Assessing Assessment -- Twenty Years Later -- Will We Ever Trust Teachers?

Nearly two decades ago, in July, 1989, I was invited to give an address at the Philadelphia Board of Education about the role of assessment in my teaching. I was the only teacher invited to present to the assembled group of university professors, outside consultants and school district administrators. Grant Wiggins was the the outside consultant, brought to Philadelphia by The Philadelphia Schools Collaborative, headed by Michelle Fine and Jan Somerville. This meeting took place in the incipient months before the launching of an unprecedented high school reform movement which lasted through the first 6 years of the next decade and affected the lives of hundreds of teachers and tens of thousands of students in Philadelphia. That work is documented in Chartering Urban School Reform edited by Michelle Fine and Is This English by Bob Fecho and many other places.

What I find so compelling about this particular address is the connection to today and the relationship among teachers, curriculum and assessment in the wake of No Child Left Behind. I believe that we will lose an entire generation of teachers along with the students they could have reached if policy makers, elected officials and school and community leaders don't engage teachers in a meaningful and substantive dialogue about how best to assess their students' learning.

I know how powerful such engagement can be. I have had the privilege of living through a time when teachers' knowledge and experience did matter - when we were invited to the table, for our questions to be heard, and our for our continued learning to be supported. The Philadelphia Schools Collaborative supported by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts provided Philadelphia high school teachers with the necessary professional development to become critical inquirers into our own practice and enabled us to work collaboratively with each other, our students and their parents to create schools and programs that challenged everyone to reach beyond even our own expectations.

I think one of the saddest consequences of the current testocracy is the limited goals we set for our children and the way the pursuit of those goals impact what happens in the classroom, particularly for the children of the poor and least powerful people in our country. School becomes a tense and unpleasant place with learning reduced to "skill-building" -- where children never have a chance to explore the world, raise their own question nor make meaning for themselves.

I could go into a whole Freirean riff here about the difference between a banking model (where the value comes from the outside and is inserted into the child) and a mining model ( where the precious metal is on the inside - potential needing to be mined.) Or I could wax poetic about the need for all children to find their own questions and become the makers of meaning in their own lives -- fighting against definitions placed on them from the outside that shutter their curiosity and squash their future.

But I won't.

Instead, I will pledge to continue to fight the good fight. I will do whatever I can to gather and tell the stories of the students who participated in the Philadelphia Young Playwrights Program ( which I discuss in the address below) and who were educated in Crossroads, the school within a school that was founded in 1991 and in which I taught until 1998, whose seeds were sown in this day in July when I laid down the challenge to those who were present to trust the teachers and the potential that was unleashed when they did.






School District of Philadelphia
Board of Education
July, 1989

address by Marsha Pincus
English Teacher
Simon Gratz High School




I am very pleased to be here this morning, addressing you, the university people, the outside consultants, the policy- makers and the administrators, as a classroom teacher. I am an English teacher at Simon Gratz High School and I have been teaching English in several different schools since 1974. This is the first time that I have been asked to speak about my classroom practices to such a group. The underlying assumption is that I have something to say about those practices.

But that assumption is not always made by those who make policy, institute curricula, or design standardized tests. In fact, the opposite assumption is often made-- that the teacher has little to say about her own practices. What she needs is a curriculum guide which spells out exactly how and when she'll teach what. Or a basal reading program which is teacher-proof. Or a standardized test that any fool, including a classroom teacher, can administer and score.

When Michelle Fine asked me to speak about how standardized assessment affects what happens in my classroom, I began to think about how my attitude towards standardized testing has changed over the past 15 years. As a new teacher, I used to have nightmares about the California Achievement Test. I spent much of my time and energy preparing my students for the test. I did lots of skill work and reading comprehension exercises- cause and effect worksheets in a multiple choice format. In many ways, the CAT gave me the framework for designing my English program. The test determined what and how I taught. Period.

As I became more experienced, gaining confidence and competence, the importance of the CAT receded. I could measure my success or failure in other ways-- by looking at student writing, by listening to student discussion, by observing student performance. With the advent of the standardized curriculum and the accompanying mid-term and final exams, I was hopeful. Here at last I thought would be a test related to what I was teaching. However, the new test ( at least the English portion) turned out to be very similar to the CAT - multiple choice format, reading comprehension questions, no context. It still didn't seem to me to measure what I was teaching or how I was teaching.

I understand that alternative ways of assessing students will involve more work for teachers than the traditional multiple choice test. I understand the lure of the quick fix, especially for already overburdened secondary teachers who teach 165 students. Back in 1985, Dr. Gerri Newman came to address the faculty at Sayre Junior High School. She spoke eloquently about the writing process and the writing across the curriculum project. She offered ways for teachers to integrate writing into all aspects of the junior high curriculum. After she completed her presentation, our next speaker took the floor- the Scan-Tron salesman who was hawking a machine which graded teacher-made multiple choice and true false tests. He was even throwing in a year's supply of answer sheets -- free.

I do not blame the teachers for wanting that machine. I do not blame them for wondering what Dr. Newman's presentation had to do with them and their discipline. After all, there is no writing on the science or math or history mid-term. Come to think of it, there's no writing on the English mid-term either.

The test not only determines what we teach, it determines how we teach it.

I read with enthusiasm the description of a performance based oral history project. But I wonder. How does this project relate to the curriculum? Who is valuing the process of having students gather and interpret information? And what happened to Chapters 1-28 of the history textbook? Such a project seems incompatible with a curriculum which stresses memorization of names, dates, and battles. Such a project seems incompatible with a curriculum which does not allow for and respect differences in culture, race, class or gender.

For the past two years, I have had the privilege of working with the Philadelphia Young Playwrights Festival. This program trains teachers in the process of playwriting and pairs each participating teacher with a professional playwright who works with the students in intensive theatre workshops. My students have learned about drama from the inside out. They have collaborated with one another in improvisational workshops. They have written and rewritten scenes. They have produced, directed and acted in each other's plays. They have published an anthology of their work. And for the past two years their efforts have been validated by the fact that five of them have won in the city- wide competition. One play has already been performed at Temple University's Tomlinson Theatre and two others will be performed this spring. In addition, my students attended five plays at the Annenberg Theatre, saw at least six professional productions at our school and read at least seven plays including works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Miller, Ibsen, and August Wilson, Charles Fuller and Ntozake Shange.

When the Standardized tests came along, I certainly wasn't worried that I hadn't covered the Drama part of the curriculum.

Yet, what my students encountered on that test was an excerpt (about 25 lines) from a turn of the century British play---- plunked down on that exam with absolutely no context ---- followed by multiple choice questions about the vocabulary in the dialogue -- a dialogue which was very alien to dialogue that they were familiar with. My students, the award winning playwrights, did poorly on the drama portion of this test.

Again, the test not only determines what we teach, it determines how we teach it. Surely I will teach drama one way if my goal is to have my students see drama as a living breathing art form with a history and aesthetic tradition - an art form they too have the ability to create. I will teach it another way if my goal is to have my students see drama as just another text to explicate.
We cannot look at assessment without considering the content of the curriculum and we cannot consider curriculum without examining how we view our purpose as educators. This became clear to me when I participated in both the School-Wide and On-Site Writing Assessments. Initially, our task was to look at and assess student writing. But we found that our task was far more complex. Because we discovered that in order to assess student writing, we need criteria. And in order to have criteria, we need a purpose. And in order to express that purpose in a way that is meaningful to our students, we must design our assignments carefully. Then we must create the context and build the framework in which the student can carry out the assignment.

So, while our ostensible purpose was to assess student writing, we did much much more. We reviewed our own practices and analyzed the underlying assumptions informing those practices. We asked ourselves questions such as: Why did we select the reading material that we did? Why did we expect every completed assignment to look the same? Why did we not allow or encourage revision? Why did we only focus on the weaknesses of students' papers? All of these questions and more were raised by teachers in these workshops. As we continue to grapple with these questions and find the answers, we will begin to change our practice.

This type of assessment is costly and time-consuming. But what is our alternative? To go back to trying to design a teacher-proof test? To once again impose the context from the outside? If the test determines what and how teachers teach, shouldn't the teachers help determine what and how the test will test?

Unless, of course, you don't trust the teachers.

Missing School- Missing Community - Missing Teachers

"The Teacher" by Marlene Dumas


Lately I have been hearing a little voice in my head saying, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone." Sure, when I retired from teaching after 34 years, I knew that I was going to miss the students. I was going to miss listening to their stories, supporting them through their struggles, challenging them to dream big then helping them break down the path to reaching those dreams into achievable steps. I knew that I would miss having a captive audience for my stories, for my love of literature, and the powerful experience of having young people respond to those stories, and make meaning for themselves. Yeah, I knew I was going to miss all of that and I steeled myself for confronting the loss.

What I didn't expect was how much I was going to miss my colleagues -- all of them -- even the ones I disliked or disagreed with. Especially them! More on that later.

Teachers are some of the most interesting people I have met in my life. Think about it. It takes a particular type of adult to choose a life in the classroom, spending most of their waking days with children and adolescents. I have never met a teacher who didn't have a compelling story about what brought him/her to this life. Some were inspired by their own teachers; others like myself became teachers by default, discovering meaning and purpose in the classroom only after living inside of it for a while. Still others have a personal mission: to redeem themselves for mistakes they made earlier in life and to prevent others from following a self destructive path. Some feel trapped in the classroom, wishing they had gone to law school or had the courage to leave to start their own business. These teachers can become bitter and inflict emotional damage on children. Others could never imagine themselves doing anything else -- the ones who say over and over again, like the old cowboy, "I'm gonna die with a piece of chalk in my hand!"

I miss the teachers as much if not more than I miss the students. I miss the English office where I could always count on one of my colleagues to listen to me as I spun out my ideas for a new project that I wanted to do with my class, or read to them with excitement brilliant and touching excerpts from my students' papers -- knowing that they would give me valuable feedback for my lessons and share my emotions about my students' responses. I miss hearing about books they are planning to teach, poems that their students love, new programs they are going to implement.

I miss hanging out with the teachers in the faculty lounge -- our shared frustrations with 5 broken duplicating machines the day before our mid-term exams were due, our complaints about misguided administrative policies and practices -- the loud raucous political debates that sometimes get personal --- and the quiet intimate moments when we would share what was happening in our lives: the marriage of our children, the birth of our grandchildren, the sadness of our divorces, the agony of our illnesses or the illnesses of our loved ones, the death of our spouses or parents.

I miss the secretaries in the office - the first people I would see each day, never taking a "Good morning" and a smile for granted. I miss the paraprofessional staff who perform the duties that teachers once did years ago, before our contracts prohibited us from doing them -- like spending time with the children in the school yard or lunchroom -- the women who monitor the hallways, keep intruders out of the building, and keep everyone safe, sometimes while putting themselves in great danger. I miss the intimate moments I would share with these women, in the woman's lounge, back in the days when we were allowed to smoke in the schools. Our mutual desire for a cigarette was the thread that connected us long enough to get to know each other cross race, cross class, cross job description. And while I am not sorry that I stopped smoking, prompted in large part by the school smoking ban, I do miss the daily intimacy of the woman's lounge. Without cigarettes as our shared excuse for lingering in the bathroom, the context for intimacy was gone.

And as for those colleagues with whom I fought -- sometimes deep, painful, very personal fights-- I miss them the most. Because they were the ones who challenged me, who forced me to bring my own ideas into focus, to find the words to articulate my deeply held beliefs -- the blades on which I sharpened my own metal.


I love teachers. They are among the smartest, most creative, most caring people I have ever known. They are educated and well informed about the world and they are engaged in making a difference in that world. They "walk the walk." They are fighters and survivors.

Schools are brimming with energy and diversity and possibility. Teachers make things happen.

I miss them.

I miss being a part of their energy.

Ah retirement.

An Open Letter to Michelle Rhee: In Response to the article in the December issue of Time

For the past four years, I have had the challenging experience of being an instructor in the Teach For America (TFA) Urban Teacher Master's and Certification Program in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. While I have my doubts about the program and believe that it sometimes does more harm than good to recycle a model of inexperience in our nation's most challenging schools, I have nothing but admiration for the generation of young people who have answered the call to bring about substantive change in schools and to make a positive difference in the lives of children and adolescents. The young teachers I have met through GSE/TFA have been some of the hardest working, resilient and committed educators I have met in my 35 years as a teacher in the School District of Philadelphia.

Jessica Simon, the author of the letter I have reprinted below is one those teachers. She is smart, committed and impatient to see the real changes that need to happen in schools across the country. And she like many of her fellow former corp members has made the decision to stay in her school beyond her two year commitment to TFA.

Her letter, which is addressed to Washington D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee, and written in response to a Time Magazine profile of the controversial figure, challenges Ms. Rhee and those who support her slash and burn, take no prisoners approach to teacher and principal accountability to think more deeply about the problems facing students in poor and underfunded district and the impact of the dehumanizing obsession with measuring the students in those schools through the sole use of poorly designed standardized tests. Moreover, the culture of disrespect for teachers and their knowledge that Ms. Rhee has created and fosters only exacerbates the problem of teacher retention.

I applaud Jessica and support her in her efforts to get her voice heard. Add your voice to the conversation. Send your letter to Ms. Rhee or to other politicians who have hijacked our schools and who currently hold our children's and our county's future hostage to a narrow and ill-informed vision of what is possible.



January 19, 2009

An open letter to Michelle Rhee: (In response to article in December's issue of TIME)

As a Teach for America alumnus who is still in the classroom, I am deeply concerned about your approach to educational policy. The words you've used to describe teachers are offensive. The arguments that support your actions are just as limited as those that you abhor, and it is clear that you are not concerned nor do you value teacher retention and its relationship to achievement.

First, your first solution to the education crisis is higher salaries in exchange for test scores. Kids need to read. If poor kids could read, everything would be fine. Teachers who taught children for 30 years will be the first to tell you, if you cared to listen to them, that money is not what kept them in the classroom; children did. Even the kids who failed the class kept them there because children have lives, and teachers affect these lives. High salaries are helpful and necessary, but they are not a sustainability plan. My fellow Teach For America alumni who currently work for double the public school salary in "successful" charter schools like Uncommon Schools (where 95% of students from the same poor and minority backgrounds as public school students score Proficient or Advanced on state tests) are exhausted, frustrated, and want to quit teaching altogether. Numbers do not sustain teachers; kids do.

"Numbers will solve the problem" is your second argument. If all kids could just read, then they would succeed. Those who believe in this theory fail to take into account what happens when poor kids who achieve academically try to pursue a college degree. According to the New York Times, only 25% of those low-income students who begin college finish with a degree, with black and Latino graduation rates closer to 20%. The biggest indicator of who finishes four years of college is parental income. Creative projects like the documentary First Person, which chronicles the lives of six Philadelphia seniors, help to reveal why academic achievement of poor kids sometimes ends in tragedy all the same. Kurtis, a key character in First Person, is in the Temple University Scholars program because his achievement is high. However, he hangs out with friends who get into fights involving guns. By the time he is 17, he gets caught up in a fight and he is now locked up; test score and all. What stops a child from shooting a gun? Standardized reading textbooks? Poverty is not an excuse for why achievement does not happen; it is a reality that affects children's lives, and the consequences of it are conveniently ignored by policymakers who have stopped talking to children about what their lives are actually like.

The featured student in the Times article about you, Allante Rhodes, was upset when you fired his principal; his "mother, mentor, and teacher." It is possible that this "mother, mentor, and teacher" was one of the people who made him feel empowered enough to write to you about his education in the first place. My principal argues that "it is because of teachers like you who did what they wanted that got our children where they are today." She means teachers like me who push for creativity and tolerance education in the classroom alongside of curriculum skills-based learning have caused low reading scores. It is noteworthy to point out that the author of the Time article only mentions in passing the racist perceptions Allante Rhodes had of you as "petite, foreign, and under qualified" as if this is not an education issue. Teaching tolerance in schools is not trendy in the policy world right now as it was in the 60s, but we as a nation, must still consider whether or not we want our children thinking all Asians are under qualified, all Black people are lazy, or that all the Jews run the Earth. Do we believe that once students pass tests, they will magically get rid of stereotypes? Whose job is it to teach students about treating people equally? Is it the parent's job? If this is the case, we're in trouble. I teach in a racially isolated neighborhood where I get told I look like Anne Frank because I am Jewish, and where the only Asians around are those who run the Chinese food stores. Where will my students be taught tolerance? However, under your policies, if I were to lead a workshop about racism and critical thinking that involved reading, I could be fired for not engaging my students in what you call "real work." You are quoted in Time as lambasting "morning meetings" as not real work because these meetings don't relate to skill-based learning. Morning meetings are done to build community and teach tolerance. Maybe if Kurtis had been involved in morning meetings throughout his education, he would not have thought guns were an acceptable response to anger.

So far in this letter, I have addressed skills and tolerance education as mutually exclusive goals. I have done this because skills are the only aspect of education currently supported by policy makers as valuable, whereas tolerance is left to the few who still believe in teaching it. However, these two educational goals are not mutually exclusive at all. I can teach active reading skills and have a discussion about why Hamlet does not commit suicide. Of course, my students may still fail the test! And then of course, you will say I have failed. I do not necessarily agree. If when my students' parents both die of cancer when she is 20 years old, and if she thinks of our discussion of Hamlet, and remembers that maybe suicide isn't the best option, I did not fail. I can guarantee that during hard times, this student will not remember that one page handout about oysters that I used to teach inferences. But she will remember acting out monologues in class, and writing her own about "To Be or Not to Be" speech about conquering tragedy.

Teachers teach because of student's lives; not their numbers. Not because of 95% correct, or 4 brothers shot, or proficient according to 10 "education experts" in a room in Washington, or 5 friends pregnant, or 2 uncles dealing drugs, or 3 studies show teachers have no effect on children, or 10 classmates dropped out because no one knew their names, or 1 gay student beat up after school and left to rot. If you don't understand this idea, then you don't know why I teach or what it means to "do your job." And it seems to me that you would fire me for valuing children's lives over their test scores. What keeps a kid fighting to get a four year degree despite the odds? Can you measure it? What keeps a kid in school despite being beat up every day; can you measure it? What makes a student feel inspired? Since these things cannot be put into an excel chart, you, Teach For America, No Child Left Behind advocates, administrators under pressure, and principals and teachers about to lose their jobs push these issues aside as unimportant. Alternatively, those things we can measure are propped up as the solution to the "problem" of educating poor children. Once they can read, they'll be fine. Calculations say it and the best experts say it so it must be true, right? Right?

Sincerely,

Jessica G. Simon

Jessica Simon is a Teach For America alumnus (2006 Philadelphia Corps) and high school English teacher at The Young Women's Leadership School at Rhodes High School.

Opportunity for Women Teachers Who Write

For my entire career as a teacher of English, I have supported the writing of others. I have provided them with tools they needed to shape their vision and I have learned how to form supportive and nurturing writing communities.

Two summers ago, I gave myself a wonderful gift. I applied to attend the 2007 Writers Retreat for Committed Women Writers. sponsored by A Room of Her Own Foundation
To my surprise and delight I was accepted and traveled to Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

At this retreat, I found a talented and supportive group of women, writers all, who came together in this beautiful, inspiring setting to write, share what we'd written with each other and provide thoughtful feedback in a positive, generous and generative community.

I met many women at the retreat and listened to their stories. I learned of the roles that writing plays in their lives. I met women whose work had been published to acclaim and women whose words had yet to reach an audience. Each woman spoke of the importance of this time and space to think, to feel, to write, to connect, to listen, to dive into our selves, to discover ourselves anew.

For me it was especially important that this was a writing retreat for women only. It was a "room of our own" - a space where we could be together not only as writers, but as women -- whose struggles to find our voices or to steal the time to write from our other responsibilities as mothers or partners or daughters -- were not considered trivial or beside the point, but very much at the center of our identities.

I also met other teachers. Many of them were from from independent schools whose administrations had paid their tuition and expenses for the retreat. As part of a policy of professional development, these schools invest in the personal and professional growth of their teachers with an unwavering belief that if they nurture their teachers, their students will benefit as well. No such opportunities that I know of, exist for teachers in under-funded urban and rural public schools.


On the final night of the retreat, all of the women gathered together. There was a reading by some of the women and then we were all invited to share our thoughts about the experience. At that time, overwhelmed by the energy in the room and grateful that I had been able to be part of such an amazing experience, I vowed to raise money for a scholarship for a public school teacher to attend the next retreat in 2009.

The biannual retreat is being held August 10-16 2009. I am happy to say that through the donations of friends and family, I have raised enough money to make this scholarship a reality.

I invite you to look at the website for A Room of Her Own Foundation, and the 2009 Writers Retreat

Here is the information about the scholarship as it appears on the AROHO web-site:

The Pincus Scholarship for Public School Teachers was created by Marsha Pincus, who recently retired from teaching after thirty four years. A retreatant at the 2007 Writers’ Retreat, Marsha was inspired “to create a scholarship for a public school teacher from an under-funded district to come and have this experience.” She says, “I gave myself a gift coming here. I would like to give that gift to other teachers.” The scholarship will provide workshop tuition, room and board, as well as an additional stipend to offset transportation costs.

If you are someone who has been spending so much of your creative energy nurturing the writing of others and you have always wanted to have others nurture and support you, and you teach in a district that does not support your professional growth through study and travel grants, I encourage you to review the materials on the AROHO website and apply for the retreat and the scholarship. You should follow the guidelines for the application to the retreat and complete the additional text field for the scholarship, explaining why you think you qualify, outlining your writing history, writing goals, the potential benefit of the scholarship to you and a statement of financial need. Applications are due by March 5 and the final decision will be made by the AROHO committee by the end of the month.

If you have any questions feel free to email me at mrpincus@comcast.net

Please circulate this information to any listserve, teacher network or individual you think might be interested.

Beyond Wiggle Room

I am establishing this space on my blog to post materials related to the upcoming publication of my chapter in Alison Cook-Sather's handbook on student voice entitled Student Learning from the Student’s Perspective: A Methods Sourcebook for Effective Teaching. Paradigm Publishers, forthcoming.
There are additional materials related to the chapter that I will publish here at a later time.

Teachers Dreaming - Only Connect

Anyone who has ever taught school for more than a year has had this dream. It usually arrives mid August, though in some especially stressful years, it can come as early as July, virtually ruining the rest of the summer. There is always a teacher in the dream and the teacher is always the person dreaming. Sometimes, when I have this dream, the teacher in the dream looks like me. Sometimes, she is physically unfamiliar – I don’t know exactly who she is but I do know that I am the person feeling the physical effects of the emotions she is experiencing in the dream – embarrassment, fear, frustration, despair.

The common element in all of these dreams is that no one (and there are usually dozens of people in the dream’s hallways, lunchrooms, school yards gymnasiums) seems to see or hear the teacher. Maybe there are no words coming out of the teacher’s mouth though in the dream the dreamer feels herself strain to speak. Her throat tightens and the sweat begins to form on her forehead, her hands turn cold and wet and in her sleep she reaches towards her face and clamps both of her cheeks with her fingers as her nails dig into the clammy skin.

In the morning she will see the scratches on her face and vaguely remember…

Sometimes she is in the wrong room. There is someone else's handwriting on the board, someone else’s books on the shelves, a periodic chart or a large map of India on the wall instead of her portraits of Shakespeare and the Globe Theater.

Once she was in a gymnasium, the only teacher in a room filled with five hundred students all milling about, forming and reforming tight circles while screaming their greetings to each other across the hot room. There are no windows in this gym though the ceiling is high. She is the one who is supposed to bring this group to order, get them under control. She is shorter than most of them and she feels herself shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller the hotter it gets. The voices in the gym swell to a thunderous roar that engulfs her and lifts her high above the shiny wooden floor and carries her through the ceiling which has just opened up to reveal the grey skies. As the noise subsides, she freezes high above the school, hangs suspended in mid air until she feels herself hurtling through space.

She awakens before she can hit the ground…

What we are suffering from here is a failure to communicate.

Disinterested students who ignore you.

Smart students who excoriate you publicly, flaying you with their questions and serving your organs up raw to the bloodthirsty class.

Teaching as a blood sport.


On a good day, though, I see this work as a sacred trust.

There are souls in the classroom.

And I don’t say this lightly or without deep careful thought. The whole concept of Soul is one of a mystical connectedness that comes from a kabbalistic belief in tikkun olam - the understanding that we are all pieces of the ONE that split apart after creation, and that we must each work to repair the world to reconnect all of the pieces of the Soul. So each time a teacher walks into a classroom, the possibility exists for disconnection and alienation or for tikkun olam.

This kind of connection is thwarted by Ego -- the overwhelming urge of the individual psyche to assert itself over others. A teacher’s ego may make her chase after power, both petty and grand; a student may be craving attention, wanting to aggrandize himself at the expense of others.

Here then is a theory of practice that comes from the Soul where the driving force behind every word or deed in the classroom comes from the need to connect with others in a meaningful way.

These teacher dreams, night terrors that begin as early as July and don’t let up until September really expose our fear of being alone – alienated – isolated – invisible – frantically trying to make the connection… to encounter and be encountered by the Soul..

To teach with integrity is to teach with all parts of you….and to be humble in the face of other people’s lives… their journeys… their struggles to connect.

People who cannot see beyond their own needs and thoughts are struggling with a handicap. Weighted down by their own ego, constrained by their own selfish desires, they are missing out on the awesome apprehension of the majestic complexity of the universe. When we see that – when we get it -- when we can hear the music and know our song and how it reverberates with others’ … or wake up to sound of our voice singing in concert with the voices of others… step into our body moving and swelling – joyful in the knowledge that what makes us unique – those very things that we have cherished as ours and ours alone – are felt by others too.

So when I write or share my experiences and send them out into the universe, they reverberate for someone else. Yes, you might say. This is what it feels like to… This is what it looks like to.. Your words have shown me… Your words have touched me… Your words have moved me out of myself into a new and initially frightening place…Your words have taken me somewhere I needed to go then led me right back to myself.


As teachers we need to embrace the night terrors that come to us in the summer and welcome them into our lives, grateful for the reminder that there is still so much work that needs to be done to keep the Ego in check – to banish it to our sleep where our dreams remind us of the primordial rule of teaching – of all human interaction – only connect.

Teachers and Autoworkers -- Connecting the Dots

I was heartened to read Bob Herbert's column ( link included below) in today's New York Times in which he compares the plight of American teachers and the public perception of the American Federation of Teachers to the plight of the auto workers and the perception of the UAW. I have often thought about these two groups of working Americans who have been vilified by the so called liberal press and demonized by the American public. By juxtaposing the situations of American public school teachers and American autoworkers, Herbert exposes the dangers of blaming these workers for the economic downturn and the consequences for all of us if we insist that they alone bear all of the weight through unreasonable concessions.

American teachers have been called lazy, unqualified and caring only about our bottom lines ( as if that's a crime!!!) by the likes of Michelle Rhee and corporate cronies who want to take over public schools and run them like businesses ( another great idea -- see Wall Street -- Why is it okay for then to think about their bottom lines?)

I have been trying to express my consternation at the ways in which the auto workers are being hauled over the coals for being greedy enough to demand job security and health care when executives and investors in the industry expect and and take ridiculously high dividends, salaries, bonuses?

Herbert compares the plight of the workers themselves -- teachers who spend their own money on materials the system doesn't supply, who take students on field trips on the week-ends, who stay up past mid-night every night preparing lessons for and grading papers of over 165 students ( 5 classes of 33 students each) -- and auto workers who labor in factories their entire adult lives only to be told to get off their "high horses" when they demand health care and job security. Why, Herbert asks, are ordinary working Americans like teachers and auto workers expected to make the largest sacrifices during an economic downturn which is hurting them more directly than it's hurting the executives and investment bankers in their respective abilities to take care of their families and secure their futures.

In the column Herbert goes on to discuss the concessions that unions must make, particularly in these difficult times and I find myself agreeing with this also.
Years ago, my colleagues and I were stymied in our efforts to institute real school reform in Philadelphia because the union leadership refused to budge on seniority rights in staffing. The union has since moved away from this pig-headed position of the mid-nineties to one of supporting site selection of staff -- but not until many of the successful small schools within a school that were established in the 1990's collapsed because they were forced to accept the appointment of teachers who did not wish to work as part of a team. Through it all, I never lost faith in the union - just its antiquated and short sighted leadership.

In the piece Herbert focuses on AFT's president Randi Weingarten's defense of teachers as hard working, dedicated people who make personal sacrifices for their students. But he also notes her willingness to make concessions about tenure, teacher assignment and merit pay. He goes on to make the comparison to AUW's president Ron Gettelfinger and the concessions that his union has already made and the ones that still need to happen. But, and this is the point of his column as I see it -- those concessions should only happen within a context in which all parties -- executives, investors, suppliers, dealers etc --- adjust their expectations for compensation and profit as well.

Do we really want to blast American workers out of the middle class?


Why is it for instance that the media finds it untenable that people who labored on assembly lines for 35 years of their lives have health care when they retire? Would it be more American if as Herbert writes, "after 30 or 35 years on the assembly line, those retirees had been considerate enough to die prematurely in poverty, unable to pay for the medical services that could have saved them?" While I applaud Herbert's shining a light on this incongruity, I don't think he goes far enough in pointing out the hypocrisy --- no -- the absurdity of expecting the auto workers to pay the greatest price for the failure of the auto industry, while the executives have earned obscenely high pay and bonuses.

There will be no fair concessions in any union contract without a public appreciation not only for the work that teachers and auto workers do, but the contributions we make to the stability of our communities.

Thank you Bob Herbert for connecting the dots in this increasingly complex picture.





A Race to the Bottom by Bob Herbert
New York Times Op-Ed Page
December 23, 2008