Roots of the Adversarial Education Culture?
Last night Chris Lehmann posted about the way that many figures in the education world view teachers more as adversaries than vital resources in the effort to educate our kids. I’ve been mulling over Chris’s post in my head since then, and while I am far from an expert I think there are a number of reasons for this viewpoint. That means there are a lot of things teachers (and others) have to do in order to correct the problem, but maybe a rough To Do list isn’t a bad place to start.
- Familiarity: I’ve noticed that writers in various creative endeavors often say that they get the brunt of criticism from people when something isn’t quite right. There’s a perception that writers have the easy job, that if they screw up it’s more egregious than if a director or an artist or what have you screws up. And they say that part of this is that even if the average person has never framed a shot or played a note, just about everyone has put words to paper. (Maybe not well, but that’s another story.) So there’s no mystery associated with the task. That mystery is a line of defense for other creators – we may know that we don’t like a song or a scene, but we don’t have a sense that we know why it’s wrong or a sense that we can do better. So we might not be as critical. What does this have to do with teachers? Well, we’ve all been students and many of us have been parents. We’ve been part of the classroom process and so we don’t feel like there’s any mystery – even if we’re not familiar with the behind the scenes work (prep, grading, lesson planning) that makes the classroom environment work. So we’re less forgiving of what we see as mistakes. Plus, since we’ve all been in classrooms, the odds are pretty good that we’ve had bad teachers at some point. I’d say I’ve had some bad teachers at every level since elementary school. I’ve had average teachers and excellent teachers too, but just like people will remember the one double play the second baseman screws up instead of the ten he turned successfully, those memories of bad teachers can become magnified and create an unease that teachers don’t know what they’re doing.
- Bad Word of Mouth: When I say that everyone knows a bad a teacher, I’m going to include teachers in that statement. I have had friends, family friends, acquaintances and associates who work in schools. Almost every one of them has had stories about teachers who aren’t up to the job. In fact, in the urban education course I took this past semester for my Master’s, I was assigned a book written by a former teacher at an urban school who warned prospective teachers not to let the bitterness and bad attitudes of experienced teachers get to them. Now, maybe that’s due to differences in styles, maybe it’s due to personal rivalries. But when people hear from people “on the inside� that there are bad teachers who don’t get called to account, that’s going to create a negative image of teachers and the organizations and officials that advocate teachers’ interests.
- Overall Anti-Unionism: Look at the flak that the United Auto Workers are taking in the discussion of the auto industry bailout. When you have a group that bands together to fight for its interests, it’s probably inevitable that an adversarial culture gets brought to the surface. Note that I say “brought to the surface,� not “created.� I think that in our society there’s always a conflict between employer and employee, but we often don’t notice it because the former can steamroll the latter. As union density decreases around the country, there’s a lot less worker solidarity. And even among union workers, if members of one union think that members of another are getting a better deal, there’s resentment – look at how some people treated the Writers Guild of America during their strike or the pressure on the Screen Actors Guild to avoid a strike now.
- Warped Incentives: I’m a few months from looking for a full time high school teaching job. And already I’m getting advice from more experiences teachers about how to identify the “good� districts and the “good� schools so that I don’t wind up in a “bad� school. Right now, just about every incentive pushes teachers away from teaching in urban schools where students really need good teachers – you can probably earn a higher salary, teach smaller classes, have more access to technology and other resources, be more likely to have students performing at grade level, and thus be less likely to face pressure based on measures like NCLB, in a wealthier district than a poorer one. To succeed in the profession is to get away from the places that need you most, unless you feel a personal calling to forego the aforementioned benefits. I think this can contribute to a perception problem.
- Empathy Gap/Misconstrued Policy: I don’t know why, and I don’t know how to correct it, but somehow teachers and education professionals have not been able to make the larger public feel and get outraged over the disparity in resources between poor and wealthy districts/neighborhoods. We hear politicians claim that we have been “throwing money at the problem� without success for years even while funding and spending statistics show how underfunded our poor schools are. Because we can’t get the public to focus on this underlying problem, all of the other problems I’ve mentioned get exacerbated, and the public and politicians start looking for someone to blame.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but part of me is exhausted having written it. Some of these are larger social forces that require us to look beyond education to our overall social fabric, and some of them represent ways that teachers need to think about how they portray themselves to the voting public.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.
December 28, 2008 @ 11:57 am