General Ed

Sunday Morning Thoughts — Sustainability

I’m writing this post sitting on the steps in my backyard (yay wifi!) and watching my kids play with some of the neighborhood kids. In six hours, I get on a plane to San Jose where I’ll be presenting at the Innovative Learning Conference and then it’s back on a plane so that I can be back at SLA when it opens on Tuesday morning.

I don’t encourage or endorse that kind of nuttiness, but the sad thing is that while the specifics of my travelling may be something that most teachers are strange, all over America today, teachers are grading papers over their morning coffee, principals are desperately trying to keep up on their emails, and educators are thankful for just one more day to try to catch up.

This is part of what I mean when I talk about putting good people into bad systems. In Philadelphia, a typical high school teacher would have over 165 students on their roster. This is why many teachers who would like to do authentic assessment regress to the simplest form of assessment or why teachers grade student writing by making grammar corrections on the first page only and then reading for content only on the rest of the essay. It’s why some science teachers teach from textbooks, rather than asking kids to delve deeply, because with 165 kids, you can at least feel like you got “through” the material and had some rudimentary form of assessment because the idea of trying to help that many students through a true, deep level of inquiry seems daunting at best and impossible at worst.

And yet, there are teachers all over this country doing their best, and most of them aren’t blogging. They are in the classrooms for 10-12 hours a day. They are bringing home papers to grade, and doing physics experiments with paper towel tubes, and as they hit their fifth, tenth, twentieth years in the classroom, they are forever making Faustian bargains about the balance between life and work.

And let me say this — that’s no way to run a public education system.

I want to celebrate every teacher who has made this job a calling. Thank you. But my concern is that this nation thinks that building an entire system around martyrdom is the way to go — that if you aren’t spending 80 hours a week and thousands of your own dollars, you can’t be an effective Title I school teacher. (And yes, I know that it’s not THAT much better in the wealthier districts.) We cannot build a national system on the idea that KIPP and TFA and the 60-70 hour work week is acceptable. It’s not.

So as I watch Jakob and Theo play, stealing a moment where I can both be a dad (you have NO idea how many breaks I’ve taken in writing this entry) and a principal (I’ve answered about ten emails during the writing too,) I have a call to arms for us all.

Every time we see a teacher celebrated for their Herculean efforts, let’s all be sure to ask the following questions:

What can be done to support and sustain you?
How can we change the system that more people can be as successful as you?
How can we create schools where it does not require Herculean efforts to be a successful teacher?

Until we are willing to engage with those questions, we are going to continue down the path of the unrealistic and unattainable expectations for our urban teachers and our urban schools, and we’re going to continue to wonder why so many of those schools aren’t giving the kids the education they deserve.

And with that, I’m off to steal a few hours of playing with my kids. Have a wonderful Sunday.

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Tags: school_reform, sustainability

Citizenship, the Workforce and the Ethic of Care

I’m re-examining the work of Nel Noddings, so I’m reading The Challenge to Care in Our Schools, so that’s what is informing this post. On a personal note, It’s exciting to reexamine her work after a few years away from it, especially since her work has been so formative in the way I think about the structure of the relationships at SLA. (There’s a few dozen posts worth of work in that last sentence, but anyway…)

Noddings argues that so many students don’t think that teachers care about them and yet so many teachers do. What is the cause for this? One of the powerful arguments that Noddings makes is that the standards — and I would argue, standardization — movement has created an objectification of students. We search for the best way to teach some mythological "student" object and then attempt to craft systems where all students are taught that way. What we have done, in the service of worthy ideals, is create a distance between teacher and student and the distance between is a mandated curriculum where the "why" of what we teach is rarely questioned and the "what" is defined in such a way that students end up feeling that teachers care more about the subjects they teach than the students they teach.

Noddings writes in detail about the ramifications of that idea, and she puts forth a compelling argument for how we can change our schools to make them more humane places, but that’s not what I want to write about today. (And Dan, before you think that Noddings is someone who is arguing for a wishy-washy definition of care, she’s not. In fact, I think she’s a theorist that if you were to read, you’d love because she’s someone who gives powerful language to many of the things you do in your own practice.)

But I want to examine a different but necessary change in the rhetoric of schooling that, in my opinion, stems from this revaluation of care. It is common in the language of school reform to hear people talk about the need for a 21st Century workforce. Now, there are a lot of reasons why I think this is shooting too low, but Noddings offers another reason why that’s the wrong lens. The notion that our job as teachers is to create a new workforce suggests to our students an objectified relationship that is the antithesis of care. To me, the language of school as pathway to workforce does not suggest an active, engaged, caring relationship between teacher and student. It, instead, suggests that education is something we do to kids in service of the larger need of society — and a market economy — to have an educated workforce. Personal growth, emotional well-being, the need to educate and care about whole child take a back seat in that rhetoric.

Instead, if we talk about schools that help students become 21st Century citizens, we can speak to their need to be engaged and involved in their entire world. We can talk about how our hope for them to find their place in our society, not just as worker but as person. That rhetoric, to me, speaks to a transaction of care, because it aspires to help students find a rich and meaningful life while also teaching the need to be part of the larger society in powerful ways. Surely, we can find ways to explain the need for mathematics, science, literature and the like through that rich lens. Surely, we can explain why our desire to teach those ideas to students speak to a care for them and for our world that can convey to students the belief that our schools — and the people within it — are there because they care about them.

David Eggers TED Prize Wish

[This was a request to post that was too good to pass up. This an amazing thing that David Eggers is doing with his TED Prize, and I hope they get tens of thousands of entries. With all the teacher and school-bashing we are hearing these days, it’s wonderful to see TED and David Eggers teaming up to tell great stories. And it’s also fun because we watched the David Eggers TEDTalk to launch SLA’s faculty workshop this summer. Oh yeah… and I’m incredibly flattered that someone from TED reads my blog!]

This is Natasha Dantzig for the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference.

I know you’re a big supporter of TED (I really like your blog), and I’m writing to let you know that organizers of the TED Prize have announced an open challenge in support of author and philanthropist Dave Eggers and his 2008 TED Prize wish to collect 1,000 stories of private citizens engaged in their local public schools. Each year, three individuals are granted the TED Prize, which provides winners with a wish to change the world, $100,000 in seed money, and the support of the TED community in making the wish come true.

As an extension of Eggers initial wish, the open challenge asks individuals to design and implement new projects for local public school students. The three winning entries will receive a pass to the sold out TED2009 Conference to be held in Long Beach, California on February 4-7, 2009. Additionally, Eggers asks local citizens to support 826 National, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping students, ages 6-18, with expository and creative writing at six locations across USA. Eggers co-founded the original 826 chapter, 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring center and writing school for children, in 2002.

Entries are open to the public and may be submitted by visiting onceuponaschool.org and will be judged by a panel of educators, entrepreneurs, and creatives from the TED Community. Projects will be evaluated on the following criteria:

Innovation: Was a new model used? Is the approach creative? Were the students provided with access to something new?
Collaboration: How well did the project leaders work with the teacher/school? Did the project address a specific challenge or need of the students?
Impact: What changed in the life of the students, teacher, and school? Was the community affected? Did the work inspire other private citizens to get involved?

The Deadline for submissions is October 31, 2008.

For more information, please visit: www.onceuponaschool.org
For more information on the TED Prize, please visit www.tedprize.org
For more information on Dave Eggers’ wish, please visit http://www.tedprize.org/?page_id=7
For more information about 826 National, please visit http://www.826national.org/

Practical Theory

General Ed

Sunday Morning Thoughts — Sustainability

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Citizenship, the Workforce and the Ethic of Care

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David Eggers TED Prize Wish

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Chapter 4: Build Modern Schools - Re:Building School 2.0

Practical Theory

General Ed

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Chapter 4: Build Modern Schools - Re:Building School 2.0