The Reorganization Design Team has proposed to dismantle the College of Education. Not merge it or transform it. Get rid of it.
On March 4, I attended the teach-in in support of the Nationwide Day of Protest in Defense of Public Universities organized by our Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom.
George Caffentzis, Eileen Eagan and two other professors conducted a panel that focused on the neoliberal effects on higher education where corporate control and thinking operates to make education inaccessible to many, diminishes the value of the liberal arts, and makes organizational restructuring decisions based on the values of business rather than the educational good of the university and its surrounding community.
Eagan asked me on the spot to say something to the students gathered there for the teach-in and I made a few comments about how the same logic plays out in K-12 education. There we see the corporate banner of accountability and international competitiveness held up as values – and threats – with teachers caught in the web of top-down standards and unrelenting testing. This, I told the students, comes from the same neoliberal mentality that we see in our universities.
I drove home wishing I had said something else to the students. I wish I had told them what is happening to the college of education. What could be a better metaphor about a university’s unthinking corporate mentality than the destruction of a college of education?
I know not all on a university campus see the value of colleges of education. Indeed, world-wide, colleges of education are under attack as unnecessary, ineffective and lacking academic rigor. While I too have some concerns about the quality of teacher education in many colleges of education, I do not have this concern about our teacher education programs in CEHD.
Our programs – at this time – are excellent. We have an incredible and hard working faculty, long-standing partnerships with our surrounding schools and districts and a supportive and scholarly dean from the field of education. Importantly, we do not have an education major, but instead require our teacher candidates to have a content major in the arts and sciences.
What we see in this proposal from the Design Team is a sure way to ruin all this. Dismantling the college of education and isolating teacher education in a college that is not even a college of arts AND sciences is not a way to maintain a respected program of professional preparation.
While an undergraduate education program for prospective teachers entails having working partnerships with many departments in the arts and sciences, including the STEM disciplines, it must also be understood and clearly seen as a professional preparation program cutting across all departments and strongly affiliated with other professional education programs. This treatment of teacher education is consistent with neoliberal thinking.
Writ large, it may be seen as an attack on the teaching profession similar in nature to the attack on labor unions. Corporations don’t like unions and those who see schools and universities primarily as business operations have no need or use for strong teacher ed programs. Why bother with all that “soft” educationalese related to understanding and engaging students, addressing diversity, designing curriculum, developing a repertoire of strategies, and assessing learning?
What is desired are teachers who will follow prescribed curricula and teach students to pass prescribed tests, not think and act as professionals. Let me be clear: disinvestment in teacher preparation leads to the de-skilling of the teaching profession in our public schools. Which leads to diminished learning on the part of our K-12 students. Which leads to less well-educated students coming to the university. It is a vicious circle.
I have been told that my argument to preserve the College of Education and Human Development in some form or another is strictly self-interest and that I am not seeing things from the point of view of the good of the university as a whole. I say in reply that eliminating and dismantling our college is short-sighted of the Design Team and certainly not in the interest of the larger K-12 school community in southern Maine nor of the teachers, children and parents that these schools and districts serve. Nor in the long term interest of the university itself.
USM was founded on teacher education institutions, including Western Maine Normal School (established in 1878), Gorham Normal School (1889), and Gorham State Teachers College (1945). The Design Team proposal to eliminate CEHD disregards this heritage and this university’s mission to serve the needs of the region. It sends a statewide message that teacher education will now have a diminished standing at USM. This, despite the intense national emphasis on the importance of public education to our country. Whose interest is this in?
Ken Jones is an associate professor in the Teacher Education Department.