The One to Blame or Thank?

In the hallway, she muttered about teachers who spend too much time cutting out elaborate bulletin-board decorations or chitchatting at “morning meetings” with their third-graders before the real work begins.

This is the problem with so many articles on education for the general public. Most everyday-readers do not know what morning meetings are, and here their purpose is compared to bulletin boards and chitchatting. Yes, it’s a throw-away quote in a sense, used to introduce the person being written about, but it invites the unknowing reader to think, “Oh, yeah, she must be a no-nonsense woman who has some good, controversial ideas I might like – that call for ‘real work’.”

The “she” in that quote is Michelle Rhee, the Chancellor of Education, and the quote is from a brief piece Time magazine published on her last month, making me aware of her name and existence for the first time. And I must say, the article left me uneasy. Not simply because of Rhee’s beliefs and approaches but more so because of the article itself. Rhee is portrayed as a rebel, and her ideas are constantly pitted against teachers in an oversimplified “heroic” way.

There’s always this morality play that unfolds in articles like this – the veteran teachers who just want to love the kids and let them do arts and crafts because she instinctively knows what’s better, and the ambitious, research-focused and data-driven authority who is trying to save students from a “touchy-feely” education.

In my first read of the article, I drew the conclusion that it is the kind of philosophy she espouses that has landed so many of our public schools in this factory-producing-the-best-products approach to education that is deadening and sickening. A philosophy that demands teachers differentiate but then re-mold the students through undifferentiated standards and standardized tests that insist on and reinforce inequality and setting students up for failure. And then giving raises or pink slips to teachers based on those same test scores.

Back to the quote above.

Be The Kid

Recently the ESL Department at my school had our first (since I’ve been there) departmental meeting with our supervisor. In the lead up to it, the veteran teachers groaned and warned about how “there’s always something” and were not looking forward to it. I didn’t really know what to expect.

As you may know by now, NYC Public Schools now receive a progress report that rates a school for the percentage of progress students make. Our school scored an A, and this meeting discussed some of the weaknesses and where we, as a school, needed to improve. One was in terms of data, so now we have to carry around the most recent running record for our students, for example.

Our supervisor also detailed some ideas she’d gotten from going for some professional development with Teachers College, with which our school is affiliated. One of the things was the suggestion to “be the kid” — during a read aloud that the classroom teacher is doing, rather than being in the front of the classroom, sometimes we should sit down with the kids and get a better sense of how they’re seeing/hearing/interpreting/discussing things. The other new teacher (more on her later) and I were really jazzed by this. The veterans were kind of like, “more work?”

This seems to be an essential question and crossroads for what kind of teacher I will become. It comes down to why someone I am a teacher and where I see myself in this career.