Who Should Set Standards?

"This is the battle of the century," says Dean Lindley J. Stiles of the University of Wisconsin School of Education. And if at first it seems like an insiders' war it nonetheless affects every parent in the land.

The standards of U.S. teacher training are increasingly determined by an organization that most Americans never heard of: the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. It was organized in 1952 by a department of the National Education Association, the schoolteachers' lobby, and has since accredited 385 of the 1,100 teacher-training setups in U.S. higher education. So far, 29 states have found it so handy that now they automatically certify teachers who have been trained at N.C.A.T.E.-approved schools in other states. Its goal is "reciprocity" in all 50 states.

N.C.A.T.E. argues that accreditation is the only way to ensure minimum standards in teacher training. The rub comes in the kind of standards being applied. Dean Stiles has leveled a drastic charge: N.C.A.T.E. seeks to impose on all U.S. schools of education a "monolithic and outdated" pattern that goes back to the "teachers' college age."

Dean Stiles declared war last fall when N.C.A.T.E. "deferred" accreditation of his own undergraduate program at Wisconsin, which has a unique system of uniting liberal arts professors and education professors. Instead of being set off by itself, Wisconsin's school of education consists of every professor throughout the university (some 800) who has even one teacher candidate in one of his classes. Harvard's Acting Dean of Education Judson Shaplin calls Wisconsin "one of the finest places in the country for the preparation of teachers." But to N.C.A.T.E., Wisconsin's "all-university" approach is not "bringing about the kind of coordination necessary." As Stiles sees it, N.C.A.T.E. is basically fearful that pedagogy is losing out to liberal arts at Wisconsin.

Stiles charges that N.C.A.T.E. is actually a pawn of the National Education Association. Stiles's evidence: 64% of N.C.A.T.E.'s money comes from N.E.A. and 13 of its 19 members represent N.E.A. affiliates. N.C.A.T.E.'s Director W. Earl Armstrong denies N.E.A. domination by saying that "some Methodists are members of the Republican Party, too, but that doesn't mean they control it."

Last week N.C.A.T.E. was rapped in an even more urgent way by the college-dominated N.C.A. (National Commission on Accrediting), which accredits accrediting agencies. To stay in business, said that group, N.C.A.T.E. "must be primarily responsible to the colleges and universities educating and preparing teachers." If it fails to do so, says one high N.C.A. official, "by a year from now N.C.A.T.E. may well be removed from our list."

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