Education Policy and Politics Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

The professional standing of educators in U.S. society is particularly conflicted, and this situation weakens their voice in shaping educational policy at the national, state, and even local levels. As a result, decisions made often reflect political considerations rather that professional, academic insights.

Public school teachers, who are the most visible and largest segment of the profession, offer a prime example of how the defining characteristics of professional status are insufficiently established and, as a consequence, how the status of educator as a professional is absent or compromised. Historians and social commentators since de Tocqueville have noted a number of reasons why teaching has not fully attained the standing of fields such as medicine, law, nursing, pharmacy, and others. These include the sheer number of persons in public school instruction, the local genesis and control of the schools, the popular conceit that no specialized knowledge is necessary for the teaching role, and the convention of allowing untrained persons to teach under “emergency” conditions. Also blurred are the lines between certified teachers practicing in their specialization and those who are either uncertified or teaching out of their field. Many thus casually use the term teacher to refer to anyone who offers instruction of any kind, as opposed to protected titles such as physician, attorney, and nurse. Teachers have strength in numbers, but they suffer from an unclear societal identity, which gives them a tenuous grip on professional status.

To a large extent, these conditions spill over onto professors of education, particularly onto those in teacher education. The education professoriate is numerous, like teachers, which lends some influence. Their knowledge base—to employ the field’s own term—undergoes much internal debate, however, and receives outside challenges over its very existence. Even the question of the need for the field of teacher education is continually at issue. One need not be a scholar in the field to verify the phenomena that challenge the field. For example, no universal, mandatory accreditation for teacher preparation exists. Competing accrediting bodies take radically different approaches to their mission. Furthermore, numerous states accept alternative pathways to certification. Such alternatives may require, for example, no more than acquisition of a bachelor’s degree and passing a standardized test of general knowledge. Part-time instructors without terminal degrees or scholarly credentials often conduct teacher education in transported “storefront” programs. A new movement matriculates elementary teachers at community colleges, reverting to a pre-World War II standard of preparation. These challenges to teacher education are unique: No other major field faces such threats of de-professionalization and de-skilling.

Phenomena such as these have a profound influence on education policy and politics and contribute to a destructive cycle affecting the profession. Assigned low status and struggling with an uncertain identity, educators are often bypassed by elected officials in the formation of policy that affects their practice. Such action prevents educators from overcoming challenges of identity and autonomy, allowing further incursions to take place. Perceived as low status and quasi-professional, educators seem to need only minimal preparation, so the cycle replicates itself at the levels of teacher education and policy development.

Some recent events in reading provide an important example. On the federal level, the National Institutes of Health, specifically under the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, assembled a research strand in reading. By determining that literacy was a “health concern,” this study of research in reading thus distanced itself from the teachers and professors of reading and literacy. The researchers, named the National Reading Panel, drawing on paradigms identified with educational psychology but distant from the practice of teaching reading, presented a lengthy, prescriptive report on reading instruction. Complementing the report was a summary and an executive summary, each of which deviated from the content of the report and neither of which the panel vetted. The report quickly affected policy and funding in reading across the United States. Even as the scholarly community of reading specialists called the report (and especially the summaries) into question, the U.S. Department of Education moved quickly to encourage applications for discretionary funding based on the recommendations of the summaries, thereby narrowly restricting educational policy and practice at the state and district levels. The net result was a redirection of federal money to prescriptive, textbook-oriented programs published by corporations active in the world of Washington lobbyists. Sloganeering, with such phrases as “Reading Wars” and “Phonics vs. Whole Language,” reduced the discussion of improving literacy to a publicity battle rather than a public discussion of the substance and subtlety of what was at issue.

What was wrong with this process? It co-opted scholarly processes in the selection process of the panel as well as its means of deliberating. Later, the process compromised the report’s validity when popularized, and slanted versions of the report were put forward to influence policy formation. Politics and public relations were disguised as scholarship for the purpose of “feeding the voter base” of phonics advocates and steering government funding to campaign donors. The experience, expertise, and perspectives of teachers were excluded except for the marginalized voice of dissent, in this case, from one panel member who had been a teacher of reading. The voices and views of reading scholars express grave concerns in the literature, but these remain primarily within the academic research community and have little influence on policy implementation.

In another example, on a statewide level, legislators ordered the California Commission for Teacher Certification to create a set of objectives in reading for preservice teachers as well as a standardized test that would serve as a gatekeeper for entry to the profession. The commission, to its credit, salvaged the process by introducing a list of expectations and an assessment, the Reading Instruction Competency Assessment, which surpasses conventional standardized tests in determining competence in professional practice. Professors of education in reading methods courses, however, were confronted overnight with a prescribed curriculum for much of their preservice coursework in reading. This is another example of a process that provides a stunning message to universities about the degree of control of the curriculum that the legislature is able to assume when so motivated. Rarely does much resistance or response emerge from faculties of education or higher education at large in such cases, yet the vulnerability of faculties of education to imposition from the political world should attract the attention of all faculty.

Characterizing education policy and politics in the United States is the marginalization of professional educators from the process of consultation and decision making. Even though teachers’ unions are among the top donors to the Democratic Party, the voices of teachers and teacher educators and their organizations are notably absent from both the writing of policy and the debates that lead to legislation. Today, in a period marked by the heightened infusion of public relations techniques into politics, policy such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is distinguished not only by its neglect of professional education expertise but also by its undermining of the public education establishment.

Education policy has departed so far from informed, collaborative decision making among educators and politicians that it has become the vehicle for creating wedge issues in political life and a means for manipulating the public treasury for the benefit of publishing houses and other campaign donors with no professional responsibility to students and society.

The statistically questionable thresholds of annual yearly progress have made NCLB a fool’s game for public education in which there are countless ways to be deemed a “failed school” and the paths to success are few and improbable. This high-stakes scenario extended the federal tradition of unfunded mandates by setting high standards without providing the additional funding known to be necessary for meaningful reforms to take place. NCLB also has not addressed what are recognized as the chronic and “savage inequalities” of the U.S. school funding system that distributes per student support in a highly inequitable fashion that is particularly disadvantageous to urban, minority schoolchildren.

Without an acknowledged and significant place in policy formation for professional educators and an honest, in-depth presentation and discussion of issues before legislators and the public, education policy and politics will continue to be subject to exploitation for purposes other than the welfare of children and youth. As the inadequacies of the current political era continue to draw criticism and public discussion nationally and internationally, educators may have an opportunity to take their rightful place as informed and experienced professionals in the arena of policy formation and political process. Progress of this type cannot occur, however, unless teachers and professors of education and their organizations are persistent and assertive in their pursuit of professional respect and autonomy.

Bibliography:

Apple, Michael. 2006. Educating the ‘Right’ Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Cochran-Smith, Marilyn and Kenneth M. Zeichner, eds. 2005. Studying Teacher Education: The Report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Garan, Elaine M. 2004. In Defense of Our Children: When Politics, Profit and Education Collide. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Nichols, Sharon L. and David C. Berliner. 2007. Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Spring, Joel. 2004. Conflict of Interests: The Politics of American Education. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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