When Teachers Teach Teaching

As it usually does, the fall season brought another shower of blue-ribbon reports about the sorry state of American education. You could hear the cluck-clucking and tut-tutting from one coast to the other.

But two reports in particular caught my eye, one for what it didn't say and one for what it did, boldly. Strangest of all, both reports came out of sectors of the education establishment that are not accustomed to self-criticism.

The first was the work of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which issued a paper calling for "more coherence (in) the very diverse mathematics curricula currently in use" in America.

The paper was a tacit acknowledgment that math instruction in American primary schools is a ghastly failure. By the time they reach eighth-grade, American students trail their counterparts in most of the developed world in their ability to perform rudimentary math.

The council's call for more rigor in the curriculum — a return to basics, almost, though they were careful not to call it that — carries an irony. For a generation now, conservative critics have placed blame for the sorry state of math education on the curricula that have been forced on public schools by professional organizations like the council.

Going under the banner of "reform math"— known popularly as "fuzzy math" — these instructional methods ignored drills and memorization in favor of allowing students maximum room for "self-expression" in the development of "problem-solving strategies." Our precious ignoramuses thus drew pictures, made up stories, and sometimes even graded themselves.

Unfortunately, grade-school math isn't a form of "self-expression," and you can't help but wonder how such an approach ever became fashionable. The council doesn't venture a guess, and I think I know why.

There's a dirty little secret behind fuzzy math. The technique didn't become popular just because it supposedly made math easier to learn. It became popular because it made math easier to teach.

Indeed, a teacher didn't have to know much of anything to guide students blindly though a fuzzy math curriculum.

Thus the council's paper, welcome as it was declined to reach the deeper conclusion about the crisis in math education: The problem lies not only with how students are taught mathematics, but how teachers of mathematics are taught teaching.

There's something rotten in the country's 1,200 education schools, where the vast major ity of the nation's primary and secondary teachers of math and other subjects get their training and degrees. To paraphrase Woody Allen, "Those that can't do, teach. Those that can't teach, teach education."

That's the conclusion — more gently formulated, of course — of the second notable report this fall, and the much braver of the two.

Compiled by Arthur Levine, the former president of Columbia University's Teachers College, "Educating School Teachers" says education schools suffer from the same afflictions that have crippled primary and secondary schools until recently: low standards of performance and graduation.

This won't surprise anyone who has spent much time at an American university, where the education school is commonly thought of as either the campus joke or the campus dump — the spots where students and teachers who can't succeed elsewhere end up. The scores of future elementary school teachers on the Graduate Record Exam, Mr. Levine says, are 100 points below the national average.

Yet for universities, the campus joke and dump is also — to switch to Mr. Levine's metaphor — a "cash cow."

Lowered admission standards bring more students into the education school, Mr. Levine writes, generating revenue that subsidizes more prestigious departments within the university. This leaves little incentive for universities to clean up their teacher-training program.

Mr. Levine's research shows that even the students themselves know how weak their programs are. Sixty-two percent of ed-school alumni say their training didn't prepare them to "cope with the realities of today's classrooms." Surveys show that school principals agree.

What's to be done? A constructive fellow, Mr. Levine spends considerable time showing what works in the nation's exemplary education schools. There are some. The examples are so compelling they just might shame other universities into following their lead, removing a major obstacle to educational improvement in America.

Education schools, for example, shouldn't treat "education" as a major in itself. Good education schools, Mr. Levine finds, require their students to master a given subject — English or math — the way a normal English or math major would. Beyond this standard four-year course, good schools then add another year of instruction in how to teach the subject.

This sounds obvious enough, but it's hard to overstate how far from common sense the American educational establishment has wandered. And there is another irony here. The low standards in teacher training, like the low quality of math instruction, are no longer ignorable for a simple reason.

The Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law, reviled by the education establishment and conservative critics alike, me included, is at last holding public schools to high performance standards from which educators can no longer escape. It's these high standards that are inspiring such welcome, and unexpected, self-criticism from the establishment.

And we have one man in particular to thank: President Bush. Too bad nobody's in the mood to thank him for anything right now.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.