To Yves Smith (education version)

Teachers and teacher ed programs are habitually blamed for the terribleness of our schooling system. With good reason, in some respects. But this kind of thinking results more from collusion and mania than examined sociology or in-depth investigation into life in schools (Of course those that do spend that level of commitment in schools in order to communicate about schools, point out the systemic chaos that prevents orderly resolutions). Now that Arne Duncan has turned the heat up, anew again, reasoned approaches to understanding the complexity of schooling and making concrete our ideal abstractions for it get washed out by more mania and collusion.

Case in point: NCATE. A new president joins their team, just in time to reorganize the organization's accreditation process. And amazingly, the new process looks to shadow exactly the changes that Duncan proposes. For a professional organization made of up scholars and teachers involved in teacher ed, reflexivity would seem to be least likely response. Sadly, no.

NCATE Blue Ribbon Panel Initiates a Mainstream Move to More Clinically

Based Preparation of Teachers

January 5, 2010

Contact: Marsha Levine, Jane Leibbrand (202) 466-7496

Washington, D.C. - The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher

Education (NCATE) today announced the formation of an expert panel on

clinical preparation and partnerships, signaling the beginning of a sea

change in the preparation of the nation's teachers. The work of the Panel,

called the NCATE Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation, Partnerships

and Improved Student

Learning<http://www.ncate.org/public/010410_BRP1.asp>, will culminate in

recommendations for restructuring the preparation of teachers to reflect

teaching as a practice-based profession akin to medicine, nursing, or

clinical psychology. Practice-based professions require not only a solid

academic base, but strong clinical components, a supported induction

experience, and ongoing opportunities for learning. This redesign is

intended to bring educator preparation into better alignment with the

urgent needs of P-12 schools. Such changes in the way teachers and other

P-12 educators are prepared potentially have far-ranging effects on the

structure of schools of education.

Me here. Instead of creating a panel to investigate if the sea really has changed, NCATE accepts the change a priori. It pegs itself to whatever the administration has already decided. The independence of the organization ceases to exist, at least in terms of professors and educators of practice coming to their own conclusions about the state of schooling. Granted, a size-able organization (over 650 members!) needs an articulated management system. However, managing need not be iron-on application of central office. I am, it seems, so naive.

Dr Nancy Zimpher, Chancellor, State University of New York System, and Dr.

Dwight Jones, Commissioner of Education, Colorado, will co-chair the

panel. Other panel members include experts in education research, policy,

teaching and learning and leaders in higher education and P-12 schools at

the state and local level. The panel will establish a set of guiding

principles for the clinical preparation of teachers so that preparation

focuses more on building the expertise necessary for effective practice as

professionals. This includes the development of candidates' ability to

understand and relate to their students and their needs, development of

practical and evidence-based pedagogical skills, and the use of research

evidence and judgment in practice.

Me here. The outcomes are standard fare, but notice the implication. Teachers today do not understand their what their students need, nor can they relate to these kids. They do not teach according to any standards of evidence (they wing it, I suppose) or pedagogical thinking. And they lack judgment; well, good judgment, a skill based on theory and exemplars. Right. Now, some - many - might fit this portrait. Lord knows who they'll let into the profession. This, of course, from an organization made from schools who have been spending the previous four decades educating teachers to be exactly who they are. If these schools have done such a terrible job, should their membership of accreditation to NCATE be revoked? Would it not make better sense to assume that member schools in NCATE have previously been educating teachers exactly the way they here describe teachers to be educated? If so, then there is no sea change, since all these member programs have already instituted just these practices. Who then are the guilty programs? Cynical me: the administration as ventriloquist.

Teaching has become a vastly different job requiring a different set of

skills than it did 50 years ago. Greater diversity among students and the

tailored instruction that many of them need, make the clinical aspects of

teacher preparation ever more important. Minority students are now the

majority in some states. Students with special needs are mainstreamed as a

result of disabilities law. English language learners from various

countries are studying in classrooms across the nation, as well as

students with individual learning plans (IEPs) who need individual help.

In addition, some students are highly motivated while others dislike

school, are disengaged, and are at risk of failure. Teachers are faced

with more challenges than ever before in the history of the United States,

and they are now being held accountable in ways that their predecessors

were not.

Maybe. But is this evidence for changing practices, or evidence gathered because they have decided to change practice? These factors are descriptions, honest and profound that they are. Descriptions are not in themselves meaningful. The dispositive statement "Teachers are faced with more challenges than ever before in the history of the United States,and they are now being held accountable in ways that their predecessorswere not." is a political judgment, not fact. If anything in this press release reveals some underlying motivation, look at this here statement. It is the political process that has decided to take the shallow route in school critique: the teachers are the loci of needed reform. Politicians do not have time to develop sophisticated programs for urban renewal, tackling the economic, social/cultural and normative processes upon which a functioning polity operates. Instead, cite blame, and develop expedient reforms from there. Does NCATE really believe all this? And by NCATE, I mean the faculty and staff at all those member schools (over 650!).

Significantly enhanced clinical preparation may mean, for example, more

extensive use of simulations, case studies, analyses of teaching and other

approximations of teaching, as well as sustained, intense, mentored

school-embedded experiences. Enhanced clinical preparation should give

aspiring teachers the opportunity to integrate theory with practice;

develop and test classroom management and pedagogical skills; hone their

use of evidence in making professional decisions about practice; and

understand and integrate the standards of their professional community.

These clinical settings also provide the opportunity for evaluating not

only what candidates know, but importantly, what they are able to do.

Finally, the professional preparation of teachers cannot be achieved by

preparation programs acting alone. Intensive clinical preparation,

especially when it is school-embedded, requires the collaboration of all

the stakeholders represented on the Blue Ribbon Panel. The group will

issue a report of its findings and recommendations when its work is

completed, most likely near the end of 2010.

Some schools of education have already developed rich partnerships with

districts aimed at boosting P-12 achievement, especially in low-performing

schools. NCATE featured a few examples of these schools of education at a

June press briefing announcing a redesign of accreditation to help schools

of education<http://www.ncate.org/public/062309_TeacherEdRequirements.asp>

move to a target level of excellence on accreditation standards, and to

encourage institutions to create Transformation Initiatives which focus on

P-12 learning needs and improve the evidentiary base of the profession.

The Panel will examine characteristics and elements of clinical

preparation in exemplary programs, will review the research, and will make

recommendations as to how those characteristics and elements can be

supported in policy and through funding formulas at every level -- school,

district, state and federal. The aim is to move from islands of innovation

which are driving student achievement in certain schools or districts to a

culture in which excellence is the norm.

Me again. To translate: as bad as things are, we will find those programs that have figured out success, copy it, disseminate it and hold all you accountable to follow it. Because, well, who does not want to be excellent? Amazingly, we will find many of the programs in our organization the very programs that have figured out how to succeed. And by complete chance, the panel is made up of faculty from these very programs.

OK; that last point was unfair. What if the panel was empowered to review the field and decide for itself whether the problem really is teacher education? Granted, such findings would be dismissed as a confirmation bias. Where, then, will the commission find out what works? And, using the standards of quality in research, how will they determine that what works (in the place they find it) does work (in places with diverse conditions)? Is this something of a show?

In a follow-up phase, the Blue Ribbon Panel will form a working group to

guide changes in NCATE standards and accreditation processes to support

more clinically-based educator preparation and working partnerships

between preparation programs and P-12 schools. NCATE will pilot proposed

changes at sites currently supported by teacher quality grants located in

Race to the Top states. A second phase of the work will be guiding the

process through NCATE policy boards to implement changes in NCATE

accreditation standards to help support the Panel's recommendations and

vision.

Me here. Sad; NCATE admits collusion. What is to be is what is. At least now the politics can be seen in clear light.

Dr. James Cibulka, president of NCATE, said, "The Panel is jointly chaired

by leaders from higher education and the states. States, districts, and

colleges and universities must work in close collaboration and in new ways

to meet urgent P-12 learning needs."

Me here. To translate: whatever the Dept. of Ed says, we can say it louder, just as long as they say it first.

Cibulka commented on the Panel's

influence on accreditation: "The Panel's work will inform future changes

to the NCATE standards and process to support a focus on P-12 student

learning to maximum advantage, and to ensure the standards and process

truly measure quality in appropriate ways. Revised accreditation standards

will help establish new norms in educator preparation," Cibulka continued.

Dr. Nancy Zimpher, Chancellor of the State University of New York System

and co-chair of the panel, said, "I am confident that this panel will help

create new synergies at the local level, through collaborative

partnerships between school districts, states, and higher education

working to assess local needs. The operative phrase is 'joint work,' which

will entail new expectations and roles for all stakeholders."

Dr. Dwight Jones, Commissioner of Education, Colorado, and panel co-chair,

said, "NCATE has taken a bold step in creating this Panel, representative

of all stakeholders, to help move forward changes in educator preparation

which will better meet P-12 urgent needs. Raising P-12 student achievement

in America is an imperative; using our combined resources in new ways to

focus on urgent P-12 needs will help reach that goal. I see this Panel as

a major step forward in restructuring educator preparation throughout the

nation."

Me here. I guess quotes add a bit of humanity. The boundary between corporate speak and educational dialogue crests caverns. In comparison terms, will NCATE become the teachers' AMA? For homework, go interview your family doctor. Ask her how she feels about the government dictating her practices in just the way that Duncan seems to be dictating to NCATE.

To sum, I agree with all the language used here to describe quality teacher education programs. In fact, I would like to see all teachers be required to undergo a med-school approach to pre-service teaching: multiple years in graduate schooling; several years apprenticing to different practitioners in schools, like rotations; slow entry into the profession at first, with heavy mentoring and collaboration from experienced teachers; different lengths of internships, depending on the area of teaching, the age level and the community. I just do not see that NCATE, via the Duncan-Obama plan, envisions such a model. Rather, it will help establish hegemonic policies that punish, retard innovation, sap motivation and hand the task of teaching more progressively into the hands of technocratic script readers.

on Arendt

At Slate, Ron Rosenbaum uses two new books on Hannah Arendt to unleash his fury over her phrase 'banality of evil.' He calls it 'fatuous,' 'subprime,' ' bankrupt,' 'fathomless,' 'deceitful and disingenuous,' 'utterly fraudulent' and 'the most overused, misused, abused pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language.' So there.

Rosenbaum offers sound evidence, pulled from the books under review and several other recent commentaries on Arendt. He builds up a psycho-tableau of her self-identy, burrowing her idea(s) under a kind of unconscious adaptation to the zeit of Germany in the 30s. Or a 'parochial' Jew living in Germany high society in the 30s. Fine. But in doing so, he must accept the patency in what Arendt meant. In condemning 'banality of evil' as he does, Rossbaum risks assigning Arendt's thinking to the banality of evil represented by nascent-Hitlerian Germany. What led her to construct a meaningless and historically empty phrase is her meaningful and historically potent frame of mind. She understand the banality of evil because, well, she represented the banality of evil in other form.

Human reason is necessarily contingent of the content of the mind at any given point in life. That content is supplied by the socio-temporal moment in which we live, our 'lifeworld' of all that is known and believed in our time. Our reason is necessarily limited by the cultural community that nurtures us, the educativeness of the society in which we grow to understand the world and the openness of our thinking to a skepticism that appreciates the novel as a challenge to the normal, the assumed to be. That kind of openness is itself subject to these same limitations. The banality impressed by Arendt fronts the everyday nature of human communities. We can not always question everything and everyone. We function through a matrix of understandings presented through a consistent world; it would be ridiculously superhuman of us to wake up everyday and remap the essence of our lives.

So we live a banal life, a fluid participation of what is, stopping to question when life unspools in front of us (major calamity), when our ideas and expectations fail to produce (William James' gut-level pragmatism) and when the mystifying overwhelms the senses. Arendt may have missed some essential truth about herself when writing Eichman, as Rosenbaum details. Yet she presents us moderns with a devastatingly clear explanation for the hubris to human understanding: reason is not an objective state of perfect clarity, but a subjective experience complete in itself. We are frail, fallible and committed to error with every thought. Accepting that radical humanness does not mean we should live in fear of acting or even thinking. Rather, the banality of evil looms over us in harmony with the banality of goodness. What we do is what we do. Our moral life is measured not by the balance sheet of deeds presented after death to Osiris, or whoever awaits outside the tombs of everlasting life, but by the capacity to understand ourselves down to the most minute and fragmentary of trace implication. Time and history, space and place; we are always and already in flow with all there is.

The Impossibles

Freud once stated that teaching is impossible.

I doubt he meant a harrumph at the indolence and irresponsibility of his students. Nor, I suppose, a lash out at the folly of standardized tests, outcome-based standards or any other idealized version of education as technical tinkering. To assume, further, that he thought as a small government, low-tax, anti-public spending libertarian would be make him too much contemporary. History still does not allow a revision of the past in the identities of the present.

So what then did Freud mean?

Let me explain this question another way. In the current model of accountability (courtesy of NCLB), our educational system uses standardized, quantitative scores on tests to determine student knowledge and skills, and growth in knowledge and skills over the course of a set period (a semester, a year, a unit). Merit or performance pay synthesizes the students' learning into their teachers' effectiveness; the so-called "value-added" model of teacher accountability. Through inferential and raw/direct statistics, a teacher can be evaluated by the result of her students' scores on such exams. This process uses a positive gain as a determination of a successful student/good teacher; a negative loss as a determination of an unsuccessful student/poor teacher.

The flaw in this system is exposed when considering the reasons for schooling. Put another way, the qualitative rationale for schooling can not be analyzed through the quantitative measures used in schooling. While we believe we can measure a student's learning of concepts and skills, we have no method for measuring the justifications for learning these concepts and skills. This lack does not mean a better instrument is needed to do so. Rather, such instruments are impossible to create. What does all this mean? It tells us that no matter how efficient and effective our teaching, no matter how documentable through quantitative data our students' learning, no matter how empirical and obvious our beautiful numbers, we can not analyze the effect of schooling in the same way. Our measurements of learning give no significant or even sensical information on what effect that learning has on the the student or society.

Now, for me, this is a huge, huge thing. If I am not able to apply the metrics used to determine whether a student has learned to determine any justification for their learning, then either

1. there is no justification for schooling, or
2. the metrics used to determine learning need to be radically transformed.

Common sense, perhaps, explains why we would want our children to learn to read and communicate, to understand and manipulate numbers, to hold a common core of truths regarding the physical and biological sciences, to have knowledge of the history of our kind and the art of our cultural heritages. Common sense, as well, explains why our democracy needs literate, rational thinkers; our economy needs effective, knowledgeable workers; our culture needs the values and capabilities of appreciation for the products of human artifice. But common sense has no purchase in the accountability we employ in the institution of education. Common sense represents something tacit, but felt and experienced to be obvious. It presents a taken-for-granted obviousness, something one need not spend time defending. To question common sense is to question rationality itself. Yet common sense prevails in schooling through the curriculum and skills expected in our students. In other words, there is no need to statistically warrant the course and scope of study (with some ding-a-ling culture wars on the margin; part of Freud labeled the "narcissism of small differences"), because the why is implied in all this common sense. This paradox, or double-consciousness, of quantitative measuring and qualitative common sense exposes the impossibility of ever getting schooling right. "Right" does not exist; only politics does.

Teaching is impossible, not because it is difficult. Nor because it is too open-ended, or even indeterminate. No, teaching is impossible because, by the laws presented as how to measure its effect, we will never know what effect its effect has on students. The outcome of teaching, like the outcome of the experience of schooling itself, is immeasurable. Literally. Both are acts, or participation of acts, that ultimate point beyond themselves. Nothing that we can determine about what is learned tells us anything about what that learning means. Teaching is therefore the investing in a purposeful act the mystification of what that act means. It is a myth, mythic; teaching is the religion of everyday life. That we have chosen to place this practice at the heart of our social order is the finest expression of the mystery to existence.

Teachers are not bankers?

Paul Krugman has a smart brief this morning on changing the way bankers are compensated. Right now, rewards are earned through short-term success, without consideration of longer term effects. As he writes, "In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses."

Many of the current ideas about 'merit pay' and/or 'value-added' models of teacher compensation take a strikingly similar approach. Teacher earn their bones, and its rewards, when their students demonstrate competency of standards-based outcomes. Sounds like a sane approach. Yet, as for the bankers, teachers in this system (just like right now) are not held responsible for a students' success or struggle in the future. After all, how could they? Rigorous research methodology would never warrant any conclusion that claimed such a longer-term effect; too much life intervenes, making any claim specious, more projection than evident.

As part of the accreditation of teacher ed programs (whether nationally, through NCATE, or state-based - in Oregon, Teacher Standards and Practices Commission/TSPC), documentation must be presented that shows the effect a program has on the success of its graduates. In other words, my school must present evidence on the effect our alumni have on their students. The evidence? Some qualitative artifacts, but mostly, k-12 student test scores.

Schools are already on that path. A 'traditional' approach to teacher pay took teachers as salaried employees of a large system, where the overall health of the community significantly effected the learning of the students. Teachers were never paid well, comfortably more in recent years, but never comparable to professionals. Implied, though, was the role teachers played in the bigger wheel of society. Their effects, in essence, were part of something bigger.

To put this all in perspective, then. Teachers are to be paid in relation to how their students demonstrate the objectives for the year. They are not held responsible, at least in terms of their pay, for a student's performance in subsequent year; that is another teacher's load. Schools of education, however, are held responsibly for how their graduates perform once they leave, regardless of the intervening factors and contingencies that occur. If Krugman is correct, and I for one agree with him, then any pay-for-performance system established for educators replicates the dysfunctional incentives that spurred the financial crisis.

Gross National Happiness

Reading Joseph Stiglitz makes me feel as if my inner-conscience has been draped over the world. He comes with all the laurels (Noble Prize, full Professorship, extensive publication via peer-review) and he invokes all the logic of doing things differently because what we are doing now blows. I often do not believe that he means what he writes, since his ideas make too much sense to me.

Take this latest essay. The challenge of measuring the most inscrutable - the quality of human experience - renders moot any attempt. As he writes, "What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things." Using GNP as a syllogism for the state of society, the micro world of individual lives suffers for the macro world of a big thing: economic growth. A rising tide may lift all boats, true; but not everyone in the world has a boat. Or can swim.

Of course, using Bhutan as a model of clarity might not win over the same-as-usual empiricists. And this topic is itself another version of the defense of liberal arts learning, more or less. Still. It encourages me to trust what I think I know, to realize that some of the important people also know what I think I know.

Senator Ted Kennedy, rest in peace.

Some journalists will eventually ask other Senators whether they now have an obligation to pass a health care bill, out of respect for Kennedy.

That is not the right question. Instead, it should be:

"If Sen. Kennedy were on life support in a permanent vegetative state and his family was ready to end his life if Congress did not pass a health care bill by the time he fell into his coma, because his family says that that is what the Senator wanted because he told them even though he did not have an advanced direct because Medicare would not cover that kind of meeting with his physician, would the Senate and House rush back to D.C. to pass a health care bill?"

Perception

Give humans something to see, and we make a world of it. A phrase from a contract, a flower in a field, one moment out of the infinite moments of a day. We give it meaning, significance. Or we don't. Context matters, so both are true. The smallest thing means everything, as the largest, not at all.

This might just be another of saying that life and all its enterprise gives itself over to excess. We find meaning in the slightest fragment of perception. We plunge into what jumps to mind, what presents itself with the slightest flicker to our open senses. All is Surface, without end, perfectly smooth and complete, but infinitely dense. Depth is the meaning we give, the fullness we find in all things. We live in that slippage; content to skim across things as they are until forced by habit or purpose or intuition to free-fall into the grain, which we catch as meaning.

Think of some professions. Medicine, teaching, state craft, law; all require inquiry and expense. When dealing with others, heuristics make for human need. Doctors and teachers, politicians and soldiers must burn through resources with impunity if they are to heal or to lead. Outcomes matter, but these are the outcomes of people, for whom being is more than a description. Means must be human, too, must give in to the accelerating complexity of what being human requires. Our bodies constantly self-stabilize, unlike clocks whose gears lie inert before the clockmaker. Doctors get to know the body, how it functions and interacts with itself, through an extensive process of exploration. Again, the means are profligate by function. Teachers, too, come to understand their students in a similar; learning is both piecemeal and indefinite, the result of an individual's own condition, not the application of technology to a clear problem. No less legislators, nor generals, when dealing with others, can avoid messy extraneous efforts. We have to go too far, because the outcome in its rightness shows itself only after we wade in. In this sense, we splurge in order to figure out what we want the ends to be.

Isaiah Berlin once said that "we must be free to make mistakes." He was talking about political democracy, but I take him to imply truth as well. And it truth, reality. Being free to err is not a license. Rather, Berlin means that we are free to be correct. The world is not given (less so a government). We thus have a responsibility to search it out, to find meanings - many wrong, few right - benefiting our task. That is an awesome load. This "negative" liberty, in Berlin's phrase, restricts prior constraint on our experiences. Put another way, institutions (whether the state or church, the academy or the hospital) do have any final answers. Citizenship of state and of humanity requires us to ask more than the given.

The difficulty in this life is obvious. We must chart things for ourselves, in concert with others on their own courses. No more so than in the professions. Doctors and teachers go as far beyond the horizon of what is known as necessary to attend the person in need. Each patient, each student brings something new in a new way with new conditions. The freedom to make mistakes is limited by the dangers of being wrong, of course, with their deadly finality. Being right, though needs the space to avoid that danger, while also engaging the difficulty of understanding the particulars of any one person.

Learning is the word for the layered interaction of what a student knew and felt previously and how the new material is experienced. Teachers can not mandate nor control that experience. At best, they create climates rich with material (content, say) for students to work through, then layer on pedagogy. Since not all students will experience the same thing, not all students will learn the same way or at the same speed. A teachers keeps this classroom practice going, long after something has been learned. She is not being inefficient; rather, she is exercising her freedom to be right for this student in this lesson at this time. Business hates waste. Teachers hate doing less than is needed since what is needed might only be known after the fact. We call this "time." Imagine the irresponsible doctor prescribing the same drug to every patient with the same symptoms. Now imagine the teacher treating every reading problem with the same lesson. It takes time to create the work that leads to learning, for each and every student. In schools, time wasted is time not being taken.

To sum this up, think about the invisible hand. It works wonderfully for economic reason by evoking the image of centrifugal wind that naturally blows goods and services to their best use. It creates an order, spontaneous and beautiful, from the combined self-interest of its participants. Yes, if we consider the hand always already at work. Within its functioning order, energy is efficiently expended to achieve known, expected outcomes. That is the system in its pure form. How, though, did it get that way? What happened before? The human need for more, for expansive time and excessive action, generates the hand. Our interests follow from our discoveries, which follow from the kind of mazy runs we take across new fields. And new fields come to us in the briefest of forms. We find patterns wherever we look; meanings emerge with the effort to form them, no matter the text.

That is why we can see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. To be human is to be large, to contain multitudes.