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Higher Standards for Prospective Teachers

WHAT'S MISSING FROM THE DISCOURSE? The standards movement--and with it new outcomes-based performance assessments and high-stakes paper-and-pencil tests for teachers and students--will arguably have more influence on teaching and teacher education than any other contemporary agenda or innovation. Across the nation, colleges and universities are scrambling to provide evidence that teacher education is a value-added endeavor linked to student achievement, and in many places there is intense pressure to shift teacher education from an "inputs" to an "outputs" model. Even the most ardent supporters of college- and university-based teacher preparation do not dispute that teacher education programs should be able to justify their value and that prospective teachers should be able to teach to high standards. But what's missing from the discourse of higher standards and more demonstrable outcomes? What's receiving little or no attention in the flurry to reinvent preservice education? Michael Fullan's (1993) Change Forces suggests one direction: As we head toward the twenty-first century ... teachers' capacities to deal with change, learn from it, and help students learn from it will be critical for the future development of societies. They are not now in a position to play this vital role. We need a new mindset to go deeper. (p. ix) The way that teachers are trained, the way that schools are organized, the way that the educational hierarchy operates, and the way that education is treated by political decision-makers results in a system that is more likely to retain the status quo than to change. (p. 3) Fullan (1993) insists it will take a new mindset to deal with what is an otherwise insurmountable problem--the contradiction of continuous change demanded by educational reform and innovation on one hand and an educational system that is fundamentally conservative on the other. Fullan argues that "change agentry" is essential to the future development of our society and that all prospective teachers must be prepared to be effective agents of change. Preparing agents of change was decidedly not the focus of the old teacher preparation. John Goodlad's major study of how and where teachers were prepared for the nation's schools (Goodlad, 1990; Goodlad, Soder, & Sirotnik, 1990) indicated that almost no teacher education programs included preparing teachers for change as part of their purpose: "Somehow, the idea that we are our own best agents of change and the will to act have taken a second seat to quiescence" (Goodlad et al., 1990, p. 398). So, what about the new teacher education? Does the standards-driven teacher education of the new century emphasize the preparation of change agents and demand demonstrations that prospective teachers know how to deal with, contribute to, and learn from change? Unfortunately; there is very little in the discourse of higher standards and demonstrable outcomes along these lines. The emerging view of the reflective and knowledgeable professional teacher (Yinger, 1999) includes few if any images of teachers as activists, as agents for social change, and/or as allies for social justice. There is little in the new standards that suggests that prospective teachers are expected to challenge the current arrangements of schools and critique those teaching methods that are increasingly promoted as best practices for all students. The discourse of higher standards emphasizes that new teachers be able to teach (and prove they can teach) in such ways that all children can learn. But, there is much less in this discourse about classroom practices and ways of relating to students that are responsive to and culturally relevant for some students but look decidedly different from those being claimed for all. There is little in the discourse about new teachers' learning to critique standards-based K-12 education and the high-stakes tests that have hijacked the standards agenda in many schools. …