Deborah Stipek on future of K-12 education, university teacher-training program
BY LISA TREI
Deborah Stipek
With the recent announcement of a $125 million university-wide initiative to improve K-12 education, a new loan-forgiveness program for graduates of the Stanford Teacher Education Program who enter and remain in the profession for several years, and the opening of a Stanford-operated elementary school in East Palo Alto, the School of Education has been in the news this fall. Stanford Report recently met with Dean Deborah Stipek to discuss these developments and learn about future plans for one of the nation's top-ranked graduate schools of education. Following is an edited transcript of the interview.
SR: How did K-12 education become a focus of Stanford's recently announced five-year, $4.3 billion fundraising drive?
Stipek: President Hennessy's vision of this university is a place where people are using their expertise and their resources and their talents to address real world problems. President Hennessy understands that big problems don't come in disciplinary packages. If we're going to solve them, it's going to require diverse expertise working collaboratively.
As President Hennessy was talking to close friends of the university about his plan, the reaction he got from almost everyone was, if you're really going to address big problems, then why isn't K-12 education one of the central issues? He's decided to do that.
This is a wonderful opportunity for the School of Education. It will help create a campus-wide effort to focus on the problems of education in this country. What we have found in having conversations with people across the campus in preparation for developing this initiative is that in every school in this university there are many people who are committed and engaged in various projects that are related to K-12 education, but it's very fragmented. They are working in the proverbial silos, and in many cases they are not having the impact that they could have if they joined hands. So I think this is an absolutely sensational opportunity to increase substantially the impact of all the energy that is already going into initiatives related to education on this campus.
SR: The state of public education in this country concerns those who argue that America is not training its youth to compete in a global economy. What should be done to fix education in this country?
Stipek: First of all, we need to understand that there's no simple solution. There's no silver bullet for fixing education. We have to worry about who we attract into teaching and how we train them and prepare them to be effective teachers. We have to worry about the school and how it's organized, and whether it's organized to facilitate effective teaching. We have to worry about the larger district, or charter school management organization, or whatever the larger bureaucratic umbrella is, and whether its policies are designed to support effective teaching. And we have to look at the policy level, at what kinds of policies we have and how they're either undermining or fostering effective teaching in the schools. Anyone who thinks we can just enter through one window and fix it, I think, doesn't appreciate the complexity and the interconnections among all of these levels.
What we're trying to do in the School of Education is really address issues of schooling and education by entering at all of these levels and looking very carefully at how they interact, and how we can create a synergistic set of policies and organizational structures and educational programs that will all work together in the service of better teaching in the classroom.
In our experience, teaching requires a lot of training. I think the United States is the one country that thinks you can train a teacher in one year. If you look at other professions like medicine, and if you look at other countries, even teaching in Japan, for example, you're not a real teacher until you've had several years' experience with mentors and supports, then you earn your credential.
SR: STEP, the Stanford Teacher Education Program, was one of the few teacher-training programs praised in a recent nationwide report by Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College, Columbia University. The report slammed many of the programs at the nation's 1,206 university-based education schools. What makes STEP different?
Stipek: In many schools of education, the teacher education program is somewhat on the margins. Many of the courses are taught by people who are not the core regular tenured or tenure-track faculty; they're people who come in as lecturers and may have less commitment than our faculty. Our teacher education program is really central to the School of Education.
We are convinced that teachers need to be well prepared and need a lot of experience in classrooms with really good teachers, and an opportunity to go back and forth between their field experience and the seminar room where they're learning the theory and the effective practices. We have our students in the field almost the day they arrive. We also have an ongoing relationship with the schools in which they're placed, so we don't just send them out.
I think what's also really important and makes a difference—makes Stanford stand out—is the level of support that we have for teacher education at this university. It is truly extraordinary.
SR: The STEP program is small. Is there a way to scale up its model so other schools could adopt it?
Stipek: We're not preparing a large proportion of California's or the nation's teachers. That's for sure. But we are training teacher leaders. Many of our graduates become lead teachers, mentor teachers; they play major roles in school reform activities. If you look at some of the most successful schools in the Bay Area, almost all of them have been started or have had the involvement of our graduates. So we're small but powerful.
I think many of the elements of our program could be scaled up and, in fact, have been. Many other schools have come to us, and we have been as supportive as we can. However, there are some things that we do that require more resources. For example, we have doctoral students who serve as supervisors of our students. They have a lot of opportunities to go into their classrooms and observe them teaching. That level of individualization and support for students who are being trained to be teachers is expensive.
But I think it's important, and what I would say to a university is, don't try to do it on the cheap. If we really care about public education in this country, then we have to stop trying to figure out how to do it inexpensively. We have to put the resources where our mouth is, essentially, and make sure that people get effective training to be good teachers. I think we would be amazed at how much a little extra attention and resources into teacher preparation would yield in terms of children's learning.
SR: Will this happen in this country?
Stipek: I think there is an understanding now of the importance of education like there hasn't been for a long time. The public is paying more attention to it; parents are paying a lot of attention to it. I think in this recognition that we've become a global society and have to be competitive, and that there are different kinds of jobs that we're preparing our next generation for, is helping people understand the importance of education. I'm hopeful that that recognition will lead to some meaningful efforts to put resources effectively into education.
One of my fears is that people will respond to a study like Art Levine's as an indictment of teacher education—in the sense that "It's bad; we should just get rid of it." I would call to their attention a report that was done in the field of medical education a century ago: the Flexner Report. The response to the Flexner Report, which made pretty much the same claims about medical education in this country was not, "Well, we should just get rid of medical education and let people be doctors without being trained." Most people would think that would be a ludicrous idea. The response was, "Well, let's close down those schools that can't get better." That's what we did in medicine. I hope that the impulse to simply get rid of teacher training doesn't become strong. That would be a devastatingly bad choice.
SR: What are your goals for the next five years?
Stipek: I want to make going into education affordable. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to have very, very talented young people say, "I'd really like to come to your STEP program, but I can't afford it, and I know that when I get out there I'm not going to make a whole lot of money. So I'm going to go into engineering or business." That's painful, because these are the very people that we want to draw into education. So one of my passionate goals is to make us truly affordable and, again, to be a model and, perhaps, to inspire other departments of education and universities to do the same.
The United States is one of the few countries in the world where there's a huge out-of-pocket cost on the part of an individual who wants to become a teacher. We make people pay dearly, not just in time but also financially, for a profession that, although very rewarding, and can have enormous psychic rewards, is not paid very well, at least compared to other professions that require the same level of education and training.
I want for us to continue on the road that I think we're on—to focus on improving practice while we're engaging in it, learning from those experiences not just so we can fine-tune our own work but also to develop a knowledge base that others can use.
