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Education Reform: Our Field, Our Voices Simply Do Not Matter
“I am an invisible man,” announces the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, adding:
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me….When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, of figments of their imaginations—indeed, everything and anything except me….That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact….you often doubt if you really exist….It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.
After the reader follows the narrator along his journey from naivete and idealism to the battered realism of coming face-to-face with his invisibility, we discover that his invisibility leads to hibernation:
I’m an invisible man and it placed me in a hole—or showed me the hole I was in….So I took to the cellar; I hibernated. I got away from it all. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t be still even in hibernation.
Invisibility and hibernation represent well the education profession because educators are more and more rendered invisible and as a result have hibernated, literally in their rooms (shut the door and teach) and figuratively in their muted voices (teachers are to be objective, neutral, apolitical).While the main elements of the current education reform movement—expanding charter schools, implementing and testing Common Core (CC), Teach for America (TFA), value-added methods (VAM) of teacher evaluation, merit pay—have created a significant amount of political and public debate (debates that by their very nature lend credibility to all of these reform policies), absent from that debate has been an essential message about the field of education: All of these education reform policies suggest that no field of education even exists.
Education: The Invisible Profession
Two powerful and persistent responses from the new reform advocates when anyone (especially an educator) challenges their reform agendas include (a) teachers are against reform and want the status quo, and (b) while teachers are quick to criticize X reform policy, they never offer any solutions of their own.
These responses are not accurate (most educators are reformers at heart, and educators, thus, have many things to offer in terms of better reform agendas), but most of all they exist in a narrative that renders the entire field of education invisible.
Modern education as a field of study is over a century old. A great deal of consensus and enduring debates characterize teacher education, pedagogy, curriculum, teacher evaluation, and assessment—all rich and vibrant elements of the larger field of education, informed by decades of practitioners and educational researchers and well as theorists and philosophers.
My doctoral work included writing a biography of Lou LaBrant, who lived to be 102 and taught from 1906-1971. Recurring messages of LaBrant’s work as a teacher and scholar reveal an ignored fact of the teaching profession: Education in the U.S. has been primarily driven by political and bureaucratic mandates that have reduced teachers to implementing education policy, not creating it.
In LaBrant’s unpublished memoir (written during the Reagan administration), she also catalogued living and teaching through three back-to-basic movements, highlighting the bulk of a century of digging the same standards-based reform hole that has never once been shown to work.
The most recent thirty years have intensified that legacy that reaches back to at least the first decade of the twentieth century, but was identified by LaBrant (1947) directly: “A brief consideration will indicate reasons for the considerable gap between the research currently available and the utilization of that research in school programs and methods.”
In effect, then, for a century, teachers have been invisible in their own field, except as both compliant workers implementing political and bureaucratic mandates and as often-silent scapegoats as that bureaucracy fails.
However, even that teachers have primarily been those who implement education policy instead of those creating it is more complicated than it seems.
For example, Regie Routman and Stephen Krashen documented the typical dysfunction that characterizes education policy. By the 1990s, California’s state literacy curriculum was being labeled a failure by politicians, the media, and the public; the culprit was whole language.
Yet, Routman confronted the charges as misleading because of two factors: (1) Much of the measurable decline in California test scores was strongly correlated with decreased education funding and an influx of English language learners, and (2) while teachers received extensive in-service for implementing whole language, the vast majority of the teachers returned to their classes, shut their doors (hibernated), and taught as they had been taught, as they had always taught—thus, never implementing the whole language pedagogy and curriculum that constituted the official bureaucracy of the state.
Krashen presented a a detailed, evidence-based unmasking of the Plummet Legend:
The Great Plummet of 1987-1992 never happened. California’s reading scores were low well before the Language Arts Framework Committee met in 1987. There is compelling evidence that the low scores are related California’s impoverished print environment. There is also strong and consistent evidence that the availability of reading material is related to how much children read, and how much children read is related to how well they read. The skills and testing hysteria that has gripped California and other states was unnecessary.
Perpetuating a similar pattern to the whole language Plummet Legend, the current reform agenda fails to seek from teachers themselves either what the primary challenges are facing education or what credible solutions would best address those hurdles.
As a result, teachers as invisible workers rebel as Ellison’s narrator does, by hibernating and embracing their autonomy and agency in ways that do not serve them, their students, or education well.
Just as teenagers seek out self-defeating ways to appear adult (cigarettes, alcohol, recreational drugs, sex) as expressions of their autonomy and agency, invisible workers of all kinds respond in dysfunctional ways when their autonomy is denied and their voices muted—just as Routman detailed about California during the rise and fall of whole language.
CC, charter schools, TFA, VAM, and merit pay plans are driven by advocates who refuse to see not only teachers but also the entire history and field of education, or as Arundhati Roy explains, “We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
If teacher quality is a genuine problem in U.S. public education, we already have a knowledge base for teacher preparation, teacher evaluation, and compensation.
If curriculum and pedagogy are genuine problems in U.S. public education, we already have a knowledge base for curriculum and pedagogy.
Let’s allow for the first time in history educators the recognition they deserve to examine, evaluate, and reform their own field. Current reform that is top-down and driven by the same historical and bureaucratic methods that have brought us to where we now stand is destined to repeat the same patterns we have already experienced for over 100 years.
But educators must step outside the social norm of apolitical, silent, hibernating teachers. Educators must confront our invisibility, but most of all, our culpability in our own de-professionalization, our hibernation, as Ellison’s narrator recognizes:
Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it. Perhaps that’s my greatest social crime, I’ve overstayed my hibernation, since there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play.
Alternative Education Reform: Among the Invisible and “Preferably Unheard”
Educators as workers in a profession rendered invisible and “preferably unheard” are increasingly being demonized, marginalized, and challenged as defenders of the status quo and anti-reformers.
The Sisyphean hell of being a teacher includes having almost no autonomy or power in educational policy but receiving the brunt of the blame when the outcomes of those policies do not meet the goals promised.
Yet, throughout the academic and scholarly press as well as the public media and “new” media, such as blogs, educators, researchers and scholars present daily alternatives to the repackaged reform movement committed to the same failed policies that have plagued education for a century—standards, testing, and assorted business models of efficiency forced onto education.
Education is a massive and complex endeavor, and the common sense perception of how to address teaching and learning, how to reform schools that appear to be broken, envisions equally massive and complex solutions (think VAM and merit pay).
And here is where educators may be trapped in our quest to discredit misguided reform and to take ownership of credible reform: Our alternatives appear too simple on the surface but are incredibly complicated, unpredictable, and unwieldy in their implementation. In short, most credible calls for education reform are outside the box thinking when compared to traditional education, business models, and social norms.
For example, Larry Ferlazzo in one sentence dismantles much of the current reform movement and offers alternatives:
Even though it’s not necessarily an either/or situation, I would suggest that both educators and students would be better served by emphasizing creating the conditions for intrinsic motivation over teaching techniques designed to communicate standards-based content.
Again, maybe this is too simple, but education reform does not need new standards, new tests, or new accountability and evaluation/merit pay policies.Education reform is needed, but should be re-imagined as a few different paradigms:
• Instead of a standards-based education system that places the authority for curriculum in a centralized bureaucracy, teacher autonomy and expertise should be the focus of reform—paralleling the culture of higher education in which professors are hired for field expertise as well as the teaching of their fields. [This change in the midset of reform and the culture of K-12 schools, thus, creates the conditions in which a revised paradigm in accountability can be implemented, see below.]
• Instead of a test-based education system that measures, quantifies, ranks, and evaluates, high-quality and rich feedback for both teachers and students should be the focus of reform; feedback is formative and thus contributes positively to learning and growth.
• Instead of high-stakes accountability focusing on outcomes and that demands compliance as well as blurs causation and correlation (teachers, for example, being held accountable for student outcomes), teacher accountability focusing on the learning conditions provided by the teacher should be embraced. This reform measure should emphasize the equity of opportunity provided all students [1], regardless of the teacher, the school the community, or the home environment.
• Instead of devaluing teacher preparation through alternative programs or ideologies that suggest content knowledge is more valuable than (or even exclusive of) pedagogy and through teacher evaluation policies that label, rank, and seek to fire teachers, teacher preparation and teacher evaluation should honor the complex nature of content knowledge and the pedagogy needed to teach that knowledge (see the first bullet above) while emphasizing mentoring and teaching as constant learning over stack ranking and dismissing a predetermined percentage of teachers.
Educators know what and how to teach. Education is a rich field with a tremendous amount of consensus and enduring debates along the spectrum of subcategories that constitute education—pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, teacher preparation, teacher evaluation, and more.
The great irony of the need to shift away from the historical dependence on bureaucratic efficiency models of education reform and toward a professional and scholarly culture of being a teacher and conducting schooling is that the latter is far more challenging for teachers and students, and as Felazzo explains:
Let’s look at what some research shows to be necessary to create the conditions for intrinsic motivation to flourish, and how that research can be applied specifically to teaching and learning about reading and writing….Pink argues that there are three key elements required for the development of intrinsic motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose…..Helping students to motivate themselves is a far more effective and energizing teaching/learning strategy than the faux magical one of extrinsic motivation.
Both teachers and students can and will benefit from education reform that focuses on the conditions of learning that honor “autonomy, mastery, and purpose” in ways that allow for failure, revision, and unpredictable outcomes—none of which are fostered in the efficiency model that historically and currently corrupts education reform.
[1] See Wright’s examination of access to equitable early childhood education
Reference
Krashen, S. (2002, June). Whole language and the Great Plummet of 1987-92: An urban legend from California. Phi Delta Kappan, 748-753.
LaBrant, L. (1947, January). Research in language. Elementary English, 24(1), 86-94.
The Socialist Objective: “I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity”
Under a pen-name for a newspaper in 1943, George Orwell wrote about Christmas, veering into a declaration of the Socialist objective, predating by many decades Kurt Vonnegut’s career of making similar and powerful claims about the need for human kindness:
The Socialist objective is not a society where everything comes right in the end, because kind old gentlemen give away turkeys. What are we aiming at, if not a society in which ‘charity’ would be unnecessary? We want a world where Scrooge, with his dividends, and Tiny Tim, with his tuberculous leg, would both be unthinkable. But does that mean we are aiming at some painless, effortless Utopia? At the risk of saying something which the editors of Tribune may not endorse, I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.
Eliot Rosewater in Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater implores:
Go over to her shack, I guess. Sprinkles some water on the babies, say, “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:
“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” (p. 129)
With both Orwell and Vonnegut, we should hear echoing behind their words, Eugene V. Debs, from his Statement to the Court (September 18, 1918):
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free….
I believe, Your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation ought to own and control its own industries. I believe, as all Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned—that industry, the basis of our social life, instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all…
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence….
I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.
When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.
Top Posts of 2013, and Thank You
This year, 2013, is when I took the plunge and began blogging at my own site—despite trepidation about “who was I..” and “who would bother….”
Because of the kindness of my fellow educators, bloggers, and Twitter-friends, I am very pleased with how many read and share my work. It is something I value as someone driven to write.
I am now tiptoeing into another commitment that started this month, but will blur into 2014—another writer urge, and thus a renewed anxiety. I am hopeful it can be even partially as fulfilling as committing to this blog.
And thus, thank you, thank you all deeply …
As a teacher and university academic/scholar perched among those who still expect academics/scholars to prepare peer-reviewed articles for journals almost no one will read and to take a nonpolitical pose, I have offered and will continue to offer this blog as an argument that our public work, our open-access work, our political voices are what truly matters most.
And thus, my top posts of 2013, those with 1000 views or more:
Faces of Free Speech
The controversy over comments by Phil Robertson in GQ has become a public (although jumbled) debate about free speech.
Matt Bruenig has done a valuable job highlighting how that public discourse has ignored a much more complicated admission, by comparing how the Right has responded to Robertson as that contrasts with the Right’s reaction to the 2003 Dixie Chicks controversy:
It is not mysterious why conservatives think the Phil Robertson disciplining is rights-infringing but think the Dixie Chicks disciplining was not. They support what Phil Robertson had to say, but oppose what the Dixie Chicks had to say. Despite their pretensions to the contrary, conservatives, and most people in general for that matter, do not care about content-neutral procedural fairness. They care about winning their stuff and beating the other’s side stuff.
Bruenig is right; the Robertson controversy so far in the U.S. is about many things, but it isn’t about free speech (and it hasn’t confronted the danger of masking at least hateful if not hate-speech behind calls for religious tolerance and free speech—an act repeated in U.S. history when the Bible served as a defense of slavery and keeping women second-class citizens).
The whole thing could, however, lead to a valuable discussion of free speech—placing what Robertson said and what consequences he faced against free speech and its consequences in contemporary Russia.
In the summer of 2013, I watch a documentary on the Russian musical act Pussy Riot and then examined their political acts and imprisonment in the context of the Dixie Chicks’ controversy.
While Robertson and his controversy dominate the U.S. pop media, Pussy Riot members were released from prison in Russia.
In the U.S., this is the face of free speech:
In Russia, this is the face of free speech.
In the U.S., a reality-TV star making millions of dollars freely offered his ideas in a magazine people are free to buy or not. The business for whom the reality-TV star works freely made decisions and viewers in the U.S. were free to respond as they wished.
Free speech in the U.S. is about the freedom of expression, not the freedom from the consequences of that expression. We have freedom of speech (freedom comes with consequences), not license.
In Russia, young women used their art to make political statements calling for freedom and equity among all people in their home country. They were imprisoned for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”
There are lessons here about freedom of speech, but I have seen little evidence we are taking the opportunity to examine much less learn them.
This Is the Common Core You Support?
Teachers of Conscience and the Common Core Scylla and Charybdis
In our popular discourse, we are prone to say we are caught between a rock and a hard place, a veiled allusion to Homer’s Scylla and Charybdis.
For K-12 public school teachers over the past thirty years, our Scylla and Charybdis have been federal, state, district, and school mandates on one side and our own professional expertise and autonomy on the other as we navigate the rough waters of serving our students.
When Diane Ravitch spoke at my home university, she offered a talk to a small group in the afternoon and then attended an informal gathering before her main speech. Since she and I had become virtual friends through email and Twitter, this was the first time we met in person. I took that opportunity to introduce Diane to a former graduate student of mine who at the time was struggling in a “no excuses” environment at the high-poverty, majority-minority public school where she taught.
I explained this as I introduced the early-career teacher to Diane, who immediately looked up from signing her book to say, “Don’t lose your job. We need you in the classroom.”
Those of us at the university level—especially emeriti and tenured professors—have positions that are unlike those of K-12 teachers, especially K-12 teachers in Southern states that are right-to-work (non-tenure).
Having taught in public school in SC for 18 years before entering higher education for the last 13 years, I know those worlds well.
And so I immediately thought of Diane’s comment when Katie posted on my blog post, Supporting Common Core Is Supporting Entire Reform Machine:
What suggestions do you have for productive resistance for those of us who have no choice but to work with it?
I also was forced to confront a hard lesson I learned when I was a co-instructor in the Spartanburg Writing Project. A new teacher, Dawn Mitchell, was in our summer institute, and once we confronted her with the tension between her first-year practices and best practice in literacy, she became the personification for me of the potential paralysis classroom practitioners face because of the Scylla and Charybdis of mandates and best practice—as well as the weight of teaching and blogging that is passionate and demanding themselves.
Dawn taught me that my role is to help teachers navigate the Scylla and Charybdis—not to reinforce the hard place of best practice. I now (thank you, Dawn) try to emphasize that teachers need to seek ways to incorporate one new best practice on Monday, but not to feel obligated to reinvent their classrooms wholesale tomorrow, and above all else, not to sacrifice themselves on the alter of nonconformity.
Now Katie has joined a long list of others who have taught me. As an apology (I should not be blogging in ways that contribute to the anxiety and pressure that K-12 teachers already feel) and an act of good faith to do better, let me answer her question:
- First, let’s all start with do not harm to children and students. If we start here, we can evaluate better how to navigate our practices under the stress of mandates and best practice.
- Be professional. K-12 teachers must be diligent about their professionalism when interacting with administration, colleagues, parents, and students. Part of that professionalism is knowing our fields. Let’s start with a powerful knowledge base of best practice, and then be prepared to show how mandates do and do not reflect that best practice. Too often, we start with the mandates; let’s flip that paradigm.
- Find or create a community of professionals, preferably within our schools but including wider communities such as forming a Facebook group, joining state and national professional organizations, committing or recommitting to graduate degrees or graduate courses. One of the most corrosive aspects of teaching is isolation. Isolation erodes your professionalism and feeds your anxiety as well as your distrust in yourself.
- Once you’ve found or created that community, take the time to do a careful and honest appraisal of what mandates are genuinely beyond your control to change and what mandates are open for how they are fulfilled. Start your efforts for reform with the latter. Few things are as harmful to our field of teaching than a misguided fatalism about what things we perceive as requirements of our teaching.
- Seek ways to communicate with your administration that are professional and evidence-based. Share articles that highlight the need for best practice and the problems with mandates. Discussions with administration are best when they are between you and the administrator(s)—in other words, not public and not unannounced—allowing those with authority to consider your points without feeling as if that authority is being challenged. Begin to build a collegial atmosphere in your school, among teachers and among teachers and administrators.
- Be political in ways that will not jeopardize your job. Share research and best practice with parents and state-level representatives, especially those directly involved in education committees. Share that research with school board members. Teachers are our best hope for teaching everyone, not just the students in our classes.
- Create a public voice for yourself by blogging, Tweeting, and/or writing Op-Eds for local, state, and regional publications. With this, I urge caution. All K-12 teachers run some degree of risk by becoming a public voice, but I remain convinced that we must speak publicly. The challenge for each teachers is learning what works, what is safe, and then what you can do to increase the safe space for teachers’ public voices. Teachers need also to consider how to join the scholarly community by conducting classroom-based research and submitting work to scholarly journals—often a less dangerous avenue to creating a public voice.
- Offer alternatives to the practices you feel are misguided. Since mandates are the given in the field of teaching, we are not served well by simply discounting what is being done (even when we are right). What should we do instead and how will that be better? Can you share with colleagues and administration models of the alternatives you have implemented in your classroom, highlighting how those practices serve both best practice and mandates?
In short, Katie’s question leads to ways in which all teachers can establish themselves as knowledgable, proactive, and professional.
Few things will deteriorate a teacher’s passion more than the fatalism of conforming to mandates she/he feels are misguided. As with students, teachers need and deserve autonomy, voice, and action.
As a final real-world point: Some Common Core advocates have responded to me by stating that the math CC standards are better than what the state had before. My argument is that instead of advocating for CC, all teachers should be advocating for teacher autonomy and thus the professional embracing of best practice identified by our perspective fields—not mandated in public policy by non-teachers, and not linked to highs-stakes testing.
Education certainly needs reform, but that reform must come from the professionals and for the good of our students.
We don’t need standards to teach, we need students. And we don’t need test scores to know how we have done, we need the faces and voices of each child we teach.
Katie, be true to your students, be true to yourself, and walk forward with patience and confidence. As Henry David Thoreau reminds us: “One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.”
Choose your something with care, and don’t let it be a burden, but a call.
I Don’t Need Standards To Teach, I Need Students
Just days ago, I completed my twenty-eighth year as a teacher [1]—eighteen as a high school teacher of English followed by ten years as a professor of education.
And I am excited about the coming semesters because, as I have felt every year of my teaching life, I know I failed in some ways this past academic year and I am confident I will be better in my next opportunities to teach.
As a teacher, I am far from finished—and I never will be.
On this Mother’s Day*, I want to make a statement to the many and powerful leaders in education reform, all of whom have either no experience or expertise, or very little, as teachers:
I don’t need standards to teach, I need students.
If You Have Never Taught, You Simply Don’t Understand
Governors, policy wonks, and think tanks, I don’t need the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
Secretary Duncan, I have no interest in racing to the top, when that means the top of the pile of my fellow teachers trampled by the policies you have created and promoted.
Bill Gates, I don’t want a dime of your billions; in fact, I am not even interested in what you do (I have always used Apple products) as long as you drop education as your hobby.
Michelle Rhee, I have no interest in my students having mouths forcibly shut by me. I am here to hear their open minds and mouths.
Pearson, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, and every company seeking to sell me anything to support my implementing CCSS or preparing my students for NAEP, state high-stakes tests, or the SAT, I am not interested in buying anything. No software, no hardware, no textbooks, no worksheets. Nothing.
Professional organizations and unions, I need you to stop racing for a place at the table with the reformers and corporations noted above, and instead, to seek ways to support my autonomy and agency as a professional so that the autonomy and agency of the children in our schools can become the primary focus of universal public education for free people.
And, finally, to anyone who thinks you know what I should teach and how, please seek a place at the front of a classroom filled with other people’s children, teach for a few years, and then let’s get together and talk. I am eager to be collegial in the pursuit of community as a key part of teaching and learning.
Then What?
Becoming and being a teacher is a constant state of becoming. A teacher must be always a student and scholar of her/his field(s), her/his pedagogy, and her/his students.
What the people and groups identified above seem not to understand is that for my eighteen years of teaching high school English, I probably taught about 2000 students; thus, I taught about 2000 different classes. And not a single measurable outcome of any of those students predicts much of anything about my effectiveness or if I’ll succeed with any future student. Some of the students who appear successful did so in spite of my failures. Some of the students who appear to have failed were provided my very best as a teacher. Almost all of the good and bad I have created as a teacher are not measurable or apparent in manageable ways.
I wasn’t concerned about meeting anyone’s standards or preparing any student for a test or making sure any student was prepared for the next grade, college, or the workforce.
And I never will be.
Instead of standards, testing, competition, labeling, ranking, and sorting (all the cancerous elements of traditional schooling and the current accountability era), as a teacher, I need to offer my students authentic learning opportunities in which they produce artifacts of their understanding and expertise. My students need from me my authoritative feedback to those authentic artifacts.
I have no interest in competing with my fellow teachers for whose students score highest on tests so I can earn more money than my colleagues. I don’t, either, want to join forces with my in-school colleagues to outperform other schools in order to compete for their customers. I couldn’t care less how my state’s schools compare with other states or how U.S. schools compare on international tests.
Absolutely none of that matters.
While not unique to Howard Gardner, we have a very clear idea of what it is teachers should do in the pursuit of learning. Gardner’s The Disciplined Mind examines a conception of education not distracted by accountability.
Teaching and learning must be primarily collaborative, a community of learners.
The goals of learning must be the broad and clear—although always evolving—defining qualities of the fields of knowledge we honor in academia.
Every history course, for example, would pursue, What does it mean to be a historian? Every science class, What does it mean to be a scientist? Every writing class, What does it mean to be a writer?
Teaching and learning are the collaborative pursuit of questions. Anything else is indoctrination, dehumanizing, and antithetical to democratic ideals and human agency.
Humans never will—and never should—learn the same box of knowledge. Humans never will—and never should—learn in linear, sequential ways.
And there is no need for any of that anyway as long as we seek to be a community instead of barbaric individuals committed to the conquest of goods at the expense of others.
There, I think, is the harsh and ugly fact. Those privileged elites—again the people and groups noted above—have acquired their status on the backs of others, corrosive evidence for them that they somehow deserve that and that it all is the way things should be. It is theirs then to perpetuate dehumanizing ways of being—labeling, sorting, ranking against the rules that gave them their power.
I choose otherwise.
I don’t need standards to teach, I need students.
* My becoming a teacher can be traced directly to the wonderful and rich influence of my mother, and that influence is inextricable from the powerful and enduring influence of my father.
[1] Originally posted at Daily Kos (May 13, 2012), and re-posted at The Answer Sheet (May 17, 2012)
Supporting Common Core Is Supporting Entire Reform Machine
Supporting Common Core is supporting either an increase or diversion of education tax dollars for funding CC-aligned textbooks, CC-aligned materials, CC-based high-stakes tests, CC-related teacher inservice and workshops, and expanded analysis of CC-based test data.
Supporting Common Core is supporting a continuation (at least) or an expansion (likely) of high-stakes testing for children, despite standardized testing negatively impacting the schooling and futures of African American, Latino/a, high-poverty, ELL, and special needs students—as standardized testing remains class, gender, and race biased and overwhelmingly a reflection of out-of-school factors.
Supporting Common Core is supporting the move to VAM-style teacher evaluations and merit pay.
Supporting Common Core is supporting the belief that teachers are inadequate, both lacking and not deserving professional autonomy.
Supporting Common Core is supporting Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, and edu-governors across the U.S.
Ultimately supporting Common Core is a concession, an abdication to the education is in “crisis” rhetoric reaching back to the mid-twentieth century, built on claims that standards are low, schools are failing, teachers have low expectations, and everyone is depending on excuses.
If you remain committed to Common Core, I invite you to read and respond to the following:
Corporations Are Behind The Common Core State Standards — And That’s Why They’ll Never Work
Are Common Core and Testing Debates “Two Different Matters”?
Faith-Based Education Reform: Common Core as Standards-and-Testing Redux
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 