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.#
