Conducting the Inner Light

I have cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post. I have been saying for some time that I would do this but the habit (really addiction) I have had towards newspapers goes back a long, long time. Not an easy one to break. The clincher for me was today’s editorial on Michelle Rhee, Ms. Rhee on trial.  That is not a link, you’ll have to go to the Post’s site yourself to read it.

Here is my problem with the Post’s attitude.  There is this one-sided view coming from their editors and Jay Matthews that the only people in this city who care about the school system and are doing anything about it are Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty.  That position having been taken, the Post has backed up Fenty and Rhee unambiguously, unreservedly, and without holding either accountable for their actions.  Today’s editorial is a good example.  That Ms. Rhee shamelessly manipulated the budget, and the city council’s dysfunction, to do what she wanted – that is fire teachers – is obvious to anyone who was at the hearing or has read the transcripts.  She hired 900 teachers despite having been warned that she faced a 12-13 million dollar deficit.  She ignored the council’s directive – which is law – and did exactly what she wanted.  Now, either the council is the lawmaking branch of our city or it isn’t.  Isn’t it the same way with our national government?  We live by the laws. We may protest the laws, we may commit acts of civil disobedience (and be arrested as a consequence) to protest those laws, but they are the laws and, until changed by the LAWMAKING body of our government, we are subject to them as law-abiding citizens.  But it isn’t just a question of whether Michelle Rhee was morally right in disobeying the council.  That is her excuse – that she is “acting in the best interests of the children”  it is a question of why she disobeyed the council.  She did it for Summer School.  Summer School?!!!!!!!

You have got to be kidding me? Right?  Any teacher in DC who has done time in summer school – and, let’s face it, that is exactly what summer school is, doing time – knows what a waste of people, time and money summer school is.  In our system, the way it works is as a kind of palliative – it promises to help a child who is behind catch up and be ready for the grade they will start in the fall.  The children arrive around 9 am and leave at 1 pm.  The kids you have there are a mixture of kids whose parents cannot afford daycare and the worst case kids in any given classroom.  You know the ones I mean – the ones who come into your classroom a year to two years behind, who substitute bad behavior as a form of ability, and who spend most of the day disrupting your lessons by acting out.  Put them all together for summer school and what do you get?  That is what needed saving?

So as not to sacrifice the high-quality, high-performing summer school program, Ms. Rhee affected cuts of teaching staff DURING the first quarter of school.  Again, as any teacher who has spent time in the classroom knows, this means that any teacher who takes over the class of a RIFFED teacher must start at sqauare one with that class – effectively making negligeble whatever progress that teacher made with that class.  If a child is already behind in level this isn’t going to help, in fact it could arguably hinder.  Ms. Rhee admitted that teachers were fired regardless of their quality so this also means that teachers who were perhaps effective in their classrooms were let go. Their class had to start at sqaure one with a teacher who has to establish trust, bond with the class and learn how to manage that class – oh, but these are intangibles that anyone with a big, red S on their shirt can manage – right?

The argument made by the Post, and many others, is that the Council’s hearing on Ms. Rhee’s actions were tantamount to a witch hunt.  Now the council is no paragon of civic responsibility but that does not make the hearings wrong.  Ms. Rhee is a public servent whose actions should be held accountable. Her tactics regarding the recent RIF, especially in light of some of the testimony by people who worked with her, are questionable and deserve the scrutiny of a hearing.  What does not serve the public interest is to let our officials work as if they are above such scrutiny.

I have read postings by teachers who have questions, good questions, questions that deserve full and comprehensive answers.  The Post isn’t asking these questions.  Their support is unequivical and blind. Of course they are doing well in this climate of test the students ad infinitum.  In today’s paper as well the Post has reported their losses and earnings as a company.  Their circulation is down almost 4 percent (as of today they can add me to that percentage, I’ve cancelled my subscription effective Monday), their ad revenue is down 28%, 27% in just the last 9 months, and their online revenue is down 18%.  What keeps them afloat?  Ta-da, Kaplan Testing Services.  The Post’s ownership of Kaplan is the company’s “biggest revenue generator.”  According to the Post itself this includes brick-and-mortar campuses “in addition to test prep.” $685 million in third quarter revenue is more than enough justification for them to support a Chancellor who sees teaching to the test as a way of getting the curriculum across.

Good people will leave our schools. They will leave our good schools and, what is even worse, our schools that need such people the most.  The mood in our system is terrible, the morale is at its lowest I have ever witnessed, and all the Post can do is recommend more of the same.  They are the doctor who amputates in place of trying to heal.

We allow ourselves to be fooled.  We fall into the traps of talking about ageism and racism instead of talking about what should be discussed – was this RIF, for any reason, necessary?  When the numbers are put out there more questions are raised than answered.  When Michelle Rhee answers questions, or, I should say, when she deflects questions or when anyone from her office pretends to answer questions, the only thing that seems to happen is an obvious deflating of the morale of teachers and more questions being raised. Good teachers, intelligent people, have some serious concerns and the benevolent dictator-like answers we are being given are not comforting in the least. No longer is it bearable to hear the words “you have to trust us” and “we are doing what we think best” and “if you knew what we knew than…”

Tell us what you know. Be transparent and trust us to decide what we think is right.  Ah, but then that would put some of these flimsy ideas in some very harsh light.  The only thing transparent about Michelle Rhee’s administration of our school system is in the quality of her ideas – truly, here we have the emporer standing naked.  We are given borrowed, half-worked-out ideas that have had mediocre results in other parts of the country; we are given an evaluation system that is, admittedly by the administration, vague and incomplete; we are told that we need to be treated like children because we do not know what is best for our schools.

The Post’s argument is that our system is so abysmal in performance that anything the Chancellor does is worthy of not only consideration but implementation.  They have yet to really examine any of the claims made about the effectiveness of these borrowed ideas or their effect on the workforce.  The Post should be apprised that the morale of teachers in the better schools in DC is as low as it gets.  John Kelly, in a recent comment on his online blog, dismissed what one teacher said by questioning whether it could possibly be Michelle Rhee defeating the morale of teachers instead of the fact that kids can’t read?  This is what the Post writers do – sit in their chairs and dismiss information coming to them from the working troops instead of going out and finding out if this is how all teachers feel.  Teacher morale is terribly low in every school in DC – not just the schools where there are “bad” teachers (God how I hate hearing that word – use effective or ineffective; this “bad” and “good” commentary is infantile and part of the problem). Is this what is wanted?  Do we throw out the good with the bad?  “The baby with the bath water” that is what I am hearing coming from the mouths of teachers and parents in these schools.

As for those of you who still believe what the Post printed in today’s editorial: Brother what’s it take to make you wise?  Do you really believe that we were ever going to see that money?  Look at that proposal again, please. Look at the fact that it takes four years to get to the highest earning potential on that chart. The private foundation funding for the bonus system is slated for four years after which the schools have to make up for that money by enrollment and managing the budget. The principals have the sole right to fire. What do you think they are going to go for:  high-paid veterans or lower priced, newer teachers. Sometimes the choice will not be theirs. This is already playing out in New York City, our very own test model for what Rhee and Fenty want to do here. Wake up.

I don’t advocate for senorioty simply on the basis of longevity.  A good school has a core of good, veteran teachers who are able to provide newer teachers with the culture and philosophy of that school.  They provide the continuity that gives consistency to the quality of education in the community.  I am very aware that in many DC schools that is lacking. But then the communities that many of those schools are in are lacking in many other things as well.  But that does not mean that destroying morale system-wide, in big, sweeping gestures, is an answer to those problems.  A good manager comes into a workplace and can discern pretty quickly what works and what doesn’t. That manager then shores up what is working and finds ways to fix what is not and to get rid of what can’t be fixed.  That is not what is happening here.  Wake up.

The other thing that parents in the NW keep hearing is about autonomy.  Once schools demonstrate an ability to score high on AYPs they will be given autonomy to work without downtown looking over their shoulder.  One parent said to me that when they questioned Rhee about autonomy for their school they were given the excuse that things weren’t there yet for autonomy to be put in place.  Give them autonomy lord, but not yet.  Promises, promises.

In a speech at Cornell university this week.  No mention was made of the budget cuts, none made about the layoffs.  But this was said:

“According to Rhee, he [Fenty] also refused to cut the budget of DCPS, asking that other departments shoulder more of the burden so that children did not have to pay for the mistakes of the adults.”

No matter what context you put that quote in, the fact that she made it without following up with what is happening now in our system speaks volumes to how Ms. Rhee manages.

Brothers and sisters, what’s it take to make you wise?

Joe Worker  from The Cradle Will Rock by Mark Blitzstein

Listen,  Here’s a story.

Not much fun and not much glory;

Low-class, low-down,

the thing you never care to see until there is a showdown.

Here it is.  I’ll make it snappy.

Are you ready?  Everybody Happy?

Joe Worker gets gypped.  For no good reason, just gypped.

From the start, until the finish comes,

They feed him from the garbage cans, They breed him in the slums.

Joe Worker will go

To shops where stuff is on show,

He’ll look at the meat,  He’ll look at the bread

and too little to eat sort of goes to the head.

One big question inside me cries:

How many fakers, peace undertakers, paid strike-breakers,

How many toiling, ailing, dying, piled up bodies,

BROTHER DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE YOU WISE?

So, do you still believe?

The rumors are just everywhere.  It reminds me of The Stalin Epigram by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam that goes like this:

Our lives no longer feel the ground under them/At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

Yes, we are talking quietly in the hallways these days. Whispers. Under the breath information being passed. Trust is completely gone. Fear, distrust, uncertainty seems to be the rule right now. People pass knowing looks in the hallways but say nothing. It seems as if the walls have ears (a line that makes me think of the walls actually having ears plastered on).

The problem is in the lack of transparency.  IMPACT is laid out for us but then we hear things, bit by bit. One rumor has the principal of one very well off Northwest school telling his staff that he has been instructed not to give 4s – that it is impossible to get a four on your evaluation.  Rumors fly of layoffs at other schools – 4 hear, 6 there – nothing certain.  Then there are the articles slowing making their way into the news – at least on the Wire – the Post’s online blog.  Things seem to be seeping towards the surface, like toxins in the soil.  In a piece on today’s wire, Rhee Cutbacks Neither Mismanagement Nor Malice, there is a letter from a former central office employee states:

It was stated that any teacher who has been in the classroom more than five years had to be ineffective and needed to be replaced. Instructions were given that evaluations must not be higher than “needs improvement” regardless of performance. It was stated that the intent was to build a case for dismissal. Anyone refusing to adhere to these commands in carrying out the evaluation process met with harsh consequences.

This lines up quite nicely with the quote from the NW principal.  Our own principal has been so vague that a job as a congressperson wouldn’t be out of character.  Many of us are feeling more than a little screwed.

Any rumors out there you’d care to share? Anything anyone is hearing?  Without transparency we are left with this.  What a sad state of affairs.

Tonight I went to the WTU emergency Building Representative Meeting.  This was called by George Parker on Sunday in a robo-call. I am not a building rep, being only rank-and-file, but I went with my building’s rep to see what it would be like.  I was extremely curious if this would be as raucous and crazy a meeting as last happened at McKinley almost a year ago this month.  It wasn’t.

Tonight was a much more controlled affair, for the most part.  There were some angry voices, and some shouting at George – inevitable really, the guy runs meetings the way the Nationals play ball, you keep wondering how he got where he did – but, all in all, the meeting was civil.  There were talks of quoroms and strikes and sick-outs and work to the rule and, in the end, not much was decided or even accomplished.

The most interesting part of the evening for me was when the meeting heated up about the planned protest scheduled by other members of the board for Thursday at 4 pm. Asked if he supported the protest George responded that he did not. His reasons were that an ineffectual protest with just 300 members showing up would do our cause more harm than good (he should know ineffectual).  George has his own protest in mind and he thought that we as a group should provide it with a theme. I turned to Nathan Saunders, who was sitting near me, and said “it’s like naming the lifeboats on the Titanic.”  We’re going down and this guy wants us to give it a name.

So, there we all were, all day, sitting at the lunch tables, listening and watching and each and every one of us feeling more and more demoralized as the day went on.  What exactly is the purpose of this rehashed bunch of tired ideas? I think demeaning is a word I would use.  Some of us are now tagged as teachers with value. The rest have no value? Well, that’s the way to build the kind of spirit your school system needs. Value added in. I feel like a can of coke – Just add the value, pour it in.

The lower grades will have a part of their assessment based on Dibbels. Dibbels for God’s sake!! Dibbels is supposed to be used as a tool for teachers to gage where there student’s are strong and where they are weak. You use it to see where you need to help that child. While tests do perform the same function it isn’t the same thing. On top of this we also find out that the evaluation process is not complete. Some of it, the basis for Non-Value Added, for instance, will be determined later. Have you ever given your students a test and not told them what they would be tested on. It’s like giving an assignment and saying the rubric will be determined later.

I also could not believe the baseball analogies we were given.  We’re in a baseball game.  But if we were would you really want to play for a coach who made you feel so lousy about your position?  A new teacher told me that the speech given at the New Teacher Orientation was equally dispiriting.  Just what is the thinking here? Does anyone really believe this to be productive? Constructive? At least doing no harm?

I found myself so filled with anger while sitting there listening to the administrator (the bearer of ill news) and reading the information and thinking that some consultant and a Teacher for a Year were paid quite a lot of money to come up with this mind-dead document. The level of imagination here is non-existent.

I loved, too, the teaching clips we watched. The “best” teacher didn’t even know how to pronounce the name of Daedalus (from the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus) – she kept saying Deedlius.  I thought at the beginning she said Delius and was wondering how she confused Daedalus with an early 20th Century English composer.  Besides the wrong pronunciation she has now passed on to her many students (how many years has she been teaching this story this way?) she also managed to give them a very misguided interpretation of Pieter Brueghal’s famous painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.  Somehow it is a painting that demonstrates that we really should be looking out for one another. Go figure. I always felt that the true meaning of Brueghal’s painting was distilled beautifully in W.H. Auden’s poem, The Musee des Beaux Arts.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W.H. Auden 1940

A poem about sufferring and how life goes blandly on while sufferring occurs. Yes, today we knew sufferring. For myself I have somewhere to get to and must sail calmly on.

Today the Washington Post in an editorial decided to not just advocate or defend but to act as a spokesperson for Mayor Adrian Fenty. In an editorial entitled A School for the Fentys the Post editorial board did what Mr. Fenty has refused to do and Ms. Rhee has only alluded to, that is explain in more detail why his children ended up at Lafayette Elementary School in the NW – one of the three most desireable schools in the district for parents to send their kids.  The editorial has much faulty thinking and reasoning not the least of which is the idea that the Fenty boys, twins, could not be in the same classroom at their own neighborhood school, West Elementary. While it is true that it is best to have twins be in different classrooms it is not the end of the world if they end up in the same classroom – it does happen (it did at my school).

Another example of the Post’s faulty reasoning is this line: “…-Ms. Rhee – using a process employed for other families in similar circumstances – assigned the boys to Lafayette.  This is faulty as well as desembling.  The Fenty’s bypassed a process used by other families – they not only skipped to the head of the line but were allowed entrance after the doors were closed. Lafayette had stopped taking out-of-boundary students by the time the Fenty’s made their decision. To suggest that they followed the lottery process just as everyone else does (and must) and received their spots legitimately is a slap in the face to each and every family that could not get their kids into the same school.

I won’t go into the obvious problem of what the Fenty’s did to get their kids into Lafayette. His actions and his response to journalists about his actions speaks for themselves. My problem is with the Washington Post.  It is imperative that we have a local newspaper that investigates and reports, not advocates and ignores. The Post has backed Mayor Fenty in most of his endeavors. They have treated transgressions by Fenty and failures by Michelle Rhee with kid gloves, often pushing these stories onto their online blog The Wire.  They refuse to pursue any story that might suggest that things are not going so smoothly on the education reform front, consistently advocating that Fenty and Rhee be allowed to do what they need to do to change the system in DCPS.  What the Washington Post does not state in any of their editorials or articles on education is that they are the owner of the Kaplan Testing Services and that Kaplan makes more money for the Washington Post then their newspaper.  They have such a big dog in this fight that the idea that they are an unbiased observer, able to report the facts of the issues and give the public at large a balanced view of what is happening, is patently absurd.

The Washington Post has a responsibility to acknowledge their conflict of interest and make clear with each, and every, editorial in which they back school reform in DC by way of Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee, that they have a vested interest in this reform taking place. After all, reform brings more testing and more testing means more customers for your Kaplan books and Kaplan tutoring programs as well as your testing services.

When others suggest, as DC Teacher Chic did in an online Tweet, that this is much ado about nothing I would direct them to go back a week or two and listen to Michelle Rhee’s podcast in which she says she sees nothing wrong with teaching to the test and implies that this is in fact getting the curriculum across to our students. It matters greatly if our biggest, and most prestigious, city newspaper is abrogating its responsibility to report in favor of advocating for its financial interest. The Fenty’s bypassing a process through political clout is a story that, had their name been Barry, would have been a front page, serialized investigation. Look hard at this picture and you will see what is so very wrong with it.

This morning in the Washington Post I read an essay by Sarah Fine, a soon-t0-be former teacher, about why she can no longer stay in the teaching profession.  Teachers leaving the profession after a couple of years or even, as in Ms. Fine’s case, several years is the biggest drain to our educational system.  At the end of her essay Fine states that having teachers who teach for more than a few years “is critical to school reform.”  I would amend that and say it is critical to education period whether reform is needed or the school is doing well already.  But I also felt there was some dishonesty in this article. Not so much that Fine was deliberately dishonest but that I had the feeling she never really questioned why she was teaching in the first place.  For me the latter half of the article contained the nut of truth – that is that the profession lacks the prestige and accord that makes it a worthy choice for an intelligent, and well-educated person; that teaching is seen as “a second-rate profession”; that people she meets on planes or trains condescend to her choice. These reasons seem to be the stronger reason for her leaving. I dare say it is a reason many leave.

Time and again I have come across this complaint in teacher blogs – especially, I hate to say, first year teacher blogs that begin with such enthusiasm and then move towards griping and complaining and a cynicism that does nothing to help education or the profession of teaching.  All too often I see little insight, very little self-awareness or true introspection, and instead a list of complaints about everything that is wrong with their school (except for themselves, of course) and education in general.  Fine offers no ideas on what needs to be done, she simply gives the reasons for her departure, laments that education needs more than “one year wonders” and that  “Four year wonders are better than nothing, but still not enough.”  To me this is a palliative that she offers herself, a little lie, “at least I stayed longer than others” she tells us and herself.  Yes, she stayed longer and she should be commended for staying at all. Teaching is the hardest profession there is and anyone who tries, no matter how long, should be given respect for that attempt.

I have been teaching for six years now. I entered into teaching as a DC Teaching Fellow.  It is a program not dissimilar to Teach for America but aimed at a different group – people who have already established themselves in another walk of life who are looking to bring that experience into the classroom. Ostensibly, at least, that is what DCTF claims.  For myself it was partly that – a second career after having done other things – but I had always wanted to be a teacher. It was something that hovered in the back of my head all through the other career I had chosen and jobs I had worked at: that someday I would teach.  Easy enough said, I know, but doing it is another thing entirely.  With teaching the dreams and desires you may carry into the classroom are truly tested and they are tested by fire. You really get to see how strong your convictions are when placed in the context of teaching, regardless of the type of classroom you are in. However, teaching in the urban environment that DCTF places teachers is an even more exacting crucible than any other place I can think of.  You find your beliefs tested rigorously, some will stand the test and become stronger than before, some will change and grow from the experience, some you will discard and realize how weak they really were.

For me teaching is a vocation. A calling.  It requires of me the same degree of commitment that faith requires, a commitment that does not waver regardless of the number of trials that rattle the windows and shakes the foundations.  The title of this blog comes from a quote by William Stafford, a great teacher and poet, He says “I’m a priest of the imagination, and when I go to class my job is conducting the inner light of those people to wherever it’s going…” That for me is the essence of what I do daily. I am conducting the inner light, the inner intelligence, of these children. I am their guide, helping them to find their way, setting up signposts for them to be able to read and make their way, to chart their own course. Some may not realize it right away. Their appreciation for what I do may come at a much later time in their lives. For right now they will fight and curse me and consider me the bane of their existence.  In some cases that realization will never come. For some, though, I see the recognition in their eyes that they understand and even appreciate what I am doing.  The parents of these children are no different. I am grateful for those that see this and appreciate what I do and a little sad for those that do not.  But neither defines who I am or what I do.

Those that can’t do teach. That is the phrase I heard as a young boy and one that I still hear today. One of my students even said it in my room last year.  For me that has always been our society’s true attitude about teaching. It reflects in the speaker a true poverty of the imagination.  Those that cannot see the true value of a teacher, of what we bring to society on a daily, working basis, deserve not an iota of respect.  I often marvel at the number of people who seem to think that made it in the world without the help of teachers or mentors.  So many self-made men and women. We are a nation of the self-made.  And yet how highly these self-made folk value their piece of sheep’s skin conferred upon them by a place of learning.

I didn’t go into teaching for the acclaim of others.  I certainly didn’t go into for the money.  Would I like a little of both? Surely, I am human. But the lack of either does not change what I do or why I do it.  That a portion of the American public, to quote Fine, sees teaching as a second-rate profession means very little to me.  They also see Michael Jackson’s death as a tragedy for the arts instead of the squalid end to a very strange existence that had ceased, long ago, to be truly creative.  I look for deeper reasons for what I do. I look within myself for what these reasons are and I place no monetary value on these reasons.  I do what I do for the necessity within me to be a teacher. For being a teacher is the greatest gift I possess and to share that gift with my students is the best thing I can do.

Paolo Freire, as with many things, said it best. In his book Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach Freire said:

“It is impossible to teach without the courage to love, without the courage to try a thousand times before giving up. In short, it is impossible to teach without a forged, invented, and well-thought-out capacity to love… We must dare so that we can continue to teach for a ong time under conditions that we know well: low salaries, lack of respect, and the ever-present risk of becoming prey to cynicism. We must dare to learn how to dare in order to say no to the bureaucratization of the mind to which we are exposed every day. We must dare so that we can continue to do so even when it is so much more materially advantageous to stop daring.”

I guess I should begin by saying Hello. I have been blogging for the last several years on my blog As the Way Opens but felt the need to start a second blog. Why do so? Well, I want to keep the Way as my place to discuss general issues that concern me, (such as art, film, literature and politics) and leave it free from being an education blog. I was finding, however, that the more I commented on other educator’s blogs the more I was finding myself wanting to write posts about education issues.  Hence Conducting the Inner Light.  The title comes from a statement made by one of my favorite poets, William Stafford:

“I’m a priest of the imagination, and when I go to class my job is conducting the inner light of those people to wherever it’s going…”

Whenever I read an interview with Stafford and he talks about what teaching means to him I find myself rejuvenated for my job, as if he has restored my own inner light. To me this is what teaching truly is, this guidance.  This, too, is the reason for my blog name, Lodesterre. It comes from Chaucer and is middle English for the lodestar, the star that all sailors guide themselves by.  This is what teaching is, guidance, conducting, helping others find their way, their voice, their inner vocation.

I may republish a few of my posts from As The Way Opens that talk about education, simply as a way of stating my philosophy.

So, greetings. I hope you enjoy the blog and I certainly hope you will participate.

Lodesterre