of Education adopted
a new “Redesign” of Teacher Education, they likewise fell
hook-line-and-sinker for a “new” model of professional
development. No longer could teachers by themselves decide
to take college courses of their choice. All in-service
training had to be approved by a local school professional
development committee. No more music teachers taking math
courses, or math teachers taking music courses. Ignoring
the fact that a music course could have fabulous applications
in math classes, all decisions on in-service training
would now be made by school committees that would ensure
that the teacher was focusing on advancing school improvement.
And
since, under QPA and NCLB, “school improvement” translates
into higher scores in reading and mathematics assessments,
many Kansas school committees have narrowed the professional
development to just those topics. School districts, along
with state grants, tied professional development they
will approve for teachers to their students’ progress
on the assessments. Take a workshop and get so many in-service
points. Incorporate the workshop into your lesson plans
and double your points. If students’ assessment scores
then go up, triple your points. This is similar to telling
surgeons you can only continue practicing by taking narrow
surgical updates—no broader medical training—and then
we will double or triple your points if patients’ outcomes
improve, regardless of the reason they improved. Like
so many education reforms, it has a superficial logic
that leads to bad consequences.
Corporate
online education mills operating in New York and on the
West Coast jumped on the nationwide trend and offer drill-and-practice
courses aimed at generic NCLB and other skills: meeting
NCLB, character education, differentiated instruction,
reducing classroom disruption, matching instruction and
assessment, teaching for high stakes testing, etc. For
$25 you can click through these online tutorials. Spend
a little more time and add another $235 and you could
buy a college credit hour from a Kansas university. And
the online ad for the system misspelled graduate: “Gradaute”!
With
the university tuition costs nearly tripling in the last
two decades, Kansas teachers cannot afford to go back
and take bonafide and intellectually rigorous summer coursework
unless it is underwritten by grants to cover the tuition
and housing. As a result, the number of teachers making
a summer migration back to universities to update their
skills has plummeted. Kansas colleges no longer schedule
regular academic courses with anticipation that returning
teachers will be a portion of their summer students.
For
Kansas students and parents, that means that most teachers
are no longer getting that update on the human genome,
or the latest music instrumentation, or new lessons in
economics from this last year. Instead, we have focused
teachers inward on teaching-to-the-test and hyping the
next education accountability fad. Along with the disastrous
new policies allowing a license for just taking-a-test,
giving masters credit for student teaching, end-runs around
content for alternate licensing, and other reforms to
“lower barriers” that also lower standards for teaching,
we are not only recruiting some more marginal teachers,
but also actively preventing them from gaining the advanced
levels of training in English, social studies, sciences,
and other fields of knowledge that our future students
need in their teachers.
-30-
John
Richard Schrock trains biology teachers and lives in Emporia.
