Category Archives: school reform

Fighting Old Battles

Education, Paradigm Shifts, school reform, teaching,

As a former teacher union member and ardent supporter of educators, I am watching the events in Wisconsin with great interest. I can’t claim great union support when I started my career; I really only joined the union because I was required to pay 80% of the fees anyway since I benefited from the contract negotiated by the union. I figured I’d chip in the extra 20% and get some of the perks like insurance and legal representation.

I saw the power of the union when, in my second year, my district went out on a six-week strike. Collective bargaining helped boost our salaries but also made sure that we were paid for all the extra work we did in support of the kids outside of our teaching responsibilities: coaching teams, advising clubs, and organizing community events. When I moved to a non-union state, I saw how the lack of the ability to negotiate meant that pay was low, extra work was uncompensated (and yet teachers still did it), and administrators made decisions without ever feeling the need to consult professional staff. Association membership was low as well, with some veterans afraid to join because of potential retaliation. I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would retaliate against an organization that had no power anyway.

With that perspective as well as recent frustration with the National Education Association who seems unwilling to stand up for the professionalism of and personal sacrifice made by public educators in this country, I find myself in a quandary. I could dive into the debate: that the Wisconsin governor is using fiscal crisis to break the back of the unions, something he said he was going to do when he ran. I could cheer on my fellow teachers who are trying to remind their neighbors that they are not some elite group that has gotten rich on the backs of their fellow tax payers, who struggled with the decision to abandon their classrooms to protest and yet in doing so provide a powerful example of citizenship to their students, and who will return to those classrooms to again spend their days with the next generation, doing a sometimes thankless job with the spirit and dedication that we have come to expect and yet take for granted.

But, there is another part of me that wonders if we are watching an old battle, based on foundations that are crumbling. More and more teachers can be found outside the usual systems. As schools discover money savings related to online learning, they may choose to do an end run around more traditional educators and create more adjunct-like relationships with their professional staff. Unionists will shake their heads since adjuncting is often seen as the sweat shop of the higher ed world, but adjuncts also have a great level of freedom in terms of their schedules and their responsibilities. I love adjuncting because it means I get to teach, putting my energy into developing courses and working with my students, rather than worrying about getting published or attending faculty meetings.

Do I miss the security of a full time job with its benefits? Not really…I’m willing to make the trade off of less security for more freedom. And, as I look across the landscape, I don’t see the same kind of ongoing security that drove my father’s generation to leave home each day in order to toil for another. Teachers are getting laid off, something that was unthinkable in the past; collective bargaining is under attack; and benefits are no longer a given when you get a job. And in the worst slap in the face of all, workers who devoted their lives to a company are losing their retirement and looking at the potential of a second career as a Wal Mart greeter.

Indeed, foundations are crumbling and the protesters on both sides in Wisconsin don’t seem to understand that they are arguing over the past rather than looking towards the future. If the educators do manage to save collective bargaining, it will be something of a Pyrrhic victory as states and localities find that they simply can’t meet the agreements that they have made.

Naming Things

21st Century Skills, Education, literacy, Media Literacy, Paradigm Shifts, school reform, technology, ,

I couldn’t find my phone this morning. Not plugged in. Not by my chair. So, I dialed the number and discovered it propped up against the kitchen window. I had used it yesterday for access to a recipe for Thanksgiving. There it was, spitting out the blues riffs that I had chosen for my home number, reminding me of the difficulty of names in this crossover, hybrid, multi-tasking age in which we live.

Earlier yesterday, that 3 X 4 inch piece of technology had been a camera, which I used to record the passing of the seasons as I walked the dog along the road to the winery.

This morning, I was looking for it because I needed it as a book to look up a quote to share with a friend.

Later, I will play sudoku and surf the web and listen to music.

Yet, we reduce it to one name: cell phone. And, we ban it, despite its potential to provide access to all the tools of education from textbooks to videos to pens. Because we can’t control it and schools have a responsibility to keep kids safe and we’ve seen plenty of examples where they’ve gotten in real trouble having unfettered access to the world. But there are also plenty of examples where grown ups haven’t done such a good job either. It’s THE media literacy issue that we need to discuss: consumer/producer/prosumer and the implications.

But even as I write the above, I wonder if we will miss this opportunity as well…the chance to make learning, working, and living all more humane enterprises. Anyone who knows even a little of the history of school reform understands that technology almost never drives real change. Instead, it gets incorporated into the existing structures of the system, maybe making small changes, but ultimately being changed itself.

But, at the risk of flying in the face of history, there seem to be larger forces at work here that are challenging our names for lots of things. Work: Changes in the way people access their jobs may lead them to question a school schedule that no longer matches their own. School: Easy access to educational resources makes it easier to imagine teaching your own children.

Even the word “teacher”…last Saturday I was part of a conference with pre-service teachers and I made an off hand comment about not being a real teacher. One of the 20-somethings looked at me and asked what I meant by that. I explained that while I was a teacher in many ways, since I didn’t teach the grueling schedule of a K-12 classroom teacher, I didn’t really consider myself a “real” teacher. I had it easy with my online courses, afternoon workshops and evening webinars. But, he insisted, I was a real teacher because I was doing the work of teaching. Just because I wasn’t adhering to a particular schedule or killing myself to try and meet impossible demands didn’t make a difference to him.

And, there it is: what will make the real difference in the future. Young people who are questioning everything about the world we have created and the way we have defined words like “work” and “school” and “fun.” His generation is the real force that, when joined with mobile multimedia technologies and other cultural shifts, will change definitions in ways we can’t even imagine.

Finding the People in the Picture

dissertation, Education, research, school reform, teacher quality, testing, Uncategorized, ,

This fall, I will be teaching an introductory qualitative research course. My own dissertation research used a qualitative methodology to learn more about how teachers plan for the use of technology. I interviewed and observed teachers at work in their classrooms with their students. I wrote short vignettes describing that work and the challenges they faced from high-stakes testing to inadequate access to resources. While I’m sure my research will not have much of any impact, I am proud of the way I represented the complexity of the classroom through the voice of the teachers.

For me, that’s the value of this kind of research. Certainly, quantitative research with its percentages and statistics and measures of error, is useful for wider “big picture” sort of research, providing access to general trends and suggestions for practices that might lead to greater success in whatever given area is being studied. But, qualitative research paints a different picture, of the people themselves, the ones who make saying anything definitive about education very difficult. I am often much more interested in those personal stories and insights than in the big picture ideas because they remind us that education is first, and foremost, about human beings.

If you’ve been following the news about the school in Rhode Island that had decided to fire all its teachers as part of its reform efforts, you’ve seen a glimpse of this tension between the big picture and the individual people. The latest news is that the administrators and teachers have negotiated an agreement and they will not be fired after all. My thoughts about the agreement itself are for another post, what I’m interested in here is the way the story plays out in the version I read at NPR.

You have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the people in the story. The teachers are only present in the person of the union boss while the school district itself is represented by the Superintendents and a state administrator. They aren’t really “people” in my book but talking points who are saying all the right things about this agreement and the efforts they are making to improve education in their district. Even the Obama administration plays a role, but again, one that is preordained and peppered with words like “accountability” and “chronically underperforming.”

But there, in the last few sentences are the people: the parents and students who haven’t been involved in the agreement and yet who will be influenced by its outcomes.

The teachers largely have won the support of students and parents, many of whom believe the staff has been made a scapegoat for the woes of a high school in one of the state’s poorest cities. Norma Velez, whose 15-year-old son, Jose, is a sophomore, said she was pleased to see the teachers return. “When the teachers teach to students — some of them — they don’t want to cooperate with the teachers,” Velez said. “They just do what they want, and they hold up the rest of the students.” Julia Pickett, a 17-year-old senior, bristled at the description of the school as failing. “I don’t like that perception of us. I think we’re a great school,” she said. “Just one test score doesn’t determine whether a school is good or bad.”

Here’s that glimpse of the real people behind the “facts” of the story…the brief insight into the kinds of classrooms these teachers face each day. The momentarily glimmer of the idea that the human beings behind the numbers don’t see themselves as failures. And, in support of my own bias, the suggestion that teachers are not the only ones to blame but have been part of a wider failure of imagination throughout the education community that has developed simplistic, easy to evaluate definitions of student achievement and success. It does often get boiled down to a number–just one test score–and the human beings get lost.