Schools and Politics: Reflections on the Occupy Movement and Teachers

Posted on December 5, 2011 by schooldog

Intuitively the conditions of economic imbalance that have spawned the Occupy movement and the condition of school bureaucratic inertia have similarities worth taking a look at.

Currently both systems, our schools and our economy as a whole, are dysfunctional, or at least poorly functioning, in important dimensions.

Certainly one difference is that the Occupy movement, like the Tea Party, has been vocal and active, if not well organized or even coherent, while no such notable outcry originates in educator ranks. Each phenomenon, Occupiers and Tea Party, has served to raise awareness of their respective grievances, toward wealth and economic hegemony on one hand, and toward perceived government oppression and infringement on traditional liberties on the other. I am aware of no parallel insurrection on the part of teachers, unless we include normal union activity, which at best too often manages a stalemate rather than asserts an articulate agenda for change in the order.

Neither teachers nor Occupiers has established identifiable leadership and a coherent agenda. Yet the Occupiers, by their sheer gut stamina, have managed to spotlight economic inequalities that have stimulated sympathies widely in the political spectrum. Teachers elicit sympathy, because most citizens have good memories of interactions with a teacher or two, but that sympathy is moderated when the question of greater pay enters the picture as a function of higher taxes. Citizen perception that teachers’ unions put status quo protection before reform may also limit teacher effectiveness in building the kind of constituency Occupiers enjoy.

Parenthetically, Tea Party folks have elicited would be leaders, perhaps false prophets, but individuals who seem to lack the vision to articulate a bill of particulars that would resonate with other than the core faithful, despite a sustained vein in American political history suspicious of large government. Mainstream professional politicians of a conservative bent seem to keep their heads down where the Tea Party is concerned, and are reluctant to challenge Tea Party orthodoxy – when they do, they pay for it – but have also seemed either unsure how to step into vacant leadership traces, or hesitate to do so because they know their political fortunes lie in an appeal to a broader base.

The conditions that vitiate teacher professional progress and those that have left the many with a dwindling share of the whole to the benefit of the few have other similarities. The most obvious is the structure of the systems that govern each. A top down hierarchical order that is chronic throughout American public schools lacks a counter balancing teacher professional voice that might balance the power structure. Similarly, the regulatory and tax structure of our economy, as well as the political and even judicial climate of the times have served to strengthen the hegemony of corporate interests and those of wealth in general. Various brakes on these powers have been weakened, and even transfer of wealth that might balance and favor the interest of workers, and other denizens of the “99”, have been rendered less effective by successfully targeted political onslaughts from the right.

A second comparison flows from this first power imbalance. Just as one might argue that some transfer of wealth, via taxes, educational supports, and government investment in research and development might stimulate greater consumer buying power, which is the engine of our economy, so it may be true that some incubation of a true professionalism on the part of teacher cadres might counter the imbalances in the educational hierarchy and lend creative juices to the reform effort.

In both instances, the American dream is revived, economically as the middle class again becomes a viable stage in upward mobility, and educationally as schools serve more capably as a vehicle for immigrant and lower and middle economic class aspirations.

The bottom line, however, is that Occupiers speak to deeply felt and very widespread fears of the pocketbook and lack of access to upward mobility, more fundamental than any movement, teacher led or otherwise, can hope to tap into for schools. The Occupy movement may yet lend inchoate strength to chosen politicians in upcoming elections, while hope for any insurrection around school reform will take a backseat to lunch bucket issues.

In any event, my attempt to compare educational reform to the more broad and deeper instincts in the Occupy movement comes down simply to my own frustrations and those of people elsewhere in schools with our own energies underutilized, and so to a sensed brotherhood with the frustrations attested to by those in the streets and squares of many American cities.

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School Bureaucracy: Teacher Rumblings

Posted on November 28, 2011 by schooldog

Many of my stories of bureaucracy have involved my own experience as a counselor, together with my history as a teacher, though I have ample reason for believing my emotional experience of a school bureaucracy is not unique. Recent rumblings from the teacher ranks reinforce that conviction, lest you begin to think all my writings are the ruminations of a crank.

Previously I mentioned that our staff has followed the dictates of administration with “intelligent obedience.” In fact, though we clearly inhabit a top down hierarchy, one of the interesting features of our climate is that the administration has generally hired competent people who communicate reasonably well, who like kids, and have a measure of professional commitment to their task. On the flip side, the hires as a group challenge authority only tentatively, and mostly remain in the cave and at the hearth of their fellow teachers, with whom the conversation remains private.

Historically, our teachers’ union and the school district have had a cooperative, only modestly adversarial relationship, but the calm has shifted in recent years with a more combative central office style and, more recently, a troubled state budget. The union has become increasingly aggressive, and staged a strike a couple of years ago, with mixed results. The new superintendent in town has yet to declare his colors, and the difficult economic circumstances has made better partners of union and administration as we have had our backs to the same wall.

Nonetheless, the district and administrative personalities have continued to push educational reform, not surprisingly, for their own jobs are on the line, and even morally, because to a significant degree we do not graduate enough kids into the job market with adequate preparation.

However, new initiatives inevitably put more burden on teachers, who are the front line, and always will be, of reform. Mutterings abound this fall on the part of teachers weighted with new responsibilities, and of the consequent difficult start to the new school year. Though administrators may rightly argue that the new initiatives are incremental, if incremental changes occur frequently, at some point the straw is added that breaks the proverbial back.

In this environment the union has asked all certificated staff to fill out a survey in an attempt to get a handle on the dimensions of the problem. Comments and questions in the meeting in which the survey is introduced in fact center around the manner in which required activity has been stretched beyond traditional boundaries, and obstacles these new responsibilities have placed between teachers and their ability to help students after the scheduled day is over. Lurking in the background, sometimes jumping to the foreground, is fear of retaliation if one is to resist the administrative directives. Statements are made about low morale.

I might add, hence the impulse to collective action, which is how unions arose in the first place, as a bulwark against administrative failure to protect worker interests, and in fact administrative tendency to run rough shod over worker interests, whether we are talking about factory workers or incipient professionals, such as teachers. Ironic it is that the alleged nemesis of most bosses, the union, has historically in effect been of their own creation.

In a rational world, some level of negotiation could occur that would cooperatively identify those changes most crucial to the mutual task at hand, and those practices that should be left behind, because minimally productive. Seldom are tasks deleted formally. More likely they are left behind or given short shrift in practice anyway because the practitioner simply can’t get to it, and so are left vulnerable to criticism by supervisors for required tasks not completed. And so the practitioner digs more deeply into her cave, complains to receptive colleagues, and then peers out, even vocalizes, when some sort of collective action seems in the wind.

Nearly simultaneous with the union meeting and survey was a department chair meeting at which a creative if difficult to implement initiative to provide extra help to struggling students was floated. The idea was to use an period out of the regular school day, similar to but separate from our existing advisory time, in which students with D’s or F’s primarily in science and math would go to their respective science and math teachers for extra help, rather than go to their regular advisory, which would become a study hall.

The intent was laudable – that is, to give students whose families lacked the ability to pick them up from after school tutorials, the opportunity for additional help during the school day. Moreover, the administration had been hosting a forum for a couple of months in which the format was discussed, so there was no secret, if still confusion, about the idea. The administration had also sought departmental input, via members at the forum.

Though I was not in attendance at the department chair meeting, I heard assorted accounts, which came down to skepticism about the help time mechanism and its numerous practical problems, and anger at the administration for formatting yet another change that would inevitably tax teachers’ already stretched energies to implement, this upon the heels of having been forced into time commitments twice a week to track and interpret classroom data. The principal, used to more muted criticism, seemed taken aback by the unaccustomed overt challenge to his stewardship, which by accounts was vehement and came from various quarters.

Full disclosure. We counselors about this time have been urged by the principal to promote and carry out a help session for parents to fill out their seniors’ FAFSA’s (Federal Financial Aid application), another new initiative, good enough in its own right, but which we initially were told would be no big deal. Several meetings later, the commitment has jumped from perhaps four hours apiece, the day of the event, to one or two trainings as well, and increased responsibilities and planning since the sponsoring outside organization seems to have overstated its ability to provide the entire superstructure of the program. So I, and my fellow counselors, are sensitive to the teachers’ reactions, for our own separate, but similar reasons.

In both cases, an arguably reasonable idea runs up against staff energies that are already stretched tautly by other incremental changes, often implemented by an assertive administration apparently blind to the effect on their subordinates, or at least dismissive of subordinates’ feelings of overwork and lack of power.

The lessons in these events are familiar ones. “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him” (John, Viscount Morley, On Compromise 1874 as replicated in the Ben Shahn poster). At some point people rebel, or at least vocally rebel and not always prettily, when they are stretched beyond what they perceive as reasonable limits. The lament is all the more acute because the change is done without input. Bureaucracies are poor at allowing instructive or discordant information from flowing upward, and then, when it does happen, usually fail to let such information inform decisions, even when the resulting directives and the proferred input have concordant themes at their respective core. When resources become scarce, as has happened in the current economic downturn, the stresses in these systems become more acute, and some breakdown in business as usual occurs. Administration and staff waste energy at odds with one another, when in the big picture both are committed to the betterment of the education kids are provided. The communication and mutual respect that might short circuit a significant number of these problems do not happen, because of ingrained and dysfunctional bureaucratic patterns, which stem from the hierarchical need to control and the perhaps unconscious assumption that subordinate point of view when articulated is an attack on the citadel.

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School Bureaucracy: More Tales from the Trenches, Some Retrenchment

Posted on November 20, 2011 by schooldog

Last week I posted a tale in which rigid administrative decisions conflicted with what seemed to be a more flexible idea to give more students a chance to make up credits they had previously failed, and so have a better chance to graduate on time. You may want to peruse the previous post for background to what follows. (11/11/11 School Bureaucracy: More Tales from the Trenches)

Though I stand by those previous arguments in principle, I have to confess that my enthusiasm for the occasional kid who would make good use of the additional opportunity to retrieve credits turned out to be pointless. In fact, all (yes, I said all) fifty of the kids enrolled in the credit retrieval program are behind the necessary pace to finish not two, but only one class before the end of the semester! Egad.

This development provides both a chuckle at my apparently quixotic, earlier advocacy and a testament to the immaturity of the students who nonetheless insist they will still graduate in June. Apparently I am arguing for systems in an ideal world rather than the one I inhabit. For these current kids, apparently the lockstep bureaucratic method is quite sufficient. Ouch.

In fact, the counter to my argument last week is that the pathos of kids who can’t seem to get it together to pass classes is best met by a structured school that provides the fiber, and teaches the fiber, that students lack in their own lives and personality. From this point of view, well meaning critics such as moi, by arguing for some flexibility, undermine the very structure that the kids need. Ambiguity is the enemy, structure is the friend. The ability of a military regimen to mature wayward youth comes to mind, frequently, to be honest.

I am also reminded of lessons from other stories that an attempt to change one system is so difficult because the one system intersects with other systems which have already established an interlocking stasis. So change in one system either requires changes in other systems or the changed system is forced to revert to the earlier order. Thus it is not enough just to limit the size of the school unit, or to reform the bureaucracy, or to reformulate curriculum, but also something profound in the culture in which we raise our kids also must be addressed. Not to mention other dimensions, such as rethinking teacher and principal training, etc.

Despite this comeuppance at the hands of my students who lag behind in their progress toward their credit retrieval, I perseverate in my insistence that flexibility has to accompany structure. Another example: In the rush to get kids signed up for the credit retrieval classes, one girl, call her Yvonne, signed up for an English class at a counselor’s direction. A subsequent and more thorough evaluation of the sequence in which she would most efficiently make up classes suggested she take a different class, a biology class, so I attempted to make the case for a change in class assignment with the powers that be, the intern and the newly minted assistant principal, both good folks, if I haven’t made that clear before. But newness seeks structure, and in this specific case the principal reinforced it. I was told to change the class would set a bad precedent, it would cost money to make the change, and there was fear she wouldn’t be able to finish the class in time, though she still has three months to finish even the original English class.

Though arguably the girl was an innocent in the situation, and though I did catch a bit of blame in my overworked position that I should have seen down the road and made sure she was properly guided (I had not been the one to give the original release), my entreaties were swept aside by the juggernaut of inflexible structure. No, was the answer, she stays with the English class. A school that remains rigid in this manner may be good, because structure has a role for sure, but structure without flexibility and good judgment, particularly when an individual kid’s situation is being scrutinized, will never be more than a clean, well lighted place.

Meanwhile, I am in the familiar bureaucratic position of having to support a decision that could have been made better by adjusting to the complex of realities in a more nuanced fashion, and am visited with an echo of many such small battles, successful ones here and there, but more often battles with frustrating results.

Still, it’s hard to shut up and accept my place in life. I throw my thoughts out there into the marketplace of ideas, in hopes they will echo true with other folks’ experience. No doubt I should thank my circumstances. At least they give me something to write about.

Numerous commentators lament the scarcity of prime graduates of our universities going into teaching. How well will such Type A’s, educated into intellectual privilege, fit into the kind of hierarchical decision making just described? Not well, I tell you. Not for long, I tell you.

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Post script, a bit later. Though I made no headway in Yvonne’s case and with the credit retrieval program in general, it turns out the administrative intern who has been managing it was listening to the outlines of my assorted arguments. Without my prompting, he recognized that the program was set for 80% to be passing, and began to wonder why the quizzes and tests were set at that bar, when 60% is passing in a normal class. The higher bar partly explained why the kids were lagging in their progress, which also concerned him. He lobbied the principal and district director of the program to rethink the passing mark. In the end, if the student proved to have difficulty with a particular section, though had given effort, and after a couple of tries at the quiz ending that section, the instructor was given the authority to lower the standard on a case by case basis, particularly for kids with reading problems, or who otherwise struggled in school. Meet the kids where they are at, bring them along from there – that’s good stewardship, good teaching.

Then the administrative intern starred again. For the second semester version of our credit retrieval program, I urged that we open the credit retrieval doors as widely as we needed to let in all students who roused themselves enough to pay their fee by the deadline. On one hand, if we limited enrollment as we did first semester, some seniors who needed to retrieve credits might lose the opportunity. Further, if underclass men and women had to wait until senior year to retrieve credits, we would be building a bubble of need that would be worse than the need this year. Admin intern goes to the principal, who bought the argument from him that he wouldn’t buy from me (maybe he’d had time to think about it?), and the doors have been opened to all comers. Thank you for listening, admin intern and principal alike.

I fight a flip and cynical urge to say that the listening behavior of the administrative intern disqualifies him from being an administrator – there, I said it – and of course in practice there are multiple examples of administrators listening in the give and take around working with kids. But there is precious little evidence in what I have experienced where significant alterations are made in contemplated plans based on subordinate input. More normally, the input is simply not invited before the implementation of the new idea. No matter that the initiative often involves processes and knowledge about students that teachers and line staff are more intimate with than building or district administrators.

You may feel I am cataloging what amounts to small things, and by themselves these are small things. But remember that day after day of variations on similar small time themes either can transform the spirit into death by a thousand cuts, or buoy workaday energies as the administrative intern’s action and a more flexible credit retrieval plan did for me.

 

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School Bureaucracy: More Tales From the Trenches

Posted on November 12, 2011 by schooldog

Summary: A simple tale of a credit retrieval plan provides a thematic setting for structure versus flexibility in school decision making.

Kids fail classes mostly because they simply do not do the work, and thereby reveal the whole panoply of theirs and the culture’s dysfunction – the dearth of accountability for our kids, the breakdown of authority, and the obsession with the gadgets of technology, as well as chronic adolescent traits such as the transfer of allegiance from parent to peer, the illusion that they are now adult and can make their own decisions, and so forth.

As a result, high schools, in order to graduate kids, are inevitably in the business of credit retrieval. In our school, that means if a kid fails an academic class required for graduation, we do not allow them to make it up within the school day, but they (or their family, more to the point) have to pay to make it up in an online program we run. OK so far. Though it is difficult sometimes not to be punitive in our attitude toward the kids who fail, because the failure is usually so unnecessary, thoughts of “I told you so” burble up from time to time. Mea culpa.

In the last school year the online program we and our school district used was poorly designed, too easy, and our delivery system lacked appropriate boundaries. Deadlines were given, but then not enforced, usually in the face of pressure to get laggard kids graduated on time, in June.

From our district HQ emerges an individual with the title of “Director” (a bunch of “directors” at the head shed), someone new to me. He sets out to reform the district credit retrieval program along corrective lines implicit in the failures of the program last year.

But he appears to do so with a heavy hand, and it is not clear on whose authority he operates, other than his own which, as a middle manager on the district level, he in practice would not have the heft of a high school principal.

Yet we seem to jump to his tune, in significant part because the relatively new vice principal in charge of our credit retrieval program is not in a position to challenge his directive, and our principal, who could do so if he chose, apparently wishes to leave the decision making in the vice principal’s hands. That much is fair enough, and understandable.

The upshot is that students enrolled in the program are given a rigid timeline in which to finish a course – that is, by the end of the semester – and will not be allowed to start a course if there is not ample time to finish it by that deadline. The argument is that last year we were too loosey goosey about deadlines, and so kids, being kids without a limit, let their course involvement lag and took overlong to complete their courses, in the meantime holding down one of a limited number of slots that another student might have used. Hence, the deadline. Makes sense.

Here I ride in with another argument predicated on the ultimate goal – graduation. Suppose student John Doe completes a course by Christmas vacation, and has approximately a month before the end of the semester at the end of January, and the beginning of the next, which by the rules will be the first opportunity to begin a second course. Meanwhile, he has lost a month in which he could have made progress on that course, thereby accelerating his run at graduation, and/or clearing up room for another student to take his slot.  By making the current decision, we are using existing space inefficiently, and thereby lowering both our graduation rates, and individual student opportunity to graduate, both modestly but measurably.

In effect, we are using rule making to substitute for sound judgment. I argued, but lost, that John Doe’s track record should determine whether or not he can start a second class before the end of the semester. If he shows due diligence in completing his first class, then he has demonstrated the likelihood that he will do so with the second class, and should be given the opportunity to start a second class, continue it past the January 27 deadline in order to make the run at graduation. If not, and has used his first opportunity sloppily, then he has to wait until the second semester to begin another class, or even give up his slot to another student if he has been particularly laggard.

The administrators in the situation worry that if a student doesn’t complete a course, a parent will want money back, and so find more expedient to use a clear deadline to do the talking. What they forget is that parents of failing students will sometimes blame the school, regardless, and most certainly will blame the school if their student does not graduate on time, so we get burned either way.

We essentially substitute a rigid rule for good judgment, which is one of the founding components of bureaucratic dysfunction. In creating more rigid structure to correct a lackadaisical system, a correct move, the powers that be have lurched in the contrary direction and promoted a new problem in place of the old. The baby is thrown out with the bath water.

There is more. In making my contrary case, I think I was listened to, even made a bit of headway, temporarily, in my advocacy for the few students who will not graduate on time as a result of this new process. But in the end there was little chance of impact, in retrospect, because the ducks were already aligned as I described earlier.

The principal, though sensitive to graduation rates, was not going to buck the more conservative decision making of his novice lieutenant who is not yet experienced enough to counter directives from above her in the hierarchy.

Moreover, decisions were made already up the line prior to my becoming aware of them. Though these prior decisions probably had some useful principal input, they were typical of decisions that don’t acknowledge the existence, let alone the value, of more grass roots input such as mine. God forbid that a lowly counselor who works with credit retrieval more than the district administrator or the building level administrator combined should be consulted. I guarantee a substantial number of teachers would nod their heads in recognition of this sentiment as applied in their own immediate sphere of expertise.

To be continued, with a surprising twist!

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School Bureaucracy: Hierarchy vs. Collegiality

Posted on November 4, 2011 by schooldog

Summary: Further thoughts on hierarchical versus collegial styles in school administration.

Having had time to reflect on my post of 10/10/11, School Bureaucracy: A Comparison of Superintendent Styles, a couple more remarks occur to me.

Briefly, in an article in the Atlantic, Joel Klein, past Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, essentially blamed the modest headway he managed in reforming City schools on the local teachers’ union and the hidebound contract system that he saw as strangling progress. He did seem to me to characterize himself as the white hat, the gunslinger striding into town to do battle with the bad guys. And the hero became embittered by his inability to right the wrongs to his satisfaction, so ended up pointing fingers in the pages of the Atlantic.

Klein is a type A personality, a hard charging, intelligent guy, who seemed to expect to change the system by sheer force of his personality, intellect, and grasp of the issues, all of which I suspect are formidable. He struck me as a top down type of guy, as well, and I suspect he strengthened resistance to change by his hierarchical style rather than promoted the change he sought.

Furthermore, would young, reform minded teachers, nascent professionals, long remain in a school system in which the top dog directed rather dialogued, and seemed in ways large and small to feel he knew best, and seemed not to acknowledge that valuable contributions might stimulate the organization from below? Would such a school leader attract the best and the brightest that many reformers acknowledge we must lure into teaching?

Long story short, in my experience it is true over time that the style of the leader of a hierarchy infects the hierarchy at all levels. If the leader is prone to fiat, then the message eventually into the capillaries of the organization is to follow orders. Wait for directive, take not initiative.

Probably I was a bit too gee whiz in praising Klein’s counterpart in Montgomery County, Maryland, Jerry Weast, in my earlier post on Klein, but his public persona by comparison to Klein still seems a breath of fresh air from my place in the ranks.

Do we not strive to encourage our teachers to be professionals in the manner of doctors and lawyers? In fact, to think, take initiative, to be partners in change, in essence, to profess?

If one accepts these premises, then we must look to flattening our school structure, and nurture the growth of teacher level input into decision making, even in large school districts, maybe particularly in large school districts, because in hardened hierarchical structures creativity and energy are both casualties. This ossifiosis, if I may coin a term, extends to students as well, for in important ways their connection to the school organization and their experience within it echoes the institutional byways that tie the adults together.

Hierarchy is the mode of the industrial era, and may be suited marginally to turning out technically proficient readers, writers, and mathematicians. But it’s a big stretch to argue that hierarchy will turn out the critical and independent thinkers so important to success in the dawning world economy.

Thus we do not need the Joel Kleins of the world to apply. Don’t get me wrong, we need gunslingers – that is, administrators who will kick butt. There has also to be discipline in the ranks. Decisions must be made. But there is a balance between structure and the cultivation of energy within staff, and those who seem his type don’t seem to understand the distinction.

Talk all we will of merit pay, and more pay, but in the long run elite teacher candidates will not flock to their own intellectual and professional death.

I am not as close as I would like to the training of principals, let alone superintendents, to know if and how they are trained along the lines of these thoughts. From what I experience I would say they are too often trained to control, much as a teacher loses face if she is unable to control an unruly class of kids. They are too little trained in the benefits and byways of collegiality, and in the concept that one gains control sometimes by giving up control.

Principals in particular these days may live in fear of ouster, having been identified as key individuals in school change, and so may be targeted for ouster if their school fails to perform. When we fear, we strive to control, and in controlling, we sometimes act against our better interests. In this case, that control reinforces underperforming institutional habits. Thus do individual school authorities act in dysfunctional self reinforcing ways that more cooperative conscious behavior could correct — again, a tragedy of the commons.

It is difficult to fathom, frankly, in what circumstances teacher types would insurrect and establish new norms from below, though I hold out hope that teacher professional growth might stimulate the development of collegial norms. Best though to look to principal and superintendent training, and to awareness in school boards who hire, in order to invent collegial structures over time that will welcome more assertive teachers, themselves trained to expect, even demand, these new cooperative constructs in our schools.

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School Bureaucracy and Bob Marley: Redemption Song

Posted on October 26, 2011 by schooldog

I ride to work this morning. I think about bureaucratic rigidities, this straight jacketing of human responses, the numerous menial indignities and disrespect integral to daily life in schools, not the insults of person to person, but the anonymous slings and arrows that wear one down to uninspired obedience. One can succumb, as I’ve suggested, live one’s life, bring as much light and life to one’s immediate circumstances, but have no spark in any wider school realm but a defeated passivity, the prisoner within showing himself only with trusted colleagues or friends behind close doors to whom he says what he really thinks. Or one can choose to contend with, however in a socially and organizationally appropriate way, the many mini assaults on good practice that occur I think more frequently than we denizens in our benumbed state recognize.

There is danger in the latter course, because progress along it is halting, and one runs risk of being viewed as a negative element. One must respect others one wrestles with, because mostly they are not an enemy, but other prisoners in the bureaucracy that are truly doing the best they can. One has to husband one’s energies, and pick one’s battles, which is hard, because it means a heightened vigilance, and therefore an emotional exposure to mistakes in the practice of the hierarchy that one has to choose to ignore in favor of battle on another issue, another day. It is difficult to straddle reality in this middle way, and the danger is to fall again into obedience, or on the other hand into a strident aggression that will either be repulsed by bureaucratic defenses, by a supervisor, or perhaps one’s own recognition that he or she cannot survive emotionally in such a difficult setting.

As I say, I ride to work this morning. The great Bob Marley, who grows on me more every year, is on the radio with “Redemption Song”:

“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, None but ourselves can free our minds.”

Listen to the song next you have a chance, those of you who labor in schools — teachers, counselors, administrators, secretaries, all. If you  experienced what I have described above with frequency in your school, if you have struggled to maintain your spirit and to do your darnedest to do well by the kids you work with, only to do so as a series of mini battles, then listen to Marley’s words.

Administrators are not the enemy. Though they often complain little to the rank and file of us, they are visited with burdens similar to those we face. We, all of us, work in a bureaucratic system that has a life and inertia beyond the sum of the parts. Some of this system is organizational necessity, but far too little do we live day to day in conscious recognition that the inertias of the system do not prescribe what is best for kids; good judgment of individual human beings has a better chance. It is a tragedy of the commons that many at all levels of the hierarchy recognize a higher alternative in many things we do, but lack the collective recognition that would humanize the bureaucracies we live in.

Honestly, as I write about these issues, and think about them with the frequency with which I have of late, I catch myself sticking my neck out, and experience a low grade fright, because I have been burned expressing my perspective in the past, because I know I would not be received well in certain quarters. Even though I have chosen to remain anonymous for just this reason, I experience apprehension whenever I voice a criticism that would be considered an assault on the order, because it is voiced.

Marley was a revolutionary of the mind, in lyrical and romantic fashion, and so side steps the practical consequences of freeing one’s mind and acting on one’s conclusions. Still, his words encourage me, and so I share them: “Bark, you dogs!”

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Schools and Culture: Basic Skills and the Global Economy

Posted on October 18, 2011 by schooldog

Summary: Though we may be making grudging progress on the basic skills of reading, writing, and math, a recent article by Thomas Friedman begs the question, when we will finally be proficient in those basic skills areas, will the train already have left the station – will the world economy have so outstripped the old economy that our students will be crippled by their ignorance of global opportunities and the need to be entrepreneurs even as employees in this much expanded and increasingly imaginative setting?

Despite the continuing political battles over No Child Left Behind, the well targeted criticisms about its flawed goal setting process, and assorted wringing of hands in many quarters, I would say in my little corner of the world, in a crude sort of way, the targets and mandates of the Bush era act have bred improvement. In many quarters, though most schools are poised to be deemed failed because they haven’t met Annual Yearly Progress, test scores have none the less improved, just not as far as the NCLB mandated. By 2014, all students were to have been deemed proficient. Well, give me a break. We’re dealing with reality here.

In my school, through workmanlike if hierarchical leadership and intelligent acquiescence by teachers, we reached AYP in reading for all groups – low income, special education, the works. Good stuff.

Shortly after these results were announced, I read an article by Thomas Friedman in the Seattle Times (10/4/2011), he of the “flat” world thesis, which recognizes the role of technology in making the emerging global economy possible. In “How did the robot end up with my job?”, Friedman again turns his eye on the hyper connectivity of the new market place, particularly as it affects employees and aspirants to work.

He cites a website, freelancer.com, through which almost three million people world wide shop their wares, a large portion intellectual services, a good percentage offered by “hungry” Ph.D.’s

Increasingly in the new marketplace, “more products are designed everywhere, made everywhere, and sold everywhere” for, of course, everyone.

Nationally identified corporations are morphing into multinationals whose employees are from many countries, whose markets are in many countries, and whose vision and corporate identity have broadened to be global. And whose allegiance is ceasing to be to the country of origin, by the way. The applicant in India may be equally competent and significantly cheaper than his American counterpart. And I’m talking white collar, not only blue collar.

So suddenly I am back in my little enclave in the Pacific Northwest, one school district, one school successful in one basic way, and I experience a kind of walking nightmare for some of my students. While we focus so heavily, as we are motivated to do, on bringing all students up to a basic standard, the world around them, and particularly the economic world, is changing by such geometric progressions as to be unrecognizable from their provincial point of view, despite the relative global sophistication of our local economy. While they are learning to read and write and do math more proficiently, the world economy has moved several orders of magnitude and vision beyond those simple basic skills, and it is not clear that our students at all are being prepared for the fast changing entrepreneurial economy, and in fact world culture that is emerging. Will they emerge from the time capsule that is our school culture into a world that has passed them by?

Of course, many kids are well beyond basic skills, both in our school and elsewhere, and have parents and other adult influences that will mediate their successful entry into the global economy. But the basic skills movement has always been about those left behind, to their individual detriment and that of our economy, and has been an effort to raise those on the lower rungs economically to the level where they are job ready. But I wonder, will they be job ready for a job that no longer exists, because basic skills alone will no longer cut it? Are we, in effect, making false promises? Are we only teaching how to crawl?

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School Bureaucracy: A Comparison of Superintendent Styles

Posted on October 10, 2011 by schooldog

I recommend to you an article in the recent June Atlantic magazine written by Joel Klein, former Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, about his efforts to reform the school system (“Scenes From the Class Struggle”). Mr. Klein ably catalogs the ills of the system as he found it. However, it seems to me the article is also about Mr. Klein himself, in ways both subtle and overt. His prosecutorial style and history, to me clearly leitmotifs of his article, I think have affected his grasp of some critical issues in the schoolhouse, as well as illuminates, without his meaning to, useful clues to the ways in which he fell short in his reform goals, despite obvious passion and commitment.

One can admire the energy of the man, and his intelligence, and still recognize that his need to impel others to do what he says, and recognize his veracity, is in fact also an Achilles heel. Orders without input and overt challenges that put teacher backs against the wall inevitably reinforce resistance, are taken as disrespect, and elicit fear, which is what I suspect  happened; Mr. Klein’s prosecutorial style reinforced the dysfunctional dynamics of the New York school hierarchy he wished to reform.

Hierarchies are used to orders from on high, but are also like hardened bomb shelters — the greater the threat the more hardened the protection. Thus, with the unsubtle ways in which he attempted to move the district from the top, in effect he nurtured his own opposition. He reinforced the classic formulation in which teachers are widgets rather than the professionals that we increasingly recognize we must empower. “Dang!” He must have often said to himself, “if only they would just listen to me!”

While he (probably correctly) laments the protections for teachers that have led to chronic abuses of their negotiated power, and uses such stories as an item in his prosecution of teacher union intransience, I hear an additional note. I am reminded of subsistence farmers in the Amazon, whom agricultural experts try to get to shift from “slash and burn” practices and adopt techniques less destructive of rain forest habitat. If one is operating close to a margin of survival, it takes great trust in the agricultural agent to make the leap of faith and trust the new technology. So with teachers, many of whom will understand that change is needed, but are equally skeptical that they should trust in a Mr. Klein whose combativeness they fear will not replace what they have with something better for themselves. Klein argues that it is about the kids, not the teachers, but here he lends a deaf ear to the real needs and fears of the teachers as well.

Down south in Montgomery County, Maryland appears to be a different story.

As it happened I also about the same time read of a counterpoint figure to Klein in the September/October 2011 issue of the Harvard Education Letter (“Leading a System Where Everyone Gains”, by David McKay Wilson.) Jerry Weast is the retiring superintendent of the Montgomery County (Md.) Schools, by many measures a successful leader of a county wide school district that serves a population of one million residents. While no doubt there are differences of significance with New York, it is still a large district with a student population that is 67% kids of color, with a substantial low income sector. Weast’s style is much more collaborative and “win-win” than Klein’s confrontational approach. Arguably, the former has gained the better traction.

While Klein’s efforts seem to have lead to some improvements, Weast’s tenure has produced more dramatic results. According to the Education Letter, his district’s graduation rate, 86%, was the highest among the nation’s 50 largest school districts for the third year in a row, the district boasts an average SAT score 150 points higher than the state average, and offers fully thirty-six different Advanced Placement classes, this in a population where 48,000 kids are from families below the poverty line. Interesting. How were such apparently impressive results accomplished?

For one example, Weast recognized that he inherited a dual school system, one for white and affluent students, and another for low income and primarily students of color. Here he demonstrated himself to be a more astute politician than Joel Klein. Rather than rush headlong into the teeth of resistance, he managed to reassure the affluent souls that they would not lose in the changes he intended to make. In the process he engaged the better nature of the affluent and elicited their support in upgrading the schooling quality of the economically challenged.

While Joel Klein points the finger at the political coalitions that stymied some of his sought after reforms, Weast seems to have understood the legitimate concerns of those who might have resisted his efforts, enlisted their support, and ultimately their trust. He would have been one heck of an agricultural outreach worker.

Weast has been equally if not more so successful in his dealings with teachers and their union. As a member of a teachers’ union that has its share of distrust of district superintendents, my jaw drops as I read his response to a Harvard Graduation Letter question:

“We’ve found that if you don’t play the ABC game – accuse, blame and criticize – you can unleash tremendous power and potential in your employees. Our teachers built not only a good system but……a good culture that worked for them and our students.”

Mr. Klein, good prosecutor that he is, clearly blames teachers and their union for his uphill battle in New York City. It is difficult to imagine him arriving at such a statement and such a gracious sharing of the glory as does Weast with his teachers.

In fact, Mr. Weast seems to have engaged teachers as partners in his efforts to change the schools. Here he goes again:

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Teaching/Learning Lexicon: “Education” as Cultural Artifact

Posted on October 1, 2011 by schooldog

Today I find myself meditating on the word “education”. In some ways I avoid a more comprehensive set of topics that I will get around to, I suppose. But also a workshop earlier today and an article read this evening have helped burble up some musings I have flirted with before.

“Education.” The word and the concept have taken on a bland connotation in my mind, but I suspect I am far from alone; I argue the word in contemporary America dulls the mind. I am reminded of vapid, superficial thinking that leads nowhere but to the fulfillment of the author’s need to publish, or to vent some complaint, without – and this is the key – producing much that is creative and exciting. What should be a stimulating, energizing word that refers to a fundamental human activity, has become its opposite.

“To be educated” is a phrase with more pop, complexity, and which compels desire, but the simple word education in the popular mind lacks pizzazz. In education where is the exalted language of service and social change that impels the environmental movement, the urge to legal action on behalf of the poor and those on death row, the saving of a life on the operating table, or the creation of urban designs?

Is this language, arguably a “branding” in contemporary market speak, part of the reason why Type A college graduates do not flock to its service, or money to teacher salaries, or prestige to the ranks of practitioners? What should be a purview as wide as all experience and as deep as the soul feels on the tongue as dull as the classic monotone lecture. I sat today in a workshop about some quite legitimate teaching principles, simple and obvious stuff yet worth review because of their importance, yet paradoxically I found myself wandering off. My daily work with kids is much more compelling, exciting, stimulating and just plain fun than the words delivered to the workshop in well meaning tones. Have we adopted a language in education that invites torpor?

A useful article in the Pacific Magazine of the Seattle Times by Linda Shaw, the Times education writer, “Teachers as Targets”, notes that early teachers in public school were women who were hired first because they would work for significantly less than men and were, moreover, traditionally those who transmit the culture to children, the early purpose of the public school. Of course transmitting the culture is a necessary function, but one deeply conservative in its timber, and the antithesis of the iconoclastic culture we all encounter contemporarily – all of us, not just children. How much then has education remained mired in unconscious institutional memory of that earlier purpose, and so takes a back seat to the much more compelling excitement of 21st century culture? Just as institutions perpetuate the racism of periods not so far behind us, perhaps also our schools transmit older, out of date, awkward patterns from bygone times when their first purpose was to transmit culture, and did not anticipate the need as today to prepare for a future where change will be the norm.

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Teaching/Learning Lexicon: “Explain” and “Guide”

Posted on September 23, 2011 by schooldog

Summary: This post extends the “Lexicon” of teaching and learning introduced 8/23/11. It may be useful to review that post before diving into what follows…..

Here be the introductory paragraph from the 8/23/11 post, which sets the groundwork for this “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.”

The first post of the lexicon explored the derivations of “teach” and of “excite”. The current one delves into “explain” and “guide”. Together I hope the accumulated weavings mirror the psychic interactions between teacher and student.

Gotta say, though, sometimes these musings seem interesting, and sometimes garbage, and sometimes I don’t know what to think about them. Yet, since this is my blog, here they are.

EXPLAIN – From Latin, ex (out of) + planus – level, flat, deriving from flatness, two dimensionality. To render flat or two dimensional “out of” many dimensions; to translate many dimensions into a “plain” accessible to the student. Thus the first step on a journey through many dimensions, or a simplified introduction to a more rich depth. The rendering of a frontier recognizable to the student, from which connections may be bridged into a deeper and more complex understanding of reality. One who explains is a elucidator of scenery, a simplifier temporarily, and by that a shower of the way to deeper meaning, a guide who lays the groundwork for more demanding voyages into multiple dimensions.

GUIDE – from roots akin to the Old English witan, meaning to look after, and a slight variation of the same word, which means to know. A knowledgeable protector, a looker after another’s best interests, which in turn implies a knowledge of surroundings, a knowledge of the one being guided, and a knowledge of the likely interface between the surroundings and the guided. To look after is to take care of, to comfort, and hence in this first instance to insist upon well being, rather than upon the movement from one place to another that we more commonly associate with the word “guide.” A guide is a protector.

Life is process and process implies movement, whether literally or figuratively, and so in the second instance a guide must oversee the travel of his charge. He must encourage the change that he knows must come, and introduce his charge to where he must go in the process of growing; well being implies change. An individual does not always know which way to turn, and so trusts in the knowledge of his guide to help define action for him.

The guide will introduce a path, yet ultimately it will be a route along which the student leads himself. A guide does not so much will a particular direction, but provides a trusted framework and an overture in which others are encouraged to explore, and creates an environment toward which others will react and relate in their own unique ways. Thus a guide is a teacher, and vice versa.

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