Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

214 mitment to the behavioral basis of good teaching was naïve. While he retained to the very end his lifelong interest in studying effective teaching, he gradually accepted the view that effective teaching could not be reduced to specific behaviors or behavioral patterns. In one of Barr’s last papers, he made clear his belief that teaching success did not have a solely behavioral basis: “Acts are not good or bad, effective or ineffective, appropriate or inappro priate in general but in relation to the needs, purposes and conditions that give rise to them” (Barr, 1958, p. 696). In an unpublished memo, written to identify a research agenda for his retirement years, Barr (1960) admonished himself to strike out in a new direction: “Can be haviors be considered in isolation or out of context? I think not. The tabulation of behaviors out of context may be misleading. I believe this is important. Study this carefully.”... Performance-Based Teacher Education A fundamental irony in the history of research on effective teaching is that its half century of barren results was rewarded in the 1970s by making this research a key component of the reform movement known as performance-based teacher education (PBTE).... Unfortunately, we know little more than Barr did fifty years ago about which teaching behaviors consistently produce student learning. Medley, though sympathetic to PBTE, is quite candid on this topic: “The proportion of the content of the teacher education curriculum that has been empirically shown to relate to teacher effectiveness is so small that if all of what is taught to students in preservice programs was eliminated except what research has been validated there would be nothing left but a few units in methods of teaching.... After a careful review of relevant research, Heath and Nielson conclude that the conception, design, and methodology of these studies preclude their use as an empirical basis for PBTE (1974). The authors go one step further and summarize other reviews of the connection between teacher characteristics and student learning; they find that the reviewers of this research generally conclude that “an educationally significant relationship simply has not been demonstrated.” For What Were They Searching? The problems associated with the four teacher effectiveness strategies are so severe that the last part of the chapter addresses the question of whether the teacher effectiveness tradition can be saved, a question whose answer is unclear. Is There A One Best Way? Unlike earlier critics who came largely from outside the teacher effectiveness tradition and who argued that this tradition was an overly narrow approach to the study of teaching, many of the current doubters are well-known members of the empirical research establishment. McKeachie, for example, notes that he no longer believes in the educational relevance of the principles of learning about which he used to lecture teachers. He now believes that these principles apply most clearly to the learning of animals in highly controlled artificial situations, and that meaningful educational learning is both “more robust and more complex” than the situations to which the classic principles apply.… The main body of this chapter examines four strategies for approaching the study of teacher effectiveness: discovering the so-called laws of learning; identifying effective teach ing behaviors; uncovering aptitude-treatment interactions, and specifying models of effective instruction such as direct instruction. Careful attention is given to the specific difficulties experienced by the practitioners of each research strategy. The results from these four be haviorally oriented research strategies are at best inconclusive.... The last section of the chapter examines the question of whether the teaching effectiveness model can be saved. Here I suggest that the various research strategies involve trade-offs and that these trade-offs make it difficult to have an instructional theory that is both accurate and applicable to a wide variety of situations. In addition, those instructional models that attempt to transcend