Edward Said wrote that “a beginning is accepted as a beginning after we are long past beginning and after our apprenticeship is over” (1975, Beginnings: Intention and Method, p.76). Being beyond a moment often helps us to reframe it.
Tonight, I am wondering about the partial beginnings I have known.
In writing about the partially
unknown beginning, Said explains “that we make and accept it at the same time that we realize that we are ‘wrong’” ( p. 78). In reading Said's words, I think about the messiness of school. We have accepted schools as they have been made. Fictions and realities
are co-constructed on a page, as well as in a classroom--in the school house. These fictions, these realities serve us little.
There are new doorways, we need to walk through if we can find the courage to do so.
II.
In
the current push for the Common Core State Standards and “tougher” normed assessments that dedicate weeks out of the school year for preparation and testing the folly of our ways is more and more obvious. Our need for certainty obscures that learning has always been a human enterprise,
temporally located, fictitious and real. Yes, fictitious and real. Schooling though is not the same as learning. It never has been--even when we needed it to be so. The schools we have known--the ones we have made are ending. And tonight I know that another generation will not sit tight for the dusting off of something old, something too blue, something they no longer need. The signs are everywhere.
Identity is
composed in the joining of fictions and realities—be it on paper or in the lived-curriculum of a classroom.Said explains that this composition holds constant “so long as we have language to help us and hinder
us in finding it, and so long as language provides us with a word whose meaning
must be made certain if it is not to
be wholly obscure” (p.78). The meaning of school can no longer be made certain.
What gets made in its stead, interests me, even though I know what we make can't help but be wrong.
American Bus Stop III: No Lemming Left Behind (M.A. Reilly, 2009)
The word “pioneer” betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West—the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited (p. 159).
Biss, Eula (2011-03-01). Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays. Graywolf Press.
I.
I sometimes think we must have forgotten that schools are inhabited places. There are bodies there. Ones that embody dreams, hopes, quiet fears, small and large talents, silence.
Schools are lived places. Messy like that.
Waiting (M.A. Reilly, 2010)
II.
With a keen, relentless drive to do good, and for some, to profit--school reformers have displaced the bodies of children, teachers, staff, and administrators. More and more the story of education is about them.
The kids are the new disappeared and in their wake the burgeoning bags of the next best thing remains. They have been displaced by best practices, roots and wings, TFA, extended school years, standards-based curriculum, tests and more tests, and most recently anything with the phrase, common core, attached.
One can hardly breathe given the crowd.
Intersection (M.A. Reilly, 2013)
III.
Reform is a fenced field. Some of it barbed, some too elegant to forget. And all of it is contained. We begin to die the day we are not permitted to act, to create--the day when we forget to remember. It's like that scene in O Pioneers!, when Carl Linstrum tells Alexandra Bergsons:
All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, that exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things.
I've been thinking about what might be left of public education and democracy, what might be left for our children and their children after the current crop of methods to 'reform' public education fail. In the pause between failure and the inevitable rise of a new crop of doing unto others, what will remain and for whom?
Efficiency seems to cross the various reform efforts. Scratch beneath the surface of the Common Core Standards, national assessments, for-profit schools, charters, vouchers, pop films like Waiting for Superman, teacher/principal evaluations based on test scores, removal of collective bargaining, increased co-payment by public school educators for health benefits, publicly displaying teacher 'effetciveness' ratings in national newspapers and you will find efficiency. Much of the reforms rest on a belief that 'optimization of the system' (and the people) will lead to better student outcomes as measured by state mathematics and reading assessments.
It's the mistake of substituting system for people when trying to optimize that most concerns me. It reminds me of this classic clip from Modern Times. Imagine this scene today. Perhaps you see Chaplin as the teacher who is being 'enhanced' by the efficient machine? Or some might see him as the student who is being 'optimized' via the great testing machine.
Efficiency is often the excuse for doing onto others. We blindly pay homage to efficiency and allow it to excuses our worse actions.
“The more you optimize elements of a complex system of humans and nature for some specific goal, the more you diminish that system’s resilience. A drive for an efficient optimal state outcome has the effect of making the total system more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances" (p.9).
This quote sent me in search of more by Walker and Salt. Later int he boo they write:
"When we aim to increase the efficiency of returns from some part of the system by trying to tightly control it, we usually do so at the cost of the system's resilience. Other parts of the system begin to change in response to his new state of affairs--a part of the system, now constant, that used to vary in concert with others. A system with little resilience is vulnerable to being shifted over a threshold into a new regime of function and structure. And as we have seen this new regime is frequently one that doesn't provide us with the goods and services we want. And, very importantly, i is not a space from which we can easily return" (p. 141).
The observation, 'Other parts of the system begin to change in response to his new state of affairs--a part of the system, now constant, that used to vary in concert with others,' is particularly chilling. It made me think about how the relentless push to ever increasing efficiency often pushes us to value fast fast fast as if it was our very self we have been trained to out run.
We speed up.
Our lives, in and out of school become ever more crazy. We begin to resemble a scene out of Godfrey Reggio'sKoyaanisqatsi.
So who remains? Who gets lost? Who is abandoned in the efficient new world order of school reform? Will we notice? Will we exercise the will to care?
Screen Shot from Koyaanisqatsi
A Different Way
There are alternatives we can embrace, especially when the certainty of standards, testing, charters, speed up, and so on collapses under its own weight. In Walk Out, Walk On, the authors tell us, 'when certainty collapses, it’s often replaced by curiosity'. This curiosity, I suspect, leads some to walk out and on from restrictive systems.
Wheatley & Frieze explain that "Walk Outs' are:
people who bravely choose to leave behind situations, jobs, relationships, and ideas that restrict and confine them, anything that inhibits them. They walk on to the ideas, people, and practices that enable them to explore and discover new gifts, new possibilities (p.4).
I tend to agree with poet, Adrienne Rich, when she observes:
I have to cast my lot
with those who age
after age,
perversely,
and with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
Reconstituting the world (or at best a local parcel you call home) is situated well in a root belief of the Berkana Exchange. Again Wheatley and Frieze write:
We create healthy and resilient communities by relying on the wisdom and wealth available in our people, traditions and environment. This belief has led us to know that we must include the elders and the youth, we must invite in the wisdom of women, we must reinvigorate our history and traditions and discover their gifts for today’s world (p. 220).
The Exchange offers 8 principles to guide Walk Outs' work. They include (pp. 221- 224):
Start anywhere, follow it everywhere.
We make our path by walking it.
We have what we need.
The leaders we need are already here.
We are living the worlds we want today.
We walk at the pace of the slowest.
We listen, even to the whispers.
We turn to one another.
There are those who have walked this open road before us.
Walker, Brian and David Salt 2006. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Seattle: Island Press.
Wheatley, Margaret; Frieze, Deborah (2011-04-11). Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now . Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Scene 1 A former graduate student shared that shortly after taking over a class (she's the 4th teacher this year) she reviewed the children's writers' notebooks. She said she was dismayed to see that a few students had written the following entry:
"I will not talk in class anymore."
Scene 2 Last week a teacher I know discontinued working with a student teacher. She indicated that the student was not ready to teach given her lack of preparation that resulted in significant and consistent errors while teaching. The student teacher was denied a credential and returned to the college.
Scene 3
Some years ago I oversaw the literacy program for a public city school system. A neighboring charter school would hire the city's Reading Recovery teachers to work as after school tutors in order to teach those students who were most at risk for reading difficulties. The leader of the Charter explained that he could not match the salaries of such senior and well educated teachers, nor could his school pay for the continuing contact and other costs associated with Reading Recovery. What he could and did do was to pay for after school eduction for children. As he told me then, "Our teachers are too green to know how to do this (prevent reading difficulties). They can help the Reading Recovery teachers and learn as the students are learning."
Scene 4 Yesterday, I passed by a charter school in an inner city. It was a beautiful building in a neighborhood of mostly boarded buildings and largely littered sidewalks. The building was well maintained and attractive with the sidewalks surrounding it, neatly swept. I thought about the number of studies I have read and the plethora of comments from public school advocates I have read all indicating that charter schools are no better or worse than public schools as measured by single test instruments and I wondered if such a measurement makes any difference to the people who send their children to this charter school.
I think of the players (teachers, students, student teacher, administrators) in these minor dramas and wonder about the complex issue that (in)form our understanding of schooling—a topic that ought to be fraught with positions, especially these days. Where one might expect to hear the clamor of different voices chiming, there seems to be just two dominant voices that relentlessly sound and sound again. Are you pro-public schools or are you pro-charter schools?
Such a query is hegemonic posturing at best. The current public discourse about teaching and learning is dangerously narrowed in order to position one's perspective and to obfuscate the more challenging realities we fail to discuss:
who has consistent opportunities to access high level curricula in this country and who does not and why is that;
what constitutes high level curricula (for whom?);
how do local values matter;
what are the relationships between poverty and learning and how do we create equitable environments for all;
how do we reconcile differences (who & what gets valued and not).
Instead of substantive conversations that take longer than the end page in a popular press magazine, we are subjected to smoke and mirrors. Consider the recent Newsweek column, A Case of Senioritis, Jonathan Alter penned. Alter writes:
After exhaustive study, the Gates Foundation and other experts have learned that the only in-school factor that fully correlates is quality teaching, which seniority hardly guarantees. It’s a moral issue. Who can defend a system where top teachers are laid off in a budget crunch for no other reason than that they’re young?
I am curious as to what study he is referencing (no citation was included) and take exception (and hope you do as well) with the syllogistic leap in logic that posits "top" teachers as being synonymous with youth. Is Alter suggesting that youth and inexperience are correlates for fine teaching? Is there some juried study that shows that? The faultiness in such thinking is extraordinary, but no longer unusual in these Shoot Out at the O.K. Corral days.
Lost in such binary advantaging (get rid of senior teachers and keep young teachers) are the necessary conversations about privilege, quality, relevance, context, opportunity, and empowerment we need to be having. This us vs. them drama distracts and keeps us from addressing our shared responsibilities regarding democracy and schooling. Recall John Dewey who wrote, “We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.”
I can't help but wonder what sense Dewey would make of the repeated calls for action (get rid of tenure, stop health benefits, do not pay for teachers' higher degrees, employ beginning teachers, privilege youth) by bureaucrats and billionaires who seem to make such utterances with mindfulness that makes me wonder to what end our democracy is secure. Their posturing (employ young teachers, build charter schools) leaves not only public schools in chaos by undermining public trust, but our democractic system as well.
I will not talk (in class) anymore may well be the first volley in this grand monologue about public schooling, especially as we seem to be running headlong into a two class system populated by those who have and those who serve those who have. Makes me wonder if all this posturing is a prelude to a return to serfdom.
