A reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat. —James J. Walker
The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend to simply adapt to the world as it is and the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. —Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
What if all schools contained administrative “black box” flight recorders? An audio recording device, used for investigating education aviation disasters only, perhaps tucked away in the conference room where big decisions are made? . . .
Belatedly in the spring, lower-middle class schools will often review some acknowledged major turbulence on the descent towards June. The self-examinations are held behind secure staff-only doors and away from the microphones of any school board meeting or other slightly interested third parties.
While these inventories may note the disproportionate student truancies, violent behaviors, smart phone addictions, reading and numeracy skill averages way below grade-level, poor nutritional options, together with (surprise) underfunded mandates and perpetually reduced resources, such discussions soon become oddly off-agenda.
Even when I ask for a seat in the control tower (including the past three years), I never get invited.
The annual administrative flight plan rejects anyone with an antiauthoritarian slant. I’m labeled as either too obstructionist or too idealistic. My skepticism gets mistaken for nihilism.
Like many aging teachers, we’re urged to stay off any tarmac of transformation, unless we have specific implementation plans for raising the golden bar of test scores. Some in the education hierarchy ultimately believe a “growth mindset” only means growing positive results on multiple-choice high-stakes standardized evaluations (termed “banking” ed, to paraphrase Freire).
Incongruously, some administrators will nervously assure us how “we need to change only what we can.”
“The students’ lack of critical and creative thinking coincides with a staff discouraged from doing the same.”
This often means a late pivot to curriculum as the cure for the ailing institution.
Well-meaning, well-educated minds desiring to lessen apathy, increase relevancy and improve academics (although often erroneously based on the standardized test scores) understandably value meaningful organization to their visions, even to the jargon of so-called success criteria.
Such formalized gatherings of wisdom also have their own built-in pacing charts, complete with their own baggage claims. Thankfully, most of us share a healthy resistance to being silenced to just periodically check electronic screens for updated testing arrivals and departures.
A student-centered curriculum is crucial. In more democratic settings, it demands frequent adjustments every year, every semester, however inconvenient. It’s vital to give administrators and especially teachers a real opportunity to dig deeper into our destinations and how we’re going to get there.
Yet why the cart before the horse (race)?
Why sidestep glaring baseline issues like attendance and apathy with the desperate hopes we’ll somehow find a safe landing with more organized (yet unlikely student-centered) curricula?
Longer discussions on how we can elevate more student-centered educational environments are typically shelved indefinitely, or at least for the next school year. Asking to prioritize student motivation over testing mandates frequently gets disregarded to post-it “parking lot” litter.
On my annual October flight to the Austin Film Festival, from my window seat, I ponder many “what-ifs,” including what if we adopted more student-centered inquiry and project-based learning?
With their continuing post-Covid power reclamation, the “Big Five” pedagogical airlines are methodically trying to remain the unidentified bureaucratic controllers.
Pearson (determined to be #1 with its College Board SAT), Cengage Learning (National Geographic) and the old textbook giants of McGraw-Hill Education, Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt and Scholastic have no desire to relinquish their always new and improved billion dollar industries to any reductions of top-down test-driven directions.
The billionaire class, who invariably send their progeny to private schools, maintain quite an interest in social stratification sorting mechanisms for public schools, most notably the second wealthiest charitable foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They hover in every airport of education, in every school hangar, like ad-hoc surveillance cameras.
Supplemental test-based strategies and resources are available, sometimes at a discount. Applause optional, payment mandatory.
Our imagined cockpit flight recorder can never tell the entire story — most significantly, the connections to the average household wealth surrounding the district.
Zip code discrepancies continue to be scored as irrelevant.
In lower middle class districts, the march to leave no child untested, every student, every marking period, requires a managed denial of emerging summative assessment fatigue and student indifference. The students’ lack of critical and creative thinking coincides well with a staff discouraged from doing the same.
A teenager explores a familiar site: the rubble of yet another failed adult endeavor. Generations of my DNA seem overly attracted to the remains of lost struggles. Here, this magnetic pull does not feature our common Detroit ruins, but a bike path stop just outside Traverse City, Michigan.
Perhaps some will wave a “Mission Accomplished” banner from the deck of an aircraft carrier parking lot in June, before our two-month rest and recovery, before the compliant return in September to assigned seats, to assigned testing logins, to assigned drudgery.
If a school eventually crashes and closes permanently, what would a recovered flight recorder reveal of its final months?
Only plummeting test scores?
Administrative-centered lesson plans?
Or how to teach to an empty desk?
I tagged you on a FB post about a school that is run by students. The premise seems to work, with more students feeling motivated and encouraged, taking charge of the direction they want their for their lives. More decision making, less structure. Guided self assessment over standardized tests.
I'm interested in your thoughts and whether you think it could work here.