AERA Vice Presidential
Address
for Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education)
AERA Annual Meeting, April 2000
This article is currently under review for publication in Teaching and Teacher Education. An International Journal of Research and Studies.
In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Clarence Earl Gideon, prisoner No. 003826 in the Florida State Penitentiary in Raiford, Florida, who was serving a five year term for breaking and entering with the intent to commit a robbery.. We now take for granted the results of his case--the right of any man or woman accused of a crime to advice and representation by counsel even if he or she cannot afford it. But this result was not so clear in 1962 when the precedent was that attorneys were provided for the "impoverished" only in capital cases or under unusual circumstances related to the youth, illiteracy, or what was then called the "feeblemindedness" of the accused. Gideon’s case, like other Supreme Court cases, was not about the direct question, Should Clarence Earl Gideon have had an attorney at his trial? nor did it turn so much on the technicalities of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Rather the case turned on the questions the court chose and allowed to construct the constitutional issue: What is fundamental to due process under the law? Does due process always require the appointment of counsel? Can there be equal justice when the kind of trial a man can get depends on the amount of money he has?
In Gideon’s Trumpet, a compelling account of the Supreme Court’s right-to-counsel decision, Anthony Lewis (1964) points out that the discretion of the court in selecting and framing the issues for consideration is so great that it is often "difficult to predict on what ground a case will be decided, much less which side will win" (p. 56). In Brown v. The Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, again Fourteenth Amendment issues, the decisions also turned on the questions that were selected and permitted to frame the constitutional issues (George, 2000). In Brown, the key question was not, Should Linda Brown be permitted to attend the White school near her home in Topeka, Kansas? Rather the case turned on the way the supporting questions were framed: What is equal education? What matters beyond the tangible aspects of facilities and resources? What is the impact of segregated schooling on children’s self esteem and ultimately their life chances? Likewise, in Roe v. Wade, the critical question was not, Should Jane Roe have been permitted to obtain a legal abortion in Texas? but, When does life begin? When does meaningful life begin? What is the role of the moral community?
In teacher education, as in law, how we construct the questions that drive research, policy, and practice limits the range and variation of possible answers and prefigures to a great extent what is emphasized, included in, and omitted from the discussion. Lee Shulman (1986) makes a similar point about paradigms and research programs in the study of teaching. He suggests that bodies of knowledge about teaching do not grow "naturally or inexorably" (p. 3) but emerge instead as a function of the questions, problems, and issues framed by those who conduct the research. What I am suggesting here is that in teacher education, how we construct the questions including how we make the case that some questions matter more than others not only drives reform and development but also legitimizes particular points of view about the purposes of schooling, the nature of teaching and learning, and the role of the teacher in educational reform.
Some might wonder about my analogy here between the questions that construct teacher education and the questions that construct Supreme Court decisions, assuming that the great weightiness of the questions of constitutional law render the comparison invalid. I would argue, however, as have others, that the questions (and answers) we are currently constructing in teaching and teacher education are extremely weighty in that they have the potential to shape and structure the experiences of the next generation of teachers and thus to influence the learning opportunities and life chances of thousands of American schoolchildren.
The Questions that Drive Teacher Education
What I would like to suggest in this article is that one way to think about and trace teacher education development and reform is in terms of the major questions that have animated the field and the varying and sometimes competing ways these questions have been constructed, debated, and enacted in research, policy, and practice. Along these lines, a very loosely chronological (and very simplified) list of the major questions that have driven teacher education reform over the last 50 years might go something like this: the attributes question, the effectiveness question, the knowledge question, and what I am proposing we now think of as "the outcomes question" in teacher education.
The attributes question, which was prominent from roughly the early 1950s through the1960s, asked, What are the attributes and qualities of good teachers, prospective teachers, and/or teacher education programs? Versions of the attributes question animated debates about the balance between professional and arts and sciences courses for prospective teachers, the scholarship (or lack thereof) of teacher education students and faculty, and the organizational structures of programs. The effectiveness question, which drove many of the developments and reforms in teacher education during the late 1960s through the mid 1980s, posed a different issue: What are the teaching strategies and processes used by effective teachers, and, what teacher education processes are most effective in ensuring that prospective teachers learn these strategies? Influenced by new studies of the "scientific basis of teaching" (Gage, 1972), many teacher education programs developed systems during this time for evaluating prospective teachers according to scientific objectives and stated performance criteria.
The knowledge question animated the field from the early 1980s through the late 1990s. Major versions of this question became almost mantras throughout the field of teacher education, What should teachers know and be able to do? What are the knowledge, skills, and dispositions prospective teachers should have? What should the knowledge base of teacher education be? Prompted in part by new research on teachers’ thinking and emerging knowledge about subject matter teaching and learning, the knowledge question drove policies and program revisions intended to ensure that the codified knowledge base was at the center of the curriculum. Some versions of the knowledge question concentrated on the contexts within which teachers could gain the knowledge they needed, prompting new kinds of partnerships, professional development schools, and collaborations.
As we close the twentieth century and open the twenty-first, the major question that is driving the field is what I have been thinking and writing about as "the outcomes question in teacher education" (Cochran-Smith, 2000), which I explore in the remainder of this article. Before turning to the outcomes question, however, three quick notes may be useful here. First, and obviously, my very short list of the questions that have been driving teacher education for the last 50 years leaves out a lot. Second, the questions I have just sketched are not simply research question. Rather each has to do with policy and practice in teacher education and with major developments and reforms in the field. Third, none of the questions I have loosely associated with particular time periods was settled or disappeared during that time. Instead many questions are periodically recycled and re-threaded into the current scene in ways that may or may not appear to be different from their previous iterations. New questions are sometimes really new questions, but old questions are always new old questions because they have a different set of implications when they are woven into the tapestry of a changed and changing political, social, and economic time.
In this article, I sketch the outlines of the outcomes question and explore some of its background and context. I concentrate primarily on preservice education, identifying three major ways outcomes are being constructed--as long term impact, as teacher test scores, and as professional performance. Then, in keeping with my opening analogy to questions of law and legal precedent, I turn to cautions and concerns about the points of view that are being legitimized but also those that are being undermined as we construct the grounds for the outcomes question and lay the groundwork for its answers.
Sorting Out the Outcomes Question
The outcomes question is a particularly complicated one in teacher education in that its various iterations usually rest on differing sets of assumptions about what teachers and teacher candidates should know and be able to do, what K-12 students should know and be able to do, and what the ultimate purposes of schooling should be. As a matter of fact, I would suggest that the "what for?" aspect of the outcomes question is at least as important as the "what?" "how?" and "how will we know?" aspects. Demonstrating that teacher education programs and procedures are "accountable," "effective," and/or "value-added" assumes answers to complex and prior questions of values, goals, and priorities, questions that cannot be settled empirically. These assumptions shape the ways terms are defined, the ways data are selected and analyzed, and the interpretive frameworks within which conclusions are formulated.
As we enter the new century, the outcomes questions we are constructing in teacher education have to do with connection the public has a right to expect among teacher education, teaching practice, and student learning. In a certain sense, every discussion related to the outcomes question assumes that the ultimate goal of teacher education is student learning and also assumes that there are certain measures which, depending on the unit of analysis, can be used to indicate the degree to which this outcome is or is not being achieved for teacher candidates, K-12 students, teacher education programs and institutions, and the education profession itself. At a general level, then, the outcomes questions we are debating and constructing in teacher education read something like this:
It is important to note that unanimity about the outcomes question begins and ends here, at this rather surface level of understanding. If we move one level deeper in terms of specificity or elaboration, we uncover disagreement. If we attempt to describe the relationship between teacher learning and professional practice, attempt to explain what we mean by teacher learning and student learning, attempt to elaborate the theoretical bases and consequences of the kind of student learning we are trying to account for, or even attempt to define what we mean by "students" (which students? how many? all of them, or some statistically significant portion of them?), we uncover differences, some of which represent deep philosophical and political divides. Notwithstanding the growing--and many say unprecedented--consensus about standards for teaching and teacher education within the profession itself (Darling-Hammond, 1996, 2000c; Darling-Hammond, Wise & Klein, 1999), it is important to acknowledge that there is considerable variation both within and outside the profession in terms of how the outcomes question is being constructed and upon what grounds it will be decided.
The outcomes question is being taken up in differing ways depending on the policy, research, and practice contexts in which it is posed as well as on the political and professional purposes of the posers. One way to begin to sort out versions of the outcomes question is to consider at least the following aspects of teacher and student learning:
It is also important to consider aspects of the context in which outcomes issues are being constructed, enacted, and debated.
At least three major constructions of the outcomes questions are currently receiving major attention and visibility nationally, at the state level, and within teacher education institutions. These have to do with: the long term or general impacts of teacher education as a profession; the aggregated scores on teacher tests of teacher candidates, teacher preparation programs, and/or institutions; and the professional performances expected of teachers and teacher candidates. In some policy and practice contexts, one or more of these questions is used in combination with others to guide decisions about distribution of resources, licensing and accreditation privileges, and relative rankings of programs, institutions, and individuals. I turn now to each of these outcomes questions and look more closely at how they are being constructed in teacher education and then consider the consequences of these constructions.
Long Term Impact as Outcome
This first construction of the outcomes question in teacher education--long term impact--is related to larger issues about the general impact of teacher education on teacher knowledge, teacher preparedness, teacher attrition, teacher ratings, and student achievement. Explorations of this question in teacher education are located within much larger debates about teacher quality and teacher qualifications, teacher licensing and certification, professional standards for teaching and curriculum, and the use of student achievement as a valid evaluation measure for teachers and schools.
The long term impact question that is most visible and most highly contested currently has to do with the impact of teacher education on K-12 students’ learning. This question, which is being debated in the research literature and in the media, is being explored primarily through syntheses and meta-analyses of previous and current work in order to make recommendations about teacher education as a state educational policy that is either value-added or not, either a good investment or not. In these high stakes debates, teacher education at the preservice level is not considered by itself but as one of several factors related to the quality and qualifications of teachers. The unit of analysis is not teacher candidates--individually or collectively--or even teacher preparation programs and institutions. Rather, in a certain sense, the unit of analysis is the profession itself--teacher preparation as one aspect of a broad category referred to as "teacher qualifications," which includes scores on licensure examinations, graduate level degrees, years of experience, preparation in subject matter and pedagogy, certification in the teaching area, and money spent by school districts on professional development. Student learning is defined as student gains on achievement tests. The relationship between teacher education and student learning is taken to be the percentage of variance in student gains accounted for by teacher qualifications when other variables are held constant or adjusted.
The initial report of National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) definitively posed the long term impact question by linking teacher qualifications-- including extent of teacher education--with student learning. Speaking for the Commission, argued that "a growing body of research appears to confirm" that teacher knowledge and teacher expertise are significant influences on student learning, as are to a lesser extent class size and school size.
The commission report generated extensive public discourse about teaching and teachers, and Darling-Hammond’s major synthesis of teacher quality and student achievement has been disseminated widely since its publication in January of this year.
Drawing on data from the commission’s 50-state survey of policies, case studies at the state level, the 1993-94 Schools and Staffing Surveys, and the National Assessment of Education Progress, Darling-Hammond examined how teacher qualifications are related to students’ achievement. She concluded:
Framing the outcomes questions in teacher education in terms of general and long term impact on students’ achievement is part of NCTAF’s larger campaign to provide qualified and competent teachers for all students by emphasizing and aligning professional standards across initial teacher preparation, teacher licensure, and teacher certification at the state and regional levels.
There is, however, another take on this first outcomes question that is--at least on the surface--quite similar in construction but diametrically different in conclusions to the one I have just been describing. Economists such as Dale Ballou, Michael Podgursky, and others offer analyses of teacher preparation, licensing, and certification that support the deregulation--rather than the professionalization-- of teacher education and seek to limit--rather than enhance-- the power of the educational community to control the profession. For example, in what they refer to as a "layman’s guide" to teacher training and licensure that appears in the Fordham Foundation’s (Kanstoroom & Finn, 1999) policy statement on how to produce better teachers and better schools, Ballou and Podgursky (1999b) conclude:
Debates about the evidence concerning the relationship of teacher education and student learning outcomes continue, and they are growing increasingly heated. In a recent issue of Teachers College Record, for example, Ballou & Podgursky (2000) directly attack the Commission’s findings, and Darling-Hammond (2000d) emphatically refutes their use of evidence and their conclusions.
Part of what accounts for these differences in conclusions is in the details of the ways terms like "alternate routes," "college majors" and "fully licensed" are defined and the ways data are used in these two analyses. But the differences may be more clearly explained by differences in the way "the problem" of teacher education is framed in the first place and how different framings shape definitions of terms, procedures for data selection, interpretations of results, and formulation of conclusions. Earley (2000) makes this point incisively in a recent discussion about the value-laden nature of educational research and its easy use by policy makers to further their own agendas. She suggests that "data and evidence used in the policy process will have several levels of bias: that embedded in the data or evidence itself, bias associated with analysis, and the biases of those in the policy world who use the information" (p. 35). This helps to explain some of the differences I have just been highlighting. Supported by the Carnegie Foundation and the Ford Foundation, NCTAF (in collaboration with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards [NBPTS], the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium [INTASC], and now the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education [NCATE]) frames "the problem" of American education in terms of democratic values (Engle, 2000; Earley, 2000; Labaree, 1997) and thus begins--and ends--with calls for stepped-up, standards-driven improvements in teacher education and professional development in order to guarantee a well-qualified teacher for every American school child.
The Fordham Foundation (Kanstoroom & Finn, 1999) and other conservative organizations and politicians, on the other hand. frame "the problem" in terms of a market approach to educational policy making. They criticize the profession’s "preoccupation with teacher preparation" (Ballou & Podgursky, 1997, p.4), seek to limit the power of the profession to control the market by controlling licensing and approved programs, and push an open-market agenda. They thus begin--and end--with calls for alternate routes to certification and pulling down "needless barriers" to the profession. They advocate heavy standardization of education rather than professional standards. (I return to this issue in the final section of this paper where I suggest, following many others, that these two approaches to educational policy--democracy-driven reforms, on the one hand, and market-driven reforms, on the other--are mutually exclusive.)
Teacher Test Scores as Outcome
The teacher tests now required for initial licensing in nearly every state in the country suggest another highly visible way that outcomes are being constructed in teacher education. The construction of test scores as outcomes is really a subset of the first construction of the outcomes question in that it explores one facet of the long term impact of teacher education. However, because teacher tests have been given so much recent attention and weight, it is worth considering them separately. Test scores as outcomes are connected to larger debates about quality, licensing, standards, and assessment. They are also embedded in the long history of criticisms of teachers as mediocre students, "semi-skilled" workers, "less than literate" individuals, and members of a minor or "not quite" profession.
With initial licensing tests, the proxy for teacher learning is usually some combination of general knowledge, including communication and literacy skills, with knowledge of specific subject matter and pedagogy, both of which are demonstrated on a paper and pencil exam. Although teacher test scores have probably received more publicity and more public outcry than any other measure of outcomes, they are linked to student learning primarily through presumption rather than empirical evidence and/or in combination with other measures of teacher expertise that are difficult to untangle as I noted a moment ago.
Until recently test scores were assumed primarily to measure individual fitness for teaching in a way not unlike the way SATs and GREs are assumed to measure individuals’ potential for college and graduate level academic work. Relatively little attention was paid to the aggregated scores of individuals from the same state or the same teacher education institution. Times have changed, however, fueled in part by the dismal performance of Massachusetts teacher candidates on that state’s first ever teacher test in spring of 1998--when 59% of candidates failed--and when the speaker of the state house called test takers "idiots." The Massachusetts scores fanned the debate about teacher quality and teacher preparation that was already going on in congress partly in response to the report of NCTAF and in light of proposed stipulations of the reauthorized Higher Education Act. (See Earley, 2000, for an excellent discussion of federal policy debates regarding teacher education.)
Of particular importance in the Higher Education Act are the mandatory accountability requirements that all states and colleges/universities that receive federal dollars must provide annual information on the performance of all teacher candidates recommended by an institution on each measure required for licensure. As has been widely broadcast, these data will be compiled into institutional and state "report cards" intended to serve as indicators of the fitness of the teacher education enterprise and will provide public, and no doubt highly politicized, rankings of teacher education institutions U.S. Department of Education, 2000).
By switching the unit of analysis from individuals to institutions, recent testing arrangements locate the responsibility for teacher education outcomes squarely at the feet of colleges and universities, some of which will be seriously threatened with closure when the new regulations go into effect (Wise, 1988). In some states, it has even been suggested that a major purpose of teacher tests has been to blame schools of education and provide ammunition for those who would like to close them (Cochran-Smith & Dudley-Marling, 2000). In a strange sort of conversion, teacher tests are now being framed as both outcome of teacher education (i.e., teacher education institutions get great public blame for low test scores) and, at the same time, prerequisites for teacher education programs (i.e. candidates in some institutions are required to take certain portions of tests in order to be admitted to programs).
Constructing the outcomes question in teacher education as scores on teacher tests creates a number of problems and has important consequences for the pool of candidates entering the profession. Some statewide teacher tests, for example, are anathematic to the concepts and knowledge taught in teacher education programs (Melnick & Pullin, in press), particularly in terms of conceptions of literacy, views of student learning, and notions of growth and progress (Luna, Solsken, & Kutz, 2000). Unfortunately, at exactly the same time that we are supposedly interested in recruiting a more diverse pool of teacher candidates, the teacher test is working as gate keeper to keep some potential teachers out. Fear of poor performance on teachers tests is leading some schools of education to change admissions standards with the consequence that fewer students are applying, and there is increasing evidence that the implementation of teacher tests--like other tests historically that are biased against minorities--may be playing a role in the decline of minority participation in the teaching profession (Garcia, 1987; Smith, 1984; Wise, 1988). Further, although some studies have also considered whether teacher candidates prepared in teacher education programs, particularly NCATE-accredited programs score higher on teacher tests than those prepared in other teacher education programs and/or those with no teacher preparation (Wise, 1999), there is little evidence that teacher test scores are related to teacher performance in classrooms or to students’ learning.
Professional Performance as Outcome
The third major take on the outcomes question--and the one that is closest to the everyday work of many teacher educators--is professional performance as outcome. This construction of the outcomes question focuses on the professional performances that teacher candidates are expected to demonstrate, including the ways candidates and teacher educators document, analyze, and evaluate these performances. The idea of performance as an outcome of teacher education is connected to larger debates about authentic assessments of teaching that result in student learning, the shift from "inputs" to "outputs" as the basis of teacher education accreditation (particularly NCATE’s new 2000 standards), new requirements in some states that all teacher certification institutions seek either NCATE or TEAC accreditation, and rapid revisions in teacher education programs across the country in keeping with other new state requirements.
In teacher education as in other areas where performance assessment is used, performance assessments are intended to evaluate teacher candidates’ ability to produce "products" and complete "authentic tasks" that closely resemble the real work of teaching (Madaus & O’Dwyer, 1999). There are a number of different ideas, however, about what the real work of teaching is. In the section that follows, I very briefly mention four initiatives that illuminate some of the ways professional teaching performance is being constructed as an outcome of teacher education. Each of the examples I have selected has been highly visible as a result of multiple publications and presentations; has been supported by or connected to larger professional foundations, agencies, or organizations; and/or has been used as a public exemplar of teacher education practice in keeping with a particular agenda.
It is important to note here that I am not proposing a typology of performance assessments in preservice education nor am I suggesting that these four are mutually exclusive from one another. Rather I offer these examples because they provide some sense of the ways performance is being constructed as an outcome of preservice education as well as some sense of the consequences of constructing outcomes in various ways. It is also important to note that my descriptions are extremely brief and do not do justice to any of these initiatives. I provide much more detailed information elsewhere (Cochran-Smith, 2000), and there is ample published literature about each of these for readers who wish to know more about the programs themselves.
Ability-Based Performance Assessment
Alverno College’s approach to performance assessment for preservice teachers is part of the larger ability-based curriculum of the college, which was developed in the 1970s in order to meet the needs of a non-traditional student population. The work at Alverno has been widely cited as an exemplar of preservice teacher education in line with the standards-based professionalization efforts of NCTAF, INTASC, and NBPTS. It is also included in the U.S. Department of Education’s profiles of "promising practices," for improving teacher quality and as the preservice example in Studies of Excellence in Teacher Education series co-published by AACTE and NCTAF.
As Mary Diez and colleagues at Alverno point out, the program, which focuses on "what students can do with what they know", is based on the idea that performance assessment is not an add-on, but a basic approach that transforms the curriculum as well as the ways teacher education faculty think about their work.
Thus students are engaged in literally hundreds of performances during their preservice preparation, each of which includes a self-assessment component. The portfolio interview assessment is the major external assessment and is required in order to conclude the pre-professional stage of the program and begin the student teaching period.
Through portfolios, analyses of lessons and units, essays, letters, case study analyses, observations of teachers, simulations with parents, and development of curriculum materials, teacher candidates are required not simply to demonstrate that their teaching has an impact of students’ learning, although they must do that, but also how and why their teaching practices impact student learning within particular contexts that closely resemble the actual contexts of teachers’ work.
Performance Understanding
Researchers and teacher educators at Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and elsewhere have for some time been involved in major efforts to develop professional education for prospective and experienced teachers--particularly in mathematics and social studies--that generates teaching strategies in keeping with new curriculum standards and reform-oriented pedagogies. Here teacher education outcomes are framed as the alignment over time of teachers’ pedagogy with current curriculum standards and with discipline-based goals for students’ learning of complex forms of reasoning, problem solving, and communication. This work has received considerable attention as part of what Hawley & Valli (1999) call the "new professional development," which is closely aligned with national standards for professional development and especially with visions for contemporary K-12 curricular reform.
Lampert and Ball (1999) describe what they call a "new pedagogy of teacher education." Writing specifically about performance and knowledge, they suggest that knowing teaching means understanding in such a way that one is prepared to perform (or practice) in a given situation for which one cannot fully prepare in advance. They emphasize how teacher candidates should know what they need to know rather than focusing on simply what they need to know (Lampert and Ball,1998). They stress that teacher candidates learn by working with artifacts and records of practice (often through multimedia presentations of the practices of more experienced teachers), that have been catalogued in order to facilitate multiple perspectives, triangulation of interpretations, and retrieval and sorting of ideas in multiple ways.
Teacher Work Samples
Western Oregon University’s Teacher Work Sample method has been in place since 1986 when the state of Oregon passed sweeping reforms of teacher education including the requirement that teacher certification programs provide evidence that teacher candidates could produce appreciable progress in the learning of all K-12 students. With NCATE outcomes-based standards are about to be implemented, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education is sponsoring a series of workshops and institutes led by Western Oregon faculty to aid the efforts of other teacher educators who are trying to develop systematic means of connecting teaching and learning, and several other states are currently considering adopting this method.
Schalock, Schalock, and Girod (1997b) point out that the teacher work sample method is a "complex, ‘authentic’ applied performance approach" to the evaluation of teacher candidates that is outcomes-based and grounded in a "context-dependent" theory of teacher effectiveness (pp. 17-18). Work samples represent teacher candidates’ teaching of 3-5 week units of study developed through 8 distinct design steps from which faculty derive 7 broad categories of measure
The following is illustrative of how the teacher work sample method constructs performance as outcome in teacher education:
Following these calculations, teacher candidates write an explanation for why K-12 students did or did not attain the desired learning outcomes. According to its architects, the work sample approach sharply contrasts with assessments that feature portfolios and teachers’ analyses of lessons planned and taught because of its explicit focus on demonstrable teacher effectiveness as measured by student learning gains (Schalock, Schalock, & Myton, 1998, p. 469).
Inquiry as Stance
For a number of years, a group of us as university- and school-based researchers and practitioners at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia area schools (and more recently at Boston College) have been involved in efforts to promote teacher research as a vehicle for generating local knowledge and challenging the status quo by linking inquiry, knowledge, and professional practice across the professional lifespan (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990, 1992a,b, 1993; Cochran-Smith, et. al, 1999). In these programs, a major outcome of teacher education is teacher learning and professional practice that promotes rich and rigorous learning opportunities with the goal of equity and social justice for all K-12 students.
With inquiry as outcome, the focus is on how teacher candidates work within professional communities to construct local knowledge, open their decision-making strategies to critique, wrestle with multiple perspectives, and use the research of others. as generative of new questions and strategies. Each of these aspects of learning from teaching is part of what Susan Lytle and I have called an "inquiry stance" (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993, 1998, 1999a)
Examples of the professional performances expected of teacher candidates in programs at the University of Pennsylvania and to a lesser extent at Boston College include: description and analysis of the culture of the school in terms of multiple meaning perspectives; analysis and assessment of students’ learning opportunities based on classroom studies that compare two or more approaches to curriculum construction and classroom teaching; analyses of individual children as learners and constructors of meaning through the development of case studies; and construction and analysis of curriculum and pedagogy intended to provide for all students (including very young children and "at risk" students) opportunities to consider and debate complex ideas, read and interpret unabridged texts, exchange points of view, and interrogate questions of equity, language, power and racism in the classroom (Cochran-Smith, 1991b, 1995a,b,1999). In addition, teacher candidates in these inquiry-oriented programs are supervised according to their demonstrations in classroom settings of the major goals of the program, including teacher candidate as communicator, as curriculum creator, and as activist (Agre, et. al., 1996). Portfolios of all teacher candidates’ inquiries, samples of teachers’ and students’ work, and critical narrative essays analyzing teacher learning over time represent a major final performance (Cochran-Smith, 1999).
Looking Across Constructions of Performance
These four examples provide some sense of the range and variation in the ways teacher education researchers and practitioners are constructing professional performance as an outcome of preservice education. In the most general sense, all five construct performance as the intersection of teacher learning, professional practice, and student learning demonstrated in authentic school and classroom tasks.
However, the similarity obtains only at a general level. In some approaches, the overriding focus is on demonstrable teacher effectiveness as measured by the learning gains of students. In others the focus is on how teacher learning and understanding are linked to students’ learning. Across the four examples, there is variation in the sources of criteria and standards for evaluation of performance. Some evaluate performance against standards aligned with both professional curriculum standards and standards of professional practice validated in the field, while others are less clear about the sources of standards and criteria. Along other lines, some approaches to the performance question emphasize critique of curriculum standards and traditional practices by evaluating teacher candidates-- at least in part--in terms of their ability to challenge, rather than comply, with what some would consider current best practice.
At the heart of different constructions of the performance question is more than a semantic debate about whether we are after accomplished teachers who know how to learn from teaching or teachers who can accomplish something by way of measured student learning gains. At the heart are basic differences in definitions of teaching and learning, in how teaching can be understood, in where learning is located, and in degree of closeness to actual schools and classrooms.
The Outcomes Question: Grounds and Groundwork
In my introduction to this article, I suggested that in teacher education as in law, how we construct the questions limits the range and variation of possible answers and prefigures to a great extent what is emphasized, included in, and omitted from the discussion. Throughout this paper, I have tried to make this case: How we construct the outcomes question in teacher education including how we are make the case that some outcomes matter more than others legitimizes particular points of view about the purposes of schooling, the nature of teaching and learning, and the role of the teacher in educational reform, but also undermines other points of view. I turn now to several cautions and concerns about the points of view that are being legitimized and undermined as grounds and groundwork for the outcomes question.
The Tension between Consensus and Critique
Many of the discussions that pertain to the outcomes question depend on the claim that there is an unprecedented professional consensus about how to reform education by developing closer and closer alignment of standards for teaching and learning, assessments of students and teachers, and new models of teacher education, licensing, and certification. There is, however, a fair amount of evidence that just below the surface of common language and some agreement at the abstract level, there are deep differences.
The movement for the deregulation of teacher education and the privatization of schooling, driven by a market ideology and a market approach to education reform (Earley, 2000) is an obvious--;an enormous--;example of lack of consensus about teacher education. The deregulation movement helps to explain some otherwise puzzling discrepancies within and among state policies. For example, many states now have official relationships with NCATE and/or are working with INTASC to develop professional standards for the licensing of beginning teachers. However some of the very states with these relationships are implementing state policies that are fundamentally out of sync with the professional standards of these organizations. Colorado, for example, has removed the word "diversity" from its regulations regarding teacher preparation, Massachusetts department of education officials have excised the word "constructivism" from discussions among curriculum leaders, and states such as New Jersey and Texas now advocate alternative routes with six week quickie teacher education workshops as a preferred entry into teaching.
These are glaring examples of a lack of consensus. Even putting the professionalization-deregulation debate aside, however, it may be that what Hawley and Valli (1999) have called in their chapter in Darling-Hammond and Sykes’ (1999) new handbook of policy and practice, "an almost unprecedented consensus . . . among researchers, professional development specialists, and key policymakers on ways to increase the knowledge and skills of educators substantially" is at least partly an illusion--;or a wish. For example, only 500 of the 1200 institutions in the country that recommend teachers for certification are nationally accredited, and there was complex debate about a provision in the Federal Higher Education Act to encourage accreditation as a means of increasing accountability for teacher education institutions (Darling-Hammond, 2000c).
Some of the differences among teacher education policy makers, researchers, and practitioners may be accounted for as turf battles, some as what Smith, Heinecke, and Noble (1999) call "political symbolism and contention" (p. 158), and some as genuine and rational debate about the meaning and purposes of teaching and learning. But in the face of these disagreements, it is appropriate to ask what accounts for the strong claims that consensus already exists and what propels such strong advocacy of closer and closer alignment of educational outcomes. Yinger and colleagues (Yinger,1999; Yinger and Hendricks-Lee, 2000) argues that standards are a powerful professional tool and that consensus is critical to the professionalization process, signaling to the public and to policy makers that a profession has established cognitive jurisdiction. He writes:
Yinger’s analysis points to the fact that we need consensus--;whether we have it or not. The danger here--;and the caution for teacher education as we construct the outcomes question--;is that we will sacrifice or gloss over the healthy and vital contribution of critique for what is arguably the greater professional good of consensus.
On a certain level, working from consensus and alignment of standards at multiple levels of schooling and teaching are rational and much-needed improvements in teacher education. On another level, however, the greater the supposed consensus and the tighter the alignment of all the pieces, the less room there is for critique and questioning within the profession and in our preparation of prospective teachers. As we construct the outcomes question in teacher education, a central challenge is how to keep central the preparation of teacher candidates who know how to perform what are considered by some to be "best" instructional practices, but also know how to challenge those practices when they exclude certain children or fail to serve some students. How will we prepare teachers who know how to "fit" into tightly aligned standards-driven schools and school systems, but also know how to raise questions about whose interests are being served, whose needs are being met, and whose are not being met by those systems?
The Problem with Inputs-Outcomes Metaphors
As mentioned above, some people are describing changes in teacher education accreditation standards as a "paradigm shift" from inputs to outputs or from inputs to outcomes in teacher education. To apply the paradigm shift phrase to new and old ways of accrediting teacher education programs implies at the very least, that "old" programs--;those that focused on the "inputs" of teacher education courses and curriculum--;had nothing (at least nothing coherent) to do with outcomes--with teacher candidates’ actual teaching or with K-12 students’ actual learning, that old programs had no concern about how teacher candidates learned to adjust their professional practice in order to meet the needs of diverse learners. As many teacher education practitioners are well aware, however, this is simply not the case.
There have been many programs over the last two decades, particularly those that were inquiry- and research-based, those that were conceptualized as true partnerships and situated within the ongoing work of schools and classrooms, and those that were committed to preparing teachers for urban and special needs populations, where there has always been what we might now call an outcomes focus.
The dominance of input-output metaphors to describe the outcomes question in teacher education with its factory and production imagery is even more troubling than is use of the paradigm shift phrase. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggest that images like these are powerful forces in the social construction of reality:
Input-output metaphors carry with them a linear view of the relationship of teaching and learning for both K-12 students and for teacher candidates.
As we construct the outcomes question in terms of teacher candidates’ performances, an important challenge will be to eschew narrow views of teaching, particularly those that begin and end with the assumption that teaching can be defined as instructional practices that lead to demonstrable student learning gains . If we require teacher candidates to use some kind of calculus that measures and aggregates the learning gains of each K-12 student from pretest to posttest measures for each lesson or unit of lessons, there will be an inevitable narrowing of the curriculum and an inevitable pull toward teaching as transmission and learning as accruing bits of knowledge. There will also be an inevitable emphasis on teaching practice as what teachers do within the boundaries of their classroom walls rather than an expanded view that includes teachers’ roles as members of a school community, and as activists, school leaders, and theorizers of practice. With Susan Lytle, I have described this broader view of teaching practice as follows (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999a):
In short, I am suggesting that we need outcomes measures that--;ironically--;make teaching harder and more complicated for teacher candidates (rather than easier and more straight-forward) by recognizing its inevitable complexity and uncertainty and by acknowledging the fact that there are often concurrent and competing claims to justice operating in the decisions teacher candidates must make from moment to moment, day to day. Linear models of teaching will not suffice, nor will approaches to the outcomes question that push only for clarity and certainty. Someone once said that "those who have been forced to memorize the world are not likely to change it." It may also be true that those who measure the outcomes of teaching only with pluses and minuses are not likely to see the value of question marks, concentric circles, and arrows that point both ways and sometimes double back.
Teachers (and Teacher Educators) as Saviors and Culprits
Many of the discussions related to the outcomes question in teacher education are based on the premise that teachers and teaching, teacher educators and teacher education, are critical components--;arguably the critical components--in school change. There is good news and bad news here. In debates about the outcomes question, teachers and teacher educators are being constructed as both the last great hope and the most culpable culprits in what ails American schools
The attention given recently to outcome-based assessment systems that incorporate student achievement data into evaluations of individual teachers and schools reinforce this idea. Sanders and Horn’s (1998) Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System, for example, has been widely cited by researchers and policy makers, even those who represent opposing perspectives. Despite their differences, however, policy makers use Sanders and Horn to make the same point about the importance of teachers and teachers’ work--;when other variables are adjusted for or held constant, teacher effectiveness is the primary factor that accounts for differences in student learning, even stronger as a determinant of students’ achievement than class size and heterogeneity. This means that teachers are responsible for students’ learning despite the mitigation of social and cultural contexts, students’ backgrounds, and the match or mismatch of school and community expectations.
My intention here is certainly not to argue that teachers--;and teacher education--;are not important. As we construct the outcomes questions that are driving reform and development in our profession, however, we face the challenge of how to emphasize the centrality of teachers’ work without implying that teachers--;individually or collectively--;are the panacea for the problems of American education. The dire circumstances of the cities are not going to change because teachers teach better. There will continue to be widespread poverty, curtailed social and economic services, the growth of a permanent underclass, severely diminished opportunities for employment and mobility, and staggering disparities between the circumstances of not only those with and without advantages but also of those with and without hope for a decent life. It has been widely documented that the failure of the educational system to serve particular groups of students is due in part to disparities in the allocation of resources to urban, suburban, and rural schools and schoolchildren (Kozol, 1991)--resources ranging from equipment, supplies, and physical facilities to books, access to computer technology, class size, teacher expertise, and students’ opportunities to learn.
Notwithstanding recent research about the impact of individual teachers on students’ learning, it may be wise for us to remember as we construct the outcomes question in teacher education that teachers--;and teacher educators--;are neither the saviors nor the culprits of all that is wrong with American education.
Getting Social Justice onto the Outcomes Agenda
In the standards of NBPTS, INTASC and NCATE, there is an explicit mandate that teachers and teacher candidates should be able to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population by producing demonstrable learning gains for all children. Several major proponents of the professionalization agenda have pointed out that the standards of these three organizations provide a remarkably consistent image of the professional teacher as a "knowledgeable and reflective practitioner willing and able to engage in collaborative, contextually grounded learning activities (Yinger, 1999, pp. 102-103).
It is important to ask, however, whether this emerging professional image also includes images of the teacher as activist, as agent for social change, as ally in anti-racist initiatives. As we construct the outcomes question in teacher education, we need to clarify and interrogate what it means to teach "all students" well and what it means to adjust teaching practices according to the needs and interests of "all children." In a 1999 chapter on preparing teachers for diversity, Ladson-Billings (1999a) suggests that "the changing demographics of the nation's schoolchildren have caught schools, colleges, and departments of teacher education by surprise. Students are still being prepared to teach in idealized schools that serve white, monolingual, middle class children from homes with two parents" (p. 86-87). In an article that same year on culturally relevant approaches to teacher assessment, Ladson-Billings (1999b) further asserts that these are "dangerous times" for teachers of students of color; she suggests that some aspects of the new presumably more authentic evaluations of teacher competency "may actually serve to reinscribe a narrow set of teaching practices that fail to serve all children well--;particularly children of color and children living in poverty" (p. 255). Similarly Jackie Jordan Irvine has suggested that some aspects of assessments such as those of NBPTS are not in keeping with what we know about the strategies, relationships, and beliefs of teachers who teach children of color most effectively (Irvine, 2000; Irvine & Fraser, 1998).
As we establish the grounds and groundwork for the outcomes question, one of the challenges we face is how to keep social justice--;particularly issues of race, class, and language background--on the agenda. At the same time that a professional consensus has emerged around an image of the professional teacher as knowledgeable, reflective, and collaborative, another image has emerged of the effective teacher of children of color and of children whose first language is not English and/or whose culture is not Western European in origin. This other image of the professional teacher is of one who constructs pedagogy that is culturally relevant, multicultural but also socially reconstructionist, anti-racist, anti-assimilationist, and/or aimed at social justice. In short, the professional teacher is one who teaches in a way that bell hooks (1994) has called emancipatory or "transgressive:"
Of course these two images of the professional teacher--;as reflective and knowledgeable, on the one hand, or as transformative and culturally relevant, on the other--are not necessarily inconsistent and they can mutually coexist in various constructions of the outcomes question in teacher education. In fact in some performance assessments where teacher candidates are expected to document student learning but also demonstrate their work as part of communities working for social change, the two images are entirely consistent and mutually reinforcing. But it is also important to note that these two images are by no means necessarily co-incidental. We could easily imagine performance assessments, for example, that demonstrate that a teacher candidate is reflective, collaborative, and knowledgeable but have little or nothing to do with critiquing the inequities of the educational system or raising questions about the school as sorting machine that reinforces privilege and disadvantage based on race, culture, language background, and gender. A challenge as we construct the outcomes question is to imagine performance assessments for teacher candidates that require both.
Democracy or Market Forces?
As I have alluded several times, many of the most contentious debates about the outcomes question in teacher education stem from two fundamentally different approaches to teacher education reform and from two fundamentally different views of the purposes of schooling. The first, which is intended to reform teacher education through professionalization so that all students are guaranteed fully-licensed and well-qualified teachers, is based on the belief that public education is vital to a democratic society. The second, which is intended to reform teacher education through deregulation so that larger numbers of college graduates (with no teacher preparation) can enter the profession, is based on a market approach to the problem of teacher shortages that feeds off erosion of public confidence in education.
A number of analysts have argued that a market approach to educational policy fundamentally undermines a democratic vision of society. Michael Engel (2000) makes this point bluntly: "Market ideology and democratic values in education are mutually exclusive" (p. 6). Similarly Earley (2000) and Labaree (1997) each point out that a market approach to reform of teaching and teacher education fundamentally misunderstands the nature of teachers’ work which is primarily a public enterprise for the common good in contrast with market approaches to educational reform which are about individual competition for what Labaree calls "private goods." Earley (2000) summarizes this point forcibly and incisively:
Constructions of the outcomes question embedded within market approaches to teacher education reform legitimize the dominance of "private goods" and undermine the view that public education is an enterprise for the public good in a democratic society.
Many of the recent attacks on teacher education are best understood in terms of this larger debate. There is a striking similarity in many of the attacks on teacher education and in their allegiance to market-driven reforms that make the anti-democracy theme very clear . In these attacks, multicultural education is often constructed as a villain --at best politically correct but meaningless, and at worst an evil political movement that is denying white middle class citizens their share of space in the pages of textbooks and causing a downward trend in children’s skills. In many of the attacks on teacher education, the commentator presumes to speak for "the public," for "public school teachers," or for "parents," all of whom want the same things--;order, discipline, basic skills, and a return to American traditions. There is also an assumption that knowledge is a static and inert commodity that is (or should be) transmitted directly from teachers to students. Finally there is the presumption that what would save our schools is the "return" to an earlier and idealized time when American values were uncontested and shared by all, when the "canon" of western European history and literary works was unchallenged, and when academic standards for all students were rigorous and culturally neutral. Each of these entirely faulty presumptions and historical inaccuracies has been critiqued and deconstructed in great detail elsewhere.
The similarities among these attacks, though, are not surprising--nor are their explicitly conservative politics and their gestures toward racism--;when it is understood that they are part of the larger conservative political agenda for the privatization of American education. Although it claims to be neutral, this agenda begins with the premise that we need to deregulate teacher education and let the market decide which children will have the most qualified teachers. These are anything but neutral premises and neutral assumptions about the purposes of American education, the purposes of teacher education, and the role of public education in a democratic society.
Mary Heaton Vorse once wrote, "In the last analysis, civilization itself will be measured by the way in which children live and by what chance they have in the world" (quotation in Maggio, 1997, p. 8). As we construct the outcomes question in teacher education, we need to keep in mind how we will be measured by our own measures. As researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in teaching and teacher education, we will not measure up unless we preserve a place for critique in the face of consensus, unless we keep at the center of teacher education rich and complex understandings of teaching and learning that are not easily reducible to algorithms, unless we acknowledge that although teachers have a critical role in educational reform, they alone are neither the saviors nor the culprits in what is wrong with American schools and American society, and unless we remain vigilant in demanding time and space on the outcomes agenda not just for professional discussions about meeting the needs of all students but for deep interrogation of questions related to diversity, equity, access, and racism.. At this critical juncture in the reform and development of teacher education, if we do not take control of framing the outcomes question, then the outcomes question will surely frame us and undermine our work as teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and policy makers committed to a democratic vision of society and to the vital role that teachers and teacher educators play in that vision.
The author wishes to acknowledge the very useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper from Susan Lytle, Curt Dudley-Marling, Larry Ludlow, and Kim Fries, who also provided valuable reference and bibliographic assistance.
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