Chris Osmond PhD

He was a dweebie way before he was a righteous dude.

He was an odd young man who had a “turbulent” relationship with education until his fourth grade teacher bribed him to study; a guy whose principal recommended he be skipped directly to high school, in part to avoid the social issues that come from being a weirdo. After changing schools, fourteen year-old Steve spends most of his time with nineteen year-old Steve Wozniak (let that sink in for a moment), a guy he meets through a mutual friend in the high school electronics class.

Seems like Woz opened the door to all kinds of adventures, mostly embodying the Merry-Prankster attitude that still hung around the Bay in the early seventies. A semester at ultra-relaxed Reed College was not a fit – he left because he knew the expense was killing his parents – and came home to a barefoot life, dropping acid (“one of the most important things he had done in his life”) and eating off returned bottles and Hare Krishna handouts. Then he designs video games for Atari for a little bit, travels in India for enlightenment, and returns to co-found the company at 21 with funds from the sale of a VW bus and Woz’s scientific calculator.

It feels like visiting a foreign country to read about Jobs’s early life, and the role school played in it (and didn’t). Where would there be a high school electronics class now, to start with? What about the opportunity to spend time in the in-between places before, after, and around school, where most of the kit-building and club-swapping happened? I am writing this blog on stolen time from prepping a seminar on Foucault and panoptic power. He suggests that knowing one is watched leads one to actually police oneself: to internalize the values of your watcher and thereby ensure that even when you are “off the grid” of its gaze, you are still keeping yourself “on” it. We work in the most heavily-monitored moment American education has ever seen. I fear the deepest damage to students is not the hours spent testing and comparing. It’s the saturation of school with the idea that what is supposed to be known is the only thing worth knowing, and that time “off-task” (or “thinking different“) is wasteful.

In our moment of international economic anxiety and pressure on the schools to fix it, why aren’t we re-reading Jerome Bruner and the rest of his Woods Hole buddies? Back in in 1960, they were way more scared of getting their butts kicked than we are, what with Sputnik looking down at their backyard barbeques. But from their anxiety came the realization that teaching the deep structure of discipline, at any age, was key to being able to really innovate. They acknowledged that intuition, sense, and emotion were cognitive events and intrinsic to our relationship to information (another Apple innovation, of course). And as Bruner explains in The Process of Education, they understood that wanting to learn was inseparable from really learning:

Motives for learning must be kept from going passive… they must be based as much as possible upon the arousal of interest in what there is be learned, and they must be kept broad and diverse in expression (p. 80).

Curriculum that follows from those insights look a lot more like wandering around and exploring than teaching and testing and teaching and testing again. Here’s Jobs remembering the electronics kits he built in middle school (out of school, of course):

Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself.

I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that “I haven’t built one of those but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I’ve built two other Heathkits so I could build that.”

Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.

Today the President is enjoying the naches of celebrating Jobs’ innovation and vision a week after his Secretary of Ed tried to forge connections between that innovation and his own impoverished and heavily-monitored agenda for American schools. That is fine, but let’s acknowledge that the two do not go together. And the economic argument (retreaded from 1983) that we need to drill-and-kill in order to keep up with the rest of the world isn’t our best idea by a long shot.

When I was at Stanford, there was a billboard by the highway up to San Francisco that showed the voluptuous new VW bug, with the slogan “Hello Rich Hippies!” A commodification of our nostalgia for the goofiness of the 60s, for sure, but also a reminder that freedom and innovation go together. Wandering around is part of finding, and being a magpie is a necessary precondition to finding the shiniest bits of others’ ideas to forge into your own.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. Thanks, Steve, for all the shiny bits.

What do you think?

Today’s the Teach for America application deadline, as about a hundred posters on campus reminded me this week. The date invites a brief reflection on what TFA is doing, and how it is doing it. Yes, it still bothers me.

As I watched Waiting for Superman with a class last night for the third time, I was challenged again by the core values the film shares with TFA: that the only way to address entrenched, systemic problems is to “drop out” of the system and start anew. This is the logic the film presents to defend charter schools as the sole, scrappy Davids capable of felling the Goliath of the ineffective existing system (an argument effectively fact-checked and dismantled elsewhere). And it is the logic of TFA too – don’t become part of the “blob” of traditional educators that prevent change: join us on the barricades of a new, nimbler effort, where your individual freedom won’t be hampered and your individual success will be rewarded.

I especially note how TFA’s recruitment pitch appeals to an inborn desire to be a member of an elite corps – in fairness, perhaps no more attractive an option to the students I teach than it would have been to me, but this is the supposedly the “Trophy Kids”  generation, more dependent upon external validation than any that’s preceded it. This terrific student columnist at Mt. Holyoke puts a very fine point on how TFA threads the needle of selectivity in a tight job market:

Teach for America is easy to gravitate towards—they come to you, saving you much of the overwhelming and sometimes scary process of figuring out where to go and what to do after graduation, and, with a 12 percent acceptance rate, they’ll assure you and everyone else that you really do have it together.

There is also the way that the “elite corps” mentality of TFA casts education as a matter of noblesse oblige, something worthy to invest in with your spare capital. Most of those recruitment posters say, “What Will Your Legacy Be?” – “legacy” being of course what the advantaged and well-off call their leavings to those who come after. A cynic could say it’s a dramatic way to capitalize on a student’s desire to make something of herself in a job market offering fewer and fewer chances to do that with a BA. And who am I to fault a college student for seeking an edge? If you can’t find a job, why not wait out the recession doing some good?

Maybe it’s those two things together that leave me queasy: the way TFA strengthens resumes as evidence of commitment to the have-nots, and the way it capitalizes on the vague desire to “make a difference” while actually undermining less-stylish efforts to address these intractable problems.

And I think I can say “undermining” because the issue is too important to depend upon the altruism and energy of the young. A school is not a Habitat for Humanity house; no disrespect to that terrific organization, but students and their schools’ cultures need sustained, institutional support, not drop-in charity. Education change requires systemic efforts that address not only the abuses of tenure and collective bargaining (that WFS succeeds in making us think about in true muckraking fashion, touche), but also intransigent and politically-toxic issues like income disparity and institutionalized racism.

It also requires us to look hard at the glaring lack of respect for teachers’ rights and craft that led to their unionization in the first place. These are crucial issues of professional autonomy that continue to be ignored in merit-based efforts to “pay teachers more” based on their attainment of measurable outcomes, despite the impressive consensus among people who spend their lives thinking about this problem that it doesn’t work and that TFA’s resources would be better spent elsewhere.

Thrashing out this whole question is bigger than my present understanding, and certainly outgrows the time I have for it today (you’d be better served to read that student editorial I linked above, and her follow-up here – man, what are they feeding the undergrads up there?) To be clear: I have deepest respect and gratitude for the energy and altruism those extraordinary young people in TFA are bringing to the students they spend a few years with. But we do need to think about legacy when we consider TFA. Will this generation be remembered as those who took on core issues that underpin problems of schools, or those who were satisfied with short-term interventions that boosted scores, but shortchanged the long-term need?

What do you think?

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was teaching middle school in Durham. Before second period I passed the admissions director’s office and heard her chatting about a radio report that had just come in. I remember thinking, fleetingly, that it must have a been a single-engine plane (what else could our imaginations admit, back then), and briefly wondering how a tragic accident like that hadn’t happened sooner. Then I went back to work, prepping the class about to start.

A few minutes later, I was on the way the copier when I passed the head of the school, another teacher, and a parent who were having a fiercely-whispered, stand-up conversation in the middle of the commons that separated the elementary and middle schools. I was running late, but I was pulled in by their urgency. There had been another crash in New York; they were huge planes; we did not know what was happening, but it was terrifying, and we needed to decide what to do.

I remember someone mentioned the nuclear plant to our west, and wondered if it was in danger. There was concern for how to manage the chaos of a run on the school of worried parents. The parent (a Duke professor) commented presciently that “this was the end of civil liberties as we know it.” What next?

I volunteered that we should not tell the students, to avoid panic and maintain order. The head agreed, and we headed our separate ways. We must have stood there for less than a minute.

It is hard to remember a time when you could put a school on information blackout. Few student had phones, and the only internet was through four ancient PCs in each classroom that took ten minutes to boot up. But that’s the way we got through the day: pretending nothing was happening. The teachers sneaked TVs into their rooms to look in between periods, before (incredibly) turning back to their lesson plans to step oblivious children through the day’s spelling or science reading or verb declensions. As the day progressed, we became increasingly unable to hold that crazy boundary. By lunch some kids had been picked up by their parents, starting a rumor among them that I never really heard but could sense. We got the kids home safe; the defining news of their young lives waited for them after the carpool line, often from the lips of parents incredulous that they did not already know.

Like all of us, I carry burning questions from that day, but as a teacher none is more powerful than the question of whether we made the best choice. Where did my reflex not to tell the kids come from, that morning? Why did the others assent so readily? Was it because it seemed safest and easiest to stay the course? What was done to the kids, knowing that the grown-ups they implicitly trusted to act in their best interest chose to warp their world to one that better suited them for six hours, rather than let them be full members of the larger culture’s struggle that day to assimilate the unimaginable? Did we do right by them?

Perhaps I should be a little gentler with our deliberations and decisions that morning. A teacher lives life at the threshold of public and private, every day. She plans what she thinks will best meet the needs of her students, but those plans are always contingent upon what the day brings her. And she rarely gets a reflective moment before having to respond to what a student has brought in the room, or what the world outside the classroom forces upon her orderly direction. In school, class is always about to start: teachers need to do, first, to live without a net in front of the attention of those they are committed to serve. Only afterwards do they get to reflect on whether their doing was the best they could, whether it met the demands of the moment, what they should have done differently and hopefully will do better in the future.

Our first and deepest responsibility as teachers is to keep our students safe. The trust that we will act in loco parentis makes safety job one, the inviolable bedrock upon which any learning must stand. It is ours to be worthy of a fiduciary duty: we will use our judgment to make decisions on their behalf that their judgment won’t let them make in that moment. These two judgments look different for first grade teachers than they do for middle school teachers or college professors, of course, but a first principle at all levels of maintaining that trust is letting our students know that we will not lie to them. That we will not abuse our almost-total power over the borders of the sealed world of the classroom and pretend the world isn’t changing, when it is.

If I had it do over, I like to think I would have spoken up for telling our children the truth at that ad hoc policy session in the hall. Even though we did not fully understand it yet, even though it would up-end all of our normality, starting with the days’ lesson plans and ending with our deepest notions about safety and autonomy. That way, at least we would have come through that day with our students’ trust intact, even when everything else had been called into question. We would have enfranchised them in the culture we were equipping them to join, rather than affirming that, actually, our world valued false order over real chaos. As it stood, we showed that we valued our own institutional peace over the incipient horror of reality.

I do not remember how I met the students who came to school on the 12th, but I know I apologized to them for abusing their trust the day before. I remember spending the next several days with the TV and computers blazing in my room as we struggled together to understand what had happened and accommodate ourselves to its implications. I still took my fiduciary responsibilities to heart, I believe. I watched Web sites over their shoulders, trying to benchmark the insanity of reality to whatever index of appropriateness I could still muster – what, exactly, constitutes the Zone of Proximal Development for “capacity to understand horror”? I did not abandon them to violence. But I stopped pretending the world was something it wasn’t in the name of maintaining my own fictional equanimity.

And I promised myself that I would never betray my students’ trust to be honest with them again. That even when things happened that destroyed my own understanding of the way our world worked, I would be a companion to them as we worked together to find the next step, not a block to their development. That commitment is part of ensuring school is a place of real transformation, not just an institutionalized replication of existing power structures. It is the bedrock of trust.

On this day of so much remembering, it is my deepest lesson, and one I hope I help my students learn.

I hope I am not the only one cataloging the “Abu Ghraib“-ing of the Atlanta cheating scandal: the assignment of blame to a few low-level “bad actors” whose motivations mystify the rest of us, while failing to account for institutional factors that are much harder to address. Note this quote from Richard Hyde, the investigator who uncovered the trends, as he describes emerging evidence that a similar thing happened in Dougherty County:

“The level of confessions we’ve received and the cooperation of parents we’re getting here is greater than it was in Atlanta,” Hyde said. The teachers who have confessed, he said, have generally shown remorse. “I don’t know what their motives are,” he said. “It could be anything from self-aggrandizement and praise to promotions.”

Come now – what could their motives have possibly been? This looks to me like a textbook situation of moral hazard: a situation in which the incentives to act in one’s best interest confound an individual’s ability to make ethical choices. But the classic example from the insurance industry – someone burning down their house to collect on a policy that is worth more than the house is – does not hold here. Teachers who work under threat of sanction, demotion, and dismissal for failing to raise test scores are not looking to get rich quick. They are trying to hold on to the meager security they already have.

Let’s remember also that a primary criterion for which states receive Race to the Top funds is their commitment to linking individual student test data to specific teachers (by 2014, in NC, vide infra). If anything, the built-in pressure for a teacher to show improvements on standardized tests or lose her job is becoming stronger, not weaker. Couple that with a teacher’s vulnerability in bucking the entrenched culture of power by standing up to a principal requiring unethical behavior – a principal whose job is also on the line – and you have a clear situation where an institution has forced the hand of its lowest-level members.

In my doc seminar last night we discussed Kieran Egan’s terrific reimagining of American schools. His provocative way of sharing that vision comes in the form of an imagined history of the next fifty years, a frame that is both frustrating and revealing. In his account, the trigger for a turn away from an atomized, standardized notion of accountability toward a more satisfying one is an environmental cataclysm that forces us to re-evaluate what our schools are and are not doing. That led to a discussion of how past sea changes in education have been associated with other “cataclysmic” social events (the immigration booms, Sputnik) that focused public energy and political will on making changes to account for them.

We wondered: might there be a public cataclysm of faith in the accountability movement on the rise? The Atlanta debacle comes at the same time that other high-profile success stories are coming under public scrutiny for possible malfeasance. Michelle Rhee‘s tenure as chancellor of D.C. schools first among them; since she is the hero of the immensely influential Waiting for Superman, if her outcomes are discredited it will be a serious public blow. Taken together with Secretary Duncan’s (relatively) quiet, unilateral waivers of NCLB expectations on a state-by-state basis – and the outright refusal of a few states to comply with the law – we wondered if a similar event might be on the horizon: an irrefutable, public crisis of faith in the way we are doing things now that invites serious, ground-up work on what we should do differently.

Of course, the antecedents we discussed also happened in eras of faith in the value of federal investment in social programs of massive scope – not at all our present moment. Still, we wondered if the conditions might be leading toward a public reckoning with the fruits of the thirty years that have passed since A Nation at Risk (a manufactured cataclysm that seemed to meet the needs of other entrenched interests) made accountability and rigor the only show in town. And what might be the results of such a reckoning? To be clear, changing NCLB should not be a step away from accountability of our schools to our students’ best interests. Thoughtful proposals for what to do next seem to build on the strengths of measuring what can be measured. But the calls for change are mounting. I hope we protect the most vulnerable actors in the current situation – the teachers – in the process.

What do you think?

(Also please note some substantial revisions of my previous post on Arctic Monkeys.)

Thanks to Colonel Flick for the great image. All Rights Reserved.

Adolescence – as I remember it, and certainly as it is reinforced and transmitted by our culture  – is about urgency. The highness of stakes. Fear of phoniness, of loss of face and the fragile esteem it brings. It is about the fear of being humiliated above all, and therefore transformation of that fear into anger toward those with the power to humiliate you. It is strong stuff.

By these lights, Arctic Monkeys’ 2006 album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not might be the most adolescent album I have ever encountered. The album is bookended between two observations: that “anticipation has a habit to set you up for disappointment,” and that with those you truly love, “you just cannot get angry in the same way.” The first is made at the beginning of the evening, as the speaker is preparing for a night out – or a weekend out, really, that will close only in the dead-eyed light of an exhausted Sunday. And while the first dismisses all the mad searching that will come as futile before it’s begun, the second settles with acknowledging the quieter but more reliable satisfactions of at least having companions for the journey. We won’t find what we are looking for – but at least we’ll be on the mad, pointless hunt for it together.

What is the search for? That’s the album’s arc. The speaker searches for pleasure, yes, but more for the connection and completeness that pleasure should bring. Our lads are running from the fear that it won’t satisfy even as they are running toward it as hard as their legs will carry.

The music opens way for these explorations. There’s a willingness throughout to keep singing even after their (many) words fail, a fresh dipping into those glossalics (“na-na-na”) that the pop tradition has used to voice inarticulateness since Phil Spector. There is a willingness to let guitars sound like guitars, in Gang-of-Four slashes as well as slabs of Sonic Youth feedback. There is such humor in these songs! Listen to Matt Helders’ drums and imagine every cymbal crash as a “yeah!” and you’ll hear what I mean. No one since Keith Moon has shared as much clownish energy from behind the kit, been as involved in commenting on the song’s proceedings as much as keeping the time. Above all there is a lightness to these songs, a deftness with which they turn corners and cut out and pile on all together, amounting to a twitchy energy by turns neurotic as early Talking Heads and as playful as early Joe Jackson.

Those records (Fear of Music, Look Sharp!, Entertainment!) are this one’s aunts and uncles, but its grandfather is beyond a doubt Quadrophenia. That was the last time a band so fully took on youth’s anxiety to make itself through affiliation – the last time rock and roll so effectively captured the satisfactions and crushing defeats that follow when youth entrusts its self-image to the wrong things and the wrong people. There are differences, surely: for one, the parents and other adults whose sham values haunt the mod’s flight into his own culture are largely absent in the “chav” culture the AM’s describe. There’s no parent horrified at what their kids are doing and wondering “did anyone see you there?”

But there’s no observatory showdown either, no frontier justice other than border skirmishes. It’s just them and their insults and disses; they are each other’s judge and jury, not combatants. The effect, though, is one of intensifying fear rather than lessening it, raising the stakes rather than lowering them. Neurotic obsession with others grow and metastasize, complete slight or affirmation in issues as insignificant as whether your mates assent to jump a cab fare or whether someone confesses to pretending to forget your name a year ago.

But holy cow, can they talk about it. In this, Arctic Monkeys’ differ from Green Day, who dropped their own rock opera in 2004 about disaffection and seeking something more satisfying. It’s been noted that, for that album’s protagonist, inarticulateness is part of the point: raised on soda pop and Ritalin, those kids don’t have much to say. Tempting to say that the AM’s made the record Green Day thought they did. As was once observed devastatingly about Chuck Mangione, “they hear more than they play.”

Here, though, we have an album full of obsessively cataloged discontent, where the specificity of reference is part of what makes the rage so effective. It is targeted: at the good-looking girl who won’t give enough attention, at the better-looking guy who gets in your way, at the perceptiveness of the bouncer who realizes you and your friend switched shirts to try to get by him, at the band affecting to be from California when we all know they are from up the road. Urgency can heighten the senses, or dull them. Here, senses are keen-edged and on fire.

Until suddenly, it isn’t: until, in a flash, clarity becomes muddy again. What you think you got, you suddenly realize you didn’t get, as they note in “From the Ritz to the Rubble:”

Last night, what we talked about, it made so much sense

But now the haze is ascended, it don’t make no sense anymore.

For teachers, the record serves as an evocation the youth we spend our lives with, of how high the stakes always are when you have so little experience with which to reckon them. I am grateful to be reminded of what else is in the water when I teach, the turmoil that might have been brought in from the hall or the home, the lens through which whatever I am offering might be viewed. It’s a call to authenticity, above all – a bright line connecting Holden to Ben to Jimmy to Alex, right here and now. It reminds me, whatever else I do, not to be phony. Because if I am not, I have a chance to be a companion on the journey.

What do you think?

CORRECTION and AMENDMENT, August 26:

First, I attributed my quote to the wrong song; it has been corrected.

More egregiously, I associated the AMs with “chav culture” thoughtlessly and ignorantly. Further research suggests they are considered more an “indie” band, or even a “chindie” band, because their take on the “chavs” is more ironic than anything. Hard to understand these distinctions from across the ocean. Happily, I learned this week that I have a student this semester from Sheffield who went to school with some of the band, so I hope he’ll set me straight.

More importantly, I was ignorant of the perjorative socioeconomic implications of the word. I should not have been: If Dick Hebdige taught us anything, it’s that youth subcultures cannot be separated from the social conditions they grow in (Richie Cunningham couldn’t cruise the strip without a car, gas, and cash for cheeseburgers; Johnny Rotten couldn’t sneer “God Save the Queen” without the backdrop of the over-the-top Silver Jubilee celebration that made a mockery of the poverty of so many Britons). Of course the way that youth subcultures get stripped of their intimate connections with socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity and other factors and sold back to us is a factor here too.

And the critique of my structuralist assertion that it is even possible not to be “phony” (i.e., NOT to slip between what you say and what you think you mean) will have to wait for another day. But I hope you get what I mean.

The Atlanta cheating scandal breaks our hearts, because – even though it looks like the fish rotted from the head – it causes us to question the integrity the most trusted person in our neighborhood: our child’s teacher.

The basic tensions accompanying pay-for-performance schemes are not that crazy or scandalous. People will be forced to act in their own interest if that interest is jeopardized by the terms of a contract, as Cuban lays out, even if that devil’s bargain means violating fiduciary trust that has been placed in them. If principals were told to boost scores by any means necessary or lose their jobs, they were in an impossible situation and handed it along to their teachers.

But the acknowledgment of self-interest in the hearts of teachers, who from our earliest years we feel exist only to serve us, is deeply discomfiting. We all remember how weird it was to see our teachers after hours doing grocery shopping or out at the movies; that they would have commitments beyond our own needs is almost unimaginable.  I wonder if that deep emotional need to believe our teachers are selfless only strengthens our tendency to blame the individuals caught up in such scandals rather than the social and cultural structures that put teachers in such positions. Here as in so many other places, it is more expedient to name and punish low-level bad actors, who are more vulnerable, than push for systemic analysis and redress.

More so because the ethical failings of teachers play out in our public conscience. In his libertarian take on moral hazard and the economic crisis, Kevin Dowd quotes Martin Wolf’s observation that “no other industry but finance has a comparable talent for privatising gains and socialising losses.” Is it not also true that no other institution but education has a talent for “socialising” both its gains AND its losses? Since all Americans who have been to school feel they know what their teachers’ values should be, they feel a personal violation when it is revealed that teachers have acted selfishly.

As we watched Waiting for Superman this summer, my students and I struggled with the pay-for-performance structure advanced by Michelle Rhee and the costs and benefits of its alternatives. These are not academic questions in a state that has been awarded $400 million in Race to the Top money, in part due to our commitment to linking student outcomes directly to teacher assessment (see p17 here for a quick look, or pp133-143 here for the relevant language in our state’s funded RttT proposal).

While I agree completely with Ravitch and Apple’s critiques of that film’s bold-faced propagandist crimes, I cannot deny its “dance of the lemons” stories of damaging teachers who are shuffled between classrooms because it is too hard to fire them and “rubber rooms” where unionized teachers loaf at full pay as their hearings drag on. I know some teachers abuse protections they were granted to incentivize them to stay with a low pay, low prestige job, and I can see the desire to find accountability in a system that historically has little (though it must be noted that impassioned calls for teacher accountability are rarely as passionate about accurately portraying of the data or exploring alternate systems of due process and security). That is a travesty, and must stop.

But isn’t the deeper question here – still – whether or not the care of our children is best managed by the same principles that maximize profit and efficiency in the business world? My colleague Michael Dale notes that in Hard Times, Dickens describes a world where the logics of pay-for-performance are played out to their logical end:

It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across the counter. And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.

The airtight common-sense of market-based social models (“neoliberalism,” for those jargonistas keeping score at home) continues to blind us to the a priori question of whether or not outcomes that can be measured are most worth measuring: whether competition thus scored does, in fact, encourage innovation and help us “win the future.” Those aspects of our work with students which cannot be reckoned as a “bargain across the counter” are systematically devalued by curriculum and assessment schemas that reduce the results of teaching to a number. I am increasingly troubled that Peter Drucker’s management dictum “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” seems to have become the unquestioned common sense of education.

Isn’t a lesson of the teacher cheating scandals that some of the virtues necessarily “abolished” by pay-for-performance are altruism and hope in our perceptions of the children we teach? That P4P also undermines a crucial sense of vocation, autonomy, and self-respect among our teachers? These are profoundly significant values that we need our teachers to nurture in themselves and in their students. They are no less crucial just because they challenge measurement. Values like these are not strengthened by competition, quite the opposite: they only grow in conditions of safety, in conditions where adequate space and resources allow teachers and students to relax into relationships with each other and with curriculum. Competition and market pressures are good at weeding out weak links and identifying scalable profit generators. They are antithetical to the nurturing of conditions of trust and support. Education’s stuff is the latter, not the former.

The New York Times piece, tellingly, loops its account of teacher and principal perfidy back around to a hopeful vignette of an Atlanta parent making a decision to trust their school again this year with their daughter’s well-being.

“It was pretty shocking to have the national news right in front of us, but I’m pretty confident we can move forward and make things good from here,” Mr. Peterson said. “I may be wrong, but I believe that anybody in teaching is doing it for good reasons. It’s about helping people, not getting rich or famous. Progress is going to happen by parents and teachers working together. It’s up to us.”

It seems school remains a reliable, trustworthy, local institution in the eyes of its constituents, despite mounting evidence that institutional pressures are forcing it not to be. Would that our policy commitments could follow the same paths our hearts already find to the school. We would then be listening to the better angels of our nature, at least where our children our concerned, and be that much closer to finding effective ways to support great teachers while removing harmful ones.

What do you think?

I read William Pannapacker’s “Overeducated, Underemployed” with terrific interest, personal and professional. I am grateful to have what must be one of the last tenure-track positions in social foundations of education in the country, and am keenly aware of the job challenges of most PhDs in the humanities and, increasingly, the social sciences. I am also at an institution with a manifest commitment to undergraduate teaching, so I do not feel the pressure, perhaps endemic to “R1” culture, to give lip service to it while actually being more devoted to my research. I am fortunate indeed, and in the minority of PhDs of my vintage.

Pannapacker makes the point that PhD programs need to do a better job at educating students about other career trajectories that are outside of the academy, free of the parochial stigma and Freudian drama that so frequently accompanies advisor / advisee relationships. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Initiative on the Doctorate affirms as much:

The PhD is a route to many destinations, and those holding the doctorate follow diverse career paths. Some seek out a life in academe, while others choose business or industry, or work in government or non-profit settings. Yet all are scholars, for the work of scholarship is not a function of setting but of purpose and commitment (4).

“Not a function of setting but of purpose and commitment.” How might this breadth of understanding transfer to our teacher education programs? Are we doing a good job preparing teacher candidates to think about everything might do with their knowledge and commitment to teaching, outside or beyond public school classroom work?

The question seems counter to the belief that our sole obligation is to our public school students. Of course, they remain our primary stewardship, and the main reason we are here. But in a climate where public school teaching opportunities are shrinking with the fortunes of other sectors, we do our students a disservice if we do not support them in also thinking more broadly about their options and careers.

My own path has been a twisty one to this point, and I am grateful for every experience that brought me here (and for a doctoral advisor who understood that not all fruitful academics beeline for assistant professor gigs). I began as an independent school teacher, not because I do not support public schools (which educated me), but because I had not earned a teaching license in undergrad and still desperately wanted to teach.

I have since held several positions that few teacher candidates know exist: curriculum developer in a not-for-profit professional development program, educational consultant at a university-based medical school, fixed-term appointments seemingly unconnected to “teaching.” Each position seems essential in hindsight, a step on the path, not off it. And each did valuable work in some part of a larger and worthy education project that was not immediately connected to K-12 students.

I remember vividly my interview for the job at the School of Medicine, where after fifteen minutes of hitting it off with the physician interviewing me I felt the need to clarify: “you do understand, right, that I know nothing about medicine?” “Everyone here knows about medicine,” she replied. “We need someone who knows about education.”

This powerful truth needs to be shared with those preparing to be educators. Every line of work, everywhere, also teaches. Our students are learning a valuable, marketable skill set that is relevant to any industry where knowledge, skills, and attitudes need to be passed from one group to another (which would be all of them). A teacher’s expertise is essential. If we can understand it as such, opportunities open far beyond the traditional ones. This realization is not disloyal to the public school students who need our best people teaching them. It is supportive of our own students, who deserve lives of security and autonomy and should be prepared to build them whatever the economy throws their way.

More’s the point, not to empower our students seems to make us complicit in the creeping historical conviction that teaching must always be, in some part, a martyrdom. This deeply-held value seemed confirmed by this year’s national conversation on collective bargaining that successfully cast teachers who sought to protect their own interests as “greedy, chalk-dusted succubi”. What is wrong with us as a profession that we continue to believe others’ versions of what we do? Or as Peter Taubman asks, “how did we become complicit in the erosion of our own power?”(128).

It seems that part of our responsibility to the next generation of teachers is to help them realize the value of their skills, and to encourage them to find all the ways those skills can contribute beyond those that are immediately apparent. The jobs that open from that mindset stretch far beyond what they (or we) can see right now.

What do you think?

What to do with the laptops and the phones during class? I’ve been having an ongoing discussion with my summer students about what happens when we’ve got all our amazing little boxes running in class: when turning attention to something more enticing, or less resistant, than the problem at hand is a touchpad scoot away.

I have opted not to “lock down” the classroom, forbidding anyone to do anything besides talk with me and each other. I figure this is the world we live in, and they, like me, will need to figure out how their always-on access to everything will strengthen or weaken the experience they came to school for. Plus that never works: the first hacker-native generation knows well that a broad wall just offers that many more places to get over (see Princess Leia, star systems slipping through fingers etc, supra). Besides, I reason, my “problem” will be theirs next year when many of them have their own students. They need to be thinking about what they’ll do when it’s their policy to set. Thus is it always when teaching education: at the root, students and professor are always colleagues at different points in our career’s journey, nothing more.

I do maintain that what we do in class – the face-to-face stuff – should not be another content feed, to be minimized until something “interesting” happens there. And that if it is only that, then the class itself needs to be re-examined, because then we are not doing “what can only be done here,” as goes a great teaching rule-of-thumb I picked up somewhere. They also need to trust me a little to know which hard things are worth sticking out. That’s something I bring that they can’t know, and they need to take my word for it until the purpose of the hard stuff becomes clear.

I also stand by the fact that being online is useful for the work at hand. I have had students email me more resources about something I mentioned five minutes ago – stuff I can bring up ten minutes later. It is amazing to have everyone working on the same question: a hive mind sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, all applied in the same direction. (And I get those emails because yes, I am checking it during class too – just like they are, around the edges of our interactions, not because I am waiting for something important, but because I can. I am in this world too.)

The other part of this, though, is that their blazing screens give me a glimpse into their lives. Without even looking, a glance across the room at the start of class reveals a still life of an impossible lily on someone’s Flickr account; another has a dense page of text, writing for himself or editing for a friend? Someone else scrolls through a Spotify playlist. Someone is on ESPN, as predictable as gravity. And invariably, half the screens have the tiny blue squares and cuneiform of Facebook, our constant alternate reality that reminds how feverishly our out-of-class lives are buzzing, buzzing, waiting for us to get back to them, or to drop in just for a second to see what’s shifted since class started. How different than what I imagine my teachers saw looking across our desks and faces. Maybe a sticker on a Trapper Keeper or a scribbled Van Halen logo suggested other allegiances and preferences, but beyond that we were locked down, responding perfectly to school’s perfect demand that we show up with only our school-ness showing.

I know many professors feel disrespected and ignored when a student sneaks a peek at a screen in class. I also remember distinguished faculty at the med school being asked by first-year students if they would please podcast their lectures, “because then I can listen to them at home 10% faster.” Their outrage was a mix of umbrage and fear – umbrage at the disrespect for the wisdom and experience that had come to teach that day, and fear that somehow their crucial, life-saving knowledge was going to be successfully ignored by the next generation because it wasn’t being shared fast enough.

It seems to me that the big question (“what can only be done here”) still holds. What we faculty can only do in class is show how our experience is brought to bear on real problems in vital, compelling ways. We can help them know which hard things are worth the work. And of course, we can share the pleasure which a true acolyte of a discipline brings to a new challenge, in hopes that the next generation will want the same satisfaction of long association with familiar, rewarding work that we enjoy. We could do better at that. They, perhaps, could do better at listening when we do.

What do you think?

I have a new post in the works, but in the meantime I am encouraged to find Larry Cuban thinking through some of the same important stuff I did last month (albeit a lot more thoroughly). Check him out!