This Just Isn’t Something Public Teachers Do — Part 1

Peter Anderson
Jul 21, 2017 · 7 min read

I sat inside the cramped office of my school’s assistant principal. He had sent me an email earlier that day asking to meet during 7th grade’s lunch period. Although the email gave no mention of the meeting’s purpose, I had a feeling. The night before I had written a strongly worded post on my personal blog about my struggles to reconcile everything I’d been reading about critical pedagogy with certain practices within my school. With a resigned sigh, my assistant principal closed his door and told me he had read my blog. While I was free to write whatever I wanted, he said, I had certain codes of conduct to follow as a public employee. He told me that it was my contractual obligation to carry out the mission of the school, the district, and the state. Flustered, I expressed frustration over my inability to engage in constructive dialogue with other teachers and staff. He paused. That’s just not something public school teachers do, he said. We don’t push back.

At the heart of this post rests the question of what it means to be a public educator working in the 21st century. What values, behaviors, and discourse are expected of our profession? As is often the case with power and institutional norms, the quickest way to uncover the rules is to challenge them.

Inside the Institutional Monoculture

My first few years of teaching took place within a highly structured No Excuses-style charter school. Our methodology was rooted in scientific management and data analytics. I pored over student data to identify trends and develop standards-based action plans. External scope and sequence documents mandated exactly what I would teach and when I was supposed to teach it. Everything we did at College Success Academy was in service to our mission: to prepare children of color for college. The head of school often told us that working at College Success Academy required every teacher to drink the Kool-Aid. So we did. We shouted out slogans from the teacher training manual every morning. We chanted the names of colleges and universities whose pennants plastered the hallways. We read Paul Tough, visited the Harlem Children’s Zone, and attended national conferences on improving grit among children of color and using test data to close the achievement gap.

The cult-like atmosphere at my school served two important purposes. First, it created an echo chamber where everyone said, chanted, and enacted the same things. It also created and sustained an us vs. them dynamic. We cast ourselves as modern reformers, cutting-edge educators untethered by mainstream education. There was no discussion of structural racism or government policies that ensure unequal distribution of resources, only the invocation of a mainstream education imaginary, a bloated system bogged down by sluggish bureaucracy, archaic methodology, and union protectionism. Eager to please, I internalized the school’s beliefs and value judgements without question. I imagined myself as a soldier willing to do what traditional teachers couldn’t. I would soon realize, however, that I was already acting in complete accordance within education’s dominant discourse.

In 2013 I took a teaching job in a district closer to where I lived. On the surface my new school had little in common with College Success Academy; I went from teaching a 100% African American population to a student body representing over 40 countries. My first school was situated in the poorest section of a city while my new school sat in one of the wealthiest counties in the country. One focused on college prep while the other claimed a holistic, whole child approach. Despite these differences, I found myself doing exactly the same things: using state testing blueprints and multiple choice test data to map out what, when, and how students would learn. My ability to move seamlessly between the two schools had nothing to do with “best practices” and everything to do with a unified core of assumptions about teaching, learning, and schooling. I had discovered the ideological boundaries of the rational community of teachers.

The Rational Community of Teachers

According to philosopher Alphonso Lingis, a rational community is a group of individuals who submit to a common discourse through a process of continual depersonalization. The concept of the rational community provides us with a useful theoretical model for analyzing the intersections of community, identity, and behavior. Lingis explains that rational communities are a necessary component of modern life (1994, p. 110). All groupings, from occupations to national and cultural identities, form through the same mechanism of depersonalization and submission to a group identity. It’s important to note that rational communities are inherently neither positive nor negative; they’re essential to the functioning of modern life. Every rational community functions in accordance with a specific set of principles that the group both produces and is produced by. He says,

Statements can be true, and meaningful, only in the discourse of an established community that determines what could count as observations, what degrees of accuracy in recording observations are possible, how the words of common language are restricted and refined for different kinds of cognition and for practical or technological uses, and what could count as an argument” (1994, p. 135).

As an example, we as a society have come to define plumbing as the knowledge and maintenance of water, sewage, and drainage systems. In order to become a plumber one must demonstrate one’s ability to understand and maintain these systems with a certain degree of fidelity. I would not expect a plumber to critique my bathroom’s color scheme because that’s not a practice of their rational community. Similarly, if I want to be a teacher then I need to act in a way that conforms to my community and society’s definition of a teacher. This means I teach content and skills to different groups of adolescents, assessing them at some point to check for proficiency. The instructional methods and assessment strategies I may pull from are not infinite; they draw from a set of assumptions that my community produces and is produced by. So while I could spend every class period performing cartwheels up and down the hallway, I wouldn’t because it obviously doesn’t fit with what we think teachers should do. But what about if I wanted to remove all grades and tests from my class? Would my actions still align with my community? Although I would still be teaching and assessing, I would no longer be enacting the practice of A — F grades, a staple of public education since at least the 1960s (Schneider & Hutt, 2014).

My ability to transition seamlessly between two opposing school environments revealed a set of technocratic and instrumentalist assumptions about what it means to be a teacher in this moment in time. These norms cast education as a scientific instrument. Teachers wield education as a seemingly neutral tool to bring about specific and predetermined learning outcomes. In my state this means ensuring that every child knows how to do things like identify the main idea of a passage, summarize important details, and ascertain a reading passage’s organizational pattern. Children demonstrate proficiency with these skills by correctly answering multiple-choice questions on a test. While teachers can and often do provide additional methods of assessment, test-based accountability means that, at the end of the day, scores on standardized exams are what matters most.

Within my rational community, student growth and social improvement come from increasing tests scores. Many scholars have analyzed and articulated the technocratic turn in education. For instance, Greg Dimitriadis and Marc Lamont Hill discuss education’s twinned tendencies of “the valorization of specific kinds of technical expertise and a more general distrust of the intellectual and the intellectual life” (2012, para 1). Theorist Michael Apple notes that education discourse is characterized by “the dominance of an ethic of amelioration through technical models” (2004, p. 27). And education philosopher Gert Biesta delineates the growth of what he describes as the contemporary “language of learning,” a form of discourse that casts student as consumer, teacher as producer, and knowledge as a free-floating commodity to be traded back and forth (2006, p. 19–20).

Such challenges from scholars have not been enough to dislodge the dominant rhetoric of growth as a manifestation of improved test scores. Mainstream publications like Education Week fill their pages with advertisements for products and seminars promising improved scores and increased school efficiency. Political candidates give stump speeches about the benefits of linking free-market economic practices to schooling. Superintendents and school building leaders implement techniques from system analysis (Mehta, 2013, p. 68). States such as New York and professional bodies like The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards contract with Pearson for teacher education and licensure (Gorelewski & Gorelewski, 2016, p. 75). Institutional norms and practices feed into one another, creating a level of inertia that makes any form of deviation nearly impossible.

To stray from the community becomes an act of open rebellion. Something as simple as removing letter grades from student assignments and providing only narrative feedback goes against the core assumptions of the community. As I found out during that afternoon with the assistant principal, refusal to participate in the practices of the rational teaching community puts one’s ability to be a teacher at risk. Regardless of the rhetoric around creativity, the whole child, differentiation, and creativity, teachers are expected to function within a of specific set of instructional practices and behavioral dispositions. Plumbers use wrenches; teachers use data.

Continued in Part 2

image: CC0

References

Biesta, G. (2006). Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Dimitriadis, G. & Hill, M. L. (2012). Accountability and the contemporary intellectual [Electronic Version]. Occasional Papers, 27, 9–11. Retrieved June 25, 2016, from bankstreet.edu/occasionalpapers/27

Gorlewski, D., & Gorlewski, J. (2016). Solidarity and critical dialogue: Interrupting the degradation of teacher preparation. In J. Bower & P.L. Thomas (Eds.), De-testing and de-grading schools: Authentic alternatives to accountability and standardization (pp. 75–85). New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Lingis, A. (1994). The community of those who have nothing in common. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Mehta, J. (2013). The allure of order: High hopes, dashed expectations, and the trouble quest to remake American schooling. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Schneider, J. & Hutt, E. (2014). Making the grade: A history of the A-F marking scheme. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 46(2), 201–224.

Identity, Education and Power

Pathways and Intersections of Understanding

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Peter Anderson

Written by

Middle School Teacher / NWP Teacher Consultant / Writer & Reader

Identity, Education and Power

Pathways and Intersections of Understanding

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