ABSTRACT
Maria Santos de Barona, dean of the College of Education at Purdue University had a unique opportunity in May of 2015. At a meeting of the trustees of the university she had the grim task of explaining the wholesale collapse of undergraduate enrollment in the College of Education-down a third over the course of five years-to, many would argue, the architect of that collapse, former governor and current president of the university, Mitch Daniels. Daniels had presided over, in his time at the helm of the state, the explosion of ‘school reform’ initiatives including massive voucher expansion, the adoption of punitive teacher accountability measures, and salary freezes that coupled with the rhetorical flourishes on which such ‘reform’ initiatives relied (the inherent and often explicit singling out of teachers as lazy, uncaring, underqualified, and easily replaceable) would, Santos de Barona implied, very soon bring the profession of teaching to an end. She noted that, in addition to Purdue, Ball State University had seen its enrollment drop by nearly half; teacher education in the state, in essence, had been put on life support. Mike Pence, Daniels’s successor in the governor’s mansion, it was understood, was standing at the bedside, pillow at the ready, set to finish
the job (Bangert, 2015). The meeting was, from the standpoint of a longtime educator like Santos de Barona, perhaps meant to elicit a particular response from the trustees just as much as it was probably meant to signal a crisis to the media and citizens of the state. The dean, in other words, was teaching and relying through numbers on a long-standing trope of the educational establishment: the teachable moment. In this construction, lessons aim at producing revelation in students, such that learning is clear, even visible in the eyes and the very posture of the learner-more on that in a moment. But suffice to say that the double here is the sense of teacher education (and public education just generally) in the state of Indiana and beyond as nearing the eschaton: the end-time events-in massive under enrollment, in teacher shortage, in the wholesale defunding of public schools-have begun (Kumashiro, 2012; Ravitch, 2013; Watkins, 2012).
