The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. ... Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. (John Dewey 1897)
Candidates know, understand, and use the major concepts, principles, theories, and research related to development of children and young adolescents to construct learning opportunities that support individual students' development, acquisition of knowledge, and motivation. (NCATE Standard 1.)
Unacceptable: Evidence demonstrates [that] candidates do not draw on their knowledge of developmental stages to motivate students and build understanding (Rubric for NCATE Standard)
by Royal Charter ... Perpetuated as Columbia College by the People of the State of New York ... (inscription above Low Library, the seat of the administration of Columbia University)
This is not research in the usual sense. This text may be more of an editorial or, perhaps, an act of "action research." I frame it
as a call for proposals to investigate more carefully the step-by-step evolution of a major, historically
grounded, that is “cultural,” institution–“the School.”
As social scientists we know a lot about the structure of schooling. We know much less about how it is still evolving, not in a distant part but
contemporaneously with our own lives. This gap in our knowledge is particularly flagrant when
looking at the ‘factualizing’ of something as massive as what the “One Hundred Seventh Congress
of the United States of America” en-Acted
“to close the achievement gap with accountability,
flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind.”
We know little about how, where and by
whom this Act was imagined, argued for and against, constituted at the most authoritative levels, and
then implemented locally so that hundreds of million of people cannot escape it. This Act is a mystery
and becomes ever more mysterious as one places it in the details of its historical context.” At least
two sets of details are worth investigating. The first set concerns the institutional agents involved in
the production of authoritative acts in America.
Who are they? This is particularly mysterious in the
United States where, in schooling as in every other matter of national policy, authority and control
are widely distributed. The second set of details to investigate concerns the actual words used in such
policies, their sources, and the specific practices that they produce: What is being done because of
what was said?
NCLB is a prime example of what Austin and Searle accounted as speech acts. I take
it to be an utterance within an ongoing conversation.
NCLB is a particularly powerful utterance
because, among other things, of who spoke it, from what position, and at what time. But it is nothing
more than a moment in a temporal sequence that includes all sorts of other utterances performed by
any number of institutional agents. Since President Bush signed it, the Act has been followed by
many other statements that have further specified what it is to entail for various people, and thereby
framed resistance. Some of these statements have constituted sub-conversations, including a
conversation about and among the participants implicated in what is listed as “Title II” of the Act:
“Preparing, Training, and Recruiting High Quality Teachers and Principals.” Practically, this makes
it a conversation about Schools of Education (SoEs)
who transform people into teachers: Who is
to control them, how, and in what terms? These schools where required to refocus their own conversations
about teacher education in extremely practical ways, in their curricula, pedagogies, evaluation methods, etc.
How this happened is what we need to explore further in order to understand more fully how the School keeps being reconstituted in the face of changing conditions, some of which might threaten it. As anthropologists, we need detailed accounts of these conversations, the flow of authority, the consequences, and the resistance to them.
Here, I focus on statements made public by the "National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education" (NCATE), an ostensibly nongovernmental agency that has gained major political authority as state after state delegated to NCATE their own authority over teacher education. Like NCLB, NCATE's medium is speech with potential serious consequences. It is public speech requiring particular forms of public speech by the SoEs. If an SoE does not produce this speech, it will not be accredited. Thus, its students will not be allowed to become teachers. Faculty may lose their jobs. I start with some comments about the distribution of political control. I then focus on the words of NCATE from its broadest "standards" to the detailed course syllabi that it requires.
If the production of teachers is to be controlled, who may speak authoritatively about these matters, and to what effect? In a democracy, the formal answer is easy: Schools and universities are "chartered" by the "People of the State," as the inscription on Low Library of Columbia University clearly states for all to see, and grant their graduates special "rights and privileges," as ritual speech at graduation clearly states for all to hear. But this answer does not tell us much about who, practically, does control the production of teachers, and through what means. It does tell us what students have to do get these rights, what they are, how they may use them or when they may claim the privileges.
In the United States at the turn of the 21st century, the legitimate participants
in the organization of the producing of teachers are few, and their public face is always institutional. The authoritative texts (catalogues, guides of studies, requirements, credit policies, state regulations, etc.) have no specified author, although they answer each other in a broad conversation.
The fully legitimate participants include schools of education, state boards, the
Federal Department of Education, some private foundations (Ford, Carnegie, etc.),
and, most interestingly, "independent" agencies, including NCATE. Of course
NCATE's mandate comes from the states. Without the state requirements that SoEs
be accredited by NCATE, perhaps more of them would resist. But NCATE is not, as
such, a part of any state agency at any level, and so we must explore the distribution
of authority that has made it the direct face of "American" hegemony. This exploration
is all the more important that this distribution can involve further delegation. For example, NCATE relied heavily on the experts of the “Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium" (INTASC). In 1992, these experts, "representatives
of the teaching profession along with personnel from 17 state education agencies,"
crafted "model standards" that would "represent a common core of teaching
knowledge and skills." These experts and representatives initially had no political
authority, but their intellectual authority gained full political weight when the model
standards became the basis for the NCATE standards now imposed on most SoEs.
Neither the authority of INTASC, nor the authoritativeness of
its standards were challenged. These standards became the reference points as they were borrowed
by the institution that will be our point of reference: the “National Council for the Accreditation of
Teacher Education” generally known as “NCATE.” NCATE has thus become the nexus through
which political control over one central aspect of schooling is now exercised in America.
The process of delegation with appeals to "expertise" produces a situation in which no one can be sure who actually is speaking or to whom to respond. The words of NCATE are now being criticized from the both the right and the left of the U.S. political spectrum. The only certainty is that NCATE is the nexus of the conversations through which political control over one central aspect of schooling is now exercised in the United States. It establishes the overall grounds for the conversations, as well as the consequences of overt resistance. As faculty members of a MSoE were repeatedly told, “we will not be able to attract students if we are not accredited by NCATE.”
NCATE is a non-governmental organization and so we must marvel at, and explore, the distribution of state authority that has made it the direct face of authority. It is as if the states of the United States that have the formal constitutional authority to regulate schooling have abdicated this authority. This is of course not quite the case. NCATE’s mandate comes from the states (and, formally, “the people of the state”). Without the state requirements that SoEs be accredited by NCATE perhaps more of them would resist. In fact the “independent” SoEs (including most of the major ones) are in the same relative position vis a vis their students as NCATE is vis a vis its schools: student receive degrees through delegated authority like schools are accredited as proper schools through a similar delegation. This distribution has interesting correlates. First, it can involve further delegation. For example, NCATE relied heavily on the experts of INTASC. Second, it can trigger the suspicion that any one of the institutions involved is actually not doing what it is supposed to do, something that requires further means of control. The radical increase in the importance of NCATE must have something to do with the sense that many SoEs were not doing what they were supposed to do. Standards had to be drawn and imposed that ensured that they do
“prepare competent, caring, and qualified professional educators (teachers, counselors, psychologists, administrators, and others) [who] demonstrate a commitment to social justice and to serving the world while imagining its possibilities” [from the web site of a Major School of Education].
NCATE celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2004–as well as a major expansion of its
authority.
By now, almost every person who is to be a teacher in the United States, and almost
everyone who teaches in a teacher education program, is being taken through a NCATE prescribed
process. NCATE now finds itself both gate-keeper and warden to an encompassing “polity of
practice.” But how exactly does it perform these roles? What does it prescribe? I argue that
NCATE’s first medium is language. NCATE acts through speech, utterances, that require other
utterances by institutions, by individual faculty members, and by their students. If language fails, then
consequences are meted (schools are not accredited, candidates do not become teachers, states do
not get federal funding, people lose their jobs). Interestingly, all consequential speech is public.
Whatever is said in private, the public documents must be produced in the prescribed words. This
justifies my rationale to start with the public statements (from the writing of standards to the shaping
of course syllabi). In the conclusion I will hint at the disconnect between these statements and the
statements any of the people involved may make, in the privacy of their committee rooms, corridors,
classrooms, etc.
In its own, always impersonal, words NCATE writes that, by 2004, it had been “adopted by 39 states ... as the state unit standards” for the accreditation of all teacher education programs. It “partners with states” and is “recognized by the Federal Department of Education.” By 2006, it had “accredited” 602 schools of education in 48 states and “another 89 are candidates and precandidates for accreditation” (all italics are mine). NCATE also writes that it took “it” took three years to come up with six standards designed to cover every aspect of a SoE, from its programs to its faculty and internal governanc. The standards are:
Each of these standards is expanded in further texts specifying what is “unacceptable, acceptable,
and target.” All of this is specified further in ever more detailed texts. To simplify, the NCATE
documents are instructions for the candidate SoEs on how to write descriptions of their practices.
I focus on Standard 1 as it most directly implies an analysis of individual beings and the control of those who are to transform these human beings. The standard reads:
Candidates preparing to work in schools as teachers or other school personnel know the content of their fields, demonstrate professional and pedagogical knowledge, skills, and dispositions and apply them so that students learn. Assessments indicate that candidates meet professional, state, and institutional standards.
This standard, in some NCATE documents, has eight parts, each with further specifying sublists. For example, Part 4 is entitled “Professional and pedagogical knowledge and skills for teacher candidates.” It requires that it be demonstrated, among many other things, that
I focus particularly on three words that are a leitmotiv in all NCATE related documents, often appearing several times a page. On the full document describing the standards, the words appear on the first page as part of the “mission” of NCATE (and on almost every page after that)
Accountability and improvement in teacher preparation are central to NCATE’s mission. The
NCATE accreditation process determines whether schools, colleges, and departments of education
meet demanding standards for the preparation of teachers and other professional school personnel.
Through this process, NCATE provides assurance to the public that the graduates of accredited
institutions have acquired the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to help all students learn.
Through standards that focus on systematic assessment and performance-based learning, NCATE encourages
accredited institutions to engage in continuous improvement based on accurate and consistent data. (My
emphasis)
“Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions” are that which the “public” is assured graduates have “acquired.” On some of the sub-subdocuments that NCATE produces, these are abbrieviated as the "KDS standards." Note the verbs and verb-adjective combinations: the KDS are acquired and systematically assessed. Note also how NCATE places itself as assuring the public that the graduates actually perform their knowledge, skills, and dispositions. This assurance is based on various tests that it is the duty of the SoEs to devise, under the watchful gaze of NCATE evaluators.
What is somewhat hidden in the documents themselves, but becomes painfully clear when any SoE starts the NCATE process, is the enormous practical burden all this places on the SoEs. The first task of a “candidate for accreditation,” that is a school of education of whatever size or resources, is to rewrite its practices in NCATE specified terms. This rewrite typically produces hundreds of pages of documents, some of which then appear on an institution’s public “exhibit” (now available on its web sites). Producing all these words is an extended activity by many people, from deans to professors, to special committees, etc. The final text is presented as a description of a property of the institution. It is written in a declarative mode: “We are ... We do ... Our graduates are ... and do ...” Politically, the documents constitutes what all in the institution are accountable for.
Given the authority structure on the production of the texts, it is not surprising that the final exhibits are similar, though not identical, across all the accredited schools. “Knowledge, skills and dispositions” are everywhere. The (mostly stylistic) differences occur in various texts further specifying what are to be the “outcomes.” For example, the University of Vermont vouches that its candidates will be “critical thinkers,” “problem solvers,” “instructional leaders,” who “will use research, data, including student performance data, and other resources to improve practice.” Florida State University has developed “control matrices and program assessment matrices” to organize all this. There are many texts specifying what “knowledge” a candidate is supposed to acquire (e.g. “candidate understands the ... uses and limits of assessment”), what “performances”are to be checked (e.g. “design instruction ... based on learners’ current needs”), and what “dispositions” the candidates will exhibit (e g. “valuing flexibility and reciprocity”). This gets specified down to the syllabus of individual courses. In one syllabus, four pages out of ten specify eight goals of the course, nine objectives, six policies. This is followed by four pages specifying how a student will be evaluated. Only two pages are dedicated to the class schedule. Most surprising (at least to an anthropologist from Mars) is that most statements are essentially generic. For example, the “objectives” for one course are:
Other courses are “designed so that candidates become familiar with a variety of instructional methods and resources to facilitate student growth.” And, “as a result of participation in the learning experiences incorporated into this course” (among other things) candidates will “demonstrate” that they have the “ability to select and utilize teaching methods that promote and enhance critical and creative thinking skills.” This is explicitly cross-referenced to this SoE’s rewrite of NCATE standards:
The redundancy of the themes addressed, and the limited vocabulary is evidence of the tight control NCATE imposes on the faculty of all accredited SoEs. All courses must increase “critical thinking,” “awareness of difference,” “knowledge of subject matter.” They are based on “educational research” “student individuals needs.” But there must be proof that all this is happening–and this of course what NCATE and “performance-based” standards are all about. Students must be guaranteed to have “acquired” that which was “inculcated.” It is not enough to say that students will graduate with a “commitment to social justice.” It has to be the case that the student has to be measured as having increased her commitment, objectively. It is not enough for a SoE to say that the graduates have taken courses where these matters were addressed. If the “assessments” demonstrate the students have not changed, then the course must be changed, and accreditation is threatened.
What difference do all these words and threats make?
What I have done so far approaches a “discourse analysis” emphasizing authority, power, and prescribed language. I could claim Michel Foucault. What he wrote (1975/1978) about discipline and examination directly applies here. What Bourdieu and Passeron wrote (1970/1977) about “pedagogic authority” also directly applies. And so I could conclude with a statement about NCATE language hiding relationships of authority and consequence. But this lead to missing that NCATE’s authority is anything but hidden, either in its documents or practices. It is particularly visible to those who are most directly affected when the documents are delivered to them with the explicit threat: no rewrite of your activity, no accreditation. It is visible when the actor (let us say a dean) converses with the person who delivers the documents and, possibly most accutely, when the actor becomes the delegated agent who must deliver the threat to those for whom she is responsible (say faculty members in teacher education). The agent, at this point, is likely to become the focus of any resistance by those she must attempt to control
And so, to assume "mis-recognition" of their position would be to insult all those who wrote NCATE’s words, or find themselves obliged to rewrite their institutions, or their course syllabi, in these very words. There is little evidence–though this is to be investigated–that writing such texts, or performing the assessing examinations, under the watchful eye of NCATE (and its local enforcers), produces a particular frame of mind–or should I write a “disposition” (to cross-reference both NCATE and Bourdieu). I argue the reverse. I have been part of too many conversations to argue that all this is simply a matter of the “culture” of my colleagues in teacher education. Nothing in NCATE is naturalized. Nothing is automatic. All is problematic as people continue to ask “why do we have to do this?” and even more pressing “why do we have to use these words?” The answers are clear: “if we write our doubts publicly we will not be accredited, our student enrolment will fall, we will lose our jobs.” The re-writing, far from hiding authority, revealed it. What may have been deliberately hidden are the new tactics of avoidance that some faculty members started using.
Analytically, what is needed is not deconstruction of some texts or practices but a close attention to constructing practices. This is the research I call for.
An ethnography of the implementation of NCATE would probably show a fundamental
ambivalence. On the one hand, one is likely to notice the initial and on-going involvement of faculty members
and researchers from the major SoEs. The first draft of the standards later rewritten by NCATE, and now re-written by hundreds of SoEs, were written by a committee chaired by Linda Darling-Hammond–
certainly one of the most influential faculty in teacher education. The personnel of NCATE, particularly in its reviewing committees, is drawn from SoEs. Many local faculty members fully
acquiesce to the process, or at least to its principle. There has been much talk about increasing the
“professionalization” of teachers–and their salaries and producing "standards" can seem a necessary step in the acknowledgement by other professions that teaching is indeed a profession to be given the same respect as, say, physicians or lawyers. In that way, NCATE is also a tool of a large industry
deliberately attempting to brand its product and increase its values. The spread of NCATE has had the effect of helping
the more major SoEs control the more minor ones, and even close them (among other things by
greatly increasing the cost of running accredited programs). All this also has to do with the struggle
with the Federal Department of Education, and its current use by those who first tried to destroy this department, and
now use it in order to control more tightly schooling across the United States–and the very major SoEs
that are often blamed even as they provide the intellectual tools for their own control.
On the other hand, an ethnography would also reveal a definitive scepticism. I will follow only one path and note two matters. First, none of the NCATE texts (including those produced by local institutions) are given personal authors. Second, many of the texts do mention many authors on whose work it is claimed the rewritten standards are built. Local committees do not cite NCATE itself as their intellectual foundation, they cite John Dewey, Maxine Greene, Michael Apple, Noam Chomsky, and Paulo Freire, Michelle Fine (not to mention Vygotsky, Bourdieu, Tyack, etc., including anthropologists like Spindler, Philips, etc.). The names of such philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, many of whom cultural critics of authority and liberal democracy, appear again and again in the institutional philosophies and the syllabi. Their names are almost as ubiquitous as “skills, knowledge, and dispositions” or “assessment” and “performance outcomes.”
There is something oxymoronic in making of, say, “critical thinking” something that can be assessed, developed, and otherwise manipulated. Worse there may be something demeaning in the stance if one takes the alternate stance with 18th century philosophers of democracy that individual freedom and critical thinking are fundamental and inalienable statuses of humanity. Most of the authors quoted in author-less NCATE texts are clearly rooted in the alternate stance and their use is either paradoxical, or indirect evidence of resistance. This use, in this context, may also indicate the futility of resistance. For example, in one document, Dewey is quoted as the source for one of the “dispositions” that candidates will be expected to have. All the critical authors of the 20th century are similarly treated as objects of knowledge, to be skillfully used and then submerged as dispositions (values, habitus?). It is not enough, as NCATE proudly states, for future teachers to have taken a course where these authors were discussed. It is essential that the “candidates” (the choice of the word suggest they might not be teachers in the future) demonstrate that they have fully embodied what the authors suggested. There can be no critical thinking about standardized, operationalized, and assessed “critical thinking”–at least not in public NCATE exhibits.
Of course, the corridors of SoEs, are sites for non-standardized critical thinking and continuing
debate. There is now even at least one book directly attacking NCATE (Johnson et al. 2005). This
book even has a foreword by one of the NCATE Most Quoted Famous Education Writer: Michael
Apple.
As the relationship between NCATE and NCLB evolves, along with the critique of NCLB
and any changes in the federal administration, as SoE faculty turn over and respond to critique from
their students, new utterances will be produced, and some of these will eventually lead to some
change in NCATE prescriptions. The “action research” aspect of this paper is, I hope, one of these
utterances within the debate and overall conversation.
I am tempted to stop here but must push further for there is something odd about the framing of the conversation. After all, I am not the first to point out a Deweyan paradox. Cremin wrote about it extensively from a related perspective (1976). It seems that, again and again, those enthused by Dewey most humanistic statements end up transforming them into justifications for high stake testing, prescribed curricula and pedagogies, and now the hegemonic control of schools of education. I have argued that this may have to do with the very language that humanists in America must use–whatever they may be trying to say. Let us just look at the obvious and let us wonder about the language of “creed” that is so often used in opening statements of longer texts that often lead to the organization of major institutions:
I would not want to say that any of those who wrote about self-evident individual equality in order to justify a new social order are exploiting earlier texts for nefarious purposes. On the contrary, I am convinced that Jefferson, like Dewey, like, say, Darling-Hammond who is the one named author of the INTASC report fully hold to the unimpeachable focus on the individual "man" or, in schooling, child. From creeds to standards to syllabi to “what time is it?” evaluating questions in classrooms–it is the very focus on the (singular) "child's powers" that limits the conversation about the means to achieve the good society. If all children have potential, but some to do not manifest it, then, pathetically, we must move to a conversation about measuring the performance of individuals after specific efforts to increase it along with specific efforts to decrease what might impede it. How is one to measure? What are to best efforts that can be made to increase performance? What hinders the development of performance? What is to be done about what appears to hinder? There can be no agreement about any of this, not so much because various groups or person who try to answer the questions have different interests, but because the very language of equality, individual, and potentiality, does not map much about humanity that is very helpful in the building of institutions with consequences. I mention this to move further than simply noticing how “American” (individualistic, etc.) this all is. I am tempted to go as far as Louis Dumont when he wrote about the “diseases” of individualism, particularly when the institutions it produces get to focus on the distinct properties of individuals–particularly when differences are noticed that are linked to social (in-)equalities and then to specific lacks that are then to be remediated (either through benevolent institutions, and expert intervention by people well trained in fully accredited schools of education). Dumont wrote in this vain about racism and fascism. McDermott and I have built on this argument as we generalized the anthropological critique of all “culture of poverty” explanations–whatever their forms.
This paper is a further example of this kind of analysis. The problem with NCATE, and with NCLB, is that it further inscribes the sense that all individual human beings are poor–in spirit if not economic means–because of limits in their personal knowledge, skills, and dispositions, that is, in the usual sense of the term, “their culture.” All individuals (children, students, teacher candidates) are poor but they can be lifted out of their poverty through specific remediation activities focusing on the individual person and conducted by legitimized experts.
What is wrong about this is that it is almost impossible to say what is wrong about it. But we should try. Not so obviously perhaps, we must take care not to personalize NCATE, NCLB, or any of the other institutionalizations of the continuing conversation about the construction of the good life. The human beings who wrote NCATE and now verify that it is implemented may have intentions and interests, some good, and some not so good. What is sure is that, like Rosa, Adam, the children of the various families, classrooms and schools, that have appeared in our work, those who live by NCATE are caught whatever their personal knowledge, skills, or disposition. They are caught as faculty members who may be obliged to write their syllabi in certain ways. Minimally, they are caught when they are asked “why can’t Johnny read?” or “why can’t Johnny’s teacher teach Johnny how to read” or “what can’t faculty in schools of education not teach Johnny’s teacher how to teach Johnny so that he, in his glorious uniqueness, can read?
So, what are we to say? First, I rely on a strong tradition of social scientific theorizing that make it clear that one is never absolutely caught. With more space I would cite Merleau-Ponty and de Certeau on enunciation through structure, Bakhtin on centrifugality, etc. Language, dialogue, conversation are but the means to say something that is precisely not what the words actually say. The search is thus for a new arrangement of the words that 18th century democracies have been developing in their attempts to sort out what we are to construct. And so I will end with an appeal to continue the conversation McDermott and I have been attempting to start with our statement that
“we must above all accept that, to make it a better day for Adam, the first, and perhaps only step, is to turn away from him, and to trust him to work with us, while we examine what all others, including ourselves, are doing around him” (1998).
What sort of institutions would this produce? What forms of hegemony? To answer this, I would turn to Rancière (1987/1991): we can trust that people will learn, one way or another, that which they will need to know in order to perform whatever task they may find themselves obliged to know once they have entered a community of practice that needs their services. This stance is probably but a version of the fundamental stance of people like Dewey, Freire, and others, before the statement was transformed into curriculum or pedagogy. Whether such a stance will increase the respect due school teachers, and pay our salaries as faculty in schools of education is a question I will leave open.
1974 Class, codes and control. Vol. 1, Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language.. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
1974 Class, codes and control. Vol. 3, Towards a theory of educational transmissions. Sec. Ed.. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron
1977 [1970] Reproduction in education, society and culture. Tr. by R. Nice.. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Cremin, Lawrence
1976 Public education. New York: Basic Books.
Dewey, John
1959 [1897] "My pedagogic creed" In Dewey on education, ed. by M. Dworkin, 19-32. New York: Teachers College Press.
Darling-Hammond, Arthur Wise, and Stephen Klein
2005 A License to
Teach: Building a Profession for 21st-Century Schools. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Foucault, Michel
1978 [1975] Discipline and punish. New York: Penguin Books.
Garfinkel, Harold
2002 Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Hill, Clifford, and Hervé Varenne
1981 "Family language and education: The sociolinguistic model of restricted and elaborated codes." Social Science Information 20: 187-228.
Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium
1992 Model Standards for Licensing New Teachers. www.nebo.edu/e_portfolio/docs/INTASC.doc, accessed on July 14, 2006.
Johnson, Dale, Bonnie Johnson, Stephen Farenga, and Daniel Ness
2005 Trivializing teacher education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)
2004 NCATE at 50. Electronic document, http://www.ncate.org/documents/15 Years of Growth.pdf, accessed July 14, 2006.
National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)
2005 Frequently asked questions. Electronic document, http://www.ncate.org/public/faqStandards.asp, accessed July 14, 2006.
National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)
2006 Professional Standards. Electronic document, http://www.ncate.org/documents/standards/unit_stnds_2006.pdf, accessed July 14, 2006.
Parsons, Talcott
1959 The School Class as Social System: Some of Its
Functions in American Society. Harvard Educational Review 29:297-318.
Varenne, Hervé, and Ray McDermott
1998 Successful failure. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Vergari, Sandra and Frederick Hess
2002 “The accreditation game.” Stanford: Hoover Institution, http://www.educationnext.org/20023/48.html, accessed May 1, 2006.