The Line

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?

It’s not enough to intend to do good. I mean, it just isn’t. What doctor is excused from killing a patient because that doctor cares?

The saccharine myths that I tell myself and others about my sacrifices, my work ethic, my own academic prowess, my caring, my love, do not ensure that my students learn.

There’s only one thing that comes close to doing that. Informed, multi-measured, reflective, corrective practice.

Lyrics are here. Lupe’s on a mission; Check it out.

New album in winter 2009. Can’t wait.

It’s this, finished about fifteen minutes ago:

Star Teachers of Children in Poverty

Clocking in at a slim 94 pages, this book is no bigger than a DVD case. It’s now underlined, dog-eared, and annotated nearly worse than my Ed Deci, and if you’ve been following the blog, you know what that means.

Written by Dr. Martin Haberman out of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, it compounds two decades of work, true multiple measures of achievement, and qualitative interviews to identify an easy handful of characteristics– I mean, seriously, like, fifteen?– of successful teaching in the ultimate test of fire, urban schools in poverty. It marries the acerbic cut-through-the-crap voice of Jonathan Kozol and Alfie Kohn with an equally compelling research base, if not more (IMHO)– along with a much larger dose of genuine compassion and insight into the beginning teacher’s mind.

As a result I cannot understand why this man’s voice is not front and center in the ever-louder clamor over the definition of successful teachers, but I think I can guess. For example, a large part of his analysis identifies superb teachers as having figured out how to actively tame and protect themselves (and more importantly, their students) from “the mindless bureaucracy” of public education– and indeed supports them positively in their lack of any desire whatsoever to reform that mindlessness. I imagine it’s the rare administrator or teacher trainer who will step out on a similar limb.

Many others of the characteristics, such as “physical stamina,” strike me as equally unconventional in typical discussions of teacher success. When was the last time a mentor told you you’d need to jog some more to do well in the inner city schools?

So there’s a teaser for you, and if I can manage it without pulling my hair out, I’m going to try and blog out all Haberman’s “functions” of successful urban teachers in a short series of posts over the course of the summer. It seems to me that getting these straight in my own head will go a very long way towards both the micro-preparation of my classroom, and the meta-conversation involving the burning questions which I posed here– and continue to wrestle with every single day.

Yep, even on summer vacation. Geeks unite.  

Not PBS, but rather this.

I mentioned it in my last post, stating (prematurely, as it turns out) that I was going to join the committee to help implement this program in our building next fall. After doing some reading on the website, though, I sent this email to our vice-principal today.

Thanks for being so thoughtful and generous with your time and information regarding PBIS. Unfortunately I have to go with my gut on this one and decline participation, for a couple of reasons.

First, in looking closely at the PBIS website, it’s clear the research-based evidence supporting the efficacy of this model is in its infancy. I’m quoting the PBIS documentation verbatim there. (On a side note, I mistrust how the site creators have buried this actual fact such that you have to sift through several webpages and a 16-page Word document to figure it out.)

Secondly, exactly because the model is not yet supported by robust research, it is my strong feeling that it’s going to be very important to our higher-ups to do it “by the book,” without modification. And as you know from our conversation, my own research reading on democratic schooling and intrinsic motivation leads me to believe that significant modification is already called for in PBIS in order for it to work in the long term. In otherwords I’m not convinced that any suggestions to change or examine the implementation of PBIS from a critical perspective will be supported by the district.

I wish you the best of luck. There’s many positive aspects to the program and I hope they play out. I will do my best to support them as a teacher in the building.

Sincerely,

Dina

I hope I’m being pessimistic, reactionary, and ill-informed. I really do. Anyone out there willing to comment on this program or his/her experiences with it?

And is it too soon to start talking about next year? Man. I must be a teacher.

09-10: A diverse sparkling range of challenges and opportunities, including our team’s first four high *high* needs special education students, a passel of Beginner English Language Learners, the second half of blogging at ASCD, a Literacy Coach and new E/LA director who fully support the workshop approach I’ve been hiding for the past two years (and hopefully no longer, right, Doug?)… and a new building culture program for which I’ve been recruited. (We’ll see about that last one. I’m joining the committee to be the Pain in the Ass about insuring kid presence and the Voice for Intrinsic Motivation.)

But for now, looking forward to a quiet summer, for once, pulling my pieces together and nestling into family, friends, berry-picking and coddled tomatoes.

Thanks to the readers as always for making this blog such an amazingly rich part of my professional life. If you had told me last year that I’d have over 100 people out there in the world consuming my musings about education, I truly would have laughed. But today, I’m just grateful.

We had two stellar musicians in to play Civil War-era bluegrass music for our kids today. I sat in on two tunes– a privilege.

Halfway through a soft, sweet piece on mandolin and banjo, our math teacher taps me on the shoulder and shows me that our two worst-behaved boys, whose home lives are wrecks, who scatter their wound-up energy and baggage through every school day– both these boys had succumbed to the peace of the music, and fallen fast, sound asleep.

Enjoy. I’m proud of this one.