The Line

Check it out. There’s arguments to be had with my position on this one, so don’t hesitate if you want to argue.

Check it out, subscribe, and tune in shortly for my response to Doug’s first post.

I must be on the right track for this year. The New York Times says so.  (I’m being facetious, of course, but if you want a fast and bright snapshot of the workshop approach I am trying, read this.)

Doug Noon at Borderland is trying it too, and we’re blogging about it together through the year. I am completely jazzed about this collaboration, to use Doug’s lovely adjective. The pairing of an inexperienced suburban/urban female teacher in New York with a rural Alaskan male teacher with 27 years under his belt, both trying the same approach, makes the researcher-poet-monster that feeds on symmetry and lives in my belly very happy. I’ll post the link when we’ve got the Wordpress theme straightened out.

All this talk I’ve been entertaining about teachers who leave, teachers who stay, and why, isn’t theoretical for me. A fairly mass exodus of committed and brilliant professionals from my building occurred this past summer, coinciding with the departure of the sometimes infuriating, ever inspiring dy/dan. The Tempered Radical has just adopted a baby and wonders if he can sustain a family on his salary. The best urban educator I know has been kicking around nursing school and other career choices. I feel…bereft. Blessed. Scared.

The list of gifts over which I have no control– a principal who provides wiggle room, a director with a shared vision of literacy, a diverse but generally socioeconomically sound caseload, a supportive and smart team of teachers who care for each other, and a curriculum which still allows me to muck around a bit and have fun– this list is ridiculously long. It will not last. What can I do in the meantime to turn the tide in favor of my own retention?

I can realize that my longtime dream of a Ph.D. is a final exit. I wish it weren’t true. But if only for the financial burden and the slow roll of innovation, it is highly unlikely that I would be able to return to the classroom with a doctorate and find some sustainable use for it with the kids. This latter scenario would be the only reason I personally could justify leaving for doctoral work in the near future, after only this mere handful of years of teaching. Realizing this– that the system cannot really integrate or balance these two callings of mine– is truly saddening, but also comforting. It’s taken a burden off my shoulders I didn’t realize I was carrying.

So there’s only one answer, isn’t there? I have to do the Ph.D. when I’m actually ready to be a teacher of teachers– that is, when I’m ready to leave the public secondary classroom for good.

I can’t even predict when that would be. In my dream world, my list sustains me for a decade plus at least, giving me sufficient courage, strength, and experience for harder teaching conditions, when they come. But all I can say for certain is that the time to leave is not yet now.

And this gives me a clearer, morally supportable vision of where I am headed. It gives me terra firma: my used bean bag chairs, that thrill of hope for a new workshop approach this year, my classroom library to be balanced, top-heavy with historical fiction (and how did that happen? I don’t even like historical fiction all that much)… uneaten macaroni and cheese sitting on the desk as I alphabetize one more shelf, wondering what kids will like and love upon them in just a few short days.

It gives me a commitment to being here.

The Sound of Silence from readers (with no corresponding dip in subscribers) leads me gratefully to believe that no one is going to mind too much if I give up on Martin Haberman for the moment. I will say (again) that his 1995 book “Star Teachers of Children in Poverty” is moving, creditable, and worth focused attention, but to approach his later work with caution. Hanna, a stalwart commenter and excellent teacher, sent a reflection on the matter I’ll quote at length here. It’s a thoughtful resolution to this troubling interaction with an educational theorist.

“When I read “Stars” I did wonder a good deal about what he based his conclusions on… I’m not sure this bothers me all that much though. It’s got something to do with that searching-for-keys-under-the-lamppost analogy – you know the one? If Haberman had stuck with the hard data, spending lots of time on analyzing and reporting on the frequency of particular responses, the conclusions he could have drawn might well have been so limited as to be relatively unhelpful. At times the value of a conclusion is less in its being certain than in its capacity to encourage different thinking and acting.

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.

H., in her commments below, mentions the Haberman-coined term of  “strong insensitives” in regards to those teachers who have remained in the profession by disassociating themselves from any responsibility for their performance. In a previous comment my long-time friend and inspiration, Hope, does a lovely job of painting a vivid picture of who these people are. I bet you can name at least one in your building right now.

Take a wander through this related elucidating 2004 article while I make scrambled eggs for my kids– I think it will serve as a fascinating bridge between the last post and the next.  Later this evening I’ll be responding to comments and putting up post #2.

Why wait? I’ll pull the trickest card from our deck of fifteen and throw it down: The Care and Feeding of the Bureaucracy. But first, a story.

Many of you will have read Sarah Fine’s heart-aching editorial in yesterday’s  Washington Post (see above), describing why she chose to leave teaching after her first four years.  (I chased back her “50% turnover within five years” sound byte to here, by the way, where it is actually only a small part of a much more nuanced statistical analysis. Read it. Question authority. That being said, the epic turnover rate in high poverty urban schools like Fine’s is undeniable.)

My heart further aches for her because she is now going to catch a certain kind of very painful criticism from some educators, including myself initially. Consider this answering post from the equally talented science teacher Michael Doyle (no facetiousness intended whatsoever):

So why does anyone teach here in the States? You’ll get a lot of answers–love of students, time off, good benefits–but for those of us who happily stay, it’s because we believe teaching matters. The financial compensation is reasonable if not spectacular, but that’s not why we teach.

I quote the post because it so concisely advances a typical argument of passionate educators currently in the field: what I’ve started to think of  “the care quota.” That is, if you have enough caring in your heart– for the kids, for the ethical choice to teach, for the global goodness to which we contribute as educators– then nothing as petty or superficial as a lack of payment, a sense of control, or career advancement should deter you.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? It’s the intuitive extrinsic/intrinsic values split. If only it were true.

As it turns out, the reasons Sarah Fine cites  for her leaving are not necessarily extrinsically motivated at all. According to the research of Ed Deci and Rich Ryan, perhaps the two foremost experts on intrinsic motivation in the world, human beings have three deep psychological needs that need to be satisfied in order to feel intrinsically fulfilled: Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. Let’s look at a couple of quotes from Sarah through this lens.

Autonomy: “I describe spending weeks revising a curriculum proposal with my fellow teachers, only to find out that the administration had made a unilateral decision without looking at it.”

Competence: “Even so, I felt like a failure. Too many of my students showed only occasional signs of intellectual curiosity, despite my best efforts to engage them. “

Relatedness: “When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it’s unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long…a portion of the American public sees teaching as a second-rate profession.”

These are not the words of a corporate executive in sheep’s clothing. They are the words of a caring person who is, legitimately, not being intrinsically supported. In this light, it seems clear that interpreting Sarah’s reasons for leaving teaching as merely extrinsically motivated– that is, not sufficiently caring– would be incorrect.  From there, it is logical to reason that one’s capacity to care as a teacher is not, in fact, proportionally related to how long one remains a teacher.

So what is? What determines who stays, and who leaves? For me, this is where Haberman’s research comes in: nailing down exactly what teachers do to make a systemically, intrinsically intolerable situation something they can live with. Indeed, this very research serves as an additional stark reminder that “caring” is not enough. The sustenance we draw from our relationships with kids, the joy we take in those magic moments of comprehension, or the hope we place in their futures which we affect, but may not see– these things may very well act as one kind of chemical inhibitor to our leaving the profession. But we all do many more things in our classrooms than think these happy thoughts– at least fifteen things, by Haberman’s count.

And the one that most directly pertains to Sarah, I feel, is the one I’ll be talking about next: the care and feeding of the bureaucracy of education.  It’s my contention that this factor, and this alone, is sufficient to drive out not only caring teachers, but the most caring teachers. Ironic, isn’t it?

Stay tuned.

This isn’t me…yet. Editorial today in the Washington Post. Do read and comment. This line of concern is open and raw for me (see below), and I continue to seek every perspective I can.

As I mentioned before, I was enthralled and challenged mightily by this book. (On a related note, and you can argue with me on this one, I seem to be developing a quick basic litmus test when it comes to decent pedagogy:  Would whatever I am planning work with a boy in poverty?)

Here, in order of presentation in the book, are the fifteen characteristics of star teachers Haberman has identified. They’re a touch sloppy and overlapping– concision is not one of Haberman’s strong points– but valuable nonetheless. I’ll cut corners for you in future posts where needed as I reflect on them.  Get out your notebooks, kids:

Persistence

Protecting Learners and Learning

Generalizations: Putting Ideas into Practice

Approach to “At-Risk” Children

Professional-Personal Orientation to Students

The Care and Feeding of the Bureaucracy

Fallability

Emotional and Physical Stamina

Organizational Ability

Effort– Not Ability

Teaching– Not Sorting

Convincing  Students, “I Need You Here”

You and Me Against the Material

Gentle Teaching in a Violent Society

When Teachers Face Themselves

You’ll note right away that some of these are descriptive, while others are prescriptive: I’ll try to sort that out for you as we go along as well. Hoping to post once every 7-10 days on average.

For now: What are your initial thoughts on what you see here? Questions? Connections to your own practice?