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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
For twenty-first century readers and students, George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 poses, I think, a temporal paradox.
1984, George Orwell
Orwell’s “other world” appears simultaneously a horrifying totalitarian future possibility for humanity as well as a technological mutt of what someone in the past speculated about the future (consider the pneumatic tubes).
As I read The Circle by Dave Eggers, I began to imagine that my experience with this novel published and read in 2013 was repeating what readers during the late 1940s and early 1950s (especially British readers) may have felt turning the pages of Orwell’s Big Brother nightmare, a Kafkan dark satire of their lived England.
The Circle, Dave Eggers
My reading experience with The Circle has at least two problematic elements.
First, I read about a third of the novel before I lost interest and picked up Feed by M.T. Anderson, which I read completely before returning to and finishing The Circle.
And second, I never felt fully engaged with The Circle because I couldn’t shake the feeling that the novel details that our dystopia is now.
Both The Circle and Feed provide readers with a genre carnival of sorts—dystopia fiction, young adult fiction, science fiction, and speculative fiction. But I struggled with The Circle in ways that I did not with Feed, despite my usual measured disappointment with many young adult novels.
Since Adam Bessie has explored the importance of Feed, especially as it informs education reform, I want to examine more closely The Circle in the context of Feed as well as my struggles to engage fully with Eggers’s important novel.
Just past the middle of The Circle, I began to see that Eggers’s dystopia is a contemporary 1984. When the main character, Mae, serves the will of the Circle by producing three slogan (Secrets Are Lies, Sharing Is Caring, Privacy Is Theft), Orwell’s “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength” echoed in my mind’s ear.
I feel compelled to place The Circle, then, within a dystopian tradition including 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—speculative works that weave contemporary social satire (albeit very dark satire) with imaginative logical extensions of what if that holds up one possible future for humankind. [1]
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
While The Circle reminds me of 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale [2]—including the slogans above alluding to 1984 and elements of zealotry along with totalitarianism’s dependency on currency manipulation (Atwood’s prescience about debit cards) shared with The Handmaid’s Tale—Eggers’s other world is not removed nearly as far from the reader as in Orwell’s and Atwood’s novels.
Since I use and know a great deal about google, Twitter, and Facebook, the Circle as a speculative logical extension of our real-world social media feels less speculative than our dystopia is now.
For the privileged in 2013—and those on the edge of privilege wanting in—smartphones, tablets, and computers connected through the Internet have blurred almost every aspect of the human condition—social with professional, entertainment with commerce, etc.
We don’t flinch when google completes our typing as we search the web or when gmail reads our emails in order to push product banners. We reduce our conversations to 140 letters with glee and among hundreds, even thousands of people we have never met in person. We retweet, favorite, and like (verbing all the way) while double posting on Twitter and Facebook—even clicking “like” under a Facebook post about the death of a dog, or a grandmother.
So when Eggers introduces the more fantastical elements of the novel, and there are some, I remained fixated on my lack of compassion for Mae and my inability to shake the feeling that Eggers is simply cataloguing the world the privileged have created, the lived world of the privileged in 2013. (I must add that The Circle and Feed focus on main characters who are compliant “insiders” of the dystopia, and both have sacrificial radical characters. I found Mae in The Circle really hard to embrace, but did feel compelled by Titus in Feed. I had the same bland response to the radical in The Circle, while caring deeply for Feed‘s Violet, my favorite character of the two novels.)
So far, I suspect, my view of The Circle may feel like less than a ringing endorsement; however, I do believe The Circle is a 1984 for our time, an important and insightful work. Let me, then, offer a few reasons why.
At its essence, The Circle is the fictionalizing of concepts explored in Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze: surveillance, “infinite examination,” “societies of control.” While Foucault and Deleuze are inaccessible in many ways for the general public, Eggers’s other world, even as close as it is to now, is stark in its clarity. At times, The Circle reads with the same sort of dispassionate camera feel that Ernest Hemingway uses in “Hills Like White Elephants.” In both works, there lies the danger that readers will fail to confront what has been placed before them—that the dispassion will read as endorsement or at least could be embraced by the readers.
While true of any artwork, Eggers allows readers to close The Circle in much the same mindset as Mae (Book III is a mere three-pages long in its twist-style ending).
As with Feed, The Circle also speaks directly to education reform, particularly as that overlaps with our current era of mass incarceration (see Education Reform in the New Jim Crow Era):
With fervor, the possibility of the Circle’s role in education is championed—and the discussion sounds eerily close to home:
“That’s the idea,” Jackie said. “…[S]oon we’ll be able to know at any given moment where our sons and daughters stand against the rest of American students, and then against the world’s students.”
“That sounds very helpful,” Mae said. “And would eliminate a lot of doubt and stress out there.”… “And it’ll be updated how often?”
“Oh, daily. Once we get full participation from all schools and districts, we’ll be able to keep daily rankings, with every test, every pop quiz incorporated instantly. And of course these can be broken up between public and private, regional, and the rankings can be merged, weighted, and analyzed to see trends among various other factors—socioeconomic, race, ethnicity, everything.” (p. 341)
In possibly the most disturbing section of the novel, the Circle is characterized as a potential law enforcement tool that can erase crime and racial profiling, by color-coding everyone on the ubiquitous monitors invented by the Circle: “The three men you see in orange and red are repeat offenders” (p. 418). This plan, however, works under the assumption that previous arrests are fair, themselves not the result of race or class bias.
In the end, The Circle is a warning shot about the end of privacy, universal surveillance. If readers feel uncomfortable while reading with their smartphone dinging nearby, it is likely because our dystopia is now, and The Circle is a nearly 500-page pamphlet saying, Welcome to the Machine:
Recently, I posted a chart highlighting that current “No Excuses” Reform (NER) claims and policies are no different than traditional problems and policies in public education.*
The great ironies of NER include that NER perpetuates the inequities of society and the current education system and that NER does not seek a reformed and revolutionary public education system but a dismantling of public schools for private interests (See Ravitch, Flanagan, and Cody).
The problem in education reform parallels the problem in our two-party system: While the competing ideologies and policies have successfully masked their being different sides of the same corporate coin, the many and varied alternatives outside the either/or norm remain hidden and silenced.
Part of the success of NER, historically (before such a phrase as “no excuses” was in vogue) and currently, lies in falsely positioning progressive education as widely implemented and failed (see Kohn) and falsely positioning status quo policies as “reform.”
So let me offer another chart I use with my introductory education course that builds on the parallels (and minor differences) between traditional and progressive agendas** while including a critical alternative to the two-party education reform agenda. This chart examines the need to change theoretical and philosophical assumptions about a wide range of aspects in teaching, learning, and public education if our reform agendas seek to revitalize a public good (universal public education) for goals that include democracy, equity, and agency:
[Traditional Practices]
[Progressive Suggestions]
[Critical Lens]
Behaviorism
Constructivism
Critical Pedagogy
Role of TEACHER
Authoritarian
Facilitator/ Mentor (Coach)
Authoritative (teacher-student)
Role of STUDENT
Receptive (passive)
Active
Empowered (student-teacher)
Role of CONTENT (ends v. means)
Ends (goal)
Means
Means
Nature of REASONING (inductive v. deductive)
Instructional decisions = Deductive
Instructional decisions = Inductive
Not primary over affect;
Instructional decisions = Inductive
Assumptions about student thinking/ learning
Analytical (part to whole)
Global (whole to part)
To be monitored by teacher and learner
Responsibility for learning
Primarily the teacher
Primarily the student
Teacher-student/ Student-teacher
Central source of CURRICULUM
Traditions of the field
Student needs and interests
Discovered and defined during process
Nature of ASSESSMENT
Selected response/ serves to label and sort
Created response/ performances
Authentic/ integral part of learning
Nature of learning conditions (individual v. social)
Individual
Social
Social
Nature of QUESTIONS (open-ended v. closed)
Closed
Open-ended
Open-ended (confrontational)
Attitude toward ERROR
Must be avoided
Natural and even necessary element of learning
Sees “error” label as dehumanizing and oppressive; function of normalization
Assumptions about MOTIVATION (intrinsic v. extrinsic)
Extrinsic
Intrinsic
To be monitored by teacher and learner
Role of psychology (behavioral v. cognitive)
Behavioral
Cognitive
Postformalism (Kincheloe)
Names associated with theory
Pavlov, Skinner, Thorndike, Watson
Piaget, Dewey, Vygotsky
Freire, hooks, Vygotsky, Giroux, Kincheloe, Apple
Attitude toward standardization
Appropriate goal
Flawed expectation
Dehumanizing
Goal of instruction (answers v. questions)
Answers (correctness)
Questions (possibilities)
Questions that confront norms, assumptions
Perception of the nature of the mind
Blank slate
Jungian (Collective Unconscious)
Cognitive and affective both valued, evolving
Nature of Truth/truth
Truth (absolute)
truth (relative)
Truths as normalized assumptions (oppressive)
NER narratives argue that school-based reform alone can somehow revolutionize U.S. society, that social inequity can be overcome by the force of public education.
That narrative is false on two fronts: (1) We have no evidence public schools have ever been revolutionary (see Traub), (2) because public schools traditionally and currently have reflected and perpetuated the inequitable norms of the society they serve.
The privileged will never lead the revolution because the privileged benefit from the status quo.
Compelling research suggests that the public in the U.S. is unique in its commitment to belief, often at the expense of evidence—leading me to identify the U.S. as a belief culture.
By Clay Bennett, Washington Post Writers Group | Political Cartoon
And this brings me to advocacy for Common Core standards, with one additional point: Along with embracing belief over evidence, the public (along with political leadership) in the U.S. tends to lack historical context.
Common Core is a response to the historical failure of all the many standards movements that have come before, and thus, the success of CC depends on CC being somehow a different and better implementation of an accountability/standards/testing paradigm.
CC advocacy is yet another example of finding oneself in a hole and persisting with digging despite evidence to the contrary. In other words, CC may well be yet another commitment to a reform paradigm that isn’t appropriate regardless of how it is implemented, as John Thompson details in his review of The Allure of Order:
Jal Mehta’s masterpiece, The Allure of Order, answers the question, “Why have American [school] reformers repeatedly invested such high hopes in these instruments of control despite their track record of mixed results?” He starts with the review of how the bloom fell off the NCLB rose, explaining why its results in the toughest schools have been “miserable.” In the highest poverty schools the predictable result has been “rampant teaching to the test” which has robbed children of the opportunity to be taught in an engaging manner.
Mehta explains that this “outcome might have been surprising if it were the first time policymakers tried to use standards, tests, and accountability to remake schooling from above.” The contemporary test-driven reform movement is the third time that reformers have used the “alluring but ultimately failing brew” of top down accountability to “rationalize” schools and, again, they failed [emphasis added].
These two claims are themselves evidence-based (and it will be interesting to watch as others respond, as they have to my previous work on CC, by either ignoring evidence or garbling evidence to support what proves to be faith-based commitments to CC), and thus should provide a foundation upon which to continue the debate about CC.
CC advocacy and criticism are often based on false narratives and baseless claims (see Anthony Cody for one example of this problem and Ken Libby‘s [@kenmlibby] cataloguing on Twitter #corespiracy)—again reinforcing the pervasive and corrosive consequences of faith-based, but not evidence-based debates.
Instead, we should start with an evidence-based recognition about standards-driven education reform.
For example, the existence and/or quality of standards are not positively correlated with NAEP or international benchmark test data—leading Mathis (2012) to conclude about CC: “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 [emphasis in original]” (p. 2 of 5).
Therefore, CC advocacy has some principles within which it should continue if that advocacy is to be credible and thus effective:
Claims that CC advocacy is separate (and can be separated) from high-stakes testing must show evidence of when standards have been implemented without high-stakes tests (and how that was effective) or evidence of some state implementing CC without high-stakes tests connected. Otherwise, this is a faith-based claim.
Claims that accountability built on standards and high-stakes testing is an effective education reform strategy must show evidence of how that has worked in the previous state-based accountability era and then explain why those examples of success must now be replaced by the new CC set of standards. Otherwise, this is a faith-based claim.
CC advocacy has been endorsed as a logical next step built on the call in NCLB for scientifically based education reform; thus, CC advocates must either comply with the two points above or concede that the CC era is a break from evidence-based reform.
I am no advocate for remaining only within rational, evidence-based, and quantifiable norms for decision making, by the way, but I am convinced we must make clear distinctions between evidence and belief—and I am equally convinced that many education reformers enjoy a flawed freedom to call for evidence from their detractors while practicing faith-based reform themselves.
It is the hypocrisy that bothers me, the hypocrisy of power:
scientist evidence – Married to the Sea
Let’s acknowledge that teachers currently work under the demand of measurable evidence of their impact on students while CC advocates impose faith-based policies such as CC, new generation high-stakes testing, merit pay, charter schools, value-added methods of teacher evaluation, and a growing list of commitments to education reform at least challenged if not refuted by evidence.
CC advocates now bear the burden of either offering the evidence identified above or admitting they are practicing faith-based education reform.
educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 