Tag Archives: henry david thoreau

Martin Luther King Jr.

Setting Aside “My Knife Is Bigger than Your Knife”

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When I waded into what I knew would be a controversial response to September 11, standing on the shoulders of an equally controversial piece by Michael Stipe, I received some expected responses that ranged from knee-jerk misreadings to very depressing fatalism about human nature and just what the most powerful nation in human history could accomplish.

One question deserves at least a brief response: How would the U.S. respond with humility instead of bravado?

First, let me start with a negative: Let’s stop responding to violence with what appears to be no more imagination than the cartoonish Crocodile Dundee:

Regardless of political party in power in the U.S., we cannot help responding to misguided violence with more and greater violence: “My knife is bigger than your knife.”

As innocent lives were erased callously in the horror of U.S. history now immortalized as 9/11, the U.S. could have—although belatedly—recognized the fundamental right that all humans should share, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness garnered on innocent lives at birth regardless of what soil is under their feet or what organized political system claims to govern their lives.

The innocent man, woman, and child in the carnage of 9/11 on U.S. soil are not more sacred than the innocent man, woman, and child anywhere on this mortal coil we call earth.

A response grounded in humility, then, is not beyond the scope of humans, and it isn’t as if we don’t have something to guide us—considering the lineage at least of Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr..

So briefly, some words from King’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail (16 April 1963):

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states….Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly….

I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes….

I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes….

Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals….

An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal….

So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?…Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists….

Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends….

It certainly isn’t easy to bring into reality, but the answer is easily stated: “the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”

Responding to violence with humility instead of bravado, then, avoids a powerful warning attributed Gandhi’s call for nonviolent noncooperation: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

Responding to violence with greater violence reduces the U.S. to the most powerful blind person among all the blind. We need to choose to lead by sight instead.

Grit, zero tolerance

Post-apocalyptic Mindset in a Civilized World

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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Since October 1999, when I experienced several weeks of unrelenting panic attacks, I have been negotiating my lifelong struggle with anxiety—many of those years spent completely unaware of the problem and then coming to recognize and even understand a condition that to most people seems completely irrational (even silly).

Not to slip into being simplistic, one of the foundational ways in which I have come to understand better anxiety is that my body responds to the civilized world in ways that prehistory demanded.

In other words, when human existence depended on a constant state of vigilance, anxiety, that quality was passed on from human to human since those humans most vigilant—most aware of the world around them—lived long enough to procreate.

Now, although no mountain lion lies in wait to pounce upon me and make me its lunch, I live in a constant state as if that were true—hyperaware of both the world and every possibility about that world.

And that is the seemingly irrational part for those who do not experience incessant anxiety. Of course, I know better, but anxiety of the type I experience is beyond rationality.

Thus, for me (and possibly my fellow sufferers of anxiety), The Walking Dead (both the graphic series and the TV series) serves as a powerful allegory for our condition because surviving humans in that imagined post-apocalyptic world actually must exist always aware of the omnipresent possibility of zombie attack.

Post-apocalyptic Mindset in a Civilized World

But there is something here far beyond my personal wrestling with anxiety: The cultural and educational post-apocalyptic mindset in a civilized world.

To survive and thrive as a human has always been, is currently, and likely will be in the context of finite resources for survival and thriving.

For much of human history (and in our imagined post-apocalyptic worlds), those finite resources were necessarily the focus of human competition.

In the 21st century, humanity has not yet eradicated existence-as-survival among large numbers of people (disproportionately children, with no political power) born into and living in extreme poverty. However, in so-called developed countries, we do have pockets of organized societies that have built resources that, although still finite, are adequate to eradicate existence-as-survival if those people had the political will to address the distribution of those resources.

The U.S. is one such country that does not suffer under a scarcity of resources, but under an inequitable distribution of resources, one that allows (and even perpetuates) scarcity for some and abundance for others (primarily determined by anyone’s accident of birth).

I want to pose two claims now:

  1. The U.S. as a civilized nation could establish an equitable society in which the basic minimum human condition would insure that all have access to those resources that support both the need to survive and the urge to thrive.
  2. That ideal cannot be attained as long as the U.S. remains entrenched in ideologies committed to rugged individualism, competition, and institutional pursuits of “grit” and “zero tolerance.”

Not only are U.S. commitments to #2 counter to achieving #1, but also those commitments serve only to support the minority elite class that benefits from those ideologies despite having rarely exhibited those qualities.

In other words, the ruling elite have been born into abundance and haven’t experienced the anxiety of scarcity, but they demand that those born into and living in scarcity rise through a manufactured culture of competition—even though we have an abundance of resources to make such social Darwinism unnecessary.

As just one example, researchers and advocates of “grit” actually recommend placing impoverished and minority students in fabricated situations of scarcity to teach them the “grit” those researchers and advocates claim is the source of achievement among the affluent (a claim that, in fact, is at best misleading, and at worst, simply false).

And to add insult to injury, those outliers who have risen through scarcity to thrive have been co-opted into the post-apocalyptic mindset maintaining that since some have fought to survive, others must fight to survive.

The alternative of a society in which such base struggles do not have to occur is either ignored or trivialized as a soft option beneath our ruggedly individualistic culture. We boast, in fact, when we make other people suffer: “I taught him a lesson.”

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As someone trapped in an irrational existence governed by anxiety—an existence dramatized in the fabricated world beyond the zombie apocalypse—I treasure the possibility of rejecting the post-apocalyptic mindset in a civilized world.

We know that scarcity creates anxiety and that any person suffers under the weight of scarcity, notably if that scarcity is avoidable. We also know that everyone benefits from a condition of abundance (see Scarcity).

And thus, I remain offended by the incessant refrain offered by those with the loudest voices in our society, voices that demand the least among us must work twice as hard as everyone else to earn the basic dignity of human existence the privileged have handed to them.

It is, ultimately, a shallow call against the world we could create, a world unlike our prehistoric past and unlike our fabricated post-apocalyptic future.

It is world where we no longer foster competition, but make competition unnecessary—as it already could be if we recognized we are no longer slaves to scarcity but to the inequitable distribution of resources that erases our humanity in very real ways that have nothing to do with zombies.

Many people throughout the world and in the U.S.—many children—lead lives of quiet desperation, desperation about food, shelter, health, and happiness.

One new fact of the human condition, however, is that those people do not have to lead lives of desperation. For those living in abundance, the choice to end scarcity is ours.

That we appear unwilling (not unable) to do so causes me great, and for once, justifiable anxiety.

Education, education reform, Teaching, Testing, VAM

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

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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:

@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].

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).