Lived Reality

The cover of Newsweek this week features an article that apparently has “the key to saving American Education” inside. I almost bought it, until I read what was written on the blackboard behind the article title:

We Must Fire Bad Teachers

This was written over and over again in a Bart Simpson style punishment, a practice that in my eight years in teacher education I have never come across as endorsed or recommended by anyone as an effective (or constructive) approach to student behavior. This is important, I think, because the image chosen for this article is completely indicative of its contents. That is, if Newsweek is using a trivial pop-culture image of schooling to sell magazines we shouldn’t be surprised that the contents of that article will feature the Rightist bent embraced by so many in our country now. “Be afraid, the schools are failing!” Bull shit.

I need to make clear, I do not wish to pretend that there are no lousy teachers. We’ve all had them in our lives, some more than others, and those of us who work and study pedagogy I believe can make fairly accurate statements about teacher efficacy. Still, what is a bad teacher?

The reason I couldn’t bring myself to buy the magazine (aside from not wanting to advertise teacher-bashing falsehoods all over the airport) was that its construction of what makes a teacher bad has almost nothing to do with actual teaching, but instead with test scores. While I’ve written about the inaccuracy of test scores elsewhere it is worth restating briefly: test scores do not accurately predict student achievement and test scores are rarely comparable to past generations but the few that are show that children today know more than any generation in US history.

What’s more, schools are falsely held responsible for poverty and the “achievement gap,” the concept that there is a gap in school achievement between white students and students of color. This “achievement” can be understood literally as capital. What we have in the United States is a poverty problem, not a school problem. You can read more about this here, Berliner on the Achievement Gap.

Schools can not control who attends them. By law, in fact, public PK-12 schools must enroll all children in their district who wish to attend under the age of 21. The thing about students these days, though, they don’t look like they used to. While teachers are still overwhelmingly white (85% in 2005) students of color make up the majority of students in 70 of the 130 largest districts nation wide (Gay & Howard, 2000). As we live in a white supremacist capitalist society (hooks, 2003) we ought not be surprised that student test scores and school wide averages are shifting based on the makeup of the students enrolled.

To sum up the above, it is not a teacher’s fault that their students didn’t get enough to eat this morning. It is not a teacher’s fault that people of color are held at a structural disadvantage in this country. Bad teachers, in my mind, are the ones who forget these factors, or who want to pretend that we do not live in a backwards and oppressive society. What all teachers must remember, however, is that education has the potential to transform lives. Our classrooms can be transformative spaces, but we will never get there if we keep blaming teachers for wall street’s greed and the legacy of white supremacy.

The following is taken from the Star Tribune’s online comment section for Jean Quam’s American Dream lives on at the U

I’d like to begin by pointing out what we, in education research and teacher education, refer to as the “demographic imperative.” Currently, 86% of all elementary and secondary teachers are white. Of these, most are women, from middle class backgrounds, and are mono-lingual speakers of English. At the same time, only 64% of K-12 students are white. The other 36% are distributed accordingly among groups of color: 17% African American, 14% Latinos, 4% Asian/Pacific Islander Americans, and 1% Native Americans/Alaskans (U.S. Department of Education). An article that ran this past Spring in USA today reported that “Roughly one-fourth of the nation’s kindergartners are Hispanic, evidence of an accelerating trend that now will see minority children become the majority by 2023.” What’s more, students of color are the majority in 70 of the 130 school districts in the United States with a student population of 36,000 or more. We are thus faced with the following: our future teachers are going to be asked to educate children who are unlike them, in schools unlike those they themselves attended.

This is not a condemnation of traditional American values or of white Americans or those with conservative ideologies. Rather, these are the realities facing young teachers today. To respond, teacher education has sought out new ways to engage students of color and erode the achievement gap, which despite every intention on the part of schools, remains drawn along racial and class lines. I agree with many of the comments here that identify non-school related social issues that keep certain students from achieving in our schools. However, the fact that something is outside the reach of schools does mean it is not brought into schools by the students and teachers who are to work together in our classrooms. Schools in the United States are committed to educating every child, regardless of disposition, race, class, creed, gender, sexuality, or disability. This is a wonderful part of our educational system. Because we educate every child, we must address that not every child comes to school with the same resources, experiences, and knowledges. While these things are not the fault of the school, they are nonetheless the school’s responsibility: again, we must educate every child.

Research over the last 30 plus years has demonstrated that an effective way to raise academic achievement is by valuing diverse students’ experiences and the knowledge that they already bring with them into our classrooms. In order to appreciate these alternative knowledges, teachers must learn how to be critical thinkers, able to evaluate their curriculum, the needs of their students, and the needs of their role in society. The most common way for this kind of thinking to take shape is by exploring and interrogating one’s own beliefs. Self-critique is not indoctrinating: it is liberating. As a teacher educator, I am teaching my students not to devalue the beliefs their students come to their classes with. It would be completely antithetical to the entire project were we to indoctrinate teachers not to indoctrinate their students.

A former student of mine, who now teaches in a charter school and self-identifies as “very conservative,” told me recently “your class actually strengthened my beliefs because I had to think about why I believed certain things.” I aim to change no one’s mind, only to give them tools for analyzing their future classrooms. Students ought to be exposed to traditional American values such as meritocracy. But, the idea that any alternative to a meritocratic understanding of society is indoctrination seems silly to me. How can we understand what meritocracy is if we do not understand other ways that societies can be organized? Examining alternatives and valuing many voices is a cornerstone of Democracy and a founding principle of our nation. To help students to critically reflect and interrogate their practice as teachers, teacher educators must design activities and assignments that push their students’ thinking. We would live in a sad and secluded world if we did not attempt to understand other’s viewpoints. We seek to understand, however, not so that we can abandon our own values and thoughts, but so that we can better communicate with others and better know ourselves. This is, at base, what the teacher education program at the University of Minnesota seeks to do.

The University of Minnesota is currently undergoing a redesign of its teacher education program. Part of this process saw the formation of several committees, each charged with addressing a particular piece of teacher education that graduates of the program saw as lacking in their own teacher education training. Among those groups formed was one on Race, Culture, Class, and Gender.

The group came up with a draft of a plan for including more critical self-reflection on the part of pre-service teachers. To address what has been called the “Demographic Imperative” (basically 86% of teachers are white, and almost half of our students are students color) the committee called for pre-service teachers to locate themselves as raced, gendered, classed, and sexed. Further, these pre-service teachers must be able to identify their own biases and perspectives and learn about themselves in a way that it may better inform them in their future classrooms. If we are aiming to create teachers who are capable of thinking critically, we must first give them the tools and practice to become self-critical.

Alas, the right wing Columnist Katherine Kersten rejected the group’s recommendations saying,

The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the “overarching framework” for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.

Kersten goes on…

The first step toward “competence,” says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize — and confess — their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China’s Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.

While many commenters on the Star Tribune’s site defended the University of Minnesota and the group members’ recommendations, right-wing radio host Chris Baker belittled the group and furthered the hysteria. You can hear the show here.

The Dean of the College of Education and Human Development, Jean K. Quam, wrote back to Kersten in the Star Tribune, though her response fell short of what many of us wished for.

Dean. Quam wrote,

We value diversity and encourage exploration of all viewpoints and ideologies. This was recognized by both the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education in its 2006 evaluation of the college and by the Minnesota Board of Teaching.

A true statement to be sure, but the above represents yet another example of the way the Right has framed the discourse around educational equity. The Dean, in an effort to defend her College but not offend, ended up crafting an argument that was forced to use data, research, and other academic reports to defend claims instead of using the same morally charged language as Kersten.

Despite the controversy, the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative is moving forward, and hopefully will act on the recommendations Kersten, Baker, and their like are so afraid of: pre-service teachers should think about the ways in which different people are privileged and marginalized in our schools.