Teaching Over the Long Haul

NOTE TO READERS.  I have been working on this blog for a while, trying to meet my end-of-May deadline, but now I am hesitant to post it, given the urgent anguish that surrounds us. I have tried to write about this moment, but I am a slow writer and was unable to produce for you anything that has not already been written, and written with more knowledge and wisdom than I have about the thick layers of pain radiating from the murder of George Floyd and so many before him.

I finally decided to go ahead and post the blog and leave it up to my readers if and when the time is right to read it. I hope it reflects, in its way, the human regard being called for by those raising their voices for equality and justice. 

 Here is the blog for May.

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There is a lot of talk these days about teaching. Continually, it seems, someone on broadcast media, or via an internet platform, or informally through Facebook, Instagram, and the rest, someone is expressing with appreciative surprise how difficult teaching is. The terrible COVID-19 pandemic has brought the demands – but only some of the demands – of the classroom into countless parents’ homes. I’m not seeing the cliched pop-culture portrayals of the teacher as unsympathetically uptight or clueless, and thankfully not hearing riffs on the tiresome adage claiming that those who can’t do, teach. 

It’s nice to have the pause button pushed on this stuff, for teaching is extraordinary work. Since my earliest days as an intern in Vi Christian’s wonderful kindergarten classroom (when I actually was pretty clueless) to the present, teaching has been a source of intellectual challenge, endless learning, humor, and self-discovery. And it is the kind of work that leads to reflection. 

I try to capture one small plane of my development as a teacher in the following, written for “Practitioner to Practitioner,” the journal of The National Organization of Student Success. I hope you enjoy it, and, if you teach, that it rings true to you. 

***

When I was a young teacher starting out many moons ago, I would hear older teachers at conferences or professional development sessions talk about all they learn from their students. I didn’t buy it. I mean, come on, after studying mathematics or literature for four years in college and then in graduate school, you’re telling me that a middle schooler or tenth grader or college freshman can enlighten you about solving for unknowns in algebra or how metaphor works? That sounded like happy talk to me. 

But as I explained and illustrated metaphor with different groups of students, in reference to different poems, I found myself going back to my college notes, to reference books, to other, more experienced teachers. I began to be more articulate in my explanations and more supple in my responses to questions—in fact, was starting to anticipate questions, which led to reading more poetry, looking for just the right examples. And then there were those times when the meaning of a metaphor in a given poem—let’s say an abandoned house, or a clock, or a storm forming in the distance—was well established by critics. We know what the metaphor means and how it functions—and then a student comes up with a credible different take on the poem. Maybe its meaning isn’t so settled after all. I’ll be damned if I wasn’t learning something about metaphor, though not in the way I had naively imagined when I was beginning my career—not simply acquiring more factual information. I was learning about metaphor through interacting with others, trying to help them understanding how literature works and, in the process, coming to better understand and appreciate literature myself, literature as a living thing. Teaching was affording me a dynamic way of knowing.

The longer I do this work, the more I’ve come to appreciate the range of what teaching enables us to know, the wide scope of human experience it opens up to us. Think of all those times in classrooms or student conferences or even in a casual encounter on campus when something revelatory happens: A student has an insight, makes a connection, thinks her or his way into and through a problem, confronts a limitation, discovers something new about a subject, discovers something about him or herself. These experiences are so much a part of the work we do that we might not pay much attention to them in the moment, and semester by semester they likely fade from memory. But the fact is we are witnesses to something remarkable that our teaching helped foster. I can say now with a little more humility but, paradoxically, a little more wisdom than I had at the beginning of my career that, yes, we do learn from our students… and learn about them, learn about each other and learn about ourselves. Our work gives us a line of sight into what makes us human: exploration, challenge, courage, and growth. 

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Classrooms and Hope

            At the beginning of 2019, the gifted political journalist Susan Glasser wrote a column titled “Is Optimism Dead in the Trump Era?” in which she mused on the “January Effect,” the “year-opening optimism” of the stock market and, more generally “the eternal hope for a fresh start” that typically characterizes many spheres of our personal and political lives. But, she continued, given the current occupant of the White House and the resulting ugly chaos, “Washington these days is hardly a town for optimists, even of the January variety.”

            Glasser’s column got me to reflecting on optimism and hope, not just in January, and particularly in these dark times. There is a passage in the writing of Czech playwright and statesman, Vaclav Havel that is relevant here:

Hope… is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather an ability to work for something because it is good.

Even when things seem at their bleakest, Havel continues, true hope impels us forward, “gives us the strength to live and to try new things.” Social movements are driven by this kind of hope.

            Another way to think about hope is to ask what in our lives acts as a counterforce to the dulling and blunting effects of evil, helps us see the good, hold to it, and work toward it? As I was reading Glasser, reading her and interiorly talking with her, I realized that for me a longstanding source of hope, of what might be, is the classroom, or, more exactly, all that the classroom represents at its best: a sanctioned space for growth, learning, discovery, thinking and thinking together. The classroom is the site of teaching, which in my late adolescence changed my life and subsequently has given my life great meaning —teaching, so beautifully described by education scholar Eve Ewing as “moments of intense focus and commitment where trying to help someone understand seems like the most important thing in the world.”

            My last post on counting and writing might be relevant here. In that post I encourage counting and describing the small particulars of daily life: “…everyday tallies and scribbles that can lift you momentarily out of the flow of events, help you take notice and give you a tool to think about what you perceive.” This attention to commonplace detail can have moral consequence. Detail grounds us in a time and place, is a hedge against stereotypes and easy labelling. Life is vibrant before us, in the case of the classroom, the vibrancy of learning and growing, which for me becomes a source of hope and commitment.

            I’m trying to think my way into something here, and apologize for the gaps in reasoning.  Let me offer some less hazy examples from past writing of what I’m reaching for. The first comes from the introduction to Possible Lives, an account of my visits to good public school classrooms across the United States.

I.                           I had been studying schools for much of my adult life, had been trying to understand how they enhanced the lives of students or diminished them. Most of that work was located in and around the LA Basin. For all its bewildering complication, Los Angeles was familiar territory, home. These trips to Calexico, to Baltimore, to Eastern Kentucky, to a nation within a nation in northern Arizona brought forth new cultural practices, new languages, new gestures. I was fortunate to have been escorted into so many classrooms, so many homes, to have been guided into the everyday events of the communities I visited, for the invitation eased the unfamiliarity and discomfort that could have been present on all sides. What I experienced was a kind of awe at our variety, yet an intimate regard, a handshake on the corner, a sense of shared humanity. The complex interplay of difference and commonality. What began as a search for a fresh language of educational critique and invention became, as well, a search for what is best in this country — realized infrequently, threatened at every turn — but there to be summoned, possible in the public domain, there to instruct a traveler settling into a seat in the corner of a classroom.

            It was, in many ways, an odd time to be on such a journey. The country was in the grip of a nasty reactive politics, a volatile mix of anger and anxiety. And people of all political persuasions were withdrawing from engagement with the public sphere. It was the time of economic and moral cocooning. The question for me — framed in terms of public schools, our pre-eminent public institution — was how to generate a hopeful vision in a time of bitterness and lost faith, and, further, how to do that in a way that holds simultaneously to what educational philosopher David Purpel calls “the interlocking and interdependent hinges” of criticism and creativity. How to sharpen awareness of injustice and incompetence, how to maintain the skeptic’s acuity, yet nurture the ability to imagine the possible and act from hope.

            The journey was odd for me in another way, considering my own teaching history. My work in the classroom has mostly been with people whom our schools, public and private, have failed: working-class and immigrant students, students from nonmainstream linguistic and cultural backgrounds, students of all backgrounds who didn't fit a curriculum or timetable or definition of achievement and were thereby categorized in some way as different or deficient. There are, as we have seen along this journey, long-standing social and cultural reasons for this failure of our schools, tangled, disturbing histories of discrimination, skewed perception, and protection of privilege.

            And yet there were these rooms. Vital, varied, they were providing a powerful education for the children in them, many of whom were members of the very groups defined as inferior in times past and, not infrequently, in our ungenerous present. What I began to see — and it took the accumulation of diverse classrooms to help me see it — was that these classrooms, in addition to whatever else we may understand about them, represented a dynamic, at times compromised and contested, strain in American educational history: a faith in the capacity of a people, a drive toward equality and opportunity, a belief in the intimate link between mass education and a free society. These rooms were embodiments of the democratic ideal. To be sure, this democratic impulse has been undercut and violated virtually since its first articulation. Thomas Jefferson’s proposal to the Virginia legislature for three years of free public schooling, for example, excluded the commonwealth’s significant number of enslaved Black children. But it has been advanced, realized in daily classroom life by a long history of educators working both within the mainstream and outside it, challenging it through workingmen’s organizations, women’s groups, Black schools, appropriating the ideal, often against political and economic resistance, to their own emancipatory ends.

            The teachers I visited were working within that rich tradition. They provided example after different example of people doing public intellectual work in institutional settings, using the power of the institution to realize democratic goals for the children in their charge, and finessing, negotiating, subverting institutional power when it blocked the realization of those goals. At a time of profound disillusionment with public institutional life, these people were, in their distinct ways, creating the conditions for children to develop lives of possibility.

-       From Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, 1995/2006, pp. 412-413

II.                         So much depends on what you look for and how you look for it. In the midst of the reform debates and culture wars that swirl around schools; the fractious, intractable school politics; the conservative assault on public institutions; and the testing, testing, testing— in the midst of all this, it is easy to lose sight of the broader purpose of the common public school. For me, that purpose is manifest in the everyday detail of classrooms, the words and gestures of a good teacher, the looks on the faces of students thinking their way through a problem.

            We have so little of such detail in our national discussion of teaching, learning, or the very notion of public education itself. It has all become a contentious abstraction. But detail gives us the sense of a place, something that can get lost in policy discussions about our schools—or, for that matter, in so much of our national discussion about ourselves. Too often, we deal in broad brushstrokes about regions, about politics and economics, about racial, linguistic, and other social characteristics. Witness the red state– blue state distinction, one that, yes, tells us something quick and consequential about averages, but misses so much about local social and political dynamics, the lived civic variability within.

            The details of classroom life convey, in a specific and physical way, the intellectual work being done day to day across the nation—the feel and clatter of teaching and learning. I’m thinking right now of a scene in a chemistry class in Pasadena, California, that I observed. The students had been conducting experiments to determine the polarity of various materials. Some were washing test tubes, holding them up to the windows for the glint of sunlight, checking for a bad rinse. Some were mixing salt and water to prepare one of their polar materials. Some were cautiously filling droppers with hydrochloric acid or carbon tetrachloride. And some were stirring solutions with glass rods, squinting to see the results. There was lots of chatter and lots of questions for the teacher, who walked from student to student, asking what they were doing and why, and what they were finding out.

            The students were learning about the important concept of polarity. They were also learning to be systematic and methodical. And moving through the room was the teacher, asking questions, responding, fostering a scientific cast of mind. This sort of classroom scene is not uncommon. And collectively, such moments give a palpable sense of what it means to have, distributed across a nation, available by law to all, a public educational system to provide the opportunity for such intellectual development.

-       From Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, 2009/2014, pp. 201-203

III.                       Classrooms are powerful places. They can be the sites of numbing boredom and degradation or of growth and connection.  …I have strong feelings about classrooms. I like them, feel at home in them. I like the banter, the crayons and pencils and scratching of pens, the smell of watercolors and acrylics, the quiet of concentration, the bustle of students thinking something through. The classroom is the place of my life’s work, the long haul, layered with emotion and memory. It doesn’t take much to call forth the wisps of childhood alienation and loneliness  ̶  the pages of a worn textbook, a kid’s slumping posture, the whiff of disinfectant ̶  or sometimes, in rapid shift, feelings of delicate hope and admiration for a teacher’s or student’s courage, quickness, humanity. Some of the most significant encounters of my late adolescence and young adulthood took place in classrooms, and it was in classrooms that I appropriated powerful bodies of knowledge and methods of inquiry. As I moved from student to teacher, I came of age in these rooms, realizing things about my own abilities and limits, my talent and fragility, the interplay of understanding and uncertainty that defines teaching, the sheer hard human work of it. I have been privy to remarkable moments, spent untold hours with people ̶  from elementary school children to adults in literacy programs ̶  as they acquired knowledge and new skill, played with ideas and struggled to understand, reached tentatively across divides, felt the grounded satisfaction of achievement, raged against history and moved toward clarity and resolve. A democracy, I believe, cannot leave the conditions for such experience to chance  ̶  or, for that matter, to the vagaries of political climate and market forces, for as Walter Lippmann observed, “the market is, humanly speaking, a ruthless sovereign.” A society that defines itself as free and open is obligated to create and sustain the public space for this kind of education to occur across the full, broad sweep of its citizenry.

-       From Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, 1995/2006, pp. 6-7

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Teaching As a Way of Seeing

             “The thing I love about Ms. Marovich,” says Hazel of her automotive technology instructor, “is that when she looks at you, she sees the finished product.” What a remarkable kind of seeing Hazel describes: An act of perception that envisions growth and that helps make that growth possible.

            Over the past several years, I have been interviewing a wide range of people, from students in high school and community college to professionals in their fifties and sixties, about experiences in or out of school that had a transformative effect on their education, that changed the way they thought about school and what school could enable them to do with their lives. A number of the people I talked to used some variation of Hazel’s statement about seeing, some visual metaphor of validation.

            A student in a Licensed Practical Nursing Program praises an instructor she would go to when she felt overwhelmed. The instructor told her that “she could see it in me that I was meant to do this,” and encouraged her to not only complete the LPN program but to continue toward a Registered Nurse’s degree, which she did.

            “I was a strange kid,” a high school English teacher says reflecting back on his time in twelfth grade, “but not to [his English teacher] Mrs. Howard. She saw me the way I wanted to be seen. It changed my life. Every day I work to see kids the way they want to be seen.”

            A middle school teacher starts talking to a boy serving detention and senses a “hunger” that leads her to invite him onto the school’s fledgling debate team. When I ask how she senses that hunger, she says, “by talking to someone and answering their questions. You can see it in their eyes.”

            A high school Spanish teacher raises the issue of college to a junior whose energies are more invested in soccer than academics, but who has a way with people and exhibits a certain savvy as he navigates eleventh grade. The teacher follows his instincts and connects the young man to a college bridge program. Looking back on it, our soccer player, now a graduate student, says of that teacher, “He saw potential in me that I didn’t see in myself.”

            These teachers seem to operate with an expansive sense of human ability and are particularly alert to signs of that ability, signs that might be faint or blurred by societal biases or by a student’s reticence or distracting behavior—or that the student him or herself might barely comprehend. Through the way they teach, through mentoring, or through some other intervention, these teachers help develop the abilities they perceive. We don’t hear a lot about this powerfully humane element of teaching, for so much current discussion of teacher education and development is focused elsewhere: from creating measures of effectiveness to mastering district or state curriculum frameworks. These are important issues to be sure, but they have crowded out so much else that makes teaching a richly humanistic intellectual pursuit.

            One last thought. To repurpose a phrase of Walt Whitman’s, education contains multitudes. There are endless treasures of human experience to be found within the classroom, so we could fruitfully continue the present discussion inside the schoolhouse alone. But given our moment in history, it’s not much of a stretch to think of how the kind of affirming perception I’ve been discussing resonates beyond education with current social movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, movements challenging perceptions that dehumanize rather than affirm. Also relevant is the portrayal of refugees and immigrants promulgated by the Trump administration, converting demonizing perception into heartless public policy. In times like these, perception attuned to ability along with a commitment to foster that ability becomes not only an educational endeavor but a civic and moral one as well.

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The Everyday Gestures of Justice

I have over the years subjected readers of this blog to some very long, even essay-length, posts. This time, I offer my shortest, a reflection on the value of small gestures in our teaching.

Asao Inoue, this year’s chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, asked a number of members to write brief (200 words max) reflections on the interrelation of literacy, language, and social justice, a topic of special importance these days. The topic can also be daunting—where to begin?—and in this little piece of writing, I simply wanted to remind us of the impact of the work we do in our classrooms—and especially the small but significant ways we demonstrate commitment and decency.

***

                  I value the small stuff. The teacher who encourages a hesitant question; who remembers a student’s name outside the classroom; who in discussing a paper suggests a book, a podcast, a movie; who spends an extra five minutes in a conference; who checks in with a student who had difficulty with the last assignment. These are everyday signs of commitment, micro-evidence of care.

                  Over the years, I’ve interviewed a lot of students from kindergarten to adult education, and I’ve been struck by how meaningful the small stuff is to them, particularly to those students who feel out of place and, in some cases, are having a hard time of it. These behaviors register, I think, because of their everydayness, because they seem to flow naturally from who a particular teacher is and therefore are experienced as real, authentic. They signal that you, the student, matter, that your development is valuable, that you belong here.

                  Of course, the big things are important: curriculum, and pedagogy, and professional and political activities beyond the classroom. Of course. But a just and decent world is also created through the moment-by-moment interactions that foster growth and local community.

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An Interview on Writing and Teaching, Part Two

Earlier this month, poet and teacher Kirsten Ogden and I had an email interview exchange about writing and teaching for the literary magazine, The Kenyon Review. Here is Part Two of that interview: https://www.kenyonreview.org/2015/11/pt-2-a-conversation-with-mike-rose/. If you missed Part One, you can access it here: http://www.kenyonreview.org/2015/11/a-conversation-with-mike-rose/.

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An Interview on Writing and Teaching, Part One

Poet and teacher Kirsten Ogden and I had an email interview exchange on writing and teaching that just appeared in the literary magazine, The Kenyon Review. I thought the readers of my blog might be interested in it. If so, here is the link to Part One: http://www.kenyonreview.org/2015/11/a-conversation-with-mike-rose/ I’ll let you know when Part Two appears.

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Forever Young: The New Teaching Career

This originally appeared in Valerie Strauss's Washington Post column "The Answer Sheet" on September 9, 2013. [link]

* * *

Imagine that you are about to move to a community where every service is provided by people who have four years or less of experience doing their work, and in many cases, the only training they received was on the job—so their training is included in that four years.  Your physician has a bachelors degree in biology—let’s even say a masters—and has been seeing patients for three years, learning by doing, in a clinic staffed by equally-experienced peers.  Your lawyer read the law for a summer and is in her second year of practice.  Your hair stylist has one year on the job, has a strong aesthetic sense, but is still mastering color work.  The firehouse two blocks away is filled with rookies—dedicated, hard charging—and the Chief…well, there is no chief, for no one stays in the service long enough to rise through the ranks.  In times of existential crisis, you visit your minister, priest, rabbi, or imam who is able to answer from the depths of 18 months of service your paralyzing questions of faith and doubt.

            This is a community straight out of a dark comedy or dystopian allegory.  None of us would want to live any place remotely like it, for we, all of us, value experience, skill gained over the years, the intuition and wisdom that comes from treating a lot of patients, seeing the many unpredictable things fire can do, reflecting on the human condition over the years of a long ministry.

            So it was shocking—even after all the recent trashing of teachers and their training—to read Motoko Rich’s story “At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice [link]” in the August 26, 2013 issue of The New York Times.  It wasn’t the central fact of the story that was surprising: that charter school networks tend to hire young folks who stay in teaching for a limited amount of time.  The KIPP average, for example, is four years.  For the most part, these people work hard and very much want to do a good job.  They are high-achievers and dedicated, and some show real talent, but they don’t see teaching as a career.  They will move on.  Rather than viewing this cadre as a valuable though small segment of a three-million-plus teaching force, however, charter networks, along with Teach For America, according to Rich, are aiming to “redefine the arc of a teaching career.”  That is, the charter players and TFA leadership, in a remarkable act of self-justification, are pushing their model as an exemplar, as the bold new thing for the teaching profession: which is to not make it a profession at all.  Here’s a sampling from the article:

“We have this highly motivated, highly driven work force who are now wondering, ‘O.K., I’ve got this, what’s the next thing?’” said Jennifer Hines, senior vice president of people and programs at YES Prep.

“My take is yes, we do need and want some number of teachers to be ‘lifers,’ for lack of a better word,” said Doug McCurry, a co-chief executive of Achievement First, a nonprofit charter operator with 25 schools in Connecticut, Brooklyn and Providence, R.I., where teachers spend an average of 2.3 years in the classroom.  But, he said, he would be happy if “the majority of teachers that walked in the door gave us five or seven really good teaching years and then went on to do something else.”

“Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America.  “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.”

I want to dwell for a moment on the illogic in these statements.  Ms. Hines seems to identify “motivation” and “drive” as the keys to success in teaching, though motivation and drive, as important as they are, are only one element of successful performance in any domain, as the highly motivated but ham-handed dropout of a surgery residency or the technically diligent but soulless singer will tell you.  And the prospect of someone announcing after a few years that they’ve “got” teaching should be the occasion for a long talk about humility rather than a public affirmation.  I’ve known a whole lot of extraordinary teachers, and not a single one of them would say that they had their chops after two or three years on the job.

Mr. McCurry at least admits that there might be a place for older teachers in his schools, though he diminishes them by calling them “lifers,” for there is in his lexicon no better word—like, maybe, experienced, master teachers, or professionals.  Notice, too the rhetorical slight of hand at the end when he wishes for a majority of his teachers to give him “five or seven really good teaching years,” as though that were possible, when, in fact, the teachers he does have bail out in one-third of that time.  Five or seven years would be a career by his organization’s norms.

One of the primary goals of Teach For America is to assist struggling schools through their recruits, so the “strong schools” Wendy Kopp refers to are not the typical schools TFA recruits inhabit.  Strong schools would be schools with solid leadership and a core of experienced teachers.  These schools would also be connected to their communities and, though probably challenged financially, would have developed networks with local businesses, small family philanthropies, and social services to enhance what limited resources they have.  All this requires stability, history, roots—none of which happens with a staff of short-term personnel.  As for developing young teachers, they desperately need mentors, old souls, wisdom.  In my last blog I mentioned the tribute KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin paid to veteran teacher Harriet Ball who saved their bacon when they were first-year TFAers in Houston.  You don’t have “great schools” without a critical mass of experience.

I am dismayed and puzzled by the stance toward experience that is developing in the school reform movement, and is represented in Rich’s article.  To be sure, we need a steady flow of fresh faces and new talent into teaching.  But, as my opening scenario suggests, the devaluing of experience defies everything we know about skilled performance.  So why are certain high profile reformers going down this road?  Perhaps to justify their own organizational practices.  Or to join the assault on unions, for it’s hard to have a union movement with people who spend a short time in a career.  Or it could be that they see their models as “disruptive innovation,” shaking up the status quo.  (For a smart analysis of the ubiquity of the word “disruptive” see Judith Shulevitz’s, “Don’t You Dare Say ‘Disruptive’” in the August 15. 2013 New Republic [link]). 

Finally, it could be that this downplaying of experience is in line with a powerful strand in school reform, an attempt to operationalize competence or effectiveness through student test scores.  I’ve written about this issue in Public Education Under Siege, and I think what I wrote is pertinent here, so with your indulgence, I’ll quote it.

“For the standardized test score to be locked in as the reigning measure of teacher effectiveness, other indicators of competence need to be discounted. One is seniority—which reformers believe, not without reason, overly constrains an administrator’s hiring decisions. Another is post-baccalaureate degrees and certifications in education, a field many reformers hold in contempt. Fortunately for the reformers, there are studies that do report low correlations between experience (defined as years in the profession) and student test scores. There are also studies that report similarly low correlations between student scores and post-baccalaureate degrees and certifications. These studies lead to an absolute claim heard frequently these days that neither experience nor schooling beyond the bachelor’s degree make any difference in teacher effectiveness—and that the test score remains our only legitimate measure of competence.

On the face of it, this is a remarkable assertion. Can you think of any other profession—from hair styling to fire fighting to neurosurgery—where we wouldn’t value experience and training? If reformers had a more comprehensive understanding of teaching, they would at least consider the possibility that something is amiss with the studies. The problem is that the studies for the most part deal in simple aggregates and define experience or training in crude ways. Experience is defined as years on the job, and it’s no surprise that years alone don’t mean much. But if you define experience in one of the ways Webster’s New World College Dictionary suggests—“activity that includes training, observation of practice, and personal participation and knowledge gained from this”—then you would most likely find a connection between experience and competence. What people do with their time on the job is crucial and becomes the foundation of expertise. As for the question about post-baccalaureate work, the same principle applies: What kind of training? Where? What was the curriculum? The quality of supervision? I’ll be the first to admit that a number of education programs leave a lot to be desired, but to discount experience and training in blanket fashion is not only wrong-headed but also undercuts attempts to create better working conditions for teachers, more robust professional development, and opportunities for career advancement—all things the reformers say they want.”

There are all kinds of issues that have emerged in the education reform debates—from Value Added Measures of teacher effectiveness to Common Core Standards to the role of private philanthropies in public policy—but this one about experience and the shape of a teaching career really got to me, powerfully and viscerally.  To argue that teaching should be done by an ever-changing corps of energetic new recruits converts teaching into a kind of entrepreneurial and experimental enterprise suited more for Silicon Valley capitalism than the development of children.  Another analogue is that teaching becomes volunteer or rescue work—intense but short-term.  And yet another comparison is missionary work, a comparison that understandably drives charter and TFA folk nuts, but this kind of talk about a few years of dedicated service in a community that is not your own reinforces the comparison.  And hand-in-glove to devalue the importance of experience on, it seems, both the individual and organizational level is to fly in the face of what we know to be true about competence and the nurturing of it.  You can bet that those making the argument for a “new career trajectory” don’t themselves receive their services from inexperienced physicians or lawyers, carpenters or mechanics…or teachers for their kids.

Given that the focus of so much school reform is rightly on poor kids in underserved schools, and some charter organizations and Teach For America are particularly concerned about making a difference with such children, this advocacy of brief teaching careers gets perilously close to moral quicksand.  Poor communities need jobs, decent housing, and health care, and they need stable institutions staffed with people who are invested in them, have made connections in their communities, are trusted by them, and operate with the best accumulated wisdom to serve their needs.  Therefore, it seems irresponsible to argue that a substantial number of teachers in these communities can come in straight from college or another career and rotate through their classrooms, giving them two, three, four years and leave.  The leaders of high profile charter organizations and especially of Teach For America have a huge megaphone, lots of influence and media connections.  People listen to them.

Perhaps this is not what these leaders really believe, perhaps they’re just trying to stir the pot, be “disruptive.”  But sometimes being disruptive is not transformative.  It is reckless, done without deep thought to long-term consequences.  And reckless is the last thing poor communities need.

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