Cheating our Children

In her syndicated column that appeared in Wednesday’s Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Esther Cepeda accuses standardized testing critics of using the Georgia cheating scandal to “bash” tests when they should be placing the blame squarely on “flawed human natures.”  Cepeda pluralizes this abstract idea to refer specifically to teachers who “made wrong choices” without surrendering the crowd-pleasing generalization:  Human nature is a convenient scapegoat when we don’t want to ask the tough questions about why people make stupid or harmful decisions in the first place. Teachers certainly did make wrong choices when they falsified student tests and/or failed to report the widespread cheating in their midst.  So did administrators and, according to the investigative report issued by the Georgia Governor’s office, so did 2009 Superintendent of the Year Beverly Hall and her senior staff.  Apparently, human nature was showing its bad side from top to bottom.

Take those seemingly innocuous tests.  Cepeda lets them off the hook of moral agency even though they are overloaded with simplistic choices for our kids.  Tests don’t cheat any more than guns kill, right?  People and their ugly natures are the real culprits, but if we accept this false dichotomy then we fail to ask who hides behind the standardized tests that have swallowed our schools.  The answer, of course, is more flawed humans prioritizing bottom line profits and faux proofs over actual teaching and learning. The Governor’s report identifies “three primary conditions” that “led to widespread cheating” in Atlanta Public Schools: a “culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation,” “unrealistic targets set by the district,” and Dr. Hall’s focus on “test results and public praise to the exclusion of integrity and ethics.”  The question is not whether humans can fall prey to fear or greed.  We know that they can, and we disapprove when they do.  The question is whether there are human-made conditions that contribute to the morally lazy actions we decry in others, and whether we are complicit in maintaining them. 

Do we want to entice teachers into bad behavior with misguided rewards and punishments that make doing the right thing a gamble with personal survival rather than a social good?  Do we want children in all of their complexity, rich or poor, to be reduced to bubbles for a subjectively designed exam that is no more proof of learning than a greeting card is proof of love?  These are ethical choices we all need to make, but Cepeda skirts accountability for them by shrinking the exercise of free will to one question, (a) to cheat or (b) not to cheat. Meanwhile, we flawed humans face several momentous choices that go unacknowledged by testing apologists.  We can choose to allow high stakes tests to be used as a lever of privatization or we can fight for authentic education befitting a democracy.  We can decide that poverty, a major factor in low student achievement, is inevitable or we can call it inexcusable.

While Esther Cepeda appears to defend poor children from the fuzzy “bigotry of low expectations,” her rhetoric leaves them easy prey for the greater, concrete evil of poverty. She implicitly accepts that being poor is an irrevocable identity and poverty a permanent state of nature.  Poor kids can learn too, says her logic, so we are doing them a terrible disservice by suggesting that poverty might impede achievement.  We should continue to debate the narrow and superficial measures of this achievement, but the crucial point here is that poverty is a changeable condition.  When we draw the connection between poverty and education, we are showing our optimism that poverty can be challenged and our faith in the future of our children and our society.  The cynical view that we can do nothing to change these stark economic inequities comes wrapped in upbeat sermons about token equality, but it is the same old tired nineteenth century Horatio Alger myth that school reformers have repackaged.  They rationalize social inaction on a massive scale and then cloak this passive cowardice in pretty words about individual expectations.  Imagine if American society rose to our expectation that child poverty would end and children’s most basic rights such as education would be adequately funded.  Until then, let them take tests!  Perhaps it’s human nature to take the path of least resistance.  Some might even call it cheating.


http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110817/OPINION/110819598/1350?Title=GUEST-OPINION-Who-is-really-being-cheated-on-tests-&tc=ar

Thinking in the Trenches: Teacher as Soldier

        

    In their April op-ed in The New York Times, "The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries," Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari compare teachers to troops and ask why we blame educators for the failures of education policy, but not soldiers for the defeats or setbacks in war.  Assuming education comes down to a war on ignorance, they argue that we should support the teachers on the ground fighting on behalf of our nation’s kids, just as we support the noble efforts of our troops on behalf of our country.  When battles are lost, we may bolster our resources, adjust our strategies, or redefine our goals, but we don’t scapegoat the men and women in uniform.  The hypocrisy in our culture’s response to teachers and troops seems clear.  Where we grant that soldiers need more resources to confront tough conditions, we expect underpaid and overworked teachers to transcend all obstacles and limitations to student achievement.  We idealize the sacrifices of troops but demonize “ineffectual” teachers who fail to produce “results,” regardless of their immeasurable passion, dedication or devotion to students.  It’s an enlightening analogy, if not entirely for the reasons the authors make explicit.

     Our culture’s view of soldiers is complex and contradictory.  If the soldier as heroic symbol is almost universally revered in our national imagination, the flesh and blood humans who fight in wars are often treated as disposable once they return to civilian life as veterans.  To the degree that we admire the image of the brave warrior, an image that transcends the corporeal and moral limitations of mortal men and acquires mythological status, we can trace our admiration to a source.  We might be impressed by a soldier’s courage, his strength and perseverance, or her willingness to be martyred for a cause.  We might value the loyalty and camaraderie between soldiers fighting for a common goal.  Even the word “soldier” has enough positive connotations that it can be used to define devotion to purposes as divergent as war and peace.  However, there is one aspect of being a “good soldier” that our society has celebrated perhaps more than any other, and that is the unblinking acceptance of authority.  Although the Nuremberg Trials set a precedent for challenging "Superior Orders" as a defense for war crimes, soldiers are still largely expected to adhere to the hierarchical chain of command.  It is in this arena of absolute, unquestioning duty that the comparison of soldier and teacher breaks down.

     Imagine for a moment that teachers in America were given not only the same respect, but also the same symbolic treatment as soldiers.  With No Child Left Behind, President Bush launched what amounted to a war on low student achievement, or at least this was his official target.  Imagine this had been an actual war.  After initial campaign misgivings, President Obama enthusiastically continued this war, and when the public asked too many questions about charter schools and standardized testing, a ubiquitous bumper sticker won them over:  Support the Teachers.  We must support the reform agenda pushed by the Federal Government and its corporate backers in spite of all the research and statistical evidence that it is misguided.  Why?  The teachers need us to get behind them.  They’re out there teaching those test questions every day, plugging away at the standards like a shooting target, so the least we can do is valorize their hard work. 

     If this reasoning sounds familiar, then what is odd about the substitution of teacher for troop in the message?  Where troops are expected to follow orders without challenging the rationale of their leaders, teachers should ideally ask questions and engage in critical thinking and skeptical inquiry.  Teachers have an indispensable role as intellectuals in our democracy.  We can no more relinquish this role than we can abdicate the responsibility to nurture creativity and critical thinking in our students, but we will be punished for teaching students how to think; in a hierarchical, authoritarian society, intellectuals are reviled.  The attacks on teachers are a troubling sign that our democracy is slipping away.

     It is important to note that soldiers have not infrequently been intellectuals and artists.  According to Kenneth Slawenski’s new biography of J.D. Salinger, the antiauthoritarian Holden Caulfield took shape amid the trenches of World War II, literally, with bombshells exploding around Salinger’s typewriter.  Before that, World War I soldiers like Wilfred Owen wrote poems condemning the glorification of war. In spite of the cynical way that the government used “the troops” as a tool to garner support for an immoral war as recently as the invasion of Iraq, there are those soldiers who saw the forest for the trees and objected to their mission.  There will always be those soldiers, but too often they are dismissed as disloyal or insane.

     Meanwhile, the soldier, the steadfast, unselfish soldier whose ultimate sacrifice becomes the circular justification for war remains a potent symbol for patriotism.  In patriotism’s perverted logic, the war must be just because people are giving their lives in its name, and it is unjust for people to give their lives to an unworthy cause.  As to the clause after the comma: indeed. That is why we must defeat unworthy causes and end all unjust wars, on behalf of soldiers, civilians, and humanity.

     And how must we respond to the metaphorical war on authentic, democratic education?  If not teachers, then who are the troops in this war?  The answer, of course, is students, the young and innocent who follow orders that we teachers, in the chain of command, are meant to give them, the kids who do as they are told in the ever-dimming hope of attaining success and a decent quality of life.  It is in the name of students that the reformers attack teachers or anyone with intelligent criticisms of their policies.  The implication is that we must not care about our kids if we're not on board with their notion of reform.  "Support our kids" can easily degenerate into a mindless slogan to instill obedience in educators.  Moreover, the bloated rhetoric about student achievement disguises an indifference to the complexity and autonomy of real kids; they are not mere receptacles of our knowledge nor are they instruments of our best-laid plans.  They are free to make of their education what they will, and we must not deceive them on this journey.  To paraphrase Owen, “my friend, you [should] not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory, the old lie, dulce et decorum est,” to sacrifice one’s real education for a passing CAHSEE score and the promise of a low wage job or a violent death in a foreign country; in other words, “pro patria mori.”

     

Motives Matter

In English class we devote considerable attention to motives.  We ask about character motivation and we may also wonder how characterization reveals an author's design or purpose.  We may inquire into our own reasons for responding to the text as we do, exploring as we read our social conditioning or personal experience.  Motives can be confessed or concealed, implied or announced, clear or convoluted; perhaps they are not even conscious. 

In education we sometimes forget to question our motives, though at minimum we pay lip service to objectives and goals.  Our intention is to teach the standards within a certain timeframe, but why?  Are we merely following the rules of our profession, reflexively doing our job in the conventional language of duty? Or do we embrace the standards and the prescribed pace of our instruction on their own merits?  These questions awaken older ones:  Why did we become teachers in the first place?  Did we have a passion for a particular discipline, or an empathetic ease with a specific age group?  Did we consider our role as teachers in an institutional setting or the classroom in relation to the larger society?  


Let's agree that we want to prepare our students to function well in our society.  What does that even mean?  Does functioning well mean accepting the current status quo, being well paid or content, not asking questions with no satisfying answers?  On the contrary, perhaps high-functioning people ask many questions and assume the psychic burden of all their provisional answers.  If that is true, we don’t just need to reflect on our own motives as educators, but we need to encourage students to reflect on theirs. 

“Teachers hate this question, but why are we doing this?”  Many of us have heard this comment or one similar to it in relation to a lesson. Most of us will admit to feeling on occasion a spasm of annoyance when it is asked.  “Why are you being contrary, kid?  Why are you asking me to dredge up a reason tailor-made for your unique sensibility when I already know, or think I know, why you are doing this?”  We sigh at the energy it takes to explain our unexamined assumptions.  Can’t our students take it on faith that we know what we’re doing, that our authority deserves their respect and deference? 

These days, few are taking our authority and expertise on faith, and ironically this is one of the reasons we expect students to adhere blindly to our most prefabricated lesson plans, those we implement rather than create.  The more we surrender our agency as teachers to the czars of privatization, the more we expect our students to do the same.  As we carry out orders that belie our claim to autonomy, we settle for the simulacrum of authority in their enforcement.  We don't make the rules, but we do impose them on our students, and when they resist we perceive it as an affront to our dignity.  But what if my students, however confused and disorganized in their rebellion, are right to resist, and what if their resistance is less an insult and more a test of my conscience?

Beyond honest debates about practice, pedagogy and policy, we might think long and hard about the motives of some of the biggest backers of the education reform crusade. Intelligent and well-meaning people can of course disagree about the best way to assess learning, or the most effective way to provide equal access to a decent education.  One hotly debated topic in public educational circles these days is whether and to what extent to offer incentives for good performance on standardized tests.  Some teachers and schools have determined that grade enhancements are in order when struggling students improve on high stakes exams, or as I see this practice, intrinsic motivation twice removed. 


On the other end of the spectrum, from capable students we suspect are tanking their results, many do not hesitate to withhold college recommendations.  Their lack of effort is bringing down the whole ship, the reasoning goes, the school's reputation not to mention individual teacher reputations, so why reward their ingratitude?  Besides, shouldn't laziness or perverse obstructionism disqualify these students from getting an extra boost into a good college or job?  Why aid their unjustified aspirations and loose these students on an unsuspecting work world?

Anyway, they may not be the end all and be all, but some of these exams are useful measures of what our students are learning.  They may be mandated by federal or state policies, imposed on us from above, but what's so wrong with that in principle?  If students are sabotaging the results, aren't they in effect sabotaging their education? 

 Even some who are fiercely critical of standardized tests and their material consequences may believe that our best defense is simply to pass them with flying colors, using incentives or any legal means at our disposal.  If we have made this pragmatic calculation, perhaps we should invite students to define their own conscious motives instead of enticing them to "buy in" to the testing program. 


We can debate these important questions assuming the good intentions of all parties; perhaps this is a prerequisite to nonpartisanship and diplomacy.  Or we can acknowledge the ambiguity of motives.  While plotting Othello's downfall, Iago pretends to be his loyal friend.  He later notes that the "parallel course" of his advice to Cassio would indeed be good and helpful were it uttered in a completely different context.  "When devils will the blackest sins put on, 

They do suggest at first with heavenly shows."  


If the purpose of the standardized testing movement is to educate students better, then however much we may question the strategy or call for a more balanced approach to learning, we are more likely to respect it as the current law of the land.  By this logic, if students refuse to follow testing protocol, they are rejecting the best efforts of our national elite to give them a solid education.  In short, they are acting stupid, and if we need to offer incentives to make them act smarter, so be it.  


However, if by contrast these exams are tools of the Corporate Establishment to dismantle public education, then we have got to ask why in the world we are advancing our own destruction.  If this testing culture is by design a way to justify the takeover of public education by private interests, then as its enforcers we are blindly acting out a tragedy of epic proportions, and we are not merely doing violence to our own interests, but more poignantly to the interests of our students whom we have a sacred duty to protect.  As we learn from Othello, motives are more instructive than outward behavior and appearances.  Sadly, honest people are often the last to recognize the duplicity of others, a fact upon which Iago relies.  Othello's ignorance, however, does not absolve him of responsibility.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/16-4

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_the_united_states_is_destroying_her_education_system_20110410/

The Politics of Teaching

When is teaching political? Many of us will answer simply,"never."  After all, shouldn't there be an enforced separation in our classrooms between the lofty goals of education and the muck of politics? Don't we need to protect the "objective" sphere of pure learning from partisan manipulations of information and the biased agendas of political parties?  When it comes to factual distortions and omissions, of course.  But are teachers ever really operating outside of the political universe, even when they aspire to transcend it?  And is such an aspiration noble or dangerous in today's world?  When we insulate students from political controversy, are we truly serving them or their future?  Must teachers avoid thorny social, political and moral questions in order to serve students digestible lessons?  Is academic knowledge designed to go down smoothly without excess emotions like doubt, fear, confusion, anger, or even love?  In short, can we truly teach without touching down on the real world in all of its contested fragility?


Leaving aside a prolonged acknowledgement of this question's different degree of relevance depending on the subject matters we teach, I believe we all must confront the matter of politics in education, now more than ever.  One reason is outlined in this article from Rethinking Schools.  In spite of the way we separate and demarcate types of knowledge, our disciplines are interrelated and commonly implicated in the world's major challenges.  Grades and test scores are puny symbols for the true human stakes of learning, and so much in our world hangs in the balance between ignorance and knowledge. While the Climate Crisis may seem outside the parameters of a high school English course, Frankenstein is not.  Mary Shelley's warning about the monstrousness of technology that is out of sync with nature is a theme our students will confront writ large, and it is crucial that we prepare their consciousness for this challenge from every academic angle.  Politics is an arena too often ceded to "specialists" and "special interests," to people who have the mind or stomach for it, but in truth, we are all political actors on a political stage.  This brings me to my second reason for believing that teachers must confront politics.


We are political scapegoats.  Our collective image is being used to further an agenda of austerity and privatization, not just in the realm of education but in the society as a whole.  Private interests and profits are superseding the interests of children, workers, and people everywhere who want a sustainable life.  Teachers are on the frontline of the resistance to this corporate takeover of our public resources. This is not a self-centered observation of complacent victimhood, but a troubling recognition that we must confront as a profession if we are to save public education.


However, much of the public sees the members of our profession in a selfish light.  Misinformation is rife about pensions, teacher tenure and the supposed epidemic of bad or "ineffective" teaching.  The mantra that teachers must be held accountable to student test results sounds to too many ears like a battle cry on behalf of children, particularly poor and minority children, against institutional neglect; in fact, the steady drumbeat of testing and reprisals for low performance reinforces an education apartheid that has already taken root in our country. Disadvantaged populations are churned out to low wage job slots from testing factories, while children of privileged parents emerge from well-rounded private educations.  This inequity is untenable in a democracy, a fact of which antidemocratic forces are well aware.  I could go on and on, or you could just read Diane Ravitch's latest.


What do we do when the fight for our salaries and our working conditions is pitted against the needs of our students, as though the more we stood up for ourselves, the less we cared about our kids?  Jim Judd's editorial in The Press Democrat suggests that we teachers need to get over ourselves and our frail egos, and get down to the business of educating our kids.  So if tying our pay to student test scores works to improve their learning, we need to do it.  If firing principals and teachers when schools "fail" is the answer to meeting our students' needs, then what's stopping us? Teachers. What else!  Disregarding ample evidence to the contrary, Judd presumes that both of the above measures do work.  He then enshrouds this presumption in an especially clever form of scapegoating when he implies that we are the problem for noticing that we are being scapegoated.  That's right.  We are now being scapegoated for objecting to being scapegoated as Jessica Jones and Michael Aparicio do in their Guest Opinion at which Judd takes aim.


We cannot fight this kind of assault by pretending to be above the fray, or telling ourselves that politics is beside the point of education.  When oligarchical power plays threaten the foundation of democracy in public education, politics is hardly beside the point, in or out of the classroom.  The accelerating pressure to replace substantive lessons with testing soundbites is a political maneuver, and we must meet it head on with a clear articulation of our own values.  I value authentic learning and democracy, and I refuse to throw my students and our nation's children under the bus of budget cuts, school closures, and mind-numbing testing curricula divorced from personal, and yes, political engagement.  We need to define teacher and student interests together.


It is instructive that the nurses at Kaiser Hospital in Santa Rosa just negotiated a salary increase amid a recession.  They succeeded  where we did not because the CNA knows that nurses are there to protect patient care, and that reduced funds translates to compromised care.  We have an analogous situation in public education, but we must embrace more fully our role to protect our students from budget cuts.  Until we can articulate the real damage to kids of slashed funding and imbecile policy choices, we will be marginalized as selfish people.  Although that damage is intellectual, social, moral and spiritual, we must express it in concrete political terms.  Public education is a right, and we will fight for it in the classrooms, in negotiations, and out in the streets.

Who We Are

We are educators in the Santa Rosa City Schools District who are concerned about widespread budget cuts amid the mounting pressures to transform the democratic province of public education into a mouthpiece for corporations.  Most of us teach at the high school level but we have been joined by University Professors, librarians, and elementary school teachers from different parts of the country. We wanted a place to discuss the crossroads in education that confronts our public schools here, and all across the nation.  


We chose a public place to have this dialogue because we believe it is urgent that the public gain a nuanced view of public education from teachers on the ground.  We do not have the corporate funds to launch a public relations campaign that delivers the truth about our nation's schools to the public; all we have are our own voices.  We hope to use those voices to amplify student, parent, citizen and resident voices everywhere as we demand the collective right to an authentic education, one that affords real opportunities to participate in a genuine democracy.  In the spirit of democracy, we welcome diverse perspectives and seek a robust and respectful dialogue.

Recommended Actions

Please inform us here of any upcoming campaigns, conferences, vigils or demonstrations that pertain to the fight for public education.


Tomorrow, April 4th is the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis.  He was there to support workers' collective bargaining rights.  In honor of him, Cesar Chavez and working families everywhere, there are events across the country on Monday, April 4th.  As of now, the closest event to Santa Rosa is in Novato.  Follow this link to learn more.


Then, this Friday at SRJC there will be a panel to discuss the Education Crisis affecting California.

Panelists To address “Our Education Crisis” April 8

To help promote informed discussions at SRJC and across Sonoma County about the college’s current education challenges and the predicament of the larger education crisis that affects all California community colleges, universities, and the state’s K-12 education system, a panel discussion is scheduled on the Santa Rosa Campus on April 8 regarding “Our Education Crisis.”

Held from 2:00 - 4:00 PM in Newman Auditorium on the Santa Rosa Campus, the panel is the first of a three-part series that are organized by Michael Aparicio and co-sponsored by the Associated Students. The well-informed panel will include:

California Senator Noreen Evans, California Assembly Member Jared Huffmann, California Assembly Member Michael Allen, Santa Rosa School Board Member Larry Haenel, California Teacher's Association Sandra lowe, SRJC Vice-PresIdent of Student Services, Ricardo Navarrette

Following the panel discussion, panelists will participate in a 45 to 60 minute audience discussion. For more information, contact Michael Aparicio, Philosophy Department, at maparicio@santarosa.edu.

  The March: Save our Schools March and National Call to Action is a powerful event planned for July 28-30 in Washington, D.C. and Nationwide.


This National Call to Action says Americans everywhere should demand

• Equitable funding for all public school communities
• End to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation
• Curriculum developed for and by local school communities
• Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies

Contract Negotiations

We are in the process of negotiating the contract for next year, and have an opportunity here to discuss our priorities.  We have already approved the calendar that specifies 2 to 6 furlough days on given dates, so that is off the table.  What remaining concerns do we want to see addressed, and in what order?  Your thoughts?