Chris Osmond

I am thinking about Kermit the Frog this morning. Noble, long-suffering, earnest Kermit: puzzled by the ways the world around him makes life more complicated than it is, but committed to working within it anyway. This mix of energy, compassion, and bewilderment is what made him the anchor at the heart of The Muppet Show. He was the John Entwistle that rooted the whole chaotic thing to the ground no matter what blew up in rehearsal, ensuring that it would get to the stage ready for the big show regardless. That’s the core of our love for him. He’s the ultimate order Muppet, and while we love to laugh at the chaos compadres that surround him, we want to live in the world he facilitates.

Kermit’s on my mind because of what my Governor had to say this week about the need to “rebrand” my state’s storied University system, to make it more responsive to market demands and therefore better suited to meet the needs of my state’s young people (or, as he might have it, “emerging workforce”). Kermit had a brush with branding in his second feature film, when he finds himself in a marketing office on Madison Avenue and is asked for the opinion of the “common, ordinary frog on the street” regarding a proposed campaign.

“Ocean Breeze soap: for people who don’t want to to stink.” What do you think? Be frank.
(after a pause): I don’t like it.
(exasperated): you don’t?
Well how about, “Ocean Breeze soap: it’s just like taking an ocean cruise only there’s no boat and you don’t actually go anywhere?”
(pause): Seems a bit long. Have you tried something simple, like: “Ocean Breeze soap will get you clean”?
Wait a minute! Wait just a second! You mean, just say what the product does? No one’s ever tried that! It’s crazy! It’s nuts! We…love it!

UNC faculty (and others, nationally) have been trying to do exactly that – actually explain what we do, its value as it has been demonstrated on a much longer arc than the current market cycle, straightforwardly. It’s increasingly a hard sell, and to some extent, “our jobs are on the line.”

Ten years ago I was writing curriculum for an education nonprofit that worked aggressively to find its place in the market, and we (like so many) consumed Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great,” wherein he details how successful organizations develop their “hedgehog concept” (the thing that, in hard times, they curl up around and protect) at the intersection of what they care about most deeply, what they are equipped to be best in the world at, and what they need to drive their economic engine. He gave us lots of buzzwords (the “Flywheel Effect” stuck with me, and probably dates me when I drop it in conversation with business types). But as I recall he did not talk too much about “brand” as an outcome, as something that needed a place at the table when an organization was making its most essential, even sacred commitments about What It Would Do.

Of course not: Collins was about finding the place where passion, competence, and economic sustainability meet, not about capturing market share through recasting yourself into the mold of whatever the market is perceived as buying this year. In this he echoes my best career advice to any student who asks, and the wisdom of many others. Branding, as Kermit sagely senses, is about identifying the fear and insecurity within the consumer and convincing them – by any means necessary – that what you are selling will alleviate it. Currently, we are terrified as a people of economic insecurity (and other insecurity, but the two tend to co-occur, as I read history). As we have for decades, we displace our fears as a people onto the schools: the places that are supposed to fit our next generation to handle the world’s threats better than we perceive it did us. This fear makes us particularly vulnerable to branding efforts that cast schools as needing to produce graduates with measurable, marketable skills, and makes any entry into the marketplace that does not scan as “hard,” evidence-based,” “workplace-ready” as soft at best or dangerous / unpatriotic / wasteful at worst.

So educators are particularly vulnerable to the language arts of branding now. But it’s still not a fit for what we are doing. “Brand” is perhaps a necessary component of determining what we teach in our schools and universities – the third leg, the “economic engine” part – but it is not sufficient. “Brand” does not exhaust the responsibilities of education: to engage the student in her world, to help her locate herself within it in intersubjective relation with those that share it. These are concerns that include the necessity to support oneself and one’s family, but they do not end there. And the fact that asserting these self-evident facts about education’s role in existence makes me seem out-of-touch with market realities only attests to the success of the branders who have been hard at work to make it so. Their efforts do not change the essential truth.

To be clear, identifying and working with synergies is not necessarily craven. I am aware that my campus is committed to sustainability principles, and thrilled at how that alignment supports my own passion for helping new teachers avoid burnout and develop the capacities necessary to thrive in this work. But sustainability can’t merely be our “brand” at App: if that’s all it is, then we’ll twist what we do every which way to make it fit whatever we think folks are buying. If it represents what we are essentially terrific at, care deeply about, and can get us the financial stability we need to do our work, then full speed ahead. I think it can, and look forward to working on teacher sustainability issues in the context of institutional enthusiasm I anticipate we’ll enjoy.

But work on sustainability in education will inevitably lead to critique of the state and national principles upon which our ideas of teacher education are increasingly being built: policies that seek to eliminate job protections and tie work security and remuneration to student testing outcomes without concomitant enthusiasm for restoring sustainable working conditions, reasonable compensation, retirement and other social supports, commensurate with those accorded other professionals. The “Finland model” is exciting, indeed – wow, look at their results. Are we similarly prepared to select, train, and support our teachers at levels exponentially greater than we currently do? These are the types of questions that honest exploration of teacher sustainability will beg. It’s certainly about individual teacher capacities, but not only that – any more than student achievement is only about skilled teachers and not about the social and cultural milieu in which school happens.

Branding-speak tends to be short-sighted and ultimately cynical, in the “vote your fears not your hopes” sense: it rarely includes discussion of what really matters most in what we do. One would think, it should ultimately include discussion of how to protect the public educational trust from the vagaries of the market, not how to better tie the two together. The fact that the opposite is becoming commonsense in my state is beyond troubling. Like Kermit, I am puzzled by the world I awake to today. Like Kermit, I’ll continue working for change and speaking truth. Hopefully, the show will all come together by curtain time. It always does.

Image from Muppet Wikia, with thanks.

Being fevered notes in advance of my participation next week in my campus’s “Great Raft Debate,” a mildly gladiatorial affair in which I and my colleagues from other fields are to harangue and berate each other for our students’ amusement (and small edification, hopefully) in support of why our discipline matters most.

Why should education make the cut?

Consider the apple.

We have always had apples in education, it seems: the apple as the symbol of the profession, a leftover from turn of the century frontier schools when itinerant teachers were given gifts of fruit and vegetables by their students’ parents to supplement their unlivable salaries. How much has changed!

Not a thing, really. We still depend upon the largesse of those we serve to approve bond measures or grant us the security of a living wage, a margin of autonomy approaching that of the humblest civil servant, the security and respect we are taught not to feel entitled to. The apple, well-polished, is still offered to evoke in us a sense of obligation, gratitude for the acknowledgement of those we serve, thanks for noticing me, thanks so much. A gift offered that could be taken back, of course – could just stop showing up on our desk, if we don’t please.

But beyond all that policy muttering: what’s in an apple? What will this symbol of domesticity offer us on our desert island? By what lights should the discipline it represents be selected as the Thing We Bring, the thing that will best guarantee that what we most care about will live on as we rebuild?

Seeds and stems, is what. Seeds and stems.

Hear me out.

Education is not really about the What. Education is about the How.

Foul! you cry. As we are talking about it in the last years, education sure seems to be all about the What! What shall the children learn, and what shall we do to them to be sure they’ve learned it? Curriculum, the common core, is all we really hear or think about these days, as if education were really about how well-furnished your mind is at the end of the process, how much you’ve crammed in there and how well you can show you’ve got it. How many shiny apples in your basket, anyway? How high your scores, how fancy your degrees?

The truth is that What is secondary to How. Did you know the fruit of the apple – the shiny, sweet part, the part you see and polish and desire – isn’t really part of the plant? It’s a “false fruit,” by which botanists mean (as far as I can gather from Wikipedia) that it doesn’t actually come from the germination of pistil and stamen by a lascivious bee. It’s a by-product of that fertilization, is all, a fortuitous result. It doesn’t even grow out of the same place as where the fertilization action happens, doesn’t really serve any purpose for the furthering of the species, except as something tasty for a predator to eat and excrete and disseminate the seeds of.

The How is about seeds and stems. It goes like this.

First, the stem is the the thing without which there can’t be an apple. Everything that matters to the apple must come through this hard, dry little thing – doesn’t look like much, but without it there’s no getting anything else downloaded from the tree. Without it, offering the little false fruit all the sun and water and dirt in the world won’t matter. And see this little dried-out flower at the bottom? That’s what’s left of the blossom – shoved down there, hidden in this obscene little dimple, a birthmark apposite the navel that you’d just as soon forget. But without it? no fruit without it, no seed, no nothing. Giving tree indeed: the poor provider in that dreadful book ended up a stump, at least, something to sit on. This, this here – this is just a bit of grit to be picked from between your teeth, stowed down here at the bottom the better to pretend it was never needed.

And the seed, neglected in this disquisition so far and, lets face it, by all of us, always. The seed of course is what comes of the apple, eventually – what becomes its own tree, making its own apples. But did you know how profoundly its “own” the seed really is? Apples seeds are “extreme heterozygotes”, which means, quote: “rather than inheriting DNA from their parents to create a new apple with those characteristics, they are instead significantly different from their parents.” You can plant an apple seed and get apples, sure – but they will always be different from the apple that produced the seed. So different that commercial apples aren’t grown from seeds, because that would cultivate an unruly, heterogenous crop: they’re grown from grafts, short-circuits of nature that feed part of the tree back into itself to force it to make more of what it is. Actual creation, for the apple, is about deep self-abnegation: the forced willingness NOT to recreate yourself in what you create. As Sweet Honey in the Rock taught:

Your children are not your children
They are the sons and the daughters of life’s longings for itself
They come through you but they are not from you
And though they are with you they belong not to you

So what does all this tell me about education? Fierce lessons; essential lessons that we’ll need as we start again on our desert island.

Mainly that if we lead with the What – ANY What – we’ll just be stockpiling apples, putting our trust in something ultimately false, because it will be something ancillary to our truest and deepest being. We’ll have lots of lovely fruits to polish, certainly – some of them nutritive hopefully, some of them delicious. But they will all fade away in the light and wind of time, as certain as textbooks become irrelevant as soon as they are published.

Esteemed colleagues: your products are delicious and shiny. But they will not endure, and will not be what we most need to begin again. The apple teaches us that if we attend to our Hows, our Whats will take care of themselves. I alone up here represent the discipline of How first, What second. Education – those little old neglected seeds and stems that made all your false fruit possible. Take me with you. If you have me…God only knows what might grow. If you don’t…nothing will.

 image from Wikipedia, as above.

As both a product and a champion of public schools, I confess that I am sometimes coy about where I got my K-12 teaching experience. I think it’s because I know how teachers determine your credibility by a quick sniff test, and it starts with how you answer the question, “where did you teach?” No list of fancy degrees or slick professional development programs will rescue you from the wrong answer to that question, and my answer is, to many, wrong.

I taught in private schools, folks. “Independent” is the term of art, actually, in an effort to more specifically distinguish the values and goal of such schools. And, along the way, get some distance from Dead Poets Society, A Separate Peace, and all the public imaginings of private schools as places where blue bloods marshal social capital to the next generation in ivied halls. The fact is that I have never taught a day of public school in my life. I taught full-time 7-12 English, Spanish, and performing arts at The Field School in Washington DC from 1993-1999, with a few summer stints at Beauvoir (the National Cathedral Elementary School). Coming clean about that – and asserting that my experience is singularly relevant for future public school teachers – is what I am up to here.

What an odd way for things to play out. I had never set foot in a private school until the day I interviewed at Field. I was an Air Force brat, shuffled among elementary programs through several moves until Dad became a reservist in upstate New York and I spent seven years in their mediocre and underfunded public schools. My family moved as I started tenth grade, and I suddenly became the beneficiary of a spectacular (and spectacularly tax-based) public high school in Newt Gingrich’s district outside Atlanta. (The contrast between the schools is another post for another day: suffice to say the lunch options in my new high school cafeteria were more abundant than any restaurant I’d ever been to, and I think I saw my first BMW in the senior parking lot.)

This was how a career in education worked out for me. It wasn’t by design – if I could have figured out how to do it, I’d certainly have taught public, because that was the warp and woof of my own experience. But I decided to become a teacher late in my college career, and didn’t have time to pursue certification before finishing my BA. After spending two years in Spain I had passion for teaching language, and took two foreign language pedagogy classes that cemented that desire and helped me develop teaching chops. The first thing private schools “buy” with their independence from state certification requirements is the right to keep their own counsel about who is qualified to teach their students. In my case, Spanish fluency, a prestigious undergrad degree, two classes in teaching, and what my Dean of Faculty came to call a “put me in, Coach” attitude was enough for me to land my first job at funky little Field School.

I get a moment of uncanny thrill sometimes in my current position, wondering if what I mean when I think “school” is what my students think. Am I preparing my students for the correct world? I need to be deliberate about stuff like this, as all teachers do: we teach from our experience, after all, unless and until we make deliberate choices to do otherwise. What does my unconsidered experience have me “teaching from,” anyway? How does my experience contrast with those that await my teaching students?

In three ways, I think.

First, the nature of the teaching work itself. The level of autonomy I was granted to figure out how to organize and run my classroom, connect my students’ “real” interests to those of the curriculum, build the culture of respect and risk-taking that my students needed. I am worried sick about the long-term effect of a generation of teachers whose ultimate judgment about whether or not what they did worked has been usurped by external accountability measures. My doctoral work tried to understand how teachers negotiated tensions between their obligations to external pressures and their own inner compulsions to teach and connect. I found hopeful stories of that negotiation – successful examples of folks “rendering unto Caesar” what Caesar needed to affirm accountability and returning to their closed-door classroom to practice mostly uninhibited.

I wonder at how that world has changed in the eight short years since I completed that work. Indications are that it feels very different to teach now, and that the locus of judgment about whether or not they have succeeded is almost entirely abrogated to external powers. That’s a tragedy, for the teachers and their students. While I was of course observed and mentored and evaluated at Field, those accountability measures always returned to hopeful, “appreciative inquiry” models that sought to build my strengths on the way to ameliorating my weaknesses. Can that happen in a standard-six world? Can it happen in a PLC? I don’t know, but I know community is grown into, not assigned, and community is the ground in which new teachers thrive.

Second, the ways that community grew at Field were so essential to our development as teachers. Lack of space forced shared offices and classrooms; we were piled on each other like puppies most of the time, and the virtue of that necessity was a lot of idea-swapping, profligate cross-pollination between our classes. We spent a lot of down-time with each other on the way to meets, performances, practices – a lot of what Roland Tharp called “propinquity” and opportunities for “legitimate peripheral participation,” interactions that built competence and confidence in organic and highly-stable ways. A lot of happy hours down Connecticut Avenue in Dupont Circle, too; the social fabric of the place was intimately connected to its intellectual and social values, and it all added up to a marvelously supportive setting in which to get one’s teaching legs.

How can that community be emulated in a public school setting? More easily than we might first think: lots of hanging out, lots of opportunities for sharing and celebrating each other’s successes. I see the challenges of creating this community in the institutional spaces of our public schools, but it can be done. Leaders who value it make time and find resources for it, and it’s more a “low-load / high-rep” thing than an annual event anyhow. Competition is inimical to it; collaboration and celebration is conducive. Kirp’s description of school success in Union City, New Jersey barely made a ripple when it was published last month – perhaps because community-building and real, relationship-based accountability like what he describes doesn’t boil down to the bold action that reform seems to have to mean these days. But it’s what he’s talking about, and it’s what I experienced. It’s what works.

But the last difference has to be the expectations we have about what goes on in the classes themselves. I taught for six years in rooms with about fifteen students – and that was a big class. I was comfortable as heck in that environment: the great boon of my undergrad study was how much time I spent in small seminars, so I came to value the genuine back-and-forth of respectful, engaged discussion between instructor and students, students and each other. It’s What School Looks Like To Me.

My present classes are just small enough to be run as (admittedly aerobic) seminars, and I continue to be gobsmacked by how many of my students tell me ours is the first class where they’ve been given opportunity and expectation to have something to say to each other and to me. Students must know they are seen, heard, read, answered. What does it mean when so many of our future teachers come through their own public school experience and undergrad training in mostly large rooms, where their accountability for learning is more based on measurable outcomes than the dispositions developed through relationships with each other and with professors? I think I DO mean something different when I think of a classroom than many teachers do, and I think my idea – smaller, discussion-based. everyone seen and heard and attended to – is what we need. We need our teachers to develop these values and instincts for what well-administered classes look like: the buzz of intersubjective connection, not the well-regulated models of atomized experiences.

So, there are three places where my private school experience comes up against my public school commitments:

• the level of autonomy I expect teachers should be able to have as they grow into their practice;
• the depth and vitality of the school communities I think teachers should be welcomed into;
• the quality of the engagement that I think teachers should be engendering in their students’ experience, and the expectations for connection that I think they should hold of themselves and their students.

As I said, I think these three values represent our best aspirations for public education, and it is an indictment of our public school investments that we have been unable to commit the resources (physical and emotional) necessary to make them a reality. Bill Ayers stirred the rhetorical pot beautifully upon the President’s re-election, and is worth quoting here at length:

Education is a fundamental human right, not a product. In a free society education is based on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being; it’s constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and, conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all…

In a vibrant democracy, whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children. Arne Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons); you sent your kids to Lab, and so did your friend Rahm Emanuel. There students found small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits, and a minimum of time-out for standardized testing. They found, as well, a respected and unionized teacher corps, people who were committed to a life-long career in teaching and who were encouraged to work cooperatively for their mutual benefit (and who never would settle for being judged, assessed, rewarded, or punished based on student test scores).

Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere—a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

In so many ways, Field emulated the best of our public desiderata of what all children should have. The fact that not all our public schools do is an indictment of our civic priorities more than our private school culture - bake sales and bombers, mindless embracing of educational “reformers” bent on their own gain in heretofore closed markets.

I don’t repent of my independent school past. Rather, I seek to carry forward the values I learned to enact in private institutions into the public school setting, where the vast majority of our need lies. Good enough for the privileged, good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere.

Thanks to earthhouse.com for the image.