Finally I've carved out some time to write what has been rolling around in my head for a few weeks.
I walked in my PhD graduation ceremony a few weeks ago. I finished everything for the program last summer, but my school only runs its graduation once a year. So nearly a year later, I got the pomp and circumstance to make it all feel complete.
The keynote speaker gave what was on the whole not exactly a sunny address. As she looked down at the dozens of graduates, (undergrads just heading out into the world of teaching, seasoned teachers earning master's degrees, and the ten of us receiving our doctorates) she painted a realistic picture of the state of education in America today. She talked about how reform measures attached to NCLB haven't been working. She talked about how the policy being dreamed up across the country will continue this trend. I remember wondering what the rest of the audience was thinking--the friends and family members of the graduates who may or may not know much about the world of education. Did they think the speaker was angry or bitter? Did they believe the picture she was painting of the state of education? I wanted to stand up and look at the audience and shout, "she's right you know! It IS this bad and it's only getting worse! PLEASE get involved. DO SOMETHING! HELP US!"
But I didn't. That would have horrified my mother-in-law more than if I had worn my bright green chuck taylors under my commencement gown. (I did consider that shoe choice, but only for a minute).
The speaker left us with this request: we must be soldiers of love. We must fight for our students and for what we know serves them best in their lives in the complex world they will face beyond school. Me must make our voices heard. This is why I went to see Diane Ravitch speak and why I have told as many people as I can about what she had to say. This is why I work tirelessly with my teaching to offer my students a classroom experience that will prepare them for what lies ahead in their lives. This is why I listen to them to better understand who they are, where they are headed, and how my teaching can help them toward those goals. This is why I write, why I send out articles for publication, why I'm working on a book manuscript of my doctoral dissertation, why I apply to present at a variety of conferences. This is why I wrote my governor and asked him to veto the law the state legislature recently approved regarding teacher effectiveness. I asked him to not only veto this law but take a stand against the current national reform movement, not play along with the Race to the Top money, and be a leader in demanding more meaningful reform. This is why I asked my colleagues to sign on with me on this letter when I sent it to the local newspaper.
The governor still signed the bill into law, and the newspaper didn't publish the letter, but I still need to speak up and fight for what I believe will best serve my students.
Soldiers of love. This should be the name of the counter educational reform movement.
This video has been making the rounds on the internet- It came to me by way of a friend on Facebook. Ah Facebook- occasionally good for something other than sucking your creative soul. It is a really fun animated version of Daniel Pink's talk at RSA. I love creative stuff like this, so I was instantly captivated. In fact, I watched it twice in a row so I would remember his main points. And I immediately found myself connecting his comments on drive, or what motivates us, to the occupations of both teaching and being a student.
Here is the video, some comments from me are below.
Pink identifies three factors that impact what he calls 'drive': Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Oh yeah, money is a factor, but not they way we might think, according to Pink (sorry for the rhyme).
Here is how I think this relates to the lives of teachers (I'll address students in another post when I have a chance- because I think what he says is also important in thinking about the experiences of students). For much of the history of public education- at least in my memory, teaching has been a comfortable middle class job. No one was getting rich, but none of us expected that. We made a living. This was using money in the way Pink identified- teachers made enough money to take the issue of money off the table. In return for stability, teachers lived with the fact that they wouldn't be subject to huge financial reward. For most of us that was a fair trade. Of course the high social prestige of the profession made up for some of that (note sarcasm here), but what was important was that it was a fair living, and since most of use have ambitions other than monetary, that was good enough.
What made teaching great was the abundance of the other three factors. Teaching has buckets of purpose. I have never met a teacher that didn't really believe in what they were doing- it's importance, it's meaningfulness, it's worth. You want purpose, education has purpose. Helping children learn and understand the world around them feels as meaningful as anything one could be doing.
For a long time, education has also had a fair bit of autonomy. Sure, in public education we are (and should be) accountable to our students and communities for providing the collective vision of eduction we are charged with, But for the most part, teachers and schools have had a high degree of autonomy in not only how we do our work, but often what that work actually is. Teachers were invited to participate in the discussion of what we should be doing, and had genuine influence. Further, in our classrooms, we often had tremendous autonomy. Though we were often told the what, the how of our work was mostly left up to teachers and groups of teachers in schools. As long as we met the expectations of our community, we were allowed freedom in how we did what we did. Note that the teachers we revere, both in our own lives and in our mythology, are the ones that exercised autonomy (think Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dead Poets Society)
And, teaching is hard. Really hard. It is the sort of higher level cognitive work Pink is discussing (I know it is fashionable in some quarters to claim that 'any person with the appropriate background can teach,' but that simply isn't true. It is hard, complicated, and takes time to get competent- a minimum of three years according to most research I have read). So mastery takes work. And we are never done. Over the nine years I have been in the high school classroom I have gotten continuously better, and every time I became aware that I had achieved a new level of competence in some way, it was also apparent to me how much further I needed to go.
So teachers were willing to put up with low social status and the less appealing parts of the job because it provided large amounts of the other things that Pink identifies as key to 'drive.' In many ways it was the perfect job (for the right sort of person). The rewards Pink is describing to produce high performance we actually working pretty well.
However, today what is happening in eduction is changing that. There is less financial stability, so money becomes an issue. I already live with a salary far below the average for my level of education, but the budget squeeze at the federal, state and district level is real and serious. My salary has never held pace with inflation, but it wasn't that far behind. Now we face real changes in the monetary aspects of education. One of my colleagues was literally in tears in her office the other day having heard that our districts 'offer' in this year's negotiations was a pay cut. It not that we are or should be immune from the realities of economics, I'm just pointing out that the game is changing. Money has been put back on the table in education and we are worried. And the stability that we used to trade for the lower salary is no longer. Benefits are being cut or squeezed, teachers are getting laid off in large numbers, and this will continue for the foreseeable future.
At the same time, there are major changes in the other factors Pink discusses. It is, again, fashionable right now to blame teachers for the problems in education. This has produced the most top heavy, top down model of management one can imagine. Teachers are losing autonomy very quickly right now. At the federal, state and district level, more focus is being put on controlling not only the what, but the how of teaching. Teachng is being transformed in some quarters from the cognitively challenging work it should be, into the sort of mechanical, menial labor that Pink says is exactly the sort of work in which the simple reward paradigm does work. Which might not be that big a deal, except that if you remember the best teachers you ever had, they probably weren't the ones who treated their work as mechanical menial work. They treated it like the intellectually complex challenging task that good teaching is. And if you think about the worst teachers you ever had, they were probably exactly the type of teacher that will fit well in the new vision of teaching.
As for the other two factors, education will never lack purpose, but if it feels like the very system you work in has committed itself to making it difficult if not impossible to achieve that purpose, then eventually all but the least imaginative will quit in frustration. And if we turn the job into a mechanical menial function, then there is no challenge in mastery, and that will cease to be a factor.
Now for the editorializing. As if I wasn't already doing that. It is always interesting to me that we (the collective 'we'- read 'that guy who has the Secretary of Education post and many others like him) think that 'business ideas' will save education, but when you hear that, the person saying it does not mean ideas like the one in Pink's lecture (or in the awesomely creative deployment by RSA Animate). No, the lessons of 'business' that we want to deploy in education all come from the manufacturing sector. Efficiency, scale, standardization. A business model with little room for the factors that Pink identifies as key to "drive." Also, interestingly, it is the part of our economy that our leaders continually tell us is not the future for our country. So we are trying to make a system for educating children (which NO-ONE ever says is not of grave importance), who we want to be passionate, autonomous and committed to mastery, using a system which researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and University of Chicago found is unlikely to allow the people who are the delivery system to be passionate, autonomous or committed to mastery. But we really want innovation? We think we want creativity in education? We want teachers passionately committed to the work they do and willing to labor at continuously improving? We could do that. But I don't think that's the direction we are heading right now.
It's two weeks to the end of the school year. I just spent two hours in which I should have been grading thinking about this, which is perfect anecdotal support for what Pink was saying. But I REALLY have to grade some papers today. Really.
This weekend, I attended and presented at my first conference for the American Educational Research Association. I was stunned at the scope of the conference. It lasts for nearly a week, with conference sessions running all day each day, with dozens of talks going on at any given moment in time. The printed program is a tome (over 400 pages), bigger than a telephone book for many towns across the country. The “participant index” lists over 12,500 names (that’s the number of people involved in presenting at the conference over its several days). The actual “program schedule” starts on page 67 and ends on page 366. With about 8 presentations listed on each page, that’s nearly 3,000 separate sessions with people talking about their research tied to education.
I knew that the conference was huge. I had no idea it was THIS huge. I had no idea there were this many people engaged in Educational Research (think of all the people who attend but don’t present, or the people who don’t go—there are certainly many many more researchers out there with their eyes toward education. I was completely overwhelmed by the scope and scale of it all.
And yet, at the same moment, we have a reform movement in education that is not actually achieving meaningful reform for our students. According to Diane Ravitch (I know F. Scott and I have been talking about her a lot lately, but her argument needs to be heard), the NAEP scores since NCLB has been in effect do not show, at all, that American students have actually been achieving higher scores due to NCLB. Yet, here we go with the same movement toward measure and punish reform and scapegoating teachers. As you know, our state is currently debating one such reform bill (SB191). The movement behind this notion of holding teachers accountable for the failings of a system far beyond their control is wickedly strong. I’m not sure we can stop it, and if we don’t—education in American may change forever.
How many of those 3,000 AERA conference sessions actually said anything about how to achieve actual, meaningful reform for our students? How many presenters made a plea to the audience to get involved, to speak up? (I did, and no one said anything to me about it—neither that they agreed with me nor that what I had said was inappropriate in that context). I feel like my dad here, a man who used to be a Roman Catholic priest and who now gives himself permission to leave a sermon in church if he gets mad that the priest isn’t talking about the big issue of society at the time—like when he and I went to church together the day after the gulf war started back in the early 90’s and the priest sad NOTHING about how the country had just gone to war. It’s like the research community maybe just keeps going along with their ever complex figures to capture conceptual frameworks, with their sophisticated statistical designs to cut across a data set in a myriad of ways, with their well-reasoned criticism of the shortcomings of schools, with their complex survey instruments to measure this or that.
I’m not writing off educational research here—please don’t get me wrong. I know some researchers who are doing very relevant and important work. I just don’t understand how, with so many thousands of researchers there are on the ground in this country, we could possibly be facing the current reform movement driven by policy makers and think tanks funded by huge corporations? Educators have not been asked to participate in the conversation, and now we face the consequences of decisions made without our counsel. It’s just not a time that researchers can ignore this in pursuit of the next idea.
This came from The Durango Herald today. It is a great articulation of some of the problems with SB191. The misconception about tenure among non-educators in this state could use some clarity. Having due process in a job with rapidly changing administrators, parents with unreasonable expectations, and adolescents subject to the vagaries of, well, adolescence, is a necessity, not a luxury.
Most of the controversy and misinformation surrounding this bill comes from the term “tenure." It means only one thing to people outside education - a guaranteed job for life. That connotation, the idea of a publicly funded job for life, stimulates knee-jerk responses.
What the supporters of this bill, including The Durango Herald, have failed to inform the public is that tenure for public teachers in Colorado ceased to exist in 1990. Under Gov. Roy Romer's administration, the Teacher Employment, Compensation and Dismissal Act of 1990 was passed. This law eliminated tenure and replaced it with a due-process clause and created the terms probationary and non-probationary.
Both M. Shelly and I saw Diane Ravitch speak this past week. It was moving, hopeful and profoundly disturbing. It was great to see someone so articulate outline what many of us practitioners have known in our guts for a while now- the current tide in education is taking us places we don't want to go, and I believe will have profound consequences for education and our nation- none of the consequences being good.
Currently in Colorado we face an initiative that is in pursuit of RTTT monies. SB191 attempts to tie teacher and principal evaluation to student test scores. It would eliminate 'tenure' for K-12 teachers in favor of performance evaluations that don't exist yet and haven't been funded. Sidestepping the question of teacher accountability for a moment, one fundamental problem is that this bill (and others like it- see SB6, recently defeated in Florida) is an attempt to impose a large scale solution with little to no evidence to support the efficacy of its methods. Too much of our education policy right now is being driven by 'theories' that have no evidence to support them. See today's article on charter schools in the NY Times for more.
But that isn't what I really want to talk about. I want to talk about education practice that does work, and has evidence to support it. I asked a colleague of mine to join one of my classes this week to discuss a subject on which he is an expert. It was really great to listen to another excellent teacher engage with my students (I only got to hear his discussion with one section, I was covering his class during the other). And it reminded me that we need more collaboration. The power of working together is so much greater than whatever I can muster on my own. The richness for students of their teachers working in concert is an evidence based strategy that has a profound impact for students across several different measures- and has the added benefit of making teacher's working life even more meaningful and rewarding.
So often though, the structure of schools gets in the way. I had to cover my colleague's class so that he could talk to my students. I didn't mind at all, but I wished for a more flexible structure. Even within my department we are so disconnected that true collaboration happens only as a result of extreme effort or dumb luck. I made this moment happen because I felt it was important and worthwhile, but nothing about the way our school is set up encourages this type of work. I have a tough enough time just having a conversation with colleagues from my own department. Trying to work closely with colleagues from other departments is nearly impossible. And I am embarrassed to admit there are new teachers in my building this year whose names I do not even know. One of the things that would really help us in collaborating is time- more time in the day, more unstructured development time, and support and direction. Frankly, I'd like more time just to get to know my fellow teachers. So often the structure of school has us buried in our own little worlds, ignorant of what is happening around us, or worse, competing against each other for resources and support. Collaborating for the benefit of students is unlikely to happen in such an environment.
To come full circle here, collaboration is even less likely if I'm living in fear for my job. What we do for our students is so much more than what gets reported on standardized tests (thank god- have you seen those tests? I have). It's taking a moment to make sure my students hear from the best sources I can muster- especially when one of those sources is only two floors away. Bills like SB191 are really frightening. Ravitch really hammered the point last week that there are fundamental changes happening right now, the effects of which are sure to be deep and long lasting. I am afraid for the future of my students and my colleagues. If you are reading this and you are a voter in Colorado, please take a moment to contact your state representative or Governor Ritter, and voice your opinion. So I bought Ravitch's book, and I am trying to stay positive by doing positive things. Like sharing my classroom with my colleagues, and my colleagues with my students. Which is what I really want to talk about...
