TO SIRS, WITH LOVE

 Over at Armchair Commentary, Ellen Kim is deliberating on the five greatest movie teachers, in honor of Teacher Appreciation Week (which has just ended, in case you were wondering when your thank-you gift would arrive). Kim’s list is pretty traditional:

• Sidney Poitier as Mark Thackeray in “To Sir, With Love.”
• Mr. Chips (Robert Donat in the 1939 version, not Peter O’Toole wooing and warbling with Petula Clark in 1969).
• Jaime Escalante, rendered by Edward James Olmos with bad glasses in “Stand and Deliver.”
• Robin Williams as John Keating in “Dead Poets Society.”
• “Lean on Me” with Morgan Freeman wielding a baseball bat as New Jersey principal Joe Clark.

And for a touch of teacher merriment, Kim tosses in Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Kindergarten Cop” as an honorable mention.

Notice anything about this list? Beyond the fact that two of the characters are not even teachers?

It’s always interesting to observe teachers and school cultures portrayed as entertainment, a kind of pop-culture anthropology. Just as I have no reason not to believe that CSI: Miami is a fairly accurate representation of forensic science in criminal investigations, there are probably millions of people who think that movies and TV shows about teaching school tell it like it is.

If that were the case, we’d be looking at a whole lot of women—even more specifically, white women—teaching on screen. Only one in five dynamic, inspiring educators (or monotone-marvel Ben Stein types) would be male, if reality intersected with cinema. I’m not about to get on a high horse about this—but there aren’t many traditional female teacher-heroes in the movie pantheon. There’s the Michelle Pfeiffer/Hilary Swank save-the-tough-kids model, inherited, perhaps, from Sandy Dennis in Up the Down Staircase (worth noting: all are stories of real teachers, from their memoirs). Or Maggie Smith, who seems to exude “quirky old maid schoolteacher” in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, presaging Professor McGonigal.

In the 70 comments following Ellen Kim’s blog, recollection, praise and criticism of movie teachers run about 10 to 1 toward men—are male characters really more memorable or exciting? Is it because school dramas and comedies tend to be set in high schools, where student characters can wisecrack or display articulate angst—and women are pigeonholed as teachers of the very young?

I liked Tina Fey in Mean Girls, probably because I could identify with any teacher’s attempts to keep adolescent girls from vicious, clique-y behavior. But I adore the small teacher moments in My Bodyguard, when Miss Jump (Kathryn Grody) gently pushes her twitchy young teens toward something like respect and understanding for each other. There’s a wonderful scene, featuring a young, gum-snapping Joan Cusack, where Miss Jump uncovers the magic of Romeo and Juliet, painting an absorbing verbal picture about two kids who have the hots for each other, then soothing her pupils with beautiful language.

My own favorite movie teacher? Defecting from the gender argument, I would choose Richard Dreyfuss in Mr. Holland’s Opus, mostly because the film felt so real to me, more life than fiction. Plus you have to love any movie where a teacher plans to cut and run for a real career, ends up staying in the classroom and impacting lives, then gets the boot as irrelevant after thirty years of masterful work. That’s entertainment.

Image:spiritualityandpractice.com/films/images

 

MATH WARS: THE HEAT GOES ON

I’m not a math teacher, but I played one in a middle school, not too long ago. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was surprised to find myself teaching 7^th grade math, in the fall of 2003. The parents of my math students were surprised, as well, when they discovered that the teacher who had been directing school bands in their community for decades had suddenly become their child’s math instructor. The concept did not compute, so to speak. The annual fall Parent Open House occurred just a few days after the kids were transferred to my lone section of math. Trying to find the exact words to reassure parents that their kids would, indeed, learn something about math in the 7^th grade was among the greater challenges in my recent teaching life.

Perhaps I needn't have worried so much. Headline in the April 2 Education Week: Essential Qualities of Math Teaching Remain Unknown.

Research does not show conclusively which professional credentials demonstrate whether math teachers are effective in the classroom, the report found. It does not show what college math content and coursework are most essential for teachers. Nor does it show what kinds of preservice, professional-development, or alternative education programs best prepare them to teach.

I don’t find this information particularly reassuring. Key point from the article: taking more advanced math courses does not improve the effectiveness of educators who work with lower-grades students. In other words, passing Calculus does not help a prospective teacher explain re-grouping in two-digit subtraction to her second graders, in ways that are useful and stick to their brains. Pedagogical content knowledge—knowing how to teach something, over and above simply knowing something—turns out to be a real and critical skill, according to the researchers. But—isn’t this something every student knows: some teachers are good at explanations, examples and clarifications?

Figuring out how to be a good math teacher was a year-long scholarly quest for me, in 2003-04. I read copiously—including both sides in the raging Math Wars, which seemed to boil down to Parrot Math vs. Rain Forest Math, two verdant-jungle images that belie the academic passion, political cynicism and outright anger behind them. I needed to know these things, because the parents’ first questions to me were: Is this the new math? Or will I be able to help my kids with their homework?

Our curriculum, Connected Mathematics Project, was relatively new in my school and a revelation to me, considering I took my last formal university math class in the early 70s. Although I can immodestly say that I got sterling grades in math, from kindergarten through college, I learned more about the mathematical ideas that lay under memorized procedures and traditional algorithms in one year of teaching math than I had in 15 years of, umm, parrot-back math.

It was fun to watch my students’ intellectual light bulbs flip on—Oh! That’s why you multiply ratios! That’s why negative times negative is positive! At the end of the year, I can confidently say, my 7^th graders understood simple algebraic ideas better than I had in the 9^th grade, especially the goofy 12-year old boys in my class, who thrived on the minds-on applications of math—tennis ball drops and flipping chips from positive to negative. So I was interested in this from the New York Times:

Many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.

The article leads off with the infamous train leaving Station A, traveling at X miles per hour, then suggests that we stop using such real-life examples. Why? Because college students in a study found it easier to solve problems when given the abstract algorithm as a model than when they had to muck around trying to figure out how to set the problems up.

I have no axe to grind in these debates—but I am very clear that the reason that Connected Math and other investigative, hands-on math curriculums include lots of real-world examples is not to make math easier to learn. It is because using math fluently in that real world means figuring out how to apply skills and understandings to actual, mathematical questions.

At the Parent Open House, one mother told me she’d looked through her son’s math text. “It was a lot of writing,” she said. “I didn’t see page after page of problems.” I tried to find the right words to describe the value of applying math to examples from life. “Oh—like story problems?” she asked, as a groan swept through the room. “I hated those.”

I’m not a math teacher—but that reaction speaks volumes.

THE VICTOR, THE SPOILS, AND THE AMERICAN WAY

Two weeks ago, my local newspaper, the Livingston County Press-Argus, reprinted one of my blogs as a Sunday editorial. It was a piece whose core message can be summed up in a single sentence:We need to improve schools in Michigan, but increasing competition in the classroom is not the most effective way to boost student learning. I expected that there would be a few negative responses in the on-line forum, mostly from successful, Vince Lombardi types, and maybe a couple of thank-yous from parents of kids who aren’t perennial winners in school.

The letters to the editor and on-line commentary haven’t stopped yet, and at the moment, sentiment is running roughly 99 to 2, pro-competition and anti-Flanagan. Hey. I taught middle school for 30 years. I can deal with it, even comments like the very first one that popped up at 8:00 a.m. that Sunday: “Ms. Flanagan is exactly the reason that our children are failing in the worldwide arena.” 

The comments range from the sweepingly vicious (see above) to dismissive (“everyone knows that lack of competition breeds apathy”) to irate but seriously off-topic (“lousy driver training makes kids bad drivers—like no competition ruins school bands, Nancy Flanagan”). I’m not making that last one up, by the way. 

For the record, I am entirely in favor of pursuing rigor and excellence, school sports and recognizing outstanding student work. Nor was I writing about use of rewards—although a number of posters seemed to feel either a) we’re giving kids too many unearned rewards or b) we need to give kids rewards because that’s how people are motivated. Both a) and b) seemed to think I was wrong, however.

I am also opposed to sheltering kids from reality, and I am decidedly against indulging kids, giving them everything they want. Like limos for the prom. (Yes, I’m quoting another accusatory discussion thread—and by the time that one was posted, I was beyond pointing out that most people who rent limos for their 15-year olds are competitive parents, trying to one-up the Joneses and their 15-year old.) Most disturbing to me were comments about how we shouldn’t even attempt to leverage more school achievement in Detroit, Michigan’s largest school system (and economic linchpin, for better or worse)—because those kids were the real losers.

The discussion morphed so swiftly and in so many directions that I came to understand that the vein I hit was untapped anger and fear over a number of issues: a challenge to long-held beliefs about a personal drive to compete being virtuous, maintaining a sense of superiority over poor people in a weak economy, and general dissatisfaction with schools and teachers. Plus an anonymous public platform, of course.

Whole books and dozens of scholarly articles have been written about competition, and the negative effects of increasing stress on performance. In a nutshell, the research on motivation and execution tells us that people perform best when they are challenged and excited by the work, and are operating in a comfortable social setting. The highest levels of excellence in science, technology and business generally come from collaborative work effort and products. This is not mushy school-speak. This is straight out of Deming. And what do sports psychologists say to premier athletes in a slump? Stop focusing on winning.

Nor is the urge to compete (which always means, of course, besting someone else) a natural, human trait. Most primitive societies developed through cooperation—and it was competition that brought mighty civilizations down. Early and strong emphasis on competition in schools (including developmentally questionable instructional practices, like teaching reading in pre-school) is uniquely American. Most countries at the top of the list in international academic achievement comparisons spend the first few years of school nurturing cooperation—ironic, eh?

Vignettes:

• A grandmother writes in to say that she is tired of having her (high-achieving) grandchildren forced to work with “lazy, slacker kids who don’t care” in cooperative learning projects. She inspires a round of 35 corroborating messages excoriating group work, and leading one to believe that half the kids in the county are useless slackers, sponging off the academic brilliance of their classmates. What she doesn’t say is what, precisely, we should do with kids who “don’t care” or how they got to the point of not caring.

• A teacher friend tells me that his principal is trying to cut down on the number of awards given at Honors Night. Last year, he selected three students for a departmental prize—all had aced the AP exam, done extraordinary community service and were part of a winning team at a statewide academic competition. This year, he only gets to pick one, because the principal thinks it will “mean more.” Mean more to whom?

• A seventh grader sends a letter to the paper, asking why “good kids” should work at all if their superior work products are not going to be so designated and rewarded—inadvertently serving as poster child for the Entitlement Generation. Why should you learn something or put forth effort unless someone confirms that your work is “better”? Well—maybe because it’s the right thing to do and you’re lucky to be getting a free, high-quality education?

I can’t say that the dialogue goes on, because "dialogue" implies give and take. I am surprisingly relaxed about the whole discussion, however, given that it’s happening in my virtual backyard. I guess that’s the way it is with us noncompetitive types.

Image: Earl53/Morguefile

DEMOCRACY: RISKY BUSINESS

For the past six weeks, I have been hooked on the HBO series, John Adams, with the same dedication and fervor other people seem to find for Dancing with the Stars. Technically, I know the facts, from 7^th grade American History—the prodigious intellect of key figures, the political maneuvering necessary to bring rebellious hotheads and cautious landed aristocracy to the point of agreeing to a “declaration of independency” and then creating a new form of government. Unlike most great stories, however, this one is better on TV. Grim details like oozing smallpox and nasty 18^th century teeth illustrate John and Abigail’s metaphoric wade through mud to get to the incomplete shell of the White House—life and governing are hard, but the passionate arguments about what is good and right for this nation never stop. 

Over at the Teacher Leaders Network this week, we’re passionately arguing about what is good and right for American schools. There has been a rich and reflective dialogue on Carl Chew the test-resistant Washington teacher, whose motto seems to be  Give me democracy…or give me unemployment. Posts range from "Carl is a genuine American hero" to "rash actions aren't helpful if we want to make carefully considered change." It's been a great balm and joy to read these fervent arguments across the spectrum of opinion, because not one of these exemplary teachers has said "there's nothing we can do"—and the core of the discussion has been around how teachers can influence democratic transformation.

The TLN dialogue is not the only thing that makes me hopeful.  The Forum for Education and Democracy released a new report this week, Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Policy in Education. There’s a lot to like in this report, a substantial response to the quarter-century anniversary of A Nation at Risk. Policy reports are sometimes susceptible to a pattern of lofty rhetoric—followed by grim facts—concluded with out-of-the-box recommendations. This paper has its share of grim facts, but the policy recommendations strike me as eminently doable, given a national will to finally get serious about our public schools.

From the Executive Summary:

Although many reforms have come and gone since 1983, we have lacked a purposeful, strategic approach for developing and investing in the kind of education that addresses the needs of a democratic society. In contrast to countries that have spent the last 20 years building forward-looking educational systems that fund schools centrally and equally, build a top-flight teaching force, focus on 21^st century learning needs and develop the capacity for school improvement, the U.S. has focused on none of these critical elements of success …we have demanded results without transforming schooling.  

The whole report takes the same calm tone: Things have not improved. We can do better. There are no rhetorical rising tides or acts of war, just some sobering statistics on child poverty (where the U.S. is 26^th out of 27 OECD nations, sliding in just ahead of last-place Mexico). A careful cost-benefit analysis is included: the benefits to society (in tax revenue, health care and welfare savings, and reduced crime) are 2 ½ times the cost of a publicly funded high school education. So—we’re not throwing money at problems. We’re building cost-effective solutions.

The authors suggest four policy priorities, all of them resonant with core democratic values:

• Paying off the debt owed to underserved kids by devoting federal resources toward equity for our most challenging schools
• Building a world-class teaching force and investing in genuine educational leadership
• Creating a new agenda for innovation and research
• Renewing community engagement with schools

There are some specifics, but none of the policy recommendations involves gutting the current system, pushing kids out at age 16, going after special interests or further punishments. It is purposeful and strategic—no silver bullets in sight.

A new direction—grounded in what we know as a nation about innovation, learning and powerful change—is needed to reclaim our leadership as a democracy and our children’s future in a land of opportunity.

I’m hopeful about that new direction, and I urge other teacher leaders to take a look. There is something we can do. Maybe we owe this to those who secured the blessings of liberty for us.

WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD TEACHER?

Corey Bower asks a lot of questions about bad teachers in his unpretentiously titled blog, Thoughts on Education Policy. Mr. Bower, a doctoral student in Ed Policy at Vanderbilt, has been pumping out an assortment of blogs on a wide array of policy issues. I started reading him when he asserted that many policy wonks and economists use sophisticated statistical data as screens to obfuscate and then advocate for pet issues. 

He also spends a lot of time and verbiage just musing (as opposed to arguing or pontificating) – definitely meritorious behavior for a grad student in education policy. You have to root for someone who doesn’t come into a social science field cocksure that his experience (in Bower’s case, two years of teaching) makes him a fully qualified policy expert.

So I was intrigued to read this in a recent Bower post:

One problem in schools is that there are bad teachers who continue to harm students year after year. What do we do about these teachers? Well, fire them of course -- that's the easy answer. How many bad teachers are there? What qualifies a teacher as "bad?" Are teachers bad because they have no talent, put forth no effort, or because they attempt to harm students?  

That’s a lot of questions. In Bad Teachers: the Essential Guide for Concerned Parents, Guy Strickland says that approximately 5 to 15% of teachers are bad—or bad enough that they need axing. I have no idea where Strickland pulls this number from (and there is nary an equation-with-sigmas to be found), but the figure strikes me as about right—somewhere between 85 and 95% of practicing teachers are doing work on a spectrum from “good enough” to “outstanding.” I have no doubt that most principals could cheerfully pick out a handful of their staff for the boot, although the duds they select may not be the bad teachers identified by parents or colleagues. Teachers are perceived as good or bad in context, and one principal’s creative teaching virtuoso might be another parent’s weirdo with a pony tail.

Lately, there’s been a move toward ranking teacher effectiveness based on their students’ standardized test scores, with the proposed corresponding action step of lopping off the bottom tier. I am thinking about a high school math teacher I knew, whose two AP classes had a near-perfect pass rate, but who also had a reputation for failing upwards of half his Algebra I students. He was a brilliant mathematician, but disastrous at teaching goofy, unfocused freshmen. Was he a good teacher or a bad teacher? His students’ standardized achievement data would give you distinctly bifurcated results.

Bower again:

Why are there so many bad teachers? Are the unions protecting them? Are principals failing to evaluate thoroughly? Do teachers tend to burn out? Are there no good teachers to replace them? How should we deal with the problem? Create better evaluation systems? Outlaw unions? Put more pressure on principals to evaluate teachers? Put more pressure on bad teachers? Give bad teachers more training?

These are the bigger and more critical questions: why and how teachers become bad, and what to do when teaching practice is identifiably substandard. The talking ed-heads would have us believe that the gene pool for teachers is shallow—that teachers come into the profession as dim bulbs looking for a light load, generous vacations and job security. Their prototypical weak teacher exemplifies all of Bower’s indicators: no talent, little effort and, eventually, malfeasance toward students. There are a lot of blog-jockeys who would lay the entire problem of bad teachers at the feet of the teachers’ unions, as well. 

I think that the entire system is set up to turn a blind eye toward teachers who can’t sustain consistently good teaching practice. Few schools provide quality induction, mentoring or early, intensive professional development—or regular constructive critical assessments of practice. Many principals hope that a mediocre teacher will get better after the window of opportunity to deny tenure passes—and there is considerable evidence that high-needs schools recruit and hire haphazardly, making the decision to keep a marginal teacher a better solution than using scarce resources to start over. Unions provide due process for egregiously bad teachers for the same reason defense attorneys represent the accused: because they paid their dues and are entitled to the assistance. 

I don’t think any of Bower’s potential solutions—more comprehensive evaluations, external pressures, mandated additional training for identified burnouts or incompetents, outlawing unions—is the one-shot answer. What we need is a different approach to the problem: rather than spending energy trying to ferret out the inadequate teachers, we might focus on producing, and retaining, genuinely excellent educators, creating a culture of teaching expertise—which could impact many teachers, the rising tide lifting second-rate boats.

And that’s not as disingenuous as it sounds. Our teacher training, recruitment, induction and development programs were created to put warm bodies in classrooms during the baby boom years. We can’t afford run of the mill teachers in this new century, nor can we afford to waste time trying to draw a bright line between still-useful and bad teachers. Let’s go for the gold.

Thanks to Corey Bower and his provocative questions.

STAR TECH: The Next Generation...of Attendance

In her last year of a degree program in Justice Studies, my daughter took a course called “Surveillance in Society.” The readings and discussion were around intrusions into personal privacy and data made possible by technology. Dear Daughter and I had many amusing conversations about some of the assignments—for example, “Are Bar Codes the Mark of the Beast? Discuss.”—which struck me as paranoid in the extreme. Dr. Crazy, as she called the professor, was obsessed with our imminent loss of civil liberty, always urging his undergrads to be suspicious of anyone asking for personal information, and, presumably, scanning the sky for black helicopters.

In an earlier blog, I mentioned Gary Stager’s observations on the three ways schools use technology: #1) to make the system more efficient and attractive, #2) to enhance and highlight teaching, or #3) to give students control over their own learning.  I think Bill Ferriter and I have been talking, mainly, about #2—but I have been thinking a lot about #1, the use of technology to gather data and “streamline” normal school processes, like testing, attendance, scheduling and grading, and to present an image of a “21^st century school.”  Here is a very simple story about data collection and our (perhaps naïve) belief that All Technology is Good.

Ten years ago, my district opened a new middle school, full of state-of-the-art technological systems. We were the envy of the other buildings, with fully networked software to handle all our data needs. We got some training and the big pitch—our new procedures would save time, paper and man-hours, give us more accurate data, impress parents with e-communications, and make life smoother for the secretaries who had been handling many of those chores.

Under Old Attendance procedures, every teacher took attendance once, at the same time every morning, recorded it in their grade/attendance book, and sent a student to the office, with an attendance form, printed on scrap paper from recycle bins. Secretaries recorded these on a master list, and handled absence data for students who came/left during the day. Teachers got a copy of the master list, to help confirm absences when students needed to make up work. 

Under New, Improved Attendance procedures, every teacher had a computer, with separate attendance book and gradebook functions. Teachers were now required to take attendance every hour, and enter absences and tardies on the computer within a five-minute window. We were not allowed to keep the attendance program open on our computer desktops (because our gradebooks, protected by the same password, might be accessed by devious students)—so we had to log in every hour. Because this was 1998, the server’s horsepower was severely strained by 40 teachers logging in simultaneously, and it would take 30-60 seconds for the program to load. Teachers who forgot to take attendance within 5 minutes would be called by the office (where a secretary now sat, monitoring the data coming in every hour), disrupting teachers’ lessons. And if someone had a missing assignment, you had to toggle between attendance and grade programs to discover whether the child had been absent.

A process that had taken two minutes of teacher-time daily suddenly began to take up to two minutes every hour. Best-case scenario, teachers would lose an extra minute of instructional time each hour: 25 minutes/week, 2 class periods per month, 18 class periods per school year—or 3 full days of instructional time. Taking attendance.

Lest you think I’m being overdramatic (or are dying to tell me that faster computing and better software have eliminated problems and made attendance-taking an absolute joy)—I tell this story not to whine about record-keeping, but to question our automatic goal of “efficiency” and the uses and purposes of data collection.

At a staff meeting, I asked why it was now vitally important to have hour-by-hour data on attendance. The state requires only daily absent/present data, and then only to ferret out kids who weren’t actually attending school, but had been counted for funding purposes. A student who went AWOL would not necessarily be picked up any quicker under the new system, and most of our mid-day leavers were signed out to go to the orthodontist with their mom, anyway.

The new system made data-entry mistakes six times more likely, and kept a secretary busy checking on students who were marked present one hour, but absent the other five due to teacher error. I had great sympathy for “careless” teachers who rushed through the attendance procedure to get started on, you know, teaching—only to be monitored and chastised later. I was one of them. And nobody in the office could explain why or how, precisely, the new system was helping us do a better job of serving kids. The on-line gradebooks and computer-based scheduling also came with attendant, unanticipated problems.

Schools pay attention to what they value. In fact, we were taking attendance six times a day because we could—because our exciting new technology had made it possible. We collected the data first, and decided how to manage it later, a pattern repeatedly endlessly in thousands of schools. We assume that everything can be done faster, cheaper and better through technology; sometimes, the rationale runs backwards—we adopt the technology, and then invent reasons for why we need it.

I have not turned into Dr. Crazy. I admire and respect teachers who integrate elegant uses of technology into instruction, who understand the difference between the teacher and the tool. Bill Ferriter’s concern over being labeled “decidedly average” is a function of #1)—data collection made possible by technology that values numbers over concrete examples or using technology to serve the system, not the teacher—and especially, not the student.

AIN'T NOTHING LIKE THE REAL THING

I once had a colleague who showed Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure every year, at some strategic point, to her sixth grade social studies students, under the rationale that it was--duh--about history. This was a big hit with the kids, who would check their schedule cards every fall, hoping to see Mrs. X, whose reputation as a teacher was built solely on her willingness to do fun things. In between Monday Computer Lab Day and Friday Video Day, she was a bit of a pedagogical loose cannon, alas, prone to assigning random things but not returning them, and erratic outbursts.

Mrs. X serves as cautionary tale for those who believe that technologies can ever substitute or compensate for instruction or intellectual judgment. She was as tech-y as they come for the 1990s, spending huge quantities of time teaching kids to stick clip art on reports with oversized purple WordArt titles. She was quite popular with the12-year olds, but a genuinely awful teacher.

I will probably need to hide someplace underground after admitting this, but I do believe that school and learning should be fun, much of the time. I also need to say that if my two children were still in middle school (and thank God they’re not), I would want them to have Bill Ferriter for 6^th grade language arts—because I know they would go on an amazing and engaging journey in communication.  Mr. Ferriter (a.k.a. The Tempered Radical) is a teacher who uses technology in thoughtful service to student learning, which is surprisingly often not the case in classrooms. It’s not that the electronic technologies aren’t present—it’s just that they have been applied to serve other values: entertainment, speed and “efficiency,” public image, control of teacher practice, or making a teacher look good in contrast to less tech-savvy colleagues.

Bill and I have been gently tussling about the desirability of technology in the classroom all over blogdom, and he recently posted a blog full of statistics (when in doubt, display numbers) and comments from his students on how much they enjoy using blogs, Voicethread and wikis. They note that learning from heavy textbooks is boring (as it always has been) and that they enjoy knowing that their work has been “published.” Much better, says Bill, to have kids using alluring tech tools than slogging through traditional instruction.

Well, maybe. It’s also worth thinking about what Neil Postman wrote, in Technopoly:

“…those who cultivate competence in the use of a new technology become an elite group that is granted undeserved authority and prestige by those who have no such competence.”

In a society that reveres the new, there aren’t many people speaking up for preserving what is good and real in old-fashioned learning. You don’t hear many people these days saying they wish their children would write poems in a secret diary, master singing in harmony, plant and tend a garden, make ice cream or watch the stars over time. Why should they? These experiences and products are now readily available without personal effort or involvement.

In my exchanges with Bill, I worried about losing the community music-making that has been supported by school instruction for decades—concert bands and orchestras, individual practice, congregational singing in churches. I took some heat for defending conventional, old-fashioned music teaching  against the onslaught of synthesized, imitative music dabbling, comments that might be summarized as: Kids NEED to know about technology—they don’t need to know about ____________ (fill in  something that you do not personally value). 

I unapologetically care about live music, as an art form and cultural representation of human identity and convergence. And that’s at least as important as knowing how to Twitter. There truly is nothing like making music together. Music is my preferred technology, and I am not alone in cherishing it. I also know that an elegant, powerful school lesson may be as simple as reading aloud and talking, and that there are some execrable projects posted on Voicethread. The teacher who does not instill rigorous principles of editing, evaluation and content synthesis in conjunction with use of Web 2.0 tools is in many ways worse than the teacher who has not moved past the overhead projector—when the excitement of having kids’ work available to the world wears off, we may be left wondering what, exactly, they have learned.

I’m sure that we could gather quantitative information on our students’ preferences for any number of things. Mrs. X would certainly have received high marks. Postman again:

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data.

COCKEYED OPTIMISTS

They're reviving South Pacific on Broadway--a hopeful sign for those of us who haven’t given up on traditional musical genres. I once took 135 8th graders to a dinner theater production of South Pacific, as part of a curricular unit on 'protest music,' where we studied the unique ability of music to shape or express strong cultural beliefs and values. My goal was to explore the way popular music reveals cultural norms over time. The field trip was a resounding success, although much of the “engagement” among my 8th  grade musicians was around a scene where a back-to-the-audience topless woman was seen behind a scrim. Much more intriguing than social protest. But I digress.

I was thinking about Nellie Forbush and cockeyed optimism today as I read Richard Rothstein’s lead essay in Cato Unbound on the 25^th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk.” Rothstein pulls no punches, leading off with the three reasons that NAR was, and remains, a misguided template for educational reform:

The diagnosis of the National Commission on Excellence in Education was flawed in three respects: First, it wrongly concluded that student achievement was declining. Second, it placed the blame on schools for national economic problems over which schools have relatively little influence. Third, it ignored the responsibility of the nation’s other social and economic institutions for learning.

Well. And Rothstein could not be clearer about the 25-year disconnect between measured school achievement and economic growth in 2008:

It is cynical to tell millions of Americans who work (and who will continue to be needed to work) in low-level administrative jobs and in janitorial, food-service, hospitality, transportation, and retail industries that their wages have stagnated because their educations are inadequate for international competition. The quality of our civic, cultural, community, and family lives demands school improvement, but barriers to unionization are a more important cause of low wages than the quality of workers’ education.

Rothstein has built a reputation around his dogged insistence that while schools can have a large and positive impact on students' intellectual and personal growth, they cannot, single-handedly, fix or even compensate for glaring deficiencies in social structures or gaps in families' social capital. For this, Rothstein and like-minded scholars (not to mention a couple million teachers) have been labeled “excuse-makers”—pessimists, burdened with low expectations and a lack of that ol’ American can-do spirit. In Eduwonkette’s brief blog on the Rothstein/Cato piece, the first commenter notes: “Richard Rothstein. Do we need to read any farther than that? LOL”

Paradoxically, the anti-Rothstein set hasn’t mustered up a great deal of optimism about American schooling, either, although there is no shortage of proposed solutions for what to do about these miserable American schools: charters, disciplinary crackdowns, vouchers, teacher-proof one-size curriculums, raising mandatory attendance age to 18, replacing experienced teachers with bright but under-prepared graduates of prestigious colleges looking to save the world and build a resumé before choosing a grad school—or getting rid of non-essentials like recess and social studies (or field trips to see South Pacific, I suppose).

Who is truly optimistic about American schools these days? I offer an article by my friend and fellow Teacher Leaders Network member Laurie Wasserman. It’s pretty low-key; it might be entitled Laurie and Craig Try Something New and Get Good Results. There are hundreds of thousands of Lauries across the country, however, improving schools through small endeavors, and keeping the faith about education as necessary in a democratic society.

And when are we likely to align and direct resources toward all the economic and social causes of poor educational results? Some Enchanted Evening?

Image Roadsidepictures via Flickr Creativecommons

 

I'M A LOSER, BABY--SO WHY DON'T YOU TELL ME?

 

Last night, I attended a fabulous community meeting--the kind of gathering which restores your faith in mankind to solve our common problems. Part of  an initiative called  Michigan's Defining Moment, it was an assembly of community leaders across my county: a local college president, a mayor, business leaders, a district judge, a school superintendent and local government officials. The meeting was facilitated by the publisher of the local newspaper, Rich Perlberg, who invited me. Our task was to help devise action steps in a structured plan toward rebuilding Michigan’s educational system, economy and government—a plan created by input from over 1500 Michigan citizens.

The evening flew by in rich conversation. It’s exciting to hang out with smart people, and talk about the huge issues and challenges facing a state we all love. There was a moment, however, when a thinking gap emerged for me, between my 30 years’ experience as a teacher and what the other citizen-consumers of public education there believed.

It came as we were discussing educational goals, listing actions that would make Michigan schools more responsive to global changes washing over our industrial economy. One businessman suggested “inject more competition into public schools” as an action goal. I first assumed he meant more competition for public schools: schools of choice, charter schools, possibly vouchers. But no—his complaint was that there was not enough competition in daily interactions in our classrooms and school buildings. He mentioned spelling bees with second chances and science fairs where everyone won a ribbon.

From the nodding heads and further comments, it was clear he had tapped into one of those things lots of people assume about education: competition is the only way to improve student performance. Participants scoffed at no-loser games in gym class and dodge ball-free recess. Finally, someone said “It’s good for kids to lose” and there was murmured assent.

While increasing competition in schools didn’t make it into our final list of proposed action items, the conversation bothered me, all the way home. I thought about how every person in that room was, demonstrably, a winner—and how their own children, carefully raised, would learn to lose gracefully, but would also have their share of shining victories, and parents whose resources would support music lessons, travel teams and even tutors to keep that healthy balance of striving and success.

In every school, right from the get-go, there are kids who see themselves as losers. Life has already taught them that other kids are smarter, faster, prettier—and they have deeply internalized those lessons. They understand that they can’t be the best, or even among the best. They can rationalize it as bad luck, or push back by refusing to try (since they’d only fail), or they can build little social networks of fellow losers. There are, of course, about ten thousand movies built on the premise of the defeated collectively striking back at the victors—from “Bad News Bears” to “Wall Street”—just in case any junior losers with time on their hands want to pick up tips from prospective models.

Deliberately increasing and emphasizing competition in schools (where there are far more subterranean rivalries and daily informal academic contests than the casual observer might suppose) is hardly a solution to our biggest educational problems in Michigan, which begin with the state’s largest district, Detroit. The graduation rate in Detroit hovers around 25%, the worst in the nation, and all the robotics challenges, basketball championships or trophies in the state aren’t likely to budge the entrenched sense of futility that young men and women living there experience. In fact, if there were ever a place where young children’s sense of themselves as winners should be nurtured, where small egos should be fed and made to feel capable, it would be in high-needs schools.

In the end, we chose an action goal for education that centered on inspiring change and experimentation in our schools. We can change and grow Michigan's economy by focusing on our strengths--and we're more likely to reach #1 without having to sort our kids into winners and losers.

SYLLABI, BYE-BYE

Several years ago, under circumstances too convoluted and nonsensical to delineate, I suddenly found myself teaching one class of 7th grade math. I have a major and two minors in music, and at the time the assignment was made (three weeks after the beginning of the school year), had neither the desire, credit hours, nor expertise to teach 7th grade math.

But—surprise!—there were 24 students, the next day, expecting me to deliver some highly qualified math instruction.

So, I did the logical thing—I asked the real math teachers to help me, help me, please. Two of them agreed to serve as collegial coaches. One of them dropped by my room frequently, shared her graphing calculators (and showed me, a relic of the slide rule age, how to use them), and provided me with just-in-time tips for teaching the topics (seeing as how I was perpetually three weeks behind her, this worked out well). The other teacher handed me a copy of her syllabus, wherein each school day was assigned a unit, chapter, topic, activity and assignment. It was late September and this lady knew precisely what her students would be doing in May. This being Michigan, she had also built in anticipated snow days—the very model of efficiency.

Now, “syllabus” is not really a 7th grade word, in my experience. I am all for planning, goal-setting, bench-marking essential learnings and seeing the big picture over time. But—wasn’t it Dewey who said that you have to start with what the student knows? And if most of the kids aren’t confident in their skills, should you really be moving on? When does the schedule start driving teachers’ reluctance to pay attention to what students have actually mastered? Are we willing to (forgive me) leave a child or two behind?

Of course, this raises all kinds of questions about our new obsession with pacing guides and the oft-repeated “mile-wide, inch-deep” curriculum coverage complaint. I was tickled to stumble across an article, Death to the Syllabus, in the American Association of Colleges and Universities fall journal. If higher education—a place where Sir Ken Robinson says professors have bodies only to carry their heads to meetings—is re-thinking the syllabus, there may be hope for a more organic, student-centered learning after all.

In recent pieces on his Gadfly blog and in Education Week, Chester Finn remembers his unsuccessful experience teaching an advanced course called “Problems of American Democracy” at Newton HS, in 1966. He blames this failure on, among other things, lack of a syllabus. I don’t mean to pick on the Checkmeister, but if there were ever a course where the readings and discussions ought to change, daily—a ripe opportunity for using current events as curriculum—it would be a class on American democracy in 1966. Reminds me of November, 2000, when every Civics and Government teacher in the country who could tear themselves away from their assigned chapters had a first-class teachable moment, complete with instructional resources and juicy activities and delivered daily through the students’ own media, on the Electoral College.

I ended up totally enjoying my year of teaching math, by the way. I was never more than a few days ahead of the kids, and the content was never something I could teach on auto-pilot. The extra thinking and intellectual effort were a gratifying challenge, however. I learned as much as my students about deconstructing mathematics, and did eventually finish the assigned books, just under the wire.

Real learning cannot be confined to boxes and schedules—and tolerance for uncertainty, even floundering may actually be an asset in a rapidly changing world.