Should community colleges do more teacher ed?

NO
Arturo Pacheco:
They have a crucial, but limited, role to play

Groups across the country are advocating for a new mission for community colleges--the training of teachers. This advocacy reflects two societal pressures: a widespread concern about a "teacher shortage" of near crisis proportions and persistent questions about both the quality and number of teachers being produced by current teacher training programs in the nation's colleges of education and universities.

As currently constituted, it seems highly unlikely that community colleges could ever handle the complete preparation of teachers. First, almost all teaching credentials in the United States require a minimum of a bachelor's degree. Most community colleges do not offer bachelor's degrees.

Second, most community colleges, where the minimum requirement for a faculty position is a master's degree, don't have the faculty expertise to offer significant training of teachers, particularly in the content areas. This is of particular concern as research increasingly focuses on the importance of teachers having a command of their subject-matter content.

Yes, some states are making it possible for community colleges to offer bachelor's degrees and, yes, increasing numbers of community college faculty do, in fact, hold doctoral degrees. It would, however, take a huge infusion of resources and effort to get community colleges to the point where they could offer a complete teacher preparation program.

To the degree that community colleges move in this direction, they become less and less actual "community colleges," and also less able to address other vital missions that make them so important to our society. Included among these are their critical vocational mission, the important remediation they do and addressing the increasingly important technical training needs of the local community.

Community colleges play a crucial role in preparing teachers. They offer solid academic preparation to students in the first two years of college before they transfer to a four-year college or university. At the large public university where I work, more that half of the 500 teachers per year who earn bachelor's degrees have done some of their work in the local community college before transferring. The traditional community college's lower costs and its faculty emphasis on teaching over research make a huge difference.

This critical role of community colleges can be best accomplished in partnership with four-year institutions, partnerships that are marked by careful articulation and alignment of courses and experiences, as well as student support systems that make the transfer seamless to the students. At the University of Texas at El Paso, we have had such a partnership in place for the past decade. Respectful partnerships, I believe, lead to the preparation of the best teachers.

Arturo Pacheco is director of the Center for Research on Educational Reform at the University of Texas at El Paso and served for 10 years as dean of the College of Education. 

YES
Joseph D. McNair:
Universities aren't meeting the needs

Judging from our experience at Miami-Dade Community College, it is entirely appropriate for two-year colleges, under the right circumstances, to expand into four-year programs. The community college is uniquely positioned to batter down the walls of elitism and exclusion when it can extend its teaching orientation into the third and fourth year of an upper division program. It is not driven by the "publish or perish" mentality or by the overweening compulsion to create knowledge for knowledge's sake.

Our university programs with their gatekeeper entrance requirements are hard-pressed to explain their vigorous recruitment out of community colleges or the fact that their regular enrollees do not perform significantly better than community college transferees. The answer is fairly simple: Good community college teachers teach. They neither "profess" nor assume that the student has the requisite higher-order learning skills to process information disseminated and extract meaning. If students don't have these skills, the community college teacher helps them acquire and develop the same; we teach them how.

Community colleges--and Miami-Dade in particular--have built their reputations through the efforts of caring faculty willing to innovate, to plan and implement programs designed around student needs. More important, we are willing to take the students who come to us, wherever they fall on the developmental continuum, teach them, train them and prepare them to compete with any other student with an associate of arts degree or who has completed the front end of an undergraduate program.

M-DCC has one of the most successful community college and transfer programs in the country. We recently received state approval to award bachelor of science degrees in secondary science education, secondary math education and K-12 exceptionalities.

When we began exploring the possibility of offering the bachelor's programs, the resistance from existing university programs in the area was formidable. We keep reiterating the message: "Hey folks, with all of the four-year institutions in the area, we are still not meeting the education demand!" The respective missions of the community college and the university are not mutually exclusive.

Be that as it may, a four-year degree program at Miami-Dade Community College will thrust open the door of opportunity and allow a more diverse set of students to realize their education goals.

Community colleges that have the resources to do so should expand their programs to four years. A greater piece of the real education demand will be met and society as whole will benefit as the body politic increases in knowledge and--one hopes--wisdom.

Joseph D. McNair is a professor of education at Miami-Dade Community College and a member of the United Faculty of M-DCC/AFT.