Faculty Work in Schools of Education: Rethinking Roles and Rewards for the Twenty-First Century (review)

This timely volume explores two fundamental and interrelated issues affecting schools and colleges of education—their nature and purpose, and the implications for the design and evaluation of faculty employment. Ten chapters, authored by scholars from leading schools of education, cover many dimensions of these issues in thought-provoking and knowledgeable detail. Although the chapters provide significant nuances about the fundamental problem facing schools of education, the book's main argument can be briefly summarized as follows:

The K-12 teaching profession in the United States is, as professions go, weak, underpaid, and currently not highly regarded by the public. Because the principal professional output of schools of education, classroom teachers, are not highly regarded, the schools that prepare them suffer the same fate. As a consequence, schools of education in research universities have tended to downplay their role in teacher preparation, emphasizing instead scholarly research, modeled on colleagues in arts and science departments. Nonetheless, even schools with a heavy research focus tend to be viewed within the university as second class, because inevitably they do not have the resources to compete effectively with such departmental disciplines as psychology, economics, government, or sociology. The result is a conflicted school, neither fish nor fowl, stranded between the professional and the graduate school models.

A further dilemma is that the graduates of schools of education do not enter a private, competitive labor market that rewards graduates from higher quality schools with higher wages; instead, they enter a civil service labor market that does not reward qualitative distinctions. Thus, a university can invest in developing a superb program of teacher preparation only to see its graduates receive the same pay as those hired from a lesser institution. Alumni of ed schools, as a consequence, do not have the same motivation as alums of law schools or business schools to give generously to their alma maters, for maintaining quality and prestige matters considerably less in this civil service environment. In short, the payoff to a school of education from linking itself closely to its profession is weakened once again.

One can easily see how this schizophrenic notion of what a school of education really is creates ambiguity and a lack of clarity regarding their faculty's role. Are faculty to be viewed as members of a professional school, with an emphasis on working with the field and influencing professional practice, or are they to be rewarded like their colleagues in the disciplines for scholarly research and publication? Several chapters in this volume explore in detail the many issues for faculty that stem from this central split in school identity.

Jeannie Oakes and John Rogers make the case for public outreach and the professional model for the research university by describing a successful program at UCLA. Their discussion provides a good analysis of the obstacles that such programs must overcome in the research setting.

Mary Kennedy provides an excellent discussion of the incentives for scholarship in education programs. This is the most philosophical chapter, exploring the history of ed schools, the difficulties of connecting scholarship to practice, and the internal dynamics of ed schools with the rest of the university. If the reader has time for only one chapter, this is it.

Yvonna Lincoln provides several case studies of tenure policies in different ed school settings. Each in its own way demonstrates how a particular type of school has resolved the graduate versus professional school dilemma.

Bill Tierney's chapter provides a thorough review of faculty demographics, comparing the composition of ed school faculty with those of other units of the university. He draws numerous conclusions from this review, including some sobering thoughts about the future of ed school faculty in private colleges and universities...