GO FISH

Sometimes, it’s not all bad to be a tiny minnow in the murky depths of a very large pond, watching clashes of the fish titans above. You just keep swimming, swimming, swimming—because you have no other choice.

When it comes to making important decisions about the work they do, teachers are usually swimming well below the action. Their own informed observations and solutions for problems that occur when Policy from On High meets Intractable Educational Dilemma don’t count for much—but they keep showing up at school and doing what they can, anyway. Some of them show up and do wildly successful and creative things, with all kinds of kids. Mostly, however, all of this happens beneath the surface.

Two things that I read this week reinforced that point:

• Joann Jacobs’ piece in Britannia Blog, reviewing a semi-snarky report in Education Next, wherein the author (Robert Slater) gets pretty excited about research showing that (wait for it) teachers are middle-class moderates and even conservatives!—or at least more conservative than their unions, which seems to be the main point the report strives to make.
• A kind-of sociogram, connecting a constellation of education policy houses, through something that might be called “board inbreeding,” although my new personal hero and blog smarty, Eduwonkette, calls these “interlocking directorates.” Eduwonkette muses that there seems to be a pretty small number of folks whose goals and interests, well, interlock, doing the writing and opining about education policy these days, asserting their informed viewpoints. Is that good or bad? Eduwonkette demurs.

Remember sociograms from ed-school in the 70s? (Oh—you didn’t go to-ed school in the 70s?) Sociograms were these little schemas you could construct for your class, by asking students which three friends they’d like to sit next to (or make a diorama with—these were the 70s, remember). You could then create sad diagrams, boxes and arrows, with some boxes surrounded by affinity-arrows and others sitting sadly off to the side, arrows going out, but none coming in. Then you’d know which students had power and influence in your class (if it wasn’t already abundantly clear after the first week of school). I forget what comes next—Values Clarification?

Anyway, same principle with Eduwonkette’s diagram—it’s the equivalent of the cool kids’ table in the ed-policy cafeteria. So many overlapping doctrines and subterranean alliances —whose are powerful and attractive enough to capture the policy spotlight? Eduwonkette also links to a nice set of essays by Dean Millot on how policy is marketed these days, which give us some insight into how things work, without taking sides. 

Jacobs points out that teachers are the ballast of the American educational structure, a conservative system if there ever was one, in the classic sense of “conservative”—not eager to change. Having eaten lunch in a teachers’ lounge for 30 years, I am not surprised by data showing that teachers go to church and have traditional social values. They’re teachers, for goodness sake, people who chose low-publicity service careers working with children. People who let a handful of highly verbal types inside the Beltway dissect their life work and propose mandates to address their shortcomings.

Richard Ingersoll in “Who Controls Teachers’ Work?” compares teachers to factory foremen, caught between layers of decision-making above and the job requirement of compelling students, in the only stratum below them, to work, er, learn. But just as foremen, working on the line, perceive ways to improve daily production, so teachers often foresee and work out problems in implementing policy. Teacher unions have to represent all teachers; their public rhetoric must be broad-based. Actual teachers, on the other hand, work in highly variable contexts and often live in the communities where they teach. The voices we need to be listening to may not be those of organizations; the resident policy wisdom in schools is more likely to come from thoughtful teachers there.

A couple of years ago, I piloted a graduate course in teacher leadership for a research university near Washington D.C. One of the class assignments was reading Eduwonk for a week, evaluating the just-between-us-insiders dialogue and confident recitation of what was important in Ed Policy World. Students in the class thought the blog was an exclusive club for self-elected experts. They pointed out that while high-profile education bloggers were seeking grants, currying favor and pontificating, they were back in their classrooms. Swimming, swimming, swimming.

Comments

[Michelle Wise Capen]

Here's an amen and hallelujah from the choir! Thank you for another great blog.

[John Holland]

Where to start Nancy.

Well how about here. You rock! I think that you are spot on about the big fish addn little fish but, ... (wait for it) some of us little fish want to be big fish too. And that is the great thing about the internet. I can comment on Andy's blog just like I can on Russo's or Wonkette's and everyone can read it. They can also click back to me, and there is the jam in the sandwich, teachers have a voice in this sociogram too. If they want one.

[Nancy Flanagan]

Hey, John and Michelle.

I want to be a big (OK, bigger) fish, too. We can comment on the big-fish blogs, and dialogue with Famous Thinkers, but teachers are not yet at the table, when it comes to policy creation.

Teacher unions are at the table. But each teacher union represents, literally, more than a million teachers (1.4 million for the AFT and 3.2 million for the NEA). And the handful of folks--a few dozen--in the sociogram represent a small but very powerful cadre of think-alike decision-makers.

[Bob]

But, you, Nancy, sit at the table through your blog and in other ways. Continue describing your policy proposals. Formulate them in memorable ways.

Never explain. Never complain. Never distain.

You never know which policy makers will read your blog, what they'll remember, when they may use it, or what influence it will have on a policy that influences student learning.

[The Professor]

Good teaching takes work and experience. You can't expect to walk into a classroom for the first time and immediately connect with every student, make everything clear to everyone and teach every child everything he or she needs to know. What you can do, though, is learn from the experience of successful teachers. We've designed our resources for new teachers to share the ideas and experience of excellent teachers worldwide to help you find ways of learning from colleagues in your own school and school system.