Education Week - May 6, 2015 - 28

LETTERS to
the EDITOR
discourage parents from opting out. Even Ms. Delisle admitted
that the department does not want to take money away from
local schools.
The rapidly growing national movement resisting test
misuse and overuse will not be deterred by this disinformation
campaign.
Education Dept. 'Disinformation'
Aims to Quell Opt-Out Movement
To the Editor:
There is no reasonable basis in federal law for recent U.S.
Department of Education threats to punish states, districts,
or schools if significant numbers of parents opt their children
out of standardized tests (" 'Opt-Out' Push Sparks Queries for
Guidance," April 1, 2015).
The original No Child Left Behind Act did state that 95
percent of students must take the test for a school to make
adequate yearly progress. If they did not, the school faced
sanctions. However, nclb sanctions no longer apply to schools
in the vast majority of states that have waivers from the federal
law. In the few nonwaiver states, virtually all schools have failed
to make adequate yearly progress, so they face no additional risk
from not meeting the rule on 95 percent participation.
Dubious claims about potential sanctions made by Education
Department staff members, particularly Assistant Secretary
Deborah Delisle, as quoted in your article, do not change
the legal reality. Federal officials are fabricating threats to
Reader Observes Ironies
In Nancie Atwell's Award
To the Editor:
In her writing, Nancie Atwell begins from the belief that
a classroom teacher is a professional, not a technician or an
assembly-line worker. So her comments about the current
state of teaching are no doubt sincere and not at all surprising
("Honored Educator Decries Current Climate for Teaching,"
April 1, 2015).
She's a truth teller.
It is certainly ironic to see her standing with her award, the
Global Teacher Prize, next to former President Bill Clinton, who
helped lead us down the slippery slope Ms. Atwell's critique
decries.
Monty Neill
Executive Director
FairTest
Jamaica Plain, Mass.
Of course, Mr. Clinton's contribution to the reactionary
standards-and-high-stakes-testing-and-punishment paradigm
is minor compared to all the lies about the so-called "Texas
Miracle" promulgated by former President George W. Bush, and
accepted by Rep. George Miller and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in
authoring the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. What a strange
moment in educational history: A global award for teaching goes
to a teacher who, I would argue, opposes pretty much everything
Mr. Clinton, former Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley, Mr.
Bush, President Barak Obama, Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan, and Bill Gates have supported and enacted during the
past 25 years-and Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gates are part of the
award's judging.
Did any of the judges actually read any of what Ms. Atwell has
written? Perhaps the same group of folks will give the Ellwood
Cubberley Award to Mr. Duncan when he's done enforcing all
the policies and programs that Ms. Atwell disdains.
David Marshak
Bellingham, Wash.
COMMENTARY POLICY
Education Week takes no editorial positions, but publishes opinion essays
and letters from outside contributors in its Commentary section.
For information about submitting an essay or letter for review, visit
www.edweek.org/go/guidelines.
Making Early Education Work
Train Teachers in New Ways
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 32
aration is no easy task. The nation's 1,130
teacher-training institutions are big business,
serving as "cash cows" for colleges and
universities across the country. Education
departments award one out of every 12 bachelor's
degrees and more than a quarter of all
master's degrees. But while these programs
grant a lot of degrees, Levine found in the
major 2006 study of the field, "Educating
School Teachers," that "teacher education in
the United States is principally a mix of poor
and mediocre programs." On most campuses,
he wrote, "teacher education is regarded by
university professors and administrators
inside and outside the education school as
one of the poorest-quality campus units."
He found this to be particularly true for programs
training teachers for younger grades.
A 2011 Thomas B. Fordham Institute
study by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett
found that half of all education professors
themselves think that "'teacher education
programs often fail to prepare teachers for
the challenges of teaching in the real world."
That same year, the Obama administration
issued "Our Future, Our Teachers," a report
declaring that "while there are shining examples
of strong programs throughout the
country, too many of our teacher-preparation
programs fall short." In 2013, the National
Council on Teacher Quality published
"Teacher Prep Review," an exhaustive study
of the nation's teacher education programs,
concluding that teacher preparation is "an
industry of mediocrity."
Educators, too, share this negative outlook.
Levine's study, funded by the Annenberg,
Ford, and Ewing Marion Kauffman
foundations, found that more than three in
five teachers report that their education degrees
did not prepare them for "classroom
realities." Barely a third of principals think
education schools are doing very or moderately
well at preparing teachers overall.
Only 16 percent believe they prepare teachers
to address the needs of students with
limited English proficiency.
The bottom line is that the teacher education
establishment does not adequately prepare
teachers, and real reform is nowhere in
sight. Thanks to years of lobbying from education
schools, regulations mandating education
degrees for K-12 teachers are deeply
embedded in state laws. A handful of alternative-certification
programs have sprung up
as an education school workaround, but the
K-12 sector remains heavily burdened by the
daunting task of "fixing" teacher education,
on top of its core business of educating more
than 50 million children.
Early education,
on the other hand,
is starting with a
clean and unencumbered
slate.
This is the right
time to make crucial,
carefully considered
decisions
about how teachers
should be prepared
to educate very
young children.
The route predictably
promoted by
education schools
and the teachers'
unions is to require
preschool teachers
to get degrees in
education. Yet that
approach would fail
to produce a highquality
workforce
and unnecessarily
bind the emerging
early-education sector
to the dysfunctional teacher-preparation
industry. Instead, early education should
seize this moment to build a better way of
preparing its teachers from the ground up,
by creating innovative, well-designed new
pathways into the profession. The latter approach
will require investing more time and
attention in the short run, but will pay big
dividends for the field going forward. n
28 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 6, 2015 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary
Remove the Financial Barriers
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 32
and economic analyses.
We can break this financial barrier. We
just have to systematically adopt three
crucial steps.
First, we have to increase public
spending on young children. Sounds
simple, but it isn't, because public funding
of programs for young children is
usually fragmented. Typically, we don't
just have one government department
in charge of these programs; rather,
Cari Vander Yacht
for Education Week
they involve multiple ministries, including
health and education and social welfare,
in each of which young children's
importance is relatively minor and so
gets inadequate attention.
But there are ways around this. Many
countries in Latin America, notably
but not only Chile, have raised public
spending on very young children. Some
countries impose a special tax that is
earmarked for young children, like the
sin tax in the Philippines. Some governments,
as in Utah in the United States,
reimburse private investors who finance
early-childhood programs once those
programs produce results.
Second, we have to recognize that most
programs for very young children are
delivered by the private sector. So we
need to encourage the participation of
poor children in these private programs.
We can give publicly funded vouchers
to these children and their families to
do this, through conditional cash transfers,
as in Mexico. We can set up tax and
other incentives so that private providers
themselves subsidize poorer children
from the fees paid by the parents of more
affluent ones-just as private universities
in the United States subsidize needy
college students. We can encourage microfinance
programs to help poor parents
pay for their children to take part, as in
Brazil.
Third, we have to get early-childhood
financing away from the early-childhood
experts. These experts are great, often
with backgrounds in psychology and extraordinary
levels of personal commitment
to very young children. But they
don't know about finance. And they don't
know about what has been achieved
in other development areas, like telecommunications,
water resources, and
health, all of which have much to teach
early-childhood programs about effective
finance and effectively targeting it
on the poor.
No one of these steps is the magic
right step. All three are needed in different
combinations in different economies
and societies. But all three need to be
tried-even if some mistakes are made
in the process. The problem with earlychildhood
financing, unlike a lot of other
areas in development, is not that financing
attempts have failed-it is that we
have failed to make attempts. n
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Education Week - May 6, 2015

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