Hammer the Hammer
Public-school teaching as a preserve for the incorrigibly incompetent is safe for the time being.

By Peter Wood, associate provost at Boston University
July 24, 2001 9:00 a.m.

olleges and universities in the United States by and large do a shoddy job of preparing students to become teachers in the nation's public schools. The public-school teachers return the favor by doing a shoddy job of preparing their students for college.

Most Americans have gotten used to these little defects. Educational mediocrity is the worn-out couch in the nation's living room — the upholstery is stained and the stuffing may be coming out, but it is still a familiar and comfortable place to sit. Every once and a while, however, we get an urge to renovate.

Congress apparently felt that urge when it passed the Higher Education Amendments of 1998. Among the provisions of the HEA was one (Section 207f) that mandated state "report cards" for schools of education. The idea was to require states to publish the number and percentages of students in each teacher-preparation program who pass that state's teacher-licensure examination. In theory, with this information, the public would be able to identify those schools of education that graduate the least adept would-be teachers.

The first application of the rule, in 1998, worked exactly as intended. Numerous schools of education across the country were forced to divulge unpleasant facts: that, after two or more years of study to become teachers, only 60 percent (or 50 percent, or 40) of their students could pass the fairly simple examinations for state licensure. The data were alarming, and the colleges with the lowest percentages of passing students faced a crisis. The shoddiness of their teacher-education programs was, for once, on full display. For a brief moment the educational establishment had to reckon with the serious possibility of raising its standards.

No, just kidding. If there is anything at which schools of education excel, surely it is finding misleading and self-serving ways to count things. Congress had simply presented a worthy challenge. The solution? Consider this a test. Can you think like an educationist? While I tell you about Fitchburg, Massachusetts, home of Fitchburg State College, see if you can figure out how to subvert the intent of school-of-education-report-card law.

Fitchburg is an old mill town about 50 miles west of Boston. It is named after John Fitch, who, along with his family, was carried off by the Indians in 1748 but who escaped the next year. The town, which once made paper, shoes, axle grease, and chairs, perhaps reached its high-water mark in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when a Norwegian immigrant, Iver Johnson, founded his "Arms and Cycle" works that combined handgun and bicycle manufacturing. In 1908, Iver Johnson's company began producing "Hammer the Hammer" safety hammer revolvers. But all this is long gone. Fitchburg today is another struggling former mill town, home to Alpha Rho, "New England's largest plastic box manufacturer" — and to Fitchburg State College.

Fitchburg State College produced one of the classes that scored near the bottom on the 1998 Massachusetts Teacher's Certification Examination. Only 25 percent of the 80 Fitchburg State College students who took the exam passed it. But, with a little help from the Massachusetts Department of Education, teacher training at Fitchburg is looking up? How?

Time's up. You win if you calculated that the best way to raise a school of education's teacher-certification passage rate is to redefine the category of "student." Fitchburg State College and many other teachers colleges decided that students who come to the college to take courses in education will be admitted to the college but not officially to the education program until after they pass the state licensure examination. Logically, this will mean that 100 percent of Fitchburg's supposed cohort of aspiring teachers will pass the test.

Ex post facto enrollment is an ingenious device with lots of other potential applications. Only individuals who have been awarded patents will be ex post facto recognized as engineering students. Only students admitted to medical school will be ex post facto recognized as pre-med. Only players with NBA contracts will be ex post facto recognized as members of the college basketball squad.

Something of the escaping spirit of John Fitch must linger in the schist hills of Fitchburg, or something of old Iver Johnson's fascination with revolving parts. In any case, rather than close a self-evidently derelict program or perchance salvage it with top-to-bottom reforms, Fitchburg simply revolved the students temporarily out of the program and back again after they had passed the examination. And the Commonwealth of Massachusetts said: OK, works for us.

But doesn't this mean that Fitchburg's worst would-be teachers, denied licensure, will not be joining the ranks — the unionized, virtually unfireable ranks — of America's public-school teachers? No, many of them will take the test several times and eventually pass it. The national teacher shortage will ensure that most of them eventually end up in the classroom. Public-school teaching as a preserve for the incorrigibly incompetent is safe for the time being. Fitchburg and colleges like it can continue to enroll education students who are ill-suited to the profession. Teacher training can continue along its desultory path of intellectual inconsequence. And the rest of us can settle in our comfortable old couch and not wonder about the quality of preparation for the Fitchburg students who did manage to pass the test.

Whatever Fitchburg's faults, I should perhaps add that, on that 1998 report card, it bested one of the other Massachusetts teachers colleges (Springfield — 22.2 percent passed) and better than doubled Laselle College's score (nine students took it; one passed). And I pick on Massachusetts colleges only because the numbers are at hand. The same circus can be found in other states.

Clearly Congress's effort to force the teacher-diploma mills into the open didn't anticipate this kind of brazen nonfeasance. No one will seriously believe that a Fitchburg State College or Bridgewater State University has suddenly leapt past Harvard College or Boston University in the quality of its programs. But no matter. The real point is just to nullify the reform by making the numbers seem meaningless.

Nor does the mischief stop with the colleges and their friends in the state bureaucracies. Recently one of the major associations of colleges and universities, the American Council on Education (ACE), called the HEA-mandated report cards for schools of education "far more difficult, complex, and costly to implement than anticipated," and it urged a series of steps that would bury the data in a sea of obfuscation. ACE would have no institution "unfairly categorized" merely because a large percentage of its candidates for teaching degrees fail the test for state licensure. In short, ACE is a Friend of Fudge.

President Bush is pushing ahead with education reform, but he must deal with that coelenterate life form, Congress, as well as an educational establishment that is out-and-out determined to prevent substantive change. Colleges like Fitchburg State, compliant state bureaucracies, embarrassed politicians with third-tier institutions in their districts, and national associations such ACE, are poised to hammer into meaningless fragments any serious efforts to improve teacher education. The road to our educational Gehenna is paved with pulverized proposals for reform.