Ed-Schools Fail to Teach the Most Basic Skill

    The WaPo op-ed column, Schools of Reeducation by Frederick M. Hess suggests why Universities are failing graduating students who lack the first basic skill of teaching - classroom management. Over the past few months I've had conversations with beginning teachers, including our youngest son. My question to them is this: Why is it that you spent four years in a University and your parents spent approximately 80 kilodollars (or more) and yet you were not taught how to get students to focus on their lessons? 

    My son and my wife spent time developing his "voice" - that quality of speaking and acting which helps him to get students to walk into class, open their music to the right page and pay attention. Without that "voice" he would be out of the classroom at the end of this year.

    Beginning teachers tell me that they were unprepared to manage their classes and had to learn this on the job. Their Unversity schools of education failed them.

    Hess's opening paragraphs suggest why:

For those who have been troubled by the tendency of universities to adopt campus speech codes, a worrisome new fad is rearing its head in the nation's schools of education. Stirred by professional opinion and accreditation pressures, teachers colleges have begun to regulate the dispositions and beliefs of those who would teach in our nation's classrooms.

At the University of Alabama, the College of Education explains that it is "committed to preparing individuals to promote social justice, to be change agents, and to recognize individual and institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism." To promote its agenda, part of the program's self-proclaimed mission is to train teachers to "develop

anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist . . . alliances."

The University of Alaska at Fairbanks School of Education declares on its Web site: "Teachers often profess 'colorblindness' . . . which is at worst patronizing and at best naïve, because race and culture profoundly affect what is known and how it is known."

Consequently, the program emphasizes "the interrelatedness of race, identity, and the curriculum, especially the role of white privilege."

    For four years of study, room, board, tuition, and expenses our sons and daughters are learning the "correct" attitudes and cultural values. They aren't learning classroom management. This is fraud.

    Does anyone know of a University or college school of education that prepares students for their first and most basic challenge?

NOTE: this post linked to Outside the Beltway traffic jam for 2/14/06

Ed-Schools

Comments

[Fred K.]

My ed grad school had an excellent course on Clasroom Management (textbook is by CM Charles - superb!).

But I know of no school that teaches teachers how to help students discover the meaning of everything.