Category Archives: education reform

Teflon, Fatalism, and Accountability

February 6, 2014 plthomasedd 7 Comments

One legacy of Ronald Reagan’s presidency is his being tagged the Teflon president, as Patricia Schroeder explained:

As a young congresswoman, I got the idea of calling President Reagan the “Teflon president” while fixing eggs for my kids. He had a Teflon coat like the pan.

Why was Reagan so blame-free? The answer can be found in the label that did stick to him — “The Great Communicator.”

Reagan’s ability to connect with Americans was coveted by every politician. He could deliver a speech with such sincerity. And his staff was brilliant in playing up his strengths. They made sure the setting for any speech perfectly captured, re-emphasized and embraced the theme of that speech. And, let’s be honest, Reagan told people what they wanted to hear.

Teflon is, I believe, an apt metaphor for the protective veneer of privilege and power. As Mullainathan and Shafir detail, individual behavior tends to reflect powerful contexts such as abundance and slack or scarcity, and thus, those living in abundance and experiencing slack live much as Reagan lead since nothing sticks to the Teflon of privilege and power.

Let me offer a brief example.

Since I hold a salaried position as a tenure professor (all of which have been attained from effort built on statuses of privilege), if I drive down the highway to work one morning and hit something in the road, resulting in a ruined tire, I simply call in, cancel class, buy a new tire with my credit card, and then go on with my day. As well, my next paycheck will not reflect that morning in any way.

If I were an hourly employee driving a car on its last leg and having no credit card (or more likely, one that is maxed out with little hope of paying more than the minimum next month), that same morning would be quite different, and once I missed work, my paycheck would be reduced as well—as my ability to get to work for days may be in jeopardy if I cannot somehow acquire a new tire.

The slack that comes with privilege and power (whether or not the person earns or deserves either) is a Teflon coating that allows many conditions that constitute the burdens of poverty to slip right off the privileged and powerful.

I want to transpose the Teflon metaphor onto another context, as well, related to the key figures leading the education reform movement built on an accountability/standards/testing model.

Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, and a wide assortment of political leaders (notably governors and superintendents of education) have some important characteristics in common: most have no background in education, many grew up and were educated in privileged lives and settings (such as private schools with conditions unlike the reforms they promote), many with children send those children to schools unlike the reforms they promote, and few, if any, suffer any real consequences for their misguided claims or policies. This crop of education reformers are Teflon reformers.

When Gates poured money and his influence into small school projects and then pulled the plug (a project that proves more about misunderstanding research than education reform), all the schools and stakeholders were left holding the bag, but Gates just shifted into “blame the teachers” mode and is investing his money and influence with the same gusto as before [1]. Education is his hobby, and nothing sticks to Gates while he is playing the game because of the Teflon coating provided by his enormous wealth (built on his privileged background).

The narratives around Duncan and Rhee are little different; they thrive on serial political appointments (often irrespective of the quality of their performance at any position [2]) and that their “leadership” skills (which they argue trumps experience and expertise in the filed that are leading [3]) are transportable from venture to new venture. But neither suffers any real career consequences as Teflon reformers.

Who does suffer the consequences of narratives, claims, and policies coming from Teflon reformers?

Students and teachers—who also represent two levels of relative powerlessness, sharing, however, a state of scarcity created by the high-stakes elements of the reform movement built on accountability.

Students and teachers also share a similar response to that scarcity combined with their powerlessness, fatalism [4].

For teachers, the self-defeating characteristics of that fatalism are captured in the current implementation of Common Core, which, as with all the preceding waves of new standards and tests, are imposed on teachers, not called for, designed by, or directed by teachers.

SC represents how caustic Teflon reform and teacher fatalism are for effective implementation of policy and practices. As is typical across the U.S., administrators, teachers, professional organizations, and unions nearly universally and without criticism accepted CC as a matter of course (an example of professional fatalism).

The standard line was that no one in any of those groups could stop or change CC from happening, thus they all felt compelled to implement CC as best as possible—including professional organizations explicitly saying they could not challenge CC as they had a duty to help teachers implement CC, again because no one could stop the implementation.

Now that many teachers have been given a great deal of training and a tremendous amount of CC-related materials have been purchased, SC is taking a predictable Tea Party turn against CC. Governor Nikki Haley has identified dumping CC as part of her re-election campaign and Tea Party motivated parents have begun to challenge directly schools for implementing CC.

While some states are also seeking to drop CC, others are simply renaming the standards. But in SC, the consequences of this churn created by Teflon reform policies and partisan backlashes against CC impact primarily teachers—trapped within demands for them to implement CC—and students who are bridging the years between their being taught and tested under one set of standards and soon to be taught (although some may have to mask that the lessons are CC-based) and tested under yet another.

For teachers, their own fatalism against the power of Teflon reform has resulted in low morale and scattered CC implementation (directly contradicting a central call for CC as a way to standardize what is taught across the U.S.).

Both Teflon reform and teacher fatalism doom any reform efforts in our schools. Teflon reformers continue to prosper despite the credibility of their claims or the outcomes of their policies.

And at the bottom of this power chain are students, themselves fatalistic.

Rick VanDeWeghe, expanding on the work of Rick Wormeli, in 2007 confronted how the flawed accountability paradigm remains uncontested, but at the center of Teflon reform’s greatest failure:

This research is based on a basic and controversial assumption about accountability. Quoting from Wikipedia, Wormeli states that accountability “implies a concern for the welfare of those with whom one works” (“Accountability” 16 [5]). This definition carries the message that “I’m here to help you along, to help you grow.” It implies that teachers are learner advocates and have a responsibility to help students grow as learners, just as students have a responsibility to demonstrate their growth as learners: It’s mutual accountability. This form of mutual accountability focuses on achievement—that is, we practice accountability when we focus on actual achievement and not on nonacademic factors, and we teach accountability when we demand that students show their real learning and growth. It sounds simple, but it gets complicated.

In contrast to mutual accountability, Wormeli notes, an alternative and more familiar definition of accountability values threat over concern (i.e., advocacy) for others….This is the ‘caughtya’ and ‘gotcha’ mentality,” and grading “is one of the default tools teachers use to play the ‘gotcha’ game.” When we play the gotcha game, according to Wormeli, “There is no growth in accountability within the student that will carry over to the next situation” (“Accountability” 16). Students learn to do whatever it takes to get the grade. (pp. 74-75)

Teflon reform along with with teacher and student fatalism have combined to create the exact failed accountability exposed by VanDeWeghe and Wormeli.

The current accountability paradigm embraced and perpetuated by Teflon reformers ignores the importance of mutual accountability as well as investment by all stakeholders in both the policies and the consequences of those policies.

When Teflon reformers are neither mutually accountable nor personally invested, their policies create fatalistic, and thus, ineffective teachers—in the same way that students become fatalistic (and learn less or simply check out of the learning opportunities) when teachers are above the accountability and thus not mutually invested in learning with students.

For education reform to work, we need to reject Teflon reformers for the sort of leadership accountability highlighted by Wormeli:

There is an old story about ancient Roman engineers and accountability. It says that whenever they were constructing an arch, the engineer who designed it stood directly underneath the center of the arch as the capstone was hoisted into position. He had worked hard, took responsibility, and knew his competence was true. It was the ultimate accountability if his design failed. (p. 25)

And thus, Wormeli concludes:

Accountability by its nature requires the interaction of others in our work. Individually, we are not, but together we are, accountable. (p. 26)

Together must include those leaders who rise above the Teflon veneer of authority and stand beside us, investing and risking in collaboration.

—

[1] For those unfamiliar with the history of Gates’s small schools focus and then shift to teacher quality (and if you jump to the assumption that my comments above are mere ad hominem), I offer the following reader (and suggest this exact pattern will occur again after teacher quality and Common Core fall as flat as small schools appeared to do to Gates):

Bill Gates And His Silver Bullet (2008)
The Small Schools Myth (2010)
Why Did the Gates Small-High-Schools Program Fail? Well, Actually It Didn’t (2010)
Bill Gates’ School Crusade (2010)
Bill Gates’ troubling involvement in school reform (2010)
The Bill Gates problem in school reform (2011)

[2] Rhee has suffered little if any career fail-out from “eraser-gate,” and Duncan attained in part his appointment as Secretary of Education on a mirage, the Chicago “miracle” (replicating the same misleading rise of Rod Paige to Secretary based on the debunked Texas “miracle”).

[3] This is the inherent problem with Teach for America, which is primarily a leadership organization, not an education organization.

[4] See Freire.

[5] See Rick Wormeli’s Accountability: Teaching through Assessment and Feedback, Not Grading

Education, education reform

From Failing to Killing Writing: Computer-Based Grading

February 4, 2014 plthomasedd 4 Comments

[Header Photo by Clément Hélardot on Unsplash]

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Bill and Mike discuss Mike’s bankruptcy:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Someday soon, two teachers of writing will be sitting and discussing the death of teaching writing, and the conversation will sound much the same.

Teaching writing came into its own in the 1970s and 1980s with great promise that the discipline of teaching composition would find its way into K-12 classrooms; this potential rested in the arms of the National Writing Project and its state affiliates across the U.S., often connected with universities.

However, we have sat silently and watched the accountability era dismantle that hope, and as a result, we have failed the teaching of writing [1].

Standards and high-stakes testing have slowly bled that promise dry, and then the addition of the writing section of the SAT kicked writing instruction while it was down. But the final nail in the coffin?

Calls for computer-based grading of writing:

Here is where leadership is needed from teachers and administrators. Before some company comes up with a way to grade essays and boards of education become enamored with the idea, and legislators find new ways to require their use…let’s lead. The technology is here….

We must lead the conversation by knowing and understanding how the technology can improve the educational process, which is based on the most important relationship between teacher and student. In educating our communities, it is essential to begin with the intention of improving teacher and student contact time, not replacing it. We need to design the solution, not be given it. First steps are opening our minds to the possibilities.

If you take the time, this is the same self-defeating fatalism that accompanies advocacy for Common Core: Let’s shoot ourselves in the foot before someone else does it!

The piece quoted above asks Will We Ever Allow Computers To Grade Students’ Writing?—to which I say, probably because we tend to do whatever is least credible in our education policy.

A better question is Should We Ever Allow Computers To Grade Students’ Writing?—to which the answer is an unequivocal No!

And thus I offer a reader of resources for speaking that truth to such calls:

Apologies to Sandra Cisneros, Maja Wilson

NCTE Position Statement on Machine Scoring

Thomas, P.L. (2005, May). Grading student writing: High-stakes testing, computers, and the human touch. English Journal, 94 (5), 28-30:

As a writer, I cannot imagine composing without my trusted iMac and iBook. And as a writing teacher, I watched the value computers and word processors had for my students—particularly as the technology contributed to students’ ability to write more and to revise more efficiently. While computers and computer programs do offer a huge benefit for the teaching of writing, they must remain merely a tool; we cannot allow anyone to suggest that computers can substitute for humans in the ultimate evaluation of a composition.

Our students’ writing has “something the tests and machines will never be able to measure,” and it is now the duty of all writing teachers to make known the art of human assessment of writing. (pp. 29-30)

[1] Please see the following:

Why Are We (Still) Failing Writing Instruction?

On Public Schools and Common Core: Graff’s Critique of Ravitch

January 23, 2014 plthomasedd 4 Comments

Are U.S. public schools failing, and if so, will implementing Common Core and next-generation tests as part of school accountability correct those failures?

At Valerie Strauss’s The Answer Sheet, Gerald Graff, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has challenged Diane Ravitch’s stance on the both public schools and Common Core, which he characterizes as follows:

“Public education is not broken,” says Diane Ravitch in her new book, “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.” The “diagnosis” of the corporate reformers “is wrong,” Ravitch writes, and their solutions are also wrong. “Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education as such is not ‘broken,’” and “the solutions proposed by the self-proclaimed reformers have not worked as promised.”

Ravitch’s argument — that the real problem is not public education but its would-be reformers — has become a familiar one for opponents of current attempts to reform the American educational system. Like most such opponents, Ravitch concedes that the system is far from perfect, but she argues that the causes lie in social conditions outside education, in “concentrated poverty and racial segregation,” as she puts it, and in the false story of a broken system that reformers disseminate in order to justify privatizing education and enriching themselves. So goes this argument.

Graff concludes: “I don’t buy it.”

While he concedes that Ravitch is correct about the negative impact of poverty and inequity on schools as well as the failure of many aspects of the reform movement (“more charters, more standardized tests and fetishized test data, all of it used punitively, more privatization”), Graff argues that, based on his experiences as a professor, public schools are failing and poverty cannot be the sole cause: “Few of the college students I teach are poor and many are white, middle class, and relatively privileged, yet their command of basic skills of reading, writing, and critical thinking falls far short of their potential.”

And thus, Graff aligns himself with the promise of Common Core standards, “which focus on precisely these ‘college readiness’ skills that my students not only struggle with but don’t seem to have been told are important” (See Mercedes Schneider’s response to Graff’s endorsing Common Core).

First, Graff’s characterization of Ravitch, I think, distorts how public school effectiveness should be described (and likely Ravitch’s position).

Public education is not failing the ways that reformers claim, typically based on raw test score comparisons (year-to-year in the U.S., international, state-to-state) and sweeping charges about “bad” teachers, public school monopolies (and lack of choices), and the negative influences of the status quo (often code for “unions”).

However, public schools are failing as they are overburdened by out-of-school influences (as long as we focus on standardized test scores, that influence remains the dominate problem facing education reform) and in the ways in which they perpetuate those social inequities (for example, tracking, inequitable discipline practices such as zero tolerance policies, rising segregation in public and charter schools, and inequitable teacher assignment including commitments to Teach for America for high-poverty minority students).

But the larger public school failure (the one I believe at the root of Ravitch’s “Public education is not broken”), however, is not that public education is failing the U.S., but that so far, we have failed public education. In other words, Ravitch’s argument is a call to reconsider our commitment to public education as part of the essential Commons and the need to reject market-based critiques and reform for that institution.

Here, Graff ignores that much of Ravitch’s Reign is, in fact, a call for reforms—which would be an odd thing to do if she in fact held as Graff claims that public schools are fine as they are.

Next, Graff’s reasons for endorsing the Common Core are ironically the reasons Common Core standards will never address the failures of public schools.

Since Graff and Ravitch highlight that public education struggles under the weight of poverty and inequity, we must acknowledge that there is nothing about Common Core (or any aspect of the accountability movement based on standards and testing) that addresses those inequities; in fact, a great deal of evidence suggests that high-stakes accountability simply labels inequity and often increases inequity—along with failing to achieve the goals often associated with accountability-based reform.

For example, there is nothing in Common Core that will change African American males being disproportionally suspended and expelled, nothing that will change African American and impoverished students attending majority-minority schools that are underfunded and staffed by inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers, nothing that will insure that minority and high-poverty students will have access to high-quality courses (such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate), and nothing that will end the disproportionate retention of minority and male students (in fact, a growing trend of the accountability movement is retaining third grade students based on high-stakes test scores).

Finally, and directly drawn from Graff’s concerns about college students not burdened by poverty, is the claim that those students are not well prepared by public education.

Setting aside that every generation has bemoaned the failure of the children coming after them (including Aristotle), we must ask why those students appear not prepared for the demands of college work.

The answer, for example, lies in Graff’s experience with students analyzing text and writing original essays.

Applebee and Langer have explored what students are asked to do as student writers in middle and high schools. Their research reveals a powerful, but damning dynamic: English teachers of middle and high school know more than ever about best practices in the teaching of writing, but students do little extended writing and much of that best practice is never implemented in U.S. classrooms.

Applebee and Langer’s research appears to expose why Graff finds his students ill prepared for college demands related to text analysis and writing, but the most important pattern found by Applebee and Langer is the reasons students are not be challenged are the inordinate high-stakes demands of the standards and testing era under which U.S. public schools function.

College-bound students, currently and over the past thirty years, have disproportionately spent their time in English classes learning to write to prompts for AP exams, high-stakes state tests, and, since 2005, the one-draft, 25-minute essay on the SAT.

As a writing teacher of freshman at a selective liberal arts university, I can attest that Graff’s characterization of students’ ability to write autonomously and with authority is lacking, but unlike Graff, I recognize that the problem is grounded in high-stakes accountability.

I also recognize that the historical record of standards and testing reveal that Common Core and next-generation tests will not change the entrenched failures of the accountability era, and Common Core has no mechanism to shift traditional failures of public schools (the inequities I have identified above).

In the end, Common Core is continuing to dig even after we have found ourselves in a pointless hole.

As Deborah Meier explains, even if Common Core standards do align better with college readiness (and that claim falls short), we are still asking too little of students with that goals.

And that is the problem, ultimately, with standards-based education and education reform.

If schools are failing to meet the needs of children living in a free society—and they are—that failure can be traced to the narrowing of teacher and student expectations—the one guaranteed consequence of standards-based education about which we have ample evidence.

In ten years, political leaders and the public will be decrying the failures of public education, professors such as Graff will still bemoan the inadequacies of their students, and we will again hear demands for yet another round of new standards and new tests—standards and tests that must be world-class and address college readiness. And Common Core will be placed on the shelf with all the other disappointing trophies to how we continue to fail universal public education.

Education, education reform

Muscle Cramps, Evidence, and the Public Education Reform Debate

January 19, 2014 plthomasedd 2 Comments

For almost thirty years, I have been a serious recreational and competitive cyclist. Despite my goals as a cyclist focusing primarily on endurance events—such as English centuries (100 miles) over mountain courses (elevation gains of 10,000 feet and more) and single-day rides of 220+ miles—I have also been that entire time prone to muscle cramps.

Since cramping has often ruined my targeted events, and since when cramps occur (and don’t) has been impossible to predict or even explain, I have spent a great deal of my cycling career studying and experimenting with how to avoid muscle cramps during endurance events—especially in the summer months of my home in the South.

When I raise my cramping issue among the cycling community, I am always flooded with “I do X and so should you!” The X includes claims about hydration (plain water for some, this or that brand sports drink for another), electrolyte tablets and gels, mustard, pickle juice, and Tums.

What is profoundly interesting about these anecdotal responses are two really important facts: (1) As Joe Friel states, “Contrary to what we’ve been led to believe, no one knows what causes muscle cramps. [1] The common lore is that the culprit is electrolytes, but this is highly doubtful. Much of the sports nutrition industry, however, is based on this myth,” and (2) research calls into question the value of sports drinks.

A common pattern, in fact, is when I send out emails or post blogs stating that we do not know what causes muscle cramps, warning not to use any product for something different than its stated purpose (i.e. Tums), and emphasizing that muscle cramps appear unrelated to electrolyte levels, I am still flooded with emails about hydration (plain water for some, this or that brand sports drink for another), electrolyte tablets and gels, mustard, pickle juice, and Tums—followed with “It works for me!”

The example above about muscle cramps and endurance athletes is no different than the current public debate about education reform.

The general public is often compelled by claims that they already believe at the intuitive or personal experience level—a personal experience level that is quick to assign causation (in fact, humans are genetically predisposed to being cause/effect machines as a matter of survival).

As a result, “That’s how I learned in school” is far more influential to the public than carefully explained bodies of research.

Amanda Ripley, Paul Tough, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, and a wide array of public voices (not restricted to only one political ideology) find their common sense and normalized claims ring true with the general public. In fact, that is how they make their living.

Thus, while it isn’t surprising to me, it is frustrating that when I make an evidence-based case against Common Core, for example, almost all of the responses replicate my efforts to inform my cycling community about muscle cramps—the responses remain mired in the initial assumptions and claims with almost no regard for the evidence. [2]

In these days between Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth day and MLK Day 2014, I am considering that King offers a hard but successful example of how to present a complex and unpopular case that is both based in evidence and ultimately compelling despite conflicting with the common sense beliefs of the time.

King exemplifies that any case requires more than being right in order to be heard, in order to lead to action. King did not have just evidence on his side—evidence of racism, classism, and widespread inequities—he also had moral imperative on his side. Yet, he was rejected and contested by many different stakeholders in the American Dream.

This is daunting for those who believe public education is in fact a powerful foundation for continuing King’s dream for the U.S.; this is daunting for those who recognize that we are failing education reform even as leaders call it the civil rights issue of our time.

I am not willing to concede yet, but I am more and more convinced that evidence alone is a weak part of any public debate addressing large and thus cumbersome movements.

As we seek ways in which we can support public education, public school teachers, and the children of the U.S., we must first be right—in other words, be on the side of evidence—but we must also recognize that being on the side of evidence is likely never enough.

And any fight worth fighting will take time and patience—like training all year for one more chance to ride that century to the top of a mountain in a personal best time, only to find yourself unable to push through when your body fails you once again.

You do the best you can that day, and then you start training for the next year, no less determined.

[1] For a solid base of what we know (or rightfully, don’t know) about cramping see the following:

Muscle Cramps and Mythology

Muscle Cramp Theory

Sports drinks, sweat and electrolytes – part 1

Sports drinks, sweat and electrolytes – part 2

Muscle Cramps: Part I // Theories and Fallacies of muscle cramps

Muscle Cramps: Part II // The electrolyte depletion model of muscle cramps

Muscle Cramps: Part III // A novel theory for Exercise-associated muscle cramps

Muscle Cramps: Part IV // An explanation of the evolution of science

Muscle Cramps: Part V // What all this means for you

Does Gatorade Actually Work?

[2] Consider the evidence against Common Core as any different from the failed standards/testing paradigm preceding them:

Hout and Elliott (2011), Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education: Most recent decades of high-stakes accountability reform hasn’t work.
French, Guisbond, and Jehlen (2013), Twenty Years after Education Reform: High-stakes accountability in Massachusetts has not worked.
Loveless (2012), How Well Are American Students Learning?: “Despite all the money and effort devoted to developing the Common Core State Standards—not to mention the simmering controversy over their adoption in several states—the study foresees little to no impact on student learning” (p. 3).
Mathis (2012): Existence and/or quality of standards not positively correlated with NAEP or international benchmark test data; “Further, the wave of high-stakes testing associated with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has resulted in the ‘dumbing down’ and narrowing of the curriculum” (2 of 5).
Whitehurst (2009), Don’t Forget Curriculum: “The lack of evidence that better content standards enhance student achievement is remarkable given the level of investment in this policy and high hopes attached to it. There is a rational argument to be made for good content standards being a precondition for other desirable reforms, but it is currently just that – an argument.”
Kohn (2010), Debunking the Case for National Standards: CC nothing new, and has never worked before.
Victor Bandeira de Mello, Charles Blankenship, Don McLaughlin (2009), Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: 2005-2007: Why does research from the USDOE not show high-quality standards result in higher NAEP scores?
Horn (2013): “The 2012 NAEP Long-Term Trends are out, and there is a good deal that we may learn from forty years of choking children and teachers with more tests with higher stakes: IT DOESN’T WORK!”

Education, education reform

On Leaders and Teacher Responsibility

January 16, 2014 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Political leaders and candidates are rightfully concerned about asserting their credibility as leaders; however, when political leaders and candidates emphasize their leadership skills in the education reform debate, the implication appears to be that leadership replaces the value of expertise and experience in education. Let me offer two examples.

Rep. Andy Patrick, R-Hilton Head Island, SC, addressed the upcoming race for state superintendent as that intersects with plans to change teacher evaluation in SC:

“You don’t hire a surgeon to run a hospital,” he said. “What I believe we need are leaders in education not beholden to a system that’s not shown the results we need to see.”

Sen. Vincent Sheheen, D-Kershaw, SC, candidate for governor, responded to concerns about his focus on raising teacher pay as central to his education platform:

Informed of this criticism, Sheheen countered: “I think teaching environment is critical, but the biggest message we need to send for our support of public education is that we value our teachers. Sometimes academics and researchers omit the important emotional content that goes into a successful system. That’s what leaders are for.”

A key aspect of Sheheen’s response is that the criticism came from me (cited in the article)—and by taking this swipe at me, and apparently the lack of credibility found among academics and researchers, Sheheen belittles the importance of my 18 years in the public school classroom.

While I concede that leadership is important and that we can identify and foster leadership skills, I reject the implication of these comments because they suggest that leadership skills replace the need for expertise and experience. I contend that leadership grows from expertise and experience (Patrick’s background includes the military and politics; Sheheen’s background includes law and politics as well as his parents working in education).

Political leadership, historically and currently, then, has contributed directly to the marginalization of teacher professionalism, voice, and autonomy.

In fact, the conditions surrounding becoming and being a teacher in 2014 are reflected in Lou LaBrant’s “The Rights and Responsibilities of the Teacher of English” from 1961*.

LaBrant begins by identifying the conditions of teaching then that are replicated today in attacks on teachers unions and the increased accountability measures such as Common Core, new high-stakes testing, value-added methods of teacher evaluation, and merit pay:

Every teacher of English exercises some rights, no matter how dictatorial the system under which he works; and every teacher carries out some responsibilities. But today we have a considerable movement in this country to curtail certain freedom—rights—of the classroom teacher, and those rights are the matter of this discussion. (p. 379)

Reducing teaching to its mechanical parts, according to LaBrant, strips teachers of their professional “freedom,” autonomy:

Teaching, unlike the making of a car, is primarily a thought process. A man may work on an assembly line, turning a special kind of bolt day after day, and succeed as a bolt-turner. (For the moment we will forget the man and what happens to his personal life.) Having the bolts tightly turned may be all the car-in-the-making needs. But the teacher is something quite different from the man who turns a bolt, because the student is not like a car. Teaching is a matter of changing the mind of the student, of using that magic by which the thinking of one so bears on the thinking of another that new understanding and new mental activity begin. Obviously, the degree to which this is reduced to a mechanical procedure affects the results….

What I am trying to say here is that the teacher who is not thinking, testing, experimenting, and exploring the world of thought with which he deals and the very materials with which he works, that teacher is a robot himself. But we cannot expect a teacher to continue the attempt to find better means or to invent new approaches unless he knows he will have freedom to use his results. Without this freedom we must expect either a static teacher or a frustrated one. I have seen both: the dull, hopeless, discouraged teacher, and the angry, blocked, unhappy individual. (p. 380)

Predating Adam Bessie’s refuting the “bad teacher” myth, LaBrant connects the “dictatorial” educational system with the implication that since some teachers are often “bad,” all teachers need control:

Repeatedly when capable teachers ask for freedom, someone points out that we have many lazy teachers, stupid teachers unable to think and choose, ignorant teachers; in short, bad teachers who need control. We do have some, but we encourage others to be bad. Even the weak teacher does better when he has to face his own decisions, and when he supports that decision. The best way to induce teachers to think and act is to put them into situations where some thinking is essential. This less competent teacher will put more effort into the work he has himself undertaken than he will into something handed out to him. Moreover, he can, if he proves helpless, be given direction. The right to select does not force everyone to use all of his freedom, but it encourages him to use his mind. The nature of human beings precludes for either teacher or class a totally static course. The exercise of freedom is itself one means by which we become good teachers. (p. 383)

A powerful point presented by LaBrant, one too often unspoken today by teacher advocates, is the need for teachers to “earn” that freedom as they also call for their autonomy; it is in effect an argument for teacher professionalism grounded in the evidence of the field:

One reason so many of us do not have our rights is that we have not earned them. The teacher who is free to decide when and how to teach language structure has an obligation to master his grammar, to analyze the problems of writing, and to study their relations to structure….But his right to choose comes only when he has read and considered methods other than his own. He has no right to choose methods or materials which research has proved ineffective….There is little point in asking for a right without preparation for its use. (p. 390)

Finally, LaBrant challenges the pursuit of “uniformity,” today’s standardization, and ends with her strong support for teacher autonomy:

Throughout our country today we have great pressure to improve our schools. By far too much of that pressure tends toward a uniformity, a conformity, a lock-step which precludes the very excellence we claim to desire. Many are talking as though teachers with sufficient training would become good teachers. There is little consideration of the teacher as a catalyst, a changing, growing personality. Only a teacher who thinks about his work can think in class; only a thinking teacher can stimulate as they should be stimulated the minds with which he works. Freedom of any sort is a precious thing; but freedom to be our best, in the sense of our highest, is not only our right but our moral responsibility. “They”—the public, the administrators, the critics—have no right to take freedom from us, the teachers; but freedom is not some-thing one wins and then possesses; freedom is something we rewin every day, as much a quality of ourselves as it is a concession from others. Speaking and writing and exploring the books of the world are prime fields for freedom. (pp. 390-391)

In the five-plus decades since LaBrant wrote this piece, little has changed, including the lack of expertise and experience in education among political leaders.

To continue championing leadership that replaces that expertise and experience is to continue to strip teachers of the very professionalism that those leaders often give lip service to with token calls for higher pay and misleading claims that teachers are the most important element in the education of students.

Leadership grows from expertise and experience; our true leaders in education walk the halls of our schools, teach every day, and yet, remain essentially ignored by those who wish to prove that their leadership skills trump all.

* For more work by LaBrant see Lou LaBrant: An Annotated Bibliography.

Education, education reform, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching

Smagorinsky on Authentic Teacher Evaluation

January 14, 2014 plthomasedd 5 Comments

At mid-nineteenth century, public schools were under attack by the Catholic church; Bishop John Hughes “described the public schools as a ‘dragon…devouring the hope of the country as well as religion'” (Jacoby, pp. 257-258). Throughout the twentieth century, the political and public messages were about the same: public education was a failure.

Ironically, the rhetorical math has never added up: U.S. prosperity and international competitiveness depend on world-class public schools + U.S. public schools are failures = the U.S. dominates the world economically and/or “U.S.A. is number 1!”

As the school accountability era began in the early 1980s, the “public school as failure” mantra began to focus on low-performing schools and underachievement by students—as the early wave of accountability focused primarily on schools (including school report cards for the public) and exit exams as well as increased high-stakes testing for students.

The twenty-first century has added to the accountability target a new focus on the “bad” teacher. As a result, teachers; educational historians, scholars, and researchers; and public school advocates have been forced into a corner, reduced to nearly a monolithic reactionary voice of rebuttal.

That position of reaction has drawn fire—charges of inappropriate tone, defense of the status quo, masked self-interest, and a failure to offer alternatives.

That last point is important, especially in the debate over teacher evaluation that has seen a rise in value-added methods (VAM) of teacher evaluation and a resurgence in merit pay policies despite both practices being at least tempered if not refuted by a growing body of research.

Peter Smagorinsky’s “Authentic Teacher Evaluation: A Two-Tiered Proposal for Formative and Summative Assessment” (English Education, 46(2), 165-185) offers an important place to acknowledge that the field of education, in fact, has numerous evidence-based alternatives to the reform agenda and highlight the reasons why those alternatives remain mostly absent from the public debate.

First, I highly recommend reading Smagorinsky’s entire piece, but that raises an important aspect about why evidence-based reform policies coming from educators, scholars, and researchers tend to carry little weight in the political and public debate about schools: high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarly work tends to be inaccessible except to fellow researchers and subscribers to relatively obscure journals.

Thus—as Smagorinsky notes himself in this essay about his increased public work as an academic—I want to touch on some of the most important points offered as an authentic alternative to teacher evaluation below.

Teacher Evaluation, Much More than What We Can Measure

Smagorinsky begins by noting the inherent failure of focusing heavily on measurable teaching and learning, an argument well supported by research but which appears to fall on deaf ears among politicians and the public.

Key in his proposal is refuting a false narrative, notably coming from Eric Hanushek, that teachers reject being held accountable. This is a powerful and important point that must be clearly understood.

The current approach to accountability in education includes holding teachers responsible for external mandates and teaching conditions that they have not created as well as measurable outcomes (student scores on high-stakes standardized tests) that are mostly out of their control (teacher impact on measurable student outcomes is about 10%, dwarfed by the influence of out-of-school factors, between about 60-80%).

As Smagorinsky notes, educators are rejecting that flawed approach to accountability and calling instead for professional accountability, which begins with teacher autonomy and includes holding teachers accountable for only that over which they have control (which is not measurable student outcomes).

If teacher evaluation policies, he explains, focused more on the conditions of teaching and learning—increasing the likelihood that both teachers and students can succeed—and less on punitive practices (such as firing the bottom X% based on VAM rankings, as Hanushek and Bill Gates have proposed), many of the goals for improved teacher quality and student achievement could be met.

Another key shift suggested by Smagorinsky is lessening significantly the amount of high-stakes testing (every 3-5 years, for example) included in teacher evaluations both as a recognition of the inordinate cost associated with testing (we rarely note that fully implemented VAM-like teacher evaluations would require pre-/post-tests of every student in every class taught in order to be fair and consistent among all teachers) and of the validity and reliability concerns that remain for VAM-based evaluations. This is a similar compromise to the one offered by Stephen Krashen, who has argued for not implementing Common Core and the so-called next-generation high-stakes tests, but to use the sampling process already in place with NAEP.

Teaching is a social activity within and for a community, and Smagorinsky envisions teacher evaluation that is more than a number, including a wide range of stakeholders. This point reminds me of the use of the SAT in college admissions. When discussing the weight of SAT scores with a dean of admissions, he pointed out that even when SAT scores are weighted less in admissions formulas, most of the other categories cancel each other out (as they are similar) and SAT, although a lower proportion in the formula, essentially remains the gatekeeping data point.

Any percentage of VAM, then, can prove to be powerful in teacher evaluations that are not aggressively nuanced and multi-faceted, including expanding the input of most if not all stakeholders in the teaching of children.

While much of Smagorinsky’s discussion includes the complex details that should be involved in teacher evaluations (and thus, I recommend reading his essay in its entirety), a few key points can serve to conclude this consideration:

Teacher evaluations should be designed as “some form of mediated discussions, with artifacts from teaching serving as the basis of the conversation” (p. 171). Important here is a process that sets aside hierarchy for dialogue, seeks teacher growth instead of ranking and punishing, and builds a consensus on a rich body of evidence (artifacts) instead of reductive metrics.
Teacher evaluations should address the entire spectrum of teacher influence, not restricted to classroom and content only. In short, Smagorinsky highlights that being a teacher is more than lessons presented to her/his students.
Implicit in Smagorinsky’s discussion, I would add, is that teacher evaluation should not continue the assumption that teacher impact is solely between one teacher and one student. Learning results from the input of many people in a child’s life; teacher evaluations should acknowledge collaboration as well as individual competence and impact.

“I again return,” Smagorinsky notes toward the end, “to the idea that what matters is how well a teacher can justify an instructional approach and relate it to student work”—and I would add, demonstrated student need (p. 182). Teacher quality should not be about teachers fitting a prescribed mold, but about the professional efficacy of a teacher’s practices in the context of the field and students that the teacher teaches.

While I recommend Smagorinsky’s proposal because he emphasizes that “[t]eaching and learning are human pursuits” (and thus, likely unmeasurable in any meaningful way), I also want to stress that this essay is but one piece of evidence that the field of education already knows what to do.

Common Core, VAM-style teacher evaluation, and the entire array of education reform are ultimately misguided because they are commentaries based on flawed assumptions about the field of education.

Despite the education bashing that has occurred in the U.S. for over 100 years, we in fact know what to do—if only politicians, pundits, and bureaucrats could see fit to get out of the way and allow the opportunity to prove it.

Until that happens, we educators must begin to make our case for alternative to misguided reform, and in ways that are accessible to all stakeholders in public schools.

Education, education reform

Trickle-Down Administration: Education Reform in a Culture of Distracting Outrage

January 5, 2014 plthomasedd 7 Comments

“One of the strange things about our politics is the disconnect between what sorts of things lead us, collectively, to express outrage and what sorts of things we don’t notice,” David Kaib begins in an examination of outrage centering on a marijuana Op-Ed by David Brooks, adding:

I’m thinking specifically of how a statement can set off outrage while the background behaviors, activities or policies that the statement expresses or seeks to justify do not….

I think this dynamic is a product of two things. First, a great deal of our politics concerns people’s motives and character, which are largely unknowable, as opposed to assessing their actions on their own terms. So when someone says something, potentially revealing their intentions, it seems powerful. Second, and I suspect more importantly, it’s hard to get upset about long-standing, entrenched conditions. We do better trying to oppose some deviation from the norm, or at least, things that are understood that way.

Kaib, I think, is confronting a socio-political and popular tendency to express outrage only at outliers and mistakenly within a cult of personality—all of which offers a powerful lens for reconsidering how teachers, scholars, academics, and public school advocates can better respond to the education reform movement.

For example, Anthony Cody shared a school memo that details how a school is instituting restroom policies “[i]n order to maximize student learning and reduce the loss of instructional time”—including justifying the policies in part by connecting the restroom guidelines to Common Core standards:

Have students fill in the “time out” and “time in” and then turn the pass in to the teacher when finished. This will help them practice the CCS of telling time with both digital and analog clocks.

First, restroom policies are a nearly universal norm of traditional schooling; thus, the likelihood that this memo will spur outrage is greatly reduced, per Kaib’s point above. However, one aspect of the policy does achieve outlier status (connecting the practices to CC) so we may anticipate outrage focusing primarily if not exclusively on that—reinforcing Kaib’s central argument that the norm of institutional and hierarchical control will remain mostly unchallenged.

Now, let me illuminate this further with an anecdote from my own career as a high school teacher. While I believe the memo above is a powerful artifact of many elements found in traditional schooling worthy of our outrage, I also think we must continue to see how policies manifest themselves in the day-to-day lives of students, teachers, and administrators.

I grew up in a small and deeply conservative (read: racism, classism, and sexism were norms and thus unexamined) Southern town in rural upstate South Carolina. After attending high school in my home town and completing college fewer than thirty minutes away, I returned to my alma mater to teach high school English for 18 years.

That school had when I was a student and continued while I was a teacher incredibly rigid and authoritarian policies for student behavior and dress. Many stereotypically strict private schools paled in comparison.

Included in those school rules (by the way, students had to pass a school handbook test at the beginning of each year) were restroom policies that mandated automatic demerits for any restroom visit during class (implicit in such rules were arguments similar to the new policies in the memo shared by Cody—protecting instructional time). The school had a demerit system connected to an in-school suspension structure governing these rules.

One year, I taught a young man who was an elite student and athlete (athletes were under a double set of extremely rigid and harsh guidelines, meaning any school infractions tended to be replicated and intensified by their coaches). During class one morning, this young man stood up quietly, walked to the trash can near the door, and then vomited (almost noiselessly) in the trash can before returning to his seat.

Once I realized what had happened, I calmly told him he needed to go to the restroom. He very politely explained he couldn’t risk the demerits.

And so let me stress here that while the new restroom policy shared by Cody and the student’s behavior in my class may appear to be outlier examples within perfectly normal and reasonable in-school policies, I must contend that they are neither outliers nor reasonable.

A comment, I believe, at Cody’s blog post helps make my case. Sarah Puglisi posted this response to the restroom policy: “Said Admin will no doubt pee as needed.”

For classroom teachers, and all workers under hierarchical structures, Puglisi’s comment is a succinct and powerful point. Let me return to my student who felt compelled to vomit in my trash can and remain in class to avoid the automatic (and I’d add “no excuses” and zero tolerance) punishment he was to receive for a situation beyond his control: The principal who sat as the personification of authority over this policy chain had his own bathroom in his office.

In the context of Kaib’s examination of distracting outrage and Cody’s exposing new restroom policies connected with CC, I want to stress several important points related to the central threads of the education reform debate:

We must be willing to highlight and then confront the norms of traditional schooling within which education reforms are being implemented. To continue to argue that CC is separate from high-stakes testing or simply a matter of implementation fails to acknowledge the growing evidence that adopting new standards and requiring different tests have never changed and continue not to disrupt many powerful ways in which schools function. The restroom memo is not an outlier; it is yet another artifact of how normal practices and new policies do not disrupt each other but inform and maintain the status quo.
Beware the hypocrisy of authoritarian and hierarchical structures, particularly as they include children. I think it is no exaggeration to compare how adults are allowed a different level of dignity in their restroom needs compared to the restrictions controlling the children under those adults’ care with the lack of accountability experienced by those imposing intensifying accountability mandates on schools, teachers, and students. The norm of accountability being inversely proportional to the hierarchical chain must be confronted in the education reform debate—not as a series of disconnected moments of outrage, but as a measured recognition that this norm is dehumanizing and incompatible with democratic ideals.
We must elevate the voices of teachers and students as we consider the claims and policies promoted by a social and political structure that is driven by leadership without public school teaching experience—not simply because that leadership lacks that experience but because the claims and policies are contradicted by the real world of teaching and learning.
We cannot afford to address social and educational issues as unrelated. Race, class, and gender inequity exists in society and is replicated in traditional schooling (for example, school discipline inequity as that mirrors the continuing era of mass incarceration). Our outrage must be at systemic policies and practices, and not diluted by targeted outrage at isolated events only, allowing an outlier mentality to suggest racism, classism, and sexism no longer exist, or can be easily overcome by in-school-only reform.

A pattern of education crisis and outrage has characterized the education reform debate for nearly 150 years. The result has been that education reform looks like the conditions of an overcrowded Emergency Room. While ERs often achieve laudable outcomes under stressful conditions, medicine is certainly better administered within a preventative care model.

The conditions of an ER are likely beyond our control to eradicate; people will continue to experience traumatic injury.

Our schools, however, need not be ERs. If we are willing to step back from crisis/outrage and then change the larger norms that tend to go unnoticed, starting with norms that are dehumanizing, as Kaib explains, we can reform our schools in ways that respect the basic dignity of children as well as honoring larger social commitments.

Education, education reform, Teaching

Classroom Teaching Experience and Whose Voice Matters

January 2, 2014 plthomasedd 15 Comments

For about two decades from my early 20s into my early 40s, my first (and I believed only) career was public high school English teacher. Around 2002, I moved to higher education where I am primarily a teacher educator but also maintain in part a role as a teacher/director of writing in our first year seminar program—meaning I have been a teacher now for 31 years.

Throughout my time as a K-12 public school teacher, I was most of those years a department chair, a position for which I received no stipend and no release time. Along with being a full-time doctoral student for 3 years and adjunct instructor at local colleges while remaining a full-time high school English teacher in the mid-1990s, I spent the last third of my K-12 teaching career also coaching soccer (at first, as head coach of both the girls and boys teams, and then as boys head coach). My coaching stipend, by the way, after taxes, added about $70 a month to my check, and I remained an uncompensated department chair throughout those years.

My first years teaching high school included five courses in a six-class-period school day (with a planning period and including my role as faculty sponsor/teacher of the journalism class) of about 30 (occasionally 35) students per class; each class required a separate prep (different courses with different textbooks for each class, totaling about 15 vocabulary, grammar, and literature textbooks I had to juggle along with learning to teach). From my first day teaching English, as well, I considered my primary responsibility to be the teaching of writing.

Since I kept a record of my work as a teacher of writing, I can attest that over those 18 years, I read and responded to about 4000 original multiple-draft essays as well as about 6000 journal-type single-draft writing assignments each academic year.

While teaching and coaching, my day went something like this:

I’d arrive at school between 7 and 7:30 a.m., rushing into the athletic offices to put my teams’ uniforms in the washing machine. After my first period class (class change time was five minutes), I would run down the hall, back to the athletic offices to move those uniforms into the dryer. Between second and third periods, I’d run back to the athletic offices to take the uniforms out of the dryer. My planning period was spent folding and sorting the uniforms, placing them in the players’ cubbies for the next match.

On more than one occasion, I was reprimanded by administration because I wasn’t stationed at my door, shirking my hall duties.

My lunch period was about 20 minutes; I ate in my room, responding to essays essentially every day.

During soccer season, I rushed directly to practice or matches as soon as the school day ended—my work day concluding around 6 p.m. when we practiced and 10 or 11 p.m. on match days.

What’s my point? My point is that this is a typical day for K-12 public school teachers. We almost never pause, and we are being watched by students and administrators virtually non-stop (there is a psychological weight to this that few people other than teachers understand). And along with our responsibilities to know our content and to teach our students, we are also responsible as adults for the safety of other people’s children.

My atypical days, by the way, included coming home with my clothes splattered with the blood of two young men I separated fighting in study hall when I was passing by on my way to the restroom. My atypical days included walking out of my room and bumping into a student gunman (someone I was teaching). My atypical days included receiving a call that the school building in which I was teaching (and where I had attended high school) had burned to the ground.

My point, however, is not that my story is some herculean feat worthy of praise. Again, my story is replicated and exceeded daily by thousands and thousands of K-12 public school teachers—many doing so three and four decades, not just my two.

Over about 150 years, the more-or-less modern public school teacher has worked in ways I describe above, and mostly, they have done so without having much voice in how their profession is administered and what policies mandate their practices.

Since public schools are government agencies, policies are mostly designed by elected officials (and in unionized states, influenced by unions, but that influence has dwindled while many teachers work in right-to-work states, where we have almost no power or voice), with virtually none having classroom teaching experience. Historically, even school-based administrators rise to their positions with minimal time teaching day-to-day; administrators (mostly men) teach and coach 3 or so years, and then become assistant principals, and then principals, district office officials, and superintendents.

Teaching as a mostly voiceless and powerless profession must not be separated from the reality that teaching has disproportionately been the work of women. Where educators have had the most power (and highest salaries), you find, again disproportionately, men.

So, now, let me raise my larger point: I continue to see a number of people weighing in on the education reform debate bristle at classroom teachers calling for their voices being heard and at the recognition that education debates and policies are being driven by people with no or very little K-12 classroom experience (such as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and Michelle Rhee).

Although not a simple argument, it is an essential argument: Classroom teaching experience and teachers’ voice should matter, by driving the education reform debate as well as informing education policy. Let me explain how that should look.

Classroom Teaching Experience and Whose Voice Matters

Let me state clearly here that I am not saying—and I believe no one else is either—people without classroom experience should have no voice in the education reform debate. My primary argument about professional autonomy and education policy is that the initial and primary voices that matter should be classroom teachers and people with significant classroom teaching experience (this is also a problem in teacher education where education professors can and do hold positions with little or no classroom experience).

Historically and currently for the field of education, the public voice and policy paradigms are greatly flipped since those without classroom experience hold most of the public voices and almost all of the power to create and impose policy on schools.

As an illustration, consider the influence of education historian Diane Ravitch, whom I have characterized as Ravitch 1.0, Ravitch 2.0, and Ravitch 3.0. Ravitch serves my point here because many who reject criticisms of educational reformers without classroom experience point out that few people raise any concern about Ravitch, who openly admits that she has no K-12 classroom experience (in fact, when Ravitch spoke at my university, this is the first point she raised at her pre-speech talk to our education students).

Ravitch 1.0 was a strong advocate for standards and high-stakes testing, and during those high-profile years, she wasn’t often championed by classroom teachers (she may have in fact been considered one of the enemies); I argue she wasn’t even known by many classroom teachers.

Ravitch 2.0 and 3.0, however, has become if not the at least one of the most high-profile education faces and voices embraced by classroom teachers—a phenomenon that is at least ironic, if not puzzling. So what gives?

The evolution of Ravitch has included not only changes in her positions related to education but also a willingness to listen to as well as honor the experiences and voices of classroom teachers.

This means that if you decide to hold forth on education and have no classroom experience, you should not be surprised if you are held accountable when your claims do not ring true among those who teach every day under the policies that you endorse or have implemented.

Ravitch 1.0—coincidentally without K-12 classroom experience—supported policy that did not ring true to those of us in the classroom (notably the first two decades of high-stakes accountability throughout the 1980s and 1990s).

Ravitch 2.0 and 3.0—coincidentally without K-12 classroom experience—supports, echoes, and endorses policy that rings true to those teaching in K-12 classrooms day-in and day-out.

If you have never taught in K-12 classrooms, you are unlikely to understand what it is like to spend your entire weekend writing lesson plans for the next week, meticulously correlating every thing you and your students will do, minute-by-minute, to the required standards and then having your principal or assistant principal drop in and ask for those plans, only to reprimand you for not being where you said you’d be. Or calling you in to tell you your students’ test scores on high-stakes tests correlated with those standards are not adequate.

As a result, if you have never taught in K-12 classrooms, you may offer a cavalier claim that Common Core is no big deal; you may trivialize the passion and even hyperbole coming from the mouths of teachers who live the reality of high-stakes accountability aligned with CC.

And it is there that your credibility correlated to not having classroom experience comes into question. When we call you on this, we are not attacking you, we are not failing the debate with our tone, we are not over-reacting. And when you follow up with any of those charges, you are stepping into an ugly tradition that includes, as I noted above, the silencing and marginalizing of teachers, what tends to be associated with women’s professions, and women—as explained on this Feminist Legal Theory blog post:

Similar to “bitch,” the word “crazy” demeans women. But, instead of negatively characterizing women, “crazy” marginalizes and dismisses them. When discussing emotional responses, our culture often describes women as “crazy,” “oversensitive,” and “hysterical”—contrast to men as “sane” and “rational.” These words reduce a woman’s response to irrational behavior. Consequently, she believes that her feelings are not normal and are thus ultimately worthless. This behavior is similar to what is known as gaslighting: “psychological abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory and perception.”

Classroom teachers are almost entirely powerless, disproportionately accountable for mandates they did not create and outcomes over which they have little or no control, and working every day in high-pressure, frantic (and tenuous) working environments. When you discount their emotional responses, their efforts to express the inexpressible through metaphor, their insistence that someone listen to them, you have failed the debate, and you have exposed the flaw of people without classroom experience driving the education debate.

There is a paternalism and oppression of the rational in the education debate that must not, as well, be discounted, ignored, as teachers and their experiences and expertise routinely are.

And the CC debate is just one example. I could spend many more paragraphs detailing this same disconnect about value-added methods for teacher evaluation, high-stakes testing, merit pay, charter schools, and the primary elements of education reform now being proposed and implemented.

Classroom teachers aren’t perfect, or universally “right.” I’ve struggled with classroom teachers over grade retention, corporal punishment, isolated grammar instruction, and such. I once taught a graduate class that included a colleague from my own English department who flippantly said in class, “O, you can make research say anything you want.”

So don’t accuse me of offering some romantic tribute to the infallible classroom teacher. I’m not.

What I am saying is that education is a field rich in experience and expertise and bankrupt by the unwillingness not to tap into that goldmine.

If you wish to be a part of the discussion and you have no experience in the field, your solidarity needs to start with you listening, really listening, before making claims yourself—your solidarity needs to include the same level of passion we teachers feel, to recognize that those feelings matter as much as the rationality you believe you are offering.

Education, education reform, Teaching

An Open Letter to K-12 Teachers: A Call for Solidarity

December 31, 2013 plthomasedd 11 Comments

In the U.S., “solidarity” and “community” are very difficult concepts. Having lived my entire life in the rural South, I’d argue “solidarity” and “community” are nearly foreign concepts here—a very painful claim to make.

But the South is an important phenomenon to examine in order to come to some understanding of what it means to be a K-12 teacher in U.S. public schools. The rural South includes mostly workers, we live and live among visible poverty, and we are nothing if not the embodiment of “community.” Yet, Southerns are prone to bashing people in poverty—railing against welfare and the lazy poor—and reject unions with a self-loathing glee that is hard to understand.

These self-defeating qualities among my South remind me of the self-defeating qualities within my profession, teaching. [And for the record, I love few things more and more deeply than the field of teaching and my South—and about few things do I get more angry than teaching and my South. As with family, we often walk a thin line between passion and anger in matters of the heart.]

And I believe we are now at a point when K-12 teachers in the U.S. must examine who they are and how solidarity is essential if universal public education is ever to achieve its purpose as an essential pillar of democracy among free people.

So it is there that I begin this open letter to K-12 teachers as a call for solidarity.

My career as a teacher is grounded in 18 years teaching public school English in the rural South as that has been informed by my dissertation work, writing a biography of English educator Lou LaBrant. Three aspects of her career serve me well in this open letter:

Much of LaBrant’s early scholarly work focused on the importance of free reading and libraries (work she conducted and published throughout the first half of the twentieth century); as well, she published much of this work with a librarian, Frieda Heller, modeling, I think, a powerful message about teacher scholarship, teacher agency, and who constitutes “teachers” within the field.
In 1932, LaBrant was offered and accepted a position at the University School newly opening at the Ohio State University. One of her first acts once hired was to lobby with the school that English was not a separate course (the position for which she was hired), but that literacy (reading and writing) were elements essential among all disciplines. Even at an experimental school, LaBrant was an outlier voice of critical re-imagining how we do school.
LaBrant was notoriously hard on other teachers; many who knew LaBrant believed that the phrase that best captured her was “She didn’t suffer fools.” Once when she was giving a talk, a teacher in the audience stood to ask just how teachers were supposed to know and do all that LaBrant demanded (and, yes, LaBrant demanded). Without missing a beat, LaBrant told the teacher if she didn’t know how, then she should quit, learn how, and then come back to teaching.

It is at this last example that I find myself torn when I advocate in public writing for both public education and public school teachers. And that is why I write this open letter.

Public advocacy for schools and teachers is a lightning rod for angry responses; what is interesting is that the venom I often receive comes from a wide spectrum of stakeholders in public education, including K-12 teachers.

Just as one current example, my stances on Common Core and high-stakes testing (I reject both entirely) are routinely challenged by K-12 teachers—not just reformers and school-bashers.

K-12 teachers and advocates for those teachers and public schools face, then, a tremendous number of tensions, and I believe our solution to those tensions rests on forming a level of solidarity teachers have yet to achieve.

In order to create that solidarity, we must confront the tensions before us:

The greatest tension facing a K-12 teacher is the call: “first, do no harm.” We must always be advocates for each child in our care, each child in our schools, each child in our community, each child in our state, and each child on this planet. This is a massive weight, one that makes our work monumental.
Another tension is the need to admit that K-12 teaching, historically and currently, is not a profession. K-12 teachers are bureaucratic employees. As hard as this fact is to face, the greater tension lies in making the case that K-12 teaching should be a profession. K-12 teacher have little autonomy and muted voices; further, K-12 teachers work under the thumb of external accountability for implementing the mandates not of their design and for outcomes beyond their control. That is not the context of a profession.
As is the case within all fields of work, that there exists a wide range of competencies among teachers is a burdensome tension. This tension confronts K-12 teachers with the need to become good stewards of their own field, even when that field is corrupted by non-expert bureaucracy.
Another incredibly complicated tension is what K-12 teacher need to admit about public education: Historically and currently public education has failed and is failing, but not in the ways often expressed by political leaders, the media, and the public. This tension, however, is ripe with possibility since the fact that schools have not yet succeeded and currently do not succeed must be placed at the feet of that bureaucracy and then K-12 teachers must claim their own table for demanding and enacting the reform we have yet to address.
Finally, K-12 teaching is criticized and portrayed as if the field is far more unified that it is, a rarely identified tension. Teaching in a unionized state is far different than teaching in the mostly right-to-work South. Teaching in a rural school is distinct from teaching in an urban school. Ironically, however, one thing most K-12 teachers share is that our work is incredibly isolated as we spend most of our working day the sole teacher behind our closed doors among our students. K-12 teaching is a frantic exercise that pushes us deeper and deeper into that isolation, in fact.

Yes, much is being done to K-12 teachers—baseless teacher evaluation and merit pay schemes as well as increased and misguided accountability mandates simultaneous with the dismantling of teachers unions and job security.

And that, I suppose, is the great tension: How do K-12 teachers achieve the autonomy and professionalism they deserve in positions so bereft of power?

K-12 teachers are not being served well by political leadership, the media, professional organizations, or unions. While all of these entities should be within the power of teachers to change, we are faced with growing evidence that will not happen.

This means K-12 teachers need solidarity. Solidarity to become the profession we have been denied so far. Solidarity among teachers and all workers to create the conditions of working that all people deserve in a free society.

Solidarity is a unified voice, but not a singular mind.

Solidarity is taking ownership of being good stewards of the field we imagine even before it comes to fruition—possibly because we must imagine before it can come to fruition.

Solidarity is teacher-led modeling of what it means to be a professional teacher and a scholar-teacher, and not merely a bureaucratic employee.

Solidarity is teacher-led praise and criticism of teaching and schooling, that is unlike what politicians, the media, and the public have offered.

K-12 teachers, among whom I align myself, can we begin the process of solidarity around the pursuit of teaching as a profession and of public education as a democratic essential?

Can we begin the process of teacher solidarity as a beacon for the solidarity of all workers within the larger pursuit of human dignity, human agency, and human autonomy?

As we turn the page to 2014, I will remain a voice calling for the actions needed for this solidarity, and I’d be honored to have you all there with me.

AlterNet, Education, education reform

AlterNet 2013

December 29, 2013 plthomasedd 1 Comment

While I am often critical of mainstream media’s contributions to the education reform debate, I want to pause at the end of 2013 and point you to my pieces posted at AlterNet, in part to ask that you visit AlterNet often and acknowledge the wonderful work done their in terms of education.

I hope as well you have found or will find my work there has contributed positively to the cause:

Why Charter Schools Are Foolish Investments for States Facing Economic Challenges

Posted on: Dec 18, 2013, Source: The State

South Carolina’s children deserve data-based and lean school reform policy, and not advocacy-based experiments.

Learning and Teaching in Scarcity: How High-Stakes ‘Accountability’ Cultivates Failure

Posted on: Nov 8, 2013, Source: AlterNet

In-school-only reforms will never be the solution for children in high-poverty schools.

The Central Issue at the Heart of America’s Growing Education Gap

Posted on: Oct 3, 2013, Source: AlterNet

It’s time for some new thinking about how to address the persistent inequalities that plague our education system.

BOOK REVIEW: “Reign of Error”: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools

Posted on: Sep 17, 2013, Source: AlterNet

Forget low test scores, says one of the nation’s foremost education experts in her new book. The privatizers are the real threat to America’s schools.

Whatever Happened to Scientifically Based Research in Education Policy?

Posted on: Sep 12, 2013, Source: AlterNet

No Child Left Behind calls for scientifically based research. But what if that research calls for repealing No Child Left Behind?

Posted on: May 20, 2013, Source: TruthOut.org

How both are creating an underclass, significantly among African American males.

The Rise of the Dogmatic Scholar

Posted on: Apr 4, 2013, Source: AlterNet

Free market think-tanks pay off scholars who are now increasingly found in universities.

Corporations Are Behind The Common Core State Standards — And That’s Why They’ll Never Work

Posted on: Mar 18, 2013, Source: AlterNet

Why do we keep enforcing more and more standards and testing that educators don’t trust?

Why Sending Your Child to a Charter School Hurts Other Children