A Few Words About Love Before the Turn of the Year

Community Is Infinite (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I. Faith in Other

I have been thinking about the mass of educational reform that has been occurring since the mid-1980s in the United States and trying to name what most disturbs me.  Yet, it was not with this in mind that I sat down to reread Pedagogy of the Oppressed and found myself lingering in Chapter 3, listening hard to Freire's words about dialogue.  He says:

Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all). Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue; the “dialogical man” believes in others even before he meets them face to face.

And perhaps this is what is most missing from the reform efforts during the last three decades: faith in other-- a faith that is (in)formed by love.  Imagine a faith in other that is so profound, so elemental that it is present before one meets face to face? This is the foundation to Freire's work.

Faith and its correlate, love, are also largely missing in the corporate reform efforts of schools.  This is the do unto others crowd; the Manifest Destiny run amok crew.

And it may well be this absence of love and faith is why these reform efforts continue to fail, as they should (and do). These reformers don't have faith in you or me.

They do not know how to love us or even that they must.


II. And in the End...

Justice is What Love Looks Like in Public (M.A. Reilly, 8.14.14)

Freire told us that "true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love." Quoting Che Guevara, he adds, “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality" (from Venceremos— The Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara, edited by John Gerassi (New York, 1969), p. 398.).

Nothing ridiculous there.

Love.

Let us begin and end with this in mind each and every time we think about ways to (in)form our work.

Wishing you the grace to love and the faith to try in 2015.








Cited
Freire, Paulo (2014-08-18). Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition (Kindle Locations 1289-1292). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

To the Temple, Singing

The Suburbs (M.A. Reilly, 12/2011)

I.

I was looking out a window the other day and noticed how the squirrels seem to have overtaken the side yard. They appear so certain, so 'moved in'--casually lounging on 'lawn' furniture we had yet to put away in preparation for winter.  All of us almost readying for winter.  They eating and then lounging on the chaise.  Me watching, a cup of Irish tea at hand, looking out the side door.

I live in the suburbs: that geographic space existing without its own rhythm--a colony of houses interrupted by strip malls and signaled by the long line of cars that motor out each morning--headlights cutting the near dark and who return the same way at twilight.

Now to be sure, I also live with forests of trees and reservoirs and paths you can almost get lost on as this is an almost-suburb.  A place without any stoplights. 30 minutes north of Manhattan on the Jersey side. A place others come to 'recreate': to fish, cross country ski, hike, sail, bird watch and kill deer and bears.


II.

Louis Simpson (1963)  in the poem, "In the Suburbs," writes:

There’s no way out.

You were born to waste your life.
You were born to this middleclass life

As others before you
Were born to walk in procession
To the temple, singing.

In "After Midnight", Simpson narrates and then wonders:

The dark streets are deserted,   

With only a drugstore glowing   

Softly, like a sleeping body;

With one white, naked bulb   

In the back, that shines   

On suicides and abortions.

Who lives in these dark houses?   

I am suddenly aware   

I might live here myself.

The garage man returns

And puts the change in my hand,   

Counting the singles carefully.

 Who lives in these dark houses?  These dark schools? 

III.

I am ill-suited for the suburbs, perhaps you are as well. I have failed at suburbia, knowing only the names of a few neighbors and not attending the PTA or the local women's group. To be honest, I haven't even tried.  Suburbia and the schools they inspire are intricately connected, and the values that (in)form both have become homogenized.

We hardly know how to breathe.

Perhaps we need to read more poetry as poets often allow us to see what is most difficult to name: ourselves in precarious spaces.  If we read America as suburb, do we wonder why schools feel less substantial then memory claims--that anyone with a few million and a borrowed idea can 'reform' a school, perhaps yours?  Just as the suburbs are a conglomerate of 'placed upon' definitions of self and geography--so too are our public schools. Stripped of place and local identity, they exist as foils, endlessly reflecting the most recent image placed before them.

Here is a partial list of how schools get 'reformed':

1. Reform large high schools by making smaller 'academies' within the high school.
   
2. Close down schools and reconstitute these schools as something else.
   
3. Replace 'low expectation' schools with 'high expectation' schools.
4.  Replace 'low expectation' teachers with 'high expectation' teachers.
5. Replace neighborhood schools with magnet schools.
6. Replace public schools with charter schools.
   
7. Replace schools with for-profit schools.
8. Allow for vouchers and parental choice.
9. Hold a lottery.
10. Cheat on high stakes tests.
    
11. Replicate school models in any number of schools in order to 'scale up innovation'.
12. Revise curricula.
13. Test.
14. Purchase scientifically proven programs and implement.
15. Develop pacing charts and enforce them.
16. Purchase units of study and enforce their use.
17. Develop professional learning communities.
18. Aim high and embrace change.
19. Make effective teachers.
20. Create alternative methods to certify teachers.
    
21. Evaluate children, teachers, principals and use these results to do x.
22. Find the 'great' teachers and have them teach the country via 'distance' learning.
23. Discount poverty as the indicator of student success.
24. Tie graduation to passing state tests to 'ensure excellence'.
    
25. Do unto others.
    

Do you see how this doing unto others is a lot like what has happened to the space of land between cities and farms?  Perhaps the connections between schooling and suburbia are so as we are who we are. We are what we value.

Is it our imagination, collective and otherwise, that needs to be re/inspired?


Works Cited

Simpson, Louis. 1963. “In the Suburbs.” At the End of the Open Road. Wesleyan University Press.
Simpson, Louis. 2003. "After Midnight."  The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940 -2001. Rochester, NY: BOA.

Visualizing School Reform & School Redesign

In 1958, Thomas Pynchon wrote "Entropy," a short story published in his book, Slow Learner.

"Nevertheless," continued Callisto, "he found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to a certain phenomena in his own world. He saw, for example, the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American 'consumerism' discovered a similar tendency from the least to most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. He found himself, in short, restating Gibbs' prediction in social terms, and envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease." (Slow Learner, 88-89)

I wonder about this heat-death of ideas when I think about school reform.  I was thinking about energy it takes to fuel school reform and how top-down methods simply do not produce enough energy to even sustain themselves, let alone fuel 'other' interests, approaches. Just visually the design of top-down reform for complex matters seems an odd match--perhaps a hold over based on the idea of input-output systems where the mater at hand is at best, complicated, but never complex.

Visualizing School Reform

Humans mess up such simple systems.

We are inherently unpredictable.

Rhizomatic redesign methods allow for the potential of far more energy to be produced as simultaneous actions can and often do occur as a rhizomatic system is one without a beginning or end, but exists intermezzo: in the middle of things.

Visualizing Rhizomatic Redesign

Hmm.  A bit of playing about on my part.
Wondering what you think.

An Open Letter to Arne Duncan

Dear Mr. Duncan:

There are no coincidences. I have been struggling with writing to you ever since the #AskArne call was announced on Twitter.  I knew 140 characters wouldn't do it.

So today when I opened an email from TC Record, I read one commentary that caught my eye: Why We All Need Integrated Schools: A Critique of a 'Successful' Urban Charter School and I thought of you and the USDOE. Zoė Burkholder offers an insightful critique explaining why integrated schools are needed based on her visit to DC Prep, an urban charter school in Washington DC, not too far from where you are located. This past year 100% of the 8th graders at DC Prep scored proficiently on the District math and reading tests.  

Ms. Burkholder, though, asks an important question. 

As I sat through the presentation by DC Prep founder and CEO Emily Lawson, I began to wonder what it costs to raise test scores on reading and math to 100% proficiency. I don’t mean financial costs, although the charter school’s impressive fundraising history suggests that money doesn’t hurt. I mean what does it cost in terms of educational ideals to focus so intently on the single goal of academic achievement as measured by standardized tests in reading and math?

It is when Burkholder digs a bit deeper into the type of learning privileged at DC Prep that questionable practices arise.  She writes:

A major learning component at DC Prep includes what Lawson terms “character education.” Lawson, who is white and upper middle-class, explains that students wear uniforms and are expected to conform to a complex set of behavioral rules and codes. This includes strict silence in the hallways and eye contact and appropriate verbal responses to teachers. The list of social skills becomes more specific for each grade, for example, teachers evaluate fourth graders for their ability to follow directions, get the teacher’s attention appropriately, accept criticism, communicate honestly, and express their feelings appropriately. Behavior is monitored through the use of a yellow score card that each student carries all day long. Teachers reward students for good behavior and penalize them for bad behavior by instructing students to add or subtract a virtual dollar to their score cards. This kind of behavioral conditioning is visible in many “successful” urban charter schools, like the KIPP schools, which use hand signals and chants to reinforce behavior.

In April of last year, a former graduate student of mine wrote a compelling post, "Miss C Recounts Teaching at a South Bronx Charter School." In that post, Miss C, a first grade teacher, wrote: 

Along with endless test prep for NYS exams, assessment and the quest for data were drilled into our curriculum and practices. Never in my life had I such a dizzying array of assessments, especially in the primary grades. Our math curriculum came with weekly tests that I had to grade using actual percentages scrawled on top, which felt bizarre and cruel to hand back to a six year old (not to mention a stark contrast to my usual star or smiley face). We were instructed to keep data on everything, and make sure anything we put in a portfolio, or hung up on a bulletin board was aligned to a rubric and graded. Our heavily scrutinized bulletin boards--which I secretly referred to as bulletin boreds--were depressing exhibitions of uniform student work that was graded and accompanied by lists of NYS standards and rubrics so observers could see what the “purpose” of the assignment was and how/why students received whatever grade they got. Giving grades was bad enough: putting them on display in the hallway was even worse. Low grades were not permitted to be displayed, so some students never had work shown. Bulletin boards were no place for whimsical artwork adorned with painted handprints, glitter, or anything fun. Nothing “counted” unless it had a grade and was approved by administration...

...I wonder about the high test scores my previous school boasts, and if they are an indication of real learning, or the result of endless hours of relentless test-prep that has taught students how to choose the correct answer at the expense of actually learning anything valuable.

In Dressing the Corpse: Professional Development and the Play of Singularities,  I chronicled a beginning teacher at an urban public school in Pennsylvania.  The teacher toiling beneath the district demands to "finish the basal literacy program" was required to adhere to a pacing chart that accounted for all available time from the beginning of the school year through most of June and to test all of her 2nd graders weekly using a battery of district prescribed literacy assessments that were aligned to the National Reading Panel Report.  As a result, the teacher was more concerned with completing the requisite number of pages each day than on thinking about the meaning children made. After leaving the teacher one afternoon, I went home and wrote:

On my way home from Harding Street School, I wonder what sense Ms. Sheridan is making of her new career. Is this what she imagined and hoped teaching might be? What is being displaced by the considerable importance attached to completing the program? Ms. Sheridan is learning how to implement technical aspects of the program, but I can’t help but think that the costs of this development may be greater than we can calculate...Ms. Sheridan and teachers working in similar conditions who are required to keep to a script are a lot like epic characters: “bounded, pre-formed, individualized by their various situations and destinies, but not by varying ‘truths’” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 35). Bakhtin explains that epic is “a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible” (1981, p. 13). As a closed text, program language can be mimed, but not lived; for it matters not how long or how well the bard tells the given story, it remains a story beyond his touch, influence, and rebuke. By requiring teachers to implement “proven” programs as epic, what local truths are silenced? What potential insights are missed?

Gilles Deleuze notes, “[b]eneath the general operation of laws, however, there always remains the play of singularities” (1994, p. 25). It is this play of singularities that is of interest here. When implementing epic programs, there is neither occasion nor disposition to attend to the singularities present in the classroom.

So hold those thoughts about control, absence of agency, and behavioral conditioning and now take a look at the questions Ira Socol raises in his latest post, What are We Teaching? 

So, I am forced to ask this question, what have we been teaching, in our schools, in our homes, in our churches, in our everyday lives, that has allowed so many completely amoral people to not just be among us, but to rise to positions of responsibility?

In the post Ira links together actions where military and police oppression of citizen speech resulted in physical harm and death and closes by reminding us:

But I'm going to add something, the University of California at Davis, like the Pennsylvania State University, are not isolated places. They are all of us. These crimes, or those on the streets of New York, or the streets of Oakland, or the streets of London, did not happen because of a few villains, they happened because we all stopped working hard enough to build a moral, fair society.

Mr. Duncan, I think we are racing to the top of the wrong priority. You and President Obama repeatedly discuss the need to secure our economic security via education.  I want to urge you that without first securing our moral will, we have little left to offer our youngsters but yellow cards where we mark their behavior and award or debit them accordingly.  The distance between this repeated behavior at children and the societal behaviors Ira outlines is very close--very aligned.  One might argue that the first done repeatedly will surely lead to adults who are at best compliant citizens too afraid to voice their opposition or to even know they ought to feel outrage.

As a mom, I would raise the roof if I had a child at any of the schools written about in this post. I imagine you and President Obama would too. And as certainly as we know this to be true, we also know that there are significant numbers of parents who are not privileged to take such an action. Their actual voices are often missing in these conversations. The assumptions that govern how learners and their teachers are situated at school bears notice more so than a single high stakes test measure done on the cheap.  Compliance is learned not only by what we say, but also by what we repeatedly do. Some questions to frame our viewing might include:

1. Are teachers and students valued as contributors of curriculum, not merely vessels through which curriculum passes?
2. Are teachers and learners privileged to work inside the messiness of error making, problem framing and solving, and reflection without the threat of reprimand based on students' performances on single state measures?  
3. Are teachers and learners agents of their own learning?
4. Are teachers and learners acted upon by forces beyond their control?
5. Do teachers and learners toil beneath the weight of irrational pacing charts, scripted programs, and endless test prepping?
6. Do teachers and principals fear job loss and does this influence their work?
7. Do children fear retention and does this influence their learning?
8. Are learners controlled by behavioral management methods that are akin to what one might find in a prison setting?

Nel Noddings (2007) in When School Reform Goes Wrong states, "Most reform movements, paradoxically, have been flawed by moral shortcomings" (p. 79).   I think we know this to be true. Noddings closes by not only asking for NCLB to be repealed, but also offers ten major changes to the USDOE to consider. I am not sure if you have read these, but I thought I would pass them along. The full text can be found on pages 81-83.  She is asking you and your agency to:

1. Recognize explicitly that education is broader than schooling.
2. Recognize explicitly that children are different in their aptitudes and interests...
3. Shift attention in research to, or at least include research that questions, basic premises.
4. Deemphasize randomized experiments and field trials.
5. Study carefully the preparation of teachers.
6. Discourage states and districts from using retention in grade and withholding diplomas on the basis of test scores.
7. Recognize that children develop at different rates.
8. Encourage responsible experimentation designed to increase relations of care and trust.
9. Encourage the study of new ideas for universal education.
10. Restore genuine respect for the full range of human talents and occupations.

The course we are on is wrong. It is harming our children, our moral center, and our economic security.  There is no shortage of voices demonstrating this through countless classroom and parental accounts.  We need to listen. The adherence to testing accountability as the sum of what makes a learner and the learner's teacher 'excellent' is irrational.  I urge you to broaden the field of influence and start over. Beginning with Noddings's list would make for a fine start.  I am volunteering to help and suspect I am not alone. 

Before We Let Them Go, We Better Understand Why We Treat Them as We Do

Richard Elmore concludes an essay, What Would Happen If We Let Them Go?,  by wondering:

“…what would happen if we simply opened the doors and let the students go; if we let them walk out of the dim light of the overhead projector into the sunlight; if we let them decide how, or whether, to engage this monolith? Would it be so terrible? Could it be worse than what they are currently experiencing? Would adults look at young people differently if they had to confront their children on the street, rather than locking them away in institutions? Would it force us to say more explicitly what a humane and healthy learning environment might look like? Should discussions of the future of school reform be less about the pet ideas of professional reformers and more about what we're doing to young people in the institution called school?"

American Bust Stop: Prisons (M.A.Reilly, 2010)

In the essay, Elmore recounts his visit to two high school English classes and chronicles the sleeping students he watches in the first classroom and the teacher who outlines in detail all of the decisions students will need to make to "organize a notebook into a portfolio" in the second classroom. He says that these examples are not the exceptions, but rather they are the expected.  In both classrooms, as well as in the school, adults' misuse of power is displayed.

Two ideas strike me as I read the essay:

1. Alternatives to traditional high school are present already, such as: options that divorce seat time from earning graduation credits, the development of unschools, virtual schools, early college, blended learning, and home schooling.  The choice to open the door may not be our choice after all.
2. Alternatives will not answer why we allow and sanction such disregard to happen.

What worries me is the probability that although the specific symptoms Elmore identifies may not be transferred to these new learning methods, the underlying power issues surely will be if we fail to understand why we keep reinventing reforms that maintain the primacy of adult power.

Having students follow an alternative path is not a solution to the issues of power and responsibility. Such action will not help us to understand why teachers, counselors,  administrators, security personnel, and support staff sanction the misuse of power to occur repeatedly.  We need to understand why indifference and over attention, just two examples in a list of power mishaps, happen. If we fail to understand and take action, we may well reinvent the same power relationships in new venues.

So how do we begin this rather straight forward redesign? We can start by honoring the work we are paid to do and being responsible for how all students are addressed, taught, disciplined, and empowered. We cannot act on Elmore's belief to understand what we're doing to young people in schools if we permit ourselves to be blind and deaf. We are complicit by our silence.

Sisyphus in the New Year

When I was contemplating writing a blog, I found myself split between wanting to compose entries about art and wanting to post entries about teaching and learning. In striking a balance between, I have come to see that each (art and education) requires a mindfulness that (in)forms the work I do, fail to do, refuse to do, and desire to do. Mindfulness occasions deep living and profound pain. Consider Camus.

Towards the end of Albert Camus's "The Myth of Sisyphus," he notes:

"The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious."  

Sisyphus.

My work as an artist and a teacher requires a mindfulness of what cannot be named earlier than the present moment will allow and at the same time often requires a rehearsal of possibilities, as well as deep reflection.  As an artist-educator, even when I work deliberately, I know that the present when traded for a prescribed truth, often yields something cliched. It takes me time to understand what I have created and to assign it value--value that sometimes changes alongside reflection and a passage of time. All things reveal themselves in time and being mindful allows me (sometimes) the opportunity to come to know and understand an insight and to (re)present that insight in the work I create. Insight, as Camus suggests, is accompanied by pain that redresses absurdity as tragedy. The dilemma associated with consciousness is old. It is the dialogue that Socrates and Malcolm X might have had: Socrates says that the unexamined life is not worth living and Malcolm X  writes that the examined life is painful. Living deliberately as artist and teacher requires both. Avoid such dilemma and little of value is left.


When I reread Camus's essay, I thought about how tragic US education feels. 30 years into a career as a teacher, learner, and leader and I see that so much of the rhetoric reported in popular press and touted by those with significant power is blatantly foolish, situates learners (teachers, administrators and students) as widgets, and is based on a belief of certainty. In these days, certainty trumps thoughtfulness. Consider how certainty is privileged in the recent post by The Christian Science Monitor, Education Reform: Eight Chiefs to Watch. With the exception of the first educator, Jason Glass, the remaining school chiefs' agendas, as represented in the article, suggest certainty as the logic that informs their positions and ideas. These leaders' views are posited as representing the singular and truthful perspective, as if meaning could be determined before the utterance. In the article, it states that these leaders want to:

1. Reward effective teachers (What does "being" effective mean? Is being a singular state?  What is effective? Effective for whom? By what measures? In what context? Across what time period? In what subject areas? At what grade levels? By whose standards? Is it possible to be effective in one context and not another?)

2. Give greater school choice to parents (The word choice means a variety of things from choice within a public system to choice beyond the public system. What choice do these chiefs want? Who gets privileged to make a choice? Who does not?  What happens to our democracy if choice weakens public education? Is separate by equal okay now? Does a democracy require public education? Is there any correlate that suggests "choice" of schools yields higher student scores on state mandated test?  What do higher scores on state mandated test mean to a learner, parent-guardian, teacher, employer...?)

3. Get "tough" with teacher unions (Are the ills of public education [whatever those "ills" actually are] directly related to teacher unions? Are all unions the same? What is tenure?  How is tenure represented in states? What happens in the absence of tenure? In the presence of tenure? Can tenure be singled out as a factor of anything? Is the presence or the removal of tenure related to a student's achievement and if so, achievement at what?)


Mikhail Bakhtin writes that the word is overpopulated with the intention of others.  We seem to have failed to understand this and instead act as if a word had a singular and agreed upon meaning. This seems to be the case today as the understanding of "education terms" such as achievement, excellence, effective teacher, school choice, funding, toughness, unions and so on are offered with little substance and less context.  Yet, meaning is always tied to the utterance.  Separate it from the context and we have little to offer and less to know.

The "discussion" about public education in the United States is a lesson in hegemony. Select people with power tell the rest of us what is truth. Their truth is uttered often enough and it is repeated by other people of means, politicians, TV and print commentators, business leaders, writers, speakers, educators, parents, bloggers, tweeters, until the words are meaningless and a position becomes a given truth. No need to understand what we mean by a given word, the task is to just continue to babble the rhetoric, like some long forgotten Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill. No wonder we feel so tired and oddly stuck. This is the tragedy about which Camus writes;  the naked awareness that allows us to see ourselves and our situation at this moment in time.  Our situation is not only absurd, it is tragic as it is impossible to discuss anything without offering alongside some definition of term and intention. Discourse is dead.

What then is needed to challenge the one view truth being passed along as reality? Oddly, on the US Department of State's web page an interesting definition of democracy is offered.

Democracies make several assumptions about human nature. One . . . is that any society comprises a great diversity of interests and individuals who deserve to have their voices heard and their views respected. As a result, one thing is true of all healthy democracies: They are noisy. (US Department of State, International Information Programs, online)

As an artist and a teacher, representation and voice are critical. Agency is critical and requires local discourse.  Noisy would be so much better than the singular drone of "those we should be following." Let's stop following "those in the know"and instead engender local conversations.