Getting Honest About Things

Recently I found myself returning from a working trip feeling weighed down by the knowledge that I am losing my job because of Congress’s desire to be more fiscally responsible. Oddly, being laid-off requires me to do the work I have always done plus the work that goes with closing out a job plus the work of beginning a new job search. On top of that, I came home to flower and vegetable gardens in need of some serious TLC. Having to pluck weeds, deadhead flowers, and do all the tasks that go with harvesting fresh veggies was going to steal valuable time in my day, time I could scarcely afford.

I started the flowerbed work annoyed, pulling out weeds with speed and determination. But, to my surprise, each time I looked up and saw a blossom or paused to watch the hummingbirds that buzzed my head, I slowed down a bit. Eventually, the weed pulling became a transformative experience. As I meandered from flowerbed to herb bed to vegetable patch, my mind began to wander too, making connections, drawing insights, developing ideas. I began to wonder - as I had read in a e-zine not too long ago -  if in our fast-paced, productivity-focused lives and workplaces, we are losing our gardens, our literal and figurative places that allow us to wander, to question, to think, to create, to reflect, to restore.

On the first leg of my last working trip to Berkeley, I was on the plane for about 75 minutes. When I opened by email as I awaited my connecting flight, I had received over 40 new email messages. As I sat trying to respond to the messages that seemed most important, the email dings kept ringing out. "How can I possibly keep up?" I wondered. “I’m doing the best I can just to paddle my little sinking boat right now.”

Then I realized, I can’t keep up. NWP is losing 60% of its staff and going through a major, unanticipated reorganization. Come September 1, I will be unemployed for the first time in 39 years. Where I live there are limited prospects for future employment. The job nibbles that I have received do not provide health care and offer a monthly salary smaller than my projected monthly COBRA payment. I am trying to keep my head above water on the personal front. But in the meantime, writing project directors and leaders with whom I’ve built strong personal and professional relationships are seeking a sense of direction, requesting information, trusting that I will listen to them think aloud about their own next steps. The emails keep coming."I have no time to think," I say to myself.

I have no time to think. Then I realize that these are the six scariest words I can say just now. 

It is not that I am unproductive; I am astoundingly productive. I produce deliverables. I seek out and recommend resources. I make decisions. I manage the closing out of programs and budgets. I coach blog talk radio shows. I direct those seeking clarifying information, answers to question, resources and support for moving forward in uncertainty.

Actually, in some ways, my productivity is the problem. Something is lost in this odd environment of manic productivity: time to reflect and learn.

In the busy-ness of losing my job, I am rarely analyzing my experiences thoughtfully, contemplating the views of others carefully, or evaluating how the outcomes of my current decision-making will influence future organizational choices. Such things take time. They require me to slow down. Who has the time for that? My job loss, which had originally paralyzed me, has now  thrown me into manic overdrive that can only be geared down by honest reflection on what I am losing, by pausing to see what it is that I can learn from my current circumstances, by pausing to contemplate both my personal next steps as well as my organizations next steps.

I have heard many say that when life is forcibly disrupted, we slow down long enough to learn. The death of a loved one, an illness, the loss of a job— they compel us to stop and think and evaluate things. 

Wouldn't it be great if we could learn continuously without forced disruptions? If we could disrupt ourselves for a few moments every day in order to reflect and learn? If we could meander through the metaphorical garden? I wonder if NWP needs a few minutes to return to the places where it does its best thinking - member sites -  and pause to reflect, create, and come back with a renewed spirit.

The intellectual conversations that I have had with National Writing Project friends and colleagues over the past 26 years have reliably provide me with a refreshing walk in the metaphorical garden. Yet I realize that I will no longer experience their generosity in the same way. While I can still call on my work friends and say, "Do you have a few minutes to think about something with me?" it will not be the same.

Now, I hope I am honest enough to allow my metaphorical and literal gardens to remind me that I have to prioritize reflective thinking over manic activity. It won't change the uncertainty of my future, but it will allow me time space to better understand what I am experiencing and time to let hope, like the hummingbirds, buzz my head and demand my attention.

Today I'm sharing a blog post from "Bridging Differences." Diane Ravitch talks about the morals of leadership and educational reform. 

What Works Best: Help or Punishment?

Posted: 17 May 2011 07:06 AM PDT

Dear Deborah,

Your last column reminded me of fruitless debates that I have had with education "reformers" who are extremely certain about their views. They are convinced that they have exactly the right solutions for fixing schools—firing teachers and closing schools—and that anyone who disagrees with them is a "defender of the status quo." I have heard exactly this charge, again and again.

A friend and former student, Kevin Kosar, created a fascinating graph in which he traced the historical usage of the term "failing schools." The term was seldom used until the mid-1990s, when it appeared with frequency. After 2000, it became a common term. Now we hear public officials use the label often and unquestioningly. There are many ways to interpret Kosar's chart. Perhaps there was an explosion of "failing schools," beginning in the late 1990s; or, perhaps federal policy created the terminology, preferring to blame the schools for low performance rather than to look at other possible causes, such as poverty, language, or resources. So are the schools failing because the staff is incompetent, or do the schools have low scores because they serve many children with high needs? I tend to think it is the latter, but the corporate reformers are quite certain that schools with low scores are "failing schools" and should close. They say that such schools can't be fixed and must close as soon as possible; anything less would mean putting adult interests over those of children. As time goes by, we learn that many of the new schools eventually become "failing schools" if they enroll the same children; many "succeed" by removing or avoiding low-performing students.

A few months ago, I spoke at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California. It is a Catholic university, located on a beautiful campus. After my talk, a member of the faculty gave me a ride back to my hotel in San Francisco. He spoke about his long career in parochial education and why he had become a college professor, mentoring many Catholic schools in the region. At one point he had been the principal of an elementary school. I asked what he did about teachers who were not doing a good job, and he described the help and support he and others would provide. I asked what he thought of the current zeal to fire "bad teachers." He said something I will never forget. He said that we must remember that one has a moral obligation not to terminate someone's livelihood and career without long and hard deliberation; to do so, he said, required taking responsibility for ruining someone's life. We talked about the "reformers" who are almost gleeful in their zeal to fire teachers. He thought that they failed to recognize the moral dimensions of leadership.

I thought, too, about a panel I was on in New Orleans last fall. One of my fellow panelists was John Jackson of the Schott Foundation for Public Education. He said that he had recently visited some high-performing nations, and at each stop he would ask someone from the ministry of education: "What do you do about bad teachers?" The answer invariably was, "We help them." And he asked, "What if you help them and they are still bad teachers?" And the response was, "We help them more."

What do I conclude from these disparate thoughts? I think we are dealing with two very different mind-sets. One sees the school as a community, a place of learning where there is an ethical obligation to support both staff and students, helping both to succeed. The other sees schools as one part of a free-market economy, where quality may be judged by data; if the results aren't good enough, then fire part or all of the people and close the store, I mean, the school and pick a new location. The former looks to teamwork and mutual support as guiding principles; the other prizes competition, leading either to rewards or punishments.

What's scary is that we now see the advance of the free-market ideology across many states—Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, for example. We see strong support for the market basis of schooling in both No Child Left Behind and in Race to the Top. We see it with the advance of charters, for-profit online corporations, virtual charters, merit pay, and the proliferation of charters as a panacea. We see a continuing campaign to dismantle public education, privatize it, and turn it over to entrepreneurs of various stripes.

So, I come back to where I started: Do I defend the status quo? Absolutely not. The status quo is firmly tied to test-based accountability, to punishing the people who work in schools instead of giving them the support they need to succeed. The status quo is indefensible. The defenders of the status quo are the corporate reformers, who want to tighten the grip of No Child Left Behind, who cannot imagine schools that can function effectively without competition for rewards and punishments for low scores.

The debates don't seem to change their views. Neither does evidence that their "solutions" don't work. Neither does the fact that the top nations in the world are not pursuing privatization and de-professionalization as cures for education. Perhaps someday they will recognize that their ideas don't work. Or they will get bored and move on to some other pastime.

Diane

meandering channels: A Rural Perspective

meandering channels: A Rural Perspective: "An apology to my readers: I am not a blogger. However, the current political and public climate surrounding conversations about ..."

A Rural Perspective

An apology to my readers: I am not a blogger. However, the 

current political and public climate surrounding conversations 

about schools and learning prompts me to speak up in ways 

that are more public.

In my heart, I am a teacher. Always have been.  Always will be.  

For 29 years, I taught in two small rural Mississippi schools. 

At my last school, I was the only teacher of 8^th grade reading and 

English students. Lucky me! That is the grade level and two of 

the three subject areas that Mississippi posts in its newspapers to 

demonstrate NCLB compliance for accountability. It was not 

just the school's aggregated scores that appeared in the paper – it 

was MY students’ scores. As the lonely,only reading and 

English teacher for my grade in my school, I could have 

suffered from the geographic and professional isolation 

that is so often part of a rural teacher’s life. 

Fortunately, I was part of a National Writing Project local 

site where I had access to a rich, professional learning 

community. I was not alone.

At present, I am a Program Associate with the National 

Writing Project.As part of my work, I take what I know

about living, teaching, and learning in a rural place to 

advocate for other rural teachers, and students. My rural 

colleagues face challenges that are common to the 

education process everywhere, but they also face unique 

challenges that are often invisible in discussions about 

school reform and good teaching. Even with the 

“rural preference” that is given in some Race to the 

Top funding competitions, with few exceptions rural 

schools find themselves in the margin of educational 

policy. (The I3 competition is an example of how 

little today’s policymakers seem to understand about 

how innovation and reform happens in rural schools.

I marvel that New York City Schools received “rural 

advantage points” in the I3 competition. But that

 is another story.)

The National Writing Project, unlike some educational 

agencies, does not leave rural teachers in the margins. 

At the heart of NWP is the notion that“every person is 

an accomplished writer, engaged learner, and active 

participant in a digital, interconnected world.” NWP 

intentionally promotes equitable opportunities for teachers 

across geographic boundaries.Rural writing project teachers 

have no need to compete against their urban colleagues. 

Rather, they are invited into a professional community 

that values their knowledge of the unique needs of rural 

students as well as the educational concerns they hold in 

common with urban teachers. Rural voices are integral 

to the collective national conversations about teaching 

and learning and are part of the data that inform 

NWP research.

Many engaged in rural schooling have come to 

believe that educational innovation and reform 

will not come from investments in scripted programs, 

more testing or competition for funding. Rather it will 

come from investing in professional development 

and leadership growth opportunities for “lonely, only” 

teachers in small schools across America. This is what 

the National Writing Project does best. It is one of the 

few educational organizations today that understands 

that a rural teacher may be the one - the one who 

is the entire high school Science Department, the one 

who teaches reading and English to an entire grade 

level, the one with four preparations for four different 

subjects, the one EL specialist who serves an 

entire K-12 school – who may reform a school by 

engaging in careful inquiry about her own classroom 

practice and how it impacts student learning.

 NWP matters.

 NWP values the voices of teachers in the smallest 
most remote parts of our nation, in the largest urban 
centers, and places in between. Listen to their stories.