I don’t normally write on non-higher ed issues in education, but this recent New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Teachers: Will We Ever Learn” has gotten a fair amount of traction on the interwebs. In fact, I heard about it in several emails from friends and colleagues who care about education issues as much as I do, so I thought I’d share my response to some of the key sections of the op-ed (which I encourage you to read in full):

In April 1983, a federal commission warned in a famous report, “A Nation at Risk,” that American education was a “rising tide of mediocrity.” The alarm it sounded about declining competitiveness touched off a tidal wave of reforms: state standards, charter schools, alternative teacher-certification programs, more money, more test-based “accountability” and, since 2001, two big federal programs, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

But while there have been pockets of improvement, particularly among children in elementary school, America’s overall performance in K-12 education remains stubbornly mediocre.

The piece proposes a way to overhaul this:

Teaching requires a professional model, like we have in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, architecture and many other fields. In these professions, consistency of quality is created less by holding individual practitioners accountable and more by building a body of knowledge, carefully training people in that knowledge, requiring them to show expertise before they become licensed, and then using their professions’ standards to guide their work.

…

In the nations that lead the international rankings — Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Finland, Canada — teachers are drawn from the top third of college graduates, rather than the bottom 60 percent as is the case in the United States. Training in these countries is more rigorous, more tied to classroom practice and more often financed by the government than in America. There are also many fewer teacher-training institutions, with much higher standards. (Finland, a perennial leader in the P.I.S.A. rankings, has eight universities that train teachers; the United States has more than 1,200.)

…

These countries also have much stronger welfare states; by providing more support for students’ social, psychological and physical needs, they make it easier for teachers to focus on their academic needs. These elements create a virtuous cycle: strong academic performance leads to schools with greater autonomy and more public financing, which in turn makes education an attractive profession for talented people.

And points to areas where we’ve tried to best train teachers:

Undergraduate education programs and graduate schools of education have long been faulted for being too disconnected from the realities of practice. The past 25 years have seen the creation of an array of different providers to train teachers — programs like Teach for America, urban-teacher residencies and, most recently, schools like High Tech High in San Diego and Match High School in Boston that are running their own teacher-training programs.

Again, research suggests that the labels don’t matter — there are good and bad programs of all types, including university-based ones. The best programs draw people who majored as undergraduates in the subjects they wanted to teach; focus on extensive clinical practice rather than on classroom theory; are selective in choosing their applicants rather than treating students as a revenue stream; and use data about how their students fare as teachers to assess and revise their practice.

Before closing with a rosy outlook:

The changes needed to professionalize American education won’t be easy. They will require money, political will and the audacity to imagine that teaching could be a profession on a par with fields like law and medicine. But failure to change will be more costly — we could look up in another 30 years and find ourselves, once again, no better off than we are today. Several of today’s top performers, like South Korea, Finland and Singapore, moved to the top of the charts in one generation. Real change in America is possible, but only if we stop tinkering at the margins.

So, here’s my response:

If there’s a consistent theme that I’ve learned in my graduate program in education, it’s that education has undergone “education reform” decade after decade that has only resulted in more and more policy churn. Old ideas become new, and new ideas become old — until the cycle begins again. In other words, ed policy may not be, in many ways, a very hopeful field to be in…

While I think teachers absolutely deserve more respect and compensation, I also think trying to equate teaching with law and medicine is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Although there’s a core accepted understanding of what medicine and law are supposed to produce, I don’t believe we have the same cohesive understanding of what teaching is supposed to be.

Education has been localized for so long that any type of effort to streamline what an effective teacher looks like probably will not be successful because our culture doesn’t really want that (by this, I mean that before we try to scale up on efforts that have worked in isolated areas, we have to understand the culture and context that make it successful — this is essential to the argument that James Hiebert and James Stigler made in their book, The Teaching Gap, based on the results of Third International Mathematics and Science Study or TIMSS in 1999). Not to mention that we haven’t even agreed on how best to evaluate teacher effectiveness…

While I think initiatives such as the Common Core Standards are a step in the right direction, there is still much more work to be done on that level. Might we be better off if we did indeed implement a national curriculum? Perhaps, but politically, that seems downright impossible. And if you try to compare the US to other countries (particularly ones that may have national curriculums), it’s extremely tough to do, particularly when you consider that Finland has a total population of roughly 5.4 million and we have over 55 million children to educate in the US. It’s partly why I realized during my year of researching education policy in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar that international education comparisons are wrought with challenges that make any real comparison damn near impossible.

While I think professionalizing the teaching profession may have good (and very necessary) intentions, the multilayered challenges that teachers face in their classrooms go well beyond simple professional development measures. The income disparity in the United States make many well-intentioned reforms almost moot points, which is another area in which international comparisons are a bit off-base (e.g. take a look at the average personal income tax rate in the US versus another OECD country like Germany). And if we were to focus on professional development in our undergraduate and graduate programs for education, can we really adequately prepare teachers to meet all the diverse scenarios they are bound to face once they’re in the classroom?

But I don’t want to seem overly gloomy about education in the US. I think our education system’s better days are ahead; I have to have faith that they are. This can only happen, though, if we make smarter choices when it comes to education reform and activate them in concert with other policy areas. We’ve seen wholesale policy implementation based on shoddy evidence (like the class size reduction strategy in California based on one or two studies done in Tennessee and Wisconsin in the mid- to late-1980s). It’s hasty policy decisions like that that contribute to policy churn and reform fatigue among educators and others — and this is just on a state level.

At the end of the day, I think it comes down to the Hiebert and Stigler argument of the type of educational culture we want and are willing to develop. You could argue that South Korea, Finland, and Singapore are all countries where there is a generally accepted attitude toward a certain type of academic achievement — and much of it may be top-down. The attitude in the US has long been to push back against top-down education standards, though, and as a result, even something like Common Core wouldn’t have been as palatably accepted as it has if it had come from the Department of Education. This view is perhaps a little bit oversimplified, but I think Common Core has had some success, because they came from the National Governors Association first. But we’ll see if they can expand it to all 50 states and adequately include other areas besides math and reading, etc.

So, what does this all mean? Who knows. But I think until we can agree on a general way of looking at education in this country (and there are and long have been competing philosophies of what education is supposed to do), we may — to paraphrase Frederick Hess — just be giving the wheels of education reform another spin.