Building on our #NCTE15: G.05 Teaching Beyond the Classroom: Social Media as Teacher Activism and Professionalism and the focus of the 2016 annual convention, Faces of Advocacy, we are forming a roundtable, Confronting Educator Advocacy with Pre-Service and Early Career Teachers.

We see a need for addressing the experiences, struggles, and strategies for supporting advocacy by pre-service and early career teachers.

Administrators, veteran teachers, teacher educators, as well as pre-service and early career teachers—our stories and how we confront the need for teachers to challenge policy, racism, sexism, and classism in our schools and society will be the focus of the presentation and roundtables.

If you are interested in joining this proposal, email me (paul.thomas@furman.edu) ASAP.

Table/topics addressing challenges for advocacy related to race/racism, gender/sexism, sexuality/homophobia, and classism are encouraged.

Some draft table ideas include:

Table: Teacher Advocacy: A Southern Dilemma

P.L. Thomas, Sean P. Connors, Nicole Amato, Kristen Marakoff

Table: Guilt as Guidance

Shekema Holmes Silveri

Table: Risk and Reward in Writing for the Public?

Peter Smagorinsky, Christina Berchini

Table: Writing for the Public – Positive Stories, Critique, or Both

Steve Zemelman

Table: Schools of education in advocacy partnerships with parents, students, communities, and k12 school personnel

Julie Gorlewski

Table: Advocating for Disability Access

Patricia Dunn

Table: What does Advocacy look like in the Rural and Small Town School

Patricia Waters

This mixing of activism and teaching, this insistence that education cannot be neutral on the critical issues of our time, this movement back and forth from the classroom to the struggles outside by teachers who hope their students will do the same, has always frightened the guardians of traditional education. They prefer that education simply prepare the new generation to take its proper place in the old order, not to question that order.

Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

There is a clear but disturbing reason that those in power in the U.S. offer and speak to the rugged individualism myth, stirring antagonism toward “government” and “unions,” for example.

The collective is always more powerful than the individual—when the individuals realize it, when the individuals commit to the collaborative power of that collective.

Competition devours while collaboration lifts.

For public education (paralleling the criminal justice system and most public institutions), there is a long and entrenched history that is indistinguishable from here, now.

How we arrived here?

Fatalism.

Neutrality.

Compromise.

Objectivity.

These are the tools of the status quo of inequity.

In education, then, students, parents, communities, and educators have been victims of all four, but have also relinquished to them.

In education, as well, the very organizations (collectives) that could have saved us—unions; professional organizations; local, state, and federal government—instead embraced fatalism, neutrality, compromise, and objectivity.

Fatalism: “We can’t change this so let’s deal with it the best we can.”

Neutrality: “We are taking no position but will provide any support we can.”

Compromise: “Both sides must have a seat at the table.”

Objectivity: “Numbers don’t lie.”

Let us recognize:

Neutrality in times of great harm perpetuates great harm.

Compromise between inequity and equity is inequity.

Langston Hughes implores: “Let America be America again,” continuing:

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

This is from 1935, but rings all too true today, 80 years later, as Hughes confronts: “O, let America be America again—/The land that never has been yet”—building to a final plea we have yet to heed:

We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Poets, priests and politicians
Have words to thank for their positions
Words that scream for your submission
And no one’s jamming their transmission

“De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,” The Police

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure—prison, hospital, factory, school, family….The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools….But everyone knows that these institutions are finished….These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies….In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything [emphasis added]. (Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, pp. 3, 5)

Let me break here my own guidelines to my students and open with something rather boring, a full disclosure.

I am the out-going Council Historian for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and on my second set of editors as a column editor for English Journal. Members and prominent leaders in NCTE are my colleagues, dear friends, and among the most respected people in my fields of literacy and education.

In short, I credit NCTE and the people of NCTE for a significant portion of my professional and personal accomplishments.

That said, something powerful and disturbing has remained with me after the 2015 annual conference in blustery Minneapolis, MN—something that leaves me with a spark of hope underneath a growing black cloud of doom.

This is a story about a place within a place within a place: Minneapolis, the convention center, and then the exhibitor hall.

As NCTE members converged on Minneapolis, another unfortunate but all too common police killing of a young black man occurred in Minneapolis, sparking a protest and occupation by #BlackLivesMatter.

On a much smaller scale and under considerably less urgent conditions, a select group of NCTE members organized a protest and occupation of the Pearson booth looming large over the exhibit hall (including also prominent displays by Scholastic, Heinemann, and other education-related corporations):

The spark of hope? Yes, I fully support the protest of Pearson, and hope that along with this demonstration of resistance, the renewed focus by NCTE on advocacy (a tribute to the legacy of Kent Williamson) is a sign that educators and their professional organizations have begun to recognize and even embraced the essential political nature of our profession, of being a professional.

This, I think, could be a unifying #EducatorVoicesMatter (and if so, it must be one that seeks out and includes all voices in our field, which itself has many challenges left with racism, sexism, and classism).

Now, this becomes much more complicated because I have a couple pointed (and what may appear to be accusatory) questions?

Why only Pearson? And just how did Pearson grow into this all-encompassing, all-powerful evil?

Over the past decade or so, I have witnessed the increased presence and influence of teaching/learning and testing businesses in education broadly, but at NCTE specifically. The exhibit hall is just a real-world manifestation of the inordinate advertising space consumed in NCTE publications and the enormous funding drain these companies create for public schools across the U.S.

With deference to Deleuze above, I must assert once again that Pearson et al. are the monsters, but it is we who are the Drs. Frankenstein.

And it is this: Thirty-plus years of state and federal accountability mandates have proven that there is no correlation between the presence or quality of standards and student achievement, that high-stakes testing always trumps any good intentions of standards, necessarily reduces the curriculum, and harms vulnerable student populations. And:

As the absence or presence of rigorous or national standards says nothing about equity, educational quality, or the provision of adequate educational services, there is no reason to expect CCSS or any other standards initiative to be an effective educational reform by itself. (Mathis, 2012)

Nonetheless, when the Common Core train pulled out of the station, politicians as engineers, it was with many educators and professional organizations (yes, NCTE) sprinting to hop on board, unwilling or unable to see students, public education, teacher autonomy, and the like tied up on the tracks as if in a silent movie.

I will now risk being accused of arrogance here, but I detailed carefully that the only people set to benefit from the Common Core mania were political leaders and teaching/learning/testing corporations, and then reported that in fact this is what happened, with Pearson standing at the top of the pile of cash.

We in education are always starting over, we are never finished with anything—driven into frantic states of crisis by the politics and bureaucracy of government-run education.

Pearson et al. are simply the natural manifestations of allowing our public institutions to feed our consumer/capitalist economy.

I hope there will be more and larger protests. I hope that spirit of resistance and professional autonomy—the rising of educator voices—grows.

But we must also make a real stand. No more new standards, no more new tests, no more dehumanizing accountability, no more top-down education legislation and mandates.

And that begins with educators as well as their professional organizations—not simply in word or protest, but in actions taken.

I fully accept Pearson et al. are the monsters, but literature shows us we must look at the Drs. Frankenstein for how the monsters came about.

Pointing fingers at Pearson cannot hide the blood on our hands.

A four-sport athlete in high school and an early-rising working-class adult, my father was never a literary or academic man. But he was a storyteller—weaving again and again the narratives of his life growing up and then the uniquely late 1950s, early 1960s courtship and marrying of my mother.

I am hurtling toward 55, and I can still tell you every story, in intricate detail. Some times, I find it difficult to extricate my father’s stories from my own redneck past, in fact.

Since my childhood, then, I have never drifted too far from history. I recall vividly the first test I ever failed—a pop quiz in world history my sophomore year of high school. And then throughout college, I took history courses every chance I could.

If I had understood how college worked (a flaw of a working-class upbringing), I would have orchestrated those courses into a history minor; instead, I simply returned again and again to history classes because I felt drawn.

That same gravitational pull landed me in an EdD program at the University of South Carolina, where coursework and then my dissertation—a biography of Lou LaBrant—were grounded in the history of education and English education.

November of 2015 is bittersweet for me as a consequence because this is my last annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) as the Council Historian.

Soon, with irony, I become a part of the history of NCTE.

But the history of the organization and the field of teaching English—this I will never release from my intellectual and emotional grasp.

As I am prone to do, I am in constant conversation with myself about who we were, who we are, who we will be.

In a session for the newly named Outreach Network for NCTE, the discussions touched on the intersections of past, present, and future—a continuum that appears to have one damning constant—those outside the field of teaching/teaching English appear unaware of who we are as professionals, unwilling to acknowledge the wide array of disciplines that our profession comprises, and defiant to acknowledge our professional authority and autonomy.

Read LaBrant in Elementary English and English Journal (NCTE) from 1931 to 1961, and you are apt to nod your head in bewildered recognition of who we are today, feeling the weight of who we will be as inevitable as the stack of essays before us seemingly multiplying like loaves and fishes feeding the multitudes as we work in Sisyphean solitude (and for this my working-class background prepared me well).

Who we were, who we are, who we will be—our history, our present, and our future are acts of speaking (my father) and writing (me) into reality that which defined us, defines us, will define us.

Who we were, who we are, who we will be—these are the politics that shaped us, shape us, will shape us.

Who we were, who we are, who we will be—narratives retold, narratives crafted, narratives imagined.

Who we were, who we are, who we will be—as LaBrant announced abruptly in her major book-length work: “We teach English.”

This is our history to be treasured, this is our present to be defended, this is our future to be determined—and it there that we must ask, “By whom?”

Chanda Jefferson, 2015 S.C. biology teacher of the year, advocates for Achievement Schools Districts (ASD) in the state.

The commentary leads readers to SCAchievementSchoolDistrict.org (SCASD).

Jefferson has also blogged at StudentsFirstSC, the state affiliate of StudentsFirst founded by Michelle Rhee.

Please connect the dots.

And Jefferson’s claims of ASD success echoes this initial claim at SCASD:

An Achievement School District has a proven track record in other states of catapulting the bottom 5% of schools into high quality, high performing, neighborhood, public schools.

However, what is that track record in reality (not the edureformer spin-zone)?

Like charter schools in general, the ASD has not performed much different than public schools, according to a 2014 analysis:

My analysis suggests that ASD schools aren’t doing significantly better in terms of student growth than they were before state takeover. In fact, in many cases the schools’ pre-takeover growth outperformed the ASD. These findings have significant implications for the future of the ASD, how we should move forward with continued takeovers, and for future turn-around efforts in general.

From Tennessee to New Orleans to Los Angeles, claims of successful take-over strategies have been discredited, but those take-overs have resulted mostly in disenfranchised children and communities while providing political capital for advocates.

Once you connect the dots of ASD advocacy, the only conclusion you can reach is don’t buy it.

Humans have tremendous capacity for good and evil.

The good is so simple, I think, that we too often fail to make it real.

“All we are saying is give peace a chance.”

“Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too.”

“‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

The great paradox is that human evil is almost never that simply, yet we respond over and over to evil as if it is.

Addressing recent acts of terror in Beirut and Paris, Sunny Hundal writes that terrorists “want us to brush away humanity and compassion with suspicion and division,” adding: “By following that script we do exactly what Isis want us to do.”

Who we are must not be defined by those who choose evil, by that which is done to us.

Who we are must be defined by what we choose to do in the aftermath of evil.

Who we are must be defined by what we choose to recognize as terror and evil, as well. Our selective and narrow gaze of outrage is another kind of evil—one that renders some inhuman by our indifference—that lies at our feet even as we condemn large-scale brazen evil.

We must not allow the din of sword rattling to drown out the voices of the past that may, again, seem to be too simple:

“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” [1]

Let us move now from the practical how to the theoretical why: Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. (Martin Luther King Jr., Loving Your Enemies) [2]

—

[1] Attributed to Gandhi, but never confirmed as an accurate attribution.

[2] See how even accurate attributions can be manipulated here.