As the Rodney Dangerfields of higher education, education schools get no respect. Back in 1921, using the rough speech of the day, Harvard President Lawrence Lowell described his university’s then-new school of education as “a kitten that ought to be drowned.” Between then and now, few have stepped forward to applaud the institutions.
But with enrollments falling and many policymakers and parents seeking new types of schools, the 2020s and ‘30s could bring opportunities to make schools of education better than they have ever been. Ironically, if the revolution happens, red states are likely to lead the way.
The problems go back more than a century. Yet through most of that time, education school failings were hidden by profound inequities that limited the employment prospects of college-educated women and African Americans: Most teachers had so much talent they succeeded despite poor training, pay, and treatment. The breakdown of very real systems of oppression in job markets has eroded K-12 teaching talent, exposing our failure to prepare educators for classrooms.
Elites could afford to be insensitive to the shortcomings of ed. schools. For example, presidents George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden attended (and typically sent their children to) private schools employing uncertified teachers, most of whom never attended ed. school. The same can be said for presidential nominees Al Gore, John Kerry, and John McCain. (Donald Trump went to private schools, too, but his secondary school was closed, and I could not verify its employ of uncertified teachers when I made phone calls to check.) These school choices reflect distrust of the expertise we education professors claim.
While many academicians disparage schools of education for lacking intellectual rigor, other critics, including former dean of Teachers College, Columbia University, Art Levine criticize us for failing to teach applied skills such as classroom management for teachers and personnel management for leaders. They say we produce too many teachers who misunderstand how children learn and too many leaders without a clue about how to hire, evaluate, coach, and when necessary, terminate teachers.
Nor have we improved equity, the word of the decade in schools of education. As David Marshall and I recently documented, the research out of ed. schools is strangely disconnected from the day-to-day needs of urban principals, focusing more on philosopher of education Paulo Freire than overcoming the COVID-19 attendance drops and learning losses, which devastated low-income communities. As American Public Media reporter Emily Hanford describes in Sold a Story, rock star professors at prominent ed. schools made small fortunes selling ways to teach reading that worsened inequities; for decades, we denied rather than trusted the science.
With enrollments falling and many policymakers and parents seeking new types of schools, the 2020s and ‘30s could bring opportunities to make schools of education better than they have ever been.
But the winds of change are blowing—most strongly from red states. The reflexive red-state distrust of university-based authorities has helped enable many governors and legislatures to remake schooling via new or expanded private and charter schools. (Even under a President Kamala Harris, the federal government seems unlikely to intervene in such changes.) Those new schools will need new systems for training educators. In 20 or more conservative states, this may require that existing education schools either thoroughly reform or fade away.
I see four broad reforms that should happen in all states and could save the schools from obsolescence even as enrollments shift to private and charter schools.
First, we should remake the undergraduate education major to incorporate applied fields with scientifically established knowledge and standards: psychology, biology (to understand child development), and statistics, along with classroom subject-matter knowledge. Such preparation could make new educators both more effective and more respected, justifying more pay.
Second, as more states and cities (including deep-blue New York City) mandate that public schools follow the “science of reading,” it seems phonics have won the reading wars everywhere but in schools of education. Ed. schools that train teachers in practices drawn from the science of reading in accord with state mandates will be well positioned for the 2030s.
Third, our current approaches to civics education, which privilege activism over knowledge and skepticism over patriotism, seem to produce graduates lacking understanding of the rule of law, our 200-plus-year history of peaceful transfers of power (which Trump threatened in 2021), and even NATO (covered by civics standards in just 12 states). For decades, University of Virginia English professor E.D. Hirsch warned that ignorance of history would destroy U.S. democracy, predictions that now seem prescient. Accordingly, ed. schools should partner with organizations like Hirsch’s centrist Core Knowledge Foundation and the conservative Civics Alliance to prepare teachers to prepare citizens.
Finally, we in education schools continue to prepare educators as if there is one (often hazy) best way to educate children. Testifying at a recent congressional committee hearing on teacher preparation, Arizona State University education school dean Carole Basile complained that “our teacher-preparation programs have been designed essentially to mass-produce identical educators. … This tells us a lot about why so many credentialed teachers would rather do something else than teach.” As Jal Mehta and Steven Teles argue in their groundbreaking essay, just as there are differing approaches or “schools” in fields like psychotherapy, elementary and secondary schools with distinct missions need educators with distinct training.
The growth of charter schools and education savings accounts as de facto vouchers will likely lead to a larger number of smaller schools of choice across red and purple states. Like many schools in Europe, these academies will likely fill specific curricular and pedagogical niches, options very different from the large, bureaucratic, relatively nonacademic traditional public schools that did not serve me or my kids very well and which do even worse for the kids back in my hometown of Baltimore.
When those 100 flowers bloom, their educators will still need preparation. To meet those demands, schools of education should hire professors specializing in specific types of schooling (Montessori, classical, No Excuses, etc.), to prepare teachers and leaders for those missions. Education schools that diversify their faculty in this way will thrive into the 2030s and beyond.
No one likes change. But if we in education schools transform to support reasonable parent and policymaker demands, we can strengthen education rather than deconstruct it.
