Expert Witness on Education - Bangor Baptist Church vs. State of Maine; Pg1

This was the only case of the seven in which private school people, rather than responding after the state attacked them, asked a federal court to block threatened action. It was also unusual that state attorneys, apparently distressed about damage I had done to their interests in Yoder, Whisner, and Rudasill, made elaborate efforts to undermine my testimony in Bangor Baptist.

Any competent expert witness knows opposing attorneys may scrutinize his background and throw skeletons at him in court, but I didn’t think three scholars whom I knew well, two of whom I previously trusted and regarded as friends, would accept lush pay from Maine for sifting my past for items that might embarrass and discredit me and go on permanent public record. (The Bangor Daily News protested the huge tax-financed costs of the case.)

It did not disturb me that the three scholars launched the best arguments they could find against the positions I advocated. I fully expected that. What they also did, apparently by pre-arrangement, was to fling charges (I’ll call them darts) against my competence and integrity, and the scholar identified below as Dartman 3, the one I had known best and trusted the most, also provided the material the state attorney used in an attempt to discredit me during almost a full courtroom day of cross examination, as the Daily News observed. I tried not to reach hasty conclusions about the motives of the three scholars, but I felt betrayed nevertheless. It was a good case, then, for seeing whether I could stay cool and testify well under fire.

One of the three dart-flingers, who had been Superintendent of Public Instruction in Illinois while I taught at the University of Chicago, asserted that I was been a troublemaker when he tried to “improve” things. In the episode to which he referred, private school leaders, fearful of impending regulation, had created the Illinois Advisory Committee on Nonpublic Schools (IACNS), secured a grant from the Continental Illinois National Bank Foundation, and commissioned me to assemble arguments and evidence in their defense. I produced a 1973 monograph titled Superparent: An Analysis of State Educational Controls, the bank Foundation released it with the mother of all publicity campaigns, the IACNS distributed it by thousands throughout the state, key members of the legislature were aroused, and the superintendent’s impending regulation was aborted.

The second dartman charged that Erickson was “out of his field” when disparaging state certification of teachers. The implication was that since he had specialized in teacher education and I had not, his opinions on the topic were superior to mine, and even that I was incompetent in that regard. I responded that I was proud not to be narrowly specialized (in keeping with the interdisciplinary tradition at the University of Chicago, which produces more Nobel Prize winners than any other university in the world). In my experience, scholars who focus too exclusively on narrow fields are incapable of sensible interpretation even there.

Many experts with narrow focus seem so preoccupied with defending current teacher preparation in the U. S. (which few would-be teachers would tolerate, I’m convinced, if our certification system did not force them into it) that they sometimes seem inept. Recent studies of alleged benefits of U. S. teacher certification, for example, have glaring flaws. The superior work of people dedicated to a career in teaching—so dedicated they will comply with certification demands to get that career--often is treated as if it were a magnificent product of certification. Kudos resonate, bands play, flags wave, and the public gets misinformed.

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