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The Bozo Syndromeby Lawrence Baines - April 06, 2003 This personal reflection describes how faculty in teacher education are often treated as second class citizens in colleges and universities. The author argues that higher education has no more vital role than that of preparing future teachers. I was in a dean's meeting, an event that has been predictable
lately only in the dull rehash of bad news. The budget was in
crisis, faculty disgruntled, student numbers way up, but the state
was cutting our funding, anyway. For the first time all
semester, I actually had an agenda—I was trying to push
through what I thought would be an easy sell—approval for a
course substitution. Currently, students seeking a degree in
liberal arts (also known as elementary education) had to take a
course called Chemistry and Society. Nobody in the chemistry
department wanted to teach it, and the course had received
consistently horrendous reviews from students over the past five
years. I wanted to replace it with a course in Environmental
Education. The professor who would teach the environmental
education course was taking a year’s sabbatical at the
internationally renowned Aspen Center for Environmental
Studies. He had been on fire about teaching elementary-age
children about the complex interactions among science, nature, and
human progress. In light of the unabashedly
anti-conservationist policies of the Bush
administration—snowmobiles in Yellowstone, repeal of the
clean air act, opening the nation’s forests to loggers,
loosening of standards for meat and agricultural products—the
need for environmental education seemed greater than ever.
However, his zeal for teaching students younger than college age
prompted his dean in the sciences to suggest in no uncertain terms
that he relocate himself from the Department of Environmental
Sciences to the Department of Teacher Education. So, he
did. Changing a course involved compiling a tome of paperwork, but it
was standard procedure for the deans to look over the materials,
ask a few, polite questions, and sign off. In case there
would be questions (and I did not anticipate any), I attached
copies of the state guidelines in science and the standards
promulgated by the National Science Teachers Association with
specific passages highlighted in yellow to show that the new course
would be better all the way around. As soon as I proposed the change, a dean spoke out against
it. "We can't have all these courses with an education
prefix. The state will discredit the education program, and
we will become the laughingstock of higher education.
Already, the state has suggested that our elementary school
teachers do not have enough upper level courses in
science." I explained that prospective elementary teachers already took
courses in chemistry, physics, biology, geology, and
geography. If they took any more courses in science, they may
as well go pre-med. The dean was livid. "Suppose the environmental scientist
recently transferred to teacher education leaves. Then, what
are you going to do? Hire some bozo with a doctorate in
education to teach the course?" And there it was: bozo with a doctorate in
education. The bozo syndrome continues to undermine teacher education at
every level. Those afflicted with it are often the severest
of critics of public education, yet most have not set foot in a
K-12 classroom since they graduated from high school.
As an undergraduate, my advisor warned me not to “go
bozo” and waste my time with teaching but to take my English
degree and go straight to grad school. I became a teacher
anyway, but eventually resigned my position to pursue an MBA, just
to prove I could, I suppose. Upon graduation, I landed a plum
of a position with a top firm but found business less satisfying
and less challenging than teaching school. Although I enjoyed
the real lunch break that came with my new job, I concluded that I
had done more good in ten minutes as a teacher than I could have in
ten years flailing away at my post in corporate America. So,
even though I was doing well, I took a 70% pay cut and went back to
teaching. I taught for five more years, then went away to pursue the
doctorate. In my second semester in the doctoral program in
English Education at the University of Texas at Austin, the bozo
syndrome re-emerged when a professor from the English department
took me aside and asked, “Why do want to slum through
teacher education?” He suggested that I transfer to the
doctoral program in English. Furthermore, he had a topic
already picked out for me--transgender allusions in the works of
James Joyce. At the time, I was working as a long-term
substitute teacher at a middle school. The very day he tried
to recruit me for transgender allusions, one of my middle school
students had tried to commit suicide, one had written me a love
note, a parent called to complain about my most recent assignments,
and a student thanked me for showing her the wonders of
poetry. I loved Joyce, but poring over books looking for
references to gender lacked a certain urgency. On the other
hand, I was pretty sure that if I left my fifth period class
unsupervised for five minutes, the gates of hell would be thrown
wide open and there would be no getting them shut
again. Despite the responsibilities of the job, teaching has never been
able to shake the Bozo rap. A few years ago, a salary study
at an institution where I was then working revealed a great
disparity between the pay among professors in teacher education and
faculty in other schools. The survey discovered that the
salaries of faculty in teacher education were more than 40% below
comparable positions in business. When the differences in
wages were pointed out to the president, he responded, “The
faculty in teacher education enjoy the lifestyle of a professor
just the same as those in business.” Lifestyle?
Faculty in education also taught two more courses per year and had
more students in each class than faculty in business. The
dean in teacher education made 20% less than any other dean.
Yet, the tuition costs to pursue a degree in teacher education were
the same as those for students who majored in business.
Part of the problem is that the reputation of the teaching
profession continues to wither. While legislators and high
profile politicians keep preaching about quality, they promote
policies that allow anyone with a pulse to go into teaching.
In Texas, of the 111 locations that have permission to provide
credentials for teachers, less than half are institutions of higher
education. Increasingly, teachers are getting their education
on the fly at regional service centers and schools,
themselves. Because of the proliferation of such easy-entry
programs, the K-12 hiring process has become more about filling
open slots with warm bodies than preparing qualified teachers for
lifelong careers. Most certification programs provided by school districts amount
to two weeks of “quick-fix training” in July for anyone
holding a bachelor’s degree in any field followed by
full-time, salaried, solo teaching in August. In comparison,
college programs typically require numerous kinds of field
experiences over a period of two or three years, a slate of
relevant courses, and 6-12 months of unpaid, full-time internship
before students get their very own classroom. Is it any
wonder that the numbers of teachers seeking alternative
certification are growing at exponential rates? In some
schools, alternatively certified personnel outnumber teachers with
honest-to-goodness college credentials. The Internet has made
inroads as well. More than 60% of all recently minted
administrators in Colorado have obtained their degrees not from the
University of Colorado or Colorado State, but from The University
of Phoenix. Although teachers have been given the sacrosanct responsibility of developing the intellectual and social capital of the country, almost anyone can certify teachers—and they do. The education and experience of the adults entrusted to care for our children has become superfluous in relation to what most legislators perceive as more pressing needs, such as vouchers, testing, and more testing. As you might have guessed, the deans voted down my request for a
new EDUC course. Instead, a compromise was suggested.
The new course, focusing on teaching elementary-age
children—required of all education majors and taught by
education faculty—could be approved, but the prefix must
identify it as a science course. I know I’m just a
bozo, but I simply can’t grasp that logic.
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