Several of us at Fordham (and some of our friends and associates in the larger ed policy world) have heard recently from James Garner, the former director of Research and Training Associates in Belleville, New Jersey. He's upset because Leo Klagholz's year-2000 Fordham monograph, Growing Better Teachers in the Garden State, failed to credit Garner for the ideas embedded in New Jersey's alternative certification program, circa 1982.
We're not inclined to re-open this (very old) can of worms. But readers might find this little bit of school reform history quite fascinating. (I did.) Here's a snippet of Garner's correspondence to Checker Finn here at Fordham:
My February 28, 1982 letter to the Star-Ledger marked the first publication of a proposal for the "alternate route" for teacher certification, about a year and a half before any announcement by Klagholz and the Kean administration. My letter outlined both the alternate route and the rationale for it in their major conceptual features.The context further demonstrates my priority in this idea. My letter was actually a criticism of the revised teacher certification procedures then proposed by Klagholz (Star-Ledger February 7, 1982). He noted the low SAT scores of education majors, but had missed their significance. Klagholz wanted to increase the liberal arts requirements in teacher training programs (laudable), but the resulting rules still systematically prevented our better college students, who did not generally enroll in teacher training programs, from teaching in our public schools. It is the recruitment of these better students that is essential to the alternate route, and there was no hint of it in Klagholz's proposals at the time. That was the point of my letter.
And the letter to the editor, while just a letter, was quite prescient. Garner argued:
Dr. Klagholz of the Department of Higher Education is right to dispute the contention that brighter students avoid teaching because the profession has no pay-off in job opportunities. The new standards, Dr. Klagholz said, seek to produce "broadly educated, intelligent young men and women with enough experience in actual school practice to know whether they really have an aptitude for teaching." Providing actual school practice is the easy part; producing broadly educated and intelligent young men and women is the hard part. But we already have these young men and women. Instead of using the bureaucracy to keep them out of our public schools, shouldn't we find some way to let them in?
Keep in mind that this was 1982--eight years before the launch of Teach For America. And Garner was right--we do have these young men and women; we just had to find a way to let them into our schools.
