schooldog

A follow up to the recent “Meditation”:

Pronouncements from higher levels – district, state, feds – are broad reaching and apply across large numbers of schools and therefore scenarios, and tend to treat them as the same when in fact they are as unique as the individuals who people them and the histories that have formed thousands of different communities. And then the pronouncements arrive from somewhere in the clouds, as it were, without any clear origin, without rationale, but with a remote finality that leaves school people with little recourse but to bend to the dictate. To challenge, or even ask questions, could take valuable time that is urgently needed in the day to day work. If there is any sameness to schools across the land, it is this subjugation to a disembodied remote control.

A couple of minor examples, from recent days:

For graduation in our state a couple of semesters are required of what we call Occupational Education, which basically refers to semi-direct vocational training in business classes, hands on shop classes such as auto tech, and home and family classes. For some years our principal, quite reasonably, had authority to allow also a special waiver of the Occupational Education requirement in isolated circumstances, such as approval for a student intending to be a doctor to use chemistry for occupational education, or a future business person to use AP Economics for the same purpose. With the waiver, the principal was in effect giving credit in Occupational Ed for those subject areas key to future employment, for students who would otherwise have difficulty fitting the regular Occ Ed classes into their schedule. Spirit of the law, it would seem to me.

Slam bang. No more, says someone, I at least do not know who, some auditor I believe. Turns out only “vocationally certified” teachers can teach classes that qualify as Occ Ed, so the chemistry and the AP Econ teacher would have to become certified as a voc teacher in order for students to use their classes for Occupational Education. So far, no one has shown interest in doing so. The rule may have originated to protect someone’s vocational fiefdom, rightly or wrongly, but the point is, who knows? The discretionary flexibility our principal once had, to use good judgment in a few situations, has come a cropper to state rules originating somewhere. Small deal, you say. I say, only small unless replicated many times. Then the principal, the teacher, the staff learn that initiative and good judgment are not valued; we await orders. Given our charge from the state and the feds to improve test scores, it is a bit like having the responsibility without having authority, as though the decisions are too important to trust in our hands.

Another example, admittedly a bit abstruse. For years we have been able to use an online program marketed by Brigham Young University for credit retrieval in cases (the many) where students have failed classes. Not too easy, not too hard, but well organized and responsive, it filled a niche that counselors and parents have found necessary. We have learned recently the state will no longer sanction the use of this particular program, and has set down guidelines regarding what characteristics the state will honor in any alternatives.

The merits of the decision are not the issue, though I would certainly ask some questions and provide my perspective, but troubling is the lack of any coherent process that I can see, as a worker in the schools, that at all recognizes that school people might have a perspective worth incorporating in a decision that affects all students at a time when high school graduation rates are in danger. Therefore I can have little confidence in the decision, and wonder why the hell it was made in such a peremptory fashion. There may in fact be a rationale that I would honor, but I don’t know what it is, nor who so concluded, nor can I have faith that considerations I have from having worked directly with real students been included. My principal, and a district level administrator I contacted, knew nothing of the decision (which arrived in the building via our registrar). To date, I have received no official notification, certainly no explanation, as a person who would authorize the use of the banished program, and would have continued blithely along but for the unofficial communication from a co-worker.

So does my judgment matter? I guess not. Should I bother to think and to take initiative? I don’t know. I could be a mule, I suppose, and plod along waiting for someone to change my path. I could get angry, rebel, take action, and sooner or later incur displeasure that endangers my job. Or I could escape to some other profession. How many ex teachers do you know?

Of course the choices are not so stark. But scratch a school professional, and not far below the surface are these sentiments. Is this what we want in those who educate our kids? Professional eunuchs? OK, OK, so I got carried away.

Let’s start with assumptions.

Bureaucracies need to measure in order to report. Reports are often quantified. Test scores, in particular. No Child Left Behind does exactly that. Scores on previous years divide real students into boxes. Passed this test. Did not pass that test. Did not pass that test narrowly. Did not pass that test by a large margin. The narrowly box gets one kind of class. The large margin box gets another kind of class. Each box school is given a number goal to reach, called annual yearly progress (isn’t “annual yearly” redundant?), based upon its scores in previous years. Land in the wrong box for one year, then two, and the consequences mount. Is it any wonder that admin types have to focus on numbers?

Given these realities, it isn’t hard to imagine how real people, and the accumulation of the daily interactions between students, teachers, and administrators get lost behind the veil of numbers. Yet it is the myriad of these interactions that determine whether change really does happen, whether kids learn what we know they need to learn, and whether kids really care or not.

So a second assumption. For want of a better metaphor, there is a curvilinear quality, an Alice in Wonderland reality of learning that defies the quantification of boxes and of pedestrian statistical analysis. Though we would infer that a kid who likes a teacher and an administrator who deals with teachers as professional colleagues will affect the bottom line quantification, it would be difficult to trace the relationship in numbers, short perhaps of a complex calculus.

Computer programmers, do they not, use mathematics to create animated visual images? Several dimensions beyond may be a calculus capable of imaging the ground level realities of learning and of change.

But for now we have linear boxes and curvilinear realities, and the twain do not meet on simple ground. We focus on the former to the detriment of navigating the latter. While our schools seem to be progressing somewhat in the boxes, the question remains whether or not we are progressing satisfactorily on more fundamental levels, albeit those defiant of measurement. Are students more focused, are teachers and prospective entrants excited about what they are engaged in? Are teachers and administrators broadly collaborative? I suspect in most schools the answer is not really, or at least far from the ideal. Yet these are the engines that must engage if we are truly to become our own masters, and achieve this elusive goal of sustainable educational progress. To be continued.

So I just shot my mouth off, intemperately, manifesto like (blog 2/23/11 “School Bureaucracy – Is This a Manifesto?”), and am now suffering a bit of seller’s remorse. A reader might think from my tone that I have labored in gaol for lo these many years, subsisting on bread and water, and only occasionally been exposed to the sweet tones of supervisor conversation. The reader might also wonder rightly if there be something wrong with one who complains in such an uncompromising tone, yet remains in a setting where he is psychically whipped every day of his working life. A professional victim, you say.

Well, yeah, it isn’t that bad. Fundamentally, there are the kids, still fresh and enjoyable to work with, whose positive futures I can see, though they themselves may not perceive yet so well. Then my immediate colleagues in my department with whom I share an atmosphere of trust, friendship, conspiracy sometimes, and often honest exchange. Our broader teaching staff gives a strong degree of effort and many bring strong intelligence to their work; their insight and collaboration help me greatly in my own specialized work. Finally the admin types both in my building and beyond with whom I have both continual and intermittent contact, often likeable sorts, most of whom harbor a professional concern for kids and their role in educating them, and who have personally been helpful to me when I’ve needed it. The human element keeps me in the game. As a rule, individuals are not the culprit, and the bed is not all of thorns.

But the concerns of the “Manifesto” to which I just referred crystallize a theme of bureaucratic stupefaction that laces through all of our professional lives, admin and staff alike, and leaves us all at times feeling burned and our professional energies squelched. The upshot is that we focus on the routine in our professional lives, and the part of us that might together quest for a better way of doing things lies dormant, awaiting the next order from somewhere, within intellectually encrusted boxes. Tightly focused on day to day issues, and day to day kids, professionalism does come to play, but the broader feeling and activity of a professional identity neither rises strongly from individuals, nor is it encouraged by the culture nearly to the degree to which professional identity might be expected to have impact.

Interestingly, in our school, as the pressure mounts to bring up test scores, it seems to me there has been a shift to reliance on teaching staff to create interventions that will be effective with individual kids. Not a perfect shift to full reliance, but early returns seem encouraging. At least, it is a directive that broadly seems to make sense to teaching staff, despite the fact that the directive occurred without consultation.

These comments will be familiar to teachers, counselors, even administrators wherever they work.  We sit on committees, only to conclude we are either to rubber stamp already concluded decisions, or we deliberate to a consensus only our time to be wasted by a higher level, different decision. Or the consensus laboriously reached seems never to be implemented.

We encounter decisions from the level above our own that conflict with or detract from good practice on our own level.  Even when the new initiative is a reasonable one, we know that modest input to the decision would have resulted in a better solution.

More maddeningly, directives arrive from levels over our own that simply make no sense, detract from our valuable time, and even become obstacles in our work with kids.

In all of the above, anger is the first response if we still care, then at some point, further down the road, resignation in the face of steady diet of the same.

Isn’t it obvious line staff level types have something to add beyond the perspectives of higher levels? Supervisory and district level administrators have valuable perspectives, but these points of view are not fully synchronous with the different yet also crucial perspective of teachers, counselors, instructional aides, and the like. Even the best and most sympathetic administrators, for example, lose sight of the emotional and tactical realities teachers face every day.

It strikes me that the same dysfunctional dynamic occurs between building administrators and their own, district level, supervisors.

Too much of this and we already have our head down, burrowed into our compromise, which for many is to establish boundaries on our time and emotional involvement. Commitment to kids continues, but the sum of it all is that we become detached, emotionally protected from our professional surroundings, and no longer “own” them. If we care too much, we can end up feeling as though our professional energies are stuffed down our throats, as though we really do not matter in the larger view of things.

Clearly, these circumstances are shared by many workers throughout public and corporate bureaucracies. Where they occur, they hinder purpose.

In the case of schools, kids suffer; schools struggle, test scores and learning remain sluggish.

Solutions are difficult, and call for enlightened and aware management, and courage on all parts. Upper levels are not evil people; nor are they any more enamored of their ascendance than the normal (at least it is useful to assume so), but time and resources are limited, even scarce, and so often the failure to consult, to take into account important perspectives other than their own, is more to expedite process than to lord position over lower brethren and sisteren. Still, a problem, one too little acknowledged in the exhaustive discussions about schools.

Not only do the bureaucratic ways of schools smother creative ideas by the way in which they operate, but it begins to look as though the problem is even deeper, in the legal structure, or lack thereof, that governs schools, teachers, and their supervisors.

On the threshold of starting my blog, a comment on a blog flyer that my wife gave me kept itching in the back of my mind. It warned sternly against blogging about the workplace, pretty much what I have intended to do, albeit in what I like the think as a balanced, nuanced fashion.

Sometime back, I had spoken to a lawyer at our state educational association, who had issued no such warning, but did refer me to website guidance for blogging, which warned against defamatory comments, and all the obvious indiscretions that could lead to censure or legal action against the blogger. Fine enough – I truly see no villains, but primarily people of various levels doing the best they can under often trying circumstances.

But the itch at the back of mind gave me a reprieve from the moment of launch (Coward!), and I once again called the legal department with the intention of talking with the same lawyer. I ended up talking to a different lawyer, who minced no words. “First Amendment rights in the work place are pretty much gone in the current environment,” he intoned. Further, any given statement is not protected, though context would still matter and the specific facts. “Still, risky to proceed with comment about the work place.” Anything considered “disruptive” to the process of the work place could be considered grounds for action by an employer, including any claims that the authority of supervisors has been undermined.

For myself as a writer/blogger, the implication is clear. However balanced and nuanced, however understanding of all the complex vectors at work on all players, I still run significant risk of being labeled “disruptive” by a supervisor who takes exception to my conclusions.

The lawyer cited a case he is currently working, in which a teacher encountered criticism for critical comments. Initially there was no discipline, but when the teacher wandered a bit from guidelines later, the administration pounced at a pretext for getting rid of the troublemaker. This is a story familiar to all staff who have been in schools for any time, and serves a chilling effect on dissent. In fairness, the stories don’t discriminate between teachers perhaps better let go than kept, and those of value who open their mouths to the point that a supervisor considers it a challenge to authority. Nor between legitimate critique and pique based upon personality.

It doesn’t take much for this habitué of school work places to recognize that my honest attempt to elucidate a dysfunctional byway of the bureaucracy could be taken by an individual above me as insubordination. Partly because I am a political animal, partly because I prefer a decision that I disagree with to no decision at all, I have managed not to run aground to this date. To the contrary, I have at times felt higher levels have had my back. But stories to the contrary do abound, involving individuals perhaps not so cautious as I.

So. I contemplate the wisdom of writing in anonymity. In fact, that is what I have chosen to do.

Questions abound. What is the basis in law for the current court holdings? Essentially feudal, in that bosses are given absolute authority? Ownership of property, in that bosses represent in effect a landed authority, as the titular representative of the public? If so, how does that apply to a public, tax supported bureaucracy, whose legitimacy ultimately rests on the consent of the governed and of the taxpayer? Or, more to the point, an organization that exists not for the profit of investors, but for the education of kids.

And the fundamental question. Where public education reform continues to trudge an uphill battle, how can we afford to shackle the speech of arguably some of the most important actors – teachers and other line staff?

One of the more pragmatic justifications for free speech is the illumination it sheds on all manner of process. Those governing are forced to answer to the governed. Where government provides insufficient grounds for actions, government is replaced. So do the media, the opposition political party, the whistleblowers all bring light to circumstances that those in power try to hide or have ignored. Where bureaucracies become unresponsive and lack creativity, whether automobile companies, public schools, or federal or state or local government, it is often because neither external nor internal light shines sufficiently.

By extension, the legal limitations on speech of teachers become as important as the bureaucratic habit of simply not listening to what teachers have to say. The former is chilling; the latter is a habit reflecting the worker rather than professional status of teachers in the eyes of their superiors. The public is left with the comments of outsiders — the professors, the pundits, the politicians who rightly probe for change, but without the richness of teachers who most directly interface with students in the unit of the enterprise, the classroom. This is not a call for revolt, but an assertion that absolutely crucial voices are muted.

(Coming attractions: professionalism briefly discussed….. part of the reform needed in concert with more legal protections….. Compare with docs, professors. Also, “loyalty” is the binding concept for workers and bosses.)