“outside the system being described”(2013: 240) and are“unexplained by the
model”(2014: 4). Home, family and socio-economic influences are excluded,
which “render unimportant, perhaps even invisible, the social and economic
inequalities that really prevent some students from doing as well as others. As a
result they help to perpetuate unequal schooling and unequal outcomes”(Thrupp
and Lupton 2006 : 312). As Mills and Gale ( 2010 : 30) have argued“context is being
forgotten in the rush to attribute student achievement solely to what teachers do.”
Even when acknowledged, teacher effectiveness models are not good at‘control-
ling’for these broader issues, partly because“researchers simply do not know all
the variables that affect teachers in their classroom”(Berliner 2013 : 240) and partly
because these external influences interact with, and so cannot be divorced from,
what teachers do in classrooms. Outside-school influences on achievement cannot
be readily dismissed as simply‘background factors’or‘controlled’by statistical
manipulation, as proponents of teacher effectiveness models suggest
(Skourdoumbis and Gale 2013 ).
Yet even within schools, teachers are not the most significant influence. The
relationship between teacher and student is far more complex (Berliner 2014 ). As
with all social interactions, classroom interactions are never entirely unilateral.
Interlocution with others is always party-dependent; it necessarily involves each
party’s changing understandings and perceptions of the context and of those with
whom they engage. Interlocutors can‘speak back’to each other and change their
position, disrupting the tentative understandings they might have of each other. The
implications for teaching are that:
the simple model of influence, Teacher—> Student, held so widely by the general public,
and particularly by our politicians, is surely reciprocal, and more like this: Teacher <->
Student. And, 25–35 of such separate relationships need to be negotiated in every class-
room. (Berliner 2014 :3)Teaching–learning relations are further complicated by the combinations and per-
mutations of Student <-> Student. Thus, the focus on teachers makingthedifference
to student achievement (Skourdoumbis 2014 ) is reductive in its simplification of
learning and in its disregard for external, out-of-school influences. Student
performance can never be directly or exclusively attributed to teacher performance.
- Teachers’performance is poor and TE is at fault
But once you accept that students are performing poorly at school and imagine a
close relationship with the performance of teachers, it is then a logical step to argue
that the education of teachers—specifically, teacher education—leaves a lot to be
desired.
Official documents suggest that TE needs to be improved and entry standards
need to be lifted. In England,“the current cohort of trainees is one of our best ever.
But we have much further to go”(Cameron and Clegg 2010 : 3). The imperative
remains to“continue [to improve] the quality of teachers and teaching”(DfE 2010 :
20). In Australia, these same sentiments are expressed more bluntly and with greater
pessimism:“the Australian community does not have confidence in the quality and
35 The Prevailing Logic of Teacher Education... 525