Education, education reform, Ravitch

Tone, pt. 3: Mirror, Mirror

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[NOTE: The topic of the appropriate tone for making and debating points in education reform will not die; thus, I am reposting two pieces on tone, both originally posted at Daily Kos in 2012 (See pt. 1 HERE, and pt. 2 HERE); pt. 3 is original and intended as a prelude to the release of Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error, which is drawing some criticism for her tone (see my review HERE). Let me be clear that it is absolutely true that tone matters, but I also have learned that the charge of inappropriate tone tends to come from those in power to put the powerless in their “place” and from those who have no substantive point to make. In the end, I call for addressing the credibility and validity of the claims being made first and then, if relevant, we can discuss tone.]

During my 18-year career teaching high school English in rural South Carolina, a foundational unit of study included a nine-week focus on non-fiction, highlighting argumentation. In that unit, we examined carefully the lineage of making arguments that depended on ethical authority—spanning from Henry David Thoreau to Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.

An important point, I believed, for young people was how these powerful and influential writers committed themselves to embodying the principles they called for in everyone. In other words, to have ethical authority, all of us must walk the talk. Otherwise, our claims are discredited by our hypocrisy.

Especially in my 30-years as a teacher of young people—many of which were also spent coaching—and in my challenging life as a father for 24 years now, I have found that young people are greatly impressed by adults who practice what they preach, but are quick to discount those of us who venture into hypocrisy.

And thus, I feel compelled to offer all the education reformers who find themselves concerned about the tone of educators, scholars, and academics who are raising a growing voice against education reform that does not hold up to the weight of evidence and increasingly offering alternatives to the failed accountability era built on standards and high-stakes testing, charter school expansion, Teach for America, VAM, merit pay, and related free-market policies a mirror to their own hypocrisy.

If you are an education reformer speaking from a position of privilege or power (Secretary of Education or USDOE official, governor, superintendent of education, billionaire, EdWeek blogger, think tank member, self-appointed leader of a reform organization, etc.) and you have made or intend to make a claim of inappropriate tone aimed at a K-12 teacher, an education researcher, or an education scholar, I must note that any of the following immediately discredits you as having ethical authority, and thus, the mirror:

  • If you use “no excuses” discourse, stop it. “No excuses” language implies those of us who teach are making excuses. We aren’t. It is an ugly, ugly implication, and it fails the tone argument.
  • If you wave “miracle” schools up as examples of what we all should be doing, stop it. “Miracle” schools don’t exist, and if they did, see above. To suggest some people are simply working harder but the rest of us can’t cut it, again, is an ugly, ugly claim. It too fails the tone argument.
  • If you label those of us who support public education as foundational to the U.S. democracy as part of the “government school lobby,” you are being purposefully dismissive and triggering intentionally the anti-government sentiment among the libertarian streak in the U.S. This is misleading, and thus, fails the tone argument for its snark.
  • If you accuse any in education of “defending the status quo,” especially after acknowledging the historical and current struggles of high-poverty, high-minority schools, you are making a vicious and malicious claim about people that is untrue. The great irony of such a claim is that it is not only an ugly charge but a foolish argument made by accountability advocates who are calling for a continuation of the ineffective accountability status quo.
  • If you accuse any educator of believing that poor children, children of color, or English language learners cannot learn, you have scraped the bottom of the ugly claim barrel. The rare people who genuinely believe such bigotry do exist, but they often have stated such in ways that we can confront and expose. But the vast majority of educators in no way believe such and to imply it is the worst sort of slander.
  • If you say teachers don’t want to be held accountable because we speak out against misguided accountability, once, again, stop it. This is more of the laziness and gravy-train narrative that has no place in conversations about professional educators. It is a damned lie.
  • If you say experience and certification do not matter—either directly or by supporting TFA—you are discounting an entire profession and central principles of all professions. Experience and qualifications matter. Period. Apply this ridiculous claim to the medical profession and you’ll see the folly. Or airline pilots.
  • If you have no experience or background as a K-12 teacher, hold your tongue until you have listened carefully to those who have taught and those who do teach. Your ill-founded arrogance is offensive.

Those who hold positions of privilege are often quick to question the tone of those they deem beneath them. That in itself calls into question the issue of tone. But in the education reform debate, it is also becoming more and more common to promote a false image of MLK as a passive voice in order to keep subordinates in our place.

That, too, is a lie.

King, especially, carried the torch lit by Gandhi that rejected framing either man as a passive leader. They called for non-violent non-cooperation—nothing passive about it.

To call a political appointee someone without qualifications or experience is not a personal attack; it is a fact. And it is something Gandhi and King did.

So let’s stop that game as well.

I end here, then, with a solemn pledge.

If any person in the education reform movement who is concerned about tone will take the first step to reject the mirror items above and to commit to never stooping to them again, I too will join you and likewise honor a similar list of concerns.

Since the reformers have all the power, however, I must ask them to go first—that is, if tone really is the issue (and I suspect it is not).

Education, education reform

Tone, pt. 2: On “Hostile Rhetoric,” Laziness, and the Education Debate

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[NOTE: The topic of the appropriate tone for making and debating points in education reform will not die; thus, I am reposting two pieces on tone, both originally posted at Daily Kos in 2012 (See pt. 1 HERE, and pt. 2 HERE); pt. 3 is original and intended as a prelude to the release of Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error, which is drawing some criticism for her tone (see my review HERE). Let me be clear that it is absolutely true that tone matters, but I also have learned that the charge of inappropriate tone tends to come from those in power to put the powerless in their “place” and from those who have no substantive point to make. In the end, I call for addressing the credibility and validity of the claims being made first and then, if relevant, we can discuss tone.]

On “Hostile Rhetoric,” Laziness, and the Education Debate*

In the early 1980s, I was newly married, seeking my first teaching job, and necessarily living in my parents’ home, which also housed my sister, her husband, and child. We were a pretty interesting extended family nestled in the Upstate of rural South Carolina.

One night, I was suddenly startled awake by my sister ripping the screened door off its hinges as she shouted for me to wake up. After a blur of jumping out of bed and following her into my parents’ bedroom, I found my father in his bathroom.

He, the floor, and seemingly the walls around him were covered in his blood.

This is my story of coming to terms in my early 20s with the mortality and humanity of my father, who transitioned for me that day from an idealized Superman to fully (and wonderfully) human, and along with my mother, two people I love deeply and can never repay for the gifts they have given me.

My father was lying there after weeks or even months of hiding what had to be obvious signs of the bleeding ulcer that could no longer be ignored that night. My father is a hard-ass and a worker’s worker. He was captain of the first state-championship football team of his high school (which I attended and where I later taught for 18 years) and had a full set of false teeth while in high school (teeth were often knocked out in the 1950s, it appears). And my father still works part-time in a machine shop as a quality control supervisor, often having to ask his fellow workers to move heavy parts he can no longer lift because of arthritic shoulders.

And I am a teacher, a professor and scholar. I lift a grande Dos Equis (about 32 oz.) after bicycle rides, but mainly, I teach, and I write.

My father was never remotely close to being rich, but I was raised in a working-class home that put on a damned good mask of middle class. I am certainly not rich by American standards, but I am certainly living in privilege, and also certainly didn’t attain that through the physical and mental toil that my father did.

Mine is literally the result of my father’s blood, sweat, and tears.

And, thus, this is also a story of my “hostile rhetoric.”

“Hostile Rhetoric,” Laziness, and the Education Debate

Anthony Cody ventured into a dialogue with the Gates Foundation (GF) about education reform, a decision I remain conflicted about since I have more than once offered arguments about not seeking a place at the table with Corporate Reformers. My compromise has been to comment only at Cody’s blog (the dialogue is simultaneously posted at the GF blog).

Recently, after confronting a GF post, a comment after my post discounted my rebuttal for its “hostile rhetoric,” leading me to consider a couple questions: (1) Was my discourse genuinely hostile?, and (2) Was the tone of my work building walls against readers considering fairly the content of my message?

Let me examine that charge against my work (the comment thread clarifies that all of my work fails due to hostile rhetoric, by the way) through two examples.

First, note this from Gina Rinehart, the world’s richest woman:

Rinehart, whose family iron ore prospecting fortune of Aus $29.2 billion (US$30.1 billion) also makes her Australia’s wealthiest person, hit out at those who she said were envious of the rich.’There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire,’ she wrote in an industry magazine column.

‘If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself — spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working.

‘Become one of those people who work hard, invest and build, and at the same time create employment and opportunities for others.’

Rinehart blamed what she described as ‘socialist’, anti-business policies for the plight of Australia’s poor, urging the government to lower the minimum wage, as well as taxes, unless it wanted to end up like Greece.

‘The terrible millionaires and billionaires can often invest in other countries… maybe their teenagers don’t get the cars they wanted, or a better beach house or or maybe the holiday to Europe is cut short, but otherwise life goes on,’ she wrote.

‘The millionaires and billionaires who choose to invest in Australia are actually those who most help the poor and our young. This secret needs to be spread widely.'”

Apparently, if my father hadn’t been so lazy, he too could have been a millionaire or billionaire. I wish Rinehart had let us in on the secret earlier.

Next, consider this paragraph from Irvin Scott of the GF:

We believe that despite a child’s circumstances, she should be given every opportunity to succeed and lead a life better than the one she was given. That is in direct contrast to the belief that because of a child’s circumstances she is destined to live a life of obstacles regardless of the opportunities she’s given. In our opinion, the purpose of K-12 education is to help provide and shape those opportunities.

Scott’s claims, unlike the bitter tone from Rinehart, can reasonably be called civil and even positive, so my two examples can also be fairly compared to examine the content, regardless of the tone.

Rinehart’s assertion that people in poverty, the working poor, the working class, and the middle class are all simply not working hard enough—that they all are in fact lazy—is not significantly different than the often less abrasive claims coming from politicians, corporate leaders, and specifically the new crop of corporate reformers in education: Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, and all the other “no excuses” reformers expanding across the U.S.

Rinehart’s comment is a “no excuses” message that may impact readers differently than Scott’s comment, but once we peel away the tone, examine what Scott is implying against what Rinehart boldly states. Focus on this from Scott: “That is in direct contrast to the belief that because of a child’s circumstances she is destined to live a life of obstacles regardless of the opportunities she’s given.”

At the heart of the “no excuses” ideology is the suggestion and even direct statement that there exists some people who do use poverty as an excuse, some people who have thrown up their hands and somehow actively embrace “poverty is destiny.”

That implication, by the way, is being directed specifically at teachers now, and the teachers’ unions being accused of protecting these fatalistic teachers.

So now let’s come back to the intersection of me holding in my mind simultaneously the image of my father lying in his bathroom covered in his own blood and the image of Rinehart telling all of us who are not millionaires or billionaires (like Bill Gates): “If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself — spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working.”

I must wonder how my public commentary and scholarship have come to be seen as “hostile rhetoric,” how the working poor and working class in the U.S. have come to be characterized as lazy, and how we justify telling children trapped in poverty to suck it up, work twice as hard, and above all else, do as you are told.

Nothing can be more hostile, mean-spirited, and accusatory than to create a false dichotomy between those who reject poverty as destiny and those who accept poverty as destiny.

Nothing is more hostile than to suggest that any teacher accepts and even feeds off accepting poverty should be destiny.

These civil claims and implications have nothing to do with tone.

And so let’s set tone aside and examine a couple concluding points:

• In the U.S., poverty is destiny. All the rhetoric in the world cannot mask that the U.S. has two justice systems, two health care systems, two educational systems—one for the affluent and another one for everyone else too lazy to be rich. [One reality of the U.S.A.: White males outnumber African American males about 6 to 1, but African American males outnumber white males about 5 to 1 in U.S. prisons—a disturbing set of data that parallels pre-kindergarten expulsion patterns. When will “no excuses” reformers explain that inequity, and when they do, where will they ascribe the blame?]

• Educators and scholars (often demonized as embracing “poverty is destiny”) are in fact arguing and actively working within the belief that poverty should not be destiny, which can only be addressed once we admit poverty is destiny, which cannot be realized until we overcome social and educational inequity.

I find myself, then, almost thirty years into a career as an educator recognizing that, in fact, a good bit of hostility and anger tinges my public commentaries and scholarship.

Guilty as charged.

You see, I learned an ironic lesson from my father, who was a disciplinarian when I was a child and teenager (“Do as I say, not as I do”). My father was apt to demand that I know my place, that I hold my tongue, that I do as I was told.

Increasingly as I grew up, I didn’t, of course, and it created more than one clash between my father and me. He was much stronger, but that rarely if ever paused my tongue.

As an adult—as a teacher, coach, and parent—I came against that same rising anger against my adult authority, and in it I recognized a pattern of anger: When the tone is hot and in the voices of the subordinate, you’d better consider the content. My students, my teams, and my daughter all taught me and reminded me of these angry moments between the one with power and the one without power.

Angry children as subordinates often had damned good reasons for being angry. Often, that reason was my fault.

Calling for civility and “knowing ones place” is the refuge of the privileged. It has been used against women, against people of color, against speakers of languages other than English, and always against children.

When civility is demanded by those with power from those without power, it is ultimately an act of oppression.

If the tone of my work offends, blame my lazy father who worked himself onto that bloody floor that night but not enough to be wealthy. Blame my 18 years teaching and coaching in a rural SC high school. Blame the millions of lazy teachers who have accepted the call of selflessness at the heart of teaching.

Or better yet, consider the consequences of suggesting my father is lazy, that teachers are lazy, and that children trapped in poverty are just plain lazy.

That’s the hostile rhetoric we need to address, I suspect, and thus, it seems unlikely I’ll apologize for my tone any time soon.

* Originally posted September 2, 2012.

Education, education reform

Tone, pt. 1: Does Tone Matter in the Education Reform Debate?

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[NOTE: The topic of the appropriate tone for making and debating points in education reform will not die; thus, I am reposting two pieces on tone, both originally posted at Daily Kos in 2012 (See pt. 1 HERE, and pt. 2 HERE); pt. 3 is original and intended as a prelude to the release of Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error, which is drawing some criticism for her tone (see my review HERE). Let me be clear that it is absolutely true that tone matters, but I also have learned that the charge of inappropriate tone tends to come from those in power to put the powerless in their “place” and from those who have no substantive point to make. In the end, I call for addressing the credibility and validity of the claims being made first and then, if relevant, we can discuss tone.]

Does Tone Matter in the Education Reform Debate?*

While shoddy arguments remain the target of freshman composition professors in colleges and universities across the U.S., ad hominem attacks, cherry-picking data, straw man arguments, either/or claims, and sweeping generalizations have become the norm in the education reform debate maintaining momentum in both the mainstream and new media.

For example, Ken Libby prompted a Twitter debate concerning the tone of arguments coming from educators, scholars, and researchers, suggesting that the tone of their arguments were keeping them from being heard.

At the Shanker Blog, Matthew Di Carlo has also confronted this trend, calling for an end to “self-righteousness”:

That’s because this kind of rhetoric has to some degree become the rule, not the exception. For every allegation from “defenders of the status quo” that philanthropists are really profiteers or that market-based reforms are a form of “teacher-bashing,” there is an ad hominem accusation from the other “side” – charging that support for traditionally union-advocated policies means you’re putting compensation and job security “above the needs of children,” or that opposition to test-based accountability means you don’t care whether schools improve.

And although Diane Ravitch is increasingly the target of questionable attacks, Alexander Russo claims she is also wrong:

Let’s start with the mis-steps:  Ravitch leads off with the notion that teachers have been “demonized” (ironic given her constant demonization of reformers), describes Gates et al as privatizers (a claim that’s factually hard to support though it sounds good), and claims that the billionaires’ influence is unprecedented (which Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Soros, and the Koch brothers might be surprised to hear).

But the most puzzling calling out for mean-spiritedness comes from Rick Hess, in the oddly titled blog posting, “Self-Pitying Tantrums Are Poor Way for Educators to Win Friends, Influence People,” in which he complains:

Self-proclaimed advocates of educators and public education have become so vitriolic, mean-spirited, arrogant, and unreasoning that it’s becoming inane to anyone who’s not a fellow true believer. This means that they’re poorly positioned to convince Americans, and painfully uninteresting to anyone who doesn’t agree with them already.

If this were satire, Hess should be commended, but his name-calling and easily labeled mean-spirited argument against mean-spiritedness suggests, at least, that a caustic tone is in the eye of the beholder.

While I remain concerned that this recurring debate about the debate is a distraction, I do believe that addressing whether or not tone matters in the education reform debate can contribute positively to what has so far been a fruitless tug-of-war.

Of Tone, Argumentation, and “Knowing One’s Place”

“Minority group identification carries with it certain behavioral patterns that often impede the process of integration in the total community,” explains Jean D. Crambs, adding, “It is because minority status produces the kind of behavior that makes social adjustment so difficult that much effort in recent years has been directed toward reducing the crucial aspects of group differences.”

Further, however, Crambs makes a provocative and relevant charge:

In the same way, workers in the field of education have been seeking ways and means for making teachers more effective in the larger community, as well as assuring the teacher as an individual of a satisfying and mature personal development. Juxtaposition of the fact that teachers on the whole are not as effective persons as the profession needs, and the description given above of the effects of minority group status, produces an interesting relationship; the hypothesis may be advanced that one cause for the lack of professional achievement by teachers as a group may be due to the fact that teachers’ behavior in some respects is restricted in the same way as is that of “recognized” minority groups.

What makes this discussion of the harmful effects of teachers as a minority group even more compelling is that Crambs wrote this in 1949; yet, it speaks powerfully to the current education reform debate and the challenges about tone raised above.

The classification of teachers as a minority group is an acknowledgement about a disproportion of power. While racial minority groups satisfy both the status of being fewer in number and having less power, not all groups having minority status are the smaller group—for instance, women.

While women constitute a larger population than men, women remain a minority because minority status is primarily about the unfair imbalance of power.

And all this leads to what makes me uncomfortable about the tone arguments. They remind me of my father’s dictum: “Children are to be seen not heard.” They remind me of that same dictum being applied to women for much of U.S. history. They remind me of that same dictum being applied to African Americans for much of U.S. history.

At the risk of crossing lines established by Libby, Di Carlo, Russo, and Hess, I am deeply skeptical of the intentions of people who hold genuine power (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and billionaire Bill Gates, for example) against the intentions of people who hold either no or substantially less power (teachers, scholars, and researchers).

And as a result, I am deeply concerned about teachers, scholars, and researchers being told to watch their tone—not that I don’t agree that tone matters, that basic logic in argumentation matters. I do believe ad hominem attacks, either/or claims, and strawman arguments are poisonous to the education reform debate.

But I also wonder how these charges have somehow become associated with the groups with the least power. I know that cautioning those with little or no power to watch their tone against those with power is disregarding the balance of power.

Tone doesn’t really matter for those with power, and anyone arguing for the dominant ideology crying “mean-spirited” is unlikely to spur any compassion from me.

As a teacher, coach, and father, I learned that when young people lost their composure and leveled hateful and even profane language at me, that was primarily a representation of their frustration about being powerless, and it was often a rightful acknowledgement by them that the imbalance of power was not fair.

Now, U.S. public discourse is dominated by several well-known and influential names: Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin, for example. What do these people have in common? They promote a nearly uniform right-wing narrative and primarily do so through the exact strategies being criticized as inappropriate for responses to the current reform agenda. [Note that the only comparable “mean-spirited” people endorsing a liberal agenda are all comedians: Bill Maher, most notably.]

If there is a mean-spirited nature to public discourse, the right must be acknowledged as at least a significant, if not foundational, source for that tone. The norm of American discourse is conservative, and all norms are markers of where the power lies.

Further, in the education reform debate, we must acknowledge when and why educators began to speak up. If the tone of responses from educators is mean-spirited, let’s note that most teachers did not raise their voices until they were in fact unfairly attacked and demonized, first by Waiting for “Superman” and then repeatedly by Gates, Duncan, and Michelle Rhee.

I offer this discusion not as excuses and not to condone the tone on either side, but to note that teachers’ have fought back in ways that should be expected from the powerless (minority status) backed into a corner.

Ultimately, the “watch your tone” argument leveled at teachers and advocates for public education and democracy remains too much like telling a profession overwhelmingly composed of women to know their place. And it reminds me that minorities, that the powerless have only one real weapon on their side—the moral high ground. And I mean the moral high ground of their claims.

So I ask everyone concerned about the tone coming from teachers, scholars, and researchers to listen to a couple examples of how the powerless speak moral authority to privilege.

Consider James Baldwin speaking from his minority status in an excerpt from Take this Hammer (1963), “Who is the Nigger?”: “What you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you.”

And consider Martin Luther King Jr. also speaking from a minority status:

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here,” that we honestly face the fact that the Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this,• You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?”

• You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?”

• You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?”

I am willing to consider and address the tone of arguments coming from educators who are experiencing the corrosive effects of minority status, powerlessness, but I am withholding that concern until we address first why the powerful are rarely held accountable for their lack of experience, their lack of expertise, and the enveloping social and educational inequity that is swallowing the children of the U.S. on their watch.

And, yes, I am also willing to risk self-righteousness in the process.

* Originally posted June 9, 2012.

Barbara Kingsolver, Uncategorized

REVIEW: Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver

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A young woman in the Appalachian hills of the rural South finds herself pregnant far too young and marries her high school sweetheart, only to lose the child. Years later, living on the farm owned by her in-laws and now the mother of two children, she walks up a mountain on that land to a rendezvous with adultery.

The hike is taxing—she struggles without her glasses (left behind out of vanity) and with her incessant craving for a cigarette—but before she meets her would-be young lover, she encounters what appears to be the entire valley below her in flames. Except there is no fire, only a billow of orange spread out beneath her.

Is this a vision from God? Or a human-made disruption of nature? Of both?

Following The Lacuna (2009), a novelization of the relationship between artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Mexico, Barbara Kingsolver explores the life of Dellarobia Turnbow in Flight Behavior (2012), as Kingsolver explains:

I had been wanting to write about climate change for some years. One morning I imagined millions of butterflies settling in the treetops – a drastically altered natural phenomenon that people would not understand as dangerous, one that looks really beautiful but is in fact dreadful. I don’t know how that vision came into my head as that is not how this business usually works. Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby, it’s a lot of effort! So when it did, I thought: oh, this is a perfect starting point.

Kingsolver’s critical and popular reputations rest, still, on her tour-de-force The Poisonwood Bible (although Kingsolver praises The Lacuna as her most enduring), but she has published to date an impressive collection of novels, wonderful collections of essays, a collection of short stories, and a powerful bi-lingual collection of poems, Another America. Throughout Kingsolver’s writing, her most compelling gift is her attention to the craft of writing as it intersects with her politics. Barbara Kingsolver has a political agenda, but her messages remain beautifully housed in her gifts as a novelist, essayist, and poet.

As a Kingsolver fan, Flight Behavior transported me back to Prodigal Summer, my favorite Kingsolver novel, and Animal Dreams. In this newest narrative, the characters are diverse and compelling; Kingsolver is never condescending or unkind when she creates characters with competing world views and backgrounds—even when the characters stand outside Kingsolver’s own commitments.

Flight Behavior creates several complimentary tensions that rise out of what would seem to most readers a premise that is anything except compelling—the appearance of butterflies on a Tennessee farm. What drives the novel, however is Dellarobia and her own external and internal tensions as a young mother and wife:

But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself….

The ones that lived through winter lasted longer, a few months, by going into something like hibernation. “Diapause,” he called it, a pause in the normal schedule of growing up, mating, and reproducing. Somewhere in midlife, the cold or darkness of winter put them all on hold, shutting down their sex drive until further notice.

Like life in an uninsulated house, she thought. Maybe like marriage in general. (pp. 59-145)

As an occasional Kingsolver scholar, I have examined and recommended her work for the classroom. And here is where I’d like to focus, emphasizing, of course, that I highly recommend Flight Behavior to anyone who has enjoyed Kingsolver before as well as readers of fiction who are drawn to rich narratives, engaging characters, and beautiful craft with language. Kingsolver delivers.

As well, Flight Behavior offers readers, teachers, and students a sort of double duty as a work of a novelist as a public intellectual and a narrative that forces readers and students to consider the role of scholars and academics as they interact with the public about large social issues.

As Kingsolver has explained, this novel is at its core about climate change, but Kingsolver also notes:

Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It’s practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments. So to create this mother, who loves her children, of course, but is just so fed up of living in a house with people who roll plastic trucks on the floor, was a writing challenge.

In other words, although Kingsolver has a clear agenda, a political point to make about climate change, she also respects her artform, readers, and the characters she has created enough to avoid allowing this novel to slip into mere preaching or to be tarnished by simplistic representations.

Flight Behavior personifies the often reductionistic and misleading climate change debate that occurs in the U.S. over talk radio and among talking heads on TV.

Ironically, in Kingsolver’s imagined world she captures the all-too-real world of climate change as it intersects with the lives and jobs of typical people, people bound to the land, people bound to their faith, people bound to pasts they regret but cannot change or escape.

Flight Behavior soars when Kingsolver invites the reader to witness the intersections of scholars with people without much formal learning, of different races and cultures, of believers and non-believers, of privilege and poverty (importantly, I believe, the working poor).

As a Southerner and educator, I was nervous about how Kingsolver would portray Southerners, and I was very concerned in one scene when Dellarobia details her experience in high school with math and science, as well as her characterization of how schools continue to fail students.

In that context of my own sensitivities, I can anticipate how scientists and climate change deniers may read the novel. And this is where I have my highest recommendation: Kingsolver treads on thin ice often in this novel and masterfully makes her way to the other side of the pond without falling through.

I don’t expect any artist to be perfect, especially when artists venture into producing art with ernest political messages. In fact, I still cringe when I share with students Kingsolver’s essay rejecting TV—a topic about which I disagree strongly with her.

Flight Behavior may stumble (although I am hard-pressed to say so), but it definitely maintains it legs from the wonderful opening scene to the series of surprises and inevitable outcomes that tie together a beautifully weaved story that will not disappoint a wide range of readers who may choose this work for different reasons and with different world views.

Ultimately, there is no dichotomy between Kingsolver the scientist (she has degrees in biology) and Kingsolver the novelist—just as there is no dichotomy between science and faith in the novel.

In the end, then, the novel itself is both embodiment and testament to the message Kingsolver makes clear: We are all one.

Uncategorized

9/11: Essays and Film

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How could we best honor the tragedy of 9/11?

Become a nation and people of peace.

Art is our path to that too often ignored goal.

I recommend Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver, a collection of essays spawned by 9/11. From the wonderful essay “And Our Flag was Still There”:

In one stunning statement uttered by a fundamentalist religious leader, this brand of patriotism specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists, and the American Civil Liberties Union for the horrors of September 11. In other words, these hoodlum-Americans were asking me to believe that their flag stood for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder? Well, our flag does not, and I’m determined that it never will. Outsiders can destroy airplanes and buildings, but only we the people have the power to demolish our own ideals. (p. 238)

Also Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man without a Country. From “Do unto others”:

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries. (p. 103)

And a film—Remember Me.

Peace?

 

Education, Education Week, Workers

1st Anniversary Repost: Writers Reflect on Chicago Strike (EdWeek)

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Writers Reflect on Chicago Strike

Education Week

Stephen Dyer (Expanded)

Andrea Kayne Kaufman (Expanded)

Missing the Forest for the Trees (Expanded below)

The Chicago teachers’ strike has sparked even more debate over the role of unions and the importance of teacher quality in public education. Yet, arguments and policy associated with teachers’ unions and teacher quality share one serious problem—missing the forest for the trees.

Carefully examining the debates themselves, in other words, pulling back from the trees to consider the forest, offers an opportunity for the public, educators, and policy stakeholders to reframe those debates and thus improve the likelihood education reform can achieve what it has failed to accomplish over the past thirty years.

Debates about teachers’ unions and teacher quality share a pop culture problem, captured in the documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’” and the feature film “Don’t Back Down.” In both, unions are portrayed as powerful as well as detrimental to needed educational outcomes while the influence of “bad” teachers is linked to those same protective unions.

If we pull back, however, from these repeated and enduring narratives (the public eagerly accepts them both in pop culture and the mainstream media), the evidence fails to support the claims.

For example, the union narrative—that unions are primarily to blame for school failures—falls apart once a few facts are examined. Unionized states tend to have higher test scores than non-union states (such as my home state of South Carolina, a right-to-work state that regularly is ranked at the bottom of traditional test data). But this fact is not pulling far enough back itself.

Unionization, poverty, and measurable student outcomes are so deeply interconnected that focusing solely on union influences on student outcomes misses the central obstacle facing public schools, teachers’ unions, and political leadership—poverty.

Next, the teacher quality debate exposes a nearly identical pattern if we focus on how to hold teachers accountable (arguments such as value-added methods of teacher evaluation) instead of asking whether or not teacher quality is a genuine problem in student outcomes, and if so, to what magnitude does that problem exist.

Like union influence, teacher quality is nearly inextricable from poverty and student test data.

The current education reform debate, then, captured by the Chicago teachers’ strike, represents a self-defeating problem of focusing on the trees (solutions and policy) without consider the forest (problems, goals).

The solution to education reform is not trying to win the trees arguments, but stepping back and addressing the forest; for example, consider the following:

• What is the broad purpose of universal public education? If we reach back to the founding of the U.S. and consider seriously Thomas Jefferson’s commitment to public education, we can identify enduring goals for public schools, goals linked to a thriving democracy and the need to focus strongly on people and children trapped in poverty:

The less wealthy people, . .by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government; and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen. (p. 50)

The object [of my education bill was] to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind which in proportion to our population shall be the double or treble of what it is in most countries.” ([1817], pp. 275-276)

• What are the influences of unions across the U.S., and what are the essential roles unionization should serve in public education as a force for democracy and equity? The education reform debate must separate arguments about the failures of union bureaucracy and the importance of workers’ rights, collective bargaining, and teacher professionalism.

• What is the proper relationship between teacher autonomy and teacher accountability? Possibly the greatest failure of the teacher quality debate has been the absence of a public recognition that accountability policy has removed teacher autonomy while imposing accountability for outcomes beyond the power of teachers to address. No educator is calling for no accountability, but educators are seeking the professional autonomy they deserve while rejecting test-based accountability as not valid. The first step in teacher accountability and education reform is teacher autonomy.

• Who is designing and mandating education policy? What are their experience and expertise in education? Too little attention is being paid to the historical fact that educators have had little to no direct influence in education policy, most powerfully linked to the political process. In the past three decades, political leadership has intensified that reality.

The education reform debate is no longer a partisan political battle because Republicans and Democrats are nearly indistinguishable in terms of education policy. Yet, the reform debate remains a regrettable failure of ideology over evidence.

The Chicago teachers’ strike exposes that political leaders are starting with solutions without defining the problems, and then promoting those solutions without grounding them in the wealth of evidence available to them. Claims about “bad” teachers, protective unions, teacher evaluations tied to test scores, “miracle” charter schools, and the “missionary zeal” of Teach for America recruits resonate until the right questions are asked and the evidence is considered. Then, these so-called reforms fall apart.

We all need to pull back, start with clearly established problems, and then pursue solutions that match those problems in the context of building universal public education that fulfills its role in supporting and achieving democracy and equity.

educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free