Schools of Education

Historical Background

The history of American public education, including its growing staffing needs, begins with the advent of the common school (and continues with the comprehensive high school). Under the leadership of Horace Mann, it flourished for at least three reasons: the expanding republic's need for well-trained, professional teachers; the industry's need for educated workers; and families' widening visions of better lives for their children. In the South, education was largely a private affair, but elsewhere, there were three imbricate forms of professional education available to meet this demand: teachers' institutes, local academies, and state-supported normal schools.

The first two could not compete and disappeared. Only normal schools remained and survived until the 1930s, after which time they evolved into teachers' colleges; by the 1950s, most of them had become departments or schools of education inside universities. Their curricular needs were met by professors in research-oriented universities who produced and disseminated educational knowledge for normal school instructors to develop future common school administrators and teachers. This hierarchical structure and hybrid method produced a tenuous relationship between theoretical disciplines and practical pedagogical problems that persists to this day.

Current Problems

Several scholars have written about what they understand are the major problems facing schools of education today. David Labaree points to low status. He claims the main reason for this lies in the ways in which two market forces have shaped their development: social efficiency and social mobility. Schools of education, he argues, had to become “teacher factories” to produce a cheap supply of labor to meet the needs of industry, common schools, and comprehensive high schools. Unable to combine quantity with quality, schools settled on producing sundry ill-prepared teachers. Simultaneously, growing consumer demand for social mobility became an incentive for schools to recruit more students with expanded liberal arts curricula (thanks to university membership) and the promise of a bachelor's degree, which had the effect of further depressing the need to raise the quality of teacher training programs.

The effect, Labaree argues, has been expanded social mobility at the cost of declining social efficiency and teacher quality. The growth of graduate programs of education has only worsened this condition. Contemporary trends in alternative certification and school choice continue to reinforce the need for education schools to produce teachers quickly and cheaply, which Labaree sees as evidence of an unabating trend.

Similar difficulties plague education researchers, claims Labaree. Schools of education prepare researchers to occupy the unenviable position of generating scholarship generally undervalued because it tends to be descriptive, variegated, and ephemeral; this phenomenon arises from the paradox of expecting education researchers to do pure research, on one hand, and recruiting them from the ranks of practitioners on the other. Another paradox is that two camps of researchers exist within schools of education—those who pursue research agendas and prepare future researchers, and those who prepare teachers and curricula; the pursuit of excellence in one tends to compromise the other.

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