The Threat of Influence

Intrigued by a tweet, I clicked over to this article on "The Most Influential Educator in America." The list of nominees is not, in itself, controversial--although clearly, some people are confusing the word "influential" with "beneficial." Apparently, a person can't be influential if you think she's wrong.

What I found interesting was the dialogue below the article, in "comments." Someone disses Wendy Kopp because, the person says, she's created a business model that imagines teaching as a stepping stone to other careers. How dare she! So, again, apparently evil isn't influential.

But is it evil?

First of all, do we really think it's a bad thing to inject more people into the American bloodstream who actually know what it means to be a teacher in a classroom? What it takes? How HARD it is? Don't you think that breaking our version of the "thin blue line" would help the cause of teachers in policy arguments, both in Congress and in the news? Don't you think the old, "you get off work at 3:00 and have summers off, so shut up" argument would diminish if more peope, in more walks of life, really understood the world of the classroom teacher?

But that's a minor quibble. The more interesting point, I think, is that we seem to refuse to acknowledge that difficult choices must be made--that we can't eat our cake of publication and have it, too. Roads are diverging in the wood, and we, being one traveler, can't take them all.

Here's what I mean: We know that, by and large, we're recruiting teachers from the bottom quarter of college graduating classes. We know that many teachers leave the profession within the first five years of practice. I think we can assume that, by and large, the ones who leave are the ones who have other job options available. Maybe that means they're "smarter" or better educated--who knows? But a lot of people leave. We know that teacher effectiveness is a significant determining factor in student success (even though older studies seemed to suggest otherwise). And we know that professional development, as it's traditionally done, isn't really increasing teacher effectiveness. So what are we supposed to do?

A) We could increase teacher pay to attract better candidates into teaching as a life-long career. But there are a hundred reasons why that isn't happening and isn't likely to happen any time soon, except in isolated cases. See: unions, pensions, the larger economy, and people's bizarre contempt of teachers.
B) We could invest heavily in intensive, long-term, work-embedded professional development to increase the effectiveness of our current cadre of teachers. That would be lovely, but I don't see it happening anywhere, probably because schools are starved for money, the unions often balk at mandating things like PD, and no one can ever agree on what information or skills, exactly, lead to increased effectiveness. Not that we don't know--we all know--we just all know differently.
C) We could re-cast teaching in community-service terms more than in lifelong-job terms, to attract quality candidates who are willing to do the job for a little while before moving on to other careers. That's the TFA model.

Is there a choice D? I can't think of one. Either improve the people you've got, replace the people you've got with "better" people, or augment what you've got with "better" people on a temporary basis. I guess choice D would be "do nothing."

If you have a choice D in mind, let me know!

Anyway, the point is, things can't get better AND remain the same, unless you think things are as good as they could possibly be, right now. And nobody thinks that. And yet, we get angry at people who are trying to change things. We say, "just leave teachers alone," which is absurd. What we're doing right now may well be intrusive, over-regulatory, and ineffective, but that doesn't mean we should just walk away and let each individual teacher do whatever the hell she wants, in isolation from the rest of the school, like in the good old days.

First of all, the "good old days," if they were really all that good, had a completely different teacher corps than we do today. They had what amounted to a captive population of well-educated women, most of whom who couldn't find other jobs, except for nursing and secretarial work. Think about the women who are currently lawyers, investment bankers, doctors, and business executives--smart, driven, amazing women--and assume that if we were back in the early 1960s, a large subset of them would be classroom teachers. And then tell me nothing has changed.

So, again: change who's in the classroom, somehow, or deal with who you've got.

What about Finland and Singapore? Everyone is crowing, these days, about how they don't regulate their teachers to death, or mandate a curriculum, or test their students every ten seconds. All true. But in those countries, they can "leave the teachers alone" because they've invested HEAVILY in them before they reach the classroom. So they have a pretty good idea what they're going to do once they get there. In our country, on the other hand, a principal can't have any clue what his teachers may or may not know, think, or be able to do as educational practitioners. They've all come from different schools, different pre-service programs, maybe even different states, all with different requirements, training mandates, curricula, and philosophies. So good luck being an "instructional leader" in your school.

Change it, one way or another, or figure out how to deal with what you've got and get better results.

There are a lot of people out there who have tried to do the latter and have found it impossible. So they've tried to find ways to change the paradigm. Some of them are succeeding. Either the new models they create will be effective, in which case we can make them spread, or they'll prove ineffective, in which case we'll cross another idea off the list and try something else. But at least we'll have learned something. At least we'll have tried.

I call that influential.