MEMORANDUM
TO: Dr. George Bailey, Chair
Educational Policies and Planning Committee
FROM: Keats Sparrow
Dean
SUBJECT: Requested Responses
A number of the questions and issues for which EPPC is seeking responses are addressed more appropriately by Dean Marilyn Sheerer of the School of Education, so my responses here will be limited to those questions and issues more relevant to my perspective as dean of the College. I’ve taken the liberty of re-ordering some of the questions so a few of my earlier answers will help respond to later questions. The overlapping nature of some of the questions and issues explains the repetitiveness of some of the responses.
Before responding directly to EPPC’s questions and issues, I’ll begin with several observations that generally address some of the issues raised about the proposed restructuring of the College’s three core teacher-training programs.
Administrative Rather Than Operational Change. It’s important to note that the proposedrestructuring represents more of an administrative than an operational change. In other words, while the restructuring would result in a change in the administrative oversight of the three programs, it would not alter the existing academic programs. Teacher education faculty would continue teaching the pedagogy courses while liberal arts faculty would continue teaching the content courses. The courses would remain the same as now and be taught by the same faculty using the same textbooks and syllabi. The same students would take the same courses and complete the same degree requirements as now. The courses would even be taught in many of the same classrooms as now. Because the day-to-day operational impact of the restructuring would be minimal, the restructuring would not represent--as some seem mistakenly to assume--an earth-shaking, life-changing revolution. Instead, it would represent only a relatively modest adjustment in the university’s organization chart.
The chief impact the restructuring would have on programmatic quality would be that in their new parent organization, the three core education programs would have much greater opportunity for further development, as will be explained more fully below.
That the proposed restructuring is primarily an administrative as opposed to an operational change, that its programs would remain unchanged by the administrative restructuring, and that the restructuring would result in enhanced opportunities for programmatic development refutes the contention that the restructuring would somehow diminish the quality of the three teacher-training programs.
Importance of Proper Mission Alignment. Many of the various rationales for the proposed restructuring can be reduced to this single statement: An academic program and its faculty have greatly increased opportunities for flourishing and developing if they are lodged in a parent organization whose mission accords with their own. Unfortunately, the English Education, Mathematics Education, and Social Studies Education programs and faculty now operate within a parent organization whose mission does not accord with theirs, as explained below, so their organizational placement significantly reduces their opportunities to prosper and grow. The proposed restructuring would move the three programs and their faculty and majors into a parent organization whose mission accords strictly with their own, so the restructuring would increase their opportunities for flourishing and developing. It would also help address the problem Dean Sheerer describes in her February 15 memo of the failure of teacher education faculty to gain tenure in units outside the SOE whose professional expectations differ in important ways from those of education faculty. In a word, the restructuring would place the three programs and their faculty in an appropriate and far more supportive environment.
Models of Teacher Education Programs With Properly Aligned Missions. While various organizational models of successful teacher education programs can be easily identified, Dean Sheerer and I have elected to follow the models in use at UNC-Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, and the University of Georgia (and which are also in use at many other highly respected flagship institutions) as we conceptualized the proposed restructuring. At these three flagship universities, all of which are often cited as exemplary institutions for teacher-training programs, the English Education, Mathematics Education, and Social Studies Education programs are lodged in the education schools from which they maintain close instructional and research relationships with their corresponding departments in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences. We believe adopting their model of aligning teacher education programs with the appropriate parent organization will augment the quality of our programs and foster their future development.
Accelerating Erosion of Unit Authority for Teacher Education Curricula. Dean Sheerer has pointed out that the curricula of teacher-training programs are already largely determined by mandates from the North Carolina Legislature, the State Board of Education, the StateDepartment of Public Instruction, and accrediting agencies such as NCATE and that such mandates will increase inthe future. Her point about the external controls over teacher-training curricula disproves the contention that leaving the three programs in their current organizational structure will enable the three departments to continue shaping their teacher-training program curricula. Regardless of the unit in which the programs are lodged, the external mandates will gradually wrest more and more curricular authority from the units. This accelerating erosion of curricular control is, of course, a critical academic-quality issue. The declining ability of units to control their teacher-education curricula greatly concerns me as dean and represents one of the chief reasons I believe the three programs would fare better in the SOE, whose faculty and administration are better prepared than those in College departments to respond to external programmatic mandates.
Fear of Watered-down Teacher Education Program Curricula. Dean Sheerer has also stated publicly that, while all curricula are subject to ongoing reviews, the School of Education has no intention of changing the curricula of the three programs following their restructuring. In addition, any proposed curricular changes would have to be approved by the University Curriculum Committee on which College and other professional school faculty have many opportunities for service, so the restructuring would not give the SOE unilateral curricular control, even if its faculty wanted to take actions opposed by other faculty. The fear that the SOE will diminish the quality of the restructured programs by reducing the number of content courses is, therefore, unfounded.
Student and Public Concerns. While the location of an academic program on a university’s organization chart has critical ramifications for the program, its organizational placement is of little interest to students, parents, employers, and legislators. So unless faculty deliberately arouse student and public concerns about the restructuring, these groups would hardly notice it.
Great Randomness in Administering ECU’s Teacher Education Programs. It’s pertinent to note that when President Leo Jenkins reorganized East Carolina in the 1960’s, he reduced controversy about and resistance to the reorganization by allowing teacher education faculty to choose whether they would remain with their current units or move to the new School of Education. While many teacher education faculty chose to move to the School of Education so they could work in a unit whose mission accorded with their own teaching and research specialties, others chose to remain where they were, thus accounting for the current randomness in the organization and administration of ECU’s teacher education programs and faculty. Yet since the 1960’s, a number of College departments, such as the Geology Department, have eliminated their vestigial education programs, leaving only relatively few departments that still retain such programs and faculty. The proposed restructuring is an attempt to address the remaining problematic randomness in the organization and administration of ECU’s teacher training programs.
EPPC questions involving missions:
The mission of the College of Arts and Sciences is stated unequivocally in the opening paragraph of its Constitution, which was adopted and approved in 1992: “The College of Arts and Sciences shall be the liberal arts college of East Carolina University.” As this statement attests, the College’s avowed liberal arts mission does not encompass applied or professional programs, which if they exist at all must therefore have subordinate status.
Because professional curricula such as the teacher education programs are Constitutionally mandated to subordination within their respective College departments, the programs and their faculty are not the primary focus of the College’s attention. In addition, the education faculty are not as well integrated into their home units as the liberal arts faculty, as indicated by the fact that the duties of the teacher education faculty differ markedly from those of the liberal arts faculty in myriad and often problematical ways. For example, it is difficult for College department chairs to evaluate the teaching effectiveness of teacher education faculty whose course loads often consist almost entirely of supervising student interns. With only three or four students constituting a “class,” the education faculty are not subjected to the Student Opinion of Instruction Survey with which other faculty are evaluated.
Moreover, College department chairs find it virtually impossible to conduct peer reviews of some of the education faculty members’ most important “teaching” assignments (e.g., intern supervision). One chair has recently complained about this very point, saying, “I . . . have no contacts with the cooperating [public school] teachers and thus am in no position to solicit opinions as to the supervisors’ effectiveness. Evaluations of these essential duties required of teacher education faculty could best be accomplished by the School of Education.” Referring to the vast differences in the research and teaching responsibilities of teacher education versus liberal arts faculty, the same chair also observed that, “All of these factors [i.e., differences between teacher education faculty and liberal arts faculty] mean that when education faculty are being considered for promotion and/or tenure, it is impossible for them to have the same ‘data base’ as their ‘content’ colleagues.” The different “data bases” of teacher education faculty place them at a disadvantage in securing tenure and promotion because the contents of their PADs are evaluated by non-education faculty.
Another example of the many problems caused by the present misalignment of the three education programs involves assessment. A department chair in a different department has pointed out that his departmental assessment committee is comprised entirely of disciplinary faculty who are not qualified for evaluating the department’s education program, yet the disciplinary faculty have no choice but to handle the program assessment anyway. The same chair also complained that, since instructors of record cannot assess their own classes (as Assessment Consultant Jim Nichols pointed out again in his most recent campus visit), and since education faculty are the only ones certified to “teach” the practice teaching and field experience courses and thus are the only faculty who teach them, assessing such courses also falls to the unqualified discipline-based colleagues. Academic program assessment assumes that fellow specialists will conduct the assessments, but this assumption is seriously challenged by the current placement of the three core education programs in ECU’s liberal arts College.
As these examples demonstrate, the misaligned missions of the College’s three core teacher education programs create numerous handicaps for both the education faculty and their programs while creating special problems for the host departments and their chairs.
EPPC questions involving the current strength and the strengthening of existing education programs and the development of new programs:
As explained above, the teacher-training missions of the English Education, Mathematics Education, and Social Studies Education programs are not aligned with the College’s liberal arts mission and hence with the missions of the College departments in which they now lodge. The missions of these three programs are clearly aligned instead with the mission of the SOE, whose avowed purpose is to prepare K-12 teachers, so placing the three core teacher education programs and faculty together with Science Education and other SOE programs and faculty will correct their current misalignment and eliminate existing barriers to program development.
An important example of the proscribed development resulting from the current mission misalignment is the Mathematics Education faculty’s worthy goal of developing a doctoral program. Obviously a liberal arts college is an inappropriate organizational setting for a doctorate in Math Education, so neither the College dean nor the Mathematics Department chair can logically support such a program development, nor can they justify providing the additional resources required to support such a program. Yet the development of a doctorate in Mathematics Education
--a field in which there is “an acute shortage” (Notices of the AMS, November 2000, pp. 1267—1270)--would fit perfectly with the mission and programmatic aspirations of the School of Education, whose dean would have solid grounds for supporting such a development and providing the required additional resources.
As suggested by this example of a doctorate in Mathematics Education, the restructuring would also yield other important benefits for ECU at this critical time in the institution’s development. It would provide the SOE with the needed faculty and programmatic mass and with the increased interdisciplinary opportunities for creating other new doctoral programs in secondary education. In view of the university’s historical teacher-training mission and of the severe shortage of professional educators for the public schools, gaining approval for such doctoral programs will likely be less challenging than trying to add new doctorates in other fields. An important university-wide benefit resulting from moving the three core education faculty and programs to the SOE is, therefore, that ECU would then be able to accelerate its progress towards reclassification as a doctoral-extensive institution.
In sum, correcting the current organizational misalignment of the English Education, Mathematics Education, and Social Studies Education programs so they will operate under a parent organization whose mission accords with their own will foster the programs’ future development. Allowing the current structural misalignment to continue would only stifle the future of these programs and hence of ECU.
EPPC questions involving program growth and development and grants:
The number of students electing to major in English Education, Mathematics Education, and Social Studies Education should not be affected by the proposed structural realignment. As explained earlier, unless faculty make an issue of where a program appears on an organization chart, students are generally oblivious to where their major is situated on such a chart, and in those cases where they are aware of their program’s place on a university’s organizational chart it makes little or no difference to them.
The ability of English Education, Mathematics Education, and Social Studies Education faculty to secure and administer grants would not be affected by their relocation to the School of Education. Granting agencies are not typically concerned with such organizational issues. In addition, as the robust health and rapid development of ECU’s many interdisciplinary programs attest, the ability of faculty from different units to collaborate successfully in teaching and advising, research, and professional service is not hindered by their organizational separation. If Mathematics Education is lodged in the SOE, for example, its faculty can still collaborate with Mathematics Department faculty in securing and administering both intramural and extramural grants.
As explained above, the placement of these programs under a parent organization whose mission accords with their own will enable administrators to provide more resources, including faculty positions, for the support of the programs, so the move should have a positive impact on the ability to maintain the needed number of highly qualified education faculty for the programs. As noted earlier, the restructuring would thus have a positive qualitative impact on the programs and, hence, on the entire university.
EPPC questions on major enrollments:
These questions probably derive from the fact that the number of majors in a department and its Student Credit Hours (SCH’s) are key factors in determining its resource base, especially its number of faculty positions (FTE’s).
Reassigning the teacher education majors from the English, History, and Mathematics Departments to the SOE would mean that only these departments’ liberal arts majors would remain and that their SCH’s would decrease. Accordingly, the restructuring would eliminate the current unfair resource advantages these three departments now have over other College departments by having, in addition to their resource bases for their liberal arts programs, resource bases for their teacher education programs. As a result of the removal of this unfair advantage, the restructuring would place the three departments on the same data footing as the other departments in securing resources. Yet, as explained below, I do not anticipate radical changes to result in the disciplinary resource bases of the three departments.
The realignment of English Education and Social Studies Education is expected to have little or no impact on the English and History Department’s liberal arts programs, ability to recruit future liberal arts majors, or justification for retaining the current number of English and History faculty positions. Unlike Mathematics, English and History have healthy numbers of majors in their various liberal arts programs and teach large numbers of service courses, so their healthy major enrollments and heavy service loads should enable them to continue generating enough SCH’s to warrant maintaining their current FTE base after the restructuring of their education programs.
Because over the last 10 years the Mathematics Department has had slightly more education than liberal arts majors, historically the department has depended on its education programs to generate many of its SCH’s and hence many of its FTE’s. So the restructuring would mean both a significant loss of majors and reduction in SCH’s for Mathematics. To replace its lost majors, increase its SCH’s, and maintain its current Mathematics FTE’s, the department would need to initiate more vigorous recruiting efforts for liberal arts majors than it has used in the past. Yet I’ve assured the department that I’ll provide special resources to support its vigorous recruitment efforts and give it a grace period during which it can replace its lost education majors and increase its SCH’s before I’ll revisit its Majors+SCH’s/FTE’s ratios and reconsider its resource allocations. In other words, the Mathematics Department will have generous opportunities to make provisions for retaining its current disciplinary resource base.
Please let me know if you’d like for me to respond to other questions or issues about the proposed restructuring, and I’ll be pleased to provide responses.
pc: Dr. Bob Thompson
Interim Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Dr. Marilyn Sheerer, Dean
School of Education
Dr. Paul Dowell, Interim Chair
Department of Mathematics
Dr. Mike Palmer, Chair
Department of History
Dr. Bruce Southard, Chair
Department of English
Dr. Bob Morrison, Chair
Faculty Senate
