Teacher education overhaul needed

The teacher education “system” in the United States, decentralized as it is, produces teachers who vary widely in their ability to succeed with children in the classroom. Unfortunately, as most of us already know, students in low-income and disadvantaged communities tend to get the less-qualified teachers.

A recent study and book, co-edited by AFT educational issues department director Joan Baratz-Snowden and sponsored by the National Academy of Education (NAE), tackles the shortcomings of the teacher education system head-on. The work pulls together current research on effective teaching and includes a set of ambitious policy recommendations to improve both the quality of incoming teachers and a more equitable distribution of the best professionals.

“Teaching is where medicine was in 1910,” Linda Darling-Hammond, the study’s other co-editor, said at a news conference on its release. “There is a growing knowledge base about how people learn and how to teach effectively. But many—perhaps most—teachers lack access to that knowledge because the programs that prepare them are so variable and because so many teachers, especially those who serve our nation’s most vulnerable students, do not ever go through a systematic preparation program.”

One lawmaker at the press conference, U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), has drafted legislation that would provide financial and other federal support to help implement some of the report’s recommendations. “Our children are not going to receive a solid education if they do not have world-class teachers, and we need to recognize the teacher crisis for the serious national problem it is.” The AFT has praised Miller’s Teacher Excellence for All Children (TEACH) Act.

The NAE report includes 10 recommendations for improving teacher education, among them:

• Provide subsidies for recruitment, such as scholarships and loans for those who teach in shortage fields or locations.

• Develop high-quality programs in high-need areas, especially urban and poor rural communities.

• Evaluate teachers based on actual performance, potentially through a national performance-based program that would assess teachers’ knowledge and skills.

• Strengthen accountabili-ty for teacher education, which would mean granting accreditation only to programs that ensure their candidates master a core set of necessary knowledge and skills.

• Improve program funding so that teacher education programs are supported at levels comparable to other professional programs, such as nursing and engineering.

• Monitor teacher education program outcomes, in part by tracking how teachers are doing in the classroom and how long they stay in the profession.
• Close inadequate teacher education programs.

• Provide support for beginning teachers through high-quality induction programs that include trained mentors, reduced teaching loads and performance assessments to guide learning.

A Good Teacher in Every Classroom: Preparing the Highly Qualified Teachers Our Children Deserve is the second of three planned volumes, produced with guidance from a blue-ribbon panel on teacher education. NAE president Nel Noddings notes that, “Only when we implement these recommendations will education do its part to close the achievement gap, give poor and minority students a level playing field, and improve the performance of our schools. We call on the federal government to do with teaching what it has done with medicine—support and leverage high-quality training and provide incentives to get teachers trained and working in the communities that need them most.”

More information about the NAE research is available at www.nae.nyu.edu.

The NLRB–sponsored election process is corrupt, says researcher

When it comes to holding free and fair collective bargaining elections, National Labor Relations Board procedures fail to conform to the most basic standards of democracy, says Gordon Lafer, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Oregon. “The system is so corrupt that it doesn’t remotely resemble the democratic process we think of when we use the term ‘election,’” he said at a briefing for members of Congress and staff in June.

At the request of American Rights at Work (ARAW), Lafer examined election standards established at our nation’s founding, the historical development of electoral law and jurisprudence, and current statutes and regulations that define fair elections. He looked at the standards applied in U.S. elections and in foreign countries. And he compared them to collective bargaining elections.

“There’s a temptation to judge the fairness of an election based on whether there is a secret ballot,” he observed. “That view is fundamentally rejected by our tradition.” It is what comes before and after the casting of the ballot that determines fairness. In all ways, he found, the NLRB-administered process is more like that “of rogue nations.”

Lafer defined six broad standards beyond the secret ballot and rated how union representation elections measure up under the law.

• Freedom of speech: Employees are restricted from openly expressing their opinions. Meanwhile, employers require workers to have one-on-one meetings with their supervisors, or captive-audience meetings that intimidate employees.

• Equal access to the media: Employees are restricted from openly disseminating information, while employers have anytime-anywhere access.

• Equal access to voters: Employers have unilateral access in the workplace. Union supporters have access only outside the workplace and can get employee contact lists only after they’ve collected signatures from 30 percent of employees indicating they support a union.

• Voter coercion: Employees are not protected against economic coercion and veiled suggestions of retaliation.

• Timely implementation of the voters’ will: Delaying tactics are the anti-union employers’ ace in the hole.

• Campaign finance regulation: There is no regulation of campaign spending, and employers have resources unions cannot hope to match.

This report, called “Free and Fair? How Labor Law Fails U.S. Democratic Election Standards,” is the first of a series ARAW has commissioned, it says, to highlight the widespread deficiencies of present-day labor law. At the same time, Congress is considering two bills—one that would defeat the status quo, the Secret Ballot Protection Act, and the other that would support the status quo, the Employee Free Choice Act.

The Lafer report is available at www.americanrightsatwork.org/resources/studies.cfm.