Academic #5
Title: Trivializing Teacher Education: The Accreditation Squeeze
Summary: While recognizing the importance of teacher education, authors claim that NCATE and the accreditation process as a whole make a mockery of the sincerity of the teaching institutions. Trivializing Teacher Education delves into the questionable conflict-of-interest of a for-profit agency accrediting so many institutions and charging others to be on probation.
Topic: Accrediting all schools of education
Category: Academic
What is it: A book written in cooperation with Dowling College
Publication Information: Rowman & Littlefield Pub. Inc.: Lanham, 2005
Author: Dale D. Johnson, Bonnie Johnson, Stephen J. Farenga, and Daniel Ness
Location: Knight Library, University of Oregon, Call No.: LB 1811.T75
Accessed: Mar. 14, 2009
Support:
- American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), Member News Bulletin
- National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), A Decade of Growth
- Katz, M.B., Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America
Trivializing Teacher Education cites research, publications, and personal experiences and anecdotes from institutions that have undergone the accreditation process. Their stories and findings build a cold portrait of NCATE, one that is not currently in the public eye.
Audience and Agenda: This book is aimed mainly at teaching institutions considering accredition. Also, the objective of the book could be conceived as an attempt to change policy or at least sway political influence. The authors are all currently professors at Dowling College.
Usefulness: Trivializing Teacher Education provides an insight into the real figures and practices behind NCATE. The most valuable chapter is “Standards,” in which the NCATE standards are held at face-value as vague, non-descriptive generalities. The requirements beg for extreme measurement of students and teachers, but they have provide no method for objectively doing so. The values NCATE holds are pleasant, but the reality in which they could be accurately realized is impossible. The standards, when held under a magnifying glass show that NCATE’s process for evaluating a school is simply a show to provide comfort for potential students and appease the political influence that teaching schools have to become accredited in the first place.
