Alternate Vs. Traditional Routes

Dave Jones
Alternate Route vs. Traditional Route
3/4/06

The problem with America’s legacy of the Protestant Work Ethic as pertains to education is that somehow or other it created a drive to subvert the idea of the traditional university, devolving what should be a scholarly institute into a career training ground. Americans graduate from college with little more than a high school degree, but they are ready to get that money as engineers, businessmen, architects, and educators. Enter Berry’s article concerning traditional and alternate route certification for teachers. The criticisms are dead-on, but he needs to dig deeper into the philosophical issues that allow such a backwards system to sustain itself. Traditional route teachers are trained for the job, but do not necessarily have anything to teach their students. Alternate route teachers are generally overqualified and have no impetus to remain at a thankless job. But is the answer really a slightly modified version of one of these two more or less failed designs?
There is no prestige in teaching, and this is at least one core cause of the specific challenges that surfaces in American schools. On one end of the spectrum, a high school teacher needs to be competent enough to be an effective babysitter, but on the other end, if that competent babysitter is, God forbid, passionate and scholarly, he deserves much more than his gig in the public schools. While this is a gross overgeneralization, the two current methods for training new teachers fit nicely into this paradigm: by requiring too many education classes and not allowing the freedom to take enough subject-matter classes, the traditional route teacher is competent enough to manage a classroom and teach the mediocre knowledge has attained, whereas the alternate route teacher is generally more qualified academically and counts down the days until he can apply to law school or ‘real’ graduate school or whatever else. Students are remarkably aware of this – at the relatively prestigious but profoundly mediocre high school in which I teach, the comfort zone is incessant busy work and a bond with teachers over the desire to get the hell away from school for the weekend. I am one of a few exceptions to the rule because I try to model a more enlightened existence, but unfortunately ‘knowing a lot’ is a foreign, inapplicable goal to these students who wonder
how long I will last before I flee back to the white tower (though I am appreciated for at least attempting to fight the good fight that cannot be won).
It would seem as though the less difficult program to fix, as Berry suggests, is the alternate route, since the traditional route emphasizes mediocrity by nature and the only true problem confronting the alternate route is the longevity of careers. So how is America supposed to retain such teachers? Berry offers several models for success and vaguely implies that if everyone throughout the country were to employ such a program, American schools would have a much easier time finding and retaining high-quality teachers. But this is no solution at all – what American schools need is a radical, sweeping change. There are any number of gold standards and examples that could magically reform the whole system for the better on a broad scale. Are we to suggest that struggling schools are simply obstinate in failing to implement such programs? The overarching logistical problem is that there are so many independent school districts throughout the nation, and they all are compelled to make do with the resources available to them. Wherever the wealth goes, so too follows a decent education for the children of the wealthy. The fight for local governance and the right to establish private schools fail the majority of American students.
While I offer no solutions myself, being a lowly first year teacher, I would call for the intellectuals working in the field of education to do something about it, since that is I assume what they are paid to work on – education does not have anything to do with sets and closures and independent practice and meaningless statistics and case studies, it has everything to do with the subtle currents of American economics and the philosophies that lead to those economics. Advancing a token successful program or two here and there in the media only exacerbates the problem. The American public wonders why such programs that work in the microscopic scale have not been attempted in the macroscopic scale and due to its fetish with the idea of individuals rising in society according to their work ethic and natural ability concludes that underprivileged schools must not be trying hard enough. The Bush administration had a huge opportunity to amend so much of what is wrong with America’s schools, but it too failed or was unwilling to discern the causes and effects of the cycle of poverty and inadequate schooling. Because this legislation assumes that it is one’s own fault for failing (a counter-productive and misguided philosophical underpinning of the larger problem), nothing will change, and this, incidentally, is the most easily swallowed bold-faced lie the elite white Protestants have ever fed to America. But, since America is not interested in actually reforming its fundamental beliefs and school systems in any meaningful way, at least we who believe in the alternate route can claim that we were on the front lines for the good guys if only for a few years.