My
friend and fellow Michigan teacher, Cossondra George, recently asked:

Do teachers have a responsibility to
be the gatekeepers of their profession? Can we settle for allowing our
colleagues to give students less than they deserve?

Teachers
ought to serve as gatekeepers for admission into the profession--and until that
happens, we can't lay claim to being fully professional. I'm all for raising
the bar for entrance to teaching (using better tools than SAT or Praxis scores),
and investing more time, resources and research on effective teacher development.

In
the meantime, however, we have teachers who are not doing the job well enough. Some
of them should be gone--tomorrow; others have plenty of untapped potential but
are floundering. No point in repairing the rusty gate granting access to teach
unless we pay attention to supporting teachers once they're in the field.

Struggling
teachers come in two basic flavors: #1) teachers who haven't had sufficient
experience or training to do the job well and #2) teachers who once had the
disposition and tools to be good teachers, but have checked out due to cynicism,
fatigue, bitterness and unforgiving working conditions.

The
first group is not necessarily easier to deal with. In some environments, "professional
development" is seen as an administrative duty, and early-career teachers
are threatened by the idea that their performance might be evaluated and found
wanting. Their daily practice is marked by the overriding desire to keep a low
profile. All teachers--from rank newbies to award-winning veterans--must
consider themselves collaborative learners and practitioners.  All of us are responsible for lending plans,
tips, materials and support to new teachers.

One
thing that can be done by accomplished veterans: asking newer teachers for their ideas, and approaching them as
full colleagues, rather than those who need help. I work with many first- and
second-year teachers who are pretty vocal about observed shortcomings in their
assigned mentors. Most faculties adopt a kind of pecking order. Flattening that
hierarchy--opening doors and sharing uncertainties--can help. Novice teachers
ought to be considered for leadership roles, such as curriculum writing or the
school improvement team, rather than dumping unwanted, time-sucking class
advisories or club sponsor roles on them.

The
second group of ineffective teachers is a different problem. I worked for
decades in a strongly veteran culture, which equated years of service with accrued
power and influence. I eventually discovered that many of the teachers
I saw as jaded burn-outs were once enthusiastic and creative, but had had
their mojo squashed by a culture of anger and perceived betrayal.

For a
teacher trained in the 70s, teaching to a mandated and scripted  reading program feels like being told that the
best lessons in their tool bags are useless, and their judgment flawed. For a
teacher who's spent 20 years in Detroit, bringing in used clothing and peanut
butter sandwiches for neglected students, blaming teachers for the system's
failures now is callous.

Some
of those favorite lessons and teaching methods are useless junk. But--a significant group of teachers who retain
the potential to be very effective in the classroom have found the only
"leadership" role open to them is fighting back against systemic
change through their unions. They need to have their professional experience
validated and acknowledged; they're not going accept either praise or criticism
from someone they don't respect, but they have not stopped caring about their
students' learning.

So there
is an opportunity to salvage good teaching--and valuable contextual
experience-- by acknowledging that veteran teachers have something to
contribute: been there, tried that, learned from it.  We might start by asking dried-up veteran
teachers "Why did you choose to be a teacher?" The ones who say
"June, July and August" can be dismissed. But the ones who say
"I wanted to make a difference in kids' lives" deserve to have their
ideas heard, at least.

An
old friend inadvertently gave me the title for this blog when he let me know
that a true Michigan conservationist and sportsman-Rusty Gates--passed over to
the great fly fishing stream in the sky last week.  Rusty Gates understood that in order to learn
to fish, you had to stand in the river for a time. And so it is with teaching.

Image: Neil Whiteside@Flickr Creative Commons

I
generally keep the fact that I used to be a cheerleader to myself. It's not
something I'm particularly proud of, as cheerleading in the 1960s was mostly
about little pleated skirts and personality. I am of the generation of women
who prefer to be known for their intellect and professional accomplishments
rather than their pom-poms.

Cheerleading,
however, has evolved, as a concept--it's become more athletic and competitive,
involving a range of gymnastic skills and strength. It's less about popularity
and more about coordination and discipline, at least theoretically--with Texas
as possible exception to the rule, of course.

I
was surprised to see Frank Deford, on NPR, equivocate on the subject of whether
cheerleading is a true sport. I thought that battle had been won decades ago,
when high schools and colleges began implementing Title IX, and all female
sports (and wannabe sports) took a major upward leap in proficiency and
aggressive athleticism. Deford's point was a good one, though: Colleges that
declare cheerleading a sport can then justify eliminating other female
sports--and spending more on expensive male-only programs, like football. 

While
discussions on gender equity in sports will likely go on forever, there's no
denying that cheerleading has developed  into
a team activity requiring significant physical ability--a sport.

I
am always amused by the passion with which people--OK, men--will squabble about
whether a particular activity is a "sport" or not. I fail to see how 22
outsized, fully padded bruisers in $200 helmets, moving a pigskin bladder two
feet while knocking each other down (and sometimes out) is undeniably a sport --but
things like archery, hunting, synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics are
questionable. 

A
lot of the arguing has to do with money--who will pay to see what--and the necessity of winners and losers,
which means that dog racing is a sport, but marching bands are entertainment,
even though every band member on the field is engaged in a complex, physically strenuous
activity requiring stamina, precision, coordination, memory, the ability to
read music and skin thick enough that tuba jokes bounce right off.

I
once had an acrimonious dispute with the Athletic Director in my high school
over whether band members should be eligible for varsity letters. The block H,
he explained, was reserved for true athletes (as were the varsity jackets with the
leather sleeves). He suggested that the band get  nylon windbreakers to show their spirit--and
eventually admitted that he was worried that the football team might not be
proud to don varsity jackets if bassoonists could wear them, too. He found no irony in the fact that the 100 members of the marching band spent two months trailing the football team around for the purpose of playing the fight song with frozen fingers every time Biff kicked a field goal.

In
K-12 World, any competitive activity that involves skills, strength or teamwork
ought to qualify as a sport. Why not? American schools spend much more on
sports than schools in other countries. If we insist that sports engage kids
whose strengths are kinesthetic rather than academic--and believe that sports
build confidence, teamwork and discipline--then we ought to offer as many
"sports" as we possibly can, so their benefits are broadly available.

It
took about five years, but the music department eventually won the campaign to
wear the same varsity letter as the football team. Our block H had a small pair
of eighth notes to distinguish it from the others: letters with golf balls, the
winged feet and--  eventually-- the little
mortarboards of the Quiz Bowl kids. I'd
call that S-U-C-C-E-S-S.

I
wish I had a dollar for every time a parent told me their fondest wish was that
their child be happy. As in: "I'm not worried about Jason's grades--I just
want him to have friends and be happy." Or: "I'm not going to insist that Mandy practice her flute. If it doesn't
make her happy, she can just quit." 

I sometimes wonder about the pursuit of happiness as iconic American goal.
I'm quite sure that Jefferson had something more noble and laudable in mind
than deciding whether he should jot down a bit of transformative political
philosophy--or perhaps take a nap, whichever seemed more fulfilling at the
moment.

It's
a good week for thinking about what makes us happy--and how we, the village,
can raise our collective children to pursue the kind of happiness that matters,
while simultaneously being aware of and grateful for their many blessings.

In
TIME magazine this week, Nancy Gibbs muses on the confounding information that
Americans scored higher on the ongoing Gallup "well-being index" this
summer than they did last summer. Although happiness plummeted in the months
after the economic meltdown, our national sense of well-being began to increase
in the spring, and has remained relatively high since, even though the news--pretty
much all the news--has been downright awful. 

Gibbs
suggests that Americans have adjusted their expectations, and that's a healthy
thing:

While optimism
is the all-American anesthetic, at some point Expectation Inflation was bound
to take its toll. I'm struck by how many people tell pollsters that the
voluntary downshifting and downsizing of the past year have come as a kind of
relief. Maybe we've lowered our standards. But we already knew that money can
buy only comfort, not contentment; happiness correlates much more closely with
our causes and connections than with our net worth.

How
does this square with current education oratory and thinking, wherein "low
expectations" are now equated with soft bigotry? It's clear that our
generational train of progress-through-education--the laborer's son becomes a
merchant, the merchant's son a professional, with each subsequent generation achieving
more--is creaking to an end. We are outstripping our natural resources and have
tilted our economy into crippling debt. The gap between rich and poor is
growing; I'm guessing the people who expressed relief about downshifting were
moving from the top tier into the middle. 

We
can expect all we want, but the reality is that we seem to be heading into a
period where the Real Housewives of Atlanta might become appalling symbols of
tacky excess, rather than an amusing glimpse into the style and habits of
people lucky enough to pursue their personal pleasures. Are we re-defining
happiness as much more than recognition, entertainment and stuff?

Speaking
of expectations, how can we blithely critique teachers for not using "high
expectations" as a handy tool to leverage student learning, when we're
ambivalent about providing those same kids with adequate health care? Don't we
want all children to reach for more than credentials and possessions--should we
expect them to become productive in ways other than generating wealth?

Maybe
we need to re-examine our current goal focus on college degrees, and how many
more dollars they're likely to yield over a  lifetime of work, and start looking at non-material
aspirations and rewards, for our own children and for the nation. Here are the three
core outcomes I want for my own children, as a result of their formal and
informal education:

• Important
  work. Work that leads to making something better, whether it's particularly
  lucrative or not. Work that is variable, challenging and absorbing.

•  Civic
  engagement. Involvement in groups, relationships with people who have similar goals,
  volunteering, participating in relevant ways in the life of their community.

• Intellectual
  curiosity. A life-long interest in a broad range of issues and disciplines, and
  willingness to read, travel, discuss, ponder, and consider alternative points
  of view. 

Of
course, I want my children to be free from hunger and fear (and the fact that I
take such basic needs for granted probably speaks to the privileges I enjoy as
an American citizen). Continuous happiness, however, seems like a pretty
lightweight and empty goal.  Gratitude is
a better place to begin.

Thanks
for reading Teacher in a Strange Land. 
Happy Thanksgiving.

Image: TheABU@ Flicker Creative Commons

Let’s
get biases and politics out of the way first. I am a big fan of the charter
school concept—defined as the rich idea that when it comes to schooling, one
size does not fit all, and big monolithic districts do not and cannot serve diverse
children as well as site-directed, purpose-driven, innovative schools. If I
lived in Detroit, I would choose a magnet school or charter school for my
children—and even though I live in a district with fine public schools, one of
my children attended a public school and the other attended a private school. Ideologically,
I’m with Dewey on this one: I want the best possible education for all
children, the kind of carefully chosen options my own children had.

One
more thing: I think that positioning charter schools as the opposite of public
schools, rather than a necessary supplement to public education, has poisoned
the discourse. And—it goes both ways. It’s not just public schools and public
school teachers being skeptical (or downright nasty) in their remarks about
charter schools.  Public school academies—charters—seem
to be bent on repeating the worst sound bites about public schools, whether
they’re strictly true or not, thereby displaying the aphorism that your mother
repeated when you were seven years old: you don’t make yourself look better by
tearing someone else down. 

I
have a number of friends now working in the charter school movement in Detroit,
a city where a handful of good charter schools have begun to flourish and bear
fruit. Last week, they invited me to attend a showing of “The Providence Effect,”
a full-length film depicting a school success story: Providence St. Mel, a K-12
Catholic school on Chicago’s tough west side.

Providence
St. Mel has accrued considerable recognition after parents adamantly refused to
close it on Diocese recommendation, 30 years ago: President Reagan visited,
around the time the “Nation at Risk” report was being crafted, and Oprah
Winfrey has taken a personal interest (and contributed more than a million
dollars). Providence’s outcomes—an average ACT score of 23, and 100% college
admission for graduates—resemble those of well-heeled suburban public schools.
Now, there is an attempt to replicate the “Providence effect:” a charter school
in Englewood, led by Providence graduates and veteran teachers, and based on
programs and principles at the original PSM.

The
screening was part of a two-day professional conference for charter school
proponents and teachers, and featured a panel discussion with Big Names in the Michigan
charter school movement, a State Board of Education member, various business-leadership
types, and the principal of the new Providence charter school. The room was set
up for hundreds of people, but I’m sure the attendance numbers (perhaps 60
people) were disappointing to the organizers. As I was parking on the rooftop
of Cobo Hall, charter school teachers wearing conference badges were flooding
out of the building, recognizable as teachers by their youth, their post-collegiate
dress and willingness to carry a tote bag—plus their “let’s go get a beer”
demeanor.

Impressions
from the film and the panel discussion:

• The
  movie has a campaign-film aura—gauzy graduation footage with students
  inexplicably wearing white gloves, bits of talking-head rhetoric, quick-cut
  black and white shots from Chicago’s troubled past, backed by a vocal track of
  adolescents singing. It’s impressive, all right, especially their catch phrase:
  It’s not rocket science. The
  lingering message: anybody with high expectations and tight rules can turn around
  kids destined for the dumpster.

• There
  is curiously little about instruction in the film; we do see a few examples of
  very traditional classroom teaching. There is a clip of first-graders in a race-to-the-board
  competitive spelling game (the teacher assigning points to teams, a la
  Professor Dumbledore), and a HS math lesson where the teacher puts an equation
  on the board and announces “No calculators!” (which drew a spatter of applause
  from the audience). An elementary teacher models a familiar and effective
  questioning strategy but then suggests that nobody in his circle believes that
  second graders can do work at this level.

• Among
  the panelists, the principal of the new Providence charter school was most
  grounded in reality. She admitted that while they were on a strong upward curve,
  test scores were still mediocre. Asked how they deal with discipline, she said
  that students were put on a “three strikes and out” contract—if they couldn’t
  abide by the rules, they held a conference with parents to decide if the child
  was a “good fit” for Providence. According to the principal, every child, even
  kindergarteners, has a grade point average (another murmur of approval from the
  audience). Nobody asked about parents who never bothered to come to school, the
  advisability of a five-year old having a GPA before he understands cumulative
  averaging, or where the kid who is not a good fit ends up.

• There
  was a kind of professional pep rally atmosphere. The panel moderator took
  questions from people who seemed pre-selected, often acknowledging the “great
  work” Joe was doing or the “outstanding leadership” of Mary. There was an angry
  question on why charter schools get less money than public schools, on average,
  from the public coffers. Reginald Turner, the State Board member, clarified:
  charter schools get the same per-pupil allowance as other public schools in the
  surrounding area. And guess what? There aren’t many charter schools in Grosse
  Pointe, where the funding level is high; charter schools are generally found
  where there is dissatisfaction with public education and not much money. And
  they get the same public monies as the other schools nearby—you might even call
  that equitable.

• When
  asked what Detroit could do as a first step to fix its failing public school,
  the business folks agreed: get new teachers, preferably from Teach for America
  (which one panelist described as “the Peace Corps of teaching,” an unfortunate
  metaphor in a city trying to pull itself out of devastating depression). A
  woman asked what special training Teach for America corps members got that
  would make them particularly effective in Detroit. The panelist replied that it
  wasn’t a matter of training—it was a chance to get “graduates of the top
  colleges” into the classroom.

If you believe U.S. News and World
Report, two of the top twenty Schools of Education are right here in Michigan,
including the long-running #1 in Elementary and Secondary teacher preparation,
Michigan State University, and the #4 public university in the country, the
University of Michigan. There is also a strong network of regional teacher
preparation programs. There is no shortage of highly qualified and skilled teachers
here in Michigan.

Michigan is a teacher-exporting state.
About three-quarters of our best and brightest would-be teachers go to work in
other states (when they can get jobs). Of those who remain in Michigan, a
significant segment gets jobs in newly formed charter schools—because there are
no jobs in public schools. The best new teachers in Michigan? They’re the folks
who went streaming out the door to grab a beer with their teaching colleagues
as I was parking my car.

When
it comes to evaluating charter schools, the key question is always: Compared to
what? Charter schools in Detroit have many potential resources that public schools
do not, beginning with positive public assumptions and PR.

Charter
World is an interesting place, with different beliefs, incentives and catch
phrases than Public School World. It would be a shame to lose the opportunity
to do something truly different with charter schools, relying instead on rhetorical
flourishes and empty myths.

At
the last high school graduation I attended as faculty member, I sat on the
stage, robed and hooded, with the rest of the teachers who served as honor
guard for the class. Normally, commencement was held in the football stadium,
but a downpour forced us into the auditorium where all graduates and attendees
were up close and personal, not to mention damp and uncomfortable.

From
my vantage point, I could reach out and touch graduates as they crossed the
stage--and see right up the gowns of the young men sitting, splay-legged, in
the front row. In spite of the class advisors' admonitions--and, probably,
their mothers'--many of the boys were wearing shorts and flip-flops and didn't
appear to be duly impressed with the ceremonial aspects of the occasion. I was
surprised at how many of them were bearded, or sporting cool-dude facial hair;
physically, these were full-grown men.

I
started thinking about my district's four-option school entry program: students
could enter school via "developmental" kindergarten and/or regular
kindergarten, and those who "needed a little more time" could do a
year in junior first grade, before moving on to regular first grade. Parents tailored
two- or three-year combination plans to get their kids to second grade, and the
large majority of those taking three years were boys. Because of the desire to
give their sons a leg up, back then, many of the young men sitting in front of
me were a hormonal nineteen years old. They'd been driving for four years, and
could easily have been carrying an M-16 in Iraq. In an earlier century, they
would have struck out on their own long before, as farmers, wayfarers or
fathers.

Today,
of course, the conventional wisdom is that their economic goose is cooked
unless they seek further education. This week's cover story in
Newsweek--"Why College Should Take Only Three Years" (by Lamar
Alexander), and a follow-up roundtable with higher ed luminaries discussing
"What is College For, Anyway?" don't manage to make an airtight case for the
three-year plan. But both pieces shed light on the big questions that we ought
be asking about a college education:

• Are
  high school seniors poorly educated and thus unready for college--or are they merely
  bored with the low challenge of high school?

• What
  does anyone need to know and be able to do to make a success in a modern
  economy? Seriously. Is there a formula for job readiness in non-technical
  fields?

• What
  comes first: a broad, internalized knowledge base, or the skills to analyze and
  evaluate the surfeit of information and data available to everyone?

• Does
  technology make it easier and faster to learn--or more challenging to develop
  focus

• Is
  there a one-size-fits-all plan, a general agreement about how much coursework represents
  a bachelor's degree? And does the new standard for being well-educated now automatically
  include a second degree, beyond the B.A.--upping the educational ante once
  again?

No
consensus reached. In fact, the various experts did not agree on the primary
purpose of pursuing a college degree--is it building workplace skills, developing
an educated citizenry, or simply the credential needed to the lock the bearer
into a higher socioeconomic stratum?

Here's
an image from Robert Zemsky, education reformer and professor at the University
of Pennsylvania: College is like a supermarket where we let students freely
choose courses. When they get to the cash register, we tell them they don't
have the right things in their shopping carts, so they must continue shopping,
for five or more less-than-fruitful years. Might it be an intellectually
productive thing, that academic mucking about? Or is it a nationally
embarrassing inefficiency, a waste of time and money?

I'm
not sure. At some point, young people need to grow up, spend time working,
traveling, living independently, making their own choices. Going to college or
trade school should be motivated by a desire to learn something, be it plumbing
or Shakespearean sonnets. You can't put off adulthood and real life forever.

Image: Uhuru1701, Flickr Creative Commons