Understanding Why Our K-5 Teachers are So Abominably Trained--- and Comprehending the Flawed Conceptualization of Our Middle Schools

The high schools of the Minneapolis Public Schools are lousy, but K-5 and middle schools face certain systemic challenges pertinent to  teacher training and conceptualization that make the chances of attaining an acceptable quality of knowledge-intensive education at those levels particularly remote.     

Here's why:

The Currently Abysmal Training of Prospective Teachers for Grades K-5

    

There is a rough similarity among the major teacher preparation programs offered by colleges and universities in the Twin Cities.  Programs that train large contingents of prospective teachers include the University of Minnesota/ Twin Cities, Augsburg College, and the Universities of Concordia, Hamline, St. Catherine, and St. Thomas.  At most of these institutions, prospective Grades K-5 teachers major in elementary education.  Hamline is unique among the metro area institutions offering teacher preparation programs in requiring its aspiring Grades K-5 teachers to get a degree in a discipline other than education. 

 

At Hamline, both prospective Grades K-5 and Grades 6-12 teachers get majors in subjects such as economics, psychology, chemistry, math, or English literature while also getting a co-major in education.  Required education courses for Grades K-5 teachers at Hamline include Educational Psychology, Diversity and Education, Theory to Practice, Schools and Society, and Exceptionality.  Teachers aspiring to teach Grades K-5 additionally take courses in Teaching Social Studies [Mathematics, Science] in the Elementary School.  In the other institutions, any route similar to the one pursued at Hamline would come through the attainment of a double major, but this is not required.  

 

With regard to education courses, though, there is great similarity in the various teacher training programs.  Grades K-5 teacher aspirants at the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development, for example, take courses called Social Studies [Language Arts, Mathematics, Science] Instruction in the Elementary Grades that parallel those given for Hamline.  Courses at the University of Minnesota also include Schools and Society and those that incorporate matters of educational psychology, exceptionality [individual differences], and diversity.  Teaching aspirants for Grades K-5 and Grades 6-12 both observe a semester of required student teaching, and in the course of their programs they spend additional hours in the field, visiting and assisting in classrooms.

 

Students at the University of Minnesota who aspire to teach, both at Grades K-5 and Grades 6-12, must get a master’s degree.  Students in the college of education typically do their coursework during the summer and fall terms;  they student teach in the spring, also taking two education courses online.  The route to the Masters of Education degree takes just three semesters.

 

Once the college or university certification program is complete, prospective teachers must take exams that include a basic skills exam, a content-focused pedagogic exam, and a mathematics exam.  Upon passing these exams, licensure is granted.  The license is permanent, given the teacher’s ongoing demonstration of professional development through certified participation in teacher-in-service days, workshops, conferences, and the like;  and with the option to pursue an advanced degree, typically a Masters of Education in teaching elementary education (remembering that a master’s degree is embedded in the program leading to teacher certification via the schedule of courses at the University of Minnesota).

 

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Nothing in this training is designed to prepare scholars with a broad and deep knowledge of substantial liberal arts content matter in the subjects of mathematics, natural science, history, literature, and the fine arts.  Education professors cling to the constructivist creed that includes the notion of teacher as “facilitator.”  They also spout slogans such as “lifelong learning” and “critical thinking” that are consistent with the notion that education is about inspiring a student to engage in personal exploration, reflecting and commenting critically on select topics, and settling in for a lifetime in which any desired factual information can be looked up as the occasion requires.

 

This is vapid training of the worst sort, a smokescreen for intellectual laziness and professional procrastination.  Teachers rarely follow up in challenging students to “think critically.”  Indeed, students are hard-pressed to think critically when they have such a slim knowledge base on which to analyze subjects and engage in robust discussion.  And there is little to suggest that students in our current K-5 schools have much ambition for lifelong learning when they haven’t been taught to respect knowledge, and when their fundamental skills are so underdeveloped.  Teachers maintain an illusion of themselves as “facilitators” when in fact they facilitate very little except the maintenance of a status quo that gives our students very little to show for thirteen (13) years in the classroom.

 

The Advent of the “Middle School”

This transition began in the middle reaches of the 20^th century and accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s.  As the student population grew, and as Grade K (kindergarten) became more of an exercised option, decision-makers in many school districts across the nation moved Grade 6 into the junior high with Grade 7 and Grade 8.  Either by changing the name, or putting the designation on a new building, those making decisions increasingly opted for the appellation of “middle school,” rather than “junior high school.”

 

And these changes coincided with an ideological movement among educators and those who took some sort of elevated interest in public education.  By that time, there was a burgeoning “Middle School Movement” that was an offshoot of the so-called “progressive” approach to education that envisions many purposes of education aside from the impartation of knowledge from teacher to student.  The progressive creed that had taken hold at departments, colleges, and schools of education values process of delivery and the manner of information acquisition over the systematic dispensation of knowledge from teacher to student;  the constructivist approach, which is a subset of the progressive creed, eventually came into particular favor among professors of education.

 

Thus it was that standards had already been lowered by the 1970s, when the Middle School Movement took off.  People who belonged to the National Middle School Association took the lead in this movement, the adherents of which argued that the main task of educators in the middle school context was to assist students in developing socialization skills and negotiating the emotions and physical changes of early adolescence.  By the early 1980s, this movement was taking hold among decision-makers in locally centralized school districts, and by the early 1990s the notion of middle school purpose as socialization dominated the thought of middle school public educators. 

 

The rise of the middle school was accompanied by an increasingly popular theory holding that human brain development plateaus during ages 12-14, and that the brain at this point should not be overburdened with a lot of new information.  By the early to middle 1990s this theory had been thoroughly debunked by the preponderance of neuroscientific evidence, but its popularity did not abate among middle school educators.  Thus, for two decades, students had undergone a boring and unchallenging middle school education, impelling many parents to move students into suburban, private, and charter schools in search of more rigor (rarely finding it in charter schools).

 

The standards movement that inspired No Child Left Behind legislation undercut the socialization-as-purpose premise, but middle school education has not recovered from the errant curricular approach of the Middle School Movement.