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SEPTEMBER 2005

New Dean of Hunter College School of Education Expands Intellectual Options

By Joan Baum, Ph.D.

Though it’s been 25 years since Dr. David Steiner was last in Manhattan, when he worked for a short time in finance on Wall Street, this Oxford-educated student of the humanities, who completed his graduate study at Harvard in political philosophy, still remembers his first and brief sojourn in the city as a twelve year old at P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village (his father was a visiting professor at NYU)—his first press interview in fact. He laughs—was it the accent that drew a reporter to ask him about life in the 7th grade? In any case, he returns now to New York as the newly appointed head of one of the city’s largest schools of education at one of the largest public university systems in the country, at one of public education’s most critical times.

He arrives by way of Boston University, where he was head of the Department of Educational Policy and, most recently, from Washington D.C. where he served as Director of Arts Education at the National Endowment for the Arts. He also arrives with a portfolio of significant publications and grant-funded research that includes a recent survey of required courses for teacher certification —not to mention books and scholarly articles that also reflect his undergraduate work in philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, and then at Harvard, much of it centered on “paideia.” Associated for years with Mortimer J. Adler, the concept of knowing and choosing from a variety of instructional methods appeals to Dr. Steiner who wants education school graduates to be “armed” with approaches drawn from wide and deep reading, no matter what the political or pedagogical perspective. Indeed, Dr. Steiner would argue—and does - prospective teachers should read both the “progressivist” and the “conservative” literature—E.D. Hirsch and Diane Ravitch along with Piaget and Gardner, Plato and Arendt, together with Dewey. Provided in concert with an outstanding practical preparation, teachers should thus be prepared to marry effective craft to deep consideration of the fundamental goals of education.

A deeply reflective man, Dr. Steiner is as graciously apologetic about sound-bite generalizations as he is coolly analytical about the problems before him at this moment of great challenge for schools of education—a “crossroads.” Shrewdly appreciative of the pressures placed on schools to perform better on standardized exams, some of it spurred by competition from private and charter schools, Dr. Steiner notes that such demands often lead to quick-fix programs that do no more than swing the pendulum back to some previous quick fix, or to manipulation of data. Besides, that which suits a part can infect the whole: without a coherent set of reforms that gives teachers a sense of autonomy and that addresses accountability and assessment at all levels in a valid and consistent way, no so-called reforms are likely to succeed for long.

Essential to any reform, however, is his strong belief that teachers must be given choice over what to do and how to do it, fully supported by their principals and held accountable by state mandates sensitive to the perils of fads and bureaucracy. He is optimistic that well-read teachers with a well-supervised practicum experience will intuitively choose instructional methods that work best for them. In some cases, the options might mean the “old-fashioned” lecture, ironically a staple of many master teacher online programs. But too many educational schools around the country, he points out, expose future teachers to only a single model of education, while school districts often demand a vastly different but equally narrow teaching method. “It’s not quite painting by numbers, but close.” And too few education schools successfully exploit technology, particularly video taping. The new dean also wants teachers—not just administrators—to be educated to use multiple assessment measures and to disaggregate test data in order to revise their classroom work. He also seeks acknowledgment of good teaching that need not cost vast amounts of money. For example, given well-designed assessments, teachers whose students consistently show exceptional improvement could be given release time and become mentor teachers, heads of department, and serve districts as advisors and evaluators of professional development programs. Poor teachers would also be held to account. Autonomy, however, must be given to principals as well. Across the country principals on average control only nine percent control their budgets—“hardly autonomy!”

Only a few weeks on the job, Dr. Steiner is deep in his own directed instruction, reading state regs, assessing Hunter’s already tight “credit-hour” program, thinking hard about how to effect change for the college’s highly diverse population. He would, it would seem, leave no serious teacher or principal behind.#

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