TESTIMONY OF LISA GRAHAM KEEGAN
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
EDUCATION LEADERS COUNCIL

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND THE WORKFORCE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON 21^ST CENTURY COMPETITIVENESS

MAY 20, 2003

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, thank you so much for the opportunity to appear before you today. My name is Lisa Graham Keegan, and I am the Chief Executive Officer of Education Leaders Council, an education reform "action tank" comprised of like-minded teachers, school chiefs, school board members, and policymakers. At ELC, we believe in high academic standards, rigorous assessments, and equal access to an outstanding education not only for all students, but for all prospective teachers as well. This will require new approaches that will require breaking with some tradition. At ELC, we know this, and we’re not afraid to do this work. That’s one reason why we’ve been at the forefront of the effort to develop a teacher certification route that relies on evidence on what we know matters in a classroom – knowledge of content and instructional methodology. The country cannot afford to require all of its prospective teachers to be subjected to so-called progressive pedagogies and certification based more on seat time and process than on actual proficiency.

Since September 2001, ELC has been working closely with Secretary of Education Rod Paige, who has made teacher excellence and alternate certification one of his priorities. And with $5 million in startup funding from the U.S. Department of Education, ELC worked with the National Council on Teacher Quality – under the watchful eye of some of the nation’s most thoughtful advocates for teacher quality – to create the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence. American Board provides a nationally recognized, high quality credential to attract the best and the brightest new and advanced teachers into our classrooms. This certification has also been recognized by the Congress – in Section 2151(c)(2) of the No Child Left Behind Act – as one of the nationally recognized doorways into the teaching profession. We’re very proud of this certification, and we think you’ll be impressed with it, too. Secretary Paige has called this certification radical – "radically better than the system we have now, a system that drives thousands of talented people away from our classrooms.

But before I tell you more about American Board, let me speak briefly about why this alternative route is so important. You’re asking a very important question with this hearing: Are colleges of education getting the job done? It’s an appropriate question, and you’re right to be concerned about it. The answer is a simple one: No, they’re not. And it’s largely because they have lost sight of what it is that teacher’s need to know. Colleges spend their time focusing on pedagogy – some of it bordering on the downright bizarre – and not on the kind of content in which I think most of us assume our teachers are being instructed.

For the most part, teacher competency in subject area is determined by the Praxis exam. When it was announced that the Praxis exam was being revised to better reflect content demands, there was considerable agreement that the test needed to be updated – but also considerable skepticism about the ability to actually do it. This is because the organizations that are traditionally chosen to revamp its test – organizations with great sounding named like National Council of Teachers of English and National Council for the Social Studies -- have already shown that they have more interest in feel-good pedagogy than actual content.

Writing about the English standards that the National Council of Teachers of English developed, example, Diane Ravitch, in Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms said that they "buzzed with fashionable pedagogical concepts but lacked any concrete reference to the importance of accurate language usage, correct spelling and grammar, great contemporary literature, or what students at any grade level should actually know and be able to do." What they did do, however, was advise teachers to stop getting in the way of a child’s natural tendencies by trying impose the burden of phonics on children who are learning to read.

We all know that the whole language approach to reading has failed an entire generation of children, but don’t tell that to the colleges of education – they’re still working hard to ensure not that no child is left behind, but that no child’s inner psyche goes unnurtured. Because teaching colleges had not adequately prepared teachers for the task of teaching phonics, the teachers who came out of these colleges didn’t teach their students how to read. Congress, in its wisdom, finally declared that it had had enough, and now requires that all federally-supported reading initiatives be based in sound, scientifically-based methodologies. That at least ensures that phonics gets taught in elementary schools. It doesn’t ensure that it gets taught in teaching schools. Perhaps it’s time to require the same of teaching colleges.

Let’s look at math standards next. Imagine what a career changer from a investment banking firm with a degree in math might think if we went back to a teaching college – as some would like to require – only to discover that math teachers aren’t told to teach multiplication tables, and that there aren’t really any incorrect approaches to long division, so long as children come up with their own methods of calculating. And the fallback position of the math standards? Use a calculator.

How about history? Surely, we could expect the National Council on the Social Studies to come up with some specific examples of what history teachers should be teaching. Even if it were impossible to compress all of the important events in history into less than 200 pages, you would at least expect something akin to "Great Moments in History" to show up in history standards. And you’d be wrong. There’s not a single mention of a specific person, place or event that should be taught.

And portfolios! We’re so intrigued with these portfolios. Teachers don’t have to demonstrate proficiency, they just have to demonstrate they can put together elaborate portfolios. Teaching colleges have done such a good job of teaching teachers about the value of portfolios that they’re even teaching students that they shouldn’t be expected to pass a contents-based exam, either – they should just be asked to put together a portfolio.

We have English standards that don’t talk about specific writers; history standards that don’t talk about specific events, and math standards that don’t talk about multiplication tables. But all of them talk about the need to let students determine what should be taught in the classroom.

This, then, is what our colleges of education are teaching. Nothing. Nothing is important. Nothing matters, except we make sure we allow everyone to explore their own approach to just about anything. Is it any wonder that we have 12^th graders in Florida who still can’t pass a 10^th grade equivalency test after five tries? These are the kinds of educators that our colleges of education are producing.

And what happens when the students these teachers are teaching fail? They blame the student. They blame the test the student has to take. They blame the legislature for lack of funding. They blame the Congress. They blame everything but the failure of adults to adequately take the responsibility of teaching these students. And they can’t teach, because they haven’t been taught how to teach, only how to empathize.

I want to make clear that this isn’t teacher bashing. There are plenty of great educators who came out of teaching colleges and have succeeded in spite of it. Just as we so often say that students can’t be expected to learn what they were never taught, so too can we say that teachers can’t teach what they haven’t been taught to teach. And that, for too long, has been the job of teaching colleges.

Now, NCATE may argue that there’s nothing wrong with teaching colleges that a good dose of updated NCATE standards won’t fix. If NCATE is in the process of updating and improving their standards – and I mean truly improving them, not just changing around all the lingo to say the same things differently – then I applaud their effort. But that’s not enough. Colleges are too far gone and entrenched in leadership that doesn’t believe content matters, and always believes it knows best. Until you change the leadership, you’re not going to see any changes, period.

Lynne Cheney recently warned that we should never underestimate the ability of special interests to co-opt education reform and continue to advance their own initiatives under the banner of change. I am fully confident that colleges of education will embrace whatever changes NCATE recommends, issue glowing press releases declaring that we’ll now be seeing a new and improved system of teaching colleges. But only the jargon will have changed, the colleges will remain exactly the same. This is a sow’s ear you have here, Mr. Chairman. There will be no silk purse, no matter how much gold thread you string it together with. It’s no longer possible.

Despite this, NCATE and colleges of education remain convinced that teaching colleges are still the only reliable route to teacher certification. We disagree. And so does the President, the Secretary of Education, and the Congress. That’s why they tasked ELC – and our partner in this endeavor, the National Center for Teacher Quality – with the challenge of creating a new alternative to teacher certification that was based on proficiency, not the ability to navigate one particular process – a process which has always been determined by colleges of education.

American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence is a rigorous way to open the doors for highly qualified candidates – including professionals who may want to enter teaching from other fields. Because the rigor of the exam its candidates are required to take, American Board certified teachers have proven that they not only have a mastery of their subject matter, but also the professional knowledge to begin teaching students right now. That’s teacher excellence – and that’s "highly qualified."

American Board will offer two types of certification: a Passport to Teaching, which will be available for career changers and prospective new teachers – including, I might add, anyone who may have come through a college of education – and Master Certification, which is targeted toward extraordinary educators who are already in the teaching profession and have a demonstrated record of accomplishment in improving student achievement. Passport certification is exactly that – a passport to teaching that is accepted in any state that chooses to accept it. Pennsylvania was the first state to accept the Passport to Teaching, and we anticipate a number of others will accept the American Board by the end of the summer.

The American Board was not created as a shortcut to the classroom, and I want to be very clear about that. The American Board was specifically created to address the "highly qualified" requirement of NCLB; that does not mean "speedily certified." And while it was created as an alternative to the teacher college route to certification, it does not pretend to be the only route to certification. This is a certification based on excellence. If you’ve got a bachelor’s degree, you can apply for American Board certification, regardless of whether you came from a college of education or a college of engineering.

And it’s not easy. American Board exams are tough – but that’s how we know that those who pass them are highly qualified. When an applicant passes the American Board’s exams, you know they’re highly qualified. And that means that administrators and recruiters can hire American Board certified teachers with the confidence that they’re getting a knowledgeable teacher.

The American Board benefited from the expertise of more than 80 content specialists to help define and refine the domains and sub-areas for all of the standards on its content exams. The American Board contracted with StandardsWork, Inc. to facilitate the development of the standards for the tests for Professional Teaching Knowledge, English, Mathematics, and Elementary Education. Our content standards are some of the most rigorous ever developed, and we’re very proud of them.

But we understand that there’s a real difference between having a mastery of a subject area and being able to teach it to a classroom of excited sixth graders. Therefore, the American Board assesses not only an applicant’s knowledge of subject area, but also their ability to work in a classroom. Because the exam is administered using computers that can generate multimedia presentations, applicants can, for example, watch and listen to real children reading, and then assess the child’s error patterns and select appropriate interventions. This isn’t your typical test – but then, we like to think our applicants aren’t the typical applicants. We ask that they demonstrate their knowledge in innovative ways, just as they will in the classroom.

One of the really exciting things about American Board’s Passport to Teaching is that, broadly speaking, anyone can take it. That means we can finally tap into the vast pool of potential teachers who are presently in other occupations, but who would become teachers if they knew they didn’t have to go back through a teaching college for a number of years. Other American Board Passport applicants have professional and life experiences as educators, but haven’t necessarily obtained the credentials necessary to teach in public schools. We believe that one becomes a great teacher by teaching – and if an applicant doesn’t have instructional experience, the American Board provides a clinical experience checklist that can be completed by those seeking to fulfill this requirement or we work with local initiatives to help individuals meet this objective.

All of these exams measure the same skills that we insist our teaching colleges instill in educators, and they do it in a much more meaningful way. Most important, with the American Board, teacher preparation is finally about content and subject mastery, not empathy. Our colleagues in the colleges of education may continue to assert to you that they all do a terrific job, and that they’re the only ones who can do it. The American Board simply begs to differ. And by the end of the summer, the American Board will offer its certification tests for elementary education, with math and English available for middle and high school teachers by year’s end. We appreciate your confidence in this project, and we’re pleased to report to you that American Board certification is still right on schedule.

Mr. Chairman, I’m delighted the committee has chosen to discuss this issue. As you continue to turn the sow’s ear over and over in your hands and wonder whether you really can make that silk purse – and Mr. Chairman, if there’s anyone made of the stern stuff needed to do that, it’s you – please also keep in mind that prospective teachers now have other options. Because of the leadership of this committee, the Congress, and the Administration have shown in establishing and funding the American Board, teacher quality finally has a fighting chance.

As you move forward with your consideration of the Higher Education Act, we at ELC look forward to working with you to encourage states and districts to expand the options their new and potential teachers have for certification to include other alternatives like the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence. Again, quality deserves a chance. Thank you for the pleasure of allowing me to speak with you today. I look forward to any questions you may have.