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Empowering Practitioners: Holmes, Carnegie, and the Lessons of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

William R. Johnson
William R. Johnson*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland Baltimore County
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Extract

The national discussion about the future of American education and the teaching profession continues with the 1986 publication of two major reports: A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the Twenty-first Century and Tomorrow's Teachers: A Report of the Holmes Group. These reports, by the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy and by the Holmes Group, respectively, agree that the key to educational improvement is to create a career ladder for teachers which recognizes and rewards excellence, but they disagree over which group—practitioners or professors—we should look to for the advancement of professional knowledge and technique. The Carnegie Forum looks to the experience of outstanding teachers in the schools while the Holmes Group seeks to reassert the role of faculty in research universities in setting professional standards.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , Summer 1987 , pp. 221 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1. Lanier, Judith E., dean of education, Michigan State University, is one of the principal contributors to the Holmes Group report and is also on the fourteen-member Carnegie Forum Task Force on Teaching as a Profession. Tucker, Marc S., executive director of the Carnegie Forum, is listed as a consultant to the Holmes Group. In addition, both groups have, or have used as consultants, representatives from government, business, and the two major teacher unions—the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.Google Scholar

2. Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the Twenty-first Century (Washington, D.C., 1986), 66, 55.Google Scholar

3. Holmes Group, Tomorrow's Teachers: A Report of the Holmes Group (East Lansing, Mich., 1986), 8–13.Google Scholar

4. A Nation Prepared, 111, 62, 66.Google Scholar

5. Tomorrow's Teachers, 65, 14.Google Scholar

6. A Nation Prepared, 67, 76, 78.Google Scholar

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11. Ibid., 11.Google Scholar

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14. Ibid. Google Scholar

15. For a superb study of surgical training at a major teaching hospital, see Bosk, Charles L., Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure (Chicago, 1979).Google Scholar

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18. Ibid., 52. On “wait time,” see the summary of almost twenty years of research on this concept by Rowe, Mary Budd, “Wait Time: Slowing Down May Be a Way of Speeding Up,” Journal of Teacher Education 37 (Jan.-Feb. 1986): 43–50. The research possibilities of this topic are not yet exhausted. See Tobin, Kenneth, “Effects of Teacher Wait Time on Discourse Characteristics in Mathematics and Language Arts Classes,” American Education Research Journal 23 (Summer 1986): 191–200.Google Scholar

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22. Ludmerer, Kenneth M., Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical Education (New York, 1985), 21.Google Scholar

23. For the impact that the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy can have on a practitioner's perspective, see Paley, Vivian Gussin, “On Listening to What the Children Say,” Harvard Educational Review 56 (May 1986): 122–31.Google Scholar

24. Rosenthal, Robert and Jacobsen, Lenore, Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils' Intellectual Development (New York, 1968); for criticism of the study, see Elashoff, Janet D. and Snow, Richard E., Pygmalion Reconsidered: A Case Study in Statistical Inference: Reconsideration of the Rosenthal-Jacobsen Data on Teacher Expectancy (Worthington, Ohio, 1971); and Dunkin, Michael J. and Biddle, Bruce J., The Study of Teaching (New York, 1974), 128–31.Google Scholar

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27. See, generally, Rothstein, William G., American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century: From Sects to Science (Baltimore, 1972). A discussion of patterns of cooperation among medical sects is found on pages 305–10.Google Scholar

28. A Nation Prepared, 3; Ludmerer, , Learning to Heal, 7.Google Scholar

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30. Ibid., 166–67, 159–60.Google Scholar

31. Ibid., 158.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., 183.Google Scholar

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34. Ibid., 104.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., 112–13.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., 139. Under pressure from President Lowell, and later Conant, James B., Holmes continued to place some of the faculty and financial resources at his disposal into research activity, sometimes with almost comical results. In 1930 Abraham Flexner had changed his mind on the value of educational research. He now believed that an uncritical acceptance of scientific testing and measurement had produced “atomistic training … hostile to the development of intellectual grasp.” According to Powell, Flexner wrote to Holmes seeking assurance that Harvard had not gone in the direction of schools like Columbia Teachers College. In reply, Holmes sent to Flexner research on commercial education done by a Harvard faculty member “as evidence of how a serious research base could undergird a technical specialization.” Flexner was not impressed. He thought the conclusions self-evident “to anybody but a jackass.” Ibid., 173–75.Google Scholar

37. Tomorrow's Teachers, 25.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., 6.Google Scholar

39. A Nation Prepared, 39.Google Scholar

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41. A Nation Prepared, 39.Google Scholar

42. Tomorrow's Teachers, 19.Google Scholar

43. A Nation Prepared, 76.Google Scholar

44. Tomorrow's Teachers, 19.Google Scholar

45. See Judge, Harry, American Graduate Schools of Education: A View from Abroad (New York, 1982).Google Scholar

46. Tomorrow's Teachers, 54–55.Google Scholar