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by Dale Johnson, Bonnie Johnson, Stephen Farenga, and Daniel Ness
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005
THE EXAMINATION WAS HELD in a room at the small teachers college that I was attending at the time. The candidates—all future teachers like me who were nearing the end of our teacher certification process—were given a paragraph to write on the blackboard. One section of the board had permanent lines etched on it, on which we were to write the paragraph in our best handwriting. The state standards were high. The grading was strict. Perfection was expected. Teachers without such perfect handwriting could not be permitted into the schools of the impoverished area where this teachers college sent most of its graduates. We all then proceeded to the next room for our speech test. Again a paragraph was given to us. We had to read it with perfect diction, the testers waiting for the tell-tale signs of nasality and the dropping of particular word endings that characterized everyday speech in this section of the country.
In preparation for these all-important state exams, our professors had organized practice sessions. In many of our courses, we had spent a good deal of time on each of these "skills," often at the expense of other things. Most of us passed, a good thing for the continuing accreditation of the college. But the relationship between these skills—perfect handwriting and perfect diction—and excellence in teaching in slum schools seemed more than a little strange to all of us. It once more demonstrated that those bureaucratic figures who determined the characteristics that supposedly were absolutely crucial to teaching real children in real communities were out of touch with both the realities of such schools and the lives of the teachers who worked in such underfunded schools and uncertain conditions in them.
This was an important lesson for all of us. The fact that it immediately came to mind when I read Trivializing Teacher Education demonstrates two things. The onerous, time-consuming, expensive, and increasingly bureaucratic processes through which teachers and teacher education institutions are increasingly evaluated are often a move backward not a move forward. These processes also point to the shifting relations of power in education.
Let me say something more about this. By its very nature the entire schooling process—how it is paid for, what goals it seeks to attain and how these goals will be measured, who has power over it, what textbooks are approved, who should teach and under what circumstances, how and by whom teachers should be educated, who has the right to ask and answer these questions, and so on—is political. The educational system will constantly be in the middle of crucial struggles over the meaning of democracy, over definitions of legitimate authority and culture, and over who should benefit the most from educational policies and practices.
That this is not of simply academic interest is made more than a little visible in the current attempts in many nations to radically transform education policy and practice. These proposals involve conscious attempts to institute neoliberal "reforms" in education (such as attempts at marketization through voucher and privatization plans, including totally deregulating teacher education); neoconservative reforms (such as national or statewide curriculum and national or statewide testing of students and teachers; tighter regulatory control over all aspects of teacher education and the faculty who teach in it, and a "return" to a "common culture" in the United States); and increasingly the rapid growth of policies based on "new managerialism" with its focus on strict accountability and constant and often punitive forms of assessment of students, teachers, and teacher education institutions. When the efforts of authoritarian populist religious conservatives to install their particular vision of religiosity into state institutions are also added to this mix, this places education at the very core of an entire range of political and cultural conflicts (Apple 2001; Apple et al. 2003).
A considerable numbers of authors have shown the lasting negative effects of these kinds of policies when they are placed in the real world of schools and communities (see, e.g., Apple 2001; McNeil 2000; Lipman 2004). However, unfortunately, the issues surrounding these reforms are not totally empirical. If they were simply empirical, support for this assemblage of policies would be much less than it is now since the evidence against the effectiveness of these kinds of reforms is nearly overwhelming.
To understand how support for what are often simplistic or even failed policies is generated, we need to look at the ways in which powerful groups generate a supposed consensus on what works in education. We need to lookat what might be called the creation of a new common sense, a common sense in which deep-seated social and educational problems are framed in such a way that only certain answers seem to make sense. Thus, one of the most significant elements involved in minimizing social and educational criticism of the ways policies may actually work is to hide from public view the fact that the definitions of what the problems are and the proposed solutions to them are nearly guaranteed to favor dominant economic, cultural, or bureaucratic groups. This is often done by creating and distributing what seems to be "public knowledge" or a public consensus about how serious problems should be dealt with. Yet, even though the language used to describe the problems and solutions is superficially about ensuring more democratic and responsive institutions such as schools, colleges, and universities (e.g., the claim that tighter control and managerial scrutiny and shaming in increasingly underresourced and understaffed institutions is guaranteed to lead to better results), the creation of such public knowledge all too often actually actively excludes the realities of the most disadvantaged members of a community or of those people in, say, many colleges and universities whose lives are often made tremendously more difficult by this artificially created consensus on how public problems are to be "solved." That is, the perspectives distributed to the public are organized around particular views of reality, ones that may not be shared by everyone but ones that legitimate policies that are in the interest of groups with the most economic, political, cultural, and bureaucratic power.
This is exactly what Nancy Fraser (1997) had in mind when she said that powerful groups will often seem to listen to the worries of those not now being well served by this society's institutions; but they will then repossess the language that is being used to protest against such unresponsive institutions. This very language will then be used by dominant groups to describe "safe reforms" that they put in place, ones that do not deal at all with the depth or the real causes of the problems, and above all will keep bureaucratic and managerial interests in power. Fraser's points are crucial in appreciating what has been accomplished in this book. In education, symbolic politics counts. Using the correct words, at the correct time, in the correct setting makes a difference in how one's proposals are read and reacted to. Diametrically opposite policies often are wrapped in exactly the same vocabulary. As Raymond Williams (1985), one of the wisest commentators on the politics of culture, noted a number of years ago, there are "keywords" that have multiple meanings and multiple uses. Among them are "democracy," "culture," "citizenship," "public," and similar kinds of concepts. Others such as "accountability," "evidence," "quality," and a number of others are now ever present on the landscape of teacher education and education in general. These concepts are what we might call sliding signifiers. That is, they have no necessarily essential meaning but rather are mobilized by different groups with different agendas. Since these words are laden with historically important associations that are connected with what Williams would call positive structures of feeling, and since their meanings can be and often are multiple, they can be mobilized by conflicting groups to support their own agendas.
A fine example today is the struggle over the very meaning of democracy. As I have argued at much greater length elsewhere, we are witnessing a major transformation of our understandings of democracy. Rather than democracy being seen as a fundamentally political concept, its meaning is being transformed into primarily an economic one. Thus, under neoliberal policies in education and in society in general, democracy is increasingly being defined as simply consumer choice. The citizen is seen as a possessive individual, someone who is defined by her or his position in market relations. (Think, for example, of voucher plans.) When private is good and public is bad in education and so much else in this society, the world is seen as basically a supermarket and democracy is seen as making choices in that market. The withering of political and collective or community sensibilities here has lasting effects, ones not limited to schooling but throughout society (see Apple 2000, 2001).
Among the key concepts now sliding around the map of meaning is standards. I can think of no one who believes that having "standards" in teaching and teacher education is bad, who believes that educators shouldn't have high expectations for all of their students and for current and future teachers, or who believes that what we should teach and whether we are successful in teaching it shouldn't be taken very seriously. Thus, standards are "good." But, this is basically a meaningless position. What counts as standards, who should decide them, where they should come from, what their purposes should be in practice, how they are to be used, what counts as meeting them—these are the real issues.
Just as in the example from my own experience as a future teacher with which I opened this foreword, all too often today these kinds of questions either are not asked in a serious enough manner or are answered with sets of assertions that have little empirical warrant. The issue of evidence—and, as this book shows, the lack of it—is of course crucial. While, as I noted, these questions cannot simply be answered empirically, empirical reality does count. But much depends on the kinds of questions we ask as well. And the answers that we may find satisfying depend on what we think education should do.
For the testers and efficiency experts then and now, education is about getting from point A to point B cheaply and efficiently. Constantly providing mountains of evidence of the most minute and reductive kinds is "good." Yet, many very thoughtful educators—indeed among our most thoughtful educators, such as Johnson, Johnson, Farenga, and Ness—find this vision of education and teacher education to be uncreative at best and simply stultifying at worst. Thus, whether we like it or not, there are very real differences in our positions on these issues that need to be taken seriously and publicly debated. Debating how teacher education should be carried on and judged is one of the most important things about which we can and must argue. But current political pressures and bureaucratic models make this very difficult.
For example, many people almost automatically think that having standards (decided by whom?) and testing them rigorously will lead to higher achievement, especially among our most disadvantaged children. By in essence holding schools, teachers', and teacher education institutions' feet to the fire, so to speak, there will be steady improvement in achievement. Yet, the empirical evidence for this assertion is weak at best. Indeed, a considerable amount of international literature should make us very cautious about assuming that this will be the case. Such policies have been shown to just as often stratify even more powerfully by class and race, no matter what the rhetorical artifice used to justify them (Apple 2001; Apple et al. 2003; Gillborn and Youdell 2000). That this may be the case in the ways in which teacher education standards are policed and institutions accredited by powerful bureaucratic groups such as NCATE is made very clear in this book.
The authors have taken the issues I raise in this foreword truly seriously. They demonstrate how bureaucratic interests work under the guise of providing assistance and upholding standards. They show the loss of democratic deliberation and the human costs, to real people inside many of our institutions of teacher education, when unreflective policies dominate how we think about and evaluate each other's work. They critically analyze the claims that are made about, and the slogans used to justify, the dominant ways in which institutions and people involved in the crucial task of teacher education are judged. Finally, they do this in a way that challenges us to step back and think about alternative policies and possibilities.
Some readers will undoubtedly be upset by what this book says. This is not bad but good. Discussions about teacher education are not the equivalent of conversations about the weather. They are about what our society believes education should do, about our very future as a nation. Taking such disagreements seriously, and making them public so that they can be dealt with honestly and openly, is what we should be doing. In this important and provocative volume, Johnson, Johnson, Farenga, and Ness assist us in this important task.
Michael W. Apple
John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies
University of Wisconsin–Madison
References
Apple, M. W. 2000. Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age. New York: Routledge.
. 2001. Educating the "Right" Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
Apple, M. W., et al. 2003. The State and the Politics of Knowledge. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
Fraser, N. 1997. Unruly Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gillborn, D., and D. Youdell. 2000. Rationing Education. Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Lipman, P. 2004. High Stakes Education. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. McNeil, L. 2000. The Contradictions of School Reform. New York: Routledge.
Williams, R. 1985. Keywords. New York: Oxford University Press.