Education

Issues of governance, funding and curriculum

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Collateral Damage and the Constitution

The Supreme Court’s allowance of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Department of Education takes indiscriminate aim at the hopes of students on the margins. The Constitutional issue may be the overriding  of the power of Congress to regulate the programs it funds, but the collateral carnage is far greater in its immediate impact.

Who provides the loans, the grants, the stimulus programs that disappear once the Department of Education dies by execution?The Resource Replacement Myth assumes that whenever the flow of funding is cut off upstream some agency downstream, such as state government, will replace it. The Myth defies the reality of flowing water as well as the economy of flowing revenue.  Water and funding do not appear spontaneously when they are shut off at the source. It is self-evidently absurd. Yet Republicans for generations have assumed that funding for education will appear at the state level as soon as it is cut off at the federal level.

The argument that states will absorb this loss of revenue for the neediest students in their schools is either naive or cynical.  No state will suddenly find the revenue to provide for these populations of students of minority status, of poverty or of unpopular national origin. States consistently plead poverty when educational needs come to their attention.  The parents of these students are not typically influential .  If the funding from the Department of Education supplied the needs of an influential class of citizens, whether white or wealthy or Ivy-elite, enough commotion would arouse the legislators to draft a bill to serve their special interests. But most of the federal funding has supported a  community with muffled representation. There will be no spontaneous replacement of funds in their classrooms.

Because the Resource Replacement Myth is ridiculous, the federal government has persisted over generations to distribute aid to local schools with its ham-handed system. The funds bureaucratically trickle down requiring full-time administrators to distribute them. Sometimes they arrive late and often they are less than promised, but they trickle down annually and keep teachers in classrooms, new books in the hands of children, college students in classes. It is the best system we have. The children see only the benefits.

Legislators and Supreme Court Justices do not get this view of education from the bottom up. They just see the problems of administering large grant and loan programs. For some reason they find waste in Education more offensive than failed aircraft development projects or indiscriminate welfare payments to agricultural corporations. At least the Department of Education continues to improve its accountability to minimize waste. Why would anyone in the Department have a stake in over-paying or indiscriminate funding?

The issue at hand is the power of Congress to dismantle the agency it created. Certainly the Court has to curtail the runaway power of the Executive, just on Constitutional principle.

However, the collateral damage matters to more teachers and more students in the public schools than the number of bureaucrats in the Court, the Congress and the Executive combined. The teachers and students depend on this funding for a redemptive education.

Whatever else happens upstream of the public schools, it must not strand students and teachers downstream in an educational desert.

 

 

 

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The Emergency Rescue Team

The Department of Education has had a target on its back, since the era of Ronald Reagan. “Eliminate  (the Department of) Education!” has been a mantra of Republicans since the 1980’s, a convenient target to reduce government spending. They found in Education a useful lamb to slaughter. Did anyone of them wonder if the public and charter schools received essential benefits from from Title I and Title II, benefits that states could not afford to take over? Not that I have heard.

As a veteran of twenty years’ teaching in high school, I can testify that Title I & II make a difference. The funding of Title I and Title II matter in the classroom. Why?

Teachers want to help every student in the classroom. In most states the normal number of students in a classroom is thirty, thirty-five in some, forty in a few. That is about ten or fifteen more students than any teacher can reach every day. Citizens who are not teachers do not understand this. They imagine a classroom where teachers lecture and write stuff on the whiteboard. How hard can that be?

Every student in the community comes into your classroom. Some of them come from homes with no books on the shelf.  Their parents do not read to them as young children, and they cannot help with homework, because they work two or three jobs. Many parents have not graduated from a high school or community college. These are typically the parents of students with individual needs. After you give a brief lesson on the Constitution or quadratic equations, you have to walk over to these students to see if they got it. Some of them have not. It is not for lack of intelligence;  it may be for an attention deficit or a learning disability or because they could not finish their homework.  These kids deserve an extra two minutes of help, not just words or numbers on a whiteboard.

This is where federal aid is crucial; those five or ten students over the expected 25 are flailing and panicking, stuck through no fault of their own. A Title I teacher walks over and discovers what the issue  is. Or a Title II special education teacher steps up to assist where whiteboard notations did not make sense enough for the student to move on. That is no fault of the teacher or the student, but merely the consequences of too many in classrooms and some unattended needs.

Some Americans have never confronted these issues, because someone in their family or someone in their immediate circle have jumped in to help them or their children. But there are too many students who seep through the cracks— especially the ones who labor from misdirection or no direction at all. Who reaches out to them ? The Title I or Title II teachers. They are the emergency rescue team.

If you don’t care about the  25 per cent or the quality of learning that would expand by the support of Title I or Title II, then of course you don’t consider the value  of the Department of Education.  Let the chips fall where they may. Your kids will sail through.

But if you believe in public schooling, where every kid deserves a chance to grow into capable citizens, then you should care about the demise of the Department of Education.

No one is going to carry the burden of the extra 5-10 students, if no Title I or Title II teachers are employed by the Department of Education. Unless your concern, your voice , your influence on the school board, which is responsible for all  30-40 students in a whole lot  of  classrooms. Teachers and unions can only protest so much before their pleas fall on deaf ears.  They are discounted as lacking  preparation or for self-interest.

You wouldn’t say that if you spent a week in any preK-12 classroom. Neither would the soul-less politicians who think they know public education. You would fight for the Department of Education. You would fight for all students, not just the socially enabled ones.  You would fight for right of all kids to be informed and responsible citizens.

 

 

 

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The Charter School War

I admired Professor Shuls’ defense of charter schools in his op-ed of September 9. He dealt in the facts and conceded points of criticism of charter schools. He made the valid point that the public schools were failing at a larger scale than charter schools.

However, he used the “straw man” argument by claiming all critics of charter schools were criticizing charter schools in general. All charter school critics don’t demean all charter schools.  Shame on the indiscriminate critics, but not on all the critics of charter schools.

Admittedly charter schools’ critics often have the ulterior motive of closing them all down, because they want students to bolster public school enrollment and teacher employment.  But that is the not what the shrewdest critics are doing.

If the goal is to give students the best education, then some charter schools should be praised. As Professor Shuls points out, it is unfair to use one example, in this case the Imagine school network, to broad-brush all charter schools.  Any school can be poorly run and carelessly deprive students of a decent education.

However, the burden of proof of success is on all charter schools, because they claim to replace an inferior institution: public schools.

In 1996 a desegregation agreement provided two million dollars to the Kansas City Metropolitan School District and a similar amount to the St. Louis Public School District. The funding intent was to improve student achievement and desegregate the school population. The results were not satisfactory to legislators and in 1998 charter school legislation in Missouri passed with the motivation to address the failure of urban school districts. https://www.mocharterschools.org/pdf/MO-Charter-School-History-Final%20_1_.pdf

Charter Schools were invented to improve achievement, not equal it. Those that exceed the performance of neighboring public schools should be considered by parents, all things being equal, but some may achieve at roughly the same rate. Why then, would parents change schools and maybe leave behind familiar students, teachers, or special education services in their neighborhood school?

It is not fair to grade schools on academic performance alone.  Quality programs in physical education, in the arts, in race and culture studies may be absent in charter schools, because they are too small to offer specialized programs. Those programs may be important to marginal students and keep them from dropping out. They are better served in a public school.

It is not fair to compare charter schools to public schools minus their exam schools or magnet schools. Selective schools are part of the system that charter schools are pretending to exceed. Should the top ten percent of charter school students be left out, so they are fairly compared to public schools? Of course not.

It is not fair to argue that charter schools are cheaper to run. Are charter school teachers making a competitive salary? How many will transfer to the public schools at the first opportunity to get a boost? How will charter schools attract the best teachers in this sellers’ market?

It is not valid to argue that parents are more welcome in charter schools. Public schools with good leadership will welcome all parents. Teachers and principals are taught to involve parents whenever possible, even if it involves objecting to a book.

It is not valid to argue that public schools are the problem and charter schools are the answer.

Every school should be evaluated for its strengths and weaknesses, not for its name or how it is funded. It should not be a competition for students, but a market for creative ideas. It should not be a marketing by brand names, but evidence of satisfied customers.

Let’s end the public vs. charter school war and look for the best of both.

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Mentors

Fr. Richard Rohr writes about his own mentors, mentors of today and how difficult it is to find them. About quality mentors he writes:

We have almost no mentors who have been there themselves and who have come back to guide us through. Of course, there are many bosses, ministers, coaches, and teachers who will happily tell younger people how to “fix” their problems, so they can be “normal” again, but a true mentor guides people into their problems and through them. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#inbox/FMfcgzQVzFWkqDfvzpkmKgWMLKrHQjvX

The late Jim Garvin was one of my early mentors in teaching high school English. By his own example, he taught me to be human to my students, sometimes baffling them with anecdotes that seemed irrelevant to his teaching. Our high school actually had a helicopter pad for visiting dignitaries, and Jim would tell his students that he frequently arrived at school by helicopter. A few went outside before or after school to see if they could observe his landing or departing.

He was a traditional Irish bachelor, living at home with his mother.  Jim would describe his multi-course breakfasts in the morning, encouraging students :”to put gas into your tank” to get a good start on the day. About one-third into the class he would launch into the topic for the day.

I used to think he was the anti-teacher before I actually team-taught with him. His students loved him. Once he was hospitalized for a heart condition, and he was not allowed visitors unless they were immediate family. Two boys from his class told the nurses they were Jim’s sons to get in to see him. Jim loved to tell that story.

Cathy Fleischer was a more traditional mentor for me, when I started university teaching.  She won teaching awards at the university, state and national level. She referred me to good professional articles, suggested how to teach small groups, and how to model student-centered teaching for my pre-service teachers. But her advice never descended to the “how-to” level.

She taught by writing. Her Writing Outside your Comfort Zone was ground-breaking for a presentation of research and learning new genres. [https://www.heinemann.com/products/e01247.aspx] It was about learning new genres, more than research, and it was composed from interviews with students who were the experts in most of her research. That method of teaching and research baffled me until I saw how she did it.

The first time I taught a graduate course was the Summer Institute of the National Writing Project. Cathy was the only faculty at our university before me to teach this magical course on the teaching of writing.  I saw her teach it and marveled at how engaged the students were. They were all K-12 teachers, who were often bored by professional development courses.

“Just find what they know about writing, and take it from there,” she assured me. She even gave me a writing prompt that had worked to start the course. I used it. It rocked. And the class did indeed run away with the curriculum. Like Cathy I was teaching by finding out what the students already knew. Who knew?

As Fr. Rohr said, a true mentor guides people into their problems and through them. Mentors actually do what good writers do. They show, not tell. You are in the middle of an experience you want to participate in.  Suddenly you are full of completely relevant questions. You tell the mentor what you know and what you want to know. There are no lectures, no cookbook teaching guides. Just teaching/ learning and asking questions.

Jim Garvin didn’t even know he was teaching me, until I pointed out something I had learned from him.  “That was probably an accident,” he would say. He was embarrassed to be considered a role model. He believed he was a model for defunct methodologies.

He was against all forms of in-service teaching. “They get paid thousands for telling us what we already know.  We should get into that racket,” he would say with a wink. He used to refer to professional conferences as “junkets.”

Often we discover  or appreciate our mentors in retrospect. Occasionally I hear from students who discovered something they had already had “learned” from me. That’s a good feeling: to pay it forward as other mentors have already done for you.

 

 

 

 

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Chautauqua – Last Day

Sorry to say we leave Chautauqua this morning about 9 a.m. We are returning in August, so it is “Auf Wiedersehen–” Till we meet again.  It is pouring rain, so not Chautauqua at its best.

Father Boyle and David French gave us what we needed on Friday.

Father Boyle told about a “homey” named Mario with stage fright. “G” (short for Greg) deliberately puts the homeys in places that challenge them. Mario had to speak before an audience of 1000 service professionals (can’t recall the exact roles), so he was terrified. In every story the homey trusts G and plunges ahead demonstrating what faith means. I am not with my notebook, so I can’t recall his message, but he was well-received, as was Father Boyle today.

Later I heard four homeys tell about life at Homey Industries–how they expressed their gratitude at the start of the day, how they worked–some at the bakery, some at “tattoo removal,” some at T-shirt production–how they affirmed each other. They are not bragging, they speak gratefully. One spoke better than I could, another was reluctant, but forged ahead, another spoke with a beatific smile, remembering the joy.  They give authenticity to Homeboy Industries.

David French added to the story of the swelling the power of the President. He went back to the Korean War, when Harry Truman called the attack on North Korean incursion, a “police action.” Since then no one has curtailed the power of the President to deploy troops, even though the Constitution specifically gives Congress that power.

French  said that two  things had to happen to address the problem of Presidential  overreach. First, to stop thinking the goal was to put your own party in power, so you could benefit from the expansion of the Presidency. Currently the President is regarded as his Party’s leader, along with his bi-partisan duties.

Second,  a willingness to compromise, so that legislation to claw back some of those powers can be passed. Partisanship has annihilated compromise in our present system.

Most meaningfully for me was when French took my question at the afternoon Q & A. He quoted my favorite Yeats’ line in the morning: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” (“The Second Coming”). In the afternoon I asked how the open-minded, those “who lack all conviction” can become full of passionate intensity, as he had urged. He said that the pursuit of joy was the key–and fulfilling curiosity by learning was one source; the other was meeting new people with different ideas, as he said  “making friends who don’t necessarily think like you.”

Very surprised he had turned the passionate march of true believers into a communal gathering, where people draw their strength from each other. And as we looked up to him on the platform, Victoria shared how joy had been the pursuit of Susan, her daughter, who died in a car accident just weeks ago. She could hardly speak for weeping.  David reached down and touched her shoulder and said how sorry he was. There was personal contact that went beyond what  we we had heard at Chautauqua this week. He reached out in love.

Now I must brave the rain and grab some coffee for the morning at the Brick Walk a few doors down. It means the return home-going has started, and Chautauqua is a point of departure. I am grateful for what it has been.

for the quiet mornings to meditate and to write

for the meditative morning services at the amphitheater

for the priest who spoke from an overflowing heart

for the homeys–also overflowing

for the thoughtful speakers who avoided simplistic answers

especially Jon Meacham, Melody Barnes, and David French

for the affirming friends (Matt and Carol) who invited us here and made us welcome

for the peaceful porch of the Athaneum, good place for a bourbon manhattan with friends

Wall of Bar Where Stout was consumed

 

 

 

for the “Rebellion Stout,” smooth and rich 

 

 

 

for the beloved community, who clapped too much, but intended kindness

 

 

 

 

 

for a refuge/ re-gathering from the troubling Presidential debates

for Chautauqua Motet singing richly and reverently

for our comfortable quarters-the Murphy bed easily slipped into morning routines

for the music of the Chautauqua Orchestra- both Mozart and Tchaikovsky

for the uplifting melodies and rhythms of Leyla McCalla, full of her culture

Leyla McCalla honors the revolutionary Haitian spirit with “Dodinin”

for the serene busi-ness of Bestor Plaza, the bookstore and cafes, right by our front door

thanks for the whole week, Giver of Showers of  blessings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Great Teacher

For some reason students are glad to give teachers credit for character formation. Asked to reflect on the influence of a teacher in their lives, students will say, “He believed in me” or “She challenged me.”  If it weren’t so difficult to measure, we might suppose that teaching was more about compassion and inspiration than the elevation of test scores.

A classroom around 30 CE:

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
“But what about you?”he asked. “Who do you say that I am?
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
(Matthew 16: 13-18)

Jesus was concerned with unleashing the potential of his followers. He planned a short stay on this planet, and he needed disciples who would seamlessly take up his work after he left. In the verses above he contrived an unstandardized test to measure the readiness of his disciples.

  1. Who do people say the Son of Man is?
  2. Who do you say that I am?

The first question had several answers, more in the way of reporting than solving a problem. “Who do people say that I am?” ranged everywhere from “John the Baptist” to “Jeremiah.

The second question “Who do you say that I am?” is the summative measure of their progress, and Peter, the star pupil, steps into the breach with the best answer “the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

The next move is where the teaching really begins, even as the learning curve often rises in the post-mortem of a test, more than from the test itself. You ask: Why do these questions even matter?

Jesus’s first lesson is “this was revealed . . . by my father in heaven.”  Peter learned by listening to God, not those who speculate that Jesus was Elijah come back from the dead.

The next move is lending perspective to what has just happened. The pupil graduating to a new identity. (Another thing you can’t readily assess). First, Jesus addresses him as “Simon,” then as “Peter” signifying his growth and potential for growth. And then prophetically, “On this rock I will build my church.”

In my latter years of teaching teachers, I suddenly began to hear myself say “You’re going to be a great teacher” when a student shared a great insight or experience. And I wished I had made such outrageous predictions much earlier in my career. Because I realize now that students remember those moments better than all the professional wisdom I could impart, and the memory may help them later in their careers.

Why did Peter need to hear that bold prediction from Jesus at that moment? First, he had made himself vulnerable by saying what other disciples were afraid to utter. Many were thinking it. Only Peter was willing to say it. Second, he was about to see the man he called “the Christ” imprisoned and tortured. The whole dream was dissolving. Third, Peter was going to contribute to Jesus’s humiliation with the three denials, something he swore he would never do. The timing of Jesus’s prediction was crucial, because it would carry Peter through his trial by fire.

There is a cliche in teaching that we teach the student, not the subject matter.  Students remember who you are and how you teach, not just what you teach. Research shows that  students of education often imitate their perceived best teachers in the past more than the teacher we try to impose on them in  the course of  teacher education. This is good from the point of view of knowing good teaching, but bad from the point of view of developing a personal style as a teacher.

In teaching student teachers I finally learned that how I teach and how I treat students is the curriculum students receive more than the research about best practices and new classroom approaches. I began to realize that Jesus’ effectiveness as a teacher came from his daily actions as a compassionate, inclusive and personal teacher that left the most enduring memory on his pupils.

My conversion to Jesus,  the teacher, came late in my life. At least half way through my journey.  But it came in the nick of time, when I was trying to teach teachers, who were eager to receive my experience as a high school teacher. What they did not know was that I was teaching more and more by example as I learned what the real curriculum was. I was trying be the teacher they would carry with them into student teaching.

Jesus shows us that character and identity formation are the heart of great teaching. His teaching was not successful because his disciples had a good grasp of the Law and the Prophets or even impressive faith. He was successful because he taught them as individuals, along with the curriculum of the Good News. He was successful because they could take up the cross as they had seen him do it: feed the hungry, heal the hurting, encourage the hopeless. They caught the Way of his teachings, the Life that would stay with them after graduation. They were changed in the same way Jesus hoped they would change others.

And that’s what made this rabbi a Great Teacher.

 

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The Tests Again

In Monday’s New York Times, some new research is cited to argue that performance on Standardized Tests  (SAT and ACT) predicts a high GPA for students from “Disadvantaged High  Schools.”

As Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, recently wrote, “Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades.”

 

A chart showing college performance based on test scores from students from advantaged and disadvantaged high schools.
Source: Friedman, Sacerdote and Tine | Data from the entering classes of 2017 to 2022, excludin

The research conducted by the College Board itself indicates that ” the predictive ability (or r squared) of the SAT I is just .22, meaning the test explains only 22% of the variation in freshman grades. With a correlation of .54, high school grades alone do a better job, explaining almost 30% of the variance in first-year college performance.” https://fairtest.org/sat-i-faulty-instrument-predicting-college-success/ .

The recent studies of college success and the SAT are flawed in that they don’t consider the impact on:

  1.  Students who waive the SAT’s to apply to certain schools that don’t require them
  2. Students who drop out after the initial year in college, lacking disciple, despite their potential.
  3. Students who do not apply to four-year schools after a mediocre performance on the SAT’s

In other words, the recent research evaluates only those students who perform fairly well on the SAT’s and have persistence and confidence to remain in college, despite the challenges of the first year, a turning point for most college dropouts.  Students who persist in college must have discipline, as well as high test scores.

Naturally poor, non-white, and test-averse students are well-presented in these absent populations in the recent studies heralded by the New York Times and other SAT advocates in recent weeks. The research showing the high predictive reliability of test scores  on student success over four years in college does not represent the students who are not good test-takers, but could succeed in college with the opportunity and good follow-through mentoring.

The legitimate problem of evaluating college applicants without test scores has been exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, a policy that gave wider options for students who do not test well.  What the studies do not show is how multiple indicators can be combined to get a broader picture of student potential. Colleges have developed methods of profiling students without tests, including high school grades (not valid by themselves), evaluation of grading within individual high schools to detect grade inflation, student essays, student performances in extra-curricula activities  (especially in art, music, artistic dance), and other exhibits students send to distinguish themselves. As indicators are combined, reliability is increased.

Another problem is the use of AI to write essays of application. Colleges have recently been challenged to evaluate the authenticity of  student writing at the college level. Probably the best current way to screen essays would be a signed statement, such as “This is my own work, unless otherwise indicated,” a statement college freshmen had to sign in first-year composition at my undergraduate school. Discovered writing fraud should disqualify the student.

While SAT results seem to give objective evidence of student potential, studies of the entire population of applicants would prove less reliability in their predictive validity of the SAT’s. Those who have succeeded on standardized tests are more confident in their predictive potential. After all it predicted their success. Those who have been less successful in the environment of timed and single-answer testing feel their potential will not be recognized in those tests.  Indeed they are less reliable than the rest of the application that represents student achievement and potential.

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Meeting Jesus, the Great Teacher

In Freeing Jesus, Diana Butler Bass says that Jesus grows in us as we age, not that Jesus himself is variable, but we discover his depth at different stages of our lives, times when Jesus meets us, speaking to our particular needs. I can see that progression in my own life: when I saw Jesus as the only the Son of God, as the Question Answerer, as the fire within us, as an absent betrayer, and as a brilliant teacher. There may be more, but this is what I see this morning.

Today, who is Jesus the Teacher?

At the Tony Awards (2015),  famous performers cited a favorite acting teacher for lifting them toward eventual stardom. Rarely do we hear teachers say, “I made her what she is today.” Yet we hear it from students all the time.

For some reason students are glad to give teachers credit for identity or character formation. If it weren’t so immune to measurement or controlled experiments, we might believe that teaching is more about compassion and example than test score elevation. A classroom:

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah, and still other Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
“But what about you?”he asked. “Who do you say that I am?
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
(Matthew 16: 13-18)

Jesus was concerned with unleashing the potential of his followers. He planned a short stay on this planet, and he needed disciples who would seamlessly take up his work after he left. In the verses above he contrived an unstandardized test to measure the readiness of his disciples.
1) Who do people say the Son of Man is?
2) Who do you say that I am?
The first question has several answers, more in the way of reporting than solving a problem. “Who do people say that I am?” ranged everywhere from “John the Baptist” to “Jeremiah.”
The second question “Who do you say that I am?” is clearly the summative measure of their progress, and Peter, the star pupil, steps into the breach with the best answer “the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

The next move is where the teaching really begins, even as the learning curve often rises in the post-mortem of a test, more than from the test itself. Why do these questions even matter?
Jesus’s first lesson is “this was revealed . . . by my father in heaven.” You get your best answers from God, not man. You learn by listening to God, not those who speculate that Jesus was Elijah come back from the dead.

The next move is lending perspective to what has just happened. Another thing you can’t readily assess: the pupil graduating to a new identity. First, Jesus addresses him as “Simon,” then as “Peter” signifying his growth and potential for growth. And then prophetically, “On this rock I will build my church.”

In my latter years of teaching teachers, I suddenly began to hear myself say “You’re going to be a great teacher” when a student shared a great insight or experience. And I wished I had made such outrageous predictions much earlier in my career. Because I realize now that students remember those moments better than all the professional wisdom I could impart, and the memory may help them later in their careers.

Why did Peter need to hear that bold prediction from Jesus at that moment? First, he had made himself vulnerable by saying what the other disciples were afraid to utter. They were all thinking it. Only Peter was willing to say it. Second, he was about to see the man he called “the Christ” imprisoned and tortured. The whole dream was dissolving. Third, Peter was going to contribute to Jesus’s humiliation with the three denials, something he swore he would never do. The timing of Jesus’s prediction was crucial, because it would carry Peter through his trial by fire.

With the disciples Jesus was interested in the highest form of teaching: the forming of new identities. As Jesus prayed later, “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.” (John 16:17-19)
All the other stuff, the interpretation of the Law, the parables, the apprenticeship, much of it did not take until Jesus was long gone. The sanctification, the love, the working together, that was crucial right away.

There is a cliche in teaching that we teach the student, not the subject matter. I have found this accurate, not only in high school, but in college, with students aspiring to teach. Students remember who you are and how you teach, not just what you teach. Research shows that education students often imitate their best teachers in the past more than the teacher we try to impose on them in their teacher education. This is good from the point of view of knowing good teaching, but bad from the point of view of developing your own character as a teacher.

In teaching student teachers I finally learned that how I teach and how I treat students is the curriculum students receive more than the research about best practices and new classroom approaches. I began to realize that Jesus’ effectiveness as a teacher came from his daily actions as a compassionate, inclusive and personal teacher that left the most enduring memory on his pupils.

My conversion to Jesus, the teacher, came late in my life. At least half way through my journey.  But it came in the nick of time, when I was trying to teach teachers, who were desperate for my experience as a high school teacher. What they did not know was that I was teaching more and more by example as I learned what the real curriculum was, what they would carry with them into student teaching.

Jesus shows us that character and identity formation are the heart of great teaching. His teaching was not successful because his disciples had a good grasp of the Law and the Prophets or even impressive faith. He was successful because he taught them as individuals, as much as the curriculum of the Good News.. He was successful because they could take up the cross as they had seen him do it: feed the hungry, heal the hurting, encourage the hopeless. They caught the spirit and the intent of his teachings, the part that would stay with them after graduation. And that’s what made this rabbi a Great Teacher.

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Indoctrination is not Good Teaching

What a sad day when a school board eliminates Black Literature and Black History, because of “ideological indoctrination,” as if school is a place to be indoctrinated.  The school board assumes that a course indoctrinates student by mere exposure, rather than by how the curriculum is taught.

If there are specific objections to a teaching methodology the school board should comment on observed examples of “indoctrination,”  defining how a racial agenda is delivered in the classroom. No teacher should indoctrinate any students, regardless of the political purpose. Teachers are not trained to indoctrinate students, but to get them to think.

What any secondary curriculum teaches is critical reading, where students recognize the ideologies through discussion and written responses. No secondary student is supposed to digest an ideology without evaluating it. If you read Huckleberry Finn with numerous examples of the “N” word,  does that make Mark Twain a racist? That is a debatable question, and students learn by reading critically to decide why Twain used the word.

Is All Quiet on the Western Front an anti-war novel or a realistic account of World War I from the viewpoint of German soldiers?  Students can argue both ways. That is the point of reading controversial literature: to articulate your own interpretation, discuss it and defend it. You don’t become an anti-war activist by reading All Quiet. You identify the ideology and decide if you agree with it. It is worth mentioning that the novel and its sequel The Road Back were banned and burned during the Third Reich. Now that was a book with ideology!

How about Pygmalion by that feminist and socialist George Bernard Shaw, and which later became My Fair Lady? What a loss for the literature curriculum to eliminate that book, and yet it is full of satire on the wealthy, patriarchal class in England in the 20th century. No one expects that play to indoctrinate students, so we give George Bernard Shaw a pass.

Yes, Black literature and Black history are ideological curricula. They would not be worth reading if they weren’t. The writing of Frederick Douglas, W.E.B Dubois, and Ida B. Wells is some of the timeless historical prose of our culture. They all had something to say about enslavement and prejudice. Of course they were ideological! Reading them does not have to be indoctrination.

Are school administrators so helpless and gullible that they assume to read is to be brainwashed? It calls into question the education these leaders experienced. Are they the kind of student who wrote down everything the teacher said then regurgitated it back on their exams?  Did they use this system all the way through college and graduate school to keep their grades up? Is that what they think education is?

So the bottom line is that the Francis Howell school board does not want its students even exposed to the culture of Black America, because they don’t trust them to read Black authors without getting indoctrinated. Sad for the loss of a valuable culture, but sadder still that the school board thinks so little of its students and teachers that they don’t give them credit for reading critically and identifying the ideological substructure in history and literature.

Education is about asking the right questions and hearing thoughtful responses. It is not about avoiding the wrong ideas for fear of indoctrination.

N.B. The school board restored Black studies to the curriculum, later that week, but insisted the curriculum of the Southern Poverty Law Center could not be used.

 

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Local Autonomy?

The principle of local autonomy: a problem is best solved by the people who live closest to it. Although there is a popular conviction that the federal government is out of touch with its citizens, the authority of the local community is also under siege.  Politicians have opened fronts at the national and school district level.

Presidential candidates, such as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, are campaigning to give state governments the power to regulate curriculum and parents the right to oversee it, up-ending the traditional authority granted to school boards and school personnel. Their bottom line is decentralization of federal government, but centralization in the control of the state.  A suspicious person would say it’s because the feds oppose their policies, while many states are likely to adopt them. Not so much a principle as a strategy.

In a Town Hall meeting in Manchester, NH (September 7, 2023) Republican candidate Nikki Haley declared,

Let’s take away the power of the federal government, reduce that size of the Department of Education and empower the parents on the ground, empower the people in those states. That way, you’re getting it closer to the kids. More money is actually going to teaching, and then you can control what’s being said and taught to your child in the classroom.

When Haley said “the money is going to teaching,” she implied that local autonomy belonged to local schools. But with one hand she doled out power to schools and with the other she handed it over to the disgruntled parents of school children.

Every parent, regardless of their education, regardless of where they’re from, knows what’s best for their child. No parent should ever wonder what’s being said or taught to their child in the classroom. We need full transparency in the classroom always.

“Full transparency” means teachers posting their lesson plans online; schools submitting all books in the classroom and school library for parental review; school principals giving parents access to the curriculum development process. Presumably Haley meant that anything a critical number of parents object to could be removed from the curriculum. This kind of transparency is implied by the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” in Missouri–“(3) The right to access and view school curricula,  guest lecturer materials, and staff training manuals in a timely manner and in an easily accessible format;”  This law (HB 627) has not passed scrutiny of the legislature at this writing.

The Parents’ Bill of Rights would make sense if it originated at the local level. It should be negotiated in good faith between the schools and the parents of students. Local autonomy insists that local decisions should not originate with the state. Parents’ rights should not be imposed from the top, but percolated from the bottom. A problem is best solved by the people who live closest to it.

Just as the principle of local autonomy should protect citizens from federal intervention, it should protect them from meddling of the state government. In Missouri, for example, some politicians want the state to override local discretion for the teaching of “critical race theory,”  “gender diversity,” and  the right of parental review, because local communities are not always hospitable to their agenda.  Again, local autonomy is rejected, but for political motives.

State oversight of the schools is the prerogative of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. It should set standards for teaching and learning, provide specialized resources, advocate for the schools and supplement their professional and financial resources.

For example, in Missouri, there is a critical need for new teachers to replace a mass retirement of baby boomer teachers. Many rural schools lack the resources to attract the best young teachers, who could bring fresh ideas and energy to aging faculty and administration. The state could be a consultant and a financial support (mini-grants) to attract graduating teachers from neighboring states, as well as local graduates. Incentives might include provisions for housing, creating teams or communities within the schools, and providing well-trained faculty mentors. Young teachers might be attracted to schools with a supportive structure, as much as they would higher salaries. The ideas and funding to implement such programs could come from the state level: the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

These complex challenges require coordinated solutions. The state is uniquely positioned to bring the participants together and provide both professional expertise and financial incentives to implement the solutions. The federal government is too remote and many school districts under-resourced to deal with these problems of school administration. But, to avoid political intervention, the education professionals  should do the coordination.

Local autonomy is a much-abused principle in the realm of politics, unless state institutions are empowered to support, not over-regulate, the public schools. Politicians claim they believe in local autonomy, but, in practice, they want to use the schools to promote their agenda.  Especially in election years, the local schools and state education departments should demand that the politicians mind their own business.