November 5, 2009

Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C. 20202

Dear Secretary Duncan:

I appreciated your recent visit to New York and was present for both your speech on community schools, hosted by the Children’s Aid Society, and your speech on teacher education, hosted by Teachers College.

You paint a very discouraging picture of teacher education in our nation’s universities. Yet many of your suggestions for improving teacher education are already being implemented in many schools of education. Consistent with your recommendations regarding recruitment of high quality teacher candidates, New York University undergraduate students are accepted into our program through a central admissions process and must meet NYU’s criteria for acceptance. Our freshman class’ SATs are regularly over 1300 in average scores; at the graduate level, we require a minimum GPA of 3.0. All of our students have majors in arts and science disciplines.

Students are placed early and often in high need public schools in Harlem, East Harlem, the Lower East Side, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. They are supervised by a mentor teacher, University supervisor, and school site supervisor. We have memoranda of agreement with 21 host schools with whom we partner; we place aspiring teachers, America Reads/Counts tutors, coaches, faculty teams, and University courses in these schools. The NYU pre-student teaching internship requirement includes observations of teachers and classroom systems, interactions as tutors with individual struggling learners, observation of the systems of the school (leadership, counseling, social work), interactions with parents and other community stakeholders, and service learning projects. By the time they graduate, students have completed a minimum of 660 hours of school-based work. All undergraduate elementary education students are prepared for dual certification as elementary special education teachers.

We agree that evidence needs to inform every aspect of a teacher education program. Students at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development study the current research on best practices in teaching and student learning, with emphasis on second language learners, children with special needs, and children living in poverty. Students also are learning to use the Achievement Reporting Innovation System (ARIS), the New York Department of Education’s tool for evidence based decision making. However, we need more research that identifies the best practices in each subject area and for different ages, abilities, and developmental levels of children and youth.

While we agree that there is a broad consensus in the research and policy communities that a high quality teacher is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for student learning, the pathway that leads to high quality teaching and student achievement is less clear. While some studies indicate that teachers who are certified are more effective, a number of studies have tried to identify whether traditional teacher education programs, alternative routes, or programs like Teach for America are more likely to produce teachers who are highly effective. The conclusion from this research is unambiguous: there is more “within group difference” than “between group differences.” In other words, just knowing the route through which one enters teaching, is not very helpful in predicting which teachers will be highly effective. The more important question is: what are the ingredients of a good teacher education program?

You said at Teachers College, “I don’t think the ingredients of a good teacher preparation program are much of a mystery anymore.” However, a number of studies are pointing to the complex and multifaceted activities that characterize effective teaching and need to be part of an effective teacher education program. We need more of these studies to direct quality teacher education programs; we need more research that identifies best practices in each subject area, and for different ages, abilities and developmental levels of children and youth.

While key leaders agree that understanding how to help an individual become an effective teacher is essential, research that can inform policy makers, teacher preparation faculty, or practitioners is sparse. According to Bruce Alberts, Science’s Editor-in-Chief, “Teacher recruitment, preparation, retention, and professional development all need to be informed by scientific research in education” (Science, 323, January 2, 2009, p. 15). Recognizing that much of this scientific work remains to be done, Alberts pledged to devote regular space in Science to research on K-12 curricula, pedagogy, assessment and school management. However, less than half of 1% of the federal education budget is spent on education research (compared to about 20% of the health budget). A fraction of the education research budget is devoted to identifying what variables, in what order, and in what form of delivery are requisite for preparing effective teachers. Furthermore, measuring teacher effectiveness is complicated by the fact that many districts assign new teachers to the most troubled schools and to teach the students with the most challenges.  We need increased funding for education research that identifies what teachers should know and be able to do so that all children in all disciplines achieve at high levels.

We also engage in continuous examination of the evidence about our teacher candidates’ effectiveness. Steinhardt’s Center for Research on Teaching and Learning assesses aspiring teachers using a battery of instruments:

1. GPA of core content, pedagogical core, student teaching and liberal arts courses;

2. Student Teacher End of Term Feedback Questionnaire;

3. Educational Beliefs Questionnaire;

4. Supervising Teacher’s Ratings;

5. The Domain Referenced Teacher Observation Scale (DRSTOS-Revised), a teacher observation instrument that is based on the work of Charlotte Danielson (Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching, 1996);

6. One-year follow up surveys; and

7. New York State Teacher Certification Exams.

Our ongoing research on program effectiveness now includes matching exit data on our graduates with their students’ New York City achievement data and with other observation tools that assess teacher effectiveness. We have been tracking these measures of our graduates for several years, including employment in NYC public schools and value-added standardized test scores for their pupils. In addition to tracking these data for individual graduates, we have administered surveys to cohorts of graduates, including exit surveys and one-year follow-up surveys. This December, we will administer a five-year graduate survey. Results of our assessments are reported to the Teacher Education Accreditation Council annually. Additional funding for longitudinal and controlled experimental studies that examine the behaviors of effective teachers, and the training they received, would move forward your agenda to have every teacher be highly effective.

Regarding your speech on community schools, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development embraces your vision of educating the whole child. We prepare professionals to work collaboratively across the fields of education, psychology, health, media and the arts. We understand that while effective teachers are essential for children’s learning, the teacher and schools only control about 45% of the variance in student outcomes; health, poverty, and English language proficiency all affect students’ ability to learn.

We applaud you for putting your office and talents behind efforts at NYU Steinhardt and other universities to provide highly effective teachers for our nation’s schools. We look forward to partnering with you to achieve that goal. We respectfully ask that you increase the resources devoted to research on teacher preparation, support university efforts to make teacher education an all-university commitment, fund innovative efforts to provide full service and community schools, and make funding available to build strong university-school partnerships.

Thank you for all your efforts on behalf of the children and youth of America.

Sincerely,

Mary Brabeck, Ph.D.

Dean and Professor of Applied Psychology

Posted by Timothy J Farrell on November 6, 2009 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, recently published a commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he described serious threats to colleges and universities. He mentions the tendency of universities to look for leadership from the private and corporate sector, corporate-style management practices, and the tendency to fill Boards of Trustees from the worlds of finance and business.

He argues that “It may be time to tack against the historical current by increasing the role of faculty members in hard financial decisions, by finding leaders for colleges who have a clear record of teaching and research accomplishment, and by building boards of trustees that also represent the worlds of art, public policy, medicine, and foundations — to temper the voices of those who come from the corporate world.”

To read the entire Commentary, click here.

Posted by Timothy J Farrell on April 14, 2009 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since it now appears that the federal Higher Education Act will finally be reauthorized, it will soon be time to examine the reauthorization of the Institute of Education Sciences. Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, who has transformed this grantmaking office of the U.S. Department of Education during his tenure as its first director, is resigning this year, and the future direction of the agency remains uncertain. In what direction should it move next? What type of research should educators and policymakers hope will be given priority in a post-Whitehurst Institute of Education Sciences?

Those of us who conduct educational research have a new paradigm to guide our work, if we choose to use it. Like other research initiatives, such as evidence-based practice, this model finds its genesis in the medical sciences, and is coined "translational research." What is it, and what does it potentially offer education?
In medicine, translational research is often identified as "bench to bedside" work. It recognizes the gap between basic research in the lab and the practice of medicine that can make a difference in health outcomes. The goal of translational research is to give practitioners the latest information from basic-research labs in usable form. The idea is to produce better medications, improve diagnostic and treatment strategies, and enhance health through the application of information from basic science research. In education, not unlike medicine, vital knowledge too often remains with the researchers and is unavailable to the professionals who are in positions to help children and youths-that is, the teachers. We have a similar "clinical lab to classroom" gap.

Consider the learning sciences. Research on how diverse children learn at varying ages and stages, and the implications of how they learn for teaching, should be central to what teachers know and what they learn to do in the classroom. But most basic research on learning is being conducted by neuroscientists who are located in medical schools, and by cognitive- and learning-science faculty members who reside in colleges of arts and sciences. Most of these scientists are ignorant of the work of their applied-research colleagues in the departments and schools of education. Those applied colleagues, in turn, in the education foundation areas of psychology, sociology, and economics, too often regard with disdain the teacher education professors who work with aspiring teachers.

Of course, many of the teacher education faculty members are epistemologically at odds with the researchers, basic or applied, who conduct empirical, quantitative studies. And to complete the circle that maintains the stalemate, those who do not believe that research findings based on inferential statistics have any relevance for children, youths, and aspiring teachers will only encounter impatience and dismissal from empirical researchers. Yet these groups, distrustful of one other, will have to build better working relationships to successfully meet the challenge of improving student learning. If the IES of the future were to adopt a model that funds translational research, such relationships might be fostered.

The National Institutes of Health has made this kind of research a priority. By 2012, the NIH expects to have 60 centers of translational research supported by a budget of $500 million a year. Twenty-four such centers have already received funding from the Clinical and Translational Science Awards program, and other universities and medical schools are gearing up to compete for the remaining funds. Likewise, the United Kingdom has invested £450 million over five years to establish translational-research centers. There are now two journals devoted to this emerging field, Translational Medicine and the Journal of Translational Medicine. In short, research agendas in health are being shaped to answer questions that start out as basic science and end up as clinical practice. And this new emphasis on translational research has pushed medical schools into collaborations with science faculties in colleges of arts and sciences, and with other professions such as nursing, allied health services, education, social work, and public health.

A new agenda for the Institute of Education Sciences could envision a similar approach to cooperation and collaboration in education research. Grants to basic researchers in cognition and neuroscience could include an "outreach" component, much like what is done with research in the STEM-science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-fields. Grants to neuroscientists might require them to work with teachers and schools as they conduct their basic research. Social scientists might be encouraged to apply the findings from basic research to the contexts where students learn: the home, the neighborhood, and the classroom. And teacher-educators could be encouraged to translate the findings from applied psychologists and neuroscientists into ways aspiring teachers should teach children and youths. The goal should be to distill basic research findings for teachers, who are, in a sense, analogous to primary physicians. Grants might also encourage teacher-educators to experimentally examine whether changes in teacher practices have a positive impact on student learning, and to track the results over time.

There is no doubt, as we consider international test-score comparisons, the stagnation in U.S. graduation rates, and the intransigence of achievement gaps between groups of our students, that we have a lot of work ahead of us. Teachers need to have usable knowledge about how children learn and how to teach them better. The federal government and higher education need to apply the same urgency of concern to this area that they do to making basic science research available to health practitioners. What can we do?

University presidents and provosts can help. They have encouraged interdisciplinary work to address the many health issues our society faces. They have devoted research provosts' time, the bully pulpit, and the university reward system to the development of better practices in medicine. They might do the same for research on teaching and K-12 learning.

Grantmakers can help. The NIH is requiring that multidisciplinary teams be involved in the development of proposals for the coveted Clinical and Translational Science Awards and other programs. A similar program might be developed within education.

In education, not unlike medicine, vital knowledge too often remains with the researchers and is unavailable to the professionals who are in positions to help children and youths-that is, the teachers.

The faculties of research universities can help. Direct conversations between basic and applied researchers have the potential to change some of the questions basic researchers ask. Basic researchers, in turn, might come to understand the complexity of schools and the situational demands that affect student learning. Synapses and school budgets are both important in student learning. Conversations with teacher-educators, and a visit to the schools where they work, would encourage applied researchers to test the predictions from basic research in the context of the real conditions teachers face. Teacher-educators will need to develop the tools to be conversant with new statistical and measurement methodologies that can be helpful in establishing useful practices for teachers to promote learning. And all will need to keep the focus on the practices in teaching that affect learning outcomes.

Finally, the public can help. People must accept the fact that changing education outcomes is a complex and lengthy process. There is no quick fix, and no single superstudy will answer any of the questions we need to answer.

If we can get all that help, and a research budget closer in scale to the NIH's budget to identify better health outcomes, we have a chance to bridge the "clinic to classroom" gap in education research.

Mary Brabeck is the dean of the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University.

Originally published in Education Week, May 21, 2008 (www.edweek.org)

Posted by Ernest Ford on June 16, 2008 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Many suspected that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's recent substance-over-mere-words attacks against Sen. Barack Obama smacked of desperation. Some expected these attacks to come to an end once Wisconsin had come and gone, giving the Clinton campaign its expected defeat there. But the fact that Clinton continues to repeat the substance-over-mere-words theme indicates that it may be the last card she has to play.

In her speech following the Wisconsin results, Clinton articulated several contrasts between herself and Obama. The first was a contrast of style versus substance, speeches versus action. With this alleged contrast, she comes dangerously close to the line of evoking a long-standing stereotype about black men: that they are "slick."

The stereotype has a history, especially tied to black men who deal in the currency of words. The idea is that they dazzle the soft-minded with a persuasive prose, but leave them with nothing more than a feeling, at best. At worst, the charm in their speech leaves unwitting audiences with something quite different from what they were promised.

In the blaxploitation films of the 1960s and '70s, the black slickster was the pimp who charmed women into selling their bodies and remitting the proceeds. He was the drug dealer who seduced the poor and oppressed into a chemical high that left them poorer, physically damaged, in jail or dead. It was he whose inspirational orations were used to set a trap, to lure the innocent into the realm of the criminal. The slick trickster can't be trusted; his words are dishonest, serving only himself.

In the world of politics, the seductive power of words is used by black politicians to gain something they don't deserve. At least, that was the story line according to former Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, in his Senate race against Harvey Gantt in 1990. If you are the Republican National Committee, slick and smooth politicians like Harold Ford Jr. use the gift of speech to attract white women and live a lavish lifestyle. Such was the idea behind an ad attacking Ford in his 2006 run for the U.S. Senate against Bob Corker of Tennessee.

When Clinton spotlights the seductive emptiness of Obama's words, is she making a substantive contrast or evoking a stereotype replete in both pop culture and political rhetoric? Maybe the second contrast Clinton highlighted the night of the Wisconsin primary last week will help answer this question.

Differentiating herself from Obama, Clinton said, "We have to have hard work." The implication is that Obama is either incapable of working hard or unwilling to do so. In either case, Obama becomes the stereotype of the lazy black. Like the slickster, the stereotypical lazy black is a prominent figure in the lineage of American cultural and political history - from the welfare queens that sparked the Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton revolutions in government assistance all the way back to the conspicuous representations of lazy blacks in "Birth of a Nation."

Similar to the slickster, the stereotype of black laziness formed the basis of countless racial appeals made by white candidates against their black opponents in recent electoral politics. It was the basis of an attack in 1994 for David Perryman, who pointed out that his opponent for the House of Representatives, former Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.), got paid a full government salary while admitting he "only needs to work 12 hours a week."

The laziness stereotype was cast on Florida congresswoman Corrine Brown in 1992, when opponent Don Weidner attacked her for receiving a government grant for a jobs program, where he claimed she never worked to produce a single job. And former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun fell prey to this allegation in 1998, when her opponent, Peter Fitzgerald, said she used money she did not work for to pay for luxuries.

The lazy black stereotype is so much a part of white political parlance against black candidates that the term "hard work" specifically has been used by most black politicians to characterize themselves when appealing to white voters. It's become a way of inoculating themselves against one of the most common of stereotypes.

Should Obama become the nominee, it will be interesting to see how his camp responds to such attacks. If history is any indication, they are likely to continue.
Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.

Posted by Ernest Ford on February 25, 2008 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last month thousands of our best and brightest high-school students found out whether they had been accepted by early decision to the colleges of their choice. Each had spent weeks poring over application forms, polishing essays, and agonizing over where to submit an application - a promise to matriculate at one institution, forsaking all others, in exchange for often considerably better odds of admission and a couple fewer months of worry about where they would spend their college years.

The applicants' anxiety was unwarranted - and it was also deceptive. Even before the applications were mailed, most of the decisions had been more or less preordained by social class.

I recently spent a year and a half in the admissions office of a highly selective Eastern college as an ethnographer, seeking to understand just how admissions officers make their decisions. I accompanied them on recruitment trips to high schools and college fairs, helped manage their offices' relentless current of visitors and mail, and observed them deliberate the fate of literally thousands of applicants.

What I found was consistent with the American ideal of educational meritocracy. I saw admissions officers who invariably made the quality of high-school transcripts the most prominent criterion of evaluation. They assessed standardized-test scores as only one part of an application, recognized outstanding records of leadership and community service, and were wise enough to distinguish genuinely strong applications from ones that were buffed and puffed by private consultants. Yes, I saw officers give special consideration to applications that were connected to promising donors - it was a private institution and, while hardly poor, it depended on philanthropy for its financial well-being - but nothing close to the shameless horse trading that occasionally makes selective admissions headline news.

Recruited athletes also enjoyed a systematic admissions advantage and often were admitted with weaker academic records. But then fully a third of the students who enrolled at the college in a typical year were varsity athletes who had invested heavily in their athletic skills throughout many years of childhood and were eager to hone those skills at competitive levels of play. In a sense, admissions preferences for top athletes are not really preferences but rather an extension of meritocratic standards to nonacademic skills.

Indeed, I realized that it was not big donations or athletic recruitment that most undermined the American dream of meritocratic admissions, but rather, and however paradoxically, the fact that our dream has come true. The days when old-school connections were enough to get through the doors of top colleges, and when dark skin or a Jewish surname were enough to be excluded, are over. Selective colleges now sort applications based on measurable accomplishment. But in general, only the more affluent among us can afford the infrastructure necessary to produce that accomplishment in our children: academically excellent high schools, rich with extracurricular programs; summer sports camps; private tutoring; "service" trips to Israel or Guatemala; and, of course, the time and money to invest in the elaborate competition for seats at selective institutions.

All that investment means that by the time upper-middle-class 17-year-olds sit down to write their applications, most of the race to top institutions has already been run, and they already enjoy comfortable leads. As William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University and president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and his colleagues demonstrate in Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (University of Virginia Press, 2005), the majority of students likely to meet the baseline criteria for admission to top institutions are from the top quarter of the national income distribution. For those kids, the big question is not whether they will be admitted to an elite institution, but which ones will offer them spots. Even while the fate of individual applicants at particular colleges remains uncertain until decision letters are mailed, the overall distribution of outcomes is heavily skewed in favor of affluent applicants. That is not the result of discrimination by admissions officers, but rather the consequence of privileged families deftly playing by the rules of the meritocratic game.

My research convinced me that the ever-more-frenzied activity surrounding selective admissions is essentially ceremonial - an elaborate national ritual of just desserts. The fact that the fates of particular applicants at particular colleges remain uncertain until the end enables us to believe that the winners earn their victories in a fair game. That is how the anxiety that attends the application season is deceptive: It encourages those who experience it to believe that the outcomes of the process are considerably more uncertain than they actually are.

More perniciously perhaps, the feverishness of each year's application season allows us to take comfort in modest reforms that mostly only tinker with that process. Some recent fixes at selective institutions - eliminating early decision, making the SAT an optional component of applications, or, a bit more radically, proposals to replace individualized selection with a lottery system for all those applicants who meet some general criteria - will do nothing to change the distribution of opportunity that delivers talented applicants to admissions officers in a markedly class-stratified way.

It would be far better if we turned our reformist energies toward improving educational opportunity earlier in life. Research in child development makes clear that young people's academic fates are decisively shaped by the amounts and kinds of resources available to them in their earliest years. A national preschool program, generously supported by the federal government, would take us a long way toward equity in selective college admissions. So too would national support for adequate college guidance at high schools in low-income areas and for the "extra" curriculars, like music, art, and varsity sports, that make meritocracy more varied and more fun for kids in wealthier school districts. Focusing our concern on larger, undoubtedly more difficult educational problems will be a tough change, especially when it means thinking about the needs of children other than our own. But the only way to have an educational meritocracy that is also genuinely just will be to make the entire system of college preparation more equitable.

Mitchell L. Stevens is associate professor of education and sociology at New York University. He is the author of Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (Harvard University Press, 2007).

Originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2008 (http://chronicle.com)

Posted by Ernest Ford on January 11, 2008 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)