Form, Function, and Frank, Part 2

Today was frustrating.  I didn't exactly have a "bad day."  It was just the sort of day as an educator that makes you wonder how many people truly understand schools and learning.  In fairness to the day, I think I may have a sinus infection, which meant I woke up at 3:30 and was at work at 7:00.  I left sometime after 5:30.  So maybe the day isn't wholly to blame.  Nevertheless I find myself at my computer with an old fashioned chilling on the desk and Beethoven sonatas playing on iTunes, trying not to be pissed off at a large number of people.

My bad day really started on Wednesday.  I discovered on Wednesday night that I would be "presenting" at a school this coming Monday afternoon for a few hours.  Lest anyone think that I'm just grumbling because I'm being asked to work on what was to be a holiday (President's Day for state employees), I really don't mind going to schools to talk to teachers.  Apart from teaching music to students, it's my favorite thing to do.  One would expect more advance notice than these few days, however.  (Actually, our office was asked to put the date on our calendar weeks ago, but having heard nothing more, most of us believed our services were no longer required.)  

No further instructions were given.  We are to present three hours of "professional development" to teachers from three schools.  Our boss is to present the first hour or so, with two hours set aside for content specialists.  The "event" is being "coordinated" (if one can call it that) by something called a "School Intervention Specialist."  I suppose this individual is charged with providing help for struggling schools.  If there were any individual who was aware of what sorts of development were needed by the professionals in these schools, it should be this person.  Yet we were given carte blanche.  I might be presenting on executing the perfect arabesque or re-stringing horns, it would be all the same, I suppose.  As it happens, I'm presenting on student engagement through creativity, and authentic assessment through performance, especially the use of performance descriptors.

You get that a lot if you are an education bureaucrat.  You may get it more if you are one working in the arts.  I don't know.  "Come present something.  Anything.  We've got a few hours to fill and we have to make these teachers do something.  You do arts?  Great!  We never plan anything for them."  It's a babysitting gig.

Only it's not.  At least to me it's not.

The assignment feels like the first general music class I taught.  I was charged with watching 20-odd 7th graders and no one else cared what they learned from me.  My administrators were unfamiliar with my standards and ignorant of any music curriculum.  Brahms or The Beatles, dulcimers or digeridoos, I could have done anything I wanted.  I could have shown the Stomp! video each and every day and no one would have cared, as long as students weren't sent to the office and parents didn't call.  The message was clear: my subject did not matter, my professional skills did not matter, and as far as my class was concerned, my students didn't matter.

The thing was, I cared.  I cared a lot.  One of the first evaluations I received said, "Mr. Deskins is an excellent teacher.  His biggest fault is that he expects others to care about music class as much as he does."  Effin' right, that.  The rest of you have your #2 pencils and your scantron tests, your  team meetings and your curriculum maps and all the rest.  My students and I have the language of angels, glimmering forms that make time audible and make our souls quiver.  We have the giants of this Earth.  We have Bach and Mozart and Bird and Monk.  We have Moonlight Sonata and "Moonlight in Vermont."  We have rock and roll.  The rest of you can go screw.  What happens in this room matters.  

So here I am again.  "Come present.  We have some teachers who need watching for a few hours."  I'm going, but I'm not just watching them.  I'm going to try to engage them, to excite them again about the joys of teaching and the joys of the arts.  I'm going to try to help them see their students for who they are and see themselves for the rock stars I know they can be.  What we do will matter.

I had another large project that took the day yesterday, so I began my task today.  I spent a large part of my morning on the what.  I'd visited one of the schools in attendance one time for about an hour.  Based on that one visit, what could I bring to them that might aid their development as teachers?  I had a few ideas, but I didn't trust myself.  I wandered down the hall for inspiration.

I wandered into the office of my math colleague, Lou Maynus.  Lou is the math teacher I wish I'd had but never did.  I casually asked her what she was presenting on Monday.  Instead of a casual answer, Lou began talking of math practices.  She was excited.  Math matters to Lou.  It's hard to be around her and not think that math matters, too.  And not because of some damned test in the spring.  One senses that evangelical zeal as Lou begins expounding on algebra.  It's exciting to hear.

As we began to talk, Lou remembered that the aforementioned "intervention specialist" had not yet told us how many teachers we would each have in our sessions.  As I left Lou said she would give this person a call.

A few minutes later, Lou was in my office.  "You better come down and listen to this."

We walked to her cubicle.  She had the lady on the phone.

"I have Jack Deskins, the arts coordinator, here with me.  Tell him how many teachers will be in his session."

"Jack, we'll have 50 teachers there."

Now, I've presented to much larger groups than that, but I was mildly confused.  I understood that three schools would be in attendance and I knew that none had a dance teacher and only one had a theatre teacher.

"You have 50 arts teachers?!"

"Well . . . "

I know this pause.

"What are you calling 'arts teachers'?"

Breathe.

"Well, Ms. X, I'm calling arts teachers 'arts teachers': dance, theatre, visual art, and music."

"Oh.  See, I was including all of the related arts."

Now, for those of you not familiar with the double speak that is common in education, an explanation is in order.  The term "related arts" refers to courses that are not (in any special sense at least) "related," nor are many of them "arts."  In addition to actual arts courses, "related arts" can refer to any number of disciplines.  The interventionist went on to explain just which she meant.

"I was including foreign language, business, consumer science, health, physical education, drivers ed, and all of those teachers."

The message was becoming clearer.  None of these content areas matter.  None of these teachers matter.  Professional development doesn't matter.  

This is the message that was becoming clear to me from this "intervention specialist," an individual charged with transforming struggling schools.

"See, I was thinking of it like a principal," she went on to explain.  "I need some place for these teachers to go."

I explained to Ms. X that I would be unable to help her, that my area was the arts and that I was unfamiliar with the other content areas.  I told her that I would be happy to present to non-arts teachers if she knew of particular needs they had and I had some expertise in those topics, but of course, she didn't know.  I told her that my presentation, such as it was at this point, was geared toward those in the arts, which are special disciplines in themselves.

I know some of you will grin at my ire.  So be it.  Screw you.  This shit matters.

Why can't we change schools?  Because we go through motions.  We have a structure called "professional development" and we check our boxes and say that it has happened.  We have a template called "standards" and we agree that they are important and check another box.  We have a form called "assessment" or "faculty senate" or "intervention" or whatever, and we never get to the essence of the thing itself.  

We can't change schools because we believe that learning is just something that happens.  We don't cultivate a culture where real learning, the kind that makes students care about polynomials and gerunds, is fostered.  We don't move with intentionality through the process.  Our understanding of education is superficial because we view it as an ends to something else: a grade, a test score, a job.

We can't change schools because we have confused image and essence.  We have mistaken a few discreet indicators of student achievement for the achievement itself.  We've linked massive amounts of money and regulation to the indicators.  We have exchanged the glory of learning for an inglorious corruptible image.

In the arts you will occasionally hear the mantra, "Form follows function."  Popularized by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the proverb reminds artists that we must not elevate our structures, our templates, above the essence of the art.  For the architect it is a reminder that how ever glorious the façade, the house is pointless where one cannot sleep.  To the musician it is a warning that no matter how exact the sonata-allegro form (or the rondo or the twelve-bar blues), all is lost if audible time does not touch the heart.  Those who forget these lessons are called "mere formalists" and their work is branded "inorganic."  Theory be damned, it all comes to that Platonic question: what is the essence of the thing itself?

In education we have elevated form for such a long while that we have forgotten function.  What is the function of education, after all?  It is, as Robert Hutchins said, to "unsettle [students'] minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects."  It is to cause students to engage the world around them through language and figures and law and custom and observation and pitch and rhythm and motion and color.  It is to prepare them for lives of productivity, certainly, but not only as the world judges productivity.  It is to make them question and reason and care.

Students be warned, though: caring has a price.  Sometimes it leads to anger.  And sometimes it causes frustrating days.

The Dilemma of the Good Teacher

When you work in education, it's easy to become discouraged about national education reports.  Most of them are written by those with little understanding of education.  Nearly everyone believes they are experts in education, because everyone attended school.  As I have pointed out before, this would be like believing you understand surgery because you had an appendectomy.  Teachers cringe as state and federal legislators opine on the ills of public education.  "Yes, yes, senator.  Would that our schools were run as efficiently and as productively as you run our government."

Most national reports tie school success to achievement on a state standardized test designed to measure a narrow range of skills in literacy and numeracy.  There are many of us who question the validity of these tests.  There are many more who believe that too many of our schools have become dismal testing centers, largely due to the federal pressures of No Child Left Behind.  

One of these reports came out last week, and it has several of my friends and colleagues talking.  It is a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality.  The Council gave letter grades for teacher quality to each of the states and ranked them according to several factors.  West Virginia received an overall grade of D+, ranking it 41st in the nation.

If you are a good teacher, it is very difficult to not become angry and hurt when you read these reports.  You know that you've spent as many hours learning your profession as your friends in law, accounting, or medicine, only to be paid a fraction of what they earn.  You know that you work in one of the only fields where the practitioner is held entirely accountable for the performance of her client.  (We do not hold the doctor accountable for the health of an overweight smoker, nor a lawyer for the deeds of the murderer he represents.)  You know the hours you spent before and after school, offering extra help to students, assessing student work, talking to parents.  You remember the sleepless nights you spent worried about the student who lives in a tent in a cousin's back yard, or the one who asked for extra food in the lunch line because she wouldn't get dinner that night.  And you already beat up on yourself this week because you've tried everything you know to engage that one student, and he still stared at you blankly, looking at the clock above your head.

If you are a good teacher, here is what angers and hurts the most: you know that some of the things they say about teachers are true.  You work with a teacher who knows less about his subject than some of the students in his class.  You know the colleague who actually became a teacher because she didn't want to work in the summer.  (And for those of you not in education, teachers don't have a "summer vacation."  They are unemployed and unpaid for those weeks in June, July, and August.)  You remember the words of the co-worker who belittled a weak student or bad-mouthed him in the teacher's lounge.  You work across the hall from the one who cannot manage even the mildest group or whose students sit glassy-eyed through hour after hour of mind-numbing lecture.  Every day you see the teacher who arrives at school seconds before the kids come to his class and runs to "beat the buses" out of the parking lot.

If you are a good teacher, it's sometimes difficult to know where to focus your anger and frustration.  You became a teacher to change lives.  Instead you find yourself saddled with absurd district and state policies, hounded by inept administrators, and crippled by a lack of resources.  You spend hours planning creative, engaging lessons, only to be told that you must focus on a few narrow measures of student achievement - or that the subject you teach is unimportant.  You're sometimes given directives by janitors with an 8th grade education who refuse to empty your trash daily or by cafeteria workers who seem angry at you for no discernible reason.  You find yourself swimming in a sea of mystifying acronyms and submitting your lesson plans to the athletic director, yet no one comes to your class to see the joy of your students when they walk through the door.  You sit through hours of something called "professional development" where your principal spends most of the time discussing the cell phone policy and reminding you where you can't park, yet you're denied leave to attend a day at a conference featuring a nationally-known speaker that you are sure will give you a renewed sense of excitement about the classroom.

Then you open up the paper and there is another one of these damn reports.  You read it and you have a  familiar feeling well up inside of you.  You're angry at the multi-billion dollar foundation that sits around generating these reports.  You're angry at the journalists and politicians who will use it to justify not paying you a decent salary.  You're angry at the mindless bureaucracy that is at the root of so many of the problems.  And you have a special anger for those teachers who provide so much of the warrant for reports like this.

Many of the best educators I know here in West Virginia would agree with most of the following:

• It's much too hard to fire bad teachers simply for being bad teachers.
• It has become increasingly difficult to attract and retain good teachers.
• There are large groups of teachers entering the field who are under-prepared.

My opinion on this has not changed since I was in the classroom.  Far too many teachers lack the content knowledge and skills to be successful in the classroom.  I won't begin to speculate on a number or percentage or anything like that, but it's more than it should be.

In my career as an arts teacher and in my current gig I have met a large number of teachers who do not have a basic grasp of the art form they teach.  They have not mastered the rudiments of their craft and cannot begin to understand the nature of art and its role in human culture.  Because of this, they cannot, of course, help students master these skills themselves or gain deep understandings.  

As a music teacher, I looked at our West Virginia standards and saw some rigorous content.  I was expected to help my students learn to improvise, compose, and arrange music.  Yet many of my colleagues lack these basic abilities themselves.  How is it possible for a music teacher to guide a student through the compositional process if she has never composed herself?  How can he create an environment where students are comfortable improvising if he cannot improvise?  Too many of my peers could not even be bothered to master their primary instruments.  

My own professional preparation was fairly extensive.  I was a reasonably good music student in high school and entered as a double major in performance and education at WVU.  Because of this (and because I just really liked class), I completed 190 undergraduate hours.  I then went on to complete a masters degree in applied music, and have taken many, many hours since that time.  I can honestly tell you that in my entire academic career I have not taken one class that did not prove valuable to my work as a teacher.  That isn't to say that they were all stellar classes.  But none of them were fluff.  When I entered the music classroom I realized that there were still additional skills that I would have to master.

At least in the arts, I can honestly say that many teacher preparation programs are far from rigorous.  In most instances, this reflects the economic nature of our institutions of higher learning, not the abilities of the faculty in those colleges and universities.  These schools are forced to compete for student dollars, and schools that are extremely rigorous only attract students who are already motivated to perform.  The problem is that graduating high school seniors who are looking for a place to coast for four years can be sure they will find someone who'll take their money.

In West Virginia we're now faced with a Higher Education Policy Commission that wants to reduce the number of required hours for teacher preparation programs to 120.  (This will not apply to our state's two largest institutions, Marshall and WVU.)  The reason is simple economics: if a student cannot be guaranteed that he can complete college in four years, he'll spend his money elsewhere.  I firmly believe that you cannot get the skills necessary to become a successful teacher (or at least a successful arts teacher) in 120 credit hours.  I find this alarming and I'm surprised that more people don't.

The issue of teacher accountability is a thornier problem.  I honestly don't know of a single good educator who believes that teachers shouldn't be held accountable.  But it begs the question, "Accountable for what?"  Our federal government now requires that all teacher accountability be tied in some measure to tests that assess a narrow set of skills in literacy and numeracy.  If I am a teacher of dance, why would I be held accountable for student math scores?  And how can we hold teachers accountable for scores on a single test when we cannot demonstrate that students themselves have made a reasonable effort to perform well?

West Virginia's new proposed teacher evaluation system tries to minimize that requirement to 5% of the teacher accountability picture.  Having spent part of the last two weeks looking at it, I can honestly say that I think it's a relatively good system and that good teachers will welcome it.  The bulk of it is tied to our Professional Teaching Standards, which describe the skills a teacher must have to be successful in the classroom.

My friend Dave believes that teaching is an innate human skill that everyone possesses.  Dave's a smart guy and I love him to death, but he is completely wrong, of course.  If teaching were something that anyone could do, we wouldn't be having national conversations about teacher quality.  You could simply hire anyone and let him do the job.  Teaching is a difficult profession that requires a unique set of skills and a great deal of professional preparation.  In addition, it requires individual commitment to the field, to the subject, and to the students one teaches.

I firmly believe we need to raise the bar for teachers in our state, but we need to make sure it is a meaningful bar tied to the skills and dispositions that embody great teaching.  While we are raising that bar, we also need to raise their salaries and provide the resources they need to be successful.  Paying a bad teacher more will not make him better.  No one believes that raising someone's salary will result in additional skills, which is why meaningful teacher evaluation is important.  What we do know is that we are having increasing difficulty in attracting and retaining great teachers, as many of them leave our state or seek work in another field.  More importantly, we know that it's the right thing to do.