Teach for America

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Noblesse Oblige

In Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” the narrator suggests that the common man was inspired by the Teddy Roosevelt who allowed his patrician roots to show, along with his Harvard persona. He was the first President to be so transparent about his prosperous origins. Today we take Ivy League credentials for granted, as long as our Presidents don’t flaunt them to excess.

But T.R. had also educated himself about the working classes in a sojourn in the West and journeys through New York’s poorest neighborhoods as police commissioner.  The documentary makes the same point about F.D.R.’s acquaintance with the squalor of urban life to explain his fervor for the most deprived classes.

Today the noblesse oblige for the working classes has spread to Ivy League schools, where undergraduates have begun to aspire to teaching as a way to express their highest values.  At Harvard, Professor Kay Merseth offers a class that reveals the social inequities in education to undergraduates: “United States in the World 35: Dilemmas of Equity and Excellence in American K-12 Education.” She has seen the class grow from 90 to 300 applicants for 47 seats in just three years.

A significant experience for those selected by lottery for the class is a series of three-hour visits to K-12 schools in the Boston area. Kia Turner reported:

That visit was the biggest moment of impact in this class for me. I never knew the discrepancy–schools that have, those that don’t. It really opened my eyes. We are not giving our kids the same opportunities. It was a moment of frustration for me, too.

This recalls the famous Jacob Riis portrait of the lower classes How the Other Half Lives, which had its impact on  Theodore Roosevelt. It was Riis, along with Lincoln Steffens, who led him through the slums of New York, partly to check up on delinquent police officers, but equally as an education in the horrid living conditions of the city’s poor. For Roosevelt, a well-bred New Yorker, it was an epiphany.

The well-bred students of Harvard received a similar education from Merseth’s class, but how many of them now see themselves as career teachers? After taking the class Manny Mendoza moved to Oklahoma  to teach secondary science with Teach for America.  Said Mendoza,

It is a privilege to be given even a choice of what career to pursue. I want to effect change on a large scale, one that will allow all students to pursue an education and career that is meaningful and productive to them.

I suppose that was my goal, too, when I graduated with my M.A.T. from Harvard, but I had also spent a year at Rindge Tech High School and saw that this was a hard job and the differences you make were incremental. And the longer I stayed in education (now 43 years) the longer I saw that not everyone was on the same side of reform. I saw the one step forward and two steps back that could make the work so frustrating.  I found more satisfaction in the one student who changed than in the uncertain progress of my school.

Like Kay Merseth I want the Millenial generation to change all this, but when I hear that undergraduates are signing up for Teach for America, I hear low investment, low commitment.  I hear early disillusionment or quick transition to more visible public service. Some may see themselves as Obama putting in time with community organization and then on to better things. Not that I am not grateful for a President who was once a community organizer, but we can only have so many Presidents.

Such teachers will never change education, because they are in to get out.  The growth curve for public school teachers smooths out after three or four years, and most TFA students will have exited the profession by then. And Ivy League graduates always have alternatives. If they feel dissatisfied with the diluted professional climate, they can move on.

So I feel queasy when I hear Professor Jon Star say,  “Teach for America captured something. It elevated the status of teaching for high-level students.” What TFA did was put bright students on the fast track to the classroom, where their commitment will be tested by senseless bureaucracy, disenchanted students, and invisible parents working two or three jobs.  We already know that most TFA teachers will exit the classroom in two years.

How will this help public education? It is a short-acting drug that injects bright young teachers into the classroom, then excretes them after two of the hardest years of their lives. There has to be a better way to “effect change on a large scale.”  And another short-term recruit takes their place.

Noblesse oblige brought us two amazing Roosevelts. They did effect change on a large scale. But we need those who are willing to effect small changes and take satisfaction in small victories to populate our K-12 schools today. We need career teachers.

 

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Short-Timers

When I taught high school, I was allowed into a Friday afternoon club called “the short-timers,” so named because these men (sic) who frequented local taverns together at the end of the work week, were within 2-3 years of retirement.  I was an honorary member, since I had no more than eight years of teaching behind me, while these gentlemen had taught at least 25 years apiece.  They were slightly jaded, but every one of them cared about the students they taught, even in a brusque way.

I continued my high school teaching career for a total of twenty years, during which I earned my Ph.D. and went on to teach teachers at a public university.  Twenty years later I am still learning to teach by teaching teachers. It is a profession that rewards a lifetime of practice and study.

I am disturbed by the article in the New York Times (Tuesday, August 28) “At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice” by Mokoto Rich, because it implies that the new trajectory for a teaching career is 5-7 years. From my experience that upper limit represents the flowering of a teacher’s skills, so such “short-timers” would  be leaving the profession at the height of their development. To say, as KIPP director Wendy Kopp  claims, that “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years ” is to severely limit what it means to teach.  In 1-2 years you can learn about as much as an accomplished substitute teacher: how to engage students’ attention, how to manage discipline, how to execute a lesson plan, how to assess a unit, and how to talk to parents.  This is not to underestimate what an experienced substitute teacher can become, should he or she remain for the long haul, but KIPP and Teach for America are only interested in the short haul.

If you think teaching amounts to mastering a few routines, you do not  understand the depth of teaching.  Only after the first two years  of teaching do you really learn how one student differs from another in needs and capability, how to bring disengaged students back into the class, how to deal with chronically absent students, how to uncover hidden strengths, how to nurture independence and group inter-dependence, how and what to re-teach, how to challenge your own stereotypes and so on.  Those who claim to have mastered these skills in two years are deluding themselves about the complexity teaching.

Instilling the “habits of mind”  is another late-developing skill.  Although teacher educators emphasize the so-called “critical” and “meta-cognitive” strategies in their pre-service classes, there is only so much about these habits you can internalize without watching students trying to operate without them.  To truly get the meaning of “habits of mind” you need to see what happens in their absence, what is happening in many, if not most, high school classrooms today. This is usually a late-developing awareness for both teachers and students.  To be honest, my own understanding of the significance of these habits came during my eighth and ninth years of teaching English.  I knew the importance of “habits of mind,” but I didn’t recognize how much they enabled or disabled students until then. I was admittedly a late-bloomer in teaching.

When teaching is compacted into the mechanics of selling a prefabricated curriculum and grading the products, it may be mastered in 1-2 years, but this is not what we once considered a “master teacher.”  Masterful teaching is about building trust and grading on successive approximation.  It is about dealing with resistance of all kinds, in students, in colleagues, in administrators.  It is about negotiating with principals and parents about what may be taught in your class and who may be given an alternative book to read or assigned a writing consultant to increase feedback.  It is about relationships, fragile and durable.  You can teach for thirty years and not understand it all.

We are making a virtue of necessity by claiming that teaching is a technical profession and teachers are easily replaced.  Today teachers are burning out early from the unwieldy size of classes, from the pressure to raise test scores, from micro-managed, scripted and lockstep curricula, from the reduction of services to students with learning, language and behavioral constraints.  Because teachers are treated like replaceable parts, they feel utterly dispensable.  They lose hope during the second and third years, just when they should be developing more confidence, so they pass through a revolving door among disillusioned novices.

Will we ever again see “short-timers” like my erstwhile colleagues, who made a career of nurturing the full diversity of students? Teachers who could reflectively read a new class through the eyes of experience? Teachers who saw behind the bluster or feigned helplessness to the latent ability? Teachers who recognized the difference between arrogance and aptitude?  Teachers like my veteran colleagues who had faced up to a succession of challenging students their whole lives?

No, the vintage teacher is becoming the freeze-dried technician.  The whole profession is now regarded as an entry-level experience for young intellectuals with a higher calling, either in school administration or a more “respectable” career.  The recognition of partial learning and the flexibility of alternative strategies are being lost to one-size-fits-all linear instruction.  What can be learned in the latter half of a decade of teaching is being lost to the ages.

In the future when we refer to the “short-timers,”  we will know the depth, as well as the length, of their careers.