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‘We Can Make Mistakes and We Can Fix Them’:
Countering Cruel Optimism to Promote Public Education
[1] Here I offer what I imagine as a spirited defense of the possibility inherent in public schools and the potential of the teachers who work there to enhance those possibilities. I seek to discovergrounds for agency and constructive identityin what most construe as a dispiriting educational age. My talk lies at the intersection, I think, of two conference themes: the role of the teacher -- and democracy and the common school. I hope to escape my own tendency to just “blame late capitalism” and neoliberal ideology, while still acknowledging Wendy Brown’s insight that in thought and action, we have reduced ourselves to homo oeconomicus. I don’t want to lock educators in to any particular analysis. I want to let us out to educate. I try to do that here by diving into the affective economies that schooling enacts for teachers. In particular, I offer a counterexample to the the dominant affects teachers are experiencing and then analyze what is present in my counter example that might be worth a second look.
This is, as Kathleen Stewart suggests, in Ordinary Affect, an “experiment, not a judgment.” You may not make of this the same thing that I have made of it … and then there will be a good conversation when I am done.
Let me begin with my counterexample:
[2] A new, young, inexperienced principal arrived to Bailey STEM Magnet Middle School in the late summer of 2012. He had been a teacher in the district and knew Bailey and its reputation—but he came anyway with a strong commitment to teachers and to equitable education for all children. He also came with a slogan that captured his goals for the kids: Individuals of character, scholars for life, leaders now and tomorrow. It would be recited daily by the scholars.
[3] He inherited a faculty that might be considered problematic, but there were strong characters in the mix, both black and white. The first year was rocky. All he managed to do was stop the bleeding – and plan for the future.
[4] And there was plenty of bleeding. Bailey sat literally at the bottom of the charts in TN. It will come as no surprise that 90+% of the students who attended Bailey were African American and roughly the same percentage were eligible for Free and Reduced Lunch, the go-to measure of poverty in US schools. To attract white, middle class students, the district designated Bailey a STEM magnet school, but it was a little like putting “lipstick on a pig.” Few new students appeared.
[5] The students who inhabited the halls of Bailey came largely from one government housing project called Cayce Homes. To say Cayce is unappealing and in disarray would be a wild understatement. It is no exaggeration to say that the Bailey kids witnessed at least one shooting a week.
[6] But it’s important to understand that the kids who attended Bailey were bussed several miles, while the children living in the neighborhood shunned the school. Stand on Bailey steps and throw a stone and and you will hit an $800,000 house. Look at these Zillow maps showing property values enroute. (HIGHLIGHT and cite $$).
[7] The new principal, Dr. Sawyer, arrived with some important commitments: that the Bailey kids were bright and deserved an education that would acknowledge that, that working toward a staff that reflected racial diversity was important, that Bailey really was going to be a STEM Magnet school. In the course of his first year, these commitments turned into plans.
[8] And the plans came not a moment too soon. At the end of Dr. Sawyer’s first year, Bailey’s reputation had not really improved.[1] (READ QUOTE?)
[9] The leadership team’s plans included moving toward a model of teaming and teacher leadership that included integrating residents from a local university (mine). Those strong characters I mentioned above were invited to participate in the planning. All faculty – even those who seemed to be “underperforming” -- were encouraged to stay on and help them model take hold. I spent one day a week there for three years. I made copies, covered classes for a few or many minutes, walked unruly children around the building to get them out of someone’s hair and regularly encouraged one and all, reminding them that we there for one reason only – to educate children.
[10] When the new plans were announced, about half the faculty left, but the ones who stayed were intrigued. When the new school year began, there were new, mostly younger and more diverse teachers, -- and a 9 person fleet of white residents who had no idea what they were getting in to. But all regularly took part in figuring out what was working and what wasn’t
[11] The changes were messy but immediate. Teams of teacher had common planning time and scheduled three dedicated sessions a week to sharing planning ideas, monitoring student progress and getting administrative guidance respectively. “Divide and differentiate” became a battle cry. As the residents got their feet under them, they were pressed into service, pulling small groups (sometimes the “troublemakers” but often the kids who needed more stimulation and attention – often the same kids).
[12] Eventually, teams sorted out new schedules for their students combining blocks and re-splitting them into “stations” where smaller groups of kids worked with classroom teachers, teacher leaders, special educators and residents in lessons with common goals but variable strategies. Time and space and people and curriculum were deployed flexibly to meet children’s needs. More caring, intelligent adults challenged the kids to care as well. The principal supported the team’s decisions.
[13] More adults were around to love the living daylights into them, to enhance the relational capacity of the school. And more adults could both model for and demand of scholars that they take responsibility for their own learning and interaction. (THIS BOARD was the brainchild of a resident who stayed to become a full-time teacher.)
[14] At the end of the first year, everybody knew things were better but one big issue loomed for the faculty. They had been teaching across grade levels (5-6 and 7-8) to make teaming possible. They didn’t want to do that anymore – and they made a case that the principal accepted even though he thought they were wrong. This might have been a turning point. Some teachers left after that year), but most stayed – and recruited their friends to join them. New team leaders arrived or emerged. At the start of the principal’s third year, the faculty had strengthened, but more importantly, they found a collective voice.
[15] Nothing external had changed They (and the principal) were under the gun to generate better test scores in all areas. The principal tried hard to shield the faculty from the pressure (which they appreciated), but sometimes he too gave in and offered a “lecture” that brought everybody down. Then he would readjust and so would the faculty and get back to work. But clearly, the scholars were more secure, happier to be in school.
[17] Bailey’s reputation was still negative but starting to improve with the STEM program leading the wayas the robotics team won a Samsung National Challenge, the school started a TV station, and STEM (and STEAM) electives once a week brought kids into the applications of science, math and the arts… The football team won a city championship, a talented local director was recruited to provide theater experiences. One teacher leader was a State Teacher of the Year Finalist.
[18] And the teams of teacher leaders, teachers and residents continued to function for the well-being of kids. This is the source of their intoxication. That intoxication was fueled partly by some positive academic results. Math scores jumped up enough that the school won an award for growth: highest in the district.
[19] By the measure of the district’s own “Academic Performance Framework,” Bailey started looking better, even good. (Point out results)
[20] It was not all sweetness and light; folks on teams didn’t get along. People got mad at one another. But nobody felt silenced. They could talk to their team; they could talk to the principal. At the end of that second year, a contingent came to town from the National Education Association (the largest teacher union in the US) and visited Bailey because they had heard that there was an interesting experiment in teacher leadership and teacher autonomy going on in a state where test scores and notoriously unstable value-added assessments were determining teachers’ future and the quality of instruction and curriculum kids experienced. It was at this event that one teacher leader said – in answer to a question from an NEA official about what made working at Bailey worthwhile -- “We can make mistakes here … and we can fix them.” Her peers on the panel nodded; her colleagues sitting in the room seemed both surprised and gratified by that characterization.
I begin with this little story because it has, I believe, big implications. The teachers at Bailey were working in tough conditions against big educational odds but they were not demoralized and they were decidedly not depressed. In fact, they were energized. They were recruiting their best friends and most valued colleagues to come teach with them. What were the sources of this energy?
That’s the dynamic I want to explore here. I want to think about what Katie Stewart calls “ordinary affects” to unpack “the embodied process of making solidarity itself” at Bailey. The school – for a brief shining moment as I explain in the conclusion – became a pragmatist haven of Deweyan democracy. Diversity – of culture, of ideas, of values even -- became a resource for political, personal and professional action. What was going at Bailey? More importantly, what was possible at Bailey?
To set the stage for this exploration, I will lay out what I take to be the central problematic of teaching today: a potentially crippling disjunct between teachers’ self-understanding as educators and the systemic (political and institutional) orientation toward achievement construed so narrowly as to be anti-educational. This disjunct locates educators in an emotional and action space that can be – and too often is -- experienced as hopeless. However, I want to reinterpret this space with the help of Lauren Berlant and recognize educators in a situation of cruel optimism, while suggesting, with the help of John Dewey, that teachers may not be as “stuck” as it seems. I also want to refocus attention – again with Dewey’s help -- on the very idea of public schools understood differently from government schools, delineating how the reality of today’sgovernment school depresses positive affect while the aspirational notion of public school is, in its very mention, energizing.
Against this background, I come back to Bailey and to the teachers who can say with conviction and wonder, fully aware of the novelty of what they are saying, “We can make mistakes here … And we can fix them.” What they were only coming to understand when this line was uttered was that they were experiencing educational community. They were living public education of the kind Dewey imagined, a space for shared action that Berlant calls “an intimate public.” They were embedded in a daily, embodied process of making solidarity itself. And it was intoxicating.
The Problematic for Teachers Today
There are, of course, substantial challenges intrinsic to the work of teaching. Gert Biesta and I explore those challenges in an encyclopedic opening chapter to AERA’s Handbook of Research on Teaching, just published. We make an argument for teaching as purposeful, intentional and relational and draw out the ways this messy reality challenges those who would be teachers, sympathetic as we are to Freud’s (and Deborah Britzman’s) contention that teaching is an impossible profession. It is fraught with predicaments (Cohen) -- a profession that requires trading in uncertainty and unsettling deeply held beliefs and understandings of one’s self and the world. It demands a combination of humility and hubris that is difficult to reconcile.
Despite its impossibility (or perhaps because of it!), teaching has drawn the effort of many educators over the history of humankind. It is intrinsically fascinating to those of us who pursue it as a craft (Tom) or study it as a social practice (Horn). And teaching has provided endless grist for the philosophical mill. To ground our analysis, Gert and I limn six “icons” of teaching well-known to many of you. These include Plato’s midwife, Rousseau’s tutor, Dewey’s designer, Freire’s problem-poser, Noddings’ carer and Ranciere’s ignorant schoolmaster. In each of these icons, there is some useful truth captured about the valued purpose, defensible intention, and optimal relation possible in educational activity. Each recommends that we focus our attention on these or those elements of the teacher-learner-content-context quartet and on specific framings of educational purpose. But none of these icons address directly what presses on today’s teachers most immediately: every day I work harder and harder to accomplish goals that seem less and less satisfying, implementing evidence-based practices with fidelity in contexts that seem to me to call for something different from what is prescribed. I do this in order to win the coveted rating of “effective teacher.” This is a pyrrhicvictory that allows me to maintain my job as a teacher, but leaves me wondering what sort of a teacher I am.
In the contemporary scenario, teachers’ judgment is erased and thepurposes and intentions that motivated their becoming teachers are too often rendered irrelevant. They are still tasked with encouraging and developing pedagogically productive relations with students, but the academic import of those relations is sundered from the moral impact, as schools take up “social and emotional learning” as if it occurs in a specified advisory period. The net effect is the kind of “demoralization” that Doris Santoro documents so vividly. It is not teacher burnout of the kind made famous to those of my generation in Bel Kaufman”s Up the Down Staircase, not the burnout that Nel Noddings documents when the one cared for is unresponsive to the carer. Rather, for today’s teachers, moral motivation is “dissed,” disrespected and disappeared. How am I to teach with educative integrity in an environment that reduces purpose from “turning the soul” to “college and career ready”? What is teaching when the “prize” my eyes hold is AYP or League Tables?
The story of how we got to this place is too rich and detailed to be told adequately here, but the impact is clear. It is capturedby Dana Goldstein in the plaintive title of the last chapter of Teacher Wars: “Let me use what I know.” Centralized efforts to “fix” teachers in order to improve educational outcomes, outcomes clearly linked to poverty and discrimination, result in endless “trainings,” scripted curricula, regular tests to benchmark progress and a general loss of what we may simply call professional autonomy. That more pointedly means that teachers’ judgment is not only not valued, it’s not allowed.
Those who are currently employed as teachers struggle mightily to reconcile their well-tuned educational motivationsand hard-won pedagogical judgmentwith the constrained expectations and prescribed programs of instruction that mark today’s government schools. When one feels unable to speak back, when those in position to create policy and designate procedure decline to listen, teachers feel handcuffed. Teachers talk with each other, but the talk is not constructive. Community is thinned.[2]
Individual demoralization is handcuffing and chasing away good, potentially good, and even “good enough” teachers and so isthisintentional – structural -- isolation.[3] While educational researchers talk about teaching as a social practice, too many teachers encounter their work as “lone rangers.”[4]
But there’s also a pattern of shared habits of feeling and response evident in a lack of patience and faith, a lack of faith that what I know matters, and little patience to allow what I know to “work.”That we don’t seem to have this patience and faith is, I think, a combined result of one socio-political reality and two developments in the teaching profession. The sociopolitical reality is neoliberalism and I promised I wouldn’t hooked on that. So let me go to realities of teaching: one, we are losing gray hair. Teachers with 25 or more years of experience are retiring in great numbers; teachers with feweryears of experience are leaving disillusioned and demoralized. And, two, we are replacing those retirees and leavers with young folks who are “more accomplished than past generations, but … also more emotionally fragile” (Brooks). “Educational reformers” in the US sport a false sense of what they are going into, an unrealistic sense of what they can do to “fix” things, and a near void about what the reality of modern schooling demands. (Ignorance) The result is an educational community that perverts the point of education. Society can’t be renewed because there’s a too thin experience of what society has been as well as can be.