Sticks, Stones, and Ideology: The Discourse of Reform in Teacher Education

Abstract

Many highly politicized debates about reforming teacher education are embedded within two larger national agendas: the agenda to professionalize teaching and teacher education, which is linked to the K–12 standards movement, and the movement to deregulate teacher preparation, which aims to dismantle teacher education institutions and break up the monopoly of the profession. In this article, the authors analyze how these two agendas are publicly constructed, critiqued, and debated, drawing on public documents from each side and using the language and arguments of the advocates themselves. The authors argue that, despite very different agendas, the discourse of both deregulation and professionalization revolves rhetorically around the establishment of three interrelated warrants, which legitimize certain policies and undermine others. Taken together, what Cochran-Smith and Fries label “the evidentiary warrant,” “the political warrant,” and “the accountability warrant,” are intended by advocates of competing agendas to add up to “common sense” about how to improve the quality of the nation’s teachers. The authors conclude that in order to understand the politics of teacher education and the complexities of competing reform agendas, their underlying ideals, ideologies, and values must be debated along with and in relation to “the evidence” about teacher quality.