A recent letter to the editor suggested that because the Ohio University College of Education inflates its GPAs, it should logically follow that the information and skills being taught there are neither important nor necessary.
While improvements can be made in teacher education programs to better prepare future educators, to discredit teacher education on the basis of grade inflation is unfounded. If the college inflates GPAs, that’s a different discussion altogether and has no bearing on ones to supplant these programs with five-week teacher preparation programs such as Teach for America.
Furthermore, to say that pedagogical training is unnecessary because college professors can get by without it is an insight into the lack of understanding these writers have of primary and secondary education. If only teaching a privileged adult college student who is paying thousands of dollars to come to school equated with teaching an ADHD seventh grader who gets beaten at home because his parents abuse drugs.
It would be great to see the three writers of this letter sign up for Teach for America and land in D.C., rural Kentucky or The Bronx and record their time in the classroom to show everyone how easy it is. They might find themselves singing a different tune after two years.
Perhaps the authors of the letter would have seen the error in their reasoning if they had consulted any teachers before writing such an illogical and poorly researched letter. This is the difference between an ordinary blogger and a seasoned journalist.
According to The Washington Post columnist Valerie Strauss, “Studies indicate that students of novice Teach for America teachers perform significantly less well in reading and math than those of credentialed beginning teachers,” (2010).
The fact is that someone who has graduated from a teacher education program will be much more prepared to handle the numerous challenges that teachers encounter on a daily basis.
If programs such as Teach for America are expanded, the message we send is that anyone can be a teacher in five weeks. The attrition rates of professional teachers are horrendous in part because the profession is emotionally and mentally strenuous and the pay is relatively low.
Brill and McCartney found that within the U.S., “33 percent of teachers leave their schools in the first three years, 46 percent after five years“ (2008). Furthermore, their article outlines the other problems caused by low teacher retention rates.
Those problems include: economic costs in the billions each year associated with finding, hiring and training new teachers; institutional costs of degrading sense of community in and around schools; a lack of professional development that occurs as a result of constant turnover; and, most importantly, instructional costs associated with novice teachers’ inability to be as effective as experienced teachers, according to the article.
Promoting Teach for America will only exacerbate the problem of teacher retention rates and the associated issues. More than 80 percent of Teach for America participants leave after three years, a figure much worse than credentialed beginning teachers.
John Wilson, executive director of the National Education Association has stated that Teach for America brings “the least-prepared and the least-experienced teachers” into the classroom. Furthermore, he states that Teach for America has “done a marvelous job of marketing their program and branding their program — you cannot take away from their business model. But what they’re doing to poor children is malpractice.”
Would an education major be allowed to construct a bridge after a five-week crash course in engineering? Do you want a business major who took a five-week crash course in education as your teacher? As your child’s teacher?
The articles and letters recently published in The Post have gone far beyond questioning the grading scale at the College of Education and instead have acted as personal attacks calling into question individuals within the college and challenging the importance of the college itself.
To undermine the value and necessity of high-quality, well-trained educators is to undermine those of us who work in the profession, our students, and the knowledge base of our democracy.
Michael Rinaldi-Eichenberg graduated from OU with a masters in education.
Anthony Xenos is a graduate student studying curriculum and instruction.
