Schools and Bureaucracy: Reflections on Survival and Other Personal Idiosyncrasies (Part A)

Posted on July 2, 2012 by schooldog

To summarize, the topic of the moment, derived from my just previous post, is a reflection on my survival over years of career in high school without escape, first as an English teacher, then as a counselor. How have I done it?

Of course, the history is of me as a person, which is less interesting than the more general group of people to whom my experience might apply. In fact, as unique as I would like to think myself to be, the sobering reality for most of us is that we are creatures of our culture, and the times in which we grow up, and the experiences that typify our coming of age. My experiences are not isolated ones.

I attended college in the sixties, on the cusp of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, both of which had a profound imprint on students of my generation. The old order was being called into question, a new world seemed on the verge of forming (so much for naïveté), and it was a time of choosing sides. In a substantial number of us a previously dormant sense of social justice was awakened, and the corporate world and it’s beckoning, wealth laden opportunities seemed in the camp of the enemy. “Sell out” was a common charge and secret fear. I would be a suspect for that camp, a lucky one with an elite education and a major in economics. Classmates were already working in New York banks.

For my part, a transformation began out of my awareness. I found myself tutoring elementary students in a neighborhood near campus. A local housing march during my senior year, what I thought was for substantial reasons, earned the derision of some of the classmates with whom I had been friendly. Sitting in our august wood paneled dining room, hall of privilege, I listened to their frankly racist comments, and felt a canyon opening between us. A talk on desegregation in Hartford fascinated me with its complex dynamics. When the time inevitably came for me to get off the parental dole, and I knew not where else to jump, I decided to go to graduate school to become an English teacher. I remember it as a choice toward a noble cause, one greater than myself. More grandly and naively, I felt myself somehow on the right side of history. Hey – give me a break – that was the sixties and early seventies. Tricky Dick was about to embody the great evil.

There was another strain in my decision which was fundamentally more selfish, unconscious, and became amplified in my work over time. Though as a young man I saw teaching as on the “noble” side of the equation, I am basically suspicious of nobility in the service of others. What does the doer get out of it, I wonder?

In college I noticed I enjoyed the interaction with the tutees with whom I worked, and with the incipient educator types and mentors with whom I came into contact. I enjoy high school students today for their freshness of perspective, their humor, and their as yet often unspoiled willingness to let others into their life who they consider genuine and concerned for their well being. As my career in schools has lengthened, once tasks have been completed in our counseling staff meetings, our gathering has devolved into conversation, as therapeutic as it was pleasurable, a momentary escape from the challenges of the work into friendship. Consultation with the many teachers with whom I have worked harbored a similar mix of professional focus and congenial exchange.

The wealth of relationships with students and with my school colleagues touches something fundamental in my existence as a human being. Whatever good I may do with individual students, or whatever I contribute along with others for the common good, it is this placement in a network of relationships, this camaraderie, that makes the work rich for me, and which sustains me. Today I recognize these relationships as the spine of my staying power over time.

I salute educator types for their compassion, for their sense of humor (sometimes of the gallows variety), for their love of kids and dedication to their growth — teachers, counselors, administrators alike – and for the common purpose we have shared. In the struggle with the bureaucratic elements of a school system, I can always fall back upon calling a kid in to work on whatever he or she needs, or share a joke with the guy in the next office, who understands perfectly where I am coming from.

But don’t get me wrong; the helping of others is a good thing. I need not be one who rejects the corporate world to seek meaning in a teaching career, or in other good works. I already got that part figured out. To be continued.

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Schools and Bureaucracy: Notes on Staying “Alive”

Posted on June 19, 2012 by schooldog

A younger colleague, in the midst of a discussion about some relatively minor indignity we counselors have suffered or observed, turned to me recently and asked as though to a veteran of many wars, “how do you do it?” She means how have you remained in the schools game, when so often our good efforts are vitiated or undermined by decisions made without our input, or by new “duties as assigned” upon our already bent backs. I suppose to my credit, she sees me as still vigorous in my work, having avoided the near to retirement shuffle of others who have lasted as long as I, and with sense of humor more or less intact. And, of course, still good looking despite all.

Her honest inquiry comes on the heels of one new decision that has largely cancelled out heavy work I and others undertook earlier in the year, and a revisit of directives from the state education hierarchy that I lamented in a post earlier this spring (2/18).

She has caused me to reflect on this latest incident, and to try to answer her query, because in fact I think I have better than survived. To set the stage, and at risk of beating a horse I have flogged much in the past, first I take you on a trudge through a few chambers of bureaucratic horror. Or, not horror exactly, but of circumstances that could hardly be better crafted, if purposely, to dull the mind, stuff the spirit, evaporate incipient professionalism, and generally turn school staff members – teachers, counselors, and yes, principals – into passive labor awaiting the next order from somewhere, as though educational good soldier Schweiks.

In the charge to increased rigor in all things expected of our students, our state has sometimes lurched more than cleanly progressed in that general direction. The mandated state testing, the High School Proficiency Exam, or HSPE, has been most emblematic of that characteristic, particularly the math testing requirement. When it became clear in the earlier going that too few students would pass the state math test, the implementation date that made a pass on the math test a high school graduation requirement was first pushed to a later year, and then when finally implemented, the state allowed a student to pass the requirement, if not the test itself, by taking two full years of math (2.0 credits in our system) after tenth grade. Fair enough.

Because in our district high school students are not moved ahead in grade level by age, but only by meeting certain credit criteria, we have a significant number of students who do not advance to eleventh grade in their third year of high school. Since the state rule to circumvent a necessary pass of the math test clearly stated “may take and pass 2.0 credits after tenth grade,” we all wondered if we could still count math for this purpose taken in the third year of high school, albeit a second year of tenth grade, or if quite specifically students who didn’t pass into eleventh grade in their third year of high school would have to wait until their fourth year, hopefully by now eleventh grade year, to start counting the 2.0 math. Not an incidental question, because many of our struggling learners both fall behind in credits as well as tend to do poorly on state math tests.

I try normally to make notes when I am given a decision to carry out because I have been burned more than once when the rules changed in the middle of the game. In this instance, unfortunately, when I and others were told by someone – by our principal, by our district, or perhaps by someone in the state hierarchy – that the 2.0 rule was to apply only once the student had been classified an eleventh grader, I failed to make such notes at the time. Now, two to three years later, I cannot remember who and at what level told us how to interpret the rule, and have no documentation of what is a fairly steadfast memory.

Operating on this undocumented understanding, at the beginning of this school year, I and others checked the schedules of about 150 seniors who had yet to pass the state math test in order to make sure they were scheduled in such a way as to meet the 2.0 math requirement, including those who had not been of eleventh grade standing in the previous year. These latter students were given two full years of math at the beginning of the year in order that continued failure on the state math test would still leave them with a math option that would graduate them. A fairly massive effort at an otherwise very busy time of the school year, but I proudly patted myself on the back for persevering through a tedious and time crunched process.

Imagine my pleasure, then, when toward the end of the school year the ruling changed. When I returned from a medical leave, our registrar said she had received a ruling, I believe from the state, though never clear, that the 2.0 math after tenth grade rule meant after the second year of high school for all students, regardless of school district policies on reclassification. Our principal, I assume in the wake of the same ruling, decided the same.

Wow. I and my colleagues who helped substantially had done all that effort in vain. Because I have some linear brain cells in my head, I am confident that I originally got a ruling of satisfactory certainty those few years ago when 2.0 math after tenth grade implied eleventh grade standing. When I polled colleagues both within my building and elsewhere in the district, there was an exact 50/50 split in those who understood all along the interpretation to be the way I had it, and those who understood all along the interpretation to be the way it came out in the end.

I rolled with the punch and chose not to question because I would get nowhere, I felt, other than to make myself an unwelcome nuisance. Moreover, I lacked any evidence in the way of emails, or even notes on phone calls or conversation that would bolster my original understanding. Finally, the new and contrary ruling to my point of view made it easier for the seniors under my charge to meet graduation requirements, so I would be in the position of arguing a rather unpopular position, and it was an easy decision of the heart to just let it be.

It was this story specifically that led my colleague to ask me how I had managed to last….

Rather younger and still with a fine shot of idealism and self importance in my veins, newly hired in my school district, with some regularity I gave full attention to various district committee assignments, bent on having some influence on the direction of the school district. Ego fully in charge, at that stage. After a number of episodes, many late afternoon and evening meetings, I began to realize that I never saw the results of my and others’ labors. The reports we produced never seemed to see the light of day, or sometimes if they resurfaced, had been transformed by unknown editing into something other than what we had produced. It began to dawn on me that I was wasting my time on these committees. With a few notable exceptions, it has been long since that I have volunteered for district committees. I wouldn’t say I have been beaten into submission, but my younger assumption of power to help steer the ship of state has been much diluted. Is this where we want our teachers and other staff to arrive?

Further tiny, but telling indignities.

— I am resigning from my full time position at the end of June, having some time ago declared my intentions, but so far there has been little information from the administration as to what will happen with my position, which leaves my colleagues remaining in limbo. More to the point, though apparently questions have been asked by our department chairman, the decision remains held closely to the vest by the principal. He has hinted he will fill the position in part as a learning tool for an administrative intern, but no input has been requested, which risks once again a decision without all the factors being considered. For example, in a similar such experiment this year with an administrative intern while I was out on medical leave, the individual did an admirable job processing the many pieces of graduation data, but did not have the background to handle the truly counseling issues that arose during my absence. Though the spirit of experiment is to be congratulated – in fact, there have been past discussions around saving money by hiring cheaper administrative assistant types to do much of the credit crunching higher priced counselors are paid more to do – the counseling staff would have useful perspectives toward a successful configuration of any such experiment, yet not consulted to date.

— Another. One of my counseling colleagues was recently hired for a part time position at a new drop out retrieval program in our school district. She suddenly began disappearing this week at times when she would normally be in our building. Vaguely, we received the message that some arrangement was made between our principal and that of the new program for my colleague’s time. None of us seems to have been asked what the consequence of our colleague’s absence might be. The rest of us have been left to wonder what the deal is, as we stay back at the ranch and deal with the students still in our building.

— Among the means to meet our state (HSPE) reading and writing test standards, is an alternative called Collection of Evidence (COE), which is utilized as one might surmise by students whose skills are marginal. In beginning years students needed to take the HSPE Reading and the HSPE Writing test each only once, and then could submit COE documents multiple times should they not pass the test itself. Suddenly, without explanation, the state has decided that students must attempt the HSPE reading and writing tests twice before attempting the corresponding COE, and then can do that only once, effectively increasing the barrier to such kids meeting the requirement, rather than facilitating their success in a more creative way. There might be a satisfactory explanation, but it is difficult to see what that might be.

However, in each of these relatively trivial circumstances, the point is not that a good decision was made or not made. In each case, it would be valid to wonder why more questions weren’t asked on my part or those of my colleagues. Why have we not more assertively asked to be a part of the hiring decision in the first instance, or why have we not inquired more directly why our colleague has disappeared without explanation? In the last instance, why would we not pound the state officials (if we can figure out who they are) with queries and arguments about the weight added to struggling students in their quest to pass the state standards?

The point is that after many such experiences, repeated in large and small ways over a number of years, one learns the futility of tilting at the proverbial windmills. However righteous, one is taught by experience that the chance of making a significant dent in a given issue is negligible, and the energy often needed even for that detracts from the responsibilities with students on the ground floor, in front of us. So in a profession that at its best calls for independent thinking and assertive action, a practitioner becomes confounded by numbness in the face of the difficulty doing either. Too often those who are successful as teachers hunker down with their students, manage and control what they can, and put up what walls they are able to around their efforts.

So my young colleague, asking how I have done it, had the mélange of these stimuli in mind. How, for crying out loud, have I done it?

Before I attempt to address the question, I want to share a post script. I told the story some posts back (2/18/12: Schools and Bureaucracy: Empower Your People; Chrysler Does – Part B) of my conflict with folks in the state educational hierarchy who attempted to reach down into schools, apparently unbidden, and tell myself and others what to do, albeit in a good cause, that of the bringing of lower income students to higher education. Though I had worked with some regularity with the very same kids they targeted, and continued to do so, I refused to do the reportage of detail they demanded.

Well, I should have known it would bite me. In the last week or two before graduation, when counselordom is at its busiest, our principal who to his credit kept himself, Olympian, out of the fray of which I complained, contacted me to ask for a compilation of data that covered the same information I had refused to the state hierarchy. Seems another principal had reported certain statistics to the superintendent, so now our principal was in need of a similar report, as soon as possible. Though it was easier to do at the end like this than to track the data over the entire semester, the effort came at a juncture when I could least afford it. What could I do but grin; the local and state low income support effort has political muscle to it, and it was bound to come round.

I can afford to grin. I won’t be around to deal with the future. Periodically bold new programs appear, without additional funding, without additional staffing, which are dumped squarely in counselors’ laps, without anything else taken off the plate. We are told to suck it up, shut it up, do the best we can, which we do, but the net effect is to hunker us down even further into our psychological bunkers.

Most preciously, on the day of this post, there arrives in email yet another layer of the same state program. To the tracking of data just referred to, and a financial aid oriented evening that was also ordered up last fall, the same state consortium is now dialing up a college application evening, to begin next fall. Even now, when I am leaving this circle of directive, I smolder, not because the program in its fundamentals is ill conceived, nor because I do not and have not myself put energies to the growth of low income students, but in reaction to the ham handed manner in which the leaders of the program choose to disrespect the autonomy of the folks in the schools who are the first contact with the low income kids being served.

I am reminded that people do what they are rewarded for doing. My erstwhile colleagues, grinding their teeth, rolling their eyeballs, will be rewarded for keeping their mouth shut, enduring, and doing their best to manage yet another layer teetering on their already oversubscribed backs. No one other than the counselors in question, it seems, cares to notice nor even suspect that quality diminishes across all manner of task in such an arena.

So all this has been preamble to the answer to my colleague’s question – “How have you (me) endured the frequent assault on sanity that seems to be a regular feature of life in schools?” All this is also a reminder of the poor quality of work environment that saturates schools I have known to such a degree as to be as unremarkable as it is profound. How, indeed, have I done this? How, indeed, do others do it for a career? Why do some stay, and some leave? What is it in the job that draws one in, or repels others? What kind of character endures, what kind gets the hell out of Dodge? Next post, my friends, next post.

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School Politics: Is Teacher Evaluation Destined for the Rabbit Hole? (Part B)

Posted on June 1, 2012 by schooldog

 

Last post (5/18/12) I introduced an article by Jenny Anderson in the New York Times, February 19, 2012, “States Try to Fix Quirks in Teacher Evaluations”, and explored some of the ins and outs of reform efforts in teacher evaluation, in which Tennessee has been one of the states early out of the box. This week continues the meditation. See the most previous blog post for the run up.

Were principals themselves or, god forbid, even teachers involved in the construction of the Tennessee teacher evaluation system? I suspect not, or only tangentially, because the pragmatic, “do-ability” of the Tennessee effort seems to be in question, which leads me to suspect that even if teachers or principals were involved in the planning, they were not weighty in the final resolution to the extent that bureaucrats, superintendents, university professors, and legislators were.

These latter folks almost certainly are well meaning, perhaps even once upon a time themselves were denizens of grass roots schools, but in the contemporary context likely lack the real time, real juice experience of current line teachers and principals. So the current product, pristine in its thorough capture of the many theoretical nuances of teaching, is proving to be unworkable.

Parenthetically, thorough going consultation with line teachers implies an acknowledgment of teacher professionalism and expertise at a time when teachers in my view continue to exist in a kind of limbo between a union, blue collar identity, and an associative, professional identity. As long as administrators and the educational bureaucracy take it upon themselves to reform the teacher ranks along a one-way street without significant degree of consultation and the respect thereby implied, the blue collar identity will continue to be reinforced, and the reform movement will continue its sluggish style of progress. Teachers for their part bear considerable responsibility to upgrade their professional identity, but the parties, teacher and hierarchy, will tend to stay locked in relationship as usual as long as administrators of all levels continue to approach them as widgets to be conformed rather than as professionals with whom they work. We have here a classic vicious cycle, in which the behavior of each party reinforces the dysfunctional behavior of the other.

On a related note, principals are quoted in Anderson’s article as frustrated that they must on one hand exhaustively evaluate folks they know to be high quality teachers, and on the other that they may be forced to evaluate a lesson as substandard that they intuitively know to be a quality one because it lacks one or more attributes that the subcategory system identifies as critical. My own district has an unwieldy evaluation system, unwieldy for administrator and staff member alike. Over a period of years, depending upon what my duties are, I will generally cover most if not all of the items upon which I am to be evaluated. But in one year I may not touch in several areas, and so run the risk of being down graded in that one year.

Is Tennessee trying to take too much discretion out of principal hands? For example, in one principal’s plaint who could speak for many of us in schools, “you know when a good lesson is being taught without looking at a rubric.” Or do the arrayed categories force evaluators to look at elements of teaching that a given principal might overlook in their inevitable time constraints, or which have disappeared from their consideration in the length of time since they themselves have been in the classroom? Probably both are true. Still, Tennessee’s directive that new teachers are observed six times a year and veteran teachers four, which acknowledges the role of experience, is probably on the right track, even if the number of overall observations will have to be adjusted still further at least in the intermediate run.

Though consolidation of some of the Tennessee sub-categories seems an obvious, even if interim solution, there may be other ways, though untested for the most part on any large scale basis, to balance out the evaluation of teachers. In an article about Rahm Emmanuel in the April 2012 Atlantic (“Rahm Emmanuel Takes Chicago: Meet the New Boss”), Jonathan Alter quotes Timothy Knowles, head of the Urban Education Institutes and a consultant to Emmanuel on education, as claiming that the best predictors of  teacher effectiveness are student evaluations, which correlate with “surprising accuracy” with other measurements. Knowles is quoted as balding asserting that standardized tests “have been gamed so mercilessly by many states that they’re of limited use.”

Mind you, these are the same standardized tests whose alleged chimera we have been following slavishly over the last ten years or so. The target has slid down the rabbit hole. It is not clear if we have followed right on down into wonderland, or if the target has emerged looking the same, but fundamentally changed in ways we do not publicly acknowledge, if we are to agree with Knowles. Given the Tennessee legislature’s consideration of decreasing the score needed for a teacher to obtain tenure (see last week), it seems that state’s efforts are in danger of diminishing into a similar oblivion. All of this satisfies my love of the absurd, but brings up short any optimism I might have that people of good will can substantially influence our politico-educational game in a sustainably positive way any time soon.

As I feel the need to end on a relatively optimistic note, I suggest our schools will continue to muddle on through incremental progress, much of which will be done on the grass roots level with kicks in the rear from state and federal levels. Teacher evaluation likely will follow the same pattern.

Nonetheless, I think there are bigger issues at play; teacher evaluation, as important as it is, is secondary to broader cultural and institutional trends that impede progress.

For example, in the longer run, the cultural fabric must undergo shifts that will induce our students to become more urgent in their acceptance of what we offer them, because our students too little buy into what we are trying to teach them, due to a host of illnesses peculiar to this unique society, and regardless of reforms schools themselves still must make.

Another example, another culture shift specifically within the educational setting: schools must find ways to be more collaborative and teachers more professionalized.

Finally, state and superintendent levels must find ways to incentivize promising initiatives via well designed goals that are fleshed out on the grass roots level, rather than by micromanaging as though schools are like a factory floor.

Should these miracles occur, the teacher evaluation conundrum may well prove a footnote to bigger stories.

Alas, I still feel the need to end on a relatively optimistic note….

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School Politics: Is Teacher Evaluation Destined for the Rabbit Hole? (Part A)

Posted on May 18, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: Teacher evaluation reforms encounter headwinds to be expected amid some sentiment that we don’t know enough about what we are trying to do, and alongside worries about the cost in time to those principals doing the evaluating. Meanwhile, the standardized tests we have come to regard as a sacred cow of teacher evaluation may no longer be up to the task.

Teacher evaluation reforms, in those states and communities at the cutting edge, are experiencing the kind of growing pains one would expect. In a New York Times article February 19, 2012, “States Try to Fix Quirks in Teacher Evaluations”, by Jenny Anderson, evaluating principals and other professionals from several states discuss their experience as they implement the new mandates they face.

According to Grover J. Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, state efforts to reform teacher evaluation

“are racing ahead based on promises made to Washington or local political imperatives that prioritize an unwavering commitment to unproven approaches. There’s a lot we don’t know about how to evaluate teachers reliably and how to use that information to improve instruction and learning.”

I like that phrase – “unwavering commitment to unproven approaches” – too often the mantra in the educational game. The only corollary I would add is that the commitment continues until the next new exciting thing shows up, often with a new round of folks in power.

Presumably the intertwining poles of teacher evaluation and improvement of instruction and learning include how we use the results of standardized testing. Though such a metric on one level makes intuitive sense, the interwoven nature of a high school student’s experience, particularly in a school that emphasizes reading, writing, and math across the curriculum, raises some open ended questions about the degree to which the results in an individual English teacher’s classroom, for example, should be used as indicative of the quality of his or her teaching.

Theoretically standardized test scores would be more clearly indicative of the quality of a teacher’s work on an elementary level where a student has one teacher, but how is a principal to moderate the evaluation of a teacher who has a high percentage of special education students or second language students, or one who had the misfortune to inherit a number of students who had a weak teacher in the previous year?

How reliable are test results if tests have been dumbed down, as feared in some states, in response to the pressures of No Child Left Behind?

Not easy questions, but which are of the type not unexpected as rhetoric is turned into real products whose tires are now hitting the road. As one of the principals quoted in Anderson’s article comments, “We’re building it on the fly.”

On top of these quandaries and by the testimony of principals quoted by Anderson, the more pivotal concern is the time it takes them to faithfully implement the new teacher evaluations, to the sacrifice of other critical duties.

That is, the new evaluations are enormously time intensive, which shouldn’t surprise, because properly supervisorial relationships are at base human relationships, delicate ones, ideally designed not to bludgeon, but to promote growth. They take time to build, with trust to be established, and a growth process created, so that the relationship is collaborative, rather than an equation in which one side intimidates, and the other side hunkers down.

These concerns echo some of my earlier comments (see post 4/9/12 “School Culture and Politics: Whither the Money?”) about the student contact time versus money conundrum we face in schools. That is, the evidence from charter schools and the at risk student literature, among other sources, argues we need more staffing to increase contact time with students with whom we face more difficult challenges, but have yet to make the case to the satisfaction of voters and politicians, and even ourselves, that we know enough about what we are doing to justify increased expenditures in a difficult economic and political environment.

So what is it that takes so much time for supervising principals, aside from the given that a successful set of such relationships needs careful tending? In Tennessee, according to the NY Times article, there are four areas of evaluation, each subdivided into twelve subcategories, which proliferate in all to 116 subcategories. Egad. Sounds a bit like a blueprint for a factory floor. It gets better. Each new teacher is observed six times a year; veteran teachers four times a year, and each time all 116 subcategories must be scored. The article reports that it takes four to six hours just to input the data (hopefully the total of all observations, not for each observation), and then of course there are pre-conferences in which “teachers explain and show the lesson, and post-conferences in which feedback is given.”

The state of Tennessee has proven itself somewhat flexible in the face of administrator complaint about the time burden, so that the mandate for full use of the 116 subcategories has been mitigated, among other labor saving devices. For my taste, when a system gets too unwieldy, it is prima facie flawed.

Disturbingly, and in true bureaucratic fashion, while Tennessee state education officials have shown themselves willing to tweak the system some, their current message is that it will not be changed significantly. As in many other cases, the devil will be in the details. In a large system, such as that governing the schools of Tennessee, good ideas cannot wilt before mere whining on the grass roots level. But such firmness becomes destructive intransigence when the “whining” turns out to be based on widespread experience and cogent argument, in this case from principals in the middle of the fray.

Something will have to give, and the result may be counter productive. Now the Tennessee legislature is considering a bill to lower the bar for tenure to a lower score than that previously in place, from a score of five, to four or three. Starts to sound a bit like dumbing down the test.

One more time: when the system is unwieldy, or constructed in such a way as to poorly define the endgame, the politico educational nexus finds ways to mitigate the harmful effects, but in the process may vitiate the original noble attempt, which in this case was to find a way to reform teacher supervision and evaluation, ultimately the quality of teaching, and to a subversive extent, get rid of poor teachers.

In other states, Delaware, Maryland, and New York specifically, state directed reform of evaluation procedures has been tabled or delayed in various ways because of the same issues – how do we evaluate teachers accurately and within the time allotted? I suspect the answer will be a compromise – simpler, less time intensive systems, hopefully more efficient ones, until such time as the political process, and the voting public is ready to trust more money in school hands for enhanced staffing, in this case in the principal cum evaluator ranks.

This is not to say all is bad. Despite these crunching difficulties, I believe in my own school, and by similar testament from a Tennessee state education official, that “rich conversations” around teaching are increasing in frequency, and instruction has improved by becoming more consciously oriented around specific goals, and via data drawn from everyday student performance. That we may becoming too concerned with the trees and forgetting about the forest – that is, focused on skills training to the detriment of broader educational goals such as critical thinking or the fostering of citizenship – does not detract from the fact that we have to get much better at giving kids those very skills – reading, writing, and computation – without which they will be crippled in the marketplace.

To be continued next week.

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A Teaching/Learning Lexicon: To Instruct, to Show, to Lead

Posted on May 8, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: A return to fundamental constructs of teaching and learning.

All this talk about NCLB (last week’s post), and how directives from the feds may or may not be successful in steering the educational ship of state, leaves me wandering around in my head, much as excessive intellectualizing can separate the head from the real life around us. So occasionally I feel a need to go back to what I know, or think I know, about teaching and learning.

It is important to have fundamental concepts against which we evaluate NCLB, or skills testing in general, or whether a new initiative is likely to lead in a direction that will expand the minds and opportunities of our students.

Periodically in this blog I have taken refuge in the language of teaching and learning, which in turn reflects the deep tissue of what I have learned in my years of interacting with students, and from my own experience as a learner. Here be my earlier introduction of my first entry in what I have called a “lexicon” —

“More by whimsy at first, but later by design, a number of years ago I began examining the derivations of words such as “teach”, and “learn”, and followed their origins into associations themselves derived from my experience teaching, and from what I have read and discussed with others.  The result is a modest and idiosyncratic “lexicon”, nonetheless an expression of a long tradition of teaching, and one by which the conduct of teachers and students – the progress of learning and growth – can be measured. No doubt, the lexicon will be incomplete; some of it may seem as fancy. I, at least, find these definitions useful to remember in this current era of skills testing when there is a danger of missing the forest for the trees.”

So, to continue. The curious could check previous posts in this vein by clicking on “A Teaching/Learning Lexicon” in the right hand column of the blog.

INSTRUCT – from roots meaning to build, toward building; akin to spreading out. Toward growing and branching out, instruction shows the way toward the construction of frameworks or pathways to new conceptual terrain. Instruction facilitates whatever internal logic the student might use to explore and organize new territory, relate the new to the old, and by which she might find his way back and froth from the new to the old, further integrating the two along the way.

The prefix in-,“toward,” implies activities designed for a further end; here again the distinction appears between the teacher and the learner. The instructor brings toward the point of building, and perhaps guides along the way, but in the end only the student can build interior understanding. As Piaget would have it, the student either assimilates the new information to schema that define previous understanding, or accommodates his current conceptual frameworks to the new information.

Looked at another way, the prefix in- can logically imply within, and hence “within building.” The word instruct thus asserts that true instruction leads not to the building of facades, but to the logic of an integrative internal cognitive structure, and hence to the strength of understanding, rather than to the show of appearance. Again, Piaget is implied.

(Thus, the question in our contemporary educational environment, do good test scores pursuant to NCLB represent understanding of the material, or a more superficial manipulation of symbols as required to do well on the test?)

LEAD – From roots meaning “to go”, which implies destination, a journey from one place to another; so, in the context of a teacher to a learner, a demonstration, a taking to something to be learned. The word “lead” implies knowledge on one part, ignorance on the other, and a service provided on the part of the former for the latter. However, a limited service, implying a willing following; to lead does not mean to shove. In an educational context, the service ends just before the destination, similarly to “instruct,” and the traveler/learner places her own last tracks, and absorbs the arrival point in her own unique conceptual integration. Again, Monsieur Piaget.

SHOW – from Latin, among others, meaning to look, to look at. The metaphor is a visual one, a placing before the eyes or, more broadly, before the senses, which initially interpret reality. To bring to attention, to notify the conscious mind of the existence of something. To show implies purpose, the intent on the part of one to demonstrate to another. Again, to show requires a complementary reception. I, a teacher, cannot “show” something that someone else, a student, does not see, hear, feel, touch, or otherwise communicate with and interpret to cognition in some way.

Show also derives more obscurely from the Latin, to be on guard, and hence connotes caution. Thus the teacher, as a guide, must remind himself, and his student, that that which is to be shown may harbor danger, and must be handled with care. We are reminded that to learn can be dangerous to previous ways of thinking, and that learning is open ended and can lead in unpredictable directions.

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Schools and Politics: Fiddling with No Child Left Behind

Posted on April 29, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: How are we to evaluate the new Obama waivers to No Child Left Behind? Political expediency or a necessary tweak to a flawed endgame? Hard to tell.

While we labor on day to day in our schools with our real students, there are political battles ongoing in the nation’s capitol that will ultimately affect our work environment and direction.  Unfortunately, the rationale, particulars, and any good works of these battles may be clear only to full time and true policy wonks. Few of us in schools themselves have the time to become knowledgeable enough to determine which positions hold promise, and which serve other agendas or would simply be ineffective.

The history and drama of No Child Left Behind, the most immediate and recent example, boring or irrelevant or opaque to most people, even many educators, nonetheless keeps drawing me back.

The latest episode is the announcement by the Obama administration that it will grant “waivers” from aspects of NCLB to states who meet certain criteria in their own more local plans for school improvement.

The mandate of NCLB and its consequence across the states is a study in social change, in this case exercised by force of law from one pole of federal power, Congress, as administered by the executive branch. I have been one who has grudgingly admitted that NCLB has forced changes that wouldn’t have happened without the stick held high, though I prefer grass roots change that can better be sculpted to the contours of the local environment.

Unfortunately, the goals of NCLB, namely that all students, including various minority groups that have historically lagged in achievement, shall meet standard in reading, writing, and math by 2014, have simply not been realized, despite progress. Moreover, it is widely thought (hopefully not group think) that Congress should tinker with the law to address its inadequacies, but, yes – THAT Congress. In the congressional vacuum, the Obama folk have stepped in administratively and granted waivers from the expectations of NCLB to states that

“put forward plans showing they will prepare children for college and careers, set new targets for improving achievement among all students, reward the best-performing schools and focus help on the ones doing the worst,”

according to reporting by Kimberling Hefling and Ben Feller of the Associated Press, as carried in the Seattle Times, and echoed elsewhere, including the Huffington Press (2/9/12)

Obama is quoted in these articles as saying to the states, “If you’re willing to set higher, more honest standards than the ones set by NCLB, then we’re going to give you the flexibility to meet those standards.” While governor types on the NCLB hot seat welcome the new “flexibility”, civil rights and education groups in their comments worry that “states would be getting a pass on aggressively helping poor and minority children.”

Here I return to my earlier comment about being a wonk. The devil is in the details. One need be a closely tuned policy type to evaluate the competing claims.

So which is it? Seemingly the states on waivers would set their own standards and measures of compliance, as well as sanctions for low performing schools, but how much of this is political gobbledygook that steers all elected types away from the embarrassing reality that as many as half of the nation’s schools will “fail” in one phase or another of NCLB accounting in the near future? Let us punt it down the road until forced to another, later accounting, most likely when someone else is in office?

Do the new Obama rules represent progress, or a cop out? A creative adaptation to an ill conceived endgame, or a dodge of political expediency? I would have to make myself an expert in the details of both the NCLB and the new Obama rules in order to mediate in my own thinking between experts on multiple sides, often who disagree.

If this sounds like Obama bashing, it is not. More, it is frustration with the realities of school reform, and its complex currents, eddies, and depth. How and can one legislate from the nation’s capitol in such a fashion as to affect positively each of the multiplicity of byways and unique local conditions that typify our nation’s schools?

If No Child Left Behind has been shown to fall short through both a Republican and a Democratic administration, then what will work? How would NCLB be tweaked in order to more effectively stay the course? And then, of course, if wonks in the hierarchy determine strategy with a decent chance of success, then how is it that Republicans will finally reach across the aisle and with Democrats come to a consensus and revive what is currently a dysfunctional process? A President cannot alter legislation; Congress must do so.

The dilemma still begs the old question — does change occur more effectively begun at the grass roots level, or from a level of power? Most likely, the answer is not either/or, but from an historical synchronicity of leadership and grass roots that responds to the same deep cultural imperatives. If NCLB has been effective, perhaps it has been because it has stimulated already nascent action on the grass roots level, often effectively, if not enough so.

Perhaps the caution here is that we stay the course. The error of NCLB has been to mandate too much change too soon in the sleepy and inertia laden burgs. The feds should keep up the pressure; the professionals deep in the schools should continue the incremental process of refining what works with their real students.

Meanwhile, the conversation should continue about the dangers of teaching to the test, even though that has been the key to what success the NCLB has wrought. How do we also quantify and measure the birth of critical and creative thinking in our students? What place in the hierarchy of mandates should the preparation of voting citizens be given? How will we justify to the voting public the additional staffing that will be needed to bring the variety of at risk students along for an equal ride? Etc.

I worry that decisions will continue to be made at the federal policy level in ways that workers on the grass roots level simply cannot evaluate without a commitment to following the policy discussions, just as the shift in policy implicit in the new Obama rules remains opaque to me in my school at this juncture. In other words, one is compelled to become more of a wonk, or submit to a faith that those in the many layers above us in the hierarchy know what they are doing. That’s a tough swallow, the latter option, and one that subtly diminishes the professional identity of school folk, I believe.

The other consequence of this disconnect I fear is that policy tends to be developed in isolation from the realities we face in schools, and so runs the danger of being ill molded to the target.

Hopefully, there exist middle level men and women to who effectively explain the grass roots to the powers who design policy, and evaluate policy options in a way geared to how they will play on the ground level. This could be one definition of your basic friendly wonk.

For now, along with tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of other practitioners, I burrow down into the work immediately in front of me, and wonder how and if the consequences of these changes far from the front lines in which I work will ultimately change my professional environment.

It must have been like this to the ancient Greeks who watched as their gods machinated their way across the proverbial heavens. Vitally concerned with the outcome, but seemingly powerless to affect it, we mortals await the next events that may constrain or may liberate our professional options.

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School Culture: Comparative Life in Another Helping Profession

Posted on April 18, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: Your faithful blogger experiences parallels between the professional life of teachers and that of nurses.

As life happens, I have just returned from a stay in the hospital following surgery. As we shall see, the timing fortuitously was on the heels of my last post, which discussed teaching as an interpersonal enterprise, and predicted that school reform ultimately will involve stronger teacher : student ratios, once and if we get right how we use additional personnel efficiently and effectively.

Back to the hospital. As the fog of surgery settled, and I became increasingly aware of my surroundings over the days immediately post op, I started to discern within the nurse ranks around me some patterns that struck me as familiar, but which remained elusive to my understanding. Those who have been blessed with post anesthetic fog and the double whammy of oxycodone will appreciate my struggle to coherence.

I persevered nonetheless, because time I had on my hands; I wasn’t going anywhere fast. Gradually the familiar came into focus.

I recognized on the nurses’ faces as they scrambled from one patient to another, to emergency to mini crisis and back, the same emotional stress that has been familiar to me as a counselor in high school working with students.

— The centrifugal tearing at cognition and plan that pulls one away from one task before completed, because the urgency of the incipient task is too great to wait upon completion of first.

— The same almost desperate attempt to cover all bases against the press of too much too do, on the part of good hearted people committed to the ethics of their profession, and to the wellness of their patients.

— The mental fragmentation from several such stops in a sequence, then later the attempt to reconstruct in a relative less intense time period, the incomplete pieces from earlier in the day, that nonetheless still need attention.

True, such is the nature of life working with people in circumstances in which emergency is to be expected. Yet to the degree such disruption becomes chronic, to that degree the level of care that nurses provide or the completeness of instruction teachers impart declines, and the danger that a critical error occurs becomes more prevalent.

Clearly, staffing levels would either alleviate or complicate such danger.

My nurses were committed professionals, communicative, mature, and hard working and, as it happened, attractive, so what could I do with all that time on my side but open inquiry into what I had recognized?

Turned out that the hospital recently had undergone staffing cuts in nursing levels as a budgetary issue and, where the nurses previously had been responsible for four patients each on this particular floor, they now had five. Do the math; workload had gone up 25%. (Might have been five patients to six, which would make the increase a 20%, still significant.) By the way, this is not to lambast the hospital administration, any more than school administrators or even state legislators who must make cuts to live within means in these difficult economic times. But the point is that patient care and, in parallel fashion, the reaching of students in schools, has suffered accordingly.

Further in my conversation with the nurses (and I swear that I didn’t contaminate the observation by suggesting it myself), a couple of them acknowledged that aside from being continually torn away from one task to attend to another more urgent one, in their newly altered circumstances they simply couldn’t get to a certain band of care that they both had been trained to do and which they considered important.

To their credit, when they were working with me, I felt as though they shut out the rest of the world, listened carefully, and responded compassionately. Our conversations didn’t go so far into the details of what they considered lower level, yet still important, but effectively deleted priorities.

However, while walking the halls, I inadvertently overheard one nurse’s conversation with another patient. The snippets of their dialogue were about the patient’s life and family, interwoven with the medical issue of the present. In this context, it struck me that perhaps nursing is like teaching, or counseling, in that the subtext of a purposeful interaction is a genuine liking and care of a patient, and a willingness to develop a relationship beyond the technical details of either medicine or learning. In fact, perhaps there is evidence that the relationship between nurse and patient is critical to the healing, just as the relationship between teacher and at risk student is shown by research to be critical to improved learning. Perhaps it is the time given to brief but genuine interactions that is lost in both school and hospital. As a result, both settings, designed as incubators of human reconstruction, become more technical and sterile, and in the process become less successful at their identified calling.

The building of relationships takes time; perhaps in the downsizing of staff it is this “soft” variable that becomes the casualty.

I know this to be true in my own work in schools; so I was surprised to encounter similar patterns in the hospital, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been. In important ways, the two settings house the work of fellow travelers.

 

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School Culture and Politics: Whither the Money?

Posted on April 9, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: A conundrum, in which school reform will depend on application of public funds toward targeted solutions that remain elusive in a political environment highly resistive to new spending.

I am a professional person. I strive to define my job by the knowledge and expertise I bring to bear on my school and my students. I know what must be done, what problems need to be solved, what processes need to be encouraged, who my students are and what they need to do to grow into the adults they are to become. I don’t need a hierarchy to tell me what to do, but to help me do my job as best I can do.

Today I sat in my office, much of the day crunching numbers, making as sure as I can that my seniors are on track to graduate. Where danger in that goal looms, I identify what steps individuals need to take to accommodate to standard. Senior portfolios await me on the side table, emails and phone calls beckon me, while I ignore a state level project that asks more of me than my professional priorities can give; late in the afternoon well after school is over, my mind turned to mush, I pack my things and take work home to finish over the weekend.

The more seriously a school teacher or other professional takes their work, the more frequently my experience above, just the other day, is replicated over and over, not only in my school, but in schools around the nation. Many of us, though we have prioritized to the max the responsibilities we have before us, still must leave elements that are themselves priorities, if lower ones, undone. Those extra steps to bring quality students to excellent, or struggling students to standard, are hard to get to short of making sacrifice of our private life.

Which brings me to the conundrum. It is clear to me that we need more people power in our schools, meaning teachers, counselors, administrators, classified staff. In schools, not in the central office. Working with kids is an interpersonal profession. Kids respond to relationships, and will follow us where we can give them time.

Often when I see a school making progress in one publication or another, at the root of the success is the creative use of human beings. Sometimes volunteers, sometimes extra staff paid by grant money, but mostly some leveraging mechanism that lowers the adult: student ratio on the grass roots level, in the school.

People have to be paid, which means more money. Aye, there’s the rub!

Critics with some reason charge that we should not send more money after a broken system until we know how to fix it. That some of these same people are averse to paying more taxes as part of a political agenda, some parts selfish and shortsighted, a few parts patriotic, does not mitigate the parts of truth in the charge. Bureaucracies do bloat and do waste money, and make no mistake, schools have a heavy bureaucratic element.

New money will have to be rationally targeted. Arguably, only in a lean system will marginal money have a chance to be used well.

Schools need more money, but the fix is too unclear to justify spending more money in an economy where public budget cuts are the norm. What to do?

The Obama administration with its “Race to the Top” provides money in this vacuum for states that meet “best practices” criteria the administration has identified as promoting educational change. According to Wikipedia, in its distillation of the “Race to the Top” program, those best practices are “performance based standards for teachers and principals, compliance with national standards, promoting charter schools, and computerization.”

Let’s take the first criterion, “performance based standards for teachers and principals.” In my own school were we to have a more rational teacher evaluation process truly based on performance (as do some schools by media accounts), I think it inescapable that administrators would need to devote a considerably enhanced share of their time to evaluation and guidance of talent. The establishment of trust required in any mentor situation, the time for question and conversation, skill specific observation and feedback, all part of any learning process, has to be carved out of the professional lives of administrators and teachers alike to a degree rarely observed, from what I have experienced. Moreover, I comment from the bowels of a large high school that most recently lost one of four vice principals for budgetary reasons, a regression of sorts rather than a progression in this context.

Charter schools present another horn of the same financial dilemma. Though charter schools as an incubation medium and laboratory make sense, the literature seems to report mixed outcomes, at best. Accounts indicate that where charter schools have been successful it has been because of lowered staff : student ratios, which once again takes what? – you’re right, more money.

Parenthetically, in a post or two down the road I will take a look at what is my own bewilderment at what to make of the literature on charter schools, as well as more on the implications for administrators if they are to get evaluation right.

In all this ambivalence about direction, Congressional naysayers more focused on reducing government back into the 19th century have a field day while they stifle enhanced spending by any means feasible.

Bottom line, though the Obama administration has taken a shot at best practices, and I think are correct in trying to support innovation in the categories they champion, just a brief look at two of the elements of Race to the Top, performance based standards and charter schools, illuminates the distance we are from a national consensus about what works, and the fact that those things that arguably eventually will work, are going to cost more money.

 

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Schools and Politics: Teacher Evaluation Reform

Posted on March 26, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: Top down federal or state mandates have a role, but may also suppress professionalism on the local level. The latter, not good.

About the time I wrote my last post urging union and administration alike to find common ground and reach a workable consensus about reform of teacher evaluation, my own state legislature passed a bill that, among other stipulations, mandates that teacher evaluations will reflect student growth as measured on standardized tests. While there are reasons that such measure does not reflect all manner of quality in a teacher’s performance with his or her students, clearly these metrics have something to say.

In addition, the bill will apparently replace the current seniority system with a process that will more readily make it possible for poorly performing teachers to be let go, after a period of focused attempt to improve the teacher’s skills.

Though there are a variety of objections to be made, from the petty to the substantial, I am convinced by the experience of my school with the blunderbuss that is No Child Left Behind, that such imprecise mandates have a role in forcing change.

Once again my local newspaper, The Seattle Times, this time on its editorial page for March 13, provides a backdrop for these comments. While the Times endorses this legislative development as a step in the right direction, its editorial writer laments that the state teachers’ union, the Washington Education Association, “was able to weaken the evaluation bill.” From the Times point of view, the bill was weakened because in its adapted form “the extent to which test scores and other student achievement data will count in teacher evaluations will be decided locally,” that is, in the bargaining process between local districts and associated teacher unions.

The fear is that the intent of the bill will be watered down in the local bargaining process and the hard fought reform will be vitiated, a not unreasonable fear.

For the record, I am of the mind that student progress on standardized tests should be one important part of the evaluation process. But principal evaluation, and even student and peer evaluation are also valid assessment tools, and may reflect qualities of teaching that the current exclusive focus on certain skills, albeit fundamental ones, does not well measure.

The Times and those of their persuasion tilt too far to the hierarchical view of things, in my view. While top down clout plays a role, such as in the federal promotion of reform, ultimately the change must be embraced on the grass roots level, in the schools, where teacher meets student, and on the local level where school administration is charged with creating the optimum atmosphere in which students learn and teachers teach.

While it may well be argued that the Washington Education Association is fighting a rear guard battle by insisting that the specifics of teacher evaluation be determined in the local bargaining arena, consider also what I have argued in various ways in this blog. To the extent that control is wrested from the teaching corps, and from the administrators, school and district, with whom they work, to that extent professionalism on the local level becomes hostage to an overly hierarchical environment, and all local parties tend to look elsewhere for direction rather than focus their energies on the lessons they are learning from the raw material in front of them – their students — and the slow process of grasping how students will best respond to one initiative or another, one technique or another.

We will not, I believe from my experience, achieve what we all wish for our students, if we cannot rely on power placed on the local level, and the expertise we nurture there.

Essentially, we are talking about polar opposites in theories of change. Bureaucracies exist to manage programs, and when bureaucracies want to reform practice, power inherent in various mechanisms is used to achieve results. Federal money, for example, is used to further the aims of No Child Left Behind.

At the other extreme, we have various histories of change that begin and are nurtured on the very local level, from neighborhood organizing, to the work of Saul Alinsky and his disciples, to the New Haven schools accord I mentioned earlier, to some of the events of the Arab Spring.

Both are valid approaches. Though the Times and fellow travelers seem to want to confine unions and teachers and their districts, squiggling, in boxes defined for them, too much of this power play is short sighted because it suppresses the professionalism, the prerogative of choice, that we need to be developing.

We need to support conditions such as those that apparently existed between the New Haven schools and their teachers’ union, in which a mutual trust was established, a common ground identified, in which teachers as professionals had a seat at the table and with freed energies committed to a change that has already had profound implications for the reform of New Haven classrooms. (see post 3/14/12….)

From this line of reasoning there is in fact a wisdom in what the Times considers a weakened statutory position. As the law stands, there is now structure that requires classroom metrics to be part of evaluation. Almost by definition teachers and their administrators are better qualified than state legislators and editorial writers to determine the specifics of how the new reality can be turned to the betterment of students. Bureaucrats await direction; professionals act. We need to create the latter, and avoid promoting the former mentality in the classroom.

Yes, there is risk of “the same old” wooden approach to change. Fair enough. However, I argue that some of the “same old” is a hierarchical structure that stifles teacher professionalism, and which in fact is a principle factor in the slow pace of change. Too much top down only reinforces the status quo.

It is in the nature of authority, when worried, to overly control by specifying process as well as result. The Seattle Times editorial fell victim to this trap.

Better a balance between the hierarchical and the local, and where there is top down direction, make it such that professionalism is promoted on the local level, in the interaction between teachers and their supervisory administrators, with a mutual respect and a common aim.

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Schools and Politics: Bargained Success in the New Haven Schools

Posted on March 14, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: A reflection on Nicholas Kristof’s recent column “Uniting to Oust Failing Teachers”. He leaves out a critical element.

In his column, “Uniting to Oust Failing Teachers”, as published in the Seattle Times February 18, 2012, the peripatetic Nicholas Kristof reports on a collaboration between the New Haven schools and its associated teachers’ union that has created a teacher evaluation system reliant on various measure of student learning.  The bargained system has allowed the district to weed out teachers that both sides acknowledge are “ineffective.” It is a truth known in most schoolhouses that there are some colleagues who do not pull the weight they are assigned, and demoralize our uphill battle to educational competence.

Kristof paraphrases David Cicarella, the president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, as saying that “accountability and feedback are welcome, if they are fair.” Last year the district pushed out 34 teachers, a nearly unheard of number, and this year another 50 are under warning that they need to improve their game. I assume these fifty, and others, are given ample mentoring to improve their skills. If Kristof reports accurately, the union would not be so fully invested if its membership was not given a fair shake.

According to New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. (paraphrased by Kristof), “the breakthrough isn’t so much that poor teachers are being eased out, but that feedback is making everyone perform better,” principals as well.

I am enough of a realist, though hopeful, to know that the rank and file may not perfectly reflect their leadership’s public pronouncements, and I assume there is some bruising in this process. Yet enough similar stories have poked their head up from time to time in the media as to lend credence to news of this particular development in New Haven.

Kristof wraps up his op-ed piece by commenting that it may be time for him to renew his faith in teachers’ unions, once lost amid horror stories of union defense of professionally marginal and even morally incompetent teachers.

Though I respect Kristof for his willingness to rethink his position in the light of new evidence, I think he misses a key ingredient in this turnaround.

Unions do not exist in a vacuum. Without reviewing the history of the American labor union, I believe it fair to state that labor unions grew in response to management injustice in focus on profit, to the detriment of the interests of labor. Simply put, management abuse led directly to the rise of labor organization.

The growth of teachers’ unions as well, I suspect, began and surged with the recognition that teachers’ interests and school administration interests did not always coincide, for a host of complex reasons, including administrative disrespect for teachers’ legitimate professional perspective.

This is not to say that unions have a corner on truth. Teachers’ unions have in local circumstances been a hindrance to legitimate reform, I believe. However, neither do those superintendents and principals that manage those same schools have a corner on truth.

In the New Haven case, not only should plaudits go to union leadership and its constituency for flexibility, but their flexibility would only flourish in a partnership with school district management that was trustworthy and that reached a collaborative hand out to its teachers. Kristof quotes the Mayor, he quotes the union president, but he leaves out the school superintendent and his or her governing school boards, without whose ability to negotiate in a climate in which trust was fostered, the union would not have moved from traditional intransigence. Leadership is required on both sides of the bargain.

As I look at my own hierarchically managed district, arguably a higher quality one than New Haven has been historically, I see warring camps, or at least mutually suspicious camps, that seem to have a hard time creating an atmosphere of mutual respect and need.

Need. Likely the New Haven success arose out of weariness at the same old game, the prodding by the public and the press and others, and finally a recognition that nothing would happen without recognition of the role the other side must necessarily play, and a faith that in the end, both sides want the same thing for kids. As Kristof quotes the union president, “We all use the same litmus test: Would we want our kid in that room?” On such simple mantras can powerful collaborations be built, apparently.

I would wish the same for my district, and the many others like mine who have so far seem to have lacked the requisite coincidence of enlightened and communicative, courageous leadership on both sides.

I am reminded of an emblematic final scene in Jean Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit”, at least as I remember and interpret it. His characters have been locked in dehumanizing interpersonal conflict, in a room from which there is “no exit,” in fact which they understand to be their personal hell. Finally they reseat themselves, reframe their conflict, and resolve to “get on with it,” meaning there is no escape, but a necessity to deal with the reality of themselves and of their counterparts. In the case of schools, without that realistic communication between union and management, between teachers and supervisory staff, nothing moves forward at more than a glacial pace. Recognize the stalemate, realize the power in the house is divided, accept nothing moves forward without a definition of common ground and a coordination of forces. We are stuck together, irrevocably. We may as well face up and deal.

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