Category Archives: Teaching

Setting Free the Books: On Stepping Aside as Teaching

December 5, 2013 plthomasedd 4 Comments

While film critics have offered mostly negative reviews of This Is 40, I have watched all and then parts of the film multiple times during its run on cable TV because I am drawn to the scenes that include the children (who in real life are writer/director Judd Apatow’s children with lead actress Leslie Mann).

In one scene, the older daughter, Sadie (Maude Apatow), charges into the kitchen and unleashes a profanity-laced diatribe onto her parents. Many years ago, my daughter did the same to my wife and me, and when the two of us burst into laughter, my daughter stomped upstairs to her room, doubly infuriated at our response.

Maybe This Is 40 isn’t a good film, but I am nearly 53 and my daughter is 24 and carrying her first child. And she and I are quietly emerging from many dark years between us so I admit viewing films and reading books through a sort of middle-aged nostalgia that allows me to appreciate things I probably didn’t recognize when I should have.

The dark years and incessant tensions between my daughter and me often included yelling, first by me and then by my daughter, who enjoyed accusing me of being bi-polar. Today, I recognize that throughout my life I have fumbled almost all of my close relationships because I have struggled with nearly paralyzing anxiety combined with a proclivity toward feeling things deeply, feeling things too deeply.

As a result, my love has often manifested itself as all-consuming, overwhelming, suffocating.

My only child, then, had little choice but to rebel, to seek freedom from the tidal wave that was my love. She is now an adult—working, married, and with child. I have been forced in many ways to set aside the worst parts of how I tend to respond to loving another, and thus, we are re-building now how a father and daughter can be.

While I have struggled with personal love relationships, I have had two other loves that provide different contexts, ones that have confronted me with challenges as well—my love of books and my love for my students. Because of these three arenas of my life, my life loving, I am in the midst of a journey as a teacher that involves stepping aside as teaching.

On Stepping Aside as Teaching

The film The Words presents a multi-layered narrative about writers and their relationships with people as well as words. One story examines a writer that Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) creates in his eponymous novel in the film; Hammond explains to Daniella, “You have to choose between life and fiction. The two are very close but they never actually touch. They are two very, very different things.”

In Hammond’s novel, the novel published by Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper) but actually written by The Old Man (Jeremy Irons) explores a writer who comes to love the words more than the woman who has inspired him to write the words.

I think the film speaks to what happens when anyone begins to covet the extension of what one loves even when that displaced urge corrupts the original love. And thus, this film speaks to parents, lovers, and teachers who are all bound by their passions as essential to who they are.

This brings me to books and teaching—two of my greatest loves— and a foundational question about how books matter in my teaching.

Since I have been an English and writing teacher for most of my 31 years of teaching, books are the lifeblood of my classroom. But I have always been deeply conflicted about the use of books when teaching. Traditional practices such as assigning required books and meticulously analyzing books (from the historical dominance of New Criticism in English courses to the more recent obsession with close reading in the Common Core) have always felt as if the inherent dignity of books was being violated.

I feel much the same way about how traditional teacher-centered instructional and discipline practices deny students autonomy and even their own dignity.

Because I have always sought ways in which I can remain true to my love of books and my students, then, I have struggled in formal educational settings. My only recourse has been to create classes where both my students and the books we read are honored over me and my role as an authority (or realistically as the authority) in the classroom. In other words, I have come to view stepping aside as teaching (much as I have learned to view stepping aside as parenting).

Setting Free the Books*

I have returned recently to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, fascinated by both the enduring power of the novel and Bradbury’s own love affair with books. In the 60th anniversary edition of the novel, Bradbury (in the text of an audio introduction) explains:

I’m a library-educated person; I’ve never made it to college. When I left high school, I began to go to the library every day of my life for five, ten, fifteen years. So the library was my nesting place, it was my birthing place, it was my growing place. And my books are full of libraries and librarians and book people, and booksellers. So my love of books is so intense that I finally have done—what? I have written a book about a man falling in love with books.

Bradbury’s love of books as a learner, a reader, and a writer creates for me even greater tension in my roles as reader, writer, and teacher—especially in the context of Charles Bingham, Antew Dejene, Alma Krilic, and Emily Sadowski’s “Can the Taught Book Speak?” The authors address three questions:

First, what does the banning, and the unbanning of books have to do with teaching? Second, what is the nature of a book, and do we honor the nature of books when we teach them? And third, is it possible for educators to let books speak for themselves? (p. 199)

Throughout the discussion, the role of the teacher—I would add the corrupting role of the teacher—is confronted:

If a book is banned because it is dangerous as a written text, then a book could only be un banned by letting loose the dangerous potential of such a written text. A book is only unbanned when it is let loose to be read by anyone, anywhere, any time. It is unbanned when it can be read in public or in private, aloud or in silence, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, without “a parent to protect” the book. When one teaches a banned book, one falls short of unbanning the book on a number of counts, but primarily on the last count. When one teaches a banned book, one does something different from unbanning the book. One parents the book. One stands against Plato’s fear of writing to be sure, but one also sides with that same fear. One lets the book be read, but one makes sure there is a parent present at the reading. (p. 201)

Teaching a book, then, is the same as parenting that book—both the teaching and parenting here characterized as intrusive in the ways I have experienced and discussed above as both teacher and parent: “What Derrida thus reminds us is that the very act of teaching is always a parasitical act.”

Teaching and parenting as necessarily “parasitical” and destructive parallels the way writers and the their love of words above people is destructive in The Words:

This figure of the teacher vis-à-vis the book might be formulated as follows: A teacher teaches a book. However, the teacher is not fully a teacher unless the book is not fully a book. That is to say, a teacher needs a book, but she needs a particular kind of book: a book in chains, a banned book, a book that does not speak for itself. If a teacher were to teach a free book, a book unfettered by place, space, or human voice, then the teacher would not be a teacher. A teacher without a book to call her own —without a book to chain in some way, shape, or form — ceases to be , as a teacher.

To put this another way, as soon as a teacher teaches a book, then the book ceases to be a book. (p. 203)

As Bradbury’s own experiences reading in libraries and not attending college show, the book is its own reason for being, as Bingham, et al., explain:

A book, after all, is meant to be free . A book is written. It is written to be read. A book is a book precisely because it is meant to be read, and to be read by anyone. It is meant to be read by anyone who chooses to read the book. If it were not to be read by anyone, then it would not be a book, but would rather be a private communiqué. This bookness of the book signifies something important for educators. Namely, it is not in the nature of a book to be taught. Why? Because a book is, itself, language. It is language that speaks. If the book was not language, if it did not speak, then it would not be a book. A book is not intended to be interpreted into speech. A book does not require that people come to consensus about what it says. A book is itself consensus. It already says something before any consensus. There is no book that requires or expects a teacher, just as there is no speaking person who requires or expects a teacher. A book speaks in and of itself. It speaks without the need of parasites, chains, or megaphones. (p. 203)

So what are we to do, we who are lovers of books and teachers?

Simply stated, the problem is this: the taught book cannot speak. Indeed, the solution to this problem would seem simple now that the problem has been identified. The problem would be solved if teachers were to leave books alone. (p. 206)

At the intersection of love, books, students, and teaching, I have come to recognize the importance of setting free the books by seeking ways in which I can practice stepping aside as teaching. Just as I had to understand that loving my daughter required me to leave her alone, I must leave books and my students alone—and thus the highest form of respect, the highest form of trust, the highest form of love.

The risks are high in this practice because so few adults trust children, so few adults trust books. And in our paternalistic culture, parenting is viewed as necessary and good—not intrusive and corrupting (in fact, we see books as potentially corrupting and childhood freedom as corrupting).

Ultimately, stepping aside as teaching is a paradox likely to be perceived as not teaching at all—by students, parents, colleagues, and the public.

But risk we must, in the name of those things we love.

* I had a long and wonderful love affair with the novels of John Irving, mostly in my 20s and 30s. Irving’s first novel, Setting Free the Bears, is intentionally alluded to in this subhead.

Education, Teaching, Testing

More on Failing Writing, and Students

December 4, 2013 plthomasedd 16 Comments

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I taught English in the rural South Carolina high school I attended as a student. Many of those years, I taught Advanced Placement courses as part of my load (I taught all levels of English and usually sophomores and seniors) and was department chair.

Over the years, I worked hard to create an English department that served our students well. We made bold moves to provide all students in each grade the same literature textbooks (not different texts for different levels, as was the tradition, thus labeling students publicly) and to stop issuing to students grammar texts and vocabulary books (teachers retained classroom sets to use as they chose).

And a significant part of our English classes was the teaching of writing—having students write often and to produce multiple-draft essays. I stressed the need to end isolated grammar instruction (worksheets and textbook exercises) and urged that grammar, mechanics, and usage be addressed directly in the writing process.

Even though the principal was supportive and a former English teacher, at one faculty meeting while the administrators were discussing recent standardized test scores for the school (yes, this test-mania was in full force during the 80s and 90s in SC), the principal prefaced his comments about the English test scores with, “Keep in mind that the English scores may not reflect what we are doing here since we don’t teach grammar.”*

In a nut shell, that sort of mischaracterization and misunderstanding about best practice is at the foundation of my previous post exploring Joan Brunetta’s writing about how standards- and test-based schooling had failed her.

A few comments on the post and a follow up discussion in the comments with Robert Pondiscio—as well as a subsequent post by Pondiscio at Bridging Differences—have prompted me to continue to address not only how we still fail the teaching of writing but also how that failure is a subset of the larger failure of students by traditional approaches to teaching that are teacher-centered and committed to core knowledge.

Revisiting “The Good Student Trap” in the Accountability Era

Adele Scheele has coined the term “the good student trap,” which perfectly captures how schools create a template for what counts as being a good student and then how that template for success fails students once they attend college and step into the real world beyond school. My one caveat to Scheele’s ideas is that especially during the accountability era—a ramping up of traditional practices and norms for education—this trap affects all students, not just the good ones.

And the trap goes something like this, according to Scheele:

Most of us learned as early as junior high that we would pass, even excel if we did the work assigned to us by our teachers. We learned to ask whether the test covered all of chapter five or only a part of it, whether the assigned paper should be ten pages long or thirty, whether “extra credit” was two book reports on two books by the same author or two books written in the same period. Remember?

We were learning the Formula.

• Find out what’s expected.
• Do it.
• Wait for a response.

And it worked. We always made the grade. Here’s what that process means: You took tests and wrote papers, got passing grades, and then were automatically promoted from one year to the next. That is not only in elementary, junior, and senior high school, but even in undergraduate and graduate school. You never had to compete for promotions, write résumés, or rehearse yourself or even know anyone for this promotion. It happened automatically. And we got used to it….

What we were really learning is System Dependency! If you did your work, you’d be taken care of. We experienced it over and over; it’s now written in our mind’s eye. But nothing like this happens outside of school. Still, we remain the same passive good students that we were at ten or fourteen or twenty or even at forty-four. The truth is, once learned, system dependency stays with most of us throughout our careers, hurting us badly. We keep reinforcing the same teacher-student dichotomy until it is ingrained. Then we transfer it to the employers and organizations for whom we’ll work.

This model of traditional schooling includes a teacher who makes almost all the decisions and students who are rewarded for being compliant—and that compliance is identified as “achievement.”

In English classes, a subset of this process is reflected in how we teach, and fail, writing. As I noted in my earlier post, Hillocks and others have noted that traditional commitments to the five-paragraph essay (and cousin template-models of essays) and a return to isolated grammar exercises have resulted from the rise of high-stakes testing of writing. As well, the accountability era has included the central place of rubrics driving what students write, how teachers respond to student writing, and how students revise their essays.

So what is wrong with five-paragraph essays, grammar exercises, and rubrics?

Let’s focus on rubrics to examine why all of these are ways in which we fail writing and students. Alfie Kohn explains:

Mindy Nathan, a Michigan teacher and former school board member told me that she began “resisting the rubric temptation” the day “one particularly uninterested student raised his hand and asked if I was going to give the class a rubric for this assignment.” She realized that her students, presumably grown accustomed to rubrics in other classrooms, now seemed “unable to function [emphasis added] unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value. Worse than that,” she added, “they do not have confidence in their thinking or writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks.”

Rubric-based writing and assessment, then, reflect the exact problem I highlighted earlier, one noted by Applebee and Langer: teachers know more today than ever about how to teach writing, but commitments to accountability and testing prevent that awareness from being applied in class; as Kohn explains:

What all this means is that improving the design of rubrics, or inventing our own, won’t solve the problem because the problem is inherent to the very idea of rubrics and the goals they serve. This is a theme sounded by Maja Wilson in her extraordinary new book, Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment. In boiling “a messy process down to 4-6 rows of nice, neat, organized little boxes,” she argues, assessment is “stripped of the complexity that breathes life into good writing.” High scores on a list of criteria for excellence in essay writing do not mean that the essay is any good because quality is more than the sum of its rubricized parts. To think about quality, Wilson argues, “we need to look to the piece of writing itself to suggest its own evaluative criteria” – a truly radical and provocative suggestion.

Wilson also makes the devastating observation that a relatively recent “shift in writing pedagogy has not translated into a shift in writing assessment.” Teachers are given much more sophisticated and progressive guidance nowadays about how to teach writing but are still told to pigeonhole the results, to quantify what can’t really be quantified. Thus, the dilemma: Either our instruction and our assessment remain “out of synch” or the instruction gets worse in order that students’ writing can be easily judged with the help of rubrics.

Once fulfilling the expectations of the rubric becomes the primary if not exclusive goal for the student, we have the SAT writing section and the unintended consequences, as Newkirk explains (English Journal, November 2005) about students writing to prompts and rubrics for high-stakes testing:

George Hillocks Jr. has shown that another persistent problem with these types of prompts concerns evidence—the writer must instantly develop instances or examples to be used for support. In a sample of the released papers from the Texas state assessment, some of this evidence looks, well, manufactured….When I first read this essay, I imagined some free spirit, some rebel, flaunting the ethics of composition and inventing evidence to the point of parody. But when I shared this letter with a teacher from Texas, she assured me that students were coached to invent evidence if they were stuck [emphasis added]. In my most cynical moment, I hadn’t expected that cause. And what is to stop these coached students from doing the same on the SAT writing prompt? Who would know?

As but one example above, “the good student trap” is replicated day after day in the ways in which students are prompted to write and then how teachers respond to and grade that writing. The failure lies in who makes almost all of the decisions, the teacher, and who is rewarded for being mostly compliant, students.

While core knowledge advocates and proponents of rubric-driven assessment tend to misrepresent critical and progressive educators who seek authentic learning experiences for students with charges of “not teaching X” or “So what shall we teach?” (with the implication that core knowledge educators want demanding content but critical and progressive educators don’t), the real question we must confront is not what content we teach and students learn, but who decides and why.

If we return to rubrics, well designed rubrics do everything for students (see Education Done To, For, or With Students? for a full discussion of this failure), everything writers need to do in both college and the real world beyond school.

Rubric-driven writing is asking less of students than authentic writing in a writing workshop.

Traditional core knowledge classrooms are also deciding for students what knowledge matters, and again, asking less of students than challenging students to identify what knowledge matters in order to critique that knowledge as valuable (or not) for each student as well as the larger society. The tension of this debate is about mere knowledge acquisition versus confronting the norms of knowledge in the pursuit of individual autonomy and social justice—making students aware of the power implications of knowledge so that they live their lives with purpose and dignity instead of having life happen to them.

My call is not for ignoring the teaching of grammar, but for confronting the norms of conventional language so that students gain power over language instead of language having power over them. Why do we feel compelled not to end a sentence with a preposition? Where did that claim come from and who benefits from such a convention?

Why does academic writing tend to erase the writer from the writing (“No ‘I’!”) and who benefits from that convention?

You see, critical approaches to teaching go beyond the mere acquisition of knowledge that some authority has deemed worthy (what Freire labels the “banking concept” of teaching). Yes, knowledge matters, but not in the fixed ways core knowledge advocates claim and pursue. Critical approaches to knowledge honor the dignity of human autonomy in children, something that many adults seem at least leery if not fearful of allowing in their classrooms.

Core knowledge, rubrics, templates, prescriptions, and prompts are all tools of control, ways to trap students in the pursuit of compliance. They aren’t challenging (or “rigorous” as advocates like to say), and they aren’t learning.

As Scheele explains:

System dependency is not the only damaging thing we learned in the context of school: We learned our place….

Yet most of us were falsely lulled into a false self labeled “good” by fulfilling the expected curriculum. The alternative was being “bad” by feeling alienated and losing interest or dropping out….

So what’s the problem? The problem is the danger. The danger lies in thinking about life as a test that we’ll pass or fail, one or the other, tested and branded by an Authority. So, we slide into feeling afraid we’ll fail even before we do-if we do. Mostly we don’t even fail; we’re just mortally afraid that we’re going to. We get used to labeling ourselves failures even when we’re not failing. If we don’t do as well as we wish, we don’t get a second chance to improve ourselves, or raise our grades. If we do perform well, we think that we got away with something this time. But wait until next time, we think; then they’ll find out what frauds we are. We let this fear ruin our lives. And it does. When we’re afraid, we lose our curiosity and originality, our spirit and our talent-our life.

Beyond Rigor, Templates, and Compliance

In my position at a small and selective liberal arts university, I now teach mostly good students in my writing-intensive first year seminars. Students are asked to read and discuss Style, a descriptive look at grammar, mechanics, and usage that raises students’ awareness and skepticism about conventional uses of language, but rejects seeing conventions as fixed rules. (We ask why teachers in high school tend to teach students that fragments are incorrect when many published works contain fragments, leading to a discussion of purposeful language use.)

Throughout the course, students are asked to plan and then write four original essays that must be drafted several times with peer and my feedback. The focus, topic, and type of essay must be chosen by the student. To help them in those choices, we discuss what they have been required to do in high school for essays, we explore what different fields expect in college writing, and we read and analyze real-world essays in order to establish the context for the choices, and consequences of those choices, that writers make—specifically when those writers are students.

I offer this here in case you think somehow I am advocating “fluffy thinking” or a “do-your-own-thing philosophy” of teaching, as some have charged. And I invite you to ask my students which they prefer, which is easier—the template, prompt-based writing of high school that created their good student trap or my class. [HINT: Students recognize that five-paragraph essays and rubrics are easier, and they often directly ask me to just tell them what to write and how. As Mindy Nathan noted above, good students are “unable to function [emphasis added] unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value.”]

My students reinforce for me every class session that we have failed the teaching of writing and those students by doing everything for them in school. They are nearly intellectually paralyzed with fear about the consequences of their own decisions.

When challenged and supported to be agents of their own learning, their own coming to understand the world, and their own decisions about what knowledge matters and why, however, they are more than capable of the tasks.

And with them in mind, I must ask, who benefits from compliant, fearful students as intellectual zombies, always doing as they are told?

—–

* Although he phrased his comment poorly, my principal was, in fact, making a valid point that a multiple-choice English (grammar) test was unlikely to fairly represent what our students had learned about composing original essays. He intended to make a swipe at the quality of the test, although he did so gracelessly.

NCTE, Teaching

Safe Spaces for Teachers’ Professional Voices in a Public Sphere

November 24, 2013 plthomasedd 9 Comments

It is a bittersweet irony that words are mostly inadequate to express my appreciation to be nominated for and then recognized with the National Council of Teachers of English 2013 George Orwell Award—”established in 1975 and given by the NCTE Public Language Award Committee, recognizes writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse.”

I am first humbled to be added to the powerful list of previous winners. I also fear I pale in comparison, but having been included, I now take on the obligation of fulfilling this recognition that my work does belong here.

So let me highlight briefly that the 2013 Orwell Award directly recognizes my blogging, identifying Evidence? Secretary Duncan, You Can’t Handle the Evidence.

As both public intellectual work and a part of New Media, my blogging is fraught with minefields in the context of my life as a university professor and scholar as well as my status as a teacher, identifying myself always as someone who spent 18 years teaching in a rural public high school in South Carolina.

Public intellectual work and blogging remain marginalized ways of being for academics and scholars, while they both are risky ventures for public school teachers.

I am cautiously optimistic that NCTE’s Orwell Award this year is about much more than me—it is about the New Media of blogging and about the importance of professional voices in public spheres.

And thus we have two obligations before us as educators, scholars, and academics:

We must work diligently to create safe spaces for all teachers’ voices in public spheres. Currently, safe spaces exist for tenured professors (my status), but such is not the case for public school teachers and their students; as Arundhati Roy has explained, “We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
And once those safe spaces are created, teachers must bring our individual and collective professional voices to the public sphere.

Because, as Orwell cautioned, public discourse is dominated by partisan political voices and “[p]olitical language–and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists–is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Professional teachers’ voices in the public sphere must, as NCTE suggests “[contribute] to honesty and clarity in public language” as a form of resistance to the continued failure of partisan political discourse, especially as that partisan political discourse impacts our public school, our public teachers, and our public school students.

Education, education reform, Teaching, Testing, VAM

When the Shoe Is on the Other Foot: Lessons for Teachers in Misguided Accountability

September 19, 2013 plthomasedd 2 Comments

If we imagined a pictorial representation of the evolution of education accountability, similar to the standard image we associate with human evolution—

—then we’d have to confront that the accountability era begun in the early 1980s focused first on students, requiring them to pass exit exams (regardless of their having taken and passed all of the required courses for graduation) in order to receive their diplomas.

Next, schools were the target of accountability with the advent and distribution of school report cards.

By the end of the first and beginning of the second decades of the twenty-first century, teachers have found their place at the accountability table, with some suggesting that teachers are now being fed their just desserts. Merit pay linked to student test scores and the more recent flurry of implementing value-added methods (VAM) of teacher evaluation and retention in many ways bring teachers into decades-long predicaments faced by students and schools: the misguided and unfair weight of standardized testing used in dysfunctional and invalid ways.

When I posted about how absurd teacher accountability has become, I expected most on my Twitter feed to recognize the situation in New York as unfair and a harsh warning of the mounting weight of failed accountability:

A Bronx performing arts school’s dance instructor will be judged on students’ English exam scores. Physical education teachers at a transfer school in Brooklyn are going to teach Olympic history lessons to prepare students for the history tests that will help determine their ratings. And teachers in Queens are putting the fate of their evaluations into a final exam that they don’t teach, but yields high pass rates.

The scenarios are not unusual — across [New York City] this year, thousands of teachers will be rated in large part based on test scores of subjects and students that they do not teach.

Rather, the scenarios are examples of how schools have tried to comply with a new teacher evaluation system that must factor student performance into final ratings. They also represent how the original purpose of the evaluations, to differentiate teachers’ effectiveness, has been squeezed by restrictive state laws, limited resources, and a tight timeline for implementation.

“It’s insane to me that 40 percent of my evaluation is going to be based on someone else’s work,” said Jason Zanitsch, a high school drama teacher who will share the same “student growth” score with colleagues in his school this year.

However, the first response I received raised a much different point:

E knox ‏@Tim_10_ber

@plthomasEdD if teachers don’t like this then way assign all the group work which is just as bad for the kids? hmmm….

My first response was to note that holding teachers accountable for the work of other teachers and the test scores of students they do not even teach is not truly analogous to having students do group work, and then be graded for that group work.

As @Tim_10_ber and I exchanged tweets, I came to recognize that I was arguing from my idealized position on how best to implement group work (group work must require collaboration—or it is simply students sitting close to each other doing individual work—and any grades assigned to group work must be articulated to reflect participation) and @Tim_10_ber was confronting a position with which I agree—that group work is often implemented and graded carelessly and thus unfairly to students.

It is from that recognition, then, that I want to make an argument about the only potential positive outcome related to the unjustifiable use of merit pay and VAM in teacher evaluation, pay, and retention: teachers need to learn how to teach better now that the shoe is on the other foot. Some ironic lessons teachers should learn from invalid teacher accountability include the following:

Testing and grades often do far more educational harm than good; the time has come to consider de-testing and de-grading our teaching. Teacher feedback, student self-assessment, student-created rubrics, and re-imagined assessment situations (such as group assessments) and formats are all better alternatives to tests and grades, if our goal is equitable and effective learning opportunities for students.
The central flaw with teacher accountability being linked to student test scores and the standards movement is that teachers have experienced declining autonomy in both their content and pedagogy as well as the high-stakes tests themselves. Accountability without autonomy is tyranny. This lesson translates into how often student learning is reduced to mere compliance. Students being held accountable also must have their autonomy honored; thus, students deserve far more choice in their learning than they have been traditionally allowed.
As noted by @Tim_10_ber, teachers must be far more vigilant about designing, assigning, and assessing group work, with a keen eye on autonomy, engagement, and causation/correlation (what are fair associations between each student and the outcomes of the group).

The accountability era has nearly destroyed public education. Little about accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing can be embraced or endorsed.

But oppressive and even capricious mandates tend to be leveled at the least among us first; once those policies trickle up to those in power—in other words, when the shoe is on the other foot—living with inequity, unfair accountability, and unworkable conditions can open our eyes to our own flaws as teachers.

As we continue to fight for our professional autonomy and dignity, taking moral stands of non-cooperation, let’s be sure to bring that fight to our classrooms and honor the autonomy and dignity of all our students as a model for those in power who have yet to see the flaws of their ways through the distorting lens of privilege they wear.

In the words of Henry David Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience”:

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too….

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn [emphasis added].

Teaching

Advice to Students and Authors: Submitting Your Work

August 25, 2013 plthomasedd 2 Comments

If someone asks me what I do, without hesitation, I can always offer, “I am a teacher and a writer.”

I am extremely fortunate because I am able to make my living as both a teacher and a writer, something afforded me as a university professor. Being a writer and a teacher, also, are not vocations I have chosen, but who I am at my core. In other words, I did not choose to be a teacher and a writer, but I did come to recognize and embrace both ways of being.

Over the past thirty years, I have taught writing to a wide range of students (from high school through graduate courses), addressing all types of writing from poetry and fiction to personal and scholarly essays. For more than thirty years, I have been a serious writer, working on my own original poetry, fiction, essays, blogs, and academic books. Also part of life as a writer has included working as an editor—co-editing a state journal, editing a column in English Journal, editing two series at two different publishers (Peter Lang USA and Sense), and editing/co-editing book-length volumes.

All of these experiences with being a student, a teacher, a writer, and an editor have provided me with a great deal of experience that has taught me some important guidelines for students and authors preparing and submitting work in courses or for publication. I want here to outline some of that advice, recognizing that advice is often futile; it is the act of writing and experiencing all that is connected with writing that ultimately teaches us what we need to know.

First, let me offer some general comments about writing and being a writer. Essentially, there are two types of writers: ones who are compelled to write (and thus refer to themselves as writers and write regardless of achieving publication) and ones whose situation (being a student or being an academic) include the necessity to write. Each situation creates unique advantages and disadvantages, but I believe it is key for any person submitting work for course credit or publication to recognize which category she/he fits within order to understand what strategies are needed to be a successful writer regardless.

Next, two strategies are incredibly important for students and authors submitting work. One is embracing the life of a purposeful and diligent reader. Reading often as well as reading deeply and widely are essential for writing well. Reading for pleasure is important, but reading like a writer is also key. Reading like a writer involves looking at not just what writers say but how writers craft their messages. For students and authors submitting work for publication, acquiring genre awareness is a primary goal of reading.

Genre awareness is identifying and then working purposefully within or against the conventions associated with different purposes for and types of writing. For example, the characteristics of text that shape poetry (crafting a piece in lines and stanzas) differ from the characteristics of text that shape journalism. Students must gain control over the various expectations for academic writing among disciplines; writing about a work of literature is a different type of writing than preparing a literature review for a research assignment in a sociology class. Authors, as well, soon realize that submitting an Op-Ed to a local newspaper is quite different than submitting an essay to a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

A second strategy is to seek out avenues for learning about language and writing beyond the formal classroom. One important resource is Joseph Williams’s Style. But dozens of engaging and thoughtful books exist to supplement the type of learning about of writing done in formal school settings.

Now, let me outline some guidelines for submitting writing, whether as a student for course credit or an author seeking publication:

In our digital age, my strongest recommendation is learn how to use your word processor, such as Word. Writers must master word processing so that the application works for you, making the tedious tasks of formatting manuscripts less time consuming so you can focus on crafting good writing. For writers, issues of headers and footers, title pages, formatting fonts and margins, handling block quotes, and formatting reference lists can create unnecessary stress that distracts from time needed for drafting and revising. The short point is that word processors will do most of these tasks in ways that are simple and quick; thus, learn how to use the word processor to do anything you need to do with preparing a manuscript.
A related piece of advice is “less is always better when formatting a manuscript.” A strong caution I must offer is avoid unneeded returns and all tabs. Two problematic areas for formatting a manuscript are block quotes and preparing bibliographies that require hanging indents; in both cases, do not manually put in returns and do not use tabs to format bibliographies, but do use the formatting features of your word processor. Also, bold and italics should be used sparingly and only within guidelines of the required style sheet. Never use quote marks or bold for emphasis (use italics, but, again, do so sparingly).
Just as less is key to formatting, simplicity is central to basic choices about manuscripts. Use 12 pt. Times New Roman for your font. Period. No variety of fonts, no variety of font sizes. Make sure headers and footers also have the same font choices. As well, in most cases (however, please conform to the style sheet required), double spacing is also required throughout, as well as 1″ margins.
Honor word count or page number requirements. Noting above, do not manipulate font type or size to reach a page count.
Follow the style requirements and refer to the appropriate guides for preparing your manuscript. Many students and authors need to conform to style and citation guidelines provided by professional organizations, such as MLA, APA, or Chicago Manual of Style. Understanding how style sheets differ and why also helps most writers conform to those guidelines.
When submitting cited writing, note that the list of references (headed differently among citation style sheets) is a part of the manuscript, although separated by a page break. Be sure to include the references list as part of the submitted manuscript. [Also be sure to include all proper citations in drafts and first submissions whether you are a student or author submitting for publication. Do not submit a piece and state you plan to add your references later; no one can adequately respond to a work requiring citations without full and proper documentation and the necessary list of references.]
Take care to provide an interesting and relevant title for all writing and take equal care with subheads (works of 4-5 pages or longer generally benefit from subheads), noting the formatting guidelines needed depending on the style sheet required.
Most students and writers will submit their work electronically (please attach your manuscript when you send that email), and as a result, most students and authors will receive comments and editing on their manuscripts through review features on word processors. As noted above, knowing how to use advanced review features on your word processor is crucial. Understand how to navigate track changes as you revise, but most important of all, be able to produce a clean subsequent draft to resubmit. An effective strategy is to save two versions of the returned manuscript—one that maintains all comments and track changes and a second (from which you’ll revise) that accepts all track changes and deletes all comments. Opening both files but working from the clean version (be sure to cut OFF track changes in that version) insures you’ll submit a clean draft for the next round of feedback, for a grade, or for a decision about publication.

Success when writing as a student or writing for publication, ultimately, depends on the quality of the ideas and expression in the final piece, but the initial experience a teacher and editor has with a submitted work begins that process. Students and authors must make that first experience a positive one.

The appearance of a manuscript sends a message about the purposefulness and professionalism of the writer. Students and authors must not expect teachers and editors to take more care with their manuscripts than the student or author has herself/himself.

CCSS, Education, Teaching

Education Done To, For, or With Students?

June 14, 2013 plthomasedd 17 Comments

Teachers caution student writers to avoid cliches like the plague, but many cliches harbor enduring truths.

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is an apt characterization of the rush to adopt and implement Common Core and next-generation assessments—particularly if we ignore the conditions of teaching and learning.

What happens in the classroom and which populations of students have rich learning opportunities are essential factors contributing to student academic growth, regardless of the prescribed standards (new or not) and regardless of which generation spawns the tests.

One way to consider the conditions of teaching and learning in the classroom is to examine the prepositions of teaching: (1) Education done to students, (2) education done for students, and (3) education done with students.

Education done to students. Traditional approaches to teaching and learning as well as the more recent “no excuses” model for schooling are driven by essentially paternalistic assumptions: Learning is reduced to a discrete body of knowledge to be imparted by the teacher and deposited in the student (Freire labeled this the “banking” concept). School becomes a place, then, where teaching is done to students.

Traditionally, education done to students has been common for the youngest students, couched inside an assumption that new learning is acquired best analytically (it isn’t because about 80% of people are global, not analytical thinkers) and in linear/sequential instruction. Direct and isolated grammar and phonics instruction, for example, represent well education done to students in traditional practices. More recently, during the rise of “no excuses” ideology, younger students and students confronting new learning continue to receive an education done to them, but high-poverty and minority students have also joined their ranks as “no excuses” schools tend to serve these populations by reducing schooling to highly structures test-preparation: work sheets, programmatic textbooks, computer-based diagnostic testing, benchmark testing.

As well, increasingly, standards- and test-based accountability has driven education toward static and reduced curriculum, teachers as mere agents of dispensing that fixed curriculum, and students as passive recipients of what is tested is what is taught. In short, education done to students fails everyone.

Education done for students. The progressive yin to the traditional yang* is education done for students. While the practices that characterize education done for students may be rooted in a kind of maternalism, those practices remain distorted by similar goals found in teaching done to students. A key example of the rise of teaching done for students is the work of Wiggins and McTighe, marketed as understanding by design. Central to this concept are some compelling ideas such as teachers being transparent with students about what learning outcomes are expected, lending credibility to the rubric as a mechanism for guiding student work and promoting the appearance of greater validity and reliability to assigning grades to a wide range of assessments (particularly created responses, performances, and products).

With the end chosen by the teacher in mind (the assessment), lesson planning remains focused on what the students must acquire in order to perform. Rubric-driven instruction and assessment do avoid the “gotcha” problem inherent in traditional teaching, but the rubric fails authentic learning because it, again, reduces learning to compliance.

Within a culture of teaching done for students, teachers are encouraged to take great care, for example, in designing writing prompts, with the argument that a well crafted prompt and carefully constructed rubric insure students will write the essays teachers seek. In that context, however, student agency is ignored and student voice is reduced to an observable and identified (for the student) set of criteria on the scoring rubric.

While teaching done for students again disproportionately impacts negatively young and new learners, impoverished students, English language learners, and minority students (in other words, those students most often marginalized by society and schools), a stark example of the failure of teaching done for students lies with the so-called top students, identified as the good-student trap by Scheele:

We come to college with the unspoken anticipation of all that will be done for us. We expect to be made acceptable, valuable, knowledgeable, and finally professional and employable. By graduation, we presume everything will be dazzlingly clear: We will find our calling, brilliantly catapulting us to a guaranteed successful career. This wish, seldom even conscious, lies deep in our hearts. Yet we believe it will happen….

Most of us learned as early as junior high that we would pass, even excel if we did the work assigned to us by our teachers. We learned to ask whether the test covered all of chapter five or only a part of it, whether the assigned paper should be ten pages long or thirty, whether “extra credit” was two book reports on two books by the same author or two books written in the same period. Remember?

We were learning the Formula.

• Find out what’s expected.
• Do it.
• Wait for a response.

And it worked. We always made the grade. Here’s what that process means: You took tests and wrote papers, got passing grades, and then were automatically promoted from one year to the next. That is not only in elementary, junior, and senior high school, but even in undergraduate and graduate school. You never had to compete for promotions, write résumés, or rehearse yourself or even know anyone for this promotion. It happened automatically. And we got used to it….

So what’s the problem? The problem is the danger. The danger lies in thinking about life as a test that we’ll pass or fail, one or the other, tested and branded by an Authority. So, we slide into feeling afraid we’ll fail even before we do-if we do. Mostly we don’t even fail; we’re just mortally afraid that we’re going to. We get used to labeling ourselves failures even when we’re not failing. If we don’t do as well as we wish, we don’t get a second chance to improve ourselves, or raise our grades. If we do perform well, we think that we got away with something this time. But wait until next time, we think; then they’ll find out what frauds we are. We let this fear ruin our lives. And it does. When we’re afraid, we lose our curiosity and originality, our spirit and our talent-our life.

In the end, education done to students and education done for students fail those students since they both ignore the agency of the learner (and the teacher) and allow outcomes that are arbitrary and symbolic to replace authentic demonstrations of understanding grounded in the wants and needs of the learner.

Education done with students. Historically and currently what remains rare is education done with students, a teaching and learning environment for the teacher-student to guide and support the student-teacher (as Freire argues). Education done with students is couched within democratic and liberatory goals, but also is well supported by decades of educational research.

Education done with students shifts the teaching and learning focus away from outcomes (tests), standards, content, and the teacher by honoring each learner as the primary source for teaching and learning.

Briefly, the diverse and student-based research base on best practice shows that education done with students proves to be effective, but incredibly complex, resisting pre-packaged programs and highly efficient testing formats. In fact, stating that best practice, broadly, means that teachers must be expert at adapting instruction to the demonstrated needs of each student sounds simple, if not simplistic.

A clear example of the power of teaching done with students as well as the essentially complex nature of best practice is to examine the charts provided by Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde at the end of each content-based chapter. Significantly, best practice tends not to discount entirely or solely endorse any practice (the charts contain two columns, headed “increase” and “decrease”); instead, best practice is a collaboration between teacher and student in which the teacher seeks those strategies that the student has demonstrated a need to acquire.

Another powerful aspect of best practice that highlights the need for teaching done with students is the gradual release of responsibility, as Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde explain: “The idea of gradual release is quite simple: in the most effective lessons, there is a stepwise transfer of responsibility from the teacher to the student” (p. 39). In other words, there is nothing whimsical (letting students do whatever they want, whenever) or haphazard about teaching done with students. In fact, it is quite purposeful, simple in its essence, and incredibly complex, messy, and unpredictable in its application (thus, it remains rare in the classroom).

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, just as the current accountability era consumed public education, education done with students gained momentum through the rise of the National Writing Project and workshop-based writing instruction, made popular by Nancie Atwell and others. Atwell’s workshop approach was controversial then, and remains rare in classrooms today. But the essence of the workshop (which Atwell attributed to Giacobbe)—time, ownership, and response—redefined the roles and agency of the teacher and the students, the nature of the curriculum (student choice within teacher guidance), and what assessments were honored (increased focus on authentic projects, such as original essays by students).

For all its promise, however, much of those initial right steps have been co-opted and consumed by traditional (teaching done to students) and progressive (teaching done for students) practices as education remains entirely focused on raising test scores based on standards.

The rush to adopt new standards and the hyperbole about next generation assessments are, then, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Once again, our gaze is poised on the wrong things, a myopic and trivial concern for moving around the same old furniture without regard to the people involved or the iceberg (poverty and social inequity) right there before us certain to prompt yet more cries of crisis.

* Yin and yang are complimentary, not opposites; thus, I use this comparison to support my argument that traditional and progressive approaches to education are essentially the same flawed ideology because they remain trapped inside a single mechanistic paradigm; progressive education appears a bit more child-centered, a bit more kind-hearted, but it isn’t.

Teaching, Workers

I Love My Students

May 22, 2013 plthomasedd Leave a comment

Recently, I was at the window of my allergist, paying for my allergy shots. The receptionist asked me something about enjoying my break, but I noted I was currently teaching a May course. Her response was something like “Sorry.”

I said that I enjoyed my May class and ended with “I love my students.” The receptionist stopped typing my information into the computer and looked up at me, her brow furrowed.

“Are you being serious?” she asked.

“Yes,” I explained, “I love my students, I love teaching.”

She explained to me that another professor came to the same office and only said that sarcastically so she assumed I was also.

This moment came back to me as I watched CNN’s coverage of the tornado destroying a school in Moore, OK. Anderson Cooper, echoing comments made by the media during the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, interviewed a teacher who had gathered all of her students under their desks during the storm—and no children from her class were injured—and stated that teachers do amazing things every day, heroic things every day, but this women had gone above her duty.

I have now grown tired of this token and blatantly superficial (and insincere) praise of teachers.

Token praise cannot, or at least should not, mask the disdain expressed about not only teachers but also workers in general in the U.S. The reposted blog below, then, remains a valid concern.

Teachers and the Death of the American Worker *

The first decade of the 21st century has been an ominous harbinger for the American worker.

Children and adults in poverty, the working poor, and the working class are increasing; the middle-class is eroding; and the pooling of capital among the 1% is expanding, forming the anchor stalling the progress of the USS Democracy.

In The State of Working America (12th ed), Mishel, Bivens, Gould, and Shierholz identify the disturbing trends that signal the approaching death of the American worker:

America’s vast middle class has suffered a ‘lost decade’ and faces the threat of another (p. 5)….

Income and wage inequality have risen sharply over the last 30 years (p. 6)….

Rising inequality is the major cause of wage stagnation for workers and of the failure of low- and middle-income families to appropriately benefit from growth (p. 6)….

Economic policies caused increased inequality of wages and incomes (p. 7)….

Claims that growing inequality has not hurt middle-income families are flawed (p. 8)….

Growing income inequality has not been offset by increased mobility (p. 9)….

Inequalities persist by race and gender. (p. 9)

Currently, the American worker—like those trapped in poverty and the working poor—have no political party because, ironically, the democratic process in the U.S. has been bought by Corporate America and democracy has been left in that wake.

Public school teachers also have no political party, and since the Chicago teachers’ strike, teachers now more than ever represent the political and public failure to appreciate and recognize the importance of the American worker.

Teachers as Workers

Early and mid-twentieth century America may have been a turning point for unionization in a country that lives more by ideology than evidence, but even that assessment may be tinted by the rose-colored glasses of hindsight.

The truth is likely that Americans’ embracing of rugged individualism has always been an impenetrable wall between the American character and the community and solidarity at the core of unions.

Nonetheless, the American public school teacher has over the past decade—during the demonstrable decline of the working and middle class as well as the rise of poverty in the U.S.—gradually become the target of the popular corporate agenda to end tenure and break unions, despite the essential democratic nature of both.

Politicians, corporate advocates, and the media have fed a willing public a steady diet of false but robust narratives that characterize teachers as the sole force behind misleading claims of failed public schools. Any evidence- and experience-based rebuttal to the “bad” teacher claim or the corrupt union mantra has been met with a “no excuses” ideology that chants “poverty is not destiny.”

This corporate agenda has no basis in fact, but the abundant commentaries and scholarship refuting this drum beat have failed to pierce the American public’s self-defeating faith in America the meritocracy.

The political and corporate elite know this, and they have little motivation to set aside their lies since they work, and since they benefit in the end.

And during the teachers’ strike in Chicago, the media and political leaders mischaracterized unions and teachers in Chicago and across the U.S.—more laziness and greediness heaped on teachers, and more evidence that the Democratic party is indistinguishable from the Republican party in terms of education and labor policy.

What is most disturbing ultimately about the demonizing of teachers and in effect all American workers is that most Americans are and will always be those exact workers who are being stripped of their rights, dignity, and access to the American Dream that the political and corporate elite along with the public claim to be protecting.

The Chicago teachers’ strike was yet another referendum on the failing education reform agenda that is destined to strip teachers of their professionalism and to further stratify the education system of the U.S. so that affluent children (mostly white) gain even more advantage in their schooling than they have in their lives over children living in working class, working poor, and impoverished homes (disproportionately people of color).

It was a political lie to claim that the Chicago teachers’ strike was the fault of lazy and greedy teachers supported by their corrupt union. It was a political lie to ignore the central demand of those teachers—a stand against test-based teacher accountability.

But neither the political elite nor the corporate elite will eventually lose in this debate because a public embracing of the corporate agenda and rejection of the striking teachers is a self-defeating commitment that will guarantee what appears inevitable now—the death of the American worker.

Teachers are not alone in this, but public school teachers are great American workers. I cannot fathom how we have come to a day when Americans no longer value something that cannot be more American than workers in solidarity.

* Reposted from Daily Kos, Teachers and the Death of the American Worker (September 11, 2012)

Charter schools, Democracy, Education, education reform, miracle schools, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, Segregation, Social Context Reform, Teach for America, Teaching, Testing

Recommended: Hope Against Hope, Sarah Carr

February 23, 2013 plthomasedd 4 Comments

I just read and reviewed Hope against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children by Sarah Carr, to be released February 26, 2013. I urge you to pre-order it.

Books on education tend to be deeply misguided and self-promoting or trapped in the “miracle” school/ “no excuses” memes that also dominate flawed education reform.

Diane Ravitch’s recent and upcoming books as well as Kathleen Nolan’s Police in the Hallways are rare exceptions.

I am surprised, then, and eager to recommend Carr’s wonderful narrative of post-Katrina education reform in New Orleans, a crucible of the keynotes of the newest reform movement invested in charter schools and Teach for America.

If you are skeptical of the new reforms and frustrated with the status quo of public education’s failure to address children and neighborhoods most in need, Carr’s book is a perfect story of three people living the reality of both.

See an excerpt at The Atlantic: “The Real Reason More Low-Income Students Don’t Go to College”

While reading, I also compiled a companion reading list, below:

Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School, Kathleen Nolan

http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/police-in-the-hallways

“More Challenges to Kirp’s ‘Miracle’ Narrative,” @ The Chalk Face, P. L. Thomas

http://atthechalkface.com/2013/02/15/more-challenges-to-kirps-miracle-narrative/

“Final Words of Advice,” “Where Do We Go from Here?” Martin Luther King Jr. (1967)

http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/King_Where.htm

Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom and “Multiplication Is for White People”: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit

http://thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_catalog&task=author&author_id=P14893

“Murky Waters: The Education Debate in New Orleans,” Truthout, Adam Bessie and Dan Archer

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10061-the-disaster-capitalism-curriculum-the-high-price-of-education-reform-episode-2

“The Teaching Profession as a Service Industry,” Daily Censored, P. L. Thomas

http://www.dailycensored.com/the-teaching-profession-as-a-service-industry/

“Is There a Christmas Miracle in School Reform Debate?” The Answer Sheet/The Washington Post, P. L. Thomas

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/is-there-a-christmas-miracle-in-school-reform-debate/2011/12/21/gIQA4FocCP_blog.html

“Unpacking TFA Support: Twisted Logic and Assumptions,” Schools Matter, P. L. Thomas

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/12/unpacking-tfa-support-twisted-logic-and.html

“Current Education Reform Perpetuating, Not Curbing, Inequity,” the becoming radical, P. L. Thomas

https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/current-education-reform-perpetuating-not-curbing-inequity/

“Lessons from the Zombie Apocalypse,” the becoming radical, P. L. Thomas

https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/lessons-from-the-zombie-apocalypse/

“Reconsidering Education ‘Miracles,’” OpEdNews, P. L. Thomas

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Reconsidering-Education-M-by-P-L-Thomas-100816-438.html

“The New Layoff Formula Project,” The Shanker Blog, Matthew Di Carlo

http://shankerblog.org/?p=2377

The Mis-Education of the Negro, Carter Woodson

http://www.amazon.com/Mis-Education-Negro-Carter-Godwin-Woodson/dp/1440463506

“Poor Teaching for Poor Children in the Name of Reform,” Education Week, Alfie Kohn

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/poor.htm

“The Pedagogy of Poverty Versus Good Teaching,” Phi Delta Kappan, Martin Haberman

https://www.ithaca.edu/compass/pdf/pedagogy.pdf

“’They’re All Our Children,’” AlterNet, P. L. Thomas

http://www.alternet.org/education/theyre-all-our-children

Education, Educational Research, Teaching, Testing, World War Z

“A Realistic, Pragmatic Approach” to Rejecting CCSS

January 25, 2013 plthomasedd 1 Comment

“Should Teachers Resist the Common Core?” asks a blog post at Education Week, continuing the debate about CCSS among Larry Ferlazzo, Stephen Krashen, David Cohen, and me.

This posting highlights a point made by David that I want to return to (again) because I agree strongly with David’s focus: “And as for the critics I’ve cited, to my knowledge, none of them is currently a K-12 teacher. That fact does not invalidate their criticisms, but I think it colors their perceptions regarding a realistic, pragmatic approach, here and now, for those of us trying to serve our current students and schools most productively.”

I have argued repeatedly that the central flaw with the current education reform movement and its major elements—CCSS, new high-stakes testing, Teach for America (TFA), value-added methods (VAM) of teacher evaluation, and charter school advocacy, such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ)—is that these reforms-as-solutions are not based on any clearly identified problems and that the leading advocates themselves have no (or very little) experience and expertise in education.

Let me repeat: I have almost thirty years of combined public high school teaching (18 years), college teaching, teacher education, and scholarship in education that all have occurred during the thirty-year cycle of accountability-driven education reform.

I have ample experience with state standards, state and national (SAT) high-stakes testing, teacher certification, and education accreditation. A central thread of my scholarship over those years has included the negative impact of accountability, standards, and testing on literacy instruction (notably writing) and high-poverty students and schools.

Also let me repeat my answer to the blog title above: Yes, teachers should resist CCSS.

I have already argued for our resistance as part of our teacher agency so I want here to address the obligation teachers have to resist CCSS grounded firmly in our classroom experiences.

I began teaching in the fall of 1984, the exact academic year South Carolina first introduced accountability based on state standards and high-stakes testing. Over the next thirty years, SC has revised those standards three or more times, as well as reformulating our testing at least three times—from BSAP to PACT to PASS (with part of that testing reform driven by a desire to move beyond “basic” [the “B” of BSAP] and to the glory of “challenge” [the “C” of PACT]). In education, it seems, it is all about the branding.

SC and virtually every state in the nation has had decades and multiple versions of standards and high-stakes tests implemented. What is the result? Today no one is satisfied with the outcomes, and the dominant solution is to try the exact same strategy, except at the federal level.

And here is where I wish to assert David’s point as support for my argument: Teachers across the U.S. know from their lived experiences as educators that the bureaucracy of implementing and revising standards and tests over the past thirty years has wasted a tremendous amount of time and funding as well as inhibited our ability to teach and ruined learning opportunities for students—especially in high-needs schools.

Three decades of the accountability era with its standards and high-stakes testing have not improved teaching, have not increased learning, have not closed the achievement/opportunity gap, have not solved the drop-out problem, and have not succeeded in a single claim of made by political advocates of any aspect of this movement.

Why? Because the accountability model built on standards and high-stakes testing is the wrong solution and a complete failure of acknowledging the problem. Educational problems in the U.S. are not a lack of accountability, a lack of standards, or a lack of testing. In fact, increasing all three has increased the real problems because they are distractions from facing the tremendous inequity of opportunity facing children in the U.S. both in their lives and then in their schools.

Teachers must reject CCSS, and we must do so in a collective voice of our experiences in the exact environments of accountability that we know have done more harm than good to the children we serve every day.

Nothing is more real or practical than that.