tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51134793008979833882024-03-13T17:46:01.151-04:00An Urban Teacher's Educationjames boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.comBlogger314125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-29206116780690541262020-05-15T17:12:00.000-04:002020-05-15T19:35:38.835-04:00A Fundamental Redesign of Our Schools<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I climbed the hill leading up to one of my favorite coffee shops in Seattle this morning to enjoy a coffee while taking in a phenomenal view of the city on this beautiful day. As I took a seat on a bench, I noticed there was a woman on a conference call sitting on the bench next to me. She'd put the conference call on speaker, so I could hear everything being said.<br />
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My attention wavered between appreciating the gorgeous day and listening to her conference call. It didn't take long for me to realize that the woman's call was among educators participating in what sounded like a virtual staff meeting. The voice leading the call was talking about the challenges of opening the school back up in the fall. There was also talk of the ways students were coping with being at home all day, and how educators could leverage their knowledge of trauma-informed strategies to help students engage with learning until everyone could meet back up at the physical school in person.<br />
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Overhearing this woman's conversation got me thinking about some of the conversations going on in the education world about what it will be like to open back up after COVID-19 is no longer such a threat, and, maybe more interestingly, if this might be a huge opportunity to fundamentally shift the way we do things in education.<br />
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While I find the prospect of huge shifts exciting, I also find them concerning. Naturally, different people have very different views of how schools ought to shift and for what purpose. Every crisis also presents opportunity, and whether we make the most of the opportunity depends on whose voices are heard and the incentives that motivate them.<br />
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I thought I'd take a moment to weigh in here about where I'd like to see education go, and the pitfalls I think are inherent in some of the more powerful currents of thought regarding a post-COVID reopening of schools.<br />
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If you don't know me, let me lay out my bias right here at the beginning: I believe the purpose of school is in supporting young people specifically, and our society generally, in growing into something more evolved, aware, and in touch with our environment and ourselves than we are right now. As <a href="https://pasisahlberg.com/">Pasi Sahlberg</a> says, the purpose of education is to help people become their best selves.<br />
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For far too long, the Western model of schooling has focused far too heavily on developing the cognitive functions of our intelligence and has generally paid little or no attention to the other vital forms of intelligence that, when trained, we are able to access through our body, emotions, intuition, and relationships, to name a few.<br />
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To draw an analogy, our overemphasis on our cognitive selves is akin to body building by going to the gym to workout your right bicep to the exclusion of every other muscle in your body. Over time, you might develop a phenomenally strong right bicep capable of lifting very heavy things. You might be so impressed with the strength your right bicep is capable of that you might mistake it for the very definition of strength, and you might mistake the purpose of the gym for the sole purpose of exercising your right bicep. You might show your right bicep off to others, and proselytize to them about the virtues of working their right bicep. If you met a person with well-developed legs and abdominal muscles, or even a well-developed left bicep, you might not even be able to acknowledge the values inherent in working those muscles because the entirety of your experience with muscle building has been shaped in such a way that right bicep strength, for you, is <i>what strength is</i>. Now you've become blind to other valuable forms of strength. You've also developed some very imbalanced musculature, which actually puts you at increased risk of injury, despite your impressive ability to lift very heavy things with your right bicep.<br />
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We do something very similar in schooling. We train students in the use and development of their cognitive domain to the exclusion of the other ways of knowing and being that are gifted to us at birth in our DNA. Yes, we sometimes pay lip service to other domains, using terms like social-emotional learning, but all in all, the culture of schooling is still very unhealthfully rooted in the notion that cognitive intelligence is the very definition of intelligence.<br />
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I would like to suggest that the unbalanced development of our young people in schools has profound implications for their health and the health of our society. Again, this is similar to the way that overworking your right bicep in the gym has implications for the stability of your posture and movement. In effect, an overemphasis on one part of your body while ignoring the others actually makes you more prone to injury and can have cascading effects on other bodily systems. It is, in fact, a risky approach to body building - something like trying to shoot a canon from a canoe. Without the support muscles that allow the bicep to do its work (in this analogy, a canoe represents the underdeveloped support muscles, when what's really needed is a battleship), the use of an overdeveloped bicep can damage the overall frame of the body.<br />
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Similarly, an unbalanced approach to learning, particularly in the very disconnected and individualistic society that we live in, also has profound implications for our health. While well-developed rational, analytical brains have proven they can do incredible things like plan civilizations, investigate the nature of quantum physics, or predict the weather, they are not always the best resource for a lot of basic human endeavors, such as figuring out how to relate to people, or how we recruit the resources available to us to help metabolize and make sense of our traumas.<br />
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Life in the modern world is inherently traumatic. Many of us have a lack of clarity about the purpose or direction of our lives. Others grow up in a society that seeks to marginalize them, sometimes quite violently. Still others have never learned what it's like to meaningfully connect to another human being. Understandably, these challenges create a lot of angst and discomfort in young people, many of whom, I believe, have yet to accept this situation as "normal." Yet, the best hope that schooling tends to offer is the possibility of financial reward at the end of a long and stressful gauntlet through the sometimes cold and institutional experience of schooling. Presumably, if you're lucky, and you've managed to secure a life where you're able to earn enough money not to be worried about housing, health care, and food security (no small task for many folks in the United States), you can figure out for yourself how to live a decent life. School has almost nothing to say whatsoever about the decent life part beyond developing your cognitive intelligence in such a way that you will be able to market it in order to pay for things you want.<br />
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It is no wonder that addiction, depression, and chronic disease are spiraling out of control in much of the modern world. The belief that a meaningful life can be achieved by following the map our culture has laid out for us, I think, could be seen as a type of pathogen. And the sense that schooling can support this path solely through the development of our cognitive abilities is a further mutation of this pathogen.<br />
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If we're going to have big conversations about possible seismic shifts in the way we do education, then let's avoid those conversations that seek to put our age-old cognitive learning approaches on steroids by trying to optimize "digital learning" and ensure equity by minimizing community.<br />
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To my mind, one of the most powerful things educators can do going forward is to digest and put to work the astounding implications of cutting-edge research in the field of traumatology, and specifically <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br8-qebjIgs">polyvagal theory</a>. Of the many things we've learned in the last decades of this research is that our cognitive thinking is undergirded by our biological and physiological processes. In other words, the way we think, reason, and respond to new experiences is largely a function of how safe we feel and how other people in our presence are responding.<br />
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Far too many schools and school systems across our country are extremely socially toxic environments - that is to say, they are lacking in authentic, meaningful relationships, and swarming with high-stress hormones due to real and perceived threats that often exist for the purpose of ensuring compliance rather than fostering creativity. In addition to unfunded mandates that create loads of precarious legal liability for administrators trying to create an appearance of checking off all the right boxes to avoid being sued, a great many of the humans wandering the halls and classrooms are in states of extreme stress and physiologically <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_dysregulation">dysregulated</a> to the point where even cognitive learning is nearly impossible. In this state, they are even less available to develop <i>the most</i> intelligent traits of humanity, such as empathy and compassion.<br />
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In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHosF5Wzyd4">an interview at Google</a> about his book, <i><a href="https://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9781455566389utm_source=Google&utm_medium=cpc?utm_campaign=NMPi_Smart_Shopping&utm_term=NMPi_Smart_Shopping&ds_rl=1264488&ds_rl=1264488&gclid=Cj0KCQjw-_j1BRDkARIsAJcfmTFFFeJhdW8LAcLR-IU7OLd6JIERPgVoYa7MjiwQ9j_16bDaPs4cnc4aAi8vEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds">Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging</a></i>, Sebastian Junger suggests that post-traumatic stress disorder might be less a function of experiencing trauma than the context in which trauma occurs. Life is full of trauma, regardless of where or when a person is born. If human beings didn't have a natural ability to integrate and metabolize trauma, it seems unlikely we would have survived very long as a species. The problem with modern societies and schooling may be that we have removed the resource by which humans heal - i.e. connection and community. Healing, growth, learning - these are different ways of talking about a common phenomenon. I think it very likely that in the future, colleges of health will house colleges of education. In the present, the schooling experience we put our young people through must begin to create room for the possibility of the integrated and balanced growth of an individual. If, as a society, we are going to create a future that both harnesses the extraordinary power of our intellect as well as decreases the horrific rates of depression, anxiety, and addiction we're currently seeing, then, yes, schools will need to be very different.<br />
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Perhaps the most significant thing I can say about how we might work to change schools for the better following COVID-19 is to say that they must be oriented first and foremost in community. People with power in our school systems must work to change policies that put people in survival modes into policies that encourage a sense of safety and creativity. Adults and students with trauma must be offered supports for understanding their triggers and working through them. And structures that encourage opportunities for eye contact, play, and emotionality will go a long way toward growing both healthy and intelligent human beings.<br />
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There was a part of me that wanted to say all that to the educators participating on that conference call I heard this morning, but, instead, I walked back down the hill to my house, and put it in this blog post. I hope I didn't ramble too much, and my thoughts are at least somewhat coherent. If you had the time and interest to read all the way through, I'd love to hear your feedback. </div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-35011858233834160772020-05-02T15:01:00.002-04:002020-05-15T01:08:11.538-04:00Working More Collaboratively in the Wake of COVID-19<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I was encouraged yesterday by a few tweets I saw from some education leaders who wondered aloud how various stakeholders in public schools might come to work more collaboratively in the wake of COVID-19. What if we could find ways to get outside of our "us vs. them" mentality when it comes to the divisions that often exist between classified, certificated, and administrative staff; the union and district administration; community members and schools; or even individual schools and the district? Is there some way we could all let go of long-held disputes and just work together to serve young people? What would that be like? How could we achieve it?<br />
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I greatly appreciated the questioning because it really got me thinking. What WOULD that be like? Why DOES working in public education feel adversarial so often? I mean, when I began teaching, I imagined most education professionals would probably get along pretty well. After all, we all chose this work for presumably similar reasons. But when I got into the classroom, and I began taking an interest in decisions being made that affected the schools, communities, and classrooms I worked in; I began to learn about the touchy politics related to school budgeting, boundary making, and class size. I discovered that even educators garrison themselves into opposing camps.</div>
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So, is there a way we can do things differently in the wake of COVID-19? I love the question. Any chance I'm offered to radically rethink the way we do things - I'll take it. So let's get to work. It seems to me that the first place we're going to have to start is by asking what's stopping us from working together <i>now</i>. And if we're going to consider that, I always think it most useful to get as close to the root cause as possible. And, when I sit back and reflect on all the teams, workgroups, and difficult conversations I've been a part of, I keep coming back to a single basic problem: a lack of trust.</div>
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Why is trust a basic problem? In an environment as politically charged as many of the school systems I've worked in, where the stakes often feel high and patience low, very few productive conversations are possible without trust. Without trust, we often struggle to even take another person at their word. And if we have a hard time believing what another person is saying, it's unlikely we're ever going to feel confident that they're working with us toward shared goals. </div>
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Now, I should note that my experience in teaching has mostly been in what I consider to be violently underresourced schools. Some schools I've worked in did not employ school counselors or nurses, and nearly all of them expected near daily superhuman tasks of every adult in the building. You might imagine or be familiar with the sort of stress that is created in those environments, and how it can erode trust quickly. While that may not be the situation everyone finds themself in, I include this background about myself so you can better understand my perspective as you read through this blog post. I also believe there to be a tragically high number of schools in our country that match this description quite well.</div>
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If we could agree that trust is one of the most basic ingredients to productive collaboration among people with different roles and perspectives, then it might make a lot of sense to ask ourselves why trust is so hard to come by. Identifying a few of those reasons and considering some possible ways forward is the purpose of the rest of this blog post. I hope you'll find it useful and consider offering your own insights.</div>
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When I sat down to brainstorm the things that I've noticed tend make trust difficult (particularly some of the more upstream factors that often undercut possibilities for trust before they even have a chance), I began to divide them into structural/institutional factors and individual/interpersonal factors. In hopes of organizing my ideas in a way that makes sense, that's how I'll categorize those factors below.</div>
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<b><span style="font-size: medium;">Structural/Institutional Factors that Make Trust Difficult</span></b></div>
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When I talk about structural or institutional factors, I'm referring to factors that are inherent in the systems that make up the society and institutions in which we live and work. Even though structural/institutional factors may take a long time to change (in some cases, they may not be likely to change in our lifetime, and in others, they may not be ideal to change), I still think we benefit tremendously simply by being able to recognize some of these factors and how they are affecting us. I decided to begin with these factors because they have so much influence on how we interact with each other on an individual level, which we'll get to in a later part of this post. However, the two categories (structural/institutional and individual/interpersonal) are certainly very much intertwined with one another.</div>
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I think that possibly the most powerful structural factor working to inhibit possibilities for trust in many school systems is a lack of resources. School districts that are strapped for cash and professionals who barely have time to eat or go to the bathroom during the school day do not make for the sorts of ingredients that anyone would want in a recipe for trust. While this factor may not immediately seem intuitively responsible for low trust in school systems, I believe it has its hands in most, if not all, of the more obvious factors I write about below. I hope I can make this connection clear.</div>
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One factor hindering trust that a lack of resources can acutely exacerbate is social toxicity. Socially toxic environments exist where the necessary ingredients for social health, namely healthy and meaningful relationships, may be relatively low, and socially poisonous ingredients, such as high-risk behavior or bullying, may be relatively high (more on social toxicity in schools <a href="https://ydekc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SGinwright_Equity-Based-SEL-Presentation.pdf">here</a>). For a variety of reasons (any one of which could easily take an entire blog post), far too many of our schools have dangerously high levels of social toxicity. Both young people and adults, bringing unmetabolized and often unconscious trauma through the doors, regularly contribute to social toxicity. Socially toxic environments raise stress hormones, make it more difficult for us to work through our thoughts and emotions fully, and encourage defensive forms of reactivity. Working with barely enough time to accomplish basic job tasks, educators in underresourced schools also lack time to communicate clearly with one another, often work with overly burdensome class sizes, and lack basic social-emotional health support for their students and themselves. All of these factors have a tendency to damage existing relationships among education professionals and stifle relationships that might otherwise grow in less toxic, better resourced environments. </div>
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Another factor I think we rarely discuss that makes trust difficult across a school district is the sheer size of our districts. Human beings are social creatures, and I think we may be healthiest when we have lots of face-to-face contact with the people we make important decisions with in our lives and in our schools. Unless we're working in extremely small districts, the opportunity for regular face-to-face contact and communication with people who are high-stakes decision-makers is extremely limited. It can be dangerously easy for us to vilify the caricatures we create in our minds of those with whom we disagree when we do not have the necessary amount of face-to-face communication with them. I suspect this happens whether we are being impacted by a decision or we are the decision-maker, and I think it can happen especially when our structures ensure that we spend most of our time with people who agree with us, or who at least share our positionality in the system. I'm afraid we do not do a good job of supporting people in different roles to spend much time with one another, but even when we do, we very literally struggle to communicate with each other across our different positions. The people with whom we spend our time reinforce our beliefs and construct the nuanced meanings we give to the words we use. When we encounter someone who does that with folks from perspectives other than the ones we're used to, it can be almost as if we're speaking a different language. I'm afraid this often leads to loads of inaccurate assumptions we make as we have these conversations, and they often only get reinforced after we leave them.</div>
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Even if we did have more time to spend with each other, and we spoke the same language, I rarely exist in politically charged spaces where those in disagreement have the sort of communication skills necessary to have meaningful conversation. I would argue that mainstream culture encourages the sort of discourse habits where each side is primarily invested in proving the other side wrong. I believe we pick up on this communication culture both consciously and unconsciously from our experience with media and in conversation with one another. Unknowingly, many of us engage in these conversations more to meet a need to be heard (which is totally legitimate, just often out of alignment with supposed purpose of the conversation) than to learn and grow from the interaction. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this is always the case, just that it might be the case more often than we realize. I believe we have a lot of work to do when it comes to shifting the way we engage with each other. This is sort of along the lines of the "It's not what you say; it's how you say it" mantra. Similarly, one could say, "It's not what you hear, it's how you hear it" (or whether you're even in a physiological and mental state capable of hearing it).</div>
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Perhaps the most pernicious and overwhelming structural/institutional factor making trust virtually impossible among all stakeholders in public schools is the widespread historical trauma many different groups of people have accumulated in their experience with public schools. Many of us know intimately or have learned about the longstanding and ongoing racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, adultist, and sexist policies and practices school systems and educational professionals have engaged in since public education began in this country. The effects of these systems of oppression are staggering, and it means that if we work in the public school system, regardless of how familiar with this legacy we are, or how equity-minded we may be, lots of people are going to distrust us, including other employees of the school system who may have chosen to work in public education specifically to do anti-oppressive work. It doesn't necessarily mean we've upheld these systems recently (although it's likely most folks have). It means that until our colleagues and community members can get to know us on a personal level, there's a decent chance they might make assumptions about us based on the fact that we represent a system that has historically treated many groups of people with extreme violence. This reality is not something any one person or small group of people is going to fix, and it's not something we as a society are going to fix soon. But being aware of the lingering effects of these traumas, and the understandable distrust they've created in all kinds of people, should help guide our thinking about how we work toward trust with one another. It may not always feel fair, but we will rarely be judged by others for who we really are, and the social dynamics of the world we've inherited are one reason for that. We should be careful about taking this distrust personally. The reactivity it can generate will not help others trust us more. More importantly, this understanding should help us explore alternative explanations for why we weren't able to communicate with another person rather than falling back on an explanation as simplistic as, "Well, they clearly don't get it."</div>
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<b><span style="font-size: medium;">Individual/Interpersonal Factors that Make Trust Difficult</span></b></div>
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Structural/Institutional factors often shape the nature of our inner realities and interpersonal experiences, so it should be no surprise to find that many of the individual/interpersonal factors that make trust difficult stem from factors above.</div>
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I'd like to begin this section by looking at some of the ways we're learning about how trauma can impact our ability to trust. I think it's relatively well understood today by those who study it that trauma can create a lingering after-effect in the body that prompts someone who's experienced trauma to see the threat of a similar trauma more quickly and clearly. While this is quite useful for avoiding future danger, it can also sometimes be maladaptive in predisposing us to interpreting possible future traumas in places that it may not actually exist. When this happens, we tend to adopt understandably defensive postures when we interact with people who remind us of people who've traumatized us in the past. This reality has massive implications for trust and for how we go about attempting difficult conversations about very difficult decisions that impact people's lives and their children. It also has implications for how people work with one another in relationships where there is an imbalance of power, which occurs daily in public education. Poorly handled, these relationships are at high risk for triggering both those who have relatively higher institutional rank and those who have lower rank, but perhaps most harmfully those with lower rank (see Julie Diamond's excellent book, <i><a href="https://diamondleadership.com/power-guide/">Power: A User's Guide</a></i>, for loads more on this). And if those relationships have been mishandled in the past, space must be created and the skill must be present for recovering them if trust is anywhere near possible. Otherwise, we risk putting people who've been effectively been abused in situations where they feel under regular threat in schools. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec3AUMDjtKQ">Polyvagal theory</a> suggests that attempting to have difficult conversations while people are in physiologically upregulated states is virtually a waste of time, and may even lead to situations that degrade trust even further. I believe an understanding of this reality could lead to significantly improved attempts to work collaboratively toward trust, on both individual and systemic levels.</div>
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Another seemingly obvious interpersonal reality we deal with that often makes trust difficult is that we do not all see the world the same way. Moreover, the way we have learned to understand the world is often extremely precious to our psychological state of well-being, particularly we when carry unmetabolized trauma. A intensely strong commitment or identification to our worldview is very often a symptom of feeling extremely threatened by something in the world we may or may not be entirely conscious of. The commitment we make to our sense of the way things are, and the way we think we fit into them, even when those beliefs are not particularly positive, nevertheless acts as sort of a lifesaver in the middle of a vast ocean of uncertainty. If we are in this situation, we might have an extremely difficult time being in a room with someone who tries to take that lifesaver away from us by suggesting a course of action that seems wildly inconsistent with our worldview. It will literally put us into survival mode, and make it impossible for us to listen or to speak clearly. Don't get me wrong. I'm not implying that decisions made about school policy or practice don't have consequences for people in the real world. They absolutely do. Sometimes that person who's threatening our worldview is advocating for a policy that may very well threaten our well-being. And so there are many, many times when a conversation about what direction to take <i>does</i> represent a very real threat to a person or a group of people. Whether the threat is real or imagined, trust will be extremely hard to come by in those discussions that test people's basic sense of themselves and their world without adequate supports.</div>
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Let's move now to look at some of the interpersonal effects impacting trust that occur when stakeholders lack the opportunity to engage with one another regularly. As human beings, our sense of safety is deeply connected to our sense of belonging and community. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number">The Dunbar Number</a> refers to a popular theory concerning the number of people with whom we can have authentic and meaningful relationships. The basic premise suggests that beyond a certain number of people in our lives (possibly around 150), we simply do not have the brain space necessary to keep up with the sort of nuanced information necessary for sustaining meaningful relationships with others. When we include family, work, and social media, most of us are trying to keep up with way more than 150 folks. Our professional relationships may especially suffer when they predominantly consist the sorts of interactions in which we only ever see each other briefly once or twice a week, and get most of our correspondence with others via email. This is the unfortunate reality in many large institutions. Behind those emails and half-hearted hallway smiles, it becomes too easy to construct horrific caricatures of other people based on assumptions that confirm our sense of the way things are. As these unhelpful thoughts accumulate over time, they work behind the scenes to sabotage any possibility for a meaningful conversation with someone we disagree with.</div>
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The ongoing buildup of hostility and mistrust that can occur in some school buildings and systems can create a <a href="https://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/models/loops.html">positive feedback loop</a>. The more we erode trust, the <i><u>more</u></i> we erode trust. When we consider the factors that drive this positive feedback loop of diminishing trust, I think it is important to call out one of the most powerful drivers of it: virtually every employee working in the public school system is overwhelmed. I can't speak for other education professionals, but I always felt that being a teacher was really two jobs: there's the teaching part with students (which takes the overwhelming majority of our day), and there's the work outside of the classroom like grading, calling home, making CPS calls, following up with counselors, tutoring, going to meetings, taking attendance, long-term and short-term planning, differentiating for various learning needs (all of which would take up a full eight hour day without students ever being in our classrooms if there were time for it). The result of this overwhelming situation is that many of us are not able to keep up with our basic job requirements. In my experience, education professionals tend to deal socially with this reality in two ways. One approach is to present to colleagues as if we're superhuman and not at all overwhelmed by the demands of the job. This shows up in the form of subtle bragging about how we do things or off-handed questions about why other people can't keep up. This is understandable for those of us who seek the security and confidence that can come from being seen to do one's job well. The other way I've noticed we deal with the overwhelming workload is to vent about it with people we can trust, and otherwise feel inward shame for not being able to keep up with the imaginary "good educator" image we have in our heads. All in all, this creates an atmosphere in which being publicly honest about one's challenges can be far too vulnerable for most people. Moreover, public honesty about failure to meet basic job requirements can be quite threatening for a person professionally. I imagine this becomes more and more true as a person moves up the educational hierarchy. We do not exactly live in a culture that rewards leaders for being honest about their struggles or perceived failures. When it comes to extremely high-stakes topics like budget expenditures, staffing decisions, test scores, or graduation rates; the culture we live in means that people will often lie or deceive in order to appear as if they're adequate to the job (not at all to say that that's happening in every situation - just that there is incentive to do this). Naturally, others can often pick up on that through reading nonverbals or noticing evidence that fails to support their claims, and this, again, by way of underresourced school systems and overworked professionals, creates quite a difficult context in which to trust.</div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Possibilities Moving Forward</b></span></div>
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If you accept my premise that educational stakeholders working together more collaboratively in the wake of COVID-19 depends on building trust, then we might also be able to agree that we have a lot of work to do. Here are a few things in the way of solutions that I think might have some positive impact.</div>
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To my mind, the most glaring need our system has when it comes to being better equipped for trust-building is being better resourced. I'll leave that here for now, with the understanding that it's a pretty well-understood problem in public education, and change toward that end will take considerable time and effort. And even if we were fully resourced, there would still be plenty of work to do in building trust, so what would that look like?</div>
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First, and this may seem strange, but I don't think we are benefitted in building trust by beginning any conversation with this statement: "Look - we're all in this for the same reason: to help young people. So we need to be working together on this." I don't know about you, but I think a version of this statement has been spoken at virtually every workshop or conversation I've been a part of in public schools that was intended to outline a new initiative or build trust. And, I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. In fact, I think it erodes trust. I'll tell you why I really struggle with the use of this statement. First and foremost, I really do not believe that education professionals choose this line of work for the same reason. Even if we all consciously decided to enter education to help young people, humans almost never do things for just one reason. Moreover, I believe that our most powerful intentions are often unconscious. We may enter into something with a conscious intention, but actually be far more motivated by an unconscious intention. What intentions besides helping kids do people who work in education have, you ask? Well, there are many. Off the top of my head, I'd say: to earn a living (some far more lucrative than others), to bolster a self-image, to earn prestige among peers and particular segments of society, to act out unconscious codependent tendencies learned in childhood, an unconscious compulsion to save others, not knowing what else to do...<br />
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Now, I'm not saying I know why most professionals begin their careers in education. I'm also not judging any of these as inherently wrong. (I actually think that part of the problem is that education professionals are really not allowed to admit having various reasons for being educators in our professional culture. We are all expected to identify as rescuers of a sort, and this identity is often used against us when it comes to how much we should be expected to work or how little we should be expected to make.) It's just that I think that if we want to take a more useful approach to understanding each other as we move through hard conversations, we'd better understand that we're really <i>not</i> all in this for the exact same reasons, or even for just one reason, AND that our reasons often change over time. And our motivations will absolutely affect the way we engage with each other. </div>
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Moreover, people in my experience who use the "We're all in this together statement" are very often (not always) unconsciously wielding their power and privilege unconsciously and irresponsibly. I often hear it used by someone with relatively high institutional rank in a situation in which they don't want an open discussion about a decision that's been made by a small number of people with a necessarily limited viewpoint without the consent or even input of the large number of people who it impacts. "We're all here for the kids" serves to distract from this reality by supposing that the decision that was made is infallibly in favor of children, and that it's now time for everyone to enact it. The phrase also sometimes comes with, "Come on, everyone. We all need to trust each other here." I struggle with this too because, to me, any simple appeal for working together that doesn't acknowledge and appreciate the complex structural, institutional, individual, and interpersonal realities we live that make trust difficult rings shallow. It implies that the speaker either does not understand the time and effort it might take to build real trust or would prefer to ignore the challenge for the sake of expediency and "getting things done," often projecting a sense that whatever they believe to be best for students <i><u>is</u></i> what is best for students, or "if only <i>they</i> would get on board, we could work these things out."<br />
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Long story short, my request is that we stop using these phrases and not imply that working together collaboratively should be simple.</div>
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That tangent aside, I certainly believe that a majority of people who invest their time in public education have the interests of students among their motivations. But a further problem emerges in that the question of what truly <i>is</i> in the interests of students is never widely agreed on, and there's good reason for this. We're different people with different perspectives. I'm sure thoughtful people have disagreed about what's best for young people for as long as people could disagree. The purpose of school and what young people should get from it is an enduring philosophical question that is valuable not because there will ever be a satisfying answer to it, but because there won't be. I actually believe that, in some ways, disagreement here is what we should be aiming for. I also believe opportunities for trust are lost when we don't commit time for having this dialogue openly and honestly among all stakeholders. I think we avoid this in our country because we're not sure how to handle the enormous variety of opinion that might emerge, and we're too busy trying to make sure schools succeed in their most basic functions, like safety or making sure classrooms have teachers in them. Hearing people's opinions about why they do the work they do or what they want for their student might feel to some like a waste of time when we could be doing something more "productive," but I think we build a lot of trust through listening. There is no need for us to agree on the big philosophical questions. There is a desperate need for us to understand each other's views. In addition to building trust, I think these dialogues also help us all learn.</div>
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However, it has always seemed to me that one of the most divisive realities in our decision-making processes is that there are often massive differences of perspective and opinion between those who look at public education from the lens of individual students and families (as paraeducators, teachers, students, and families often do), and those who necessarily have to look at outcomes from a system-wide perspective (as administrators, union leaders, and lawmakers do). Both of these perspectives are inherently valuable AND limited (and, of course, there are lots of people who attempt to look through both lenses). However, those who have power to make decisions in our systems are nearly always those who see most regularly reason through systems-level thinking (see James C. Scott's book, <i><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state">Seeing Like a State</a></i>, and Jerry Muller's excellent book, <i><a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174952/the-tyranny-of-metrics">The Tyranny of Metrics</a></i>, for an overview of historical and contemporary data use and misuse by those whose job requires them to make large, systemic decisions that impact lots of people). If we're going to build trust and improve systems, I believe we must find ways to have both perspectives equally represented in decision-making processes (in addition, of course, to representation of all identities). Most importantly, voices of stakeholders from various backgrounds need to be BOTH represented in discussions around big issues AND have equitable amounts of power in determining the outcomes of those decisions. We absolutely must understand that an essential part of building trust is sharing power equitably. Obviously, this is no easy task, and there's no perfect way to do it, but even simple actionable steps in this direction can go a long way toward building trust.</div>
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Many of the challenges that stem from diverse perspectives might be supported by innovative strategies within districts for people to sit down and practice listening to one another. A facilitator might guide participants from varying backgrounds and positions through listening strategies and identify opportunities that arise for building trust. We could all benefit from learning and practicing new ways of talking to each other. Nothing would "get done" in our conventional way of thinking, but we would strengthen our bonds with one another and likely lower some of the social toxicity that exists in our systems.</div>
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In a similar vein, I'm afraid many of us need to learn almost entirely new skillsets when it comes to useful communication involving tough issues. Our go-to one-sided attempts to prove others wrong and demonize those we fail to understand will ensure that we remain at low levels of trust. <a href="https://www.nonviolentcommunication.com/aboutnvc/aboutnvc.htm">Nonviolent Communication</a> is one powerful tool I've found in working toward this. However, we should be wary of efforts to "civilize" communication that reinforce a violent cult of civility that functions to gaslight people, denying their emotions and expression of their unique lived experience. We must also work, simultaneously, toward raising our awareness about the many ways we've all been conditioned to imagine people as part of a violent social hierarchy as a function of things like race, ability, religion, class, sex, or gender expression. Attempting to disagree with one another openly and healthfully WHILE ALSO working to raise our consciousness around systems of oppression is no easy task, but I do think one can be supportive of the other. This effort, in addition to equitable power sharing, might be among the most important things we can do in building trust system-wide.</div>
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Lastly, it seems vital to me that the education system take the time to truly digest the substantial implications of polyvagal theory, one of many valuable theories which describe how trauma impacts bodies, and how upregulated physiological states make it nearly impossible for us to truly communicate. There are ways we can learn to regulate ourselves, not just with young people, but also with each other. These must be understood going into difficult conversations with people. Some of those methods involve learning to work internally with our own triggers. Others involve learning how to structure environments that help calm our nervous systems.</div>
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If you've managed to make it this far, I hope some of the ideas I've shared here have felt useful. If you feel I've gotten something wrong, or you'd like to share your insights with me, please reach out or comment below. We all become smarter when we can engage.</div>
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james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-22998052978759913352019-11-23T17:58:00.000-05:002019-11-23T23:46:07.232-05:00What We're Not Talking About When We Talk About Equity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The term equity is being used a lot these days in education circles, certainly more than when i began teaching in 2006. On the surface, that seems like a good thing. A lot of us would like to prioritize equity. But, the more it gets thrown around, the more it seems like it's being used in ways that are so superficial that they actually perpetuate inequity.<br />
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Understandably, some folks, having seen this happen over and over again, are beginning to lose hope for the possibility of equity to move us in the direction we want to go, namely the direction of justice.<br />
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In this blog post, I'd like to attempt a somewhat complex but extremely important argument concerning the way school districts and educators are approaching the concept of educational equity in 2019. I believe that in order to understand what's required for educational equity, we have to a) significantly broaden the way we talk and think about what equity truly demands, and b) we must identify and understand the roots of equity.<br />
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Let's begin by looking at a common definition for equity. This one comes from an <a href="https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/02/19/21puckett.h33.html">EdWeek article</a> on equitable education funding from 2014 written by Marin Gjaja, J. Puckett, and Matt Ryder. They write:<br />
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"Equity should require that every student receives sufficient resources to have the same chance to succeed, rather than that every child gets the same level of funding."<br />
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This is pretty typical of the way i think equity is being discussed in school districts across our country, the idea being that equitable treatment of students and families is different than equal treatment. And this doesn't just go for dollars. Educational equity is also about culturally responsive curriculum and instructional practices, proper and appropriate special education evaluation and services, socially and emotionally supportive learning environments, and much more.<br />
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In other words, the basic premise of our current equity conversation encourages us to understand that students come with different needs and abilities. Because our students come with different needs, giving them all the exact same supports would only perpetuate the unequal educational outcomes we've seen our systems produce for as long as we can remember. It's only when we treat students <i>equitably</i>, by offering each of them what they need (even when that looks different or costs more than for other students) that we will begin to see parity in outcomes.<br />
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To be sure, actualizing this definition of equity is an enormous task. And i value tremendously the willingness to attempt such a large undertaking. But i'm afraid something extremely important is missing from this definition, which is that it really only addresses one side of the equity equation.<br />
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What's not often fleshed out in our equity conversation is that, in striving for equitable practices, we're trying to create something. Depending on the vocabulary used, that something is usually either described as "equal outcomes," "parity of outcomes," or, most often, "success."<br />
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Let's take a look at that definition from the EdWeek article once more:<br />
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"Equity should require that every student receives sufficient resources to have the same chance to succeed, rather than that every child gets the same level of funding."<br />
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Notice how equitable funding is defined as a level of funding that every child needs for a chance to "succeed."<br />
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What we're not doing nearly as often in talking about equity is unearthing what's beneath the other side of the equity equation. In other words, what are we talking about when we talk about success? And this is absolutely crucial, because the second half of the equity equation has literally everything to do with what we think equitable processes are.<br />
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Consider, for example, a school that weighed heavily the number of proficient swimmers it managed to graduate in comparison to a school that, instead, considered the number of students who could produce extraordinary graphic design as their most significant metric. What if we put educators from the different schools in the same room for a conversation about equity? I suspect they might have a hard time agreeing on equitable practices that work for both schools. The sort of supports a school would use for each of its students to create excellent swimmers would be quite different from the graphic design school. Funding, facilities, and educator qualifications would also be naturally very different.<br />
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What if the swimming school created excellent graphic designers but mediocre swimmers? What if the graphic design school graduated fantastic swimmers? How would those outcomes impact the way they thought of equity for their students?<br />
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Clearly, the outcomes we seek to create - i.e. what we call success - have everything to do with what we think equitable practice is.<br />
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So what should count as success in a public school in the United States? What are the outcomes we're seeking to create? And how are we measuring them? Surprisingly, these questions are rarely seriously considered in the formal conversations we're having about educational equity in professional development, at school board meetings, or in articles from outlets like EdWeek. How could we possibly have any sense for what we think equitable practices are if we don't have deeper conversations about the outcomes we're trying to create, or what counts as "success?"<br />
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Now, i could offer an informed guess as to why we don't wade into these conversations more often. Behind the question of what counts as "success" is a very messy question that people have been arguing about in the United States since public schooling began: What is the purpose of school? That's a question few school district administrators are equipped to dive into with communities or educators in a meaningful way.<br />
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Moreover, the outcomes we're tying to create, at least in public schools, have, in many ways, been defined for us by policymakers who tie school funding and the career trajectories of administrators and educators to standardized testing and curricula. Whether students are capable of demonstrating proficiency on the extraordinarily narrow sliver of possible human competencies described by standards has come to define the second part of the equity equation for us. And we don't even seem to realize we've been cut out of this absolutely essential part of the conversation. This means that conversations about equity within districts and schools are bound by these very narrow, and frankly violent, definitions of success. To my mind, this is what allows the term equity to be used in a way that actually perpetuates inequity.<br />
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(There are, of course, other metrics of success that districts often use, including graduation rates and college admissions rates. However, these metrics almost always relate back in some way to students' abilities to show proficiency on standards, either through passing classes or taking tests.)<br />
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In my mind, equity work is also a critical component in creating justice. It means working against racism, sexism, ableism, classism, all other forms of oppression, and healing the violence we continue to do to ourselves and our earth. Creativity, imagination, artistic ability, intuitive capacities, empathy, social-emotional competencies, problem-solving skills, collaborative, and in-depth analytical and critical thinking capacities are absolutely urgent in this work. Unfortunately, our currently limited approach to tackling equity in schools largely ignores focusing on the development of these competencies in students, primarily because we haven't been able to push these outcomes into the common conversation around the second half of the equity equation.<br />
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We will not begin to delve into the depths of what equity demands until we can open up the conversation in the second half of the equity equation with students, families, communities, and the educators who serve them. This will not be easy work, but i believe it is utterly essential.<br />
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But beyond the equity equation, what else is required for creating real equity in our schools? I believe the other massive piece of creating equity is understanding its roots.<br />
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I don't think that the roots of equity exist in academic, abstract, analytical conversations about equity (like the one in this post). The possibility of creating real equity actually grows from within each of us, particularly those of us who are parents and educators. It grows out of our willingness to fundamentally shift the way we think about schools, young people, and learning.<br />
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The way equity is currently being discussed seems to come from a deficit perspective. We act as if students are missing something that we have, and we believe that if we invest the right amount of energy and teaching in them, they'll finally be made whole and capable of success. There will be parity in outcomes, and more marginalized students will graduate ready for the real world. This mindset imagines that our students and families don't come to our schools with extraordinary wisdom and a capacity to be successful without anything being "added" to them. It imagines that our youth aren't already exactly what the world needs. In fact, they are.<br />
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I'm not implying that schools don't have tremendous responsibility for fostering student learning. They absolutely do. My point is that schools won't be able to fulfill that responsibility as long as they seek to correct students rather than curating space for them to unfold. And most schools have virtually no idea how to do that. They've been in the habit of correcting students for far too long.<br />
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I once heard <a href="https://pasisahlberg.com/">Pasi Sahlberg</a> say that Finland sees its schools' purpose as helping every child become themselves. This is my favorite definition of equity. Equity is not about making students into something they are not. The roots of equity grow out of <i>our </i>capacity - i.e. educators, adults, parents, citizens - to see the exquisite beauty and unique set of talents and skills that each student brings, and then to support their growth.<br />
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When we realize this, we realize that the work is perhaps significantly larger than the conversations we're currently having imply. That may seem overwhelming. The good news is that equity has become a pretty regular part of the discourse around policy and practice in education. That gives us leverage. It gives us a foothold for demanding more. But first, we need to get extremely clear with the folks who use the term about what it means, and who we're all accountable when we use it. I believe that fleshing out the entirety of the equity equation is essential for this. But more importantly, how do we, as people invested in creating equity, change ourselves?</div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-23484328965124098002019-05-30T15:08:00.001-04:002022-08-13T17:24:27.031-04:00A Critique of Standards-Based Grading<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;">It first happened to me about ten years ago. I was beginning my third year of teaching in a new school in Washington, DC. Social studies teachers were sitting at a department meeting, and the assistant principal assigned as our department head was explaining to us why standards-based grading was going to close the achievement gap.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"This is all very interesting," I said, "and I'm happy to get on board, but besides standards-based grading, what other legitimate grading practices are out there?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">"Well, whatever they are, we don't practice them here. Standards are about raising expectations, and that's what we're about." His response seemed designed to discourage me from inquiring further. In other words, my principal didn't seem to know.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I spent that year, and many of the years since that meeting, working furiously to become the best standards-based grader I could possibly be. That was not easy, as most teachers know that standards-based grading can be a pretty confusing endeavor. It comes with all sorts of differences in philosophy and application. I've had principals attempt to mandate everything from a no zero policy to a no homework policy to a "you can give homework, you just can't grade it" policy. Then there are the long discussions about whether attendance might somehow be counted toward a standard so that it could be included in a grade, or whether classroom behavior and timely submission of work can be included in a standard related to job readiness or citizenship.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">There is a striking lack of clarity in the education community about just what standards-based grading is. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Nevertheless, in my first three or four years of working through standards-based grading, I was excited by the possibilities. In many ways, SBG seemed like it afforded more opportunities for students to demonstrate and be affirmed in their learning. Students could retake tests if they were having a bad day. They could demonstrate their learning in styles that better suited them as learners. And clearly defined standards helped students zero in on common learning targets throughout the school.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">There were also struggles. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">One of my biggest struggles was what to do with activities that seemed to be valuable for learning but didn't seem to connect with a standard, or activities that could fit five or six standards at the same time. Then there was the challenge of determining whether the assessments I gave actually assessed a standard. (Many professional developers in the world of SBG will spend hours with teachers "unpacking" a standard, claiming that most people don't really understand what's in the standard, as if reading what it says is not enough for your average teacher.) And then there were the mental acrobatics involved in finding a way to push all of those rubrics with circles on them into a single letter grade for students' transcripts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In my beginning years, I was a vocal advocate for SBG, assuming that many of my challenges would fade with more practice. Over time, however, I ran up against problems that I began to see as immovable walls. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Three or four years ago, I stopped advocating for SBG. I began to understand that there are serious limitations to the practice, and I began to suspect that it needs a much clearer analysis than what most teachers have access to in schools where administrators effectively function as SBG propagandists. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">With the remainder of this blog post, I would like to suggest a clearer definition for SBG. I also argue that when it is applied poorly, it can function, like all forms of standardization in public education, as a tool of institutional discrimination and cultural destruction.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Today, I believe that the most problematic feature of SBG is that many districts impose it on students and communities with the expectation that the only factor that can be included in a student's grade is evidence that shows achievement of content-area standards. I call this "pure SBG" to distinguish it from other grading systems where outcomes not connected to state standards are also included.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">A different and more direct way to define pure SBG is to say that<i> it is the practice of excluding from a student's grade any form of human ability or growth that is not seen by the teacher to be related to the teacher's content-area standards.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Crucially, I think it's important that, in talking about SBG, we do not conflate it with reasonable outcomes-based assessment practices. The crux of standards-based grading is all in the name. Grades are based on standards. In my mind, all the philosophical discussions about how many opportunities a teacher provides to reassess or whether including zeros in the gradebook are discussions about outcomes-based assessment. And there's lots of room for great conversations about how to do that, but that's not my focus here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Many people would argue that pure SBG is a reasonable practice precisely because the skills that students need are the skills that are in the standards. Primarily, they need to know how to read, write, and do math. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">On this point, too, it is important to be clear. I am <i>not</i> arguing that skills included in the standards are <i>not</i> valuable. I believe many of them are, and they have an important place in a person's development. The problem I have with them primarily is the way they're being used, and secondarily how limited in scope they are in defining what counts as valuable human competencies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Let's start with how they're being used.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Standards, as I see them, are best suited to serve as reference guides for professional educators who are entrusted to guide the learning of young people who they know and love. The term "standard" gives away an intended use we should problematize. It's borrowed from industries concerned with weights and measures of objects, where it's desirable to produce with consistency. That education has appropriated that term to refer to humans and human development betrays within the term itself the ways in which the use of standards will go wrong. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The beauty and value in human diversity is the diversity itself. It's a big part of how human populations are able to adapt and meet new challenges, by encouraging the innate strengths of their members. And while guidelines like learning competencies can assist professional educators in charting a trajectory for young people's growth, imposing them in ways that create barriers for students in the form of grades can become a form of structural violence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I begin by making the point that the primary problem with standards is the way they're used because if I begin by pointing out how insufficient they are in capturing the myriad forms of valuable human beingness and ability, the inevitable response is usually, "Okay, so we need more standards then." And, sure, we can write learning competencies until we're blue in the face, but we'll certainly never get to them all. And, in doing so, we often don't seem to realize that statements written about competencies are not and never can be a fully accurate descriptor of the competency itself. Language just isn't that advanced. Further, if we can't understand that any quantitative data we record in service of determining whether a student has met said competency is, again, not learning itself but a terribly rough and abstract representation of learning, we will be forever showing up to restaurants and eating the menu. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">When we imagine that a stated learning target is the target itself, and that numbers generated from tests are synonymous with learning, we impose our adult inability to understand reality onto students. We let our shortcomings show up in their grades, and then punish them until they become just as out of touch with things as we are.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">SBG, in my experience, often comes with a philosophy that positions grades and standards as ends in themselves. In this model of thinking, learning is done in service of standards and grades. And we can imagine here how psychotic this must feel to a young person. No wonder interest in school declines rapidly as students get older. This is a sign that there's hope for our young people. They're not buying it, thank god. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This positioning of grades and standards as ends unto themselves also has grave implications for how we think about equity. When we position standards and grades as ends, we imagine those are the equal outcomes we're trying to create. And we work furiously through how we can possibly engage in equitable practices in order to achieve those equal outcomes. When we do that, we lose sight of the fact that those things we've positioned as desired outcomes (grades and standards) are not outcomes at all. They, too, are practices we employ to achieve real outcomes. The way you can determine this with folks you have conversations with is simply by asking, "Yeah - but <i>why</i> do we want students to reach standard?" or "<i>Why</i> do we want students to get good grades." They'll inevitably go on to talk to you about the economy or something, and with whatever it is they say, you can point out that the grades and standards are <i>in service</i> of something greater. And when we understand this, we understand that the way we employ standards and grades is a question of equity, in that our grading practices either support all students in becoming their best selves or they don't. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">My secondary concern with the standards I've had to use is in how they drive what Yong Zhao calls an "employee-oriented" education. Few state standards speak to valuable human competencies like creativity, imagination, interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, ethical/moral awareness, critical citizenship, visual literacy, self awareness, problem-solving, or habits of mind. Furthermore, the standards I've used run the serious risk of orienting teachers and students in a deficit-perspective toward students, as so many of the assets our students bring into the classroom are not affirmed by the standards. These assets are often (but not always) <a href="https://www.aacu.org/diversitydemocracy/2016/winter/kanagala">cultural in nature</a>, as the standards used in the US primarily represent the epistemological values of Eurocentric thinking and culture. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ibram Kendi <a href="https://www.aaihs.org/why-the-academic-achievement-gap-is-a-racist-idea/">writes</a>,</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">"What if different environments actually cause different <i>kinds</i> of achievement rather than different <i>levels</i> of achievement? What if the intellect of a poor, low testing Black child in a poor Black school is <i>different</i> - and not <i>inferior</i> - to the intellect of a rich, high-testing White child in a rich White school? What if the way we measure intelligence shows not only our racism but our elitism?</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"Gathering knowledge of abstract items, from words to equations, that have no relation to our everyday lives has long been the amusement of the leisured elite. Relegating the non-elite to the basement of intellect because they do not know as many abstractions has been the conceit of the elite.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"What if we measured literacy by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environment: how much individuals knew all those complex equations and verbal and nonverbal vocabularies of their everyday life? </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"What if we measure intellect by an individual's desire<i> to know</i>? What if we measured intellect by how open an individual's mind is to self-critique and new ideas?</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"What if our educational system focused on opening minds instead of filling minds and testing how full they are? What if we realized the best way to standardize a highly effective educational system is not by standardizing our tests but by standardizing our schools to encourage intellectual openness and difference?"</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">In the wake of NCLB, lots of media coverage was given to schools that were cutting recess, art, music, and other "extracurriculars" to support students in preparing for standardized testing. In 2019, there seems to be greater awareness around the harm of these practices (although they still continue), but pure SBG could easily turn into shallow and toxic year-round test-prep in disguise. If grades are only to be comprised of student learning toward standard, and the standards are the same standards being assessed by the state standardized tests, then what does that mean for students who still struggle to meet standard? In some schools, it means being held back from recess or lunch to work with teachers on "classwork." Which students do we imagine this most likely to impact? And will that impact be in service of their learning?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The good news is that the US isn't the only country in the world, and other governments are recognizing that their young people will need opportunities to develop a wide range of competencies not currently enshrined by standards in the US. The province of Ontario has an <a href="https://peopleforeducation.ca/our-work/competencies-and-transferable-skills/">exciting set of competencies</a> that they're asking schools to develop.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But even within the US, there are lots of movements seeking to redefine what learning looks like. In their recent book, <i>In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School</i>, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine spent over 700 hours in high schools building an analysis of what teaching and learning looks like, and how they might be improved. They found that the best teaching and learning often happened at a school's periphery - in clubs, extracurriculars, electives, etc. Not the spaces most heavily colonized by standards, in my view. They also suggested that powerful learning happens at the confluence of three virtues: mastery, identity, and creativity. Indeed, I believe <a href="https://deeperlearning4all.org/">Deeper Learning</a> as an instructional design has much to teach proponents of pure standards-based grading. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">While I believe there are plenty of teachers who can bring their classrooms to life within the context of SBG, I believe that when that happens, it will happen in spite of SBG rather than because of it. Pure SBG does not value the identity of young people as curious learners who have agency, nor does it value the status of teachers as professionals. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Let's work toward a more inspiring assessment model that works in service of young people's health and growth. </span></div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-37287540851816211122017-07-16T20:37:00.002-04:002017-07-21T19:41:38.475-04:00You Can Be an Astronaut, but You Can't Be Black<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">"I want to be an astronaut!” shouts Bobbie.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“That’s great! You can do it. You can be anything you want to be!,” our teachers and parents replied. In the United States, you can do anything you want to do if you just put your mind to it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">It’s almost embarrassing to admit that I never really stopped to consider what those conversations might have been like in other households. In families where parents had not experienced the sense that this was anything resembling a land of opportunity, where their most salient experiences with carving out some degree of financial safety and success more often had to do with what sorts of demeaning labor richer people were willing to offer them money for than fulfilling their potential. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">How do parents and teachers who’ve suffered incredible trauma at the hands of oppressive systems guide their young people who begin to sense that it may not be as simple as asking the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In my family and in my schools, it was always about encouraging whatever idea I had at the moment. Although I don’t remember ever seriously thinking I would consider a career path apart from teaching, I had a profound sense that I would hear affirming comments from all of my supporting adults if those ideas ever arose. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Our American ethos is based on individual determinism. You do you. Whatever you want to do, that’s what you should do. Now, it is probably true that middle and high-income white children growing up in the United States are probably exposed to the reality that this encouragement doesn’t exist for every student all over the world. The way we’ve taught history in public schools for sometime has often emphasized American exceptionalism. We do seem to have an awareness that this is not quite what it’s like for children in all parts of the world. But rarer is the white child who understands that this unconditional support of a child’s career aspirations is not available to a great many children in the US.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">One of the elements of white consciousness that may be most crippling when it comes to inter-racial dialogue is an almost total lack of opportunity to see outside of ourselves, to see outside of ways we’ve been brought up, to suppose that what we are and the way we think are mostly natural functions of the human condition rather than constructs that are built in us as we marinate in the comfortable surroundings of white, patriarchal culture.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">As a result, I think we white folks often approach the world with an expectation not only that we have a right to be whatever we want, but also an assumption that everyone else thinks that way too. One place we see that play out in school is when white educators attempt to encourage students from diverse backgrounds to do well in school as if all of those students were in school primarily for themselves. A great many students from all backgrounds see their purpose in school primarily as fulfilling a responsibility to bring honor and/or strength to their family rather than to their individual name. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Because it is difficult in a culture that worships white identity for white folks to see outside of our habits of thought, we often engage with people from different backgrounds in ways that are confusing and often harmful due to our blindness of other ways of thinking and knowing. And I’m afraid that our overwhelming sense of ability, that we can do anything, also translates into a false belief in our capacity to know, understand, and be like other people.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We very often hear white folks who want to be allies to people of color and other marginalized identities whitesplaining a situation. I imagine that a white person explaining the plight of a person whose identity they’ve never experienced is among the more obnoxious of white behaviors. It seems also rooted in a white overemphasis on intellect and intellectualizing human issues that simply cannot be gotten at through white analysis. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In this way, I believe we find that many of us not only wrongfully assume that everyone has the freedom to ignore external factors in the name of pursuing a future that their individual ego guides them toward, but we also come to believe that our ability to become anything extends beyond the realm of career.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For us white folks, we sometimes imagine that being black, Asian, Hispanic, or Pacific Islander is just another sort of identity we’re free to pursue. We intellectualize what it means to exist in those identities and ignore and are ignorant of the lived experience of that identity in our world. Some of us literally claim to be black (Rachel Dolezal), while others misappropriate culture or dominate conversations about race with our analysis. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Undergirding this form of white consciousness, I believe, is a subconscious desire to distance oneself from whiteness. A sense exists that there is something harmful with whiteness and, rather than reckon with what that is or how we participate in it, we’d sooner remove ourselves from it. Rather than naming our light-skinned privilege, many of us would sooner to choose to identify as French or Irish. We come to a conscious or unconscious sense that we, as white people, are not okay. And I believe that underneath this sense of not okayness is tremendous white shame.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We should distinguish between guilt and shame. Guilt is about a negative feeling we have for something we’ve done, and it can often be healthy when we’ve done harmful things. Shame, on the other hand, is never healthy. It is a sense that there is something inherently wrong or unlovable about us as people. White shame, the sense that there is something inherently wrong or evil about white people, is a terribly harmful orientation for a white person to take on. I believe it very often serves as the fuel for many harmful white behaviors, such as cultural appropriation and saviorism. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">It may seem somewhat counter-intuitive, but for white folks who are working from this lens, I think we very often have to begin our work by acknowledging the ways white supremacy has worked to disembowel our own humanity. We too have been oppressed. We too have been victims of white supremacy. While our cultural practices and behaviors have, at times, been horrendous, they are born out of harmful conditioning that infests our minds rather than an inherent evil within the basic nature of our being. When we can come to hold ourselves with the sort of love and care we’re mostly taught should be offered to others, when we can see our own wounds, then we can finally open our eyes to the largeness and depth of the wounds our culture inflicts on others and work to undo those practices. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In this process, we learn that while it may be within our grasp to become an astronaut, we can never be or understand what it’s like to be another race in the United States. We can and should try to imagine the experience, but to attempt to take on another’s culture is a fundamentally different prospect, one that is terribly damaging. The primary challenge in the work of undoing racism and prejudice is not understanding other people’s cultures. It’s understanding our own. When we begin to make real progress in that, we will be an in real position to help. </span></span></div>
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james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-34381157044057309862016-04-21T14:26:00.000-04:002016-04-23T11:41:04.243-04:00Dear White Educators<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Dear White Educators,<br />
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I struggle with you. I struggle with me. I struggle with how, if, and when to write us this letter. There is no perfect time, no perfect medium, and no perfect collection of words.<br />
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And yet, we are out of time. Long have been. The time is now, as it was five hundred years ago.<br />
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So here it is...<br />
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For a very long time, a tragically long time, the idea of white shame did not resonate with me.<br />
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I am lucky enough to have a mother who raised me to understand that my white male identity gave me tremendous unearned privilege in our society. In school, I learned some of the history of marginalized peoples, and I sympathized. So when it came to me and the possibility of my white shame, I felt confident that, having long "understood" the realities of oppression, I should have none to grapple with.<br />
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After all, I am kind to people who are different than me. I have friends and colleagues of color. What shame should I really have to process?<br />
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It is at this point that I must confess to you that when I was nine years old, I called one of my classmates a nigger.<br />
<br />
It was the fall of 1992. My family had just moved from New Mexico to Tennessee, and Mr. Powell's fourth-grade class was the first time I met and made black friends.<br />
<br />
Mr. Powell was a quiet and stern man who was missing two fingers. His missing appendages and the fact that he never smiled encouraged our obedience.<br />
<br />
It was early one morning when my friends and I were sitting together and joking around before class began. One of my friends told us the story of his bus ride to school.<br />
<br />
"The bus driver says to me that I have to sit down and be quiet. You know what I told him? I told him, 'You be quiet, honkie!'"<br />
<br />
All of us laughed, two of us black and two of us white.<br />
<br />
Having only recently been introduced to the <i>N</i> word by my friends in what I interpreted as playful ways, I thought I'd try to fit in by responding, "Well you know what I would have said? I would have said, 'You stop talking and be quiet, nigger!'"<br />
<br />
Just before that sentence fell out of my mouth and into the world, the chatter among the rest of the class inexplicably died, and a void of silence was created such that everyone could hear exactly what I had said.<br />
<br />
My friends 'OOOoooed' and laughed for a moment, but then became deathly still. They saw the look that came over Mr. Powell's face, who looked directly at me with a sternness I didn't know that even he possessed.<br />
<br />
More than two decades later, I find myself thinking about my role in struggling through our country's very complicated history of racial oppression. I have been struggling toward some sort of voice that works to counter racism, but I often also find myself questioning how exactly to fashion that voice when it comes from a white male.<br />
<br />
Along the way, I've fallen over and over again into a harmful trap. It's a trap that I'm afraid many white people fall into as they begin to gain an emerging level of consciousness regarding our race problem. The trap I'm talking about is that of buying into a discourse of charity that, in the words of Lise Vaugeois, valorizes the giver while maintaining the inferior position of the receiver.<br />
<br />
It is at this point that I must confess that I have spent a great deal of time trying to help people of color in ways that, in actuality, only served to perpetuate my privilege and their oppression.<br />
<br />
My decision to move to Washington, DC, a city I was not from and had never lived in, to teach at the age of 26 strikes me now as a corollary to that of calling a black classmate a nigger at the age of nine. I did both believing they would help me fit in with people of color, and both, because of my ignorance of the experiences of those around me, had the potential to do harm to others.<br />
<br />
I recently had a dream in which I was a lawyer in a courtroom arguing before a judge about whether a statement before us was racist. (Forgive the strangeness. It was, after all, a dream.) I argued passionately that the statement in question was racist. I remember that the lawyer on the opposing side was white, although the identities of the jury and the judge were unclear.<br />
<br />
In reflecting on the dream, I realized that this is something that I do often. I regularly attempt to point out injustice, particularly institutionalized racism. But upon further reflection, I noticed something disturbing. I most often spend my time calling out racial injustices when I'm in the presence of people of color, as if they need to hear about such things from me.<br />
<br />
The question becomes, Why? Why do I do this more often around people of color and less often around white people?<br />
<br />
I can rationalize it in a way that makes me feel good. I can imagine that I know people of color will be more willing to listen to talk of oppression, and that white people are less likely to accept it. But isn't that why I should be talking about race and racism around white people <i>more often</i> rather than less?<br />
<br />
I can equally look at it from another perspective. There's a good chance that my talk of race and racism around people of color serves a desire I have to distance myself from other white people. The attempt to distance comes from a refusal to see ourselves in others, and I have to admit that I find myself doing that often. It was in this realization that I had my first inklings as to the existence of my white shame.<br />
<br />
I used to think that white shame was probably an issue for some white people, but as someone who received a progressive education and had a mother who called out oppression for me at every turn, I thought, "White shame? I guess, but I don't have any of that."<br />
<br />
Not true.<br />
<br />
If I didn't have white shame, I wouldn't spend so much of my time attempting to distance myself from whites who haven't yet come to terms with their place, their history, or their privilege. I realize that my shame is an insidious form of shame. It's the shame that hides, unconsciously, in the mind of the self-righteous individual who doesn't realize that his demons are waiting anxiously to be wrestled.<br />
<br />
And so I come back to interrogate my dream. While my subconscious still likens me to a litigator in the trial of racism, I must confront the reality that that is not my place. I am not the lawyer, not the judge, nor the jury. In this metaphor, I stand most appropriately in the shoes of the accused. I am the accused not because of any conscious malice on my part, but because of the body I inhabit and the identity that's been cultivated within it over years of social conditioning.<br />
<br />
At some point in time, all of us have to sit down and take inventory. We have to clear the smoke from the mirror and really look at ourselves. In this difficult process, we come to realize that as we come to accept ourselves, we also must learn to accept that much of who we are is rooted, like it or not, in the roles society has created for us. To deny this is fantasy.<br />
<br />
For you see,<br />
<br />
"All the world's a stage,<br />
And all men and all women are merely players:<br />
they have their exits and their entrances;<br />
and one man in his time plays many parts,..."<br />
<br />
Nobody else can play your role. I do not get to run from or deny my whiteness. It is one of the many parts of my role for which I am responsible to play in this life. No, I did not have a choice, but that does not alleviate me from facing a socially constructed identity for my public life that history demands I own.<br />
<br />
It's true that I can try to feel better about using the <i>N</i> word when I was young by remembering that I didn't know what I was saying. But it is also true that ignorance is capable of just as much harm as intentional violence.<br />
<br />
Moreover, whether I choose to identify as white or not, others will continue to identify me in that way. As a result, I have and will continue to benefit consciously or unconsciously in ways that have and will continue to harm others.<br />
<br />
In my inner life, my spiritual life, there may be space for aspects of my public identity to fall away. In my public life, however, this is not an option. I must learn to own this identity that I've grown into.<br />
<br />
Part of the work here means involving myself in the never-ending task of identifying and acknowledging the many ways that unconscious bias inherent in our language and institutions affects our behavior. As <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/verna_myers_how_to_overcome_our_biases_walk_boldly_toward_them">Verna Myers</a> said, "We were all outside when the contamination came down." The roots of our dysfunction are incredibly deep and extend back centuries.<br />
<br />
In a sober assessment of his own whiteness, <a href="https://medium.com/@abelateiner/grieving-the-white-void-48c410fdd7f3#.9q4l1evo4">Abe Lateiner</a> suggests that, for white people, there will never be some final conscious awakening in which we're capable of seeing all of the delusions we've lived with since the dawn of white supremacy.<br />
<br />
Lateiner writes,<br />
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"As I embody the understanding that I am always going to be delusional, I can accept that I am not in a position to make demands about the road to freedom. I've lived for my first 30 years of life unaware of the existence of my own velvet restraints, and I'm only just now beginning to create a vision of my own freedom."</blockquote>
At this point in my journey, the deconstruction of my own privilege is most pressing in the classroom, particularly as a humanities teacher. The space I inhabit with students is most obviously the space where the things that happen will quite directly serve to liberate or oppress.<br />
<br />
And so the question finally becomes: How does a white male in the United States work in public schools with students of color day after day? How do I deconstruct my privilege to create space for colleagues of color to have their voice heard? How do I honor my students perspectives on complex issues without attempting to whitesplain the situation? How can I be an ally to families of color who yearn for equitable schools that provide their students with an excellent education?<br />
<br />
In my struggle to deconstruct my privilege, I experiment with ways to bring all voices into classroom discussions around delicate subjects. I search constantly for books and professional learning opportunities offered by experts of color. I search for the courage to be vulnerable in speaking often about systems of oppression and owning my identity in the healthiest way I know how, most importantly with other white people.<br />
<br />
After I made my racist comment that morning in fourth grade, Mr. Powell made me sit in time-out for fifteen minutes. I remember being confused and scared. And I remember having the distinct sense that I should never use that word again. But without many desperately needed follow-up conversations to help me begin to grapple with race, I'm afraid my growth in this area was stunted.<br />
<br />
When I think back to my young white body sitting in that fourth-grade desk confused about what had just happened, yearning for a stronger sense of clarity, I wonder if that is not who, underneath it all, I still am, who many of us still are.<br />
<br />
In <i>The Hero with a Thousand Faces</i>, Joseph Campbell writes of the infantile unconscious:<br />
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"We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life."</blockquote>
In writing of the work of Werner Erhard, Peter Block says of personal change in his book <i>Community</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The way this [personal change] happens is by changing our relationship with our past. We do this by realizing, through a process of reflection and rethinking how we have not completed our past and unintentionally keep bringing it into the future. The shift happens when we pay close attention to the constraints of our listening and accept the fact that our stories are our limitation. This ultimately creates an opening for a new future to occur."</blockquote>
Our dysfunction is in our unwillingness to reconcile our story. We are either unaware of our past, or we refuse to look at it. In either case, we are unable to own our identity, live in fantasy perpetuated by delusion, and neglect those golden seeds.<br />
<br />
Those golden seeds have not died, though. Our capacity for change, for new possibility, never dies. That is our potential for salvation. The moment we realize the possibility, we have found the potential to change the world.<br />
<br />
The shame will persist as long as it is ignored, as long as we refuse to own our identity and find healthier ways of being white and teaching our children to be white. The more I can come to terms with my own frailties and ugliness, the more I can acknowledge those things to others, and the more I find ways to create equal space for other identities, the closer I come to peace about who I am and what I do.<br />
<br />
Education is not the work of technocrats. It is the work of rational, emotional, intuitive, and ethical beings committed to creating healthy communities for a healthy society. As such, we cannot imagine our role as educators to be limited to the aiding of students in acquiring information. We must also acknowledge the crucial role of the health of our own identities and the relationships those identities form with the students and communities in which we work.<br />
<br />
If our own children are to be saved from the same miseducation we received, then we're going to have to take it upon ourselves as white people to put ourselves in the uncomfortable position of clearing the smoke from the mirror, of re-educating ourselves, and of removing the infestation of that unconscious bias in our minds and in the minds of our children. Our young people need that retelling of our story that could have served us all at a young age. It's time we own our role.</div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-943216777131117332016-02-07T15:36:00.002-05:002016-02-07T23:10:20.964-05:00Preparing Innovative Change Agents for Justice<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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After spending yesterday in a district discussion about how to remake and rebrand our high school, I spent a lot of time thinking about what we should be preparing students for after high school.<br />
<br />
Before I go further, I want to emphasize that I believe that school is not just about preparing students for the future. It's about helping them manage their now. I think we often get so caught up in a focus on the future that we do damage to the now, but that's for another blog post.<br />
<br />
When we do think about the future of students, which is often, we talk in terms of creating equal educational outcomes that will prepare them for participation in the economy.<br />
<br />
"How can we ensure they'll be able to compete in the real world?"<br />
<br />
"What skills and knowledge do they need to have options when they go looking for jobs?"<br />
<br />
Now, I acknowledge there is a shred of legitimacy to these discussions. But I find them to be extraordinarily problematic because they presume the purpose of an education for an individual is, ultimately, to make money. And that notion is based on the even more problematic notion that the larger purpose for education systems is primarily to create a highly-competitive economy.<br />
<br />
Even if we were to accept participation in the economy as the highest aim of public education (which we shouldn't), the way we talk about preparing students for their wage-earning futures is wrapped in language about how they can be good workers and consumers.<br />
<br />
We don't ask how our schools can help students think innovatively to identify and solve the pressing problems facing our world. We don't ask how they'll need to be prepared to be active citizens, researchers, creators of knowledge, or entrepreneurs.<br />
<br />
It is for these reasons that the ideas of <a href="http://zhaolearning.com/">Yong Zhao</a> and <a href="http://sirkenrobinson.com/">Ken Robinson</a> resonate with me. Both propose that schools must be retooled to develop the skills, knowledge, habits, and dispositions necessary for a student to go into the world and play an active role in its creation and recreation. This seems to me an endeavor fundamental to the human condition.<br />
<br />
Where I diverge from Zhao and Robinson is in their discussion of creating an entrepreneurial mindset.<br />
<br />
Because entrepreneurs bring together the factors of production in order to make a profit, I actually don't think entrepreneurs are at all what we need.<br />
<br />
I've heard Zhao mention that students, if they want to be successful, have to find ways to create things that other people want. He references Kim Kardashian as an example of a person who found a unique way to make a living. To be fair to Zhao, he is a hilarious guy with lots of great material, and he probably does not mean to spread the idea that following Kardashian's model is a healthy path forward for students.<br />
<br />
However, I would go so far as to say that any entrepreneurial pursuit that seeks to provide a dopamine fix to that segment of our population privileged enough to afford excess with some form of thought-blocking entertainment (e.g. a new line of clothing, fashion accessory, or other luxury) and does not consider the environmental costs of the waste and social costs of the time that will necessarily be a byproduct is decidedly not what we want to produce in schools.<br />
<br />
I agree with Robinson and Zhao that we desperately need to start talking to students with the understanding that they have it within them to change our world. Indeed, they are our greatest hope to change our world. Though, to do that, they're going to have to be even better at thinking outside the box than the entrepreneur.<br />
<br />
The entrepreneur can rely on a traditional model for creating goods and services enshrined in our law. Create a business plan, apply for the license, find your capital, etc. But change agents for justice in our society are going to have to step outside even that model.<br />
<br />
Change agents for justice are going to need a strong understanding of justice, freedom, love, community, democracy, and civic engagement. They're going to have to identify seemingly intractable social problems. These problems will be the type our economy normally doesn't create space for people to do work around because they don't typically appeal to individuals who want to spend their excess income. They're going to have to do the hard, hard work of identifying solutions to those problems, and then they're going to have to bring together the people and resources necessary to implement those solutions. Along the way, they'll learn lessons, and they'll need to share those lessons with future generations. Perhaps most challengingly, they'll need to find funding to make their solutions happen.<br />
<br />
Start talking about students' futures like this in schools, and I bet a lot more people start participating in the conversation.</div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-13583923550526714902015-12-13T21:21:00.000-05:002015-12-14T22:13:30.898-05:00The Critical Link Between Education and Health: Why You Must Watch Paper Tigers<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It was an April morning early in my teaching career when, in the middle of a history lecture, I paused because of an unusual noise coming from the hallway.<br />
<br />
"Finish copying down the rest of that slide, everyone. I'll be right back," I told my students.<br />
<br />
I poked my head out the door to find out just what was going on in the hallway. Megan, one of my students who'd I'd marked absent at the beginning of the period, lay crumpled near the wall rapidly double breathing. I rushed over to help her up and find out what had happened. Her face was red and covered in tears. She couldn't bring herself to speak, so I quickly called the office for assistance.<br />
<br />
After school was dismissed that day, I connected with our school counselor and found that just before arriving at school, Megan's cousin had called to tell her that Megan's mother had attempted suicide that morning. The crippling stress of such news was compounded by the fact that Megan had no siblings and that she'd never known her father. Her mom was all she had.<br />
<br />
The name and details of the above story have been altered to protect the privacy of individuals. It's very close, however, to many experiences I have had as a teacher in schools and serves to cast light on what educators often experience in schools.<br />
<br />
In the mid 1990's, the <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/">CDC and Kaiser Permanente partnered</a> to begin the study of how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) impact longterm life outcomes. Nadine Burke Harris speaks eloquently about the study and ACEs in the video below.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="330" mozallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime.html" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="600"></iframe><br />
<br />
Recent advances in neuroscience have helped us understand how ACEs, trauma, and chronic stress affect not only life outcomes, but the ability of students to focus and learn. They also affect our physical health. We know now, as <a href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/good-health/gabor-mate-how-to-build-a-culture-of-good-health-20151116">Gabor Maté puts it</a>, that humans are <i>bio-psycho-social</i> beings. Our physical health and optimal functioning is affected as much by diet and exercise as by our social-emotional health and vice versa. The implications of this new knowledge are so significant that those of us who work in schools have no choice but to educate ourselves on the effects of trauma and the practices of trauma-informed care.<br />
<br />
For every student like Megan, for whom we may learn about an emotionally distressing life experience, there are many more who keep silent and cope on their own.<br />
<br />
However, it needs to said that the point trauma-informed care is not to train educators to be therapists or to insinuate that every teacher needs to know the deep emotional lives of their students. In a <a href="http://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/how-you-can-better-understand-the-root-causes-of-student-discipline-challenges-and-why-that-matters/">recent post</a> by the Seattle Times Education Lab on trauma's effect on students, one commenter mistakenly perpetuates this view.<br />
<br />
Forest Farrington writes,<br />
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<span style="font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"This is the most asinine trend in education. Teachers taking the "trauma' approach to discipline must dance around every student disruption in order to sooth their past traumas. In time, all of us experience some sort of trauma, and in the real world of the workplace, employers won't take the time to consider our past traumas if we choose to behave out of line. If my child chooses to disrupt her teacher's classroom, I don't expect the teacher to psychoanalyze what's going on with my daughter at that moment; rather, I expect her to immediately address my daughter's choices with redirection, and if necessary, discipline."</span></span></blockquote>
Educators who understand trauma do not need to "dance around every student disruption in order to sooth [sic] their past traumas." Rather, teachers who understand trauma learn to hold students accountable for their behavior more humanely and compassionately. This decreases the likelihood that a student who's angry about something in their home life from that morning will deal with a teacher who snaps at them for something minor like being late to class.<br />
<br />
In her book <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2012/07/police-in-hallways.html"><i>Police in the Hallways</i></a>, Kathleen Nolan notes that it is often the inappropriate adult response to minor misbehavior that can escalate situations. This can lead to disproportionate punishment and youth disengagement with school. When students are unable to manage their emotional response, this can be a recipe for suspension and expulsion when denying students an education is exactly what we're trying to avoid.<br />
<br />
Educators who understand trauma understand that students need to be taught how to handle their emotions and how to understand themselves. This does not mean that educators can't hold students accountable for their behavior. To the contrary, it means they continually strive to hold students accountable for their behavior in ways that help students grow.<br />
<br />
It's with this understanding that James Redford and Karen Pritzker made the film <i><a href="http://www.papertigersmovie.com/">Paper Tigers</a> </i>about<i> </i>Lincoln Alternative High School in Walla Walla, which the <i>Seattle Times</i> hosted a screening for yesterday morning at Foster High School in Tukwila.<br />
<br />
My emotional response to the film was strong, and as a friend commented on Facebook, "if you have experienced childhood trauma, care for yourself as you watch it, and afterwards." But as an educator and the son of a social worker, trauma-informed care training for educators is an issue I feel strongly compelled to advocate for.<br />
<br />
<i>Paper Tigers</i> is empowering because it shows us that there is much we can do in schools to better serve our students. And we shouldn't imagine that ACEs affect only students in low-income communities. The rash of suicides in <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/">cities like Palo Alto</a> make it clear that emotional health is just as important an issue for affluent communities.<br />
<br />
But <i>Paper Tigers</i> also reminds us how deeply ill our society is. Schools must adapt to better educate students, but schools alone will not solve issues of structural inequity buried deeply in our societal systems. Problems like segregation, pollution and waste, climate change, structural unemployment, soaring college costs, and wholly deficient social services must be addressed alongside school reform if we are to have hope for a better future.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, it is through this lens that we understand that health and education are intricately connected, so much so that I think they are actually the same thing. It's difficult to learn and be metacognitive when you are unhealthy, and it's very difficult to be healthy and whole without an education.</div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-77637328566059915832015-10-03T23:39:00.000-04:002016-01-16T15:11:22.436-05:00PBIS, Token Economies, and Dreary Estimates of the Human Potential<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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My school, like thousands of others across the country, is working to implement a system for encouraging positive behavior called PBIS (positive behavioral interventions and supports). If you work in public schools, odds are you’ve worked with PBIS and have some notion of what I’m talking about.</div>
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The idea behind PBIS is that our more traditional method of disciplining kids, based primarily on punishing them for wrong behavior, has largely led to negative outcomes like suspension. For many students, responses like suspension merely put them on a path toward dropping out.</div>
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The PBIS model works to create an environment in which there is a systematic effort to acknowledge and affirm the positive behaviors of students and staff. It also seeks to create an environment in all parts of the school that lowers the potential for misbehavior by being extremely clear and explicit about the expectations for school conduct.</div>
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I’ve heard PBIS trainers say that “research shows that” 80% of people want to follow the rules, if only they were clear about what the rules were. The thinking is that 80% of people would follow the rules most of the time so long as those were clear. </div>
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As for the other 20%, PBIS has a multi-colored triangle that outlines a frame of responses for those who chronically violate expectations. The thinking is that it’s smart to have a set of “tier 2” responses ready for students who need a little extra help getting their behaviors in order, and a set of “tier 3” responses for students who are particularly challenging or behave in especially harmful ways.</div>
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At the bottom of the triangle are tier 1 strategies, which attempt to prevent and resolve minor misbehavior that nearly all students are bound to engage every now and then. Examples of this include arriving to class late, forgetting to bring required materials, or having a minor dispute with a teacher or other student. Tier 1 strategies are geared toward supporting the majority of students (those who want to follow the rules) make sound decisions. They include posting and regularly discussing school-wide norms and expectations from day one. </div>
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“We treat one another with respect. We engage with our academics. We act as scholars at all times.”</div>
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They also include noticing and affirming behaviors that support those school-wide norms and expectations. </div>
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“Thank you, Darius! I like the way you’re ready for work. Great job, Monica! You’re sitting silently.”</div>
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Much PBIS work is necessary in schools and communities. There is an aspect of PBIS that troubles many educators, however.<br />
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PBIS systems often advocate offering students superficial, inauthentic rewards for conforming to behavior expectations. A common form of this is the token economy. In the classroom, this might include teachers creating fake money that students receive for participating or turning in homework on time. School-wide, administrators might hand out tokens or points when they see students behaving in the hallways or at lunch. These tokens are then turned in for rewards later, like at an arcade.</div>
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What is bothersome about the token economy is that it seems to ignore more meaningful incentives humans have for behaving well in school and community.</div>
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Token economies are often rationalized by relating them to the money-based economy we participate in at a societal level. All of us are motivated to work and participate in the money-based economy, so why shouldn’t offer students the same incentive opportunities?</div>
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Considered in this way, PBIS strikes me as only marginally more progressive a system for discipline than the more traditional, punishment-oriented system is seeks to replace. Like that more traditional system, it seems to be based on a pretty dreary estimate of the human potential. While, compared to a punishment-only system, PBIS has an expanded notion of what drives human behavior, its notions of what those motivators are doesn’t even begin scratch the surface of their depth and possibility. Its assumptions seem dangerously oversimplified.</div>
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External motivators do drive desired behavior, but we have to be really careful about their use. This is particularly true as people mature. There often comes a time when the attempt to use external motivators with highly developed people can backfire. I, for one, am likely to feel condescended to when another person tries to exact a behavior from me with an external reward. </div>
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The motivators for most people’s behavior are far more nuanced and complex than rewards offered in a token or money-based economy. Relying on rewards that appeal to a person’s baser desires (cookies or pizza parties, for example) communicates that these are the real rewards worth working for in school when the reality is that there are much deeper and more meaningful reasons for participating in a well-functioning classroom or school community. </div>
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Furthermore, capturing a student’s interest in a token economy in which the rewards are in no way naturally connected with their behavior might limit them from exploring, experiencing, and understanding a deeper part of his or her self - the part that finds purpose in a sense of vital engagement in work that is meaningful. </div>
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When schools have a hard time communicating to students the meaning in their work, it becomes clear why a superficial system of consequences and rewards is required to control their behavior. </div>
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Sadly, many of our public schools today are overburdened with mandates to focus on packaged curriculum that would seem dry to any of us. Few people can derive a sense of vital engagement and purpose from preparing for test after test after test. Whatever we were put on earth to do, test-taking it was not. In this context, pizza parties seem about as powerful a motivator as any.</div>
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So we can see that meaningful discipline systems are undergirded in schools by work that engages students in purposeful education and helps them see their role in their community and their world clearly. In other words, schools have a greater purpose than preparing students simply to fill job openings and going on to participate in the “real economy.” </div>
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Students and citizens are motivated far more deeply by incentives outside the bounds of the money and tokens. Today, the word “economy” is so closely connected with the concept of money that many of us have a hard time separating one from the other. But there are economies that are not based on money. Indeed, before the invention of money, humans still participated in complex systems of give and take that created powerful motivators for people to behave.</div>
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Humans are complicated beings with diverse and nuanced reasons for their behavior. At their best, those who live and work in community (like at school) respond most readily to relational obligations they regularly create for themselves and others. This is especially apparent when you ask people who work in social services why they do what they do. The need “to give back” is an obligation that has been created for individuals raised in and by healthy communities. Individuals sense that the positive things that were done for them must be “paid back.” Reciprocity is also borne out of an intuitive understanding that acknowledges and accepts the importance of helping others.</div>
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Most schools and many communities in our society, do not spend much time thinking explicitly about the relational obligations that we create (and are created for us) on a daily basis. </div>
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They are there, however. You see them most often in families. Most of us would be unwilling to accept money for doing something for an immediate family member. </div>
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But they can also be seen between strangers on the street.</div>
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A little while ago, I was browsing an independent bookstore that I just discovered. While I was pursuing, a husky man with a big beard came in and picked up ten books that he proceeded to put down in front of the owner, who sat behind the cash register, to purchase. As the owner began scanning each of the books, the man began to speak in a strong Eastern European accent:</div>
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“Before, when I was homeless, I stole many books from this store. I sold them on the street for money. Now, I have come back to make up for my transgressions. I would like to buy these books and donate them to your library in the back.”</div>
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We feel relational obligations when it becomes clear that we have harmed another person. The harm we do to others stays with us and affects us until we have the opportunity to make it right. This is true for people across the continuum of social-emotional, cognitive development. However, many of those who are in earlier stages of development need significant support in order to see how their behaviors affect other people in order to begin to understand and sense the obligations they’ve created for themselves in harming others. This, I would argue, is the authentic work of school discipline systems.</div>
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It seems that an unfortunate number of people don’t understand or believe that these deeper human motivators exist in all people, and especially in students. There is a depressing sense, embedded deeply in our culture, that people are only (or at least mostly) self-interested. Given the opportunity, people will take what they can get for themselves and leave others on their own. Therefore, if we want people to behave, we’re going to have to make it worth their baser brain’s while. </div>
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I would argue that this is a byproduct of our peculiar industrialized, affluent, Western, highly competitive capitalist culture; and not innately human.</div>
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When people are disconnected from community, and when the deeper bonds of relationship with those around them are either not present or badly bruised, they tend to act more selfishly. They often don’t feel that those around them care about them or can be trusted - other harmful byproducts of our unique culture that values fierce independence (which often leads to intense isolation) and whose notion of success is based on winning the comparison and competition game perpetuated relentlessly by corporate media.</div>
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It doesn’t have to be this way in schools. </div>
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Students who are mentored in schools where comparison and competition are not highly valued, if at all, and are supported in thinking about and caring for themselves and their peers are significantly more likely to understand and respond humanely to their relational obligations.</div>
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Social and relational obligations are the most authentic of human motivators. However, young people need time spent discussing their behaviors and teasing out the obligations they’ve created. Beyond that, they must spend time thinking about how to respond to those obligations in humane and courageous ways.</div>
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When schools and systems get too big, when we’ve forgotten what really drives us as humans, when we’re too overworked in schools covering standards and preparing for tests; it’s easier to fall back on superficial systems of punishment and reward, like a token economy. But when we do that, we drastically underestimate the beauty and significance of what it means to be human and the potential that each of us has to grow into a force for peace and justice. We sacrifice a valuable opportunity for offering our young people an actual education.</div>
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james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-77459264705813287172015-04-14T21:32:00.000-04:002015-04-15T01:27:28.022-04:00What and Why We SHOULD Teach<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's time to give it up. I'm abandoning it whole-heartedly. Here and now. I'm leaving it behind forever.<br />
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What am I talking about?<br />
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As long as I've been a teacher, I've been trying to be something that I should never have been: dispassionately objective. Now, most people who know me personally would probably laugh at the idea that I've ever pretended to be that. I speak out often. I engage people with politics. And I've sometimes acted with a chip on my shoulder.<br />
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But ever since I began teaching, at some level of my consciousness, I've held onto this naive belief (with increasingly less and less vigor) that I should attempt to be a technician of teaching - that my ultimate purpose should be to learn the latest and greatest techniques to help students learn sets of skills and facts that could ultimately be quantified. And, importantly, in doing so, I should not allow students to know my beliefs and opinions - or, at the very least, I should not allow them to influence their thinking.<br />
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Well, that chapter in my life is over. I'm declaring it dead here and now. Goodbye teacher technician. There is no right place in the world for you.<br />
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Why am I doing this? Why kill the part of myself that so many teachers point to when asked what makes them good at what they do?<br />
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You see, I have this strong opinion about the world in which we live.<br />
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It's fucked up.<br />
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I don't cuss often in this space. And I don't use <i>fucked</i> lightly here. I thought about its use long and hard.<br />
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How would a reader take it? Lightly, as means of keeping her engaged? Or heavily, as a deep expression of my sorrow and pain at what I observe?<br />
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It's meant to be heavy.<br />
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Nearly thirty-two years into my life, I've come to hold one opinion more strongly than all others. And that is this: Much of modern society deals in death and dehumanization. We are slowly (but with increasing rapidity) destroying our earth and ourselves, a superficial division between a single system of life.<br />
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Although it should be clear to anyone who's paying attention in the richest country on earth, it is perhaps not as obvious as it might be to those who live on humanity's margins.<br />
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Those of us who drive fancy cars and live in gated communities with pools, the time for golf, and private masseuses are often not confronted directly with the ravages that our global monoculture of consumption <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/gallery/2015/apr/01/over-population-over-consumption-in-pictures">has afflicted</a> on our planet and species.<br />
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As a straight, white, "educated," wealthy, healthy, male living in the richest country in the history of the world; I attribute that I have mainly been confronted with this reality to two things: 1) I have been privileged enough to travel to many "poor" countries, and 2) I have worked nearly a decade in some of our country's "poorest" neighborhoods. (I put poor in quotations because I mean to highlight the idea that material wealth is not what everybody means when they use the words rich and poor.)<br />
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And in a way, these experiences have been my true privilege in life: to see outside the cultural lens with which I was raised in order to understand others.<br />
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That which drives the cycle of consumption and destruction can be attributed to the same root problem that drive many social problems, including the many isms that social justice education seeks to redress.<br />
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That root problem is that our modern world's cosmology believes each of us to be individuals whose primary purpose is to compete against one another in order to achieve what we've defined as success. In that pursuit, while we may do well racking up material goods or money (our imaginary system of "wealth" that leads to the long-term destruction of life), we have become isolated, alienated, and completely disconnected from both our earth and one another in so many different ways.<br />
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In other words, we have forgotten how to love.<br />
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The fundamental anchors that moor our systems of modern education promote this loveless drive for success.<br />
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In the name of life, we must change our cosmology, the story we tell ourselves about reality, immediately. Seen through this lens, education takes on a new sense of urgency. And it is not the urgency we commonly associate with getting kids to pass tests.<br />
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As my thinking about learning and community matures, I've abandoned almost entirely the precepts that have guided schooling in our country over the last two centuries or so.<br />
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Systems have a tendency to create humans in the image of those who run them. Public schools are no different. Most of us who attended public schools internalized their basic structures and practices. As a result, we find it difficult to imagine what alternative might exist in their absence.<br />
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When I discuss current practices in public schools with others, I often find myself returning to a fundamental truth a great many of us seem to have forgotten. And that is this: Science estimates that modern humans have inhabited the earth for approximately 200,000 years. So, for 200 millennia, humans have found ways to learn, participated in culture and various types of societies, and found ways to humanize themselves and one another. It has only been for a tiny fraction of that time that the modern school has attempted to "aid" in that learning, or humanization. 1/1000th of that time. For the other 199,700 years, humans somehow found powerful ways of learning and being without our schools.<br />
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The modern school, while often well-intentioned, is far from ideal. It long ago abandoned the quest for wisdom, and has replaced it with the banking system of education described by Paulo Freire focused on filling students with information and skills. It has become a very two-dimensional system of education that promotes the idea among both students and staff that the earth, knowledge, and others should be objectivized in the quest for "success."<br />
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Through various practices, we foster a culture of competition rather than collaboration. We have debate rather than dialogue teams, high-stakes tests rather than authentic formative assessments, persuasive rather than reflective writing, lists of standards to be mastered, a focus on winning rather than learning in school sports, etc...<br />
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I do not mean to imply that debate or sports do not offer an individual value. I do mean to say that used in this way, they mostly foster isolation and promote the idea that success (and what we should strive for) comes as a result of working against rather than with others.<br />
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So I'm sorry. I can do this no longer. I will not continue to be a silent bystander who acts as an accomplice in the destruction of the world.<br />
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From this point forward, I will be very clear that I have a bias as an educator.<br />
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Educators, if we are to be more than indoctrinators, must imbue love. And here, I don't mean what our culture imagines love to be: romantic, weak, sappy, and mostly powerless.<br />
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I mean real love. The kind that makes clear that all of us are in this reality together. We are not here to compete, dominate, or have more than anyone or anything else.<br />
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Some would, and have, snickered at this notion as idealistic. They believe it is a lame and ignorant vision for our future disconnected from reality. I believe that perspective wholly denies the extent of the human potential, of life's desire for deep and authentic community. I believe that perspective to be ignorant of the power we have to change, and largely borne of the trauma and cultural pathology that accompanies the worship of competition, economic efficiency, and perfection.<br />
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So that is what and why I will teach. It is what and why we should all teach. I've come to believe that if there is such a thing as truth, it is this; it is love. And I'm not going to feel bad or unprofessional for being direct about that bias. </div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-81437598489926863662015-03-09T23:05:00.000-04:002015-03-09T23:24:34.008-04:00Engaging Those Who Disagree Through Love and Vocation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The board room was packed, and the tension was palpable. Scores of teachers and community members had turned out to tell the board not to sign a contract with Teach for America.<br />
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When it was my turn to speak, I was angry. I was angry and frustrated. I tried to look into the eyes of the people behind the suits who I was speaking to, but it was difficult.<br />
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There was the school board, who seemed to mostly go along with whatever the superintendent wanted. There was the superintendent, who I believed made most of her decisions based on a desire to secure a job at the state’s education department. And then there was the district’s communications director. He always wore his pristine suit wherever he went and had recently told our local NPR affiliate that the district was interested in a partnership with TFA because it was difficult to find traditionally certificated teachers for vacancies they were trying to fill. I didn’t believe him.<br />
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When I spoke to them, I must have sounded venomous. Because I did not teach in the district considering the contract, I felt free to express my anger openly. On a few occasions I raised my voice, and I came close to explicitly calling the communications director a liar.<br />
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When it was over, the crowd clapped for what I had said, and I felt a sense of pride. When the board voted unanimously to approve the contract with TFA, despite every person in the room speaking against the decision to do so, the crowd made a collective groan of frustration and anger and left the room in unison, despite that the meeting was not over. The room went from being over capacity to being nearly empty in a matter of a minute.<br />
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Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of <i>The Righteous Mind</i>, points out that very often, when we engage in political discourse, especially when we are arguing with someone who has a different point of view, we are actually not attempting to communicate with them. What we’re actually trying to do is communicate with the people around us who agree with us.<br />
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I think that’s exactly what I was doing when I gave my mostly angry speech at that board meeting. While I thought I was trying to express the kinds of words and emotions that would help the board members and superintendent understand the error in their ways, what I was really doing was showing my solidarity with the crowd.<br />
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What must the superintendent have thought of my speech? Or the communications director? I imagine that if they’d talked about it afterward, which I doubt they did, they would have mentioned how little I understood about the workings of the district, or the need to fill vital teaching vacancies. Whether they would be right in their lamentations is besides the point. I suspect they would have felt them authentically.<br />
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It strikes me that there are two places from which those of us in public education (and really any line of work or profession) draw motivation: 1) from a sense of vocation, calling, or need to do good work in the world; and 2) from a desire for success - money, reputation, and power.<br />
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It also strikes me that in our professional lives, all of us are motivated by both of these to one degree or another. There are moments when we’re more motivated by vocation than by success and vice versa. And there are those of us who draw more deeply on a regular basis from one of the motivations than from the other.<br />
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On the other hand, I also find that I draw on two different motivators when it comes to affecting positive change in my community: 1) frustration and/or anger and 2) love.<br />
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When I spoke before that school board, I was manifesting frustration and anger. I did that because I had found a way to dehumanize my audience by imagining that they participate in the work of public education solely out of a desire for personal success. In doing so, I allowed myself to wish them ill will, and, as a result, I don’t think they heard anything I had to say.<br />
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When attacked by others, it is the rare person who is able to put their ego aside and truly listen to what is being said. More often, when we feel threat, we close our ears and look for ways to prove the speaker wrong.<br />
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This is why we must be cognizant of how we seek to affect change and how our actions actually impact those around us. If our primary goal is to rally our base, then yelling and being angry can do that. But I’ve found that the negatives tend to outweigh the positives.<br />
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After that board meeting was over, the crowd regrouped in the parking lot even more angry than before and began talking about strategies to unseat the board members on election day.<br />
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When we get to this point as a community, we’ve resigned ourselves to no longer engaging the other side. We allow ourselves to take a shortcut, like thinking about how to get rid of a board member, and avoid the harder work of engaging those who disagree with us.<br />
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Why should we seek to engage those who disagree with us? Because when we do, we allow them their humanity. In doing so, we allow ourselves our humanity. And in that act of humanization, we must remember that we should listen at least as much as we speak.<br />
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Affecting positive change through love is deeper and more challenging work. It requires discipline, patience, and resolve. But its fruits are abundant.<br />
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When we yell and scream at those who disagree with us in the battle for saving the public in public education, we lose energy and hope fast. In fact, I’d say the yelling and screaming are already a sign of desperation. This method almost entirely fails to engage the other side.<br />
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John Lewis, the US House of Representatives Member who played a prominent role in the Civil Rights Movement, talks about being trained to make eye contact with those police who would beat him for marching in the movement. The goal was to force the aggressor to confront the humanity of their victim. But the same is true for those of us under attack. A true act of love requires remembering the humanity of the aggressor.<br />
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We who defend public education believe it has the potential to be an incubator for a strong civil society that does not go to war for profit, destroy the natural environment, or set material wealth as the determining factor of a person’s value. When we confront the forces who believe in high-stakes testing and ranking students to determine which jobs or colleges they should matriculate into, we must do so with love as our intention.<br />
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This does not mean that we should be less urgent or demanding in our actions. But it does mean that our tone should be different.<br />
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Had I addressed the school board that day with the intention of love and humanization, I would not have raised my voice, felt an increase in my stress level, or found it difficult to make eye contact with my audience. I would have spoken more smoothly, with more confidence, less stress, and more intelligence. My remarks would have been more difficult to write off as those of an angry, ignorant teacher.<br />
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Rather, I would have forced them to come face to face with the humanity of both myself and my students. A part of them, no matter how deeply it might be buried, that is motivated by a desire to live out their vocation and their humanity would have been touched. Were I to see one of them again, at perhaps the grocery store, it would have been far less awkward to start a conversation. And I, holding the confidence that I’d spoken my truth in a way that acknowledged both my own and their humanity, would have found it far easier to engage them in meaningful dialogue.<br />
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We should not imagine that any of us have the right to make our system of public education in our own image. But rather acknowledge that a meaningful way of educating our children will come out of this deep dialogue in our local communities.<br />
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A pre-requisite of this dialogue, however, must be that we engage with it as educators by vocation rather than educators seeking personal success. Only then can we have a dialogue that manifests love, restores our humanity, and takes us closer to restoring the public in public education. This is part of what we fight for.</div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-40248313909004804712015-02-11T21:18:00.001-05:002015-02-11T22:04:38.154-05:00High-Stakes End of Course Exams Harm Students in Washington State<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1">In the state of Washington, high school students who want a diploma this year must pass four exit exams known as end of course exams (EOCs). However, three bills were heard before the House Education Committee in Olympia last week that would decouple these exams from graduation requirements. As a national board certified teacher from a low-income school, I and fifteen students felt compelled to go down to Olympia on February 3 to speak in favor of one of these bills, HB 1363. We were all from the Academy of Citizenship and Empowerment (ACE) on the Tyee Campus of SeaTac in the Highline School District, and a majority of our students speak English as a second language. Inspiringly, four students were even brave enough to testify before the House Education Committee in favor of HB 1363. (You can watch the testimony in the House Education Committee on tvw.org from Feb. 3 <a href="http://www.tvw.org/index.php?option=com_tvwplayer&eventID=2015021024">around 25:00</a>.)</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The most powerful testimony came from the most heroic human I’ve ever had the honor of knowing. Violeta is a senior at our school who lives in her own apartment with her daughter. She works a job after school, and has nevertheless earned a 3.6 GPA in her four years at ACE. Even though she received an A in Biology, she hasn’t passed the Biology EOC, which will be the only thing that might hold her back from graduation this year. She pointed out that few, if any, of the legislators in Olympia likely had to take an exit exam for their high school diploma. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">However, some representatives, like Chad Magendanz (R-Issaquah), ask how the state would ensure that students take the EOCs seriously if we don’t tie them to a graduation requirement. Rep. Magendanz seems to be unaware of one of the most highly respected assessments in the US, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). It is so respected precisely because it’s not high-stakes and teachers are never told in specifics what’s going to be on it. NAEP is used as barometer for how students in all fifty states fair in comparison to one another. And this is one of the ways that assessment can be used responsibly. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">To be sure, among professionals who study and implement standardized testing, there is profound agreement around the issue of making them high-stakes in nature: it’s a bad idea. What’s worse is that it’s clear that they exacerbate inequities in a public education system already chock full of them. Bruce D. Baker, professor of education at Rutgers, makes this point in a recent column published by Valerie Strauss on her Washington Post Blog, <i><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/01/15/cutting-through-the-stupid-on-annual-standardized-testing/">The Answer Sheet</a></i>. A <a href="http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/07/exit_exams_boost_the_school_to.html">study in 2013</a> by Kevin Lang and Olesya Baker at Boston University found that increases in high-stakes exit exams are linked to higher incarceration rates. John Papay, Richard Murnane, and John Willet at Harvard <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1165514">found that</a> high-stakes exit exams stopped low-income urban students in Massachusetts from graduating at disproportionately high rates. Multiple studies have found questions on these tests to harbor racial bias. In other words, a majority of questions asked are repeatedly answered correctly at higher rates by Caucasian students than by African-American or Latino students.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Furthermore, when a majority of students at a school speak a language other than English at home, we have a hard time knowing for sure whether the tests are actually measuring what they purport to measure, or if they’re measuring a student’s English language ability or cultural knowledge. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">I remember proctoring a test a few years ago during which students who’d recently arrived from the Dominican Republic could not explain why the main character in a reading passage would live in someone’s yard, and subsequently answered most of the questions associated with the passage incorrectly. It was because they didn’t know that, in the United States, Rover is nearly always a dog’s name. However, the test didn’t consider that that might be an issue.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">When students from ACE met with my legislator, Senator Sharon Nelson (D-Maury Island), she rightly asked if there wasn’t a collection of evidence (COE) course offered, which the legislature created years ago as a means of offering students who couldn’t find success on the tests another way to meet the requirement. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">When Senator Nelson <a href="http://kuow.org/post/students-lobby-lawmakers-junk-science-test">asked about the COE</a>, students spoke at length about how, at our school, the COE class has been a terribly disorganized once-a-week class, sometimes lasting as long as three hours, where, for the Biology COE, teachers are essentially doing an hour of test prep covering biological concepts that are normally taught in class over the period of a month or more, and then students get online to take a test without help. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Worse, because our district was unable to find the money to include the COE in the regular school day schedule, teachers in their first few years of teaching were asked to give up their after-school time (normally used for grading, planning, and making parent contact) to teach an additional class that often lasted two or three hours. Because the Biology COE is in its first year, and nobody has ever taught it before, teachers felt compelled to give up whole weekends trying to make the COE course meaningful for students who often weren’t even able to show up due to after school jobs. This is one sure way to speed up the burnout rate so many teachers already give into before they even get to year five as an educator. The issue was so concerning that nine students and five staff members went before our school board in December in hopes they might find a way to better support us.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">While the COE classes are a good idea in theory, our circumstances speak to a larger problem with the EOC/COE requirement in our state: we’re not equipping our schools with the resources they would need were they to truly prepare all students to achieve success on these tests. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Still, many argue that colleges have been, for some time, complaining of the low level of skills that students enter with. They continue to suggest that these high-stakes EOCs and/or COEs are one way of hedging that phenomenon. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Wayne Au, a professor of education who studies high-stakes testing at the University of Washington at Bothell, has repeatedly harped on the fact that tests have historically been used by the state to deny people living on the margins of our society from finding ways to assimilate and become a stronger part of the fabric of our culture – going back to the eugenics movement. Many professors of assessment will tell you that, despite studying standardized, high-stakes tests for years, they’re still not convinced they can say with certainty what they’re actually measuring. However, we do know that scores on them are strongly linked to the zip code the student lives in and the educational attainment of their parents. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Delinking the EOCs from graduation requirements would not mean that teachers could not still make them an integral part of a student’s grade. Their score on the EOC might, for example, comprise a certain percentage of the overall grade in that teacher’s class. But teachers know that one-time high-stakes measures of learning are damaging to students, not least because all assessments are human constructs and likely have at least some flaws. In professional development courses across the country, teachers learn that ongoing, multiple assessments of student performance are a far more reasonable way to assign a grade and determine whether a student is ready to move on. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Is it important to ensure that students graduate high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to join the work force or enter college? Absolutely. Are high-stakes tests a part of that solution? Absolutely NOT. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Rather, lawmakers should spend their time finding ways to lower class sizes in schools where it’s already difficult for students to learn and teachers to teach. They should also seriously consider bills like HB 1541, which would address issues of equity by ensuring better access to cultural competency training for school-based staff.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">It is wildly inappropriate for lawmakers to stick to their guns on an issue for which there is so much evidence suggesting the possible harm of high-stakes tests. Are we, as a state, comfortable denying students like Violeta access to participating in the economy in more meaningful ways because she’s a few points short of achieving an arbitrary cut score on a Biology test that has been poorly implemented? I say Hell No.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Leaving these requirements in place could mean thousands of students who've earned all of their credits this June have to simply wait until the next time a test is offered before they can work with a high school diploma.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Truth and urgency emanate from this argument like heat off the sun for those of us who teach and learn in low-income schools of color around Washington. So I urge students and families from around the state to take yourselves down to Olympia and pack legislators’ offices on this issue – particularly the office of the Chair of the Senate Education Committee, Steve Litzow (R-Mercer Island), who told a group of students from Tyee last week that there is no support for eliminating the EOCs as graduation requirements in the Senate – despite that Senator John McCoy (D-Tulalip) put forth just such a bill.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Join students from Tyee, who are planning on returning to Olympia on February 16 with upwards of thirty students to lobby legislators around this important civil rights issue. Contact your legislators, in person if possible, and see if you can’t clear some of the clouds down in Olympia, and hope the Senate might see some of the blinding light the rest of us deal with on a daily basis. </span></div>
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james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-5159593312383343642014-12-17T22:23:00.000-05:002015-02-11T21:00:34.933-05:00Wait! I'm a Radical Educator?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A version of this post was published at <i><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/12/24/we-are-trying-to-close-the-achievement-gap-all-wrong-teacher/">The Answer Sheet</a></i>.<br />
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When I started teaching, I had a radically different understanding of public schools and their purpose than I do today. Back then, I believed that great public schools could be the great societal equalizer for otherwise disenfranchised people in our society (I say much more about that in <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2010/12/im-lucky.html">this post</a>). And so, in this post, I'd like to discuss how that view has changed, and why I no longer believe schools can serve that purpose.<br />
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I want to start by telling you about a student I once taught. (Here, we'll call him Guillermo.) Guillermo had long, dark hair that usually covered his face. He was tall and lanky and normally wore black pants and a black jacket to school. When he spoke with you (or, more often, sat while you spoke to him), he would keep his head down. I can't remember a time that we made eye contact. After a long day at school, he would arrive late to the last period of the day with various colors all over the skin of his arms and hands. His friends had used markers to write their phone numbers, pictures, or messages on him.<br />
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Many days, Guillermo slept through class. Although he rarely spoke back to me when I asked him about his life, I had the distinct impression that he wanted to do well in school. To be fair, I believe every student wants to do well in school. But there was something unique about Guillermo's behavior that made me think that. For one, he was in school virtually every day. I caught him, on multiple occasions, asking other students what he was supposed to be doing when he didn't think I was looking. He always brought a pencil. And even though he never turned in work, I saw him occasionally writing on paper during work time.<br />
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A few years after I had him in class, I learned from our school counselor that the reason he slept in class so often was that his mom had relocated their family about twenty-five miles from our school. She wanted them to have an uninterrupted education, however, so she had them take public transportation from the temporary housing she'd found to our school, which required Guillermo to wake up at 4am to catch the bus. After school, he would hang out with his friends in the courtyard until the bus home arrived (around 5pm). He would return home around 7:30, help out with chores like grocery shopping, and fall asleep around 11 or 12.<br />
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Getting to and from school wasn't the only challenge Guillermo faced, though. His father abandoned his mother and siblings when he was four years old after some years of verbal and physical abuse, and his mom wasn't able to afford a regular housing situation on her own. Although I didn't learn about these facts until after he'd left my classroom, it made a lot of sense. Guillermo was a student who had suffered the loss and abuse of a father, and the emotional instability of a mother. On top of that, he struggled with the same challenges that teenagers who don't face such tremendous trauma deal with on a daily basis: hormonal changes, fitting in at school, and finding an identity.<br />
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I'm telling you about Guillermo because it's so very important that people who don't work in high-needs schools understand what the lives of the people who attend them are like. Of course, nobody else had Guillermo's unique situation; but most students living in material poverty experience a high degree of what one might call emotional poverty as well. It's not just about not having money for food and housing; it's often about not feeling the love, support, and stability needed for social-emotional health.<br />
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The challenges students face range vastly. There are students who live with two parents who are both unable to work due to disability; students who never knew their parents and grew up in the foster system; students who fight their parents' drug addiction; and students who have been routinely abused since the time they were born.<br />
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If I'm not careful at this point, I might be accused of attempting to foster a sense of pity for youth who grow up in poverty and trauma. But our reality is that, in many communities, trauma stemming from abuse and neglect are a way of life.<br />
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This reality, when fully grasped, suggests strongly that the primary purpose for school, particularly for tremendously disadvantaged students, should not be preparing them to compete in the marketplace, as I often feel our society believes it to be. Furthermore, the policies advanced in our country that are designed to make students competitive job seekers often do far more harm than good for students like Guillermo.<br />
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In one famous study from the 1980's, psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley found that children of professionals amassed a vocabulary that included 32 million more words than did children raised in poverty by THE AGE OF 4!<br />
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When you enter kindergarten at such a profound deficit in the skills and knowledge public schools assess young people for, it can be both difficult and debilitating to find that your teachers, and perhaps some of your peers, consistently judge you to be a failure. Compound that with the reality of what's going on at home for you with your parents and family, and the real inspiration is that so many students persist in school.<br />
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While we might, with extended school days and outstanding teachers, find ways to make up for the deficits of skills and knowledge our culture believes to be important to competition in the marketplace, it is a tremendous task.<br />
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What I finally realized, in my ninth year, is that it's not one that I support. That's right, I said it, I DO NOT SUPPORT NARROWING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP - at least not with school alone.<br />
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Let me clarify a little. What we mostly mean, as educators and as a society, when we talk about narrowing the achievement gap is finding ways to get students of color to score as well on standardized tests as white students do. As Hart and Risley's work suggests, skills and knowledge essential to performing well on standardized tests (like vocabulary) are not easily gained, particularly when a student's social-emotional issues (and perhaps hunger or lack of safety) stop them from focusing in school.<br />
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Does public education have a history of doing disservice to poor children of color in our country? Absolutely! Is it because they haven't closed the achievement gap. Actually, ironically, I would say schools continue to disservice students because they're so hellbent on closing the achievement gap.<br />
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Schools leaders who focus on closing the achievement gap often do things like eliminate art, music, social studies, recess; and, instead, spend lots and lots of time analyzing student performance on math, reading, and writing tests in an effort to improve those skills. Are these skills important? Certainly. But this kind of schooling comes with grave costs.<br />
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It's high time education policy acknowledges that we live in a tremendously unequal and unjust society that creates the problems we see in schools before students ever even arrive there. Students need to feel safe, to feel loved, to eat, to sleep, and to have friends before they can engage in learning. When students don't feel safe or loved or are hungry, they don't learn very well, if at all. Because the students who often don't have their social-emotional needs met in and out of school are the same students who are on the bottom end of the achievement gap, force feeding math and language down their throat becomes terribly inhumane.<br />
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Visiting the <a href="http://jjse.org/">June Jordan School for Equity</a> in San Francisco last month, I was delighted to hear one of the staff members say, "I'd rather have a student come to us, drop out their sophomore year, and go on to be a good person than graduate with a 4.0 and go on to be an asshole who doesn't know how to deal with other people."<br />
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Students who have to spend the vast majority of their day doing reading, writing, and math instruction geared toward helping them pass tests lose valuable opportunities to practice myriad other skills and learn vast amounts of other knowledge that are so critical to being human and participating in society. Why don't we spend more time teaching students about interpersonal communication or nutrition or personal finance in public schools? Why do we still cling to a curriculum that is so outdated and bareboned?<br />
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When you put people and animals in environments that do not stimulate them, like solitary confinement, they start to go crazy. It feels like that's what we're doing to students with our curriculum.<br />
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It forces one to ask questions: Why are we doing this? Why do we support a system of public education? Is it to ensure all of our kids can participate in the economy? And if it is, for whose benefit? For theirs or their employers?<br />
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The truth is, making a shitload of money isn't a universal value. When I asked a handful of my students last month if they were considering going to a four-year university when they graduate in June, all of them looked at me like I was crazy. "Why not?" I asked. "It'd be a phenomenal opportunity."<br />
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"Yeah. Probably. But my family comes first, and they need me here, with them right now" one of them said.<br />
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It reminded me that I come from a family and culture that puts great import on individual success. Different people and cultures will define success differently, and our public schools must be a place that accommodate those differences, particularly regarding how we talk to students about their post-secondary life and aspirations.<br />
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So what should the purpose of schools be for students like Guillermo and the family he belongs to?<br />
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In low-income communities, schools should serve as centers for civic dialogue, healing, and humanity. While learning the basics like math and language should certainly constitute some of what goes on in schools, our primary effort should not be to stress everyone out trying to bring underprivileged students' math and language skills up to par with their counterparts in affluent communities. Because, the truth is, those skills are not the only skills in life that matter. And so they shouldn't be the only skills that determine whether you receive a high school diploma.<br />
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Rather, schools should spend much more time serving students by identifying their strengths, helping grow them, and using the buy-in that's created by that work to motivate them when they work in academic areas in which they're less able.<br />
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Ultimately, schools are places we can go to take a glimpse into what our future society will look like. Since that's the case, it's imperative that the adults who work in them (and who create policy for them) are guided not by a desire to mold children into the model employee, but rather by love for the child. CHILDREN SHOULD FEEL LOVED IN SCHOOL.<br />
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And that's pretty much when I realized I'd become a radical - when I had that thought in my brain, and I realized I agreed with it. Because there are so many more conventionally minded people who would read this and think that I'm soft, that school is naturally the place where preparation for the marketplace should be front and center, and that individual competition in pursuit of monetary success is <i>the</i> appropriate way to live.<br />
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I can only respond by noting that Guillermo desperately needed a school that understood and accommodated for his unique needs. His six-period day packed with notes and homework and math tests did not do that. And we never reached him. He dropped out when he turned sixteen.</div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-60763028669599218202014-11-02T15:11:00.002-05:002014-11-02T23:34:39.920-05:00Complex Problems; Simple (and Harmful) Solutions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Public education seems mundane an issue enough. Schools, teachers, kids, learning, life-preparation, etcetera, etcetera.<br />
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International relations, astrophysics, calculus, or third-world economics all sound so much more complex and potentially interesting.<br />
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To listen to public opinion, this must be the way many people think. If Haley Sweetland Edwards' recent piece in <a href="http://time.com/3533556/the-war-on-teacher-tenure/">TIME </a>is to believed, David Welch is one glaring example. </div>
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Since it came out, the article has unleashed a fury of backlash from educators across the country. Sadly, too much of the counter-narrative (i.e. the narrative resisting the corporate reform of public education) often comes across as vitriolic. It includes ad-hominem attacks and equally poorly reasoned, ignorant charges.</div>
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Both sides over-simplify the issues at hand.</div>
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One example of such over-simplification is evident in Edwards' piece here:</div>
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"It seemed crazy to Welch that teachers in California receive tenure–permanent employment status designed to protect them from unfair dismissal–after less than two years on the job and that principals are often required to lay off the least experienced teachers first, no matter which ones are the best. It seemed even crazier to him that in some districts it takes years and tens of thousands of dollars to fire a teacher who isn’t doing a good job. Welch remembers asking a big-city California superintendent to tell him the one thing he needed to improve the public-school system. The answer blew Welch away. The educator didn’t ask for more money or more iPads. 'He said, ‘Give me control over my workforce,'” Welch said. “It just made so much sense. I thought, Why isn’t anyone doing something about that? Why isn’t anyone fixing this?'"</blockquote>
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To read the article (after this quote), one gets the impression that, armed with a single insight from one superintendent, Welch went on to finance a tremendously costly <a href="http://accomplishedcaliforniateachers.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/vergara-ruling/">lawsuit </a>aimed at stripping California teachers of due process rights. </div>
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I should hope that Welch did more research before making that move. If you're going to use your tremendous personal means to influence democratic institutions in ways that only a small sliver of extraordinarily privileged people have access to, it might behoove you to spend a significant amount of time gathering information from as many different stakeholders as possible before doing so. I hope Edwards just left that part of the story out. </div>
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In the part of the story that I hope Edwards left out, I wonder if anyone suggested to Welch that superintendents should not necessarily be trusted as the eternal protectors of students' well-being and development. I wonder if anyone pointed out to Welch that superintendents often have personal agendas. And I wonder if anyone talked at length to Welch about the standardized test movement in this country and how it often plays into those agendas.</div>
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The article portrays Welch as having made an elementary mistake. He assumed that public education can be understood and treated like private industry. It's a mistake made time and again by well-intentioned wealthy philanthropists, and most eloquently captured by <a href="http://www.jamievollmer.com/blueberries">The Blueberry Story</a>. </div>
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In my experience, there are a number of different types of superintendents: the teacher's superintendent, the administrator's superintendent, the people's superintendent, the state's superintendent, and the superintendent's superintendent. </div>
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Just like in business, the people who move up the pecking order at district offices typically have career ambitions. Too often, those who climb the ladder to the position of superintendent aspire to continue up that ladder. Sometimes the goal is to take state or national directorship roles, or possibly go into highly-paid consulting work.</div>
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The more noxious elements of NCLB and Race to the Top have guaranteed that central to the strength of the rungs on the career ladder for superintendents is performance on standardized tests and other one-dimensional measures of student achievement. </div>
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Administrators oriented in their work primarily by the career ladder naturally have an interest in giving a majority of their attention to the appearance of their schools according to these one-dimensional measures. </div>
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Ironically, and particularly in low-income districts (where we are ostensibly most concerned with the quality of pubic education), this attention to looking good often inspires compliance-oriented work on behalf of teachers and principals. This, in turn, takes time away from dedication to thinking through the hard issues around achieving quality for their particular students. </div>
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If Welch had called me, I would have coached him through his thinking a little further before mounting any lawsuit. I would have agreed that it makes sense to give district leaders control over their workforce when those leaders are incredibly intelligent, compassionate public servants deeply attuned to the needs of their particular communities. I would have suggested that his money might be more meaningfully spent dismantling the choke-hold standardized testing currently has on education politics. Maybe try sorting out the details of labor-management challenges later on.</div>
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The challenge of providing truly public, truly equitable education is tremendous. </div>
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Referring to the fight over education policy, Edwards notes: </div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 26.8799991607666px;">"It is fought not through ballot boxes or on the floors of hamstrung state legislatures but in closed-door meetings and at courthouses. And it will not be won incrementally, through painstaking compromise with multiple stakeholders, but through sweeping decisions–judicial and otherwise–made possible by the tactical application of vast personal fortunes."</span></blockquote>
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It seems antithetical that much of the movement in public education policy is spurred by privileged individuals, many of whom advocate against the public part of public education. This is <i>not only</i> a problem because public problems should be solved publicly, but also because the individuals with the money clearly don't understand the breadth of the problems.</div>
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james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-12349478719219657562014-10-26T19:25:00.000-04:002014-10-26T19:54:56.559-04:00Developing A Spiritual Hazmat Suit<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Two weeks ago, I attended the Teachers 4 Social Justice Conference at Mission High School in San Francisco.<br />
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In the morning, I participated in a session led by a woman who'd taught for some years in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The title of the session was something like "Self Healing for Education Professionals."<br />
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Describing her time as a teacher in LAUSD, our facilitator told us about a time an internationally renowned African healer visited her school and mentioned to her that upon entering, he felt immediately that he'd stepped into a "energetically radioactive" environment.<br />
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If you've spent any time in public schools, particularly schools that serve large numbers of students who deal regularly with poverty, trauma, substance abuse, and institutional racism and discrimination; I think the notion of "energetically radioactive" might resonate with you. Particularly if, along with these factors, you also struggle with poor administration.<br />
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Our facilitator mentioned that, in order to work in these environments, it's important for educational professionals to develop what she referred to as a "spiritual hazmat" suit.<br />
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Toward the end of my tenure as a public school teacher in New York City, I began experiencing what doctors would later tell me were panic attacks.<br />
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One day in May of 2011, I was sitting alone in my apartment typing on my computer and, out of nowhere, I felt a streak of pain shoot through my forehead. A few seconds later, my heart rate shot through the roof as if a bear had jumped out of the closet. However, NOTHING had happened. I began doing deep breathing to calm down whatever in my body was happening, but it didn't seem to work, and I dealt with a tightened chest and high heart rate for the next few minutes.<br />
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The stress of working 10-12 hour days with an hour commute to and from work, combined with a lack of exercise and sleep, and relatively inadequate diet, had me showing up to work with bags under my eyes and tremendous irritability.<br />
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Students who experience trauma at home don't need to spend their days at school with teachers and counselors who don't have a strong hold on their own lives. It leaves us less compassionate, less capable, and less able to deal with the hard problems that show up at our schools on a daily basis.<br />
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I now think of my experience in NYC as the first step on my journey toward creating my own spiritual hazmat suit. I've strengthened it over time through the development of balance in my own life, meditation, proper diet, exercise, and (most importantly) regular sleep patterns.<br />
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When you begin teaching in high-needs schools straight out of college, you have this sense that if only you care enough, you'll change the world.<br />
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And you're half right.<br />
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The caring part is important. But you can't care with reckless abandon. If you do that, you'll send your sympathetic nervous system into overdrive and find yourself unable to meet your own basic needs. Forget about tending to the needs of the children who walk through your school's doors every day.<br />
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We call this burnout, and it is one reason we see such high turnover in public education professionals.<br />
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Do you want to last in public education? Here are my recommendations for developing your own spiritual hazmat suit. These things should not be negotiable.<br />
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- Sleep regularly, and enough to allow you to wake feeling energized.<br />
- Have one off-day per week where you do not allow yourself to think about work or do anything related to it.<br />
- Make time for <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/play-spirit-and-character/143">play</a>.<br />
- Get over yourself. You cannot do it all, nor should you be expected to.<br />
- Do a small number of things well rather than a large number of things poorly.<br />
- Breathe deeply and meditate for 15 minutes a day.<br />
- Take a nap mid-day.<br />
- Take time to work out the food you're going to eat throughout the week with attention paid to meeting your dietary needs. Seventy-five percent of your diet should be fruits, grains, and vegetables.<br />
- Move. It can be any type of movement that works for your body, but we all desperately need to move.<br />
- Speak with students and colleagues as positively as possible at all times. Never pass up an opportunity to complement someone.<br />
- Work to ensure the environments you inhabit most often are welcoming and feel good (e.g. your classroom).<br />
- Think deeply about your life's purpose and how the activities you participate in on a daily basis support that purpose.</div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-68455016735804981722014-09-21T18:35:00.000-04:002014-09-21T18:44:55.107-04:00Don't We Need Standards?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A recent developer of professionalism says to my staff, "We all know we need to be teaching standards. If we're not, the kids just aren't going to learn."<br />
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Holy cow. What a comment! Without standards, children can't learn.<br />
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Woe to those miserable educators since time immemorial who tried teaching anyone anything without standards. Glory to contemporary American schooling.<br />
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In my fourth year of teaching, I worked at the Columbia Heights Educational Campus (CHEC) in Washington, DC. I had just moved to DC and was impressed with how organized the administration seemed to be around supporting instruction in the school. The administrator over the social studies department mentioned on a number of occasions that CHEC was was committed to "standards-based instruction." He talked at length about the perils of planning your instructional activities <i>before</i> thinking through your standards.<br />
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At the time, I remember wondering: So if <i>we</i> do 'standards-based instruction,' what's the alternative? Presumably, you would only have to voice your commitment to such a practice if some sort of other practice existed. I'm pretty sure I asked him what the alternative was once, and his response was something along the lines of "crappy teaching." And there I had it. Wondering over.<br />
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In January, I wrote a post on why I think <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2014/01/how-standards-based-instruction-is.html">standards are murdering school</a>. In today's post, I'd like to further deconstruct the notion of standards as essential to teaching and learning.<br />
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For decades, plenty of educators have eloquently voiced their resistance to the notion of standardizing education. They tend to have more liberal/hippie attitudes toward teaching and learning, and have often been quickly dismissed by more conservative thinkers and administrators toward the top of the educational career ladder who like standards for what they can offer in terms of data and assessment.<br />
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In his <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud">extraordinarily popular TED talk</a>, Sugata Mitra notes that the origin of our current school model dates back to the Age of Empire, approximately 200-300 years ago. (You can find a more detailed history of the primary school in Eric Hobsbawm's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Age-Empire-Eric-Hobsbawm/dp/0679721754">The Age of Empire</a>, which I talked about in <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/04/test.html">this podcast</a>.) Mitra says that the most incredible computer was actually not a computer as we think of computers. It was, in fact, the European bureaucratic machine. The output was society, and the inputs were civil servants - people who had been trained in school to read, write, and think the same way in order to participate in the creation and maintenance of society, or in the case of the British, empire.<br />
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Hobsbawm refers to the period between 1870-1914 as the Age of the Primary School. This was not coincidentally also a period of time when Europe's newly emerging nations were competing for citizen allegiance. You see, back then, the notion of countries and nations was still a relatively new idea. Convincing the average citizen to pledge their allegiance to some government and flag by the name Germany or Italy (both countries only came into existence as we know them today in the 1800s) was still a work in progress for the European political elite. The primary school turned out to be a pretty effective tool for unifying diverse peoples with different languages and dialects under national banners. This was largely done with language instruction (languages that had only recently been, or were in the process of being, standardized).<br />
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It turns out that when your goal is to create a society of people who think and act alike in service of some larger purpose, standards can be pretty useful.<br />
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BUT here's the rub: humans are incredible organisms. As a species, we've thrived for millennia without standards or classroom agendas. There will forever be an infinite vastness of skills and knowledge for humans to learn. Seen in this way, learning is really just an expression of our attempt to interact with our environment. We never really achieve total understanding or mastery of anything. We merely strive to exist and to adapt.<br />
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Now - I understand that, in that last paragraph, I've perhaps gone far to the left of any of the administrators who may work 'downtown,' or the education policy wonks in DC. But I have to defend this perspective on learning because I feel it is a far more humane way to view what should be happening in schools.<br />
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Our 21st-century world is an outrageously complex place and time. It would be naive to disregard the idea of standards-based instruction entirely. There are some very important uses for standards. However, the notion that students will not learn except from standards-based instruction seems to me a tremendously unhealthy way to understand the human brain.<br />
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Believing that students cannot learn without standards is extreme pedagogical arrogance. Students learn all the time, and mostly the learning that is meaningful to them is not in alignment with the teacher's goals. Learning is natural, and it comes easily given the right context.<br />
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As Dewey pointed out, the purpose of school in the modern world is primarily to help students develop literacy (see more on literacy <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2012/03/teaching-humanity.html">here</a>), which requires at least some formal instruction for most students to find success. Literacy and numeracy can be helped along tremendously by educators who have clear goals in mind for their students. But the most wonderful parts of learning are mostly accomplished by the individual and align with his or her unique strengths.<br />
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For these reasons, I will always see my job primarily as a facilitator of student development than as a deliverer of standards. </div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-62652320928482190962014-09-21T17:13:00.001-04:002014-09-21T18:52:25.321-04:00I'm a Racist, and You Are Too. Accept It.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It’s the beginning of a new school year, a time when I find myself reflecting on the parts of myself that brought me into this work.<br />
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It was the fall of 2005 when I first stepped in front of a group of diverse students. I stayed up all night planning the perfect thirty-minute lesson. I must have tweaked it, reworked it, and totally re-planned it dozens of times before I went to bed late at night.</div>
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Then, I believed excellent teaching was about perfect planning, exact timing, and lots of energy. Now, I believe it’s more about appropriate perspectives on school, society, and human behavior.</div>
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In the years since that first lesson plan, I’ve learned hundreds of times over that I have led a tremendously privileged life. And while I believed that in 2005, teaching in urban schools has allowed me to experience its veracity many, many times firsthand.</div>
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Nine years later, I’m still discovering assumptions I make about people and behavior that need reexamining. This is a fundamental part of human nature buried deep in our amygdala. A predisposition toward prejudice is part of the package.</div>
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The question is not whether you will be biased toward a group of people for this reason or that. The question is which group of people it will be and how it manifests itself in your behavior. To believe otherwise is to put yourself on a pedestal – to raise yourself above the rest of us. Our society is not post-racial because we as individuals are not, and never will be, post-racial.</div>
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Unbeknownst to people who claim not to be racist, nobody lives 100% of their life in their pre-frontal cortex. Prejudice and the tendencies toward oppression that accompany it are deep-seated and often unconscious.<br />
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This is important for people who work in institutions that serve as cornerstones of democracy (like public schools) to understand. We endeavor to create a more equitable, less oppressive society that honors the individual while addressing the needs of the group. (It’s a noble goal, anyway.) To believe that you behave without bias often serves only to reinforce oppressive behavior by closing your mind to valuable opportunities for reflection.</div>
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The perfect instructional plans are years in the making. Anyone who teaches knows the importance of experience in crafting valuable learning environments. You’ll get there if you persist, but only if you understand humans (and yourself) for what they are and how they’re inclined to behave.</div>
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Prejudice does not make a person evil. And it shouldn’t be thought to exist in one person or another, but rather to be a inextricable piece of humanity. Combatting it in others can be both challenging and meaningful, but sometimes less so than doing that work within yourself.</div>
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I can think of no group of people who need to understand this more than educators.</div>
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james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-26113897372474348022014-07-10T05:35:00.000-04:002014-07-10T05:41:35.224-04:00On Shutting Teachers Up<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Nothing but net for Nancy Flanagan the other day in her post over at <i>Teacher in a Strange Land </i>entitled, <a href="http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teacher_in_a_strange_land/2014/07/shutting_teachers_up.html">"Shutting Teachers Up."</a><br />
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She writes, "When practitioners aren't allowed to openly share their critical perspectives, they lose the ability to speak their own truths and use first-hand experience as a lever for change."<br />
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And, "Any number of thoughtful, intelligent, provocative voices in education operate behind pseudonyms, to give them the cover they need. But there's something about writing under your own authentic identity, having to own what you write and defend your words from criticism, that's quintessentially democratic, and a mark of honest journalism."<br />
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And, "Technology has led us to the point where anyone can publish and anyone can opine. Money makes it possible for the profiteers to have the loudest voices at the same time as public employees are worried about losing their modest jobs. It's no way to pursue bona fide excellence in public education. If that was ever our genuine aim..."<br />
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You know, when I started in this profession I had this attribute I thought was ambition. I later named it idealism. Now think of as naivety.<br />
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I was going to step into a school, infect others with my powerfully positive attitude, and change some lives. I was going to report what I saw in schools, and enrage others about the inequities that existed there.<br />
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I initially began blogging under a pseudonym, "The Reflective Educator." I wasn't particularly careful about hiding my voice off the internet, though, and district officials soon discovered who was writing my blog.<br />
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That naivety believed that, of all places, public education would be a sector in which employees would be given the right to honestly express their views, and relate their working conditions. It's public, after all - AND EDUCATION!<br />
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But soon after I began doing so, I was threatened with a <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/10/responding-to-parcc-and-common-core.html">lawsuit</a> on one occasion, and given a <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2010/01/open-letter-to-my-former-staff_30.html">horrendous performance review</a> in another district. This for writing about my opinions on schools and experiences in them.<br />
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An administrator I trusted convinced me to put my name on the blog if I really wanted to take a stand. She argued that I would be taken more seriously if I was brave enough to do so.<br />
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But <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/06/goodbye-reflective-educator.html">attaching my name</a> to this blog has also limited what I feel comfortable writing about. When I was first hired at my current school, the district made clear that they knew about my blog.<br />
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"Hi James. How was your first day? Great, great. Glad to have you on board. So....... by the way, we know you have a blog. Just wanted to let you know that we'll be monitoring it"<br />
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"Ummm - okay. Thanks for the heads up?"<br />
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Don't be fooled, you can't exactly express your opinion as a public school teacher freely. You do need to be careful. But as Ms. Flanagan points out, it's important work. Somebody needs to do it. </div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-66668550723602490782014-07-07T18:31:00.001-04:002014-07-07T18:54:44.193-04:00On Schools, Health, and Success<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>In the Western world, success is often thought of in terms of working hard to become upwardly mobile</b><b>, making a name for yourself, and, perhaps, accomplishing something of lasting importance.</b><br />
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Our notions of success, and the pressures they exert on our egos and superegos, have had varied effects on millions of <a href="http://www.allaboutcounseling.com/forum/general-support/type-a-personality-advise-tips/">Type A</a> personalities in the modern world. (I include <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/05/stupid-education-policy-stresses-me-out.html">myself</a> among them.) We push ourselves to the brink, attempting to fulfill societal expectations, and <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=humblebrag">humblebrag</a> about how many hours we spent working to get this contract signed or that task finished on our way up the career/reputation ladder.<br />
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We overextend ourselves, accumulate cortisol buildup from being <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/07/07/327322187/stressed-out-americans-tell-us-about-stress-in-their-lives">overstressed</a>, <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html">overeat</a>, and die early. Our role models are those who sacrifice themselves for their work, whether the result of that work is a better planet or insane amounts of money.<br />
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<b>Health - "a state of being free from illness or injury." </b><br />
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A major contributor to health is balance. Imbalance leads to dysfunction leads to ill health. In the body, this is easy to understand. If you eat too much sugar (inflammatory) or not enough vegetables (anti-inflammatory), you run the risk of develop a host of illnesses, cancer among them.<br />
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By what standards should we judge the health of a school? I don't think it's all that different from how we should judge the health of an individual.<br />
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<li>Do students know how to deal with their emotions, so that they don't build up and lead to harmful stress? Do staff?</li>
<li>Are students and staff generally happy in schools or angry?</li>
<li>Is real food served? Are the meals balanced?</li>
<li>Does justice matter?</li>
<li>Is a sense of empathy cultivated?</li>
<li>Is the workload of students and staff humane?</li>
<li>Do students and staff have opportunities to build community and learn from one another's differences?</li>
<li>Are students and staff valued and affirmed for being who they are?</li>
<li>Do students and staff have opportunities to exercise their wide range of talents and interests? </li>
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When we use the terms success and failure in discussing schools, we most often think about test scores, graduation rates, or suspension rates. I have never read an article that discussed school success with any of the components I listed above in mind.<br />
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If I had my way, I would change the connotation and denotation of success for both individuals and schools to be more closely aligned with 'health.'<br />
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<b>In the 1970s, James Lovelock proposed the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis">Gaia Hypothesis</a>. Taken to its full extent, it suggests</b><b> earth, rather than a collection of organisms, might be better thought of as its own living organism. </b><br />
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Think of the human body. Most of us perceive to be a single living organism, but it also consists of billions of other living organisms. Are we to our planet what the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome">microorganisms</a> that inhabit our bodies are to us? I think it's a reasonable conclusion. I think we might be well-served to look at schools the same way.<br />
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<b>Ongoing scientific research continues to find stunning connections between the mind and body. Many people believe we should stop thinking about them as different things. </b><br />
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If we continue to judge school and individual success in the very limited way that we do, we may one day discover that success is not at all what we wanted. </div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-12509491034582823402014-06-25T11:32:00.000-04:002014-06-25T14:56:11.337-04:00Faking Student Data<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The <a href="http://blogs.seattletimes.com/educationlab/2014/06/25/eight-teachers-eight-struggles-with-measuring-student-growth/">Education Lab Blog</a> at the Seattle Times today shares some of the stories of four teachers this past year using Washington's new TPEP evaluation system.<br />
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Teachers are cited as saying that they found the student growth goals component of the evaluation to be something of a joke. "Teachers were literally joking (I hope) about grading everything ridiculously hard the first time, and then just being easier on the kids the next time."<br />
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I appreciate this teacher's desire to be idealistic, but I'm quite sure that a number of teachers in Washington this year did just that. When you make student growth a component of someone's evaluation and then give them control over how that growth is scored, this is bound to happen.<br />
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I don't think it's that teachers are evil, or out to get off easy, as one commenter suggested:<br />
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"Is anyone surprised that the first thing these teachers tried to do was game the system or somehow cheat the system into the results they wanted"<br />
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In my experience, teachers in many public schools barely have time to do the fundamentals of their job (planning, teaching, and assessing). For teachers on the comprehensive evaluation this year, it was about as much work as teaching an extra class.<br />
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Before working in the Highline School District, I worked in Washington DC. There, in 2009, Michelle Rhee rolled out a new evaluation system known as IMPACT. It did many of the same things as TPEP is trying to do in Washington State now. And prior to many evaluation conferences, I saw teachers scrambling to create data that looked favorable so that their conference would go well. A difference was that, in DC, many teachers lost their jobs as a result of those conferences. It had people operating in survival mode - a poor environment for nurturing students.<br />
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Public educators are extraordinarily overworked . The solution proposed for incentivizing us to do as much of that work as humanly possible seems to be to make us all highly accountable for proving that we've done everything we're supposed to. As a result, school-based staff are not only overworked (teachers work somewhere between 50-55 hours per week on average), but are now operating out of fear. Don't surprised if teachers are faking data. </div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-86666300811702655502014-04-07T23:24:00.002-04:002014-04-07T23:24:33.019-04:00On Teachers United, WEA Rep Assembly, and Engaging New Educators<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I arrived back in Seattle yesterday morning from my first experience at the <a href="http://www.washingtonea.org/">WEA's</a> Representative Assembly in Spokane, and I learned a lot.<br />
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I've been a part of a number of different teachers unions in my day (TEA, WTU, UFT, WEA), and I came back from the WEA RA feeling that the WEA is overwhelmingly the strongest among them.<br />
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Had you asked me about teachers unions ten years ago, I probably would have told you that I was skeptical of their work. I would have told you that teachers unions are mostly about protecting their members' compensation, jobs, and pensions.<br />
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You see, when I began teaching, I was eager to learn as much as I could about teaching. At the time, most of the media was in agreement about the necessary fixes to our system of public education: fire bad teachers; hire younger, more effective ones; get rid of tenure; consider complete school makeovers when tests failed to show academic improvement. It was all I ever read about in Newsweek or TIME, or heard about on the news.<br />
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So, in 2009 I left the state of Washington to work in the city of Washington, DC to find out if what Michelle Rhee was doing there was really working. By the time I returned to Washington State from the East Coast, my take on public education and teachers unions had shifted dramatically (see posts <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/03/why-teachers-like-me-support-unions.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2012/09/the-good-how-teachers-unions-can-do.html">here</a>).<br />
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If you ask me about teachers unions today, I would still tell you they serve to protect teachers' compensation, jobs, and pensions. But I would add that the good ones also serve to protect democracy, the 'public' in 'public education,' and the educational values that I hold dear. I do not believe that unions are comprised of saints, but I've come a long way in ten years.<br />
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I know I'm not the only idealistic, type-A college grad to have been disillusioned by what passes for education reform these days. I've met a number of others. A group of us even considered starting a blog at one time to share our stories. (Note: Diane Ravitch's thinking also did an about-face.)</div>
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It's because of the changes I've gone through in my career that I spoke in favor of a new business item presented before the WEA RA Saturday night by Daniel Calderon of Federal Way and Evin Shinn of the Highline School District.</div>
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Their proposed NBI recommended: "That WEA identify early career teachers who have demonstrated effectiveness and leadership in the classroom and/or school community and that WEA establish a year-long, online fellowship that offers professional development on union leadership for those teachers, including three two-day, in-person meetings during the year and using existing resources such as the professional development network."</div>
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At the beginning of the debate around this NBI, I had the sense that a majority of the body seemed to support it. The conversations I heard going on were mostly in favor, and many members spoke in favor. But then, after about six or seven speakers, it was brought to the body's attention that the makers of the motion may have been connected with a Gates funded group out of Seattle known as <a href="http://www.teachersunitedwa.org/">Teachers United</a>.</div>
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I don't know if Daniel or Evin are members of TU, or even what it takes to be a member of TU (I've been to a few meetings myself), but knowing Evin's thoughts on education relatively well, and having eaten lunch with Daniel earlier in the day, I think it would be fair to say that the makers of this NBI did think like most of the members of TU. In other words, their views on testing and teaching are not in line with a majority of WEA members. However, <i>to be sure</i>, Daniel and Evin <i>are</i> members of the WEA. </div>
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When the final vote came on the NBI, after many members of the body had had a chance to look up TU, it was overwhelmingly defeated.</div>
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And I had a hard time accepting that.</div>
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As strong as the WEA is, and as much as I believe it to be, by far, the best professional association I've been a part of, I don't believe we do ourselves any favors by failing to address something that is a real problem: a lack of newer educator involvement in WEA.</div>
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Of course, opponents of this NBI were deeply concerned that it would serve a more sinister purpose. Perhaps the language would somehow be construed in order to serve some corporate reform agenda.</div>
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I don't think so.</div>
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Take young teachers, listen to what they have to say, and engage them in honest conversations about what's right for students, and I think that's a discussion where the truth comes out on top every time. It certainly happened for me.</div>
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I found what happened Saturday night to be deeply concerning, not because the body choose to vote against it in the end, but because of <i>how</i> it happened and what happened afterward.</div>
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Many of us reacted quickly and out of fear, and to be fair, that's understandable. But following the vote, were quick to laud a "take down" of TU over Twitter and Facebook. Delegates discussed the nefariousness of Bill Gates and his money (despite the fact that most teachers have worked on some project or another tied to Gates money). </div>
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If I had witnessed that happen ten years ago, I would have thought, "These people are just here to protect their own interests. Never mind that this body is far from representative of teachers in Washington State in terms of age and political leaning. I think I'll be going somewhere else to effect change in education." And I wouldn't blame Daniel or Evin for thinking the same.</div>
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I'm afraid we may have missed an opportunity for real dialogue. I understand why. We have real reasons to be afraid and angry about the direction education policy is headed. But I urge all of us not to let those emotions stop us from engaging in real conversations with those who disagree with us. Who knows, we might just learn something.</div>
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There are new educators entering our system all the time, and many of them have very different perspectives than we do. If we don't engage and listen to them, they may very well stop listening to us.</div>
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james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-90516617863647584252014-03-14T22:20:00.000-04:002014-03-15T11:29:17.485-04:00New Teacher and Principal Evaluation System Driving Out Principals?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
If your Washington State school is anything like mine, your administrator(s) has/have been so overburdened with completing documents related to the new <a href="http://www.k12.wa.us/edleg/tpep/default.aspx">TPEP</a> system, they've hardly had time to be administrators.<br />
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As I was talking this over with my administrator, she pointed out that there are more openings for principals in our region than she's ever seen (and it's only March). Her boss at the district told me that he agreed with her opinion. They both also agree that the burdens of TPEP are probably a cause of much of this. They went on to imagine that lots of principals close enough to retirement are happy to get away from what is a nightmare workload.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkV7dYY24eydLGzx1qhNjtKvHQTA1oDZgVBpj6KfKKBgmXC2Iu02qU1CIxMiK3Sjbk35e2eDQiBydG0vQDe4A3fPzJwHWNEZvwgG3cWAnL2GSeFzrFgBhN71BHjEPdgcb1q1aCNpiX4JQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-03-14+at+7.13.44+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkV7dYY24eydLGzx1qhNjtKvHQTA1oDZgVBpj6KfKKBgmXC2Iu02qU1CIxMiK3Sjbk35e2eDQiBydG0vQDe4A3fPzJwHWNEZvwgG3cWAnL2GSeFzrFgBhN71BHjEPdgcb1q1aCNpiX4JQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-03-14+at+7.13.44+PM.png" height="315" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Administrator Openings in King County (www.awsp.org)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Principals at poorer schools, where there are more teachers newer to the profession, are forced to complete more comprehensive evaluations than other schools, taking away time they would otherwise have to do all the other things principals need to do.<br />
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Our principal is leaving after this year, and there is a real worry that we will be left with few, if any, qualified candidates to take our principalship - particularly since we're a small school (which means less pay and more work) and we have an extremely high rate of students who are high-needs. An administrator I know told me that she doubts many experienced administrators would want to touch the job at my school a ten-foot pole.<br />
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I think this issue deserves media attention. The outrageously burdensome new teacher evaluation system in WA has really taken a toll on administrators. Schools having to hire new principals this fall may suffer, as many may be forced hire from mediocre candidate pools. If this happens, and instruction suffers, few in the public will see any connection to the teacher evaluation system. What was supposed to support quality instruction in the classroom might lead to poor leadership in the principal's office. And nearly everyone in schools understands just how important it is to have an excellent leader.</div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-70956646030450010682014-03-07T21:46:00.000-05:002014-03-09T20:13:44.918-04:00Washington State Legislature Considers Tying Test Scores to Teacher and Principal Evaluations<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Two bills currently under consideration before the legislature in Olympia, <a href="http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=5880&year=2013">Senate Bill 5880</a> and <a href="http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=2800&year=2013">House Bill 2800</a>, would mandate the inclusion of state test scores in both teacher and principal evaluations.<br />
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These bills were introduced after US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told Governor Jay Inslee that he would not consider extending a federal waiver currently in place beyond this year if state test scores were not included in teacher and principal evaluations. The current waiver allows Washington schools more control in the way they direct Title I funds and frees them from having to send letters to parents indicating their schools are not meeting the goals NCLB set for them when it was passed.<br />
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In other words, Duncan sent a clear message to our state: tie test scores to evaluations OR lose discretion in the way you spend federal money and send home the letters (nearly 100% of WA schools are failing by NCLB standards).<br />
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After Duncan's meeting with Inslee, the governor and Washington's state superintendent sponsored HB 2800, which mandates the inclusion of test scores in teacher evaluations beginning with the 2017-2018 school year.<br />
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Many Democratic proponents of HB 2800 and SB 5880 argue that this is a necessary measure if we want to avoid losing federal money and sending home loads of letters indicating to parents that our schools are failing. One of my own legislators, Democrat Eric Pettigrew, expressed exactly these sentiments as I followed him down one of the hallways of the legislative building yesterday. In a later meeting with teachers, Democratic Representative Mia Gregerson expressed similar concerns if the bills fail to muster the necessary votes.<br />
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It is not accurate that the Title I money would be lost, however. It would be redirected. This seems not to be understood by some lawmakers. The possible consequences of that redirection are debatable.<br />
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Dr. Susan Enfield, the superintendent of my school district, Highline, sent out an email to Highline staff yesterday explaining why she was in Olympia lobbying <i>in favor</i> of HB 2800. Among her reasons were: 1) she is concerned with the way the redirection of Title I funds would affect HSD schools; 2) she believes we may lose our Race to the Top grant money (applied for with seven other districts in the surrounding area); and 3) she is concerned that the labeling of so many of our schools as ineffective would be detrimental to the community's perception of the good work we're doing.<br />
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I will allow her point 1. She knows better than I how the redirection of funds might affect schools. But I, and many others, take issue with points 2 and 3.<br />
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I listened to House Education Committee Chair Sharon Tomiko Santos speak at length with Seattle Education Association President Jonathan Knapp yesterday in the halls of the legislative building. Knapp pointed out that a memorandum of understanding included in the Race to the Top Application that Seattle and Highline were granted last year makes it clear that our access to that money will not be affected by whether test scores are tied to teacher and principal evaluations. Santos asked for those documents, and Knapp promised to supply them. If Knapp is correct, then it would appear that Dr. Enfield has no grounds for concern.<br />
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Dr. Enfield's third concern was that letters going out to families informing them that their schools are not meeting AYP would be detrimental to our community. Possibly. But, if these bills fail, those letters will also be going out to nearly every other family in our state with a student in public schools. I, for one, would welcome that. I think it would raise public awareness of a terribly flawed federal law.<br />
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<b>When it comes down to it, tying high-stakes tests to teacher evaluations is bad policy. </b><br />
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In some ways it makes sense that a superintendent would support such a policy. Dr. Enfield is, after all, judged on her ability to raise test scores by the public. The more she can create teacher and principal ownership of that, the more likely she is to succeed in that endeavor. But there are very grave concerns about using tests in such a manner, and a number of other Washington superintendents wrote to oppose the bills.<br />
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Lots of research suggests that the results of high-stakes tests may correlate more strongly with a student's zip code and parents' educational background than with the student's knowledge of the subject ostensibly being assessed (see <a href="http://www.texastribune.org/2011/05/02/is-poverty-the-key-factor-in-student-outcomes/">Michael Marder</a>). Importantly, test makers across the country warn that their tools are NOT designed to evaluate teacher effectiveness, much less principal effectiveness.<br />
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While many among the public are concerned that poor test results are indicative of an ineffective school, teacher, or principal; I seriously doubt that is always (or even often) the case.<br />
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Students perform well or poorly on tests for a variety of reasons. Last week I attended a function at the University of Puget Sound where Bellevue Elementary Teacher Linda Myrick made an excellent point. She noted that <i>some</i> (certainly not all) of her students who fare well on tests have told her that they think some of their performance can be attributed to the extra tutoring their parents paid for them to attend over the weekend. At the same function, University of Washington at Bothell Professor Wayne Au, an expert on standardized tests, said that <i>even he</i> is still unsure that standardized tests are actually measures of learning so much as they are measures of other things.<br />
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Moreover, high-stakes tests hurt low-income students the most, exactly those students the accountability movement professes to be attempting to help. At my school (approximately 90% free and reduced), we have seen teaching positions go unfilled for months at a time. Our reputation is not what we would hope, and many of our students are faced with significant life challenges. The first response I received from my staff when I alerted them to the possibility that some of them may soon have test scores compose a part of their evaluations was: "Thank you for the information. And now I want to quit."<br />
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Faced with the reality that a) nobody, not even "experts," has discovered a surefire method for improving student test scores and b) this affects teachers' livelihoods; many teachers in low-income schools will be delivered a strong incentive to find a more affluent school to teach in if they want to continue in this profession.<br />
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And take it from me - someone who's worked in inner-city DC and the South Bronx - most of the people who work in these kinds of schools in 2014 are among the most dedicated people you could ever hope to work with.<br />
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<b>Tying student test scores to teacher and principal evaluations is bad policy.</b><br />
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I will grant there is some room for argument as to whether it's worth swallowing bad policy in exchange for some of the benefits the federal government might offer. But in this case, I believe it is not.<br />
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I believe this is a chance for Washington State to make a clear statement to the federal government: You can't bully us into accepting your bad policy - policy you not only have no evidence to show is effective, but policy for which there is tremendous evidence that it is affecting schools in states where it has been swallowed <i>extremely</i> <i>negatively</i>.<br />
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So I urge you, Washington State citizens, to use <a href="http://app.leg.wa.gov/districtfinder/">this link</a> to find and contact your legislators regarding this matter. Contact them now, contact them often over the next week, and contact them in different ways with stories of how you fear this will affect our schools negatively.</div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-75614290095600848492014-01-12T23:34:00.000-05:002014-01-13T00:11:19.960-05:00What's Best for Kids<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
If you've spent any time in schools or in school district offices, there's a good chance you've heard someone implore others to remember that it's important to keep students in mind when making decisions.<br />
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Although not always, this is sometimes a underhanded insult. It suggests that others may have ulterior motives (presumably self-interest) when making decisions about how schools work.<br />
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At my school, we've recently been thinking about how to change our structures, schedule, class offerings, and other important operational components in an attempt to provide better educational experiences for students. The process has led to a few reminders that we should keep students at the heart of our thinking, which led me to really think about how my school might change if we really thought about said change through the lens of "what's best for kids."<br />
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Here are a few things I think would put students first (certainly not an exhaustive list):<br />
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<b>1) We would allocate far fewer days to testing and test preparation</b><br />
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Many of my students experience severe anxiety about tests, and some even skip school when they know a test is coming. There is much to be said for learning to take tests and their role in society, but we've overdone it by a long shot. The emphasis we place on tests encourage deficit thinking and lead to hours upon hours spent thinking about how to make up for student shortcomings.<br />
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Focusing on students' strengths would not only create a healthier learning environment, it would give us the leverage we need to think about how we might best remedy some of their weaknesses.<br />
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<b>2) We would spend our staff meeting time and professional collaboration time thinking about students</b><br />
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In my estimation, millions of meetings in public schools go nearly to waste every week because staff are directed to poor over data the district office is held accountable for by the state and federal government. Without training on how to interpret that data or draw inferences about how to act in service of changing it (much more on that <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/08/on-data-part-four-advocating-for-data.html">here</a> and <a href="https://civilsociology.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/doing-program-evaluation-scientifically/">here</a>), school staffs leave these meetings with little more than a headache and complaints about how they could have used that time grading.<br />
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Part of the problem here is the type of data staff are being asked to analyze. Of far better use would be student work. There no data I can think of that better helps me plan effective lessons.<br />
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<b>3) We would spend more time creating fascinating and relevant <a href="http://www.edutopia.org/blog/pbl-vs-pbl-vs-xbl-john-larmer">project-based curriculum</a></b><br />
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Students in too many schools are receiving the type of drill and kill instruction geared toward preparing students for the tests that make or break the careers of the adults in the system. Too often, the charge is made that teachers who eschew standards-based, test-centered instruction are not doing what's best for students. I find this ironic since standards-based instruction is mostly intended to improve the few drops of data that force repercussions for adults. (Read more <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2014/01/how-standards-based-instruction-is.html">here</a> on my thoughts about standards-based instruction.)<br />
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No - there are plenty of excellent strategies available for helping students meet standards. What I currently see lacking at my school, and many schools like mine, is a severe lack of motivation/interest on behalf of students.<br />
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Contrary to popular belief, students do not dislike learning. In fact, like all humans, they enjoy it tremendously - when the learning is right for them.<br />
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If we were to put students first, we would ask students to join us in developing cross-curricular units that seamlessly integrate desired standards in pursuit of solving a community-based problem or presenting a meaningful project. This could be anything and everything from helping our students advocate to the school-board their right to use electronics in class to analyzing the harmful effects of popular music videos on teenage body image. Whatever it is, it has to matter to students and value their prior knowledge.<br />
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<b>4) We would spend more time building relationships between all members of our community</b><br />
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Unfortunately, many of the staff at our school were raised in vastly different environments than our students. We may know what our students allow us to see of them in a school setting, but there are undoubtedly many more layers to each of their unique personalities.<br />
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People who go to work where they feel like they know the people they spend time with well enough to speak honestly and openly with them enjoy what they do. This leads to a healthier environment for all involved.<br />
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<b>5) We would make small class sizes a priority for all students, regardless of whether they're in a class that requires a high-stakes test at its end or not</b><br />
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Class size is often poorly understood because changes in class size don't affect all classrooms in all schools the same way.</div>
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Students from safe environments who know how to learn, are motivated to learn, and already have background knowledge in the subject at hand are significantly more manageable in class. But even when you have all of those factors working in your favor, an increase in class size still portends a massive increase in work when it comes to parent communication, assessment, and tutoring - all tasks that fall outside of the school day, and therefore often slip the minds of those in this "debate" who don't work in schools.</div>
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For teachers who work in schools that serve less privileged communities, increases in class size carry an even heavier burden. It means that you have to be extraordinarily skilled at classroom management, willing to devote tremendous effort planning detailed lessons, and have the competencies and social-emotional characteristics that allow underprivileged students to trust you and learn from you.</div>
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Ultimately, smaller class sizes mean better educational experiences for all students - and that is particularly true for the students least well served by our system.</div>
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<b>6. We would be mindful of how changes affect different students differently</b><br />
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Solutions being posed by many of our district leaders center around offering students more choice in the classes they take, including increasing the rigor (terrible, terrible word to use to describe what goes on the classroom - can we please just say challenging) of classes.<br />
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It is my sense that these solutions primarily come from parent feedback. And while I acknowledge that these are important pieces to consider, they are not game changers, at least not for the students we're currently failing as a system.</div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5113479300897983388.post-70800949691167076182014-01-08T21:46:00.002-05:002014-01-08T22:08:52.134-05:00I Don't Have Enough Time to Be a Good Teacher<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When I got into teaching, I was bewildered by all of the things supposedly good teachers did in their classrooms.<br />
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From professors and mentor teachers and administrators, I learned at least three new things that good teachers did every day for a long time.<br />
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A few examples:<br />
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- Good teachers keep records of phone calls home<br />
- Good teachers greet students at the door and know at least one personal fact about each of their students<br />
- Good teachers base their instruction on assessment<br />
- Good teachers collaborate<br />
- Good teachers stay after school to work with struggling students<br />
- Good teachers differentiate their classes heterogeneously and homogeneously depending on the lesson<br />
- Good teachers have excellent transitions<br />
- Good teachers engage all of their students<br />
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The list of things good teachers supposedly do is endless. When I started teaching (the type A personality that I am), I was eager to work toward doing all of the things on that list. For years, I stayed late after school crossing every T and dotting every I. I desperately wanted to be good at my job, and I was deeply concerned that I wasn't good enough. I dealt with so much stress as a result that I nearly left the profession twice (<a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2010/01/checking-out_10.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/05/stupid-education-policy-stresses-me-out.html">here</a>).<br />
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I used to be of the opinion that with enough hard work and effort, I would one day reach a place where I could seamlessly do all of the things on that good-teacher list.<br />
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Of course, the more I teach, the better I get. My skill in responding to student behavior has improved tremendously. I am more adept at creating assessments and using them to instruct. I have a much stronger opinion about the purpose of school and my role as a teacher.<br />
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However, no amount of skill or talent can substitute for spending time I don't have planning, collaborating, or grading.<br />
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There's sort of a dirty secret in education: not very many of us <i>are</i> good at our jobs - at least not if you measure a teacher against the never-ending list of good-teacher expectations. There's just too much.<br />
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Schools and education workers are overburdened with work, to put it mildly. That much is clear. Therefore, our focus becomes getting things done, checking them off our never-ending to-do list, and getting out of the building every day with our sanity.<br />
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I don't think school improvement is complicated - at all. If we had the time to focus on quality work, and were supported in doing that, school quality would improve greatly.<br />
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Two plus two equals four...<br />
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You don't need research to know it's true or a talking head on CNN to agree. It's just true. Expensive, but true.<br />
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What makes today's school improvement complicated is that we're trying to be better at what we do with fewer resources - less time, less money, and fewer professionals.<br />
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You even hear school leaders acknowledge this. They conclude, "We're going to have to do better with less. That's just the way it is." Which is what probably got them hired in the first place - convincing the community that they could actually do that. But it's not going to do much in the way of real school improvement. (Many educational leaders garner success by finding inventive ways to lie with data.)<br />
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As long as this rigamarole continues, I can't see how any real headway will be made in improving educational experiences.</div>
james boutinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09625944306253098621noreply@blogger.com0