Bridging Differences

Dear Diane,

You've caught me remembering what wasn't there. I reread A Nation at Risk, and—you are right-- it didn't claim that teachers were the enemy within. It even gave a few kudos to hard working teachers. It's interesting (to me) that I should misremember it.

So how did we get from 1983 to 2008? I think that, in some ways, the argument put forth by A Nation at Risk is part of the problem.

First. The enormity of the crisis that they perceived and the sole focus on schools as the cause and solution eased the way into teacher bashing. While the authors of A Nation at Risk specifically avoiding naming scapegoats for the school crisis, unlike the Bold and Broad argument they took little (or no) note of other obstacles. They failed to ask questions about other institutional and systemic failures that need to be addressed.

Secondly, the report was inaccurate in claiming a "period of long term (school) decline" and tying that to the "15 year decline in industrial productivity." First of all it takes 15-20 year for the products of schooling to reach the market—become employees! So which historic period should have been "blamed"? It quotes one Paul Copperman approvingly saying "Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country this generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach those of their parents." That was inflammatory nonsense, only the last—"economic attainment" (wages)—is proving true.

Al Shanker defended these misstatements to me as necessary to awaken a smug public. But calling "fire" in a crowded theater can be dangerous. Dealing with "an unfriendly foreign enemy" easily slipped into seeing the people who ran our schools as in cahoots and demand a quick fix. Since the narrative of decline coincided with the growing unionization of teachers, a period of collective empowerment, it was a quick and easy step to seeing the unionization and empowerment of teachers as the enemy within. It struck a bell that had been used a few years earlier by the leaders in the Black power struggle in the late 60s, searching for their own empowerment and seeing teacher empowerment as an obstacle rather than an ally.

Third. The report notes that we have "lost sight of basic purposes." But no where does it take up "basic purposes" except for outstripping our foreign competitors. It's their rising tide, not our rising mediocrity that in fact is the problem. Was it the workers in the auto industry, or its union, that led to Japan and Germany's rising competition? Or was it judgments made by those who had competitive scores? The fact that we put such enormous numbers of our low-income youth in prison—at rates and for crimes none of our competitors match—goes unnoted. In fact, since 1983 those numbers have soared.

No nation—with high or low scores—comes anywhere close. These nonproductive youth have an impact on both our economy, their families and our future. What can we learn from our competitors about "get tough" imprisonment policy?

Fifth. If the economy is the only dilemma, why does the report focus on "academic" skills? How do we connect such academics to the needs of the work world? Is there something else also at stake?

Bloomberg in his Florida speech rests his arguments on the same distortions. The Texas miracle, the Chicago miracle, and now the NYC miracle. I'm glad to see that Bloomberg didn't claim that Wall Street's woes are the fault of the NYC teacher's union. Bloomberg is one of many that view anything that isn't built around a harsh competitive spirit, with easy to count winners and losers, and money at stake can't work. Maybe even shouldn't work. Further, if you believe that nothing worthwhile happened prior to the arrival of one's own new bold plans little attention need be paid to those "on the ground." Crisis thinking has that inevitable downside—one has no for serious thought, for persuading or being persuaded by the reluctant in face of imminent danger. * All independent power blocs that stand in the way (like parents and teachers) must be immobilized so that swift and inflexible action can be taken from the top. (Bloomberg should reread War and Peace.) For noble ends, short cuts in truth-telling are allowed. We remember (and disremember) best what proves our point. (Mea culpa too.)

I've been reading new books about the Civil Rights struggles of the late 60s and early 70's, and struck by an irony which I want to explore. Given that I shifted my work from the civil rights movement to teaching in 1965 I should be delighted with the slogan that "education is The Civil Rights issue of the 2lst century". But I'm not.

Deborah

P.S. It was similar over-stated alarms over literacy that paved the way for the scandals of Reading First—anything was better than the bad old days, and criticism of the new was tantamount to being anti-reform.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

NYC’s decision—for budgetary reasons—to forego mandatory intelligence testing of 5-year-olds this fall is worth celebrating. But it’s a dangerous idea that will be back again. The earlier the testing culture starts, the more it erodes the resilience of all children, but above all those raised in a different culture and language than such tests rest their norms on.

Some natives, hearing the accents or dialects of foreigners, treat them instinctively with disrespect. A good friend of mine, Florence Miller, had a talent for joining other cultures and languages. We traveled together to France, Greece, and Spain. She was already fluent in French, but even in Greece she had a way of connecting that made people think she understood; and she did! No doubt our new friends thought of me as the quiet, possibly stupid one. But she made worlds open up for us. I think of our differences often lately, since she died of cancer last week. It was a gift not only of language, but larger than that.

For many 5-year-olds, kindergarten is like entering a foreign country. They respond as I did abroad—silently. Some overcome the silence with physical rowdiness, or by being naughty. They need a Florence who can bridge worlds for them. They need teachers and peers who find their experiences every bit as significant as the more familiar ones, and who seek the common ground—the shared mysteries of life. Our shared puzzlement over the meaning of “up” and “down”, over the way sound travels (the idea itself is startling) become the bridge. Even our different ways of pronouncing words can offer delight, not shame. My 6-year-old son spent a silent year in a NYC first grade because his teacher (as she confided to me mid-year) was trying to rid him of his “bad” Chicago accent! I’ve occasionally met teachers who assume their students were deaf as they regale me loudly about the impoverished backgrounds and linguistic stupidities of their students. A loving hug cannot wipe away the insult. Some kids overcome. They succeed perhaps out of defiance, or because they switch allegiances, adopting the school rather than their home. Some come from families of unusual strength and confidence, enough to brush aside the school’s ignorance. Naturally, most don’t.

Native Americans have suffered from assumptions regarding their basic inadequacy as a “race” since the Europeans first conquered them. African-Americans for just as long. I was glad to discuss Charles Murray again, Diane, as a reminder that his assumptions are alive even in “well-educated” circles. We fool ourselves if we think these theories regarding intelligence have disappeared. The history of this kind of testing—past and present—plays a role in the perpetuation of such assumptions.

There’s a lot of work to be done in our classrooms and schools to level the playing field. Foremost is tackling how we—including above all the child herself—see, hear, and make sense of our differences. The task of schooling involves overcoming what child specialists call “infant egocentricity”. But it’s not only infants who suffer from it. The natural assumption that only “I” am real, all the others are instruments to enhance or endanger me, is appropriate as a starting point. That the “I” expands to others “like me” is a step forward, but a baby step compared to what is needed on the part of teachers and students.

As I drive through the countryside—particularly at night—and see lighted windows, I am suddenly overcome with a sense of my minuteness. In every window is an “I”. It’s cause for wondering. So, too, as a scientist reminded me recently, is lying outside on a cloudless night and seeing the universe unfold.

It’s that sense of wonder and awe that we can share across differences. It’s where storytelling—fast becoming a lost art—originates. Thousands and thousands of years of human history have rested upon our capacity to invent narrative “what ifs”. It’s at the root of literacy and science. Even our well-intended focus on written text—starting from birth—and the world of virtual realities threatens that heritage. Am I foolish in imagining that good schooling can unite us across our differences if we aren’t in a race to sort and label our children?

My naiveté has probably survived so long due to the fact that 43 years ago I happened to find myself teaching 5-year-olds. I acknowledge that it’s probably an absurd idea that we can create schools free enough and powerful enough to challenge an increasingly me-centered consumer-driven competitive society.

The other night we celebrated the 25th birthday party of one of the schools I started in East Harlem—Central Park East II. For a few hours, the idea that we could overcome the odds seemed utterly reasonable. Seeing old colleagues who love their work, seeing parents who are now grandparents of CPE students, and children I knew as kindergartners who now teach at our schools, took my breath away. I drove home that night determined to remain naïve.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

The notion of good medical care as "test prepping" is delightfully bizarre, but maybe no less so than traditional forms of test-prepping? Perhaps Richard Rothstein is correct that it would have a greater impact on test score gaps.

Traditional psychometrics is filled with problems built into the excellent history you’ve offered us, Diane. It presumes that scores fit a curve, and that there is a norm, usually labeled 100 or expressed in percentiles with 50 percent below, 50 percent above grade or age “level”, with a particular cluster toward the center. All very precise.

How come half the kids are still below grade level after years of school improvement, I was once asked? Half were below because that's how we defined "grade level", I explained. If more kids started doing better—via test prep or actual skill—they'd renorm the tests. Scores were just a "promise" about where one stood in the rank ordering of all students who might take this test at this particular point in their school career.

Recent attempts to change the scoring method so that it reflects benchmarks of skill rather than percentiles is a positive step, even if you and I disagree regarding current definitions of basic, proficient, etc. The big plus (or weakness) is that they now rest on human judgment, not mathematical formulas.

Incidentally, in response to some of the critics who worried about my two math examples: they weren't intended to "prove" anything except that we know precious little about why "right" answers appeal to some people more often than to other people. I included that duo precisely because they puzzle me, and why I appreciated readers' efforts to explain them, and Jay Rosner’s replies.

What I’ve discovered is that both the kids who get the answers right and the ones who get them wrong can often give persuasive reasons for their selection. Sometimes—and over the years I’ve collected a host of these—the right answer is, upon closer examination, even clearly wrong. But what they are never wrong about is who gets which ones right! Are you following this?

When asked on a 3rd grade reading test, for example, how the children felt when the trucks came and cut down the trees to widen the highway by their house, only the middle-class kids said "sad"—which was the "right" answer. Many of the others said "excited". I know that's a particularly stupid question, but the division was startling.

Ditto for a familiar IQ question on what to do if you lose a friend's ball. Middle-class kids are more likely to say "buy him a new one" and working-class kids to say "tell the teacher". In fact, the latter are the least likely to tell the teacher, but more likely to believe that was the right answer.

Also interesting is how hard it is to guess whether items come from IQ or reading or math tests. I've tried random items out on audiences and gotten random answers.

Rosner's point, among others, was that if ETS (Educational Testing Service) has historically played around with items to ensure that male scores more properly matched or surpassed female scores, it could do so for race. Yet, he discovered, that the pre-tested items on which blacks more often got answers right were virtually never used—although they existed. The two items described were among that pool.

Democracy requires us to "act as if" the views of every single citizen are of equal importance. Not equally "correct" or "wise"—just equally important. And that each has a "logic" that the community would do well to acknowledge and make sense of.

That's what I rest my case on for democracy writ large, and writ small. I take it for granted, or tried to, that the stupidest questions or answers were important to understand. Doing so did not always lead to new truth. But it amazes me how often it broadened my understanding and that of others in the class. After a while it became possible to "outlaw" the phrase "it's obvious" in class! Jean Piaget’s work helped us see precisely how difficult it was to convince someone else of "the obvious" when they were viewing it from a different perspective of age, experience, temperament.

A youngster, studying a world map in the hall, asked me (shyly) why the West Indies was in the east and the East Indies in the west? It startled me into noticing an "obvious" misnomer stemming from the perspective of the maps we were accustomed to using. Ditto the 5-year-old who corrected me when I asked what the man on the moon might see if he looked “down” at us? She blurted out, “he’d look up!," setting my mind whirling on the concept of up and down!

Children aren't being "cute" when they say surprisingly wise things; they are just being both observant and accustomed to taking their observations seriously. Too often, schooling cures them of both. In contrast, while schooling based on both these qualities allows us to cover less in the here and now, it rests on the conviction that—in the long run—it will cover more. Yes, “less” can just be “less”, contrary to one of my favorite Coalition of Essential Schools principles. It all depends on…..

And that’s where the craft of teaching begins—with “it all depends on…”

Deborah

A P.S. for future conversation. You and I remain unpersuaded by Murray and Herrnstein, Diane. I'm glad. But that a public bombarded with the apparent intractability of the "achievement gap" might fall back on centuries of racist/classist conclusions seems inevitable.

It's one of the potential unintended consequences of the well-intended battle cry to "close the gap" without more carefully examining what test scores as we know them can and can't tell us, and what other gaps we might start closing.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Let's pursue, over time, these topics: (1) the way we see "popular" culture and "the street" as sources for learning, (2) the notion of a "consensus" on curriculum—and the idea that we can insure that it only takes 50 percent of our time, and, finally, (3) that it doesn't matter whether we put the moral and social purposes of society or each individual's success on the job market as the public purpose of education. Alas, the latter isn't even within our means—as the economy doesn't produce more good, decent-paying jobs just because there are well-educated people who want them! I suspect we aren't so far apart on the latter.

But I'm rushing off to Washington, D.C., for a press conference of a group we started a few years ago—our own smoke-and-mirrors "think-tank"—the Forum for Education and Democracy. We've issued our own statement: about "Democracy At Risk" 25 years after the seminal A Nation at Risk.

Here's my contribution to it.

Editor's note: The following are Deborah Meier's prepared remarks for the Forum's April 23 press conference:

What are the “basics”, the ABCs of a democracy? Among others, they involve the exercise of thoughtfulness and wise judgment on the part of its citizens. We cannot expect to teach this to our youngsters if they are keeping company with adults who are not able to exercise such habits—and do so in the presence of their students.

We propose—in short—schools that operate on the basis of both the collective and individual judgment of the adults most important in young people’s educational lives. Both their families and their teachers. There is no shortcut that leaves them out.

But this also means a well-educated teaching force, accustomed to exercising such thoughtfulness and judgment.

Imagine schools where educators work together to address students needs, not federal mandates, where the decisions are made by those closest—not farthest—from the real action. Where student engagement and responsibility for their work is mirrored in the attitudes of their faculty.

These are the schools that we need today. Some of them exist. I helped establish several in New York City’s East Harlem and Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. In the deepest sense of accountability, few schools have made their work more open for public review and critique. Each developed a set of authentic and meaningful standards and then designed every aspect of the school so that students could meet them.

They are designed so that teachers are powerful adults who make decisions that continually improve the school—who work in teams that share students, and who have time every week to plan a curriculum together that responds to the realities on the ground as well as in the subject disciplines, to develop and evaluate portfolio assessments, and to talk about kids and what they need and how to support them.

These schools and others created since have succeeded with students who were previously written off in urban schools. And they have succeeded because teachers had the expertise and the authority to design powerful instruction responsive to kids’ needs. And they had the time. The latter is the much forgotten and ignored ingredient essential for schools designed for democracy.

Schools like these are widespread in some nations like Finland, which rose to first in the world in reading, math, and science after making massive investments in highly expert teachers who are prepared to teach all kinds of students and to teach for inquiry and problem solving. Having developed such teachers, Finland allows them great latitude in designing schools and curriculum that can meet the needs of their students.

Unlike the U.S., where teachers either go into debt to prepare for a profession that will pay them poorly or enter with little or no training, high-achieving countries like Finland and others recruit top candidates and pay them to go through a top-quality preparation program. Beginners are supported by expert mentors, and teachers routinely have 10 to 20 hours a week to work and learn together—supports that are non-existent in most parts of the United States. We consider ourselves lucky in the USA if we set aside an hour or two a week. Mission Hill and Central Park East Secondary School went to the extraordinary length of building in five hours a week—less than half of what most nations in the world provide.

The report we are releasing today provides a realistic plan to make powerful and continuously well-prepared teachers available to all children through what we call a Marshall Plan for teaching.

Like the original Marshall Plan that rebuilt a democratic Europe after World War II, this is a strategy for moving beyond the half-measures that have characterized the last 25 years.

For an annual investment of $4 billion—or less than what we are currently spending for a week in Iraq—we could underwrite strong preparation for 40,000 teachers in high-needs fields annually—enough teachers to fill every vacancy currently filled by an unprepared teacher—seed 100 top-quality urban teacher education programs, ensure mentors for every new teacher hired each year, provide incentives to bring expert teachers into high-need schools, and, above all, strengthen ongoing on-site professional development for teachers and principals.

To dramatically improve schools, we need to transform the profession—making it attractive to thinkers and do-ers. Our plan will support this while developing new career pathways that help teachers extend their abilities and share their knowledge with others.

Finally, we propose a major initiative to improve school leadership. This includes proactively recruiting expert teacher leaders—rather than just waiting to see who shows up in administrative credential programs or wooing people from unrelated fields. Once again, it must rest on a full-year internship under the wing of principals whose work apprentices want to emulate.

I’ve never believed there was one best system for educating children, or adults. But if we have the preservation of democracy in the front of our minds, then we have no choice but to build schools where children experience what a democratic community of adults can produce.

There may not be one right way, but there are also many wrong ways. Every time we issue mandates that effectively remove power and responsibility from the adults who surround kids we remove the ingredients needed for them to become powerful and responsible adults.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (86) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing we can do, as educators, is provide examples of adults who use their minds freely and toughly, in the interest of raising smart, feisty youngsters!

On a recent visit to Wesleyan, where my granddaughter is a student, some teachers and students played with the question of whether schools should provide young people with opportunities to act on their ideas. After all, teenagers have historically always been activists, not just scholars. I think probably yes—but, if so, don’t we need to be equally prepared to support the “actions” that we disagree with as those we agree with? Given the power relationships in a school, that may be unrealistic. This, too, is another one of those complicated balancing acts.

But I’m so glad you raised so vehemently your view of “the street” and “popular culture.” Probably we need to examine our use of these phrases. “The street” is my shortcut for where kids spend their time when we’re not watching them. I want schools to serve as a place where students exercise the same “habits of mind” to thinking about the “street” (or popular culture) as we ask them to bring to bear on history, and science. We’ve paid too high a price for saying to one large group of kids, “park your ‘other’ self outside before you enter ‘our’ house of learning.”

Our debate reminds me of the distorted controversy about Ebonics (the colloquial speech of some African-Americans) that took place a decade ago. The idea wasn’t to “teach” the kids Ebonics, but to understand where it did and didn’t correspond to “standard” English, to see that all languages have rules. In short, the idea was to use Ebonics as a tool to understand grammar and language rules rather than pretending it was just “bad” English. By bringing it out of the closet of taboo subjects, it could be studied, examined, explored. It was an explosive subject, but that’s because it’s so fraught with a history that we all need to better understand, not hide.

In fact, “bullying” isn’t acceptable on the street. The “street” (the kids’ out-of-school-and-home culture) is more complex than that. It was one reason we had a column in Mission Hill’s weekly newsletter describing what kids did during recess in the school’s back yard—to help us understand the rules and language of their “free” play, in all its complexity.

By the way, I think the kind of schooling I’m describing might be far more accountable, in the true sense of that word, than any federal mandate could achieve. I stopped last week before I got into how schools might be governed—which is at the heart of accountability—so that we could focus on “content.” But, of course, they overlap. I sometimes think that our difference lies in part upon how we can imagine our roles. I immediately imagine myself the recipient of mandates—the one who has to obey (or sabotage or get around them). Perhaps you see yourself as designing them? As a thought experiment I wish we’d both imagine what it might be like if Bush’s favorite educators had had the power to design our course content; what basic concepts, ideas, facts might he impose? Perhaps I want a wall of separation between state and classroom.

But in addition, I’m an opportunistic educator. One takes advantage of the moment, the setting, and the people on hand, One plays to their strengths, and to the time in history one is living through. One “uses” everything available to excite the (controlled) passions of the young. And their teachers' passions, too. Because it helps the retention rates of both.

And finally, anything worth learning shouldn’t be easy to shake off. We studied physics for two years at CPESS, and covered half the usual textbook. It wasn’t enough for kids to know that light travels in a straight line. We wanted them to consider what ideas about light preceded this “discovery”—as well as what they thought before we showed them Truth! We wanted to "uncover" more than we wanted to "cover."

But it all goes back to the question that isn’t asked: So, what’s it all for? (And, who decides?)

A good friend sent me the mission statement of a school I respect, High Tech High. Their answer: “To succeed in today’s global and knowledge-based economy.” So I wonder, should I have a right to say that this is not okay as its primary mission? (And, does "succeed" mean make a lot of money?) Can I demand—and under what rules of the game—that all U.S. schools must first and foremost justify their work as meeting, and thus understanding, the demands of a democracy? Is that or isn’t that akin to George Counts’ chutzpah?

Best,
Deborah

P.S. How rare it is, Diane, to be reminded of our educational history—thanks.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

I was just sitting down to reply to your post and thought I would first scan my email. I opened the daily email from ASCD SmartBrief, which links to interesting stories about schools across the nation. There was a story from Pontiac, Mich., with this headline: “Teacher Recovers from Attack: Police Say 3 students Assaulted Northern High instructor, who has a fractured skull, a broken rib and an injured lung.” This incident occurred because the teacher told several students to leave the boys’ restroom. They followed him to his classroom and beat him up. The president of the Pontiac Education Association said, “Teachers are in a war zone, and we should be getting combat pay. Teachers are scared going into their jobs every day, in both the middle schools and high schools.”

Now, I do not mean to suggest this kind of violence is typical. Thank God, it is not. But what I do suggest is that there is a level of disrespect and misbehavior that has become commonplace in many schools. Readers say it is confined to urban schools, and they may be right. You say that if I go back to the “Little House on the Prairie” books, I will see that restless, school-averse, mischievous children were always part of the educational landscape. Huckleberry Finn didn’t like school; neither did Tom Sawyer. True.

I am reminded of my own historical research about the schools of the 19th Century and early 20th Century. Educational authorities then complained about students who were “wild” because they chewed gum or spoke out of turn. In one extreme incident, a boy was reprimanded for throwing stones at another boy after school. When you look at the actual behavior of students who were “out of line,” it seems awfully tame as compared with students today who look the teacher in the eye and say “— you.” Or who beat up their teacher or classmates in school with no regard to the consequences.

As one of our readers said, classrooms should be for students who want to learn. Those who don’t want to learn should not be allowed to make life impossible for the teacher and the willing students. Why not charter schools for the kids who hate school? Give them a chance, free of all the usual bureaucratic restraints, to show what they can do with the students who don't want to be students.

I don’t think this is really about progressive vs. traditional education. The John Dewey High School in New York City was "locked-down" on March 26 when a gun fell out of a student's backpack. This school has always been known for its progressive methods and curriculum, which has nothing to do with this student's decision to bring a gun to school.

As I have often insisted, there are many strands to the progressive education movement. Since I like you so much, I put you in the strand I admire, the educators who were trying to figure out (as you said in your last post) how to “reexamine the power and nature of the ‘academics’ so that they connect with the curiosity and interest of the young…”

The strand that I find objectionable (I wrote about this at length in "Left Back") was the progressivism that not only “watered down” the curriculum but made no effort to connect with the curiosity and interest of the young. They simply didn't want the children of working-class and poor families to have any contact with what we call the academic curriculum. They didn't consider these kids worthy. There were progressives like David Snedden of Teachers College (and commissioner of education in Massachusetts) who wanted the schools to focus on vocational and industrial education, except for the privileged few who were college-bound. There were progressives like John Franklin Bobbitt and W.W. Charters (the creators of the curriculum field) who tried to turn the curriculum into job-preparation only. There were progressives like those in the life adjustment movement of the 1940s and 1950s who thought that 60 percent of the population were unsuited to either an academic or a vocational education and needed only to be “adjusted” to their lowly station in life.

John Dewey’s own school at the University of Chicago was rich with academics. Teachers worked really hard, collaboratively, to connect deep understanding of history, literature, science, and mathematics to the lives of their students. When I read the curriculum of the Dewey School, I realize how much we have lost. The school did have a curriculum. It was academic, but brought to life by inspired planning and teaching. The Dewey School did not teach down to those who were restless. Of course, as a private university school whose students were mainly children of faculty, it did have a huge socioeconomic advantage.

If every school in the U.S. had the curriculum—the coherent, content-rich curriculum of the Dewey School in Chicago—and the well-educated, reflective, selfless teachers at that school, we would be in great shape.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I think we took the same message from the NYC pizza event. If I called it an example of out of control bureaucracy it’s because Klein and company seem to acknowledge no limits! Which leads nicely into our discussion of limits!

Yes, I think you are partly right about behavior and authority—and partly wrong. Where you and I so often end up!

Reread those classics by Laura Ingalls Wilder, as well as her autobiographical account of teaching school in the late 1800s. Many of the older kids were completely "out of control," angrily waiting until the planting season began again so they could go back to being grown-ups, not under the thumb of mostly female teachers. While in many parts of the world being able to go to school is a longed-for privilege, it’s hard to convince kids when we require it. Like the starving children of Armenia that my mother used to tell me about, the suffering of others didn’t make me a more avid eater. Especially of overcooked vegetables and icky stuff. (Which I was required to finish to the last morsel.)

I remember a mother coming in to complain to me (when I was a principal) about something bad she thought I had allowed to happen. She noted angrily that when she was a girl in her Catholic school it wouldn't have been tolerated. I reminded her that if her mother had talked to the principal in the manner in which she was talking to me, she would not long have remained in that Catholic school. We allowed for a few minutes of silence, and then continued.

Entitlements, civil rights, labor unions—all have their flip side. Resistance to authority has a long and mostly noble history—and future (I hope). It isn't easy to separate the noble vs. the ignoble.

So, much as I would like to elevate the larger culture, we meanwhile struggle in school to get the balance just right or “righter.” There is nothing in the end that works better than one's own drive to be learned. But I believe it's possible. I believe it because most of the time we did so in many schools I know well. Still it never comes easy, especially when it's built on compulsion. That’s the conundrum.

In some ways the "watered-down" schooling that you decry (and view as a result of progressive education) was a practical answer to the boredom, restlessness, and misbehavior of working- and lower-class kids who became our responsibility once we required them to attend or else. It was “progressive” in that more limited, nonideological sense. Done well, I do think vocational ed is better than trying to cram "the academics" down their throats. Why? Because what’s absorbed is not in any honest sense of the word fair to call “academic” and leads, in fact, to a lot of well-deserved anti-academic contempt.

Can we reexamine the power and nature of "the academics" so that they connect with the curiosity and interest of the young, thus mitigating the need for all this focus on “control”? I think we can, but it will not look like what you call “academic” a lot of the time, Diane.

Many of the commentators on our blog think I’m being romantic on this point, too. John fears trying to mix the culture of the “street” with “the academy”—whereas I’m prepared to start wherever the learner is. He has, however, a point. I agree with him that the kids must see us as unequivocally “on their side”—prepared to protect as well as be tough on them. Dickey thinks we need programs that “shape” student behavior, the kind we use, he says, with dogs and cats to reward them for proper behavior. It’s even possible that in settings in which both parties to the behavior-shaping trust each other’s intentions such techniques pay off. I’m dubious. But that’s not our schools. It might also "pay off" if such means weren't too often incompatible with our ends—like developing life-long learners, adults resistant to nonsense, people with a sense of good craftsmanship and irrisistably drawn to seeing the other side of things. And above all stuck with such habits even when we're not watching.

Don Berg thinks that if schools were free, but not compulsory we’d need to focus less on managing. Maybe, or maybe we’d just have more cheap labor. Erin suggests that if exams were external, it would be easier for the teacher to be seen as an ally, not a judge and enemy. She has a very good point, which probably you would concur with, Diane. I think the Central Park East Secondary School alternative—which involves both in and out-of-school judges—is best of all. It allowed me to remind my advisees that pleasing me was not the goal. Their work had to meet agreed-upon standards as interpreted by a wider range of judges. It gave me a foot in both camps—advocate and judge. (Go directly to the Comments for a fairer and fuller view of our readers.)

I urge you, Diane, to sometime take a look at Fred Wiseman’s film, "High School II." Not for particular answers, but for the sense of what a school that is “on their side” feels like. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s why faculty longevity is critical to good schooling. Yes, powerless automated teachers, and ABA behavior systems, make a kind of sense if genuine relationships of authority are not possible. But under such circumstances the “thee, thou and ‘it’” triangle that David Hawkins described isn’t possible either. I’m not ready to lower my expectations for the kids who need it most, while the ones that need it least benefit from schools that offer the real thing.

The students we taught at CPESS and Mission Hill, the ones society claims to be so worried about, need more of what the rich and powerful offer their children, not one whit less.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Debbie,

Since I don’t imagine that any state or school district plans to roll back its school attendance requirements—no more than you intended your bored student to leave school and go home—I am not going to debate whether school is or is not a scary place for most kids. These days, it seems to be more a scary place for the grown-ups, because they have so little “control” over the kids, especially the adolescent ones. I do not use the word “control” to refer to corporal punishment, which has rightly been prohibited almost everywhere in this nation. No, I speak instead of the informal mechanisms that make the classroom a place where teaching and learning can proceed in a respectful atmosphere.

Many young people don’t respect adults. They don’t respect authority figures. They don’t respect their parents, or officers of the law, or teachers, or principals, or the grown-up in the store who chastises them for bad behavior or shoplifting. Our popular media have carried the celebration of bad behavior to an extreme, and authority figures are ridiculed or made to look ridiculous by the overgrown adolescents who write the television programs.

Add to this lack of respect—not by all students, but by enough to affect the tenor of the classroom for all students—the addition of students with severe emotional or social problems, students who demand lots of attention from the teacher. It is a wonder that anyone learns anything.

I recently read Dan Brown’s book, "The Great Expectations School." This is not the same Dan Brown who wrote "The Da Vinci Code," but a young man who decided to enter the Teaching Fellows program in New York City and landed a job teaching a 4th grade class in the Bronx. Poor Dan! He tried so hard, but he was constantly struggling to teach despite the constant fighting, cursing, and disorder caused by a handful of unruly students.

Do other countries have these problems? I don’t think so. An image comes to mind, an experience I had a few years ago. I was in Siena, Italy, touring a beautiful small museum. A group of students about 14 or 15 years old arrived with their teacher; they sat in a circle around her as she explained the meaning of the tapestries on the walls. They sat entranced, listening carefully. I assume she had prepared them beforehand. No one appeared to be bored or incarcerated. Fast forward a month later, when I went to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. A similar group arrives with their teacher. She was trying to explain the great art before them, but she couldn’t get their attention. They were loud, running wildly in circles, completely ignoring her. The guards were called to try to corral them.

Maybe I just stumbled upon a wonderful teacher in Italy and an inexperienced teacher in New York City. Maybe. Maybe not.

How can anyone hope to teach in a school, a class, or a society where disorder is tolerable? And where efforts to establish it are treated as equivalent to incarceration?

Oh, and by the way, I referred to the rule against pizza parties not as an example of out-of-control bureaucracy, but rather to ask you how meaningful school "autonomy" or "empowerment" actually is when the central authorities are still reaching deep into every school's activities and making rules that are utterly senseless.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (25) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

I am happy to join with you in adopting a bridging motto of “Neither guide on the side nor sage on the stage.” One of the things that brought me to admire you was your obvious passion about teaching, learning, and children. I said at the outset of our conversation that I would gladly entrust my children (who are now too old to entrust to anyone but their spouses!) and my grandchildren to your classroom.

Somehow, though, I think that teachers you admire could work within the context of a common curriculum that described the parameters of what is taught in each year, without specifying it in such detail that it cramped their creativity and freedom of action. A common curriculum, as E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has observed, need not take up more than 50 percent of the school day. And, I would add, it need not—should not!—prescribe answers to controversial issues.

But if I may change the subject, I’d like to turn to an issue that I think is of growing importance: Incentivizing education by paying people to produce higher test scores. I think of merit pay for teachers; bonuses for principals; even payments for students, all tied to student test scores. If they go up, everyone gets a reward. If they go down, no extra pay for anyone, possible sanctions for the grown-ups.

This is a way of thinking that now suffuses American public education. Just recently, Time magazine had a cover story about “how to make great teachers.” The answer, I am sorry to say, was to adopt some form of merit pay or performance pay. When I put that “solution” alongside what you wrote in your last blog about passion, relationships, community, and burning questions, it is depressing to see the contrast.

Will we really get “great teachers” by paying some more than others? What do you think?

I think that teachers should be paid more for doing more: for taking a more challenging assignment; for mentoring other teachers; for other kinds of responsibilities that call for additional effort and time. But I am troubled by the idea that annual changes in test scores (or even changes over two or three years) should determine who gets paid most. I can think of many reasons to object to this kind of “merit pay.” I suspect it will promote cheating scandals, that it will encourage teachers and principals to arrange for certain students to stay home or disappear on testing days, and that it may even encourage students to hold their teachers hostage with threats of not even trying.

My view is that education has become permeated with the language of management and business and corporate-speak. This is a verbal poison in the bloodstream of our schools.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Your frustration about folks avoiding original sources is reasonable. Especially when it's actually easily available. But, of course, the "original source" itself is an interpretation of data. In short, we fall back on easier, less time-consuming ways. ("We" being me. See the back-and-forth comments about—presumably—the same data between Erin Johnson and myself.)

In fields that I don't feel deeply connected to, I mostly look for the experts I "trust". There's no way to be an expert in all the subjects I need to have an opinion about! So I go along with the consensus in some cases (like climate) and rely on "my" experts (generally via the magazines I read) on foreign policy and economics—e.g. Richard Rothstein, or Paul Krugman. So why should I expect folks to do otherwise about schooling?

But it's why it is so easy to get myths out there into the public sphere as though they were facts. In our field, there's the myth about the good old days. It rests in part on how often opinion leaders of all political stripes refer casually to the "decline" of public education; ditto for the assumption that most other nations are doing better at something called "schooling" or "education" without our having stopped to define what either means. We fall back on test scores whose contents and assumptions few question, whose methodology even education reporters know little if anything about, not to mention the narrowness of the measures—or the way scores are set. We use a language that assumes that being well-educated is a zero-sum game, in which the progress of others has to injure us.

We trust these assumptions because to think otherwise would require going against the grain and becoming an expert oneself. Rothstein's piece in American Prospect is not the first masterly complicating of the economic/schooling myths, but precisely by complicating it he loses part of his audience. For example, he reminds us that we "forget" that there's a 20-30-year gap between when the tests are administered and when that age group has an impact on the economy. In the information age, resources are also not evenly distributed. While, for example, FairTest—the only national organization that is in the business of being skeptical about test data, has a budget of less than half a million, the three or four leading testing agencies each spend many millions on promoting the idea that tests are the one true measure. (Disclosure: I'm on the board of FairTest.)

It leads me to wish we had a very different way of spending those 13-20 schooling years—preparing people to assess the events that surround them, independently sorting out pros and cons. I'm for the "liberal arts"—but not at the expense of "making sense" of the world around us, those "habits of mind" we build our curriculum around at schools associated with the Coalition of Essential Schools. The traditional liberal arts might even support such habits, if we designed them with this in mind. It would, for example, take a very different definition of advanced mathematics. The public's much-criticized lack of interest in advanced math may, in fact, betray their good sense, not their bad. Calculus-driven math may be foolish-driven math, that mis-prepares us, leaving us disarmed before the realities of our world. Perhaps a "statistics-driven" math would be equally tough and "advanced" but more suitable for a democratic citizenry?

In short, what frightens me about a national curriculum is not merely that I think it's more exciting to teach based on the particular interests and events that swirl around the young but because I think I can even "cover" more stuff of importance if I begin with what grabs our interest—from dinosaurs, mummies, castles, to modern Iraq or climate claims. I can better engage kids with the world they live in—including its history—if I make that the central aim of my work. Diane, it seems unlikely we can get a national consensus around the kind of experimentation that many of us think needs to take place. Nor should we! But suppose I'm right, that more "coverage" of the traditional fare won't make us either scientifically more sophisticated or mathematically more at home in this world? I'm not interested in banning traditionalism, but I'm also not interested in prohibiting us from the kind of exploration that needs to take place. Nor do I want to leave it all to private schools to experiment with the age-old conundrums. I think there are responsible ways to engage in this work, not just in private but also in public schools.

Our scientific future depends, I believe, on our remaining a nation that appreciates "play"—the non-utilitarian (or at least not immediately so) mindset that we're born with. We are systematically cutting ourselves off from the roots of human intellectual inventiveness. We need to find the equivalent of a generation-old practice of taking cars and radios apart to see how they work and building fortresses out of whatever is on hand. Computer-programmed games can't replace the old chemistry sets. Finding the modern equivalents requires us to experiment, not to return to the 1896 Ivy League consensus, great as it was. Some of us were lucky to have had both, but too many kids today have neither. They thus develop an acquiescent mindset or else a merely rebellious one, but an insufficiently curious and self-disciplined one.

As I meet with teachers and principals and parents I hear a lot of anguish and fear. Of course my sample is biased, but…. Read Dan Brown's book, "The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle" for a moving account of why we may be entering an era of temp teachers.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

No, I don't think the dilemmas you describe are as omnipresent in all of life's vocations as they are in teaching. I don't have the classroom experience that you have. I have taught mainly graduate students in my life as a professor and have spent most of my time as a historian and writer about education. In many ways, maybe most ways, that puts me at a disadvantage in comparison to you. But the great advantage that I have had in my own career has been that I have been free from the kinds of dictates and mandates that you have encountered. The life of a professor and a writer is far, far less regulated than the life of a teacher!

Most professors, I think, have tenure, which insulates them from political pressures. I have never had tenure and have not had that layer of protection. In 1994, I was pushed out of my untenured position at Teachers College because (as I was told at the time), my colleagues did not like my views. Fortunately for me, I landed at New York University, also untenured, and so far no one has told me that my views demand my exclusion.

I am not teaching now, just writing. When students ask me for advice, I encourage them to be true to themselves, but I know that in the university today, there are limitations on what one is allowed to say and believe and write. Of course, you can say and believe and write anything, but if you offend the reigning orthodoxy in your department, you cannot count on being hired the next year unless you already have tenure. So, the unwritten rule for born rule-breakers is to stay in the conventional mode and keep your views to yourself until after you have tenure.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt in my mind that people who work in higher education are far freer than teachers to express their views, to criticize their leaders, and to dissent from current policies. There is far likelier to be open dissent and discussion in the university setting about the university's policies than there will be in schools about the policies of the school, the "system," the district, or the state.

Back in the 1930s, Howard K. Beale wrote a book titled "Are American Teachers Free?" His answer was negative, because there were so many restraints on teachers' freedom of belief and speech. Today, for different reasons, the challenges to teachers' freedom of belief and speech are very different. Yet, I think that if a similar book were written, it would come to disturbing conclusions about teachers' freedom and professionalism.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Years ago—when I was teaching both 5-year-olds at PS 144 in Harlem and teachers at City College—adults said that, unlike me, they weren't allowed to do x and y. After ascertaining why they thought it was so important to do x or y, I'd ask: "and what will happen if you do?" There was always a pause.

So we'd have a class discussion about the consequences of not following orders (usually none).

I think this is an important exercise—for adults and kids. We can't always get our way; there can be consequences that follow. But there may still be good reasons to accept the possible consequences and tactfully (or do I mean tactically) do what you believe is right.

Our first responsibility is to have a strong basis for making decisions—knowledge about kids, the nation's system of schooling, mandated rules, curriculum, subject matter more broadly, pedagogy, and one's own risk-status. (Of course, often you have to act instinctively.) I advise: take fewer risks, for example, before you have tenure, or if your principal doesn't like you. Also, decide what's important and what's trivial.

When I left my kids with a baby-sitter I had the same dilemma in reverse. How many dictates should I lay down? My five rules. Rule one: Any good child-care giver had to be someone whom I trusted enough to make split-second judgments (there's virtually no other kind when dealing with kids). Rule two: Provide information about the kids, the household (where things were), and how I could be reached. Rule three: Provide as few no-no's as you can—we don't hit our kids ever, or if they want the light left on in their bedroom, that's okay. Rule four: Listen carefully to what the kids say after and what the sitter says about the same events. Finally, if there's no one whose judgment I sufficiently trusted, I stayed with the kids myself. These pretty much fit the way I looked at being a principal, too.

I began teaching ten years after my first child was born, and I brought the same mindset into my classroom, and later into my schools. Over the decades I had many different supervisors, and fortunately no one ever stopped me from going my own way even when I did it pretty openly. Was it all just good luck? Probably partially.

What happens if you're not so lucky? You learn to hide a bit more, say "sorry" rather (and rarely ask permission), build a strong record in other ways, and keep open to the possibility that you are wrong! That latter is not just wise strategy, but wise for getting to be smarter at one's craft.

But there are some things I could never have done; and fortunately was never "required" to. Certain forms of discipline, for example. Teaching (e.g. covering too much) in ways that left kids feeling dumber than when I started off. Comparing kids in ways that led to misleading conclusions about their place in the world. Those were my "bottom lines."

After I left Boston new rules came out that I'd have had a hard time following. During state testing sessions (which are un-timed and can last 2-3 hours a session) one is not allowed to pat a nervous 7-year-old kid on the back, offer a drink of water, or suggest a short break when clearly a kid has become too tense, and so on. All of those gestures are viewed as forms of cheating and could get me fired today. (I even had food brought into the testing room at Mission Hill in the early days!) I'm sad not to be in the schoolhouse anymore, but I'm glad not to be the adult responsible for carrying out such rules on little kids who trust me to use good sense. It's not good sense.

One late afternoon, as I was leaving my Grade 7-12 school in East Harlem, I noticed three boys playing basketball (unsupervised) in the gym. I reminded them that it was too dangerous to allow them to continue and that they'd have to leave the building. They were very courteous about leaving; but the last lad turned and asked me, "do you really think we'll be safer playing in the street?" I accepted the critique—I was thinking about my personal and "institutional" safety, not theirs. When we're going along with bad policies, at least we ought to be straight about it.

At some point the compromises we make lead us to lose our love for the work. I hope that all practitioners can catch themselves before they reach that point and reverse course: break more rules?, get them changed, or…….quit. But "creative compliance" "creative non-compliance" in the interest of good practice is, as my one-time bosses Tony Alvarado and Sy Fliegal reminded me, an option one should not shun. For hundreds of years teachers have known this. There may be reasons to change the culture from solo to collaborative work—but not to giving up our collective
conscience.

So I still tell folks, push ahead as far as you can doing what you think is right, and when someone in authority says "stop"—stop and think about what comes next. Maybe try a different crack in the pavement? In short, I still give my colleagues the same advice I did 30 years ago at City College. It may, however, be harder than I think.

Are these dilemmas that face folks in all life's vocations, Diane?

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)