Change in teacher education: How holmes was hijacked

Summary A movement among universities noted for research and for rigorous scholarship that would have insured a significantly improved education for prospective teachers was transformed in a short time, about ten years, into another agency of centrally inspired “school refrom,” The Holmes Group’s initial program called for prospective teachers to undergo five years of general education and teacher education, devoting the undergraduate years largely to arts and sciences. It also called for a closer collaboration between teacher educators and arts and science faculty in order to prepare preservice teachers to teach more rigorous pedagogically organized subject matter. Included in the early Holmes agenda was the concept of a professional development school as a public school site for pedagogical application, under the direction of veteran teacher cadres. However, as a consequence of an increasingly liberal academic ideology, informing a persistent criticism of Holmes’s original proposals as elitist and insufficiently activist, the Holmes group came in a short time to underplay its call for a five-year program, to back off from a closer collaboration between teacher educators and arts and sciences faculty, and to transform its concept of an affiliated public school from a site for pre-service pedagogical classroom practice into an exemplary school-to-be. Some hope may remain: the Holmes staff recently distributed the “Conference Proceedings” of the January 1998 annual convention held in Orlando. On page 42 of those proceedings, Arthur Wise, the peripatetic head of NCATE (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education—now a Holmes “partner” at the national level) found Holmes neglectful of an appropriate concern for arts and sciences education for prospective teachers. Wise was a “ranconteur” in Orlando; as such he was expected to provide a “reflective response” to the conference. He said, apologetically, I might offer my one sound of criticism ... I just worry when I see that ... we may be paying too much attention to the external aspects of school and maybe not enough to the guts of the matter which is, after all, content and how to teach it.