All of the professional training in the schools our
excellent sheep-like leaders has made them single-minded. Says William Deresiewicz, “Our rush to
efficiency, our addiction to methodologies, and ‘metrics’—testing regimes,
protocols…spreadsheets, the management mentality in all its incarnations—[the
humanity of] humans has been torn from what they do.”
The professions many of our education reformers, leaders,
and philanthropists enter too often ignore that. They are trained with
specialized efficiency in mind. They plow ahead with that capacity to do what
they believe their job is: to recreate education in this country to resemble
how they see it: an efficient, metrics based, testing regime with school
leadership based on the management mentality, not a “principal teacher”
mentality. It is all they know. It is
how they succeeded. Thus, those are the schools and systems they support. Those
are the not for profits they support. Those are the charters they support. As
much as they believe they are the dissenters, they, in fact are the tyrants who
refuse to collaborate with their workers. They refuse to question themselves. They
all live in the same “Ghetto of the Mind.” They become the Emperor or Empress
with no clothes.
How does all of that effect teaching? These elite leaders
who come from the same “Ghetto of the Mind” say that all it takes is to put a
great teacher in front of every class and all will be well. Three things are
wrong with that. First, most great teachers do not park themselves in front of
the room and second, most great teachers don't fit their concept of greatness.
Deresiewicz tells us, “Teaching is not an engineering [STEM] problem. It isn’t
a question of transferring a certain quantity of information from one brain to
another” and teaching test taking strategies so that test scores rise and all
of a sudden a school and its teachers are “good”. Finally, third, it takes time and experience
for even the most talented teacher to become most talented and SKILLED.
We, in the profession, know what it is. It is mentoring,
coaching, prodding, questioning, motivating, inspiring, and awakening. We (and
even they) have felt it when it has happened. But because it isn’t
quantifiable, our new tyrants can’t listen, even to their own hearts.
Suddenly Teach For America is the answer. Take our best
and brightest elite 22 year olds, give them a 5 week training period and watch
them perform miracles because they are us, and we are Mormon… oops…I mean we
are miracle workers. Don’t our huge incomes show that? Don’t our prestigious
positions achieved by the age of 28 show that? Doesn't that data show that?
As Deresiewicz believes “for all the skill teaching
involves, you ultimately only have a single tool: your entire life as you have
lived it up until the moment you walk into class.” Like parents, teachers are
what they lived as well as what they learned. The best not only bring their
knowledge and skilled methods, they bring themselves as human beings. We all
know great teaching as soon as we see it. You don't measure it. You feel it.
“It reaches deep inside of you.” It changes your life.
Our excellent sheep tyrants don't understand, even if they
acknowledge all of that when you ask them about their own teachers. They still
want to cut the profession down to size and focus on the bad rather than the
good. They refuse to pay attention to the vast amount of research that counters
their one-track minds. Not only have they removed the “awareness of other
possibilities” from others, they have removed it from themselves. How else do
you stay a “successful tyranny”?
David Greene
David Greene
Author: Doing The Right Thing: A Teacher Speaks
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