Well, readers, I’ve had my first royal muck-up on the blog. I posted something I didn’t read carefully enough, and what I discovered when I did has cast a pall over the entire Martin Haberman post series I had planned.

“Teacher Burnout in Black and White,” a Haberman article from 2004, starts out with a description of the continuum of who stays and who leaves in teaching, and seemed to dovetail so nicely with our discussions here that I punched it right out for everyone in its own post. Turns out, though, that it is a dreadfully argued piece, with plain old errors so numerous that it would be embarrassing– not to mention boring– to critique them all.

I will give you the worst one, though, as it’s also the pertinent one. Haberman takes his entire central thesis (that preservice teachers are so ill-educated about urban work that they fail)– you know, the thesis he has spent the last 40+ years refining?– and throws it out the window.  He begins by stating that interview answers from these same quitting teachers regarding why they leave the profession (the working conditions, the difficulty in classroom management, and so on) should not be trusted. Why?

The reason for concern over the authenthicity of reasons offered for leaving urban schools is that the negative conditions of work are well known even to the general public and must surely have been known to the teachers accepting positions (italics mine).

In otherwords, teachers, who cannot be expected truly to comprehend the problems of working in an urban school, are misrepresenting their reasons for leaving– because surely they comprehend the problems of working in an urban school. (You see the issue.)

And for what compelling alternate thesis is Haberman abandoning the basic rules of syllogistic logic? As he states shortly thereafter, with nary an explicative quantitative or qualitative analysis to support it:

[In fact,] quitters and leavers cannot connect with, establish rapport, or reach diverse children in urban poverty because at bottom they do not respect and care enough about them to want to be their teachers.

This is the first time in the article that the word “diverse” surfaces, and the last six or seven pages are devoted to discussing the problematic ethnicity gap between the majority of white, middle-class teachers in urban schools, and their poor students of color.

And so there you have it– the answer to everything. All quitters appear to be bigots. Soft bigots, perhaps. Unconscious bigots. Bigots reinforced by the problematic assumptions of poor teacher preparation programs. But bigots all the same.

As you can imagine, this calls into question for me the authenticity not of teacher responses, but of Haberman’s research. Mere bias is one thing.  Destructive, unsupported implications involving race and class are quite another. And even were someone to point me in the direction of other, better Haberman work, the paucity of logic and basic scientific rigor in the writing of this article alone is enough to give me the shakes. About race and class in America, for pete’s sake– the two subjects which arguably require our utmost attention and care.

However, I don’t want to commit similar errors of logic and throw the baby out with the bathwater. After all, the main thrust of Star Teachers is not an analysis of why teachers leave, but the common characteristics of teachers who successfully stay, and there is a lot of value in that.

Still, it’s three weeks until school begins for me, and Dr. Haberman? I don’t really have time for this. I’m going to leave where I go next up to the readers. If they’d still like me to blog out your book, I will.  If not, I will continue to recommend it, but with significant reservations. And you can expect a letter from me shortly.

Let me know, folks. And I suppose there’s at least a little good in this. I certainly have learned my lesson about quick linking. There is also value in interacting with several different ways of looking at an issue, as my wise friend Kim L. points out.  And lastly, apparently I am not so burned out an English teacher yet that I cannot be dismayed and saddened by something I have read.