A License To Teach

Building A Profession For 21st Century Schools

Linda Darling-Hammond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429710926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A License to Teach speaks directly to the quality-of-education debate now focused on public schools. It shows that reforms of teacher education and licensing are needed to ensure that teachers are prepared for the classroom.

1
Licensing Teachers: The Need for Change

TO BORROW A LINE from Rodney Dangerfield, teacher licensing in most states gets no respect. The traditional system of "certification" based upon completion of specified courses in state-approved programs of study has left most practitioners, members of the public, and policymakers unconvinced that licensing standards separate out those who can teach responsibly from those who cannot. Despite the many examples to the contrary, the conventional wisdom among many veteran practitioners is that the teacher education courses they experienced too rarely helped them in their practice. Most members of the public continue to think of professional training requirements for teachers as weaker than those of other professions such as medicine (NCATE, 1993). And many policymakers' suspicions lead them to create special routes into teaching that avoid teacher education and standard licensing because they believe these are unnecessary (Darling-Hammond, 1992).

In part because of this lack of credibility, teaching is now the only state-licensed occupation that continues to grant "emergency certificates" to untrained practitioners when vacancies need to be filled (Bacharach, 1985). This practice would not continue if all major constituents felt that licensing standards and processes effectively captured the important knowledge and skills teachers must have in order to serve students well.

All of these concerns have stimulated rethinking of teacher licensing. Equally important is the growing realization that the intense national quest to improve education for students requires attention to the knowledge and skills of teachers. The ongoing school reform movement of the last decade has riveted renewed attention on the capacities of teachers to teach a more demanding curriculum to the increasingly diverse groups of learners who are present—and who must become successful—in American schools.

A New Mission for Teaching

Efforts to restructure America's schools to meet the demands of a knowledge-based economy are redefining the mission of schooling and the job of teaching. Because the great masses of students need to be educated for thinking work rather than for low-skilled factory tasks, and educational success is a necessity rather than a luxury for a chosen few, schools are being pressured to change. Rather than merely "offering education," schools are now expected to ensure that all students learn and perform at high levels. Rather than merely "covering the curriculum," teachers are expected to find ways to support and connect with the needs of all learners (Darling-Hammond, 1990a). Furthermore, they are expected to prepare all students for thinking work—for framing problems; finding, integrating, and synthesizing information; creating new solutions; learning on their own; and working cooperatively.

This new mission for education requires substantially more knowledge and radically different skills for teachers. The kind of teaching required to meet these demands for more thoughtful learning cannot be produced through teacher-proof materials or regulated curricula. In order to create bridges between common, challenging curriculum goals and individual learners' experiences and needs, teachers must understand cognition and the many different pathways to learning. They must understand child development and pedagogy as well as the structures of subject areas and a variety of alternatives for assessing learning (Shulman, 1987; Darling-Hammond, 1990b).

If all children are to be effectively taught, teachers must be prepared to address the substantial diversity in experiences children bring with them to school—the wide range of languages, cultures, exceptionalities, learning styles, talents, and intelligences that in turn requires an equally rich and varied repertoire of teaching strategies. In addition, teaching for universal learning demands a highly developed ability to discover what children know and can do, as well as how they think and how they learn, and to match learning and performance opportunities to the needs of individual children. This mission for teaching defies the single, formulaic approach to delivering lessons and testing results that has characterized the goals of much regulation of teaching, many staff development programs, and a number of teacher testing and evaluation instruments. The capacities teachers need to succeed at the twenty-first century agenda for education can only be widely acquired throughout the teaching force by major reforms of teacher preparation and major restructuring of the systems by which states and school districts license, hire, induct, support, and provide for the continual learning of teachers (Wise and Darling-Hammond, 1987).

Because of widespread concerns for school improvement that have characterized the school reform era, teacher licensing has undergone major changes in states across the nation during the past decade. As policymakers, practitioners, and the public have sought greater assurance that licensed teachers are well prepared for their work, new requirements for teacher education and certification have been promulgated with substantial zeal and alacrity (Darling Hammond and Berry, 1988). These include basic skills and subject-matter tests in a great many states and at least rudimentary tests of pedagogical knowledge in some.

Nonetheless, even these new requirements are not accepted as meaningful and credible by many policymakers, who have simultaneously enacted loopholes to their states' newly enacted standards—and by members of the profession, who frequently have not been involved in creating the standards. There is a growing sense that additional efforts are required to create licensing standards and systems that are defensible and meaningful, that are acceptable to the profession and the public, and that will actually improve teaching practice.

New Directions in Licensing

In this book we describe many of the efforts currently underway to develop and implement more meaningful standards for teaching. These include the move toward performance-based standards for teacher licensing, companion efforts to. develop more sophisticated and authentic assessments for teachers, and the development and integration of national standards for teacher education, licensing, and certification. These national efforts are being led by the new National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), established in 1987 as the first professional body in teaching to set standards for the advanced certification of highly accomplished teachers; the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), a consortium of states working together on National Board-compatible licensing standards and assessments; and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), which has been strengthening standards for teacher education programs, recently incorporating the performance standards developed by INTASC.

We propose an approach to licensing teachers that we believe will better meet social demands for education and will support the improved preparation of teachers for more effective practice. The foundation for this proposal is an earlier project we undertook to design the structure for a professional system for licensing teachers in Minnesota and to develop and test options for specific components of that system, Minnesota's experience is significant, as it was the first state in the nation to define performance-based licensing standards for teachers that are to be assessed in a structured internship and performance assessment system. This task was undertaken by the Minnesota Board of Teaching, one of only three professional standards boards that existed prior to the late 1980s.

This system, which directly assesses what teachers know and can do, will replace the traditional methods of requiring graduation from an approved program or tallying specific courses and then licensing a teacher based on successful course completion. It also stands in contrast to first-generation approaches to teacher testing, emphasizing performance assessments of teaching knowledge and skill rather than the multiple-choice tests of basic skills and subject-matter knowledge used by most states (Darling-Hammond and Berry, 1988).

Assessment through a careful and systematic review of on-the-job performance in a structured internship program, supplemented by evaluation of performance on realistic and appropriately complex teaching tasks, provides the possibility of more successfully judging prospective teachers' readiness to teach. This approach should also support the development of teacher education programs organized more explicitly around the attainment of important teaching abilities.

Ultimately, altering the process by which teachers are prepared for and inducted into teaching can provide the impetus for deeper structural changes in the recruitment and responsibilities of teachers. As has occurred in other professions, as teachers receive more rigorous training, their voice, effectiveness, and responsibilities within schools should increase, and the public (including potential recruits) should increasingly recognize teaching as a challenging, vital career requiring expertise and talent.

Since the MBOT adopted performance-oriented licensing standards in 1987, a number of other states have started down the same path. Eighteen states have been involved in drafting model licensing standards that are performance-based rather than defined by inputs (INTASC, 1992), and a number of other states—including Arkansas, California, Kentucky, Maine, New York, Ohio, and Texas—have recently moved to adopt such standards. Some states, including New York and California, have also launched internship programs for prospective and/or beginning teachers. Meanwhile, the development of new, more professionally credible and performance-oriented assessments for licensing teachers is underway in states such as Connecticut, New York, Texas, and California. This trend is also reflected in changes being made by testing companies to seek to make their teacher assessment instruments more performance-oriented and more grounded in a complex knowledge base for teaching.

Launching a New System in Minnesota

Throughout the 1980s, the Minnesota Board of Teaching (MBOT) led one of the most progressive movements in the nation to strengthen the preparation and licensure of teachers, beginning with studies of teacher education and support for exemplary teacher education programs and extending to the design of a system to assess the skills of prospective and beginning teachers. Following the release of a state task force report in 1986, Minnesota's Vision for Teacher Education: Stronger Standards, New Partnerships (MBOT, 1986), released jointly by the Board of Teaching and the Higher Education Coordinating Board, the MBOT adopted rules to redesign teacher education programs to implement a "research based, results-oriented curriculum." The board also received legislative authorization to implement new systems of teacher education and approval focused on performance outcomes that reflect the skills teachers need in order to be effective (MBOT, 1992).

As part of its initial efforts to conceptualize a more effective and meaningful licensing system, the Minnesota Board of Teaching worked with the RAND Center for the Study of the Teaching Profession to develop a new design for assessing the performance of beginning teachers (Wise and Darling-Hammond, 1987; Darling-Hammond, Gendler, and Wise, 1990). Modeled after licensing systems in other professions, the design provides for prospective teachers to complete a carefully designed and supervised internship program operating under state guidelines in local school districts. This internship occurs after candidates have completed liberal arts and professional education courses and assessments of basic skills and professional teaching knowledge. Successful completion of the internship is to be a prerequisite for taking a final state examination of teaching skills based on performance assessments of contextualized, complex teaching tasks.

In 1992 the Minnesota Board of Teaching created a comprehensive plan for establishing outcomes-based teacher education programs, a restructured licensing system with new assessments, and pilot professional development schools within which the internships would occur. In addition to the required internship in a professional development school, the plan calls for an examination of pedagogical knowledge prior to the internship and an examination of teaching skills after the internship. The board hopes for full implementation by the year 2000, depending upon legislative authorizations and appropriations.

This design, developed from a study of licensing in other professions, is a substantial departure from traditional and recent approaches to teacher licensing. It represents an effort to support more conceptually and practically useful and valid approaches to teacher preparation and to provide the public with a higher level of assurance that novice teachers are prepared to practice responsibly.

In the course of our research leading to these proposals, we studied Minnesota's current teacher preparation and licensing systems; evaluated other states' assessment practices for preservice and in-service teachers, as well as for licensing systems; examined new approaches to teacher testing; and reviewed licensing examinations in other professions. We also investigated efforts to define the knowledge base for teaching and assessed the possibilities and limits of various taxonomies and techniques for defining and measuring teaching skills.

Based on this research, we developed a framework for assessing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of prospective teachers. Working with Minnesota teachers, we then developed prototype standards and tasks for sample components of this assessment framework as a model for more thorough development and, ultimately, implementation. In this book we describe our work in Minnesota, including the structure of the proposed assessment system, the standards and criteria for establishing internship programs, and prototypes for the proposed tests of professional knowledge and teaching skills.

The New Generation of Teacher Assessments

Placing the Minnesota work in a broader context, we also examine emerging conceptions of teacher knowledge and performance as they are being articulated by a number of other states and professional organizations, exploring how these relate to teacher assessment. We describe related assessment development initiatives for teacher licensing in California and some of the emerging work on assessment for advanced certification of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which begins from similar conceptions of teaching and teacher knowledge.

These examples of the new generation of teacher assessments and approaches to preparation and licensing have in common an understanding of teaching as reciprocal—that is, intimately connected to students and responsive to their needs; complex—dependent upon many kinds of knowledge and understanding that must be integrated and applied using analysis and judgment; and contingent—reliant on considerations of context, including the nature of students, subjects, goals, and situations within which these are pursued.

In the final chapters of this book we explore implementation concerns in undertaking these new approaches to teacher development and licensing, along with further work to be done in fully developing and implementing a comprehensive licensing system that can represent and well serve a responsible profession of teaching.

The Need for Licensing Reform

To those involved in the quest for better schooling, licensing represents one means of promoting educational change. Many proponents of licensing reform believe the establishment of rigorous professional standards for entry into the teaching profession will both improve the quality of teaching and help establish teaching as a respected and responsible profession. If standards create meaningful and inviolable screens to entry, it is also possible that salaries will rise to the market level needed to ensure a more steady supply of talented and well-prepared entrants.

Another argument for licensing reform is related to current education reforms that envision greater teacher responsibility in educational decisions at all levels. Restructured schools require changes in the nature of teaching work and knowledge, including a more active, integrated, and intellectually challenging curriculum and a broader range of roles for teachers in developing curriculum and assessments of student performance, in coaching and mentoring other teachers, and in working more closely with families and community agencies. Because restructured schools are also redesigning classroom organizations so that "push-in" rather than "pull-out" methods are more likely to be used for children with special needs and interdisciplinary approaches to a "thinking curriculum" are more common, teachers will need to know more about both subjects and students than they have in the past. Finally, school-based management and shared decisionmaking initiatives rely for their success on the capacity of education practitioners to make knowledgeable judgments about curriculum and assessment, school organization, and program evaluation (Lieberman, Darling-Hammond, and Zuckerman, 1991). This increased responsibility means that teachers will need to be prepared to make such decisions responsibly. Licensing standards should reflect the demands of teachers' evolving roles. Reform of licensing is thus needed to support the success of broader school reform efforts. Obviously, the goal of all of these changes is better education for schoolchildren.

Licensing changes will not produce these benefits overnight. Indeed, the investment of both the time and the money required to implement programs such as the ones described here will probably not produce noticeable results in schools for many years. However, steps in the direction of more meaningful and valid systems for licensing teachers will likely influence the preparation of teachers much sooner. These steps will also send a message that the state and the profession take seriously their obligations to safeguard the educational well-being of students by insisting on and supporting the competence of their teachers.

Standard Setting in Teaching

Over the years, the occupation of teaching has had difficulty defining standards and enforcing a common knowledge base. This has been the case partly because, in contrast to other professions that have developed throughout the twentieth century, teaching has been governed through lay political channels and government bureaucracies—state legislatures along with state boards and departments of education—rather than professional bodies charged with articulating and enforcing knowledge-based standards. A related problem has been the political inefficacy of professional standards-setting initiatives, which have been largely ignored by politicians enamored with the false hopes of creating the "one best system" (Tyack, 1974) implicit in regulating teaching.

The Problems of Political Governance

Members of state legislatures and state and local school boards have typically adopted a view of teaching as relatively simple, straightforward work conducted by semiskilled workers and controlled by prescriptions for practice. This view is reinforced by the "apprenticeship of experience" adults lived through during their years as students. When some of these adults are later charged with making decisions about the regulation of teaching, they often view questions of required knowledge and skill through the distorted, time-clouded lens of a former pupil rather than the clear and polished lens of a trained practitioner.

In addition, legislatures and state agencies have a conflict of interest in enforcing rigorous standards for entry to teaching, since they must ensure a warm bo...