Western Governors University's Path to Becoming a Teacher in NJ

The Christmas gift that keeps on giving. Teaching jobs abound in New Jersey.

Western Governors University is recruiting heavily for part time adjuncts in New Jersey to stay in their pajamas and conduct on line courses for NCATE approved "evaluations." If you are looking for a job as a data evaluator, with no benefits, no job security and no office, then this is for you.

Now that they are dismantling teacher unions and public schools, it's a free for all. Just sign up, pay some money, take some on line courses and you are sure to be an 
"effective" teacher. Just follow the script. You'll do fine.

With experienced educators being fired or fleeing to save their souls, the demand is huge for anyone interested in working in public schools that have been taken over by corporations, i.e., Common Core via PARCC, Pearson and Achieve 3000.

No need to study the history or philosophy of education, curriculum methodology, psychology or subject content, it's as easy as clicking a few buttons.

NCATE Accreditation

WGU is the first exclusively online university to receive NCATE accreditation for its degree programs that lead to teacher licensure, a testament to the fact that WGU graduates "have the knowledge and skills to be effective in helping all students learn."

Read more about our NCATE accreditation

Change Lives with an OnlineTeaching Degree Program

WGU offers challenging online teaching degree programs for both current and aspiring teachers. Because WGU is a nonprofit, online university founded and supported by the governors of 19 U.S. states, you'll benefit from both superior online degree programs and lower tuition.

WGU’s programs are designed to produce highly competent teachers because our degrees are aligned specifically with state standards throughout the country.

Relay School of Education: The New Test U School of Penal Pedagogy for the Poor

re lay: an electromagnetic device for remote or automatic control that is actuated by variation in conditions of an electric circuit and that operates in turn other devices (as switches) in the same or a different circuit.

If you consider it either ridiculous, dangerous, unethical, unscientific, or simply stupid to fire and hire teachers based on gains or losses among invalid and non-reliable student test scores, you ain't seen nothin' yet.  Last Fall when the Oligarchs convened the leaders of the lonely hearts club of teacher accreditation outfits known as NCATE (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education) to declare that teacher education needed to "incubate a whole new form of teacher education," those of us familiar with NCATE's fealty to the Business Roundtable knew something big was in the warmer.

Now we know.  The first hatchling is christenend the Relay School of Education, a creation of political hack, David Steiner, who has created the neo-eugenics corporate model for training educational technicians to program poor children so that they can pass tests.   Bloomberg and Tisch, in turn, made Steiner New York's ED Commissioner, whose office just recently voted unanimously to approve the new school in a market already saturated by other programs.

What makes Relay (think "remote or automatic control") a uniquely monstrous offspring of teacher education is that degrees are only awarded to those candidates whose student test scores show a year's worth of gains during the year that candidates are learning to teach on poor people's children.  Those who get their degrees based on student test scores, then, go into schools with the unquestioning acceptance of test scores as the only reason for schools or teachers to exist.  Flip the switch!

This new model was designed with the KIPP/TFA ethos of anti-cultural imperialism by white elites clearly in mind.  In fact, KIPP co-founder, David Levin, is one of the three founders of this new Test U, and many of the 200 candidates getting underway this coming Fall will be Wendy Kopp's carefully-recruited Ivy League missionaries.

So where does NCATE play a role in this fledgling corporation? From Elizabeth Green, who is quickly becoming the Oligarchs' go-to-girl to get their stories into print:

Teacher U [Relay School of Education] has received praise at the national level, including from a group that has defended traditional schools of education in the past: the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. James Cibulka, the president of NCATE, submitted a letter to the Regents endorsing the Teacher U team’s application, citing a recent report by NCATE that cited Teacher U as an “exemplar” of needed efforts to “turn teacher education in the United States ‘upside down.’”

Yes, yes, upside down.  No evaluators sent out yet, but Cibulka knows quality before he sees it, apparently.  So top-heavy with cash, how could they fail to capsize teacher education!  In fact, one of the other three founders of Test U, aka Relay School of Education, is none other than hedge fund superstar, Larry "L-Train" Robbins.

It's worth recalling that everyone was not out to lunch on the eminent explosion of the bulging home mortgage bubble in 2008, leaving Wall Street in shambles and the hedge funders and other casino capitalist rats swimming for their offshore bank accounts.  Larry "L-Train" Robbins was one of those seers from the inside, who had the uncanny ability to make money when everyone else was taking a hit.

When a Fortune Magazine interviewer in late 2007 asked L-Train how his Glenview Capital hedge fund was up 20 percent for the year when some other funds were getting creamed, part of his answer offered this clue:

  . . . . Second, we've maintained a short position in mortgages since late 2006. That gave us a hedge against liquidity contraction and it gave us early and valuable insights into the consumer lending market and its deteriorating conditions. 

Now we know the Fed could not have known was was going on because Greenspan said so, right?, or certainly not the media or anyone who read Fortune Magazine in 2007, but the L-Train had some remarkable insight, you might say. With quality leadership by such civic-minded swine, how can Test U fail?

By the time David Steiner has completed his mission in Albany, Relay will likely have an endowed chair waiting for him.  Will they call it the Frederick Winslow Taylor Endowed Chair of Educational Efficiency?  Sounds good, doesn't it?

"Clinically-Based Teacher Preparation"

If there is a phrase that you are likely to get as sick of hearing in the next few years as you did "scientifically-based evidence" during the last few, it is likely to be "clinically based teacher preparation."  No doubt, too, this new catch phrase will have about as much connection to science as the last one did, which is minimal to none.

"Clinically-based teacher preparation" represents a new scheme to further weaken the impetus toward child advocacy and ethical student treatment, the social justice mission of schools, and the progressive and humane philosophical grounding of teacher education that has been under attack since Reagan came to power.  The new plan was incubated and hatched by the gang that brought you the era of nonstop test and punish, corporate welfare charter queens, anti-cultural shrunken curricula, teacher demonization and union busting, Reading First parrot teaching, DIBELS, corporate tutoring, the super-sized junk food textbook, and unending data surveillance systems.  It has been marched out under the banner of what has been until now a highly-regarded teacher accreditation outfit known as NCATE.

First, a comment about the psychology of this "comprehensive" report, which bears the schizophrenic markings that only come from hurried committee construction by forces in clear opposition.  For instance, we see corporate America's anti-preparation program, Teach for America, mentioned in the same paragraph with the highly-respected Alverno College, as if there is some equivalence of legitimacy between the two to teacher education.  And many alternative prep scams in between, all given full-throated support by the organization charged with the responsibility to uphold the integrity of teacher education in the U. S. Sad, but done. Very sad.

If NCATE really wanted to move to a clinical model that would emulate American medical education, it would have taken some effort the make changes much more significant than the ones outlined in this pathetic report.  For instance, in medical ed, we have pre-med preceding med school, which has its clinical internship, as well as pre-clinical component.  The pre-clinical is made up of three years of classroom study in basic and medical science, supplemented by heavy doses of acculturation and observation. Following the clinical comes at least three years in residency.

Based on the three "crucial goals" being advanced below, it would seem that very little time or coursework, if any, is being added to the "clinical" teacher model.  Rather, it seems that more of the existing time is being given over to the "clinical" with the effect being a further reduction of the pre-clinical.  If you can think of a doctor prescribing a medicine without understanding chemical interactions, or a surgeon cutting you open without knowing where the veins and arteries are, then you get the picture.  The pre-clinical body of knowledge--child development, educational psychology and sociology, educational philosophy and history, learning science, cognitive science, curriculum theory and practice, research skills, classroom management, and human dynamics--all will be subjected in the new plan to a further squeeze, rather than being expanded to really develop the heft, breadth, and depth that would truly emulate a medical model.

So does TFA, then, qualify as a "clinical" model?  Why not?  Let's give these med students 5 weeks of pre-clinical education and then dump them into a hospital where people are dying left and right. But don't worry, they are learning something about chemistry and anatomy at night after a ten-hour day at the hospital, where the roof is leaking, by the way, and there's no toilet paper in the bathroom, and patients are being treated in broom closets.

This phony-baloney, scientifically-sounding super sham of a plan represents the final capitulation by a once-respectable organization to the corporate boards, corporate foundations, and the oligarchs who own them.  This will open the floodgates to "alternative certification" and the further diminution and marginalization of university programs that have never acceded to the new role of training prison guards, rather than teachers.  Teacher education, the real kind, will survive through this dark period, but it won't be with the help of an agency whose integrity has been bought and paid for by the corporate oligarchy for the benefit a handful of dress up and go to lunch bureaucrats with the moral courage of slugs.

Oh yes, the crucial goals:

Specifically, the Alliance partners will focus on advancing three crucial goals:

1. Foster collaborative partnerships among schools, districts, and teacher preparation programs by:
Identifying demonstration sites that have or will develop a strong partnership between teacher preparation programs and school districts or schools with a particular focus on high-needs schools.

Testing different delivery models for clinically based teacher preparation such as year-long residencies as part of four year programs; two-year post-baccalaureate programs using spiral curricula that weave together content, theory and laboratory experiences in year one and full year school-embedded residencies in year two; and preservice practica experiences designed to engage candidates with a group of students throughout their professional programs to follow their cognitive, social, and developmental needs over time.

Establishing incentives to create joint responsibility for induction by hiring districts and preparation programs.

Developing innovative funding models to institutionalize teacher preparation through the  school/teacher preparation program clinical model.

Working with diverse preparation programs to assure that robust clinical teacher preparation is a central feature across all pathways into the teaching profession.

2. Assess all aspects of performance on a continuing basis by:
Collecting and analyzing multiple measures of formative and summative assessment data used by teacher candidates reflecting classroom learning and school improvement.

Linking performance assessments to state licensing requirements.

Expecting demonstration sites to establish and implement an accountability system based on assessment measures of graduates’ and programs’ performance through value-added and other measures in state and district longitudinal data systems.

Including performance assessment of establishing teacher preparation programs for the purpose of program improvement in the state’s teacher preparation approval system.

3. Develop more effective state policies to prepare teachers who meet school needs by:
Offering incentives or establishing policies that guide the numbers and types of teachers who are prepared so that school and district needs are met.

Identifying and eliminating or addressing state and local policies and practices that might impede innovation and shifting to clinically based teacher preparation programs.

Creating a “scale-up” plan to expand from a limited number of clinical teacher preparation partnerships to a state-wide system of such partnerships as a means for improving student learning – especially in high-needs schools.

"Dummying down" Teacher Education

Here is the new " comprehensive report" from the "expert panel" put together by NCATE and the corporate foundations.  I am reading it now, but here is the bottom line of the bottom line

Measures of Effectiveness 

Current Teacher Ed Model: Programs are not always held to same standards by state departments of education; variability of standards and licensure requirements among states. 

 The New Model: All programs held to same standards; data-driven accountability based on measures of candidate performance and student achievement, including gains in standardized test scores. Data drives reform and continuous improvement (p. 12).

In other words, teacher education will now be judged by test scores, like everything else in the K12 universe.  More later. 

Social Justice--Meet Madison Avenue

There are many educationists and educators who have been so brow-beaten by conservatives intent upon preserving the current out-of-whack social system that they have abandoned, even, the term "social justice" from their working vocabularies. Of late, we see half the term, "justice," surviving in some schools' guiding documents, as if the Constitution and the legal system will be enough to combat the corrosive effects of racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism that undergird, and undercut, our social lives.

With the disappearance of the term, social justice, there goes, too, the principles and practices aimed at combatting oppression, hatred, bigotry, and the more subtle behaviors and policies that perpetrate the many unfairnesses surrounding race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. One of most prominent examples of capitulation occurred recently with the national accrediting concern, NCATE, and its decision to follow the path of least resistance by caving to right-wingers who are angered and threatened by the prospect of a teacher corps committed to dispositions grounded in principles of equity, equality, and fairness. Such is the state of politics in America, when social justice can be successfully demonized as a partisan value that is too offensive to remain on our list of cherished institutional ideals.

It is encouraging, then, to see the goals of social justice making a comeback, even if it is on Madison Avenue and not in the agencies where we might expect it, say, in the institutional values of what was at one time the most respected teacher education accrediting body of the Land.

A clip from the NYTimes:

FOR the first time since the Advertising Council was founded in 1942, the organization — which directs and coordinates public service campaigns on behalf of Madison Avenue and the media industry — is introducing ads meant to tackle a social issue of concern to gays and lesbians.

The campaign, which is scheduled to be announced by the council in Washington on Wednesday, will seek to discourage bullying and harassment of teenagers who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

The campaign, created pro bono by the New York office of Arnold Worldwide, urges an end to using derogatory language, particularly labeling anything deemed negative or unpleasant as “so gay.” That is underlined by the theme of the campaign: “When you say, ‘That’s so gay,’ do you realize what you say? Knock it off.”

There will be television and radio commercials, print and outdoor ads and a special Web site devoted to the campaign (thinkb4youspeak.com). Some spots feature celebrities, the young actress Hilary Duff and the comedian Wanda Sykes, delivering the message.

The campaign is on behalf of a nonprofit organization in New York called the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, or Glsen (pronounced glisten), which promotes tolerance among students. Glsen is spending about $2 million to develop and produce the campaign. . . .

NCATE's Appeasement of Anti-Social Justice Mob

Capitulation complete on the teacher education front. Social justice language and dispositions disappear from NCATE standards. Another marker on the road to fascism. From the Chronicle's Blog:

The board of the nation’s largest organization accrediting teacher-education programs has formally voted to drop controversial language about social justice from its standards for evaluating teacher-education programs.

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education had been criticized by some students — and by conservative activists — for suggesting that teacher-preparation programs evaluate students’ professional “dispositions” by considering students’ “beliefs and attitudes such as caring, fairness, honesty and responsibility, and social justice.”

The concept of social justice, opponents said, had been used by institutions to weed out would-be teachers based on their social and political beliefs. Several teacher candidates had complained about education professors who seemed more interested in students’ political views than in their classroom performance (The Chronicle, December 16, 2005).

The accreditor first announced in the summer of 2006 that it would eliminate social justice from its recommendation for how teacher-education programs could evaluate students (The Chronicle, June 16, 2006). Now its board has formally voted to do so, said Jane Liebrand, a spokeswoman for the organization.

Under a new definition in the glossary of its standards, the accreditor says it expects institutions to assess students’ “professional dispositions” by considering students’ sense of “fairness and the belief that all students can learn.” —Robin Wilson