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The Learned Report on Teacher Education

Posted on: Tuesday, 20 September 2005, 03:01 CDT

A Vision Delayed

Ninety-five years ago, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released Bulletin #4, a report on the education of physicians in the United States and Canada that shook the medical profession. The Flexner Report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada, named for its writer Abraham Flexner, would lead to closure of half the medical schools in the country and determine the way physicians are trained to this day.

During the subsequent two-decade period, from 1910-1930, the Foundation issued a series of other reports on the condition of professional preparation in several different fields, including law and engineering. Among these is a study published in 1920 that has all but been forgotten: Bulletin #14, The Professional Preparation of Teachers for American Public Schools. Despite the intention of the Foundation that it would have a greater impact than all the other studies of professional education, the Learned Report-named after its chief author William S. Learned-had little lasting effect, died the quiet death that has been all too common for reports on teacher education during the ensuing 85 years, and has largely disappeared from the discourse about teacher education reform.

But the Learned Report should have enjoyed the acclaim earlier accorded to the Flexner Report. It was in every way as big and bold as-and had several advantages over-its predecessor. While it derived its analytic framework from the Flexner Report, it commanded more resources from the Foundation, met higher standards for data gathering and analysis, offered a more robust set of recommendations, and involved more time and attention of officers of the Foundation. We believe that had policymakers, institutional leaders, and teacher educators fully embraced the Learned Report in 1920, teacher education and the teaching profession would be far better today.

With the cacophony of voices calling for a modern Flexner Report to act as a lever for a massive overhaul of teacher education, we think this is the time to revisit the findings and recommendations of Learned and his colleagues. Our contention is that teacher education has already had its Flexner Report and that its recommendations, although 85 years old, are still as pertinent as ever. It is now time to move on to the serious work that the Learned Report recommended: the transformation of teacher education into a professional, evidence-based clinical preparation program.

ORIGINS

During the first decade of the 20th century, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) was "urged...to undertake some examination of the present methods of training teachers" and came to believe in "the desirability of conducting a systematic enquiry into the present status of the training of teachers for elementary, secondary, and vocational....for several years." Recognizing the difficulty of conducting a study of the entire universe of teacher-preparation institutions in the United States, the Foundation board finally agreed to study a single state in depth.

In the summer of 1914, then-Governor of Missouri, Elliott W. Major, wrote a letter to Foundation President Henry Pritchett inviting Carnegie to study Missouri's teacher education system. The one-term Democratic governor (1913-1917) noted that one of "the chief problems confronting this and other states is a wholesome supply of adequately-trained and prepared teachers" and then posed three questions that he hoped the investigation would answer: 1) "What is the best preparation" for teachers? 2) "What is the duty of the State in meeting it?" and 3) "How can the State secure the greatest benefit at a minimum expense?"

Besides the state's willingness to participate, a host of other considerations resulted in Missouri being chosen. Missouri's teacher education system, like those of other states at the time, faced a number of daunting problems. One of the most significant was an explosion of demand for teachers. The number of Missouri's elementary and secondary schools was growing, and the combined output of all of its teacher preparation institutions was about half the number of teachers needed.

The results were especially disastrous for rural schools. A great disparity in teacher quality existed between the two urban districts- Kansas City and St. Louis-and the rural districts in the state. Nearly 10 percent of teachers in Missouri's rural schools had no schooling beyond the 8th grade. The state superintendent noted in his 1915 annual report that "the average amount of schooling of a grade school teacher is 41 months above the 8th grade," with most of it in local high schools by instructors who were often graduates of the same schools. This produced an "inbreeding....likely to result in dead level uniformity and general lack of progressiveness."

The Foundation immediately accepted Missouri's invitation and, in 1913, hired the then-38-year-old Learned at the princely sum of $3,000 to lead the study. Learned had recently completed his doctorate at Harvard and was soon to publish his study of the German school teacher, The Oberlehrer. He had well-formed ideas about American education and would have an enduring influence on the teaching profession during his 33-year tenure at the Carnegie Foundation.

Learned assembled an array of talented scholars and statisticians to work with him on the report over the subsequent five-year period. His most prominent collaborator was William C. Bagley, later to become the leading proponent of "essentialism" in American education- a philosophy that held that schools should focus on the academic performance of their students rather than on their "development." In a companion piece to the Learned Report, Bagley described a curriculum for prospective teachers that emphasized their preparation to teach subject matter. Later, Bagley would organize the Essentialist Committee (under the banner of American Association of School Administrators) and promote an essentialist curriculum of basic skills for American education.

According to educational historian Diane Ravitch, Bagley was "the profession's most prominent dissident" over the course of the following three decades. He opposed the central doctrines of progressive education, insisting that they were both antiintellectual and overly utilitarian. While the economic depression, World War II, and the power of progressivism would overwhelm Bagley and his sympathizers, education historian Gerald Gutek contends that it is Bagley's essentialism that is at the core of the policies and practices of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind agenda. It also profoundly influenced the Learned Report.

METHODOLOGY

Learned launched the study in November 1914. Even by today's databaseenabled research standards, the scope of Learned's study was ambitious. While Abraham Flexner had focused on medical education in two countries, William Learned's study of teacher education concentrated just on the state of Missouri. But the researchers held "countless interviews at free hours with instructors and students," as well as with county superintendents and school superintendents in the 25 largest school districts and "conversations with students, alumni, and board members."

Learned and his colleagues examined course-taking patterns of almost 500 students, queried 180 school principals about the success of new teachers, and received responses from 163 experienced teachers regarding the value of their preparation for teaching. They tested 652 training-school students in arithmetic, spelling, penmanship, reading, and comprehension. They analyzed the secondary and teacher training curricula, vitae of faculty, and the backgrounds and experiences of students enrolled in the normal schools. They generated 15,000 questionnaires, "many of them of considerable length and of a complex character not adapted to tabulating machines." Included were expenditure data for training programs and salary information for the instructors and faculty in those programs. Finally, "practically every normal school instructor....and 3/4ths of the students in attendance" prepared written reports. The 50-page appendix alone is an extraordinary source of information regarding the condition of teaching and teacher education in early 20th century America.

The study focused on Missouri's five normal schools, one public college, two city training schools, and more than 100 high schools offering teacher-training courses. In 1915 the Missouri constitution still required black teachers to be educated separately from white ones, and Learned excluded the Lincoln Institute-the "school for colored teachers"-from the main discussion because its problems and conditions were unique. But he described the history of the institute (established through the philanthropy of the U.S. Colored Infantry), and he observed that it needed "competent leadership" while rejecting the claim that such leadership could not be found among "colored candidates."

Despite its single-state focus, the study had national ambitions- its authors suggested that conditions in Missouri were echoed "in many other, perhaps most, American states." They suggested that the report was important forAmerican democracy and the American commonweal. "Teachers of children and youth, while not the sole instruments, are by far the most influential instruments thru [sic] which a people may consciously control its future," they asserted. Learned saw the study as providing guidance on how teachers should be educated nationwide, considering it "greatly in the interests of our national solidarity" for it to do so.

THE Learned Report's RECOMMENDATIONS

One of the Learned Report's boldest recommendations was that all teachers-regardless of whether they would teach at the 3rd or the 1 Ith-grade level, in a city school or in one located in a rural community-needed four years of study in a college exclusively devoted to the preparation of teachers. During a period when many were satisfied with high school credentials or one or two years of college-level training for teachers, the recommendation was viewed as both bold and expensive, but it would become the standard for teacher preparation over the course of the following two decades. While he acknowledged the pressing need for practitioners in the years ahead, Learned anticipated a time when training for teaching might occur at the graduate level.

The authors of The Professional Preparation of Teachers for American Public Schools were specific about the kind of college they had in mind. They argued that neither liberal arts colleges nor public universities could prepare teachers adequately, given the separation between the academic and the pedagogical on all campuses. Neither was the model they envisioned that of the then-prevalent normal schools, of which they were also critical.

While the normal schools' mission was the education of prospective teachers, they argued, the schools were actually focused on summer school offerings for current teachers and short courses for teachers in training. They also worried about the deep divisions in the normal schools between the academic and the professional and between faculty who taught subject matter and those who taught future teachers. They saw the leaders of these schools as having "excessive prerogative," and they called for their faculty to be vested with the authority to determine the institutions' education policy.

Bulletin #14 was forceful in its description of a curriculum for prospective teachers that combined content and pedagogy. The authors described this as the "professionalization of subject matter" and suggested that university content courses would not serve the needs or purposes of future teachers. While Learned and his fellow authors called for a four-year curriculum that focused on subject matter knowledge-for instance, history or chemistry-they also described the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that beginning teachers should attain and the "important precepts and principles" related to the "art of teaching" that they should learn. Every course was to increase the content knowledge of teacher candidates but also their understanding of classroom procedure and their "professional intelligence and insight." Rather than recommending separate methods courses, they thought that all courses should demonstrate how their subject matter would be taught to 3rd or 11th grade students.

So in this new type of collegiate-level institution, everyone would be invested in preparing teachers, from those who taught mathematics to those who supervised practice teachers. The report urged that there be a blurring of the distinctions between academic faculties and teacher educators, that status differences among faculty be eliminated, and that all faculty "exemplify and justify the approved methods of teaching" their subjects and engage in what we would later describe as the "scholarship of teaching." They also called for higher standards for the hiring of these instructors. Observing that "a person can scarcely hope to qualify as a guide for teachers of children in public schools without first-hand and continuous experience with the conditions and problems which he is fitting his students to face," they suggested not just specialized knowledge but experience in teaching at the primary or secondary school level as a criterion for hiring faculty. And they suggested forms of mentoring for beginning faculty that still have not found their way into most colleges and universities.

The report's authors understood the value of developmental psychology to a teacher. Every course in the curriculum "should be in an important sense a course in psychology," they claimed, with attention to "the characteristics of the child's mind in its successive stages of growth." Teacher candidates should understand "the principles of habit formation and the laws of learning." They also wanted teachers to be educated in ways that would enable them to play a prominent part in deliberations concerning American education.

Learned and his colleagues denounced the "indiscriminate or loosely grouped elective system...with short, interchangeable units" and the excessive number of electives that then characterized the typical teacher-preparation curriculum, recommending instead the creation of "fixed curricula." Bulletin #14 observed that "a true curriculum is more than a mere aggregation of courses, it is an organization dominated by a unitary purpose" and asserted the need for "the integration of all of the work of the normal school into one consistent whole." In the teacher-preparation curriculum that Learned and his colleagues envisioned, all teacher candidates would take a prescribed four-year course of study that culminated in a series of capstone experiences and a comprehensive examination. They advocated a case-based approach to teacher education, modeled after legal education.

They urged as well that teacher education programs be clinically based, with ongoing opportunities for observation and practice in the training schools that would be attached to the new type of teachers college (analogous to the teaching hospitals described earlier in the Flexner Report). They also wanted community schools to be available for teacher training supervised by the teachers college, with substantial time spent in those schools by prospective teachers and their college-level instructors. With rhetoric we hear echoed today, they insisted that faculty's "experience in teaching elementary or high school classes...fades rapidly into a dim background.... [S]ubjects and methods of approach change, and a teacher 10 years out of elementary teaching may easily be a complete stranger in a rural or graded school. The problems have become theoretical and academic, and have lost their grim and vital aspects." They thought that faculty needed to establish "direct and stimulating relations with the schools" and recommended for each faculty member "a frequent turn of a week or more in a neighboring school."

The Learned Report made dozens of other bold recommendations that resonate still. Its authors urged that teacher candidates be given opportunities to reflect on their practice and to experiment with different teaching strategies in the training schools. At the same time they worried about the quality of the attached schools and whether they could maintain high test scores when students were taught by practicing teachers. They recommended that demonstration or experimental schools be established parallel to the training schools but urged that they be viewed as having separate purposes.

The writers addressed questions about studentteacher supervision that were surprisingly modern: what supervision methods should be used and whether lesson plans should be submitted prior to the teaching lesson or following the lesson, "as a review." They concerned themselves with how frequently supervisors should visit student teachers and what form the conferences should take. Like The Carnegie Corporation's present-day "Teachers for a New Era" initiative, they believed that student teachers should be assessed by the progress of the students in their classrooms. To reinforce the point, they concluded that "in all effective supervision of [student] teaching, the efforts of the supervisor must be supplemented by objective tests that will determine the growth that the pupils have made under the [practice] teacher's direction."

Merle Borrowman later describes the report's authors as "professionalists" who spent most of their careers writing about the profession of teaching. Long before it was fashionable to do so, they pressed for a knowledge base for teaching that would be widely shared and for standards by which one teacher's college could judge its quality relative to that of others. Learned and his colleagues envisioned teacher colleges equal to the professional schools that prepared lawyers or doctors. They believed that faculty in these colleges should be accorded the same professional status, rewards, and recognition that faculty in other professional schools received.

THE PRIMACY OF THE TEACHER

In an era of child-centered advocacy, Learned and his colleagues saw the teacher as of paramount importance in transforming education. They wanted a well-educated teacher capable of inspiring children and youth. Teachers should be able "to treat...children intelligently as individuals," and they should be "entrusted with the adaptation of educational materials to their varying capacities," with an ability to teach both the "dull pupil" and the "capable child." They called for teachers with both the "external elements of skill" and the "internal elements of insight and resourcefulness."

To quote its own words, the report saw good teaching as including:

* aptness and readiness in illustration;

* clearness and lucidity in explanation and exposition;

* keen sensitiveness to evidences of misunderstanding and misinterpretation on the part of students;

* dexterity and alertness in devising problems and framing questions;

* a sense of humor;

* an attitude that requires reaso\ned support of each point presented;

* quickness to detect inattention; and,

* a sense of proportion to distinguish between the fundamental and the accessory.

But the study also asserted that teaching was more an art than a science. The authors contended that good teaching involves "form, enthusiasm, and substance" and argued that form is as important in teaching "as it is in painting, sculpture, architecture, writing, and acting."

Learned and his coauthors deplored the level of instruction that occurred in schools, which they attributed to teachers' being neither prepared nor treated like professionals. They complained that most teachers were expected to deliver a set of lessons carefully orchestrated from above. Bulletin #14 insisted that the nation should no longer tolerate school systems that were "elaborate hierarchical device[s] that undertake thru successive gradations of textbook makers, superintendents, principals, and supervisors to isolate and prepare each modicum of knowledge and skill so that it may safely be entrusted to the humble teacher at the bottom, who is drilled for a few weeks only, if at all, in directions for administering it ultimately to the child." They worried about attracting high-quality candidates to teaching and called for significant increases in teacher salaries, allowing women to continue to teach once they were married, and finding additional ways to attract and retain male teachers.

THE SCHOOLS

Bulletin #14's discussion of K-12 education should find adherents among the neo-conservatives or neo-essentialists who dominate today's policymaking climate. In language that the current Bush administration might use, Carnegie Foundation President Henry Pritchett asserted that the greatest problem facing American education was "the superficial character of our education," which too often, in his view, was merely "a smattering of knowledge in many things" rather than "mastery of any one subject or..the ability to think clearly."

Although the document was centered on teachers, it was modern in its insistence that student learning should be at the heart of the matter. "It is in terms of...the growth of pupils...that the outcomes of teaching must ultimately be evaluated and the young teacher should be accustomed from the outset to think of his work as measured finally by this standard." Its call for standards-based schooling would be familiar to current advocates of such schooling in American public schools. The report asserts that "there must be a definite program of attainments, so to speak, which shall be a guide to a teacher's efforts and a standard against which to measure his achievements."

THE DEBATE

What is startling about Bulletin #14 is its apparent insularity. At the time, educational progressivism was being shaped by a range of texts, studies, commission reports, and policy proposals. Educational historian Diane Ravitch paints the period when Learned was conducting his study as one in which progressives sought to "demolish... the rationale for the academic curriculum." As examples of a movement that Learned and Bagley and their colleagues largely ignored, she points to William Lewis's 1914 Democracy's High School; John and Evelyn Dewey's Schools of Tomorrow, released in 1915; John Dewey's classic Democracy and Education, which appeared in 1916; and Ellwood P. Cubberly's Public School Administration, published in 1916. William Heard Kilpatrick published his essay, "The Project Method"-which Ravitch describes as "the quintessential statement of the child-centered school movement"-in September 1918; The Cardinal Principles of secondary Education, a report of the U.S. Bureau of Education, also appeared in 1918. None of this seemed to influence Learned and his colleagues as they came down on the side of traditionalism and made the appeal for a "knowledge curriculum."

With the release in 1920 of The Professional Preparation of Teachers for American Public Schools, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching inserted itself into the national debate regarding schools and teaching. The study advocated for traditional academic courses as the appropriate general education for prospective teachers and recommended a teacher-preparation curriculum at odds with the then-popular idea of a problem-based approach to learning. It also rejected the popular movement to create distinct types and levels of schools for students at different ages and instead called for a common education in graded schools for all students.

THE IMPACT OF BULLETIN #14

Carnegie President Pritchett wrote his introduction to The Professional Preparation of Teachers for American Public Schools, and the Foundation issued the study on June 28, 1920, more than five years after its initiation. Two days later The New York Times headlined its release as "Favors Married Teachers: Carnegie Reports on Means for Better Instruction." A year later, the 15th Annual Report of the Carnegie Foundation noted that the report was "accorded a generous reception," with some universities adopting it as a textbook and many normal schools committing themselves to a "systematic examination of the study."

Nationally, the normal school presidents' and principals' organization and the American Association of Teachers Colleges (AATC) claimed that the study had "aroused much profitable self- examination in teacher-training institutions and is now profoundly affecting these colleges thruout [sic] the country." In 1923, AATC adopted a set of standards to accredit normal schools and state colleges that were consistent with the recommendation of Bulletin #14 and a precursor to the accreditation design of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education.

AATC set completion of four years of high school as an admission standard to teachers colleges, described a set of program standards, and suggested that 120 hours of academic and professional study leading to a baccalaureate degree be required for teachers. According to those standards, faculty at teachers colleges should hold at least a "standard bachelor's degree," with three years of teaching experience and specialized training. AATC also recommended that professors carry a maximum teaching load of 16 hours, with no more than 30 students per class; called for a requirement that all teacher candidates have 180 hours of observation and practice teaching prior to graduation; and suggested that training colleges have "adequate" libraries and other facilities. Two years later, a system of institutional reports and visitations would be launched that sought to bring standardization and quality to teacher education.

But even as these reforms proceeded, Bagley became a member of an AATC Committee on Teachers Colleges that proclaimed the movement "sound in policy" but still at an "experimental stage." The committee recognized that it would need legislative support and institutional cooperation if the movement was to succeed-support and cooperation that failed to materialize. Later Bagley would deplore the failure of the attempt to professionalize subject matter and the movement of teachers colleges away from their singular attention to the preparation of teachers.

Pritchett offered the observation that state departments of education now had to be the instruments for implementing the recommendations of the study and urged that "these offices be developed into successful instruments" in Missouri and elsewhere. But in 1919, Missouri became the first state to enact legislation to convert normal schools not into single-purpose teacher-preparation institutions but into comprehensive colleges; it was followed by 18 other states during the succeeding 20 years. The probable reason for this movement was that local communities demanded comprehensive institutions, and the presidents and faculties of these institutions sought to emulate the curricula and programs of the state universities.

Bulletin #14 was intended to have as profound an effect on the preparation of teachers as the earlier Flexner Report had had on the preparation of physicians. It did nationalize the debate about teacher education and raise the expectations for training of all elementary and secondary teachers. But even though President Calvin Coolidge's U.S. Commissioner of Education, John J. Tigert, applauded the movement to create four-year training colleges and urged that the normal schools not "undertake to enter the field of higher education except for the purpose of training teachers," the report's central recommendation to create single-purpose, collegiate-level teacher-preparation institutions was unacceptable then and remains so today. As the demand for more teachers exploded and economic conditions declined in the aftermath of World War I, states were either unwilling or unable to respond to the recommendations of the Carnegie Foundation that teaching be professionalized as law and medicine had been.

One can only speculate about what the condition of teaching might be had the Learned Report's recommendation been adopted. What if community leaders and local normal school principals and presidents had embraced the Learned agenda and foregone the temptation to transform normal schools not into professional schools but into comprehensive colleges? What if the philanthropic community had funded the recommendations of the Learned Report like they supported the transformation of medical education based on the Flexner Reparti Could professional teachers colleges have gained the stature of other professional schools and commanded the resources invested in them? Would teachers colleges have been able to parallel the move of other professional preparation programs to the post-baccalaureate level and gained the recognition that those others have attained? Would programs that demonstrated that their graduates were able to make a positive difference in the learning of children and youth have bee\n able to withstand the successive waves of criticism that have battered American education and teacher preparation?

Is it too late to consider again the possibility of professional schools of education devoted exclusively to the task of preparing teachers for America's schools?

Had policymakers, institutional leaders, and teacher educators fully embraced the Learned Report in 1920, teacher education and the teaching profession would be far better today.

They argued that neither liberal arts colleges nor public universities could prepare teachers adequately, given the separation between the academic and the pedagogical on all campuses.

Bulletin #14 observed that "a true curriculum is more than a mere aggregation of courses, it is an organization dominated by a unitary purpose."

"A teacher 10years out of elementary teaching may easily be a complete stranger in a rural or graded school. The problems have become theoretical and academic, and have lost their grim and vital aspects."

The document... was modern inks insistence that student learning should be at the heart of the matter.

RESOURCES

* American Association of Teachers Colleges, "The Teachers College Movement," Yearbook, Washington, DC, 1922.

* Borrowman, Merle L., Teacher Education in America: A Documentary History, New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 1965.

* Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 15th Annual Report of the President and Treasurer, New York, NY, 1920.

* Evans, William P., 65th Report of the Public Schools of the State of Missouri, Jefferson City, MO: The Hugh Stephens Company, 1914.

* Flexner, Abraham, Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, New York, NY: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1914.

* Gass, H.A., 66th Report of the Public Schools of the State of Missouri, Jefferson City, MO: The Hugh Stephens Company, 1915.

* Gutek, Gerald L., Philosophical and Ideological Voices in Education, Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2004.

* Learned, William S., and William C. Bagley with Charles A. McMurry, George D. Strayer, Walter F. Dearborn, Isaac L. Kandel, and Homer W. Josselyn, The Professional Preparation of Teachers for American Public Schools: A Study Based Upon An Examination of TaxSupported Normal Schools in the State of Missouri, New York, NY: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1920.

* Ravitch, Diane, Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

* Tigert, John J., "The Nationalization of Teachers Colleges," Yearbook, Washington, DC: American Association of Teachers Colleges, 1923.

David Imig was the chief executive officer for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education for 25 years and contributed to this piece while a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Scott Imig is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education. He also directs the Teaching Assessment Initiative, the research component of UVA's Teachers for a New Era grant.

Copyright HELDREF PUBLICATIONS Sep/Oct 2005

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