The Schooling Rule: Education is a certified teacher
teaching a standardized curricular topic to a
registered student in an accredited institution.
-- Meyer & Rowan (1977)[1]

Meyer & Rowan, in characterizing Education, omit any mention oflearning: and, with good reason.
Learning, particularly learning specific subject matter, is a secondary -- if even that important -- goal of
schooling. Teaching, though it may aim at learning, is not primarily judged by learning success[2], despite
the solemn public invocation of metaphors such as achievement, assessment, and the like, that appears to
guide it.

In the American public school tradition, teaching is primarily a performance art constrained by an individual
teacher's desire to impart information, skills and attitudes, and by the realities of the classroom's group
dynamics as well as by many other factors outside the school. The misconception among many educators, of
course, is that developing one's pedagogical skill is to pursue science.[3] Teacher preparation is rife with
references to treatments, learner characteristics, outcomes and the like. What, in fact, there is of science that
informs pedagogy, is more likely than not to be washed out of practice in the pursuit of the fads and
political goals of those who directly control our schools.[4]

c. newly acquired knowledge about learner characteristics and the curricular innovations that such knowledge supports often languish unrecognized by a public only peripherally interested in the learning process.[5]

What is the point of schooling, if it isn't learning? A school's apparently most important product -- ask any
parent who pays college tuition -- is status. Why else do Ivy League schools command tuitions far out of
proportion to the excellence of their curricula? Early education gets you to high school; high school gets you
to college. College gets you to grad school; grad school gets you to ... success! The higher you climb the
ladder, the better a person you are; the more income you merit. That is why, teachers' concerns aside,
cramming, plagiarism, cheating and Cliff's Notes are no big issue!

Only in some areas -- the really important ones -- does knowledge matter. In order to maintain one's
certification in, say, CPR, one must show competence every two years on a retest. CPR is important.
Medical knowledge is important and similarly retested for. So it is that every seventh grader, to divine what
the teacher really thinks is important, knows to ask, "Will this be on the test?"

Whatever a general Bachelor's degree means, whatever information, skills and attitudes one might take it to
indicate, is never, ever retested for. Those of us who enjoy the social benefits of a degree in higher
education, for example, a substantially higher lifelong income than those not possessing a Bachelor's degree,
can rest on our laurels assured that -- outside of specific technical or scientific occupations -- we will not
have to demonstrate any information, skills or attitudes supposedly acquired in the process of getting our

If teaching or managing schools were certain, clear, and straightforward tasks, then educators could find a haven in a professional culture or technology. But education is an indeterminate enterprise. Its purposes and technologies are unclear. Its goals are diverse, diffuse and disputed among various stakeholders.[6]

Since whatever change is involved in a proposed reform is putatively a change for the better, if people
cannot agree on what is "for the better," then the proposed change will not be seen as a "reform." In our
very pluralistic democracy what this means is: to the extent consensus is lacking on the direction of school
change, then, to that same extent will there be no lasting school reform. The "curricular pendulum" of
teacher lore is a recognition of this fact.

So, what's new? It's certainly not news that scientific knowledge is ranked below other considerations when it comes to practice in the political reality of everyday life. It took decades for the ill effects of tobacco to be generally acknowledged. The debate about global warming will probably take decades more. How is the

What makes the situation in education somewhat novel is that prospective educators, in the course of their professional education, are inculcated with contradictory theories employing incompatible metaphors. But they are usually not made aware of these contradictions and incompatibilities. Their "theoretical toolbox," so to speak, is full of mismatched tools.[7]

Theories of teacher accountability usually are buried in exhortations to educators to "take control of their
classroom outcomes," or to "be accountable for the learning of all children." Such theories are embedded in
such legislation as No Child Left Behind. But, as a concept, accountability can range from the quite unjust
practice of taking reprisal against hostages -- people who by virtue of their circumstances are made to suffer
for things beyond their control -- to the reasonable and just practice of rewarding or punishing a person for
what she has power over. We recognize this distinction in practice to the extent that we understand that
merely deciding to hold a person accountable does not necessarily give her additional power to deal with a

One kind of theory of causation is what is called "direct linear causation", an ancient "push-pull" concept
that holds cause to be immediate and roughly proportional to effect. Such a theory is embedded in advice to
teachers, for example, that the better they prepare for their classes, the more their students will learn -- as
though the only thing student learning depended on was the teacher's preparation.

learning depends on a condition of the learner that is normally out of the immediate control of the teacher,
and whether other factors, often internal, may have a significant effect on learning. We recognize such
systemic causation in our practices of grouping by, for example, age, grade, reading level, physical size or
gender. Such student grouping is seen to address a "structural issue" beyond the limit within which teachers
can be held individually accountable.

A possible incompatibility arises when we consider the interaction between theories of accountability and
theories of causation: to the extent that learning is a systems phenomenon, i.e. complexly causal, to that
same extent is the teacher minorly, if at all, responsible for its occurrence. Consider a student whose ADD
has not been recognized. The teacher of that student may well have prepared a wonderful lesson only to
have it fall flat because the student is not focused on it. The recognition that such complexities are part of
everyday life makes it obvious that schools, say, that profess to undertake to do such things as "teach
students to be lifelong learners" are either patently foolish or megalomaniac.[9]

Theories of equity identify certain group outcomes as desirable or not. The slogan, "All children can learn," rests on such a theory. "All" is often the critical term. Students who are left out may be considered unjustly discriminated against.