Quotes from Rita Kramer’s

Ed School Follies
About
Gary Lyon’s article,
Texas Monthly magazine,
Sept. 1979
Why Teachers Can’t Teach.

Paul Richardson
2010
Before you say, “This is worthless because it happened so long ago” let me argue that it
is as current as today. That is because the performance of our education system as a
whole has not changed materially since Mr. Lyon wrote his article. Education schools
still teach process (pedagogy) to the exclusion of any rigor in subject knowledge.
Education schools have been in what Arthur Levine in his series Educating School
Leaders, Educating School Teachers and Educating Researchers (2005-7) called a Race
to the Bottom. They have lowered standards for admission and graduation to keep the
diploma (money) mill cranking. Thus, this quoted material from Rita Kramer’s
bestselling book Ed School Follies is as pertinent today as it was then.

A cause celebre in its time, it called teacher education in Texas—and everywhere

else in the country—“a shame, a mammoth and very expensive swindle of the
public interest, a hoax, and an intellectual disgrace.”

Lyons reported that half of the teacher applicants to the Houston Independent
School District scored lower in math and a third of them lower in English than the
average high school junior and he blamed the state’s sixty-three accredited
teacher-training institutions for turning out “teachers who cannot read as well as
the average sixteen-year old, write notes free of barbarisms to parents, or handle
arithmetic well enough to keep track of the field-trip money.” He accused the
teacher colleges of coddling ignorance and, “backed by hometown legislators,” of
turning out “hordes of certified ignoramuses whose incompetence in turn becomes
evidence that the teacher colleges and the educators need yet more money and
more power.”

He attacked the system that made graduation from an accredited teacher-training

program tantamount to certification and heaped scorn on the education
bureaucracy, backed by the National Education Association, to whom “to insist
upon literacy is considered coercive and potentially harmful” and a proof of
“cultural bias.” Real knowledge and skills, he maintained, had been replaced by
“matters such as sex education, driver training, drug counseling, and the proper
attitude toward siblings” by “educationists”…afflicted with a cultural relativism
so profound it has become an intellectual disease.

“Basic traditional academic disciplines, in which fundamental intellectual skills

are supposed to be taught” had, he found, been replaced in teacher education by
“a promiscuous choice of courses” that he called the intellectual equivalent of
puffed wheat: one kernel of knowledge inflated by means of hot air, divided into
pieces and puffed again.” The graduates of the schools of education, “where
everyone is transformed into an A student,” he charged, “are defrauded into
believing they have an education,” and he identified the cause of grade inflation
and trivial courses (in which “fools dissect, categorize and elaborate upon the
perfectly obvious” and in which it is “virtually impossible to fail”) as the system
that made the operating budgets of all state colleges dependent on the number of
students enrolled.
In programs “where there is no subject matter, only method,” Lyon saw enormous
amounts of money, energy, and time wasted, and suggested that future teachers
could get more useful experience in less time if they were “apprenticed after
securing honest college degrees to proven and experienced master teachers in
actual classrooms with real kids.” When he made the suggestion to a professor of
education, the response was, “You’re talking about my job.”

It was a scathing indictment, and it included the prophecy that fully literate
teachers would continue to be the exception and the incompetent the rule as the
field moved “toward more specialization and more education courses … for an
expanded faculty to teach … in such growth areas as special education, learning
disabilities” and bilingual education, “the going things these days.”

Lyons hoped his article would blow the whistle on the existing system and that
“the attack on the Educationists’ monopoly over the public schools may have
already begun.”

And indeed, a series of education battles fought in the Texas legislature in the
ensuing years had resulted by 1987 in passage of a bill limiting the number of
methods courses for future teachers to eighteen hours, about half the previous
requirement, beginning in 1991. Senate Bill 994 also abolished the undergraduate
education major. The intention was to have more time for future teachers to
acquire a general education in subjects and skills, to become literate and
numerate.

The response of the ed school establishment was predictable. The Journal of

Teacher Education, in its issue of November-December 1988, reported on the
new law in an article titled “Assault on Teacher Education in Texas.” In addition,
the head of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, in an
editorial entitled “Outrage in Texas,” appearing in the organization’s publication
ACCTE Briefs, reported “hostility,” “dismay,” and a “numbing effect” among ed
school faculty and went on to speak of “a Kafka-like nightmare” in which “shock,
anger, and disbelief” were joined by a “feeling of betrayal.” To him, any
reduction in the time future teachers spend studying pedagogy means that they
“will be less prepared to teach,” an understandable reaction from those with a
vested interest in the teaching of pedagogy.