Colleagues, thank you very much for setting up this space numbers this evening.
I think as it stands just in between Oxford and more time,
so we we kind of conversation might rely upon how strange it is that sometimes we think of it like five o'clock,
it's fine, but we don't actually keep going up to try to pass these days before the show.
So I'm delighted to see me so well for my country.
One thing we've done in the this week, so there is a great pleasure to welcome you here.
This is the first of a series of spending cuts that we are going to go through.
The embarrassment, of course, teacher education and the serious.
This is the opening and sending out a series of continuing to the June 29 with.
Who will be the first one, so everything going into them, as well as an additional funding to do that, so please watch this space.
So what is causing professor of teacher education for urban schools at the New School of Education,
Boston College, where she has been for a while and has achieved wonderful things?
I think some people are fully aware of my resource.
She's an ex president of the very early next member of the National Academy of Education,
and we've had just, I think, a couple of the many achievement awards that are associated with my life.
She's written her books, hundreds of articles, reports, the range of other publications that I think are quite familiar to the rest of us.
And she is currently looking for a research project which is about teacher funded by the Spencer Foundation,
which is about teacher preparation for the new Graduate School of Education.
And you've just completed a research project which has become the book The Classroom,
which I think you would find on your on your chest about what insights from which you are going to draw in your talk today.
So without further ado, this is what we want to hear for Liverpool.
Good evening. I guess this evening, I'm really happy to be here for the Department of Education's Public Speaker Seminar series
and especially for this sub series that Alison and Diane are convening on teacher education.
Obviously, I think that's a really important topic and they do as well.
It's also great to see some old friends and longtime colleagues who had such an enormous impact on education and teacher education in the UK.
So thanks to some of my old friends for being here, and then I'm going to launch right in because I have a lot to say.
So as you can see, my brother John title for the evening is rethinking teacher education.
The trouble with accountability and Alice and I were talking about this picture so you can see why I chose this particular.
It's actually a painting, a drift keeping score. So before I begin, I want to make two short caveats.
The first one is about the source of this work, and Alice just mentioned this one I'm going to talk about tonight draws on the work of Project Chair,
Teacher Education and Education Reform, which is a group of nine teacher educators who have worked together to work together about five years.
We produce many products, policy briefs, chapters, presentations, etc. and which culminated in this book,
and as Alice mentioned, there's free advertising for you, and if you find it after tonight, you get a 20 percent discount.
I am told to tell you. So that's my first caveat about the sources.
The second is about the context, and it's not like for long.
I do want to make the point, though, that the examples and the conclusions that I'm going to talk about come from the U.S. context.
I am not assuming, however, that the U.S. context is the same as England's context or as the context of the U.K. There are many differences.
But I do think we can safely say that we're all living in the wake of a shift to the so-called knowledge economy,
unprecedented attention to teacher quality, and lots of new expectations about teacher preparation and workforce preparation.
We also share across many countries increasing income inequality and disparities,
or persistent disparities in opportunity and outcomes for minorities and disadvantaged groups.
So I think some of what I'm going to say is relevant just given some aspects of the larger context.
So I invite you to hear what I'm going to say with about the U.S. as kind of a
provocation and perhaps a point of comparison that will lead us to premature perception.
I think we will have. So I've organised this talk around three questions that are straightforward sounding.
And seemingly simple, but of course, they are not simple at all.
So I'm going to talk about these three questions in terms of teacher education accountability.
Where are we? How do we get here and where do we need to be?
And again, I am talking about the U.S. context, but you'll see that there are broader implications in some way.
So just a note. The first question is empirical. Here we use of policy studies of.
Particularly when used frame analysis to analyse major national level
accountability policies and initiatives in terms of their history and discourses,
their underlying assumptions and very importantly, the presence or absence of evidence to support these various policy initiatives in
terms of whether they actually have the capacity to do what they set out to do.
The second question is also empirical. Here we used primarily a historical approach,
and we focussed on professional policy and political discourse is about future education and education reform.
And to do that,
we drew on a very large repository of reform and accountability documents that I started collecting in the late 1980s and into the 90s.
And then the group continued with me towards the latter part of that period.
The third question is very different. It's a normative question and very explicitly and intentionally.
It begins with values and ideals and goals.
So this question, I think, allows us to get at some of the questions about the politics of Panopto.
And I hope the promise of democratic education. So let me go right to the first one in terms of teacher education accountability.
Where are we in the U.S. for at least the last two decades?
Accountability has been pretty much not on.
It's not questionably the major policy approach to improving teacher education quality.
That doesn't mean everybody agrees with that, but that is the approach that policy has taken.
But holding teacher education accountable is not one thing, so it's not a single concept study unitary concept.
Rather, there are multiple coexisting accountability initiatives and multiple, sometimes competing accountability demands and expectations.
These playoffs differently when different regulatory, professional and advocacy organisations are involved.
So I'm going to focus just on major or national level accountability policies and initiatives.
And I want to say this once, and I won't keep saying I'm only going to be able to talk about the highlights.
So practically with everything I say, I want to and each little tiny section by saying,
of course, there's much more I could say and should say, but I don't have time.
I won't keep saying that. That applies to every point, I think.
I'm going to make so in terms of this, multiple competing accountability initiatives, multiple competing agendas.
Each of the 50 states has its own Department of Education with accountability, procedures and policies for evaluating teacher education institutions.
Over the last two decades, there's also been a strong and up until very recently growing federal role.
That's changing somewhat now.
But the interplay between the states and the federal government for control of teacher education has been described by some people as a tug of war.
In addition, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation for Paper,
which is the sole national a creditor of teacher education as of 2013.
And some of you will be familiar with its current successor and Kate.
So this is the next generation of engaged.
So they also have a set of standards to which all provinces want national accreditation have to be accountable.
One important note here is national professional accreditation is voluntary in 36 states and compulsory in 14 states.
But in the states where it's voluntary. Many teacher education institutions seek national accreditation, including my own, for a variety of reasons.
In addition, for the last five years, an organisation called the National Council for Teacher Quality,
which is a private advocacy organisation with no regulatory power and a historically attired university teacher education agenda,
has been grading teacher education programmes across the country, a to have a lot of these monographs and disseminating the results in very slick,
smoothly packaged ways, often delivering alarming news straight to the desks of university presidents.
But you can imagine such a market.
And then finally, many states now require teacher candidates to pass a teacher performance assessment for licensure.
The biggest of these is called at GPA, and it's now required in some states and used in at least one programme in 40 of the 50 states.
So this is widely used. But some states have their own.
Some states have multiple ones that institutions can choose from.
In short, though, what I've been trying to show here is that the teacher education accountability
system is a thick web of multiple overlapping accountability relationships,
which Ramsey tells us is common in Western democracies, and it's common not just in education, but also in the public sector.
So to sort all this out, my colleagues and I and project here developed a framework for accountability in teacher education,
and we drew on the cross disciplinary accountability literature, our own analysis of teacher education policies over many years.
So we developed this eight dimensional accountability framework.
So these are the dimensions we label them values, purpose concepts, the diagnostic dimension.
The prognostic dimension. Control the content and consent.
But then we've clustered these eight dimensions into three themes.
So the first three dimensions we call the foundations of accountability.
So this has to do with underlying values, ideals, purposes and ideologies of any given accountability agenda or policy or initiatives.
The next two dimensions prognostic and diagnostic form a cluster that we call the problem education.
What we mean by that is how the advocates or the architects of a particular accountability scheme diagnose and
frame teacher education as a problem and then how they construct the prognosis or the solution to that problem.
And then the last three dimensions form a cluster that we have called power, relationships and accountability.
And this gets at the politics of accountability, including who has the authority to stipulate and enforce expectations.
Who gets to participate in decisions about those expectations or about standards.
What counts as evidence that the expectations are or are not being met and what the intended and unintended consequences are?
We found that using these eight dimensions organised in these three clusters helped us uncover the theory of change behind
any accountability initiative and also helped us think about its consistency or not with the larger democratic project.
And I'm going to come back to that idea quite a few times, but to give you an idea of what we did based on hundreds of policy documents,
policy tools, position statements, editorials, media postings, critiques and research studies,
we analysed the four major national accountability initiatives which are here on the left going
down in terms of the eight dimensions of accountability that are going across the top here,
then working at the level of our clusters. We analysed across the board.
So this is the kind of analysis that we did to try to get a handle on accountability in the U.S.
We found that although there are differences to measure,
accountability initiatives have clear similarities and some cross-cutting themes that constitute what we've called a dominant accountability package.
And we refer to the period of the dominance of this paradigm as teacher education accountability era,
and we market and I can talk later about why if anybody wants to know, but we market as the period beginning in 1998 until the present.
And as I alluded to a moment ago, things may be changing somewhat now.
It's kind of hard to tell yet. But for many purposes, we're still in the accountability era.
So this paradigm, as you can see in the last part of this context, has dramatically reshaped the field.
So what I want to do is look at the dominant accountability paradigm in terms of our three clusters of dimensions.
To give you a little bit more detail about this.
So the core foundations of the dominant accountability paradigm are market ideology and thin equity market ideology is pretty familiar.
I think applied to teacher quality and teacher education.
It can be summarised in three words teachers matter most when it comes to students achievement,
individuals success and international economic competitiveness.
This idea, and again, I think this is very familiar. This idea was echoed relentlessly in the U.S. and a lot of other places for years.
In fact, it became what I think of as a kind of global mantra that a country's economic health
depended on its education system and that the quality of its education system.
We all remember those words are many because some of outcomes could not exceed the quality of its teachers arguments and assumptions that are,
of course, problematic, arguable and not been argued in a variety of ways.
But this was still what was underlying the dominant accountability for parents.
Second, we found that every one of the accountability initiatives we looked at had explicitly stated equity goals.
But beneath the surface, we found what we came to refer to as thin equity,
which assumes that the unequal distribution of good teachers, good schools, good curriculum is the cause of inequity.
And thus, if we can ensure that everybody gets equal or the same access to these, these good teachers,
good curriculum and so on, then this will create equity without necessarily challenging.
The structures and systems that produce and reproduce inequity in the first place
and in equity is a really powerful concept because it's not called thin equity,
it's called equity. And so the impression that is given is that all of these accountability agendas have as a very important goal of achieving equity.
But what they are really doing, and I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment,
what they are really doing is actually preserving much of the status quo.
But let me move on for the moment to the second cluster.
We found that was the dominant accountability paradigm. The problem of teacher education was consistently framed as its failure to earn public
confidence and trust and its failure to be thought of as a bona fide profession.
But the next part is as important.
The failure was constructed as the result of the lack of systems of continuous improvement based on the collection of.
Dramatic data about impact, outcomes and performance, and the other part of the cause was that teacher education,
as well as improved teacher education programmes as a group, did not use systematic data to improve practise.
So we looked at these documents and we used frame analysis to figure out how they framed the problem and how they framed the solution.
We found the word data and data systems used over and over and over again.
Now, if this is the problem, then you can pretty easily get to what is going to be the solution.
So the solution, of course, with the dominant accountability paradigm is data and data systems.
So more data, better data, the creation of national data using uniform indicators,
cutting edge new assessment tools and sophisticated data analytics, hopefully using larger and larger databases.
Many of these reassigned test scores as the central indicator of teacher effectiveness, some of them zero in on market forces.
But the assumption is that holding teacher education accountable for impact and outcomes will let good programmes rise
to the top and force bad ones to either get better to either remediate or close up shop and get out of the business.
Finally, let me say something about how our relationships with the dominant accountability paradigm.
This has to do with the professional organisations, government agencies or other entities that have control and jurisdiction over teacher
education and how they define what teacher education should be accountable for.
So given the deep mistrust of teacher education in the U.S.,
it's not surprising that we found that control with all of these initiatives tends to be external to the programmes and institutions being evaluated
with few opportunities for the participants in actual programmes and institutions
to help develop the expectations or to opt out of the accountability.
This was particularly interesting to us. What we found was that even with accountability initiatives purportedly developed by and for the profession,
that language was used over and over again.
And that would include and TPA, and that would include Case, which is intended to be a professional organisation.
We found that even with those given multiple implementation problems, multiple management issues, original intentions were really quite transformed.
And now there is mounting case study and survey research and some other emerging
research that indicates that these accountability initiatives also are,
even though they're labelled by and for the profession,
they're increasingly experienced by programmes and institutions as extraordinarily imposed without regard for local knowledge,
local commitments or the professional judgement and agency of teachers and teacher educators.
So this has given you a very, very quick overview of the kind of conceptual and frame analysis we did to identify the
dominant accountability paradigm and to unpack at the moment in terms of our dimensions.
But in addition to this conceptual analysis, we also wanted to delve deeper to answer the question.
Still on this first question where are we?
So another thing we did was to analyse the evidence of each of these four major accountability initiatives, and these are the same four.
And we did that by asking two questions for each one of them.
What claims do the proponents of the initiative make about how it's going to actually
improve teacher preparation and thus help solve the teacher quality problem in the U.S.?
Once we unpack those claims. Then we ask what evidence supports these claims?
So the first question is is intended to get further out the theory of change behind the initiative in the
sense of people's assumptions about how particular mechanisms will actually operate to create change.
And the second one has to do with validity and reliability about the initiative as a policy instrument.
So we were really looking for whether or not there was evidence that the initiatives actually had the
capacity to meet its stated events and bring about the kind of change that it wanted to bring about.
We presented a detailed analysis of the evidence we found in the form of the policy brief.
And if anybody's interested, this was published by any policy the National Education Policy Centre in 2016.
You can easily find it under any say they have all of their policy briefs available.
I can't give you the details here, but I want to make it very clear that we looked carefully at this evidence, in short.
So we found that three with three of the four initiatives,
there was very little evidence to support the claims about how the policy mechanisms would actually operate to improve programmes.
The irony, of course, is that these policies call for teacher education programmes to make decisions based on evidence,
but they're not based on evidence themselves. With the fourth initiative, and you're probably wondering.
Papa, where's the fourth one with the fourth initiative and that's at TPPA?
There is some evidentiary support as a policy initiative, but as I alluded a minute ago,
there is also mounting concern within the teacher preparation community about this set of standards
that was imposed by some few elite members of the teacher education community on everybody else.
And there have been implementation problems in the states where they require a GPA.
With those two things happening, it seems highly unlikely that there will be the kind of widespread implementation and professional acceptance of
TPA that they depend on in terms of their rationale for how this is really going to change change in the field.
So that's my whirlwind tour of where we are. And I want to go to the second question, how did we get here?
So to answer this question again, very briefly, without being able to really go into detail,
I want to talk about five policy political and professional coaching challenges
that contributed to the emergence of the dominant accountability paradigm.
And also to its staying power. I think so. This is the list I'm going to take up.
Each one of these individually, I'm going to read it to now, but you'll see them as I talked about this.
So first, I've already alluded to, this is unprecedented global attention to teacher quality tied to neoliberal economics.
As we all know, the emphasis on it in accountability emerged as part of the Decades-Long shift to a knowledge economy in the U.S. and other places.
This was also a shift to neoliberal economics and to a conceptualisation of human beings as rational individual economic actors.
The connexion of these big ideas to teacher education accountability is not very hard to find, and it's been crystal clear in the work of a person.
Some of you may be familiar with Eric Kanishka, who is a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute and arguably one of the most
influential U.S. economists in the area of public education policy for two decades.
And a chef has defined teacher quality very simple.
He sets teacher quality. His teachers who produce large gains in student achievement.
And if we don't see large gains in achievement, that indicates the absence of teacher quality.
And he says it's just that wildly so for Hanukkah, the key to effective education policy is pretty obvious.
Accountability in the form of performance, incentives for teachers, teacher educators,
schools and not policies that try to change school conditions is that we don't know enough about that.
But we do know that we want gains in achievement. That's what we.
Rewarded with that money. This is where I say again, there's a lot more to say here, but I want to move to the second idea.
So the second point in my answer to how did we get it?
Second point is a continuous public narrative about the failure of university based teacher education.
And I want to share some themes from that narrative.
There are many, and I'm only going to share a few, and I should note very carefully on reporting these things.
I'm not endorsing them. So some things in this public narrative are first,
teachers having completed university teacher preparation makes no difference in the achievement of students
compared to the achievement of students who have teachers who have not completed university teaching.
And second thing, teacher education programmes have a liberal, progressive bias,
and they focus a on on touchy feely self-awareness rather than objective or scientific knowledge.
Another theme alternate routes into teaching that bypass or drastically streamline university programmes are superior to university programmes,
and they provide a policy model for improving teacher quality.
And the final one I'm going to mention teacher education hasn't changed despite years of reform.
Reform should focus on what really matters. Accountability for student outcomes and teacher effectiveness.
And there are many others. Now, I hope it's clear that this failure narrative is a potent concoction of contested empirical assertions,
normative claims, hyperbole and politics, and some just plain mean spirited, meaningful work.
But despite that description, and you might even if you only agree with part of the way, I just characterised it well enough.
Despite that, those things together became the rationale underlying many new accountability schemes designed to produce compliance and uniformity.
This narrative also paved the way for the proliferation of alternative pathways with
new non-profit and for profit providers and test only entry routes into teaching.
Now, here's the interesting thing about the failure narrative that built on the international consensus I mentioned a minute ago that teachers,
not teachers, matter most, which is a really highly seductive idea.
Of course, teachers matter. Probably most of the people in this room are committed to that idea that teachers matter.
But the assertion that teachers matter most that they are the most important factor in students' achievement is really a double edged sword.
In the US,
this assertion lived alongside the received wisdom since at least the publication of the Nation at Risk report in 1983 that the schools were failing.
Now, it doesn't take too much to figure out what the logic is.
It's really quite clear if teachers are the most important factor in students' achievement,
and if U.S. student achievement is substandard, then teachers and the people who prepared them are to blame.
Third point in terms of how we get here.
So the third point is the emergence is teacher education to find as a public policy problem focussed on outcomes.
I've been writing about this for years, including in a special journal issue in the book,
which ran for a long whatever year that was 2008 £90million in which we talked about this idea of teacher
education defined as a policy problem across countries when teacher education is seen as a public policy problem.
The goal is to figure out which of the parameters broad policy parameters that
policymakers can actually control will have a positive impact on outcomes in the US.
The Bush administration's no child left behind. Which everybody has at least heard of.
Went into effect in 2001 intensified this whole policy approach to improving teacher and teacher education.
But the wording of the Obama administration's race to the top guidelines, which determines states eligibility for federal funds.
So there were really, really important cemented the idea that effective teachers were those who raise test scores.
This was a shift then, in how we thought about teacher quality away from what we referred to as inputs,
including teachers, qualifications, their credentials, their backgrounds,
their dispositions and toward a definition of teacher quality in terms of outcomes which focussed on teacher's classroom performance,
career retention and most controversial in the U.S.
Evaluating teacher preparation programmes based on the achievement of the eventual students programme graduates.
So it's this long chain of logic that is problematic at every turn, but nevertheless it's in operation again in keeping with time limits.
The fourth factor in the emergence of the dominant accountability paradigm is teacher.
The teacher education establishments only turn toward accountability.
Now that U.S. teacher education scene is pretty complex,
but there are two national organisations that I think have generally been regarded as the established.
The National Council for the Accreditation of Teachers or anything, which,
as I said now is key and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education,
ACTU, this is a membership organisation for teacher education institutions, deans and a lot of individual teacher educators attend as well.
So in 2000 and Kate announced new accreditation standards,
they were described by NASA itself as a paradigm shift from input staff comes because they required performance evidence about teacher candidates.
In 2013, Kate announced its new standards,
which demanded higher selectivity requirements for candidates and also demanded of every programme that they
show evidence of programme impact and of graduates effectiveness defined in terms of students achievement case.
New standards were very intentionally organised to signal that they were getting tough on standards.
That's how they described it and that they were raising the bar regarding the preparation of teachers.
Now we think slightly more cynically,
they were also intended to demonstrate that the audience in this nation still had a relevant role in the very crowded field of teacher preparation,
which was going in all kinds of. Actions say something about actually the dean's institutional organisation, AICTE,
also moved to support standards and accountability in the early 2000s, in part given the threat of privatisation.
On the one hand and the withdrawal of government funding. On the other hand,
they city also was trying to walk a fine line between carrying the torch for the new accountability and questioning in keeping with members concerns.
Finally, the this factor in how we got to the government accountability paradigm is that over time,
U.S. policymakers and others came to assume the Congress that the income inequality
could be remedied by education reform without reforms addressing other social,
economic and political conditions along these lines.
I really liked the work of policy historians Harvey Carter and Robert Lowe.
Some of you may be familiar with them. They do an extremely thoughtful, and I would say,
the chinchillas analysis of the evolution of U.S. social policy and is that
they argue that ever since the Lyndon Johnson presidential era in the 1960s.
Education reform, rather than a robust welfare state, was the favoured solution to poverty and inequality.
The belief that education reform can ameliorate inequality relieves policymakers of the burden for developing social policies.
That, coupled with education reform, actually maybe could reduce inequality.
This belief in the U.S. exacerbated additional disillusionment with public education,
and it also supported the turn away from public schools for teacher education.
This belief ratcheted up when policymakers and the public expected from teachers and teacher education.
So increasingly teachers were expected not only to produce a competitive workforce,
but also to meet rising social expectations and help achieve social equity.
The belief that education reform could eradicate inequality also led some people to the conclusion that anybody who
said teachers and schools couldn't solve the nation's social problems were insiders who supported the status quo,
wanted mostly to lighten their own workloads, and we're simply making excuses about the ineffectiveness of schools, teachers and teacher.
So these five highly interrelated policy, political and professional developments,
I think, help explain some of the context and conditions within which this dominant.
Accountability paradigm in the U.S. emerged, and this really became in a way with commonsense about teacher education.
So when I say that, what I mean is that the language and logic of accountability became so deeply embedded in the everyday discourse
and practise of teacher education that they became very difficult to discern as policy and practise alternative.
Third question that I want to address. Where do we need to be before I turn directly to this search question?
I want to make it clear that I'm not suggesting either in the book or here that we should reject teacher education accountability,
but rather that we should reinvent this as a lever for reconstructing teacher education
is targeted for its purposes and its consequences to reclaim the profession.
And that's really the central art. And I just want to say a word about the word reclaiming, which I'm using very deliberately here.
So if you look up definitions for the word reclaiming,
a lot of them focussed on the idea of retrieving or getting something back that was previously lost or denied rhetoric,
claiming your right to the throne or something that was temporarily separated from its owner, like reclaiming your luggage.
But definitions of reclaiming also include the idea of rescuing something.
From an undesirable stage or reforming something from wrong or improper conduct.
So when we do this reclaiming in the book, we are talking about reclaiming teacher education accountability in this last sense of the word explicitly.
I want to rescue teacher education accountability from its current immersion in market ideology and the human capital paradigm.
And I want to rescue it for democratic education, which not only prepare students for participation in democratic deliberation,
which I say more about in just a moment, but also identifies and works to eradicate the structures and systems that produce.
So for my third question, where do we need to be?
I want to return to our eight dimensional accountability framework and use that to help talk about where I would like to see us moving.
So you remember, I hope that with the dominant accountability paradigm,
I argue that the foundations for market ideology and inequity with democratic accountability,
which we are proposing as an alternative idea of values, are derived from democratic education theory, especially ideas related to strong democracy.
And what we have called strong equity. So democratic education theory draws on thinkers like many of these,
and I know I know these are not all the same or many critically important differences amongst them,
but they share some basic assumptions about what Michael Engle called democracy.
Understood differently with and whether he meant democracy,
it involves something beyond participants voting in elections and organising special
interest groups to lobby for their own viewpoints and their own advantages.
So really, what we're talking about democratic accountability,
something more like Benjamin Barber's classic strong democracy, which is participatory, popular and community oriented.
And there is the assumption here is that there actually is something called the public interest and that there actually is something
called the common good or common goods and public interest that is more than different from just the sum of its individual self interest.
The foundations of democratic accountability are also based on this notion of strong equity,
and we develop this notion of thin and strong equity building on Barbour's thin and strong democracy idea in the first place.
So we've conceptualised this idea of strong equity drawing,
especially on the work of Nancy Frazier's theories of social justice and other work, and through some of my own early.
About social justice in teacher education.
So we are suggesting that the notion of strong equity for teacher education has four core ideas sort of four r's with your families with me.
So the first is the idea of redistribution to all schools of teachers who are committed to work with other
people for social change and who know how to teach students not just the core skills of literacy and numeracy.
Although of course, they need to know how to do that, but also how to advocate for themselves and engage in democratic deliberation.
The second R is recognition, and this is a recognition by teachers,
school leaders and policymakers of the structures and systems that produce inequity.
So this means it's not just going to be changes in teacher policies that are necessary to interrupt inequity.
It's going to involve a whole lot of other kinds of social policy changes.
The idea of recognition also includes recognition and representation of the values and knowledge traditions of minority students,
families and communities in school curricula, practises and policies and in teacher education curricula.
This means that access is not the sole answer to the achievement of strong equity.
As Joyce King reminds us, equal access to a faulty curriculum that is one that doesn't include multiple knowledge, traditions is not justice.
So that's part of this second part. The third are is what we've talked about is reframing how awful prevalent frames related to equity,
equality and justice, especially ideas like colourblindness and meritocracy, which assume objectivity.
And that's the structural, economic and racialized nature of inequality inside a discourse of individualism and equal access.
In the final hour is resolving tensions,
and this has to do with acknowledging the inherent tensions and contradictions amongst competing ideas and competing forces about
equity and about achievement in teacher education and trying to manage these in ways that are knowingly imperfect but concrete.
And also what this really means is not leaving these ideas at a high level of abstraction,
which is pretty easy to do, but to resolve the tensions in some way on the ground.
In local context, with real student teachers and real communities that we're working with is much more difficult to get into.
Practitioners don't have the luxury of these high levels of abstraction.
So moving on again with the dominant accountability paradigm,
I hope I made it really clear that the problem of teacher education was framed as teacher education's
failure to become a trusted profession because of its lack of sophisticated data systems.
With the with democratic accountability, the problem is not seen as a lack of data.
The problem is seen as the dominance of the economy.
And so.
And its negative effect on teacher education and teaching, so following Angela Badlands, where we used the word subtractive here to describe this.
So we see the impact of the dominant accountability paradigm as having had a subtractive influence on the field.
So it's prompted uniformity and compliance. It's redefined how many teacher educators understand their roles and their own agency.
It's emphasised narrow test based or performance outcomes.
It's de-emphasised local knowledge and local communities and reduce the spaces in teacher education
for discussion and action related to efforts related to justice and democratic education.
The democratic accountability The solution, then, isn't more data systems, but much more collective work.
And so this means teacher educators working with other teacher educators, working with teachers,
school leaders, families, communities, activists, multiple stakeholders and yes, even policy makers.
The third aspect of democratic accountability has to do with how relationships there are no especially control.
So here, instead of the dominant accountability paradigms focussed on externally controlled monitoring schemes,
we are proposing the concept of intelligent professional responsibility in teacher education.
And this is derived from three ideas.
Intelligent accountability, professional accountability and the distinction between responsibility and accountability,
I would just say a tiny bit about each of those. Some of you may know the work of Onuora O'Neill here in the UK.
She suggested that the audit culture in the public sector has resulted in lack of motivation, mistrust and no actual improvement in people's work.
She called instead for intelligence accountability, which begins with trust and with the audacious assumption that the people who do the work
in a particular area actually know something about it and generally want to be better.
The second idea professional accountability, was developed by Michael Flynn, some of his colleagues,
and they were working on accountability in primary and secondary schools, not teacher education.
But they suggested that in order to support teacher and student learning in schools and external
policy makers should concentrate not on holding people accountable for all these things,
but for creating the conditions for strong internal accountability.
And they defined that as collective professional accountability with schools and school collaborations for continuous improvement.
And finally, the distinction between responsibility and accountability has to do with the notion of obligation and imposition.
So some people have suggested that responsibility is chosen.
Accountability is imposed.
So what we tried to do in the book is to elaborate and weave together these three concepts to develop for teacher education.
The idea of intelligent professional responsibility.
Obviously, this requires a lot of dialogue and participation of all the stakeholders in teacher education,
including local teacher education institutions and the programmes who are being held accountable,
but also the schools and the families and communities and the people they work with.
So dialogue, inclusion and deliberation are key.
The role of external regulators and in the U.S. that would be state or federal
policymakers or national creditors is to create the conditions for intelligent,
professional responsibility and networks programmes themselves and across.
In terms of what future education programmes are actually how the.
Well, for this Democratic candidate.
Of course, teacher educators and teacher education programmes would be responsible for teacher learning and teacher performance and student learning.
But consistent with living in a democratic society in today's world.
So that means students learning would include academic learning, but also this long list of social and emotional development,
sense of well-being, civic engagement, critical thinking, problem solving and democratic skills, in particular in our divided society.
This would emphasise respect, perspective, taking responsible disagreement and delivering.
Finally, with democratic accountability, the intended consequences would be heightened trust amongst participants, enhanced teacher and teacher,
educator professionalism and deep responses to ongoing internal evaluations,
rather than the very calm and superficial responses that are based on compliance when there are externally imposed.
Now, it's no time for a fourth big question, which there isn't.
I think it would have to be huge. Can we get it or is there any possible way we could even get close to this?
There isn't time for this. But I do want to know.
He said he thinks that in the book, we talk about promising practises and we identified nine of these in the final chapter of my book.
Each of these nine is relevant in some way to our concept of democratic accountability in teacher education.
The practises are different from one another. They're drawn from different levels of practise, so there are a few local teacher education programmes.
There are a few local teacher education programmes that have gone up further to scale and have now multiple programmes like that.
There's a teacher performance assessment developed by a statewide network of all of the teacher educators in one state.
There is a not a new national and educator preparation accreditation,
and the jury's still out on this just was announced that it was going to the press and a new national advocacy organisation of education school deans.
So we are not saying that any of these accomplished democratic accountability.
But we think that maybe they provide a proof of possibility that there are some places where people
are doing some things that are in sync with what we're talking about in front of the cameras.
I can't end without saying. That these are really tough times for teacher education in the US and a lot of other places.
And it's not just a few million dollars for a moment.
It's apparent in the US that the Trump administration favours neither strong democracy nor strong equity.
So rather. Neither, although Trump shows little direct interest in education and some of us think that we should probably be grateful for.
The Trump administration is presiding, so is relegated people over multiple options that are diminishing the protection of minority
student groups and some people have claimed possibly represent a new low in terms of equity.
When I walk with it, you tell me a little bit about the.
But I think we also have bigger problems and deeper fault lines that are not unique to the US and weren't invented or introduced by the Trump era.
Although his presidency has dramatically exacerbated, it's so across many developed countries,
as I said at the beginning, we have growing income inequality, we have intergenerational poverty,
we have persistent disparities in the educational opportunities and outcomes of
people from historically privileged and minorities for disadvantaged groups.
We have the emergence of conservative nationalism, a backlash against immigrants and immigration policies.
We have the acute polarisation of various groups of people and in some countries led by me.
I think I am very ashamed to say we have unprecedented and nearly unbelievable degrees of bigotry
and contempt exhibited by people at the highest levels of leadership about diversity of every kind.
These are tough times, even dangerous times, I think, for teacher education and for democracy.
Given all this, I mean, given all this, we should all just go ahead and bring this.
Possible, but in conclusion,
I just want to raise some questions about what it might look like to reclaim teacher education accountability for democracy.
So for example, there's a question what would state national or professional teaching standards or curriculum
frameworks look like if teachers were expected to teach students the skills of disagreement,
deliberation and perspective?
To what would teacher preparation programme accreditation look like if programmes have to show evidence of democratic outcomes?
What might countrywide reporting requirements and regulations, which we have in the U.S. include,
is the definition of recruitment and persistence didn't just mean whether people entered and stayed in teaching,
but included whether they make persistent efforts to challenge existing systems,
school structures and policies that reproduce exactly what advocacy groups,
business interests or philanthropists might invest their time and resources in reporting to the.
The progress initial teacher education programmes were making for Democratic candidates.
What if we recast teacher education accountability as the mutual intelligent responsibility of all
stakeholders based on commitment to the public good and to democratic goals like deliberation,
disagreement and dialogue? In short, what if we worked from the outrageous assumption that accountability should serve democracy,
not global competition and economic power for a relatively small so few people?
I think that one of the things we ought to do in future education is try to find out what is the accountability service.
Thank.