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.

First, read this--Claus von Zastrow's brilliant, poignantly
hilarious treatise on why public schools and teachers just can't win, posted
last week on the Public School Insights blog. It encompasses the entire range
of criticisms--building yurts with tongue depressors!--and skillfully
illustrates the "painted into a corner" nature of being a public
school advocate these days. No matter what you believe, no matter how
thoughtful your research-based educational practice, someone disagrees.
Probably viciously.

Conflict over the role of the arts in intellectual
development and public schooling is one of the oldest of these squabbles. As a
music teacher, I was pink-slipped six times in 30 years and shifted to a new
position 17 times; I've spent a professional lifetime defending the necessity
of the arts in school curriculum, from every angle. As human beings, we were
created and designed to make representations--in sound, drama, movement and image--of
the things that matter most to civilization. 

People who believe that children do not need well-designed
experiences with the arts to be fully educated are wrong. The evidence comes
from the fact that children spontaneously create art, music, dance and dramatic
play all by themselves, with no education whatsoever--and the all aspects of
human communication, from political to religious to commercial, revolve around
artistic expression. Developing aesthetic discretion is a useful skill, not to
mention a lifelong pleasure.

Yesterday, in the Washington Post, David C. Levy, former
director of the Corcoran Gallery and founder of the New School for Jazz and
Contemporary Music, takes on the challenge of flaws and gaps in K-12 arts
education in America. The piece starts strong--but then Levy jumps on the
knee-jerk teacher-blame bandwagon and claims that  art education is suffering because school art teachers
are lousy artists--"many of them can barely draw." He attempts to
soften this indictment by mentioning that art schools are guilty, too: they
require a "smorgasbord of classes in unrelated media," making rigorous
training and serious specialization impossible. Then, he asserts that the
situation is vastly better for prospective musicians (who have a range of
"elite musical ensembles" with a "demanding meritocracy" to
sharpen their skills).

Levy's irritating and erroneous assumptions about arts
education pile up; he claims that schools don't stress artistic skill
development, preferring to let kids just "express themselves"--and
that most children begin playing musical instruments early enough to have ten
years of instruction with a competent professional before pursuing a music
degree. Perhaps in some major cities--but not in my world. Levy may well know a
great deal about the professional art and music world, but he's clueless about
the vagaries of K-12 scheduling, hiring and programming and regional support for the arts--not to mention the
nature of teaching large groups of children, where a jack-of-all-trades
artistic sensibility comes in handy, as does a bagful of tricks for keeping
"media" on the table, rather than in the hair or on the clothes.

The vast majority of kids learn to understand the making of art, and to sing, dance and
play an instrument, in a classroom. While there is certainly variance in the
quality of teaching, most arts teachers want nothing more than to develop
skills and excellence in their students, to ignite a musical or artistic
passion that burns well past graduation.  Only three or four in 100 students will pursue
a career in the arts, but all of them need to learn some basic skills, as an
entry point to enriched taste and enjoyment. College-bound high school students
in traditional public schools have no room in their schedules to take a variety
of arts courses--even if their school offered them.  Elementary schoolkids who get a 45 -minute
art class once a week are lucky, indeed. The picture, as Levy notes, may be
gloomy--but let's not point fingers at teachers.

In one of my districts' financial crises, a high school art
teacher who taught jewelry, pottery and graphic design was shifted to an
elementary art job (13 weeks apiece in three K-4 schools). As Fine Arts
Department chair, I was sent to make sure he was "doing a good job,"
since he was vocally disappointed when jewelry-making and graphic design
courses were dropped from the school curriculum. I watched him teach
perspective to first graders, their first art lesson with the new teacher. He
used words like "foreground" and "horizon," explaining as
he went along. They drew houses. Amazing, realistic houses. They were
incredibly excited, and couldn't wait to show their drawings to their parents.

I was beyond impressed, but he was nonchalant.

"Just basic art," he said. ”Anybody can teach
perspective."

Image: Flickr Creative Commons, Jansen Mann

In the Internet dark ages—1993—I was invited
(coerced, actually) to do a “flyaround” media tour with then-Governor of
Michigan, John Engler, to promote a school funding initiative.  It was kind of fun, in a surreal way. We
started at dawn in Detroit with a few grumpy reporters, and then flew to a
half-dozen cities doing pre-arranged media events with various conscripted audiences
serving as backdrop. Two of our stops were at middle schools, where TV cameras
captured the governor’s remarks to school assemblies.

Being thoroughly familiar with gymnasiums full of
bored 13-year olds, these performances were no big deal to me, but the governor
was more than a little anxious about his prepared remarks and how they would go
over with preadolescents. I reassured him that any school would prepare
students for a gubernatorial visit by threatening kids with serious
consequences for any untoward outbursts. He could expect respectful, quiet
behavior, but couldn’t count on anything like comprehension, let alone enthusiasm,
from the kids.

You may be wondering how I was selected as the
governor’s sidekick for this experience. It was done scientifically, in fact:
the media consultant for the campaign (Republican stalwart Mike Murphy) held a
focus group session, to determine whom Michiganders trusted most on issues of
education. Their #1 pick was the State Teacher of the Year. Since the
governor’s trust numbers were significantly lower, and I was currently serving
as MI Teacher of the Year, I was drafted. The third member of the media team was
the president of the Michigan Education Association, a distinguished-looking
African American gentleman who was not on speaking terms with the governor. The
three of us were an appealing public relations mix, evidently, a diversity dream
team—but the atmosphere on that four-seater plane was pretty frosty.

I also shot a few TV commercials endorsing the
proposal, in a borrowed classroom, which had been tarted up with fake
blackboard writing, Palmer-method penmanship borders and—naturally—an apple or
two.  I didn’t mind doing any of this—I
strongly supported the funding proposal, which represented a shift away from
property taxes that left enormous funding gaps between the wealthy suburban
districts and the generational poverty of tiny community schools in the
northern woods.  But I was repeatedly
struck by the calculated manipulation of symbols and people to make political
points.

I was
supposed to be on tour as decorative moral support, but when the gov’s dry,
wonky remarks fell embarrassingly flat with middle schoolers in Saginaw, he
turned and asked me--surprise!--to say a few words to the students. When I made
them laugh with a comment about how their teachers were strategically placed
next to known outlaws, I was suddenly part of the official program. Somewhere
between Grand Rapids and Traverse City, the governor decided I looked like
Hillary Clinton (a definite stretch, but oh well), and started joking about how
even Hillary thought the proposal was a great idea. That inanity and
accompanying photo made several local newspapers.

Did the governor have the right to shamelessly use
seventh graders as scenery--or make a pitch in a public school, even if that
school would benefit greatly from a funding shift? I would say yes. Just as
much as Barack Obama had the right to urge kids to take responsibility for
their learning, Ronald Reagan had the right to disguise his tax policies as a
history lesson, and George W. Bush had the right to read "My Pet
Goat" in a photo op arranged by his own personal governor, after a night
of Republican fund-raising in Florida. The purpose of schools is not to shield students from politics and media; it's to educate them about those things.

Here's how it works: media is about
attention, and politics is about influence. 
Neither is about considered and noble principles or genuine communal
good. Want to distract attention from an important national speech where someone is
constructing a thoughtful policy argument before your eyes? You aren’t going to
get it with debate or dialogue. So just go ahead and call the guy a liar—better
yet, bawl it out on national TV, knowing that the incident will go viral on
YouTube, the notoriety lasting much longer than any pro forma apology you may
offer later. Attention guaranteed.  Influence? Remains to be seen.

Too bad that South Carolina Congressman Joe "You lie!" Wilson didn’t hear the
principal’s admonitions about appropriate behavior in an assembly. Too bad
there wasn’t a teacher sitting next to him, reminding him that the president
was an honored guest. When we demand respectful behavior from students but
public officials demonstrate appalling rudeness, how can we expect students to
take the policy process seriously?

I
suppose it was inevitable. When the blurring between reality TV and, you know,
actual reality has encompassed things like marriage, parenting and Hugh Hefner,
it was only a matter of time until schools offered up their students--and their
integrity--for fifteen minutes of fame and $3500 an episode.

Tony
Danza--who wasn't even The Boss--appears to be headed for a well-publicized turn
as a fake teacher on a reality show based in a public school in Philadelphia. I
thought Channel One  was bad--and renting
a brand-new school in my hometown as movie set for a stoner flick was
abominable. This is much worse.

Philly
Mayor Michael Nutter is all for it. His rationale? Students might be allowed to
serve as production interns, he says-- and such a reality show will make it
easier to recruit teachers.

"Teach'
represents a unique opportunity to highlight many of our city's dedicated
teachers and administrators, and the talented students they serve.''

Well,
gosh. If the show were truly going to highlight the city's best bona fide teachers,
I'd be all for it. And I'll believe that having high school students work as
gofers on a TV set in their own school is a good idea when I see the rigorous national
content standards for movie production. My thinking runs along the lines of
Philadelphia Daily News' Ronnie Polaneczky who said the idea was:

"...a way
to pimp our kids' education to an unemployed sitcom actor who wants to
kick-start his stalled career on the backs of students who'll be distracted by
cameras and microphones.''

This
is actually something I have experience with; I can offer some first-hand insights
into how this will likely play out with Tony and the kids in Philadelphia:

Some
years ago, I was asked to be a featured teacher in the Annenberg Foundation's
video series on teaching, The Learning
Classroom. It was a project with an excellent pedigree--the series advisors
were highly respected academics, and the mission was sterling: filming teachers
at work, hearing how and why they make teaching decisions, integrating theory and
practice. My segment was Feelings Count:
Emotions and Learning.

I had
several conversations with the producer before they came to film. The plan was
for the crew to spend five full days in my classroom. Don't worry, she said.
You won't know we're even here. I was the one who insisted on notifying
parents, and getting release forms signed--a precaution the producer found
ridiculous.

I
also spent considerable energy devising lessons that would tap into the
emotions of volatile middle schoolers to yield richer learning. My seventh
graders were working on Ashokan Farewell,
a lovely tune that Ken Burns used throughout his Civil War series, most notably during the heartbreaking letter from
Major Sullivan Ballou of the Union army to his wife, Sarah. One of my
students--a young man--read excerpts from the letter, and I shared some
thoughts about how music helps people through milestone moments in their lives.
Students spoke about songs played at a grandparent's funeral--or how they found
joy and consolation in particular songs. It was a terrific lesson, a nice blend
of rich content and relevant emotion.

Unfortunately,
none of that lesson--or any other bits of creative, solid teaching--ended up in
the final segment. At lunchtime on Day One, the producer (who turned my office
into her own personal Disgusting Starbucks) had a little problem. She wanted to
know when they were going to see some reality. The kids were so good. So
polite. Clearly, this was not the way they behaved every day. "I feel like
I'm in Mayberry," she said--and she didn't mean that in a nice way. Where,
she asked, was the emotion?

I
explained that it took months of hard work to build a functioning community of
65 12-year old musicians. She didn't buy it. She needed to see some
conflict--somebody crying would be ideal. On Day Two, the production crew moved
from my classroom to the hallway, hoping to catch a fight or a breakup.  The producer went to the principal, asking for
permission to film all the kids. At a quick after-school staff meeting,
permission slips for the entire student body were distributed. I shared my apprehension
with the rest of the teachers. Some of them were concerned--but others were
hoping for a visit from the camera crew. "You're not the only good teacher
in the building, you know," one said. "Some of us would love a chance
to be on TV, too."

It
was a long week. The worst moment occurred on Friday. One of my 8th graders had
been out of school for several weeks, undergoing treatment for testicular cancer.
He came back for a quick visit, and was surrounded by friends, trying to figure
out what to say to another teenage boy who has a life-threatening illness. As I
hugged him, I heard the cameras whirring. They followed him into the band room
and filmed his interactions with friends attempting to be cool, and his own
struggle to describe his illness without telling them where his cancer was, or
what procedures he had undergone.

I
would never have interrupted these painful but essential conversations--but I
sure as hell did not want them exploited. I told the producer later that we had
no release form, so they would have to scrap the film they were salivating
over. We did not part on good terms. While I do appear in the video series,
none of the things that were important to me were captured or highlighted.

One
can only wonder what the producers of a reality show will find compelling. And
whose education will be compromised.