one - After the crash: a new crisis of teacher education

Summary

At the end of the film adaptation of Michael Lewis's The big short (2010) – an account of how the US sub-prime mortgagebacked securities market led to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 – one of the main characters, in voice-over, offers this coda:

In the years that followed hundreds of bankers and rating's agency executives went to jail. The SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] was completely overhauled. And Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries.

[Beat]

Just kidding.

The banks took the money the American people gave them and used it to lobby the Congress to kill big reform. And then America blamed immigrants and poor people. And this time … even teachers. (Randolph and McKay, 2015, p 125)

This book, like that character, identifies the GFC as a significant point in the evolution of social policies around the world and, particularly, policies for education and for the preparation of schoolteachers. The GFC was a social, cultural and political shock to globalised systems as well as an economic one. It prompted nations to rethink different aspects of their welfare states – not only benefits (such as pensions and sickness payments) but public services such as health and education, their scope and scale. As Andrew Gamble put it soon after the immediate shock, the GFC created ‘spaces for thinking differently’ about societies (Gamble, 2010, p 703), at the level of a ‘fundamental reordering’ (p 4), and the aftershocks of the GFC have unfolded across societies in the years that followed.

As the character in The big short observed, there was also a new emphasis on linking teachers – and their effectiveness in achieving good test results for their students – to the economy, often explicitly to measures such as gross domestic product, to industrial productivity and international competitiveness, from a ‘human capital’ perspective (Becker, 1975). Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2004) had previously shown how teacher education became a ‘policy problem’ – and not only a teacher education policy problem but a much larger one of societal consequence. So it wasn't that this hadn't happened before; it had (see also Furlong et al, 2009).