tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3127151275195663342024-03-13T19:09:39.623-04:00CareyThinkingMartha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-68613780425077215332023-03-09T10:55:00.006-05:002023-03-10T14:33:49.377-05:00Paths of Motion<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilvHFilvtqBua6P6xeY4pprJU4BLDh-K6izb__IlQlMdNAXCuCt0I41hx0hGW9IsceUi3cqAk7AxUkymjGUZ2rDbd4BeLbRstMign61NX9exhAVB0rm-az3gnrGXCr4MBln00WGk2nxR0IiWiGbdTdPFKDfbxl97xWBUkxpdeOXPnBifE4qvaaIyOC/s564/Objects%20of%20No%20Concern.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="564" data-original-width="551" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilvHFilvtqBua6P6xeY4pprJU4BLDh-K6izb__IlQlMdNAXCuCt0I41hx0hGW9IsceUi3cqAk7AxUkymjGUZ2rDbd4BeLbRstMign61NX9exhAVB0rm-az3gnrGXCr4MBln00WGk2nxR0IiWiGbdTdPFKDfbxl97xWBUkxpdeOXPnBifE4qvaaIyOC/w253-h259/Objects%20of%20No%20Concern.jpg" width="253" /></a></div>Thinking about care (from afar) of our Dad who has dementia, and who is slowly fading, brings up past grief for our lost Mom, and it brings up so much fear. A friend suggested to me the other day that, since I was trained from early on to think my way through things and rewarded for the use of my brain in intellectual pursuits, there must have been an accompanying fear about the loss of that ability. A fear we never talked about in my family. <p></p><p>Then Mom died of a glioblastoma in her brain stem and Dad is losing his grip on his mind as we watch and wait and just try to keep him safe. My sister and I talk about this present moment, where he is now and what time is like for him, and that leads to talk about Mom and what happened to her, how sudden and terrifying and weirdly acute it was. She was the one who taught us to use our brains for self-protection, as the marker of identity, as the management tool for complicated feelings, as the place to shove unwanted or confusing things. These were some of her survival skills. She died at 60 when she was betrayed by her brain. </p><p>Nothing I could do after she died could help me manage the loss and love and grief; I could never think my way through that. And I have, I see now, very poor skills at living with grief. Having a parent with dementia is like grief telling me to get a guest room inside myself ready for a permanent stay, but in order to do so I have to find the space and create the plans and make the walls -- and I have so few tools and such little material to build with, I am bereft.</p><p>I look backward (as I am sure all of us dealing with grief do in these moments) and see times when there was loss, when I lost someone, and it can overwhelm. Learning to let it happen means really recognizing how hard a life of loss is. Means seeing how hard parts of my life have been, because I loved people and then they were gone and I did not know how to let that in. I did not understand that I have been brokenhearted. Or that feeling the intensity of loss is real and good and a part of living that is pervasive, common, and expected. </p><p>Last week I recalled a childhood friend who died in a boating accident at 15, and I allowed myself to remember that I loved him, that I had met him in second grade and that I had looked forward to being in high school with him, that he made me laugh, that he was wry, that he was sweet. It was hard to fight through the fear of facing that memory. But I am learning that if I can make space for those good memories and those real feelings, and that loss that is so real to me, then it may be possible to build guest rooms inside myself and to make the space for all that love, the space for grief. <br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"> </div>Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-11889542109050522582023-03-02T18:43:00.002-05:002023-03-02T18:47:25.452-05:00Mapping<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY_seXR94xw_pOXNA4wgbXrHK7dM8GRQvvGKKsepB0BiukYurgJ7y6ohUn_mjAcLFUYbsoPJFUtVqHQEI_z6P-IZR-OTouVjjOvCnA6KUWEnJfHU0_RI3AXmIbtSz1Hu0Y4N7YMgTw2cQ/s1600-h/atgranitefallsweb.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5345816715236216658" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY_seXR94xw_pOXNA4wgbXrHK7dM8GRQvvGKKsepB0BiukYurgJ7y6ohUn_mjAcLFUYbsoPJFUtVqHQEI_z6P-IZR-OTouVjjOvCnA6KUWEnJfHU0_RI3AXmIbtSz1Hu0Y4N7YMgTw2cQ/s200/atgranitefallsweb.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 150px;" /></a>From what I can recall from childhood, Connecticut summers regularly featured thunderstorms in surround-sound, and the humidity made the season feel like it was always <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">on</span> you, not around you. The summers I spent in Minnesota as a 20-something were the antithesis; you could see the thunderheads building from across the flat, and you could watch the sky turn from blue to green to black, storm directly over you, and then quickly reassemble its calm blue face. <br /></p><div>
</div><div> </div><div><div> <div> </div><div>The clouds in Minnesota bundled together at the end of the day and were pulled offstage like a cluster of balloons. The sky in Connecticut was more like the pale-hued wall of a hospital or a school, a wall propped up between you and the Long Island Sound. Some days were grey/blue, some grey, some white. And at night the cloud wall would stretch out to the horizon and settle into a deeper grey. The sky was never fully dark -- too much ground light from the densely packed suburbs, and from Manhattan, 30 miles away -- and never really clear enough to see many stars.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>
<div> </div><div>The beach in our town was built on a point jutting out into the Long Island Sound, so that even though the coastline ran along the town's southern edge, you could go to the point and stand on a beach and look east, out to the imagined Atlantic and then Spain and then Mongolia. Or you could stand on another stretch of beach and look southwest and (squinting) see the skyline of lower Manhattan, or you could stand on another small beach and look straight south, across to the mundane mirror shoreline of Long Island. This was the unchanging geography of my childhood. </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>The geography of adulthood is still being mapped. The sky in Wyoming on a September night was overflowing with stars, and I felt, looking up, as if I was falling into a pool of crystals -- just as my husband had promised I would. I don't recall the sky from my years in Boston; I spent that time looking down, or sitting in a class, or waiting for the T. And our first summer in northerly Seattle, it seemed as if the sky just moved from blue to deep blue to indigo, though the pines blackened at night.</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>Then, in Northern California, south of foggy San Francisco, west of the scorching central valley, in a spot between the muggy bay to the east and, to the west, the foothills that hold the seawall back at night. There were so few clouds. I was unaccustomed to the colors there, having grown up in a world that was, in every possible way, a muted palette (the milky purple crocuses coming up by the church on the hill on the Post Road counted as "vibrant" there) and having lived for years in the northwest, where it seemed everything but the sky was some tone of green. </div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>Even my <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">car</span> looked like a different color there, a funky super-infused purple. And the gardens in my neighborhood were ridiculous with reds. My eyes were newly saturated with the intensity of color and the yellow-white daylight of the here that has always <i>been</i> here (so different than the cool white of Minnesota days) and this made me weep with relief.</div></div></div></div>Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-79577399403800849192023-03-02T18:41:00.000-05:002023-03-02T18:43:58.030-05:00World of Wonders<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfDBClGSFQJBVQp7tm6ie2BfFBf9ceBQ7c_KhcLuDvnjiIlm3KRF-QIXJL53NgJ38zvIlfQbChcIht8gaIiggHq6B3GKduYQF80vYLNpWBemYwteuvyypJHGPBzHRR4CPD9MxaMwa9pgk/s1600/The+first+rocket+flamed+to+heaven.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5485465742943353922" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfDBClGSFQJBVQp7tm6ie2BfFBf9ceBQ7c_KhcLuDvnjiIlm3KRF-QIXJL53NgJ38zvIlfQbChcIht8gaIiggHq6B3GKduYQF80vYLNpWBemYwteuvyypJHGPBzHRR4CPD9MxaMwa9pgk/s200/The+first+rocket+flamed+to+heaven.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 200px;" /></a>Every human starts out with one cell and we develop, via regulatory processes we are still learning about, into a collection of about 10 trillion cells. To date those 10 trillion cells have been categorized into about 300 types, and we know how to turn one type of cell into another type, and we know that different cells seem to have different preferences about where they like to live and what surfaces they like to grow on. And we know that the proteins within cells cluster together. Just like stars.<div>
</div><div> </div><div>Another thing we know now is that "waltzing" pairs of black holes way way way out in space do their dance (follow their pattern of movement) in a way that echoes the movement pattern of electrons in their little tiny orbits around tiny nuclei in tiny atoms. This seems both revelatory and common sensical -- that the movement in atoms, which make up all stuff, echoes the movement of all objects made of stuff. </div><div> </div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>But who is the "we" I am referring to here? How many people really have an active engagement in the connections between atomic motion and the motion of invisible, immortal celestial bodies? And of course there is the question of what one <i>does</i> with the knowledge. Does knowing a thing compel one to spread the word? And what does knowing a thing mean, anyway? Facts are mutable, in time, and history is mutable as well. I used to "know" that punk rock would change modern life forever, that architecture was apolitical, that no one could ever be as bad a president as Reagan, and that Einstein wasn't a slut.</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>I also used to "know" that new endeavors of the mind were always their own reward, that curiosity was always a fuel for happiness, and that travel was always thrilling. But with age comes wisdom, especially about plane travel...and the recognition that it is patterns (of thought, of motion, of experience) rather than new and unique instances that make up most of what is. </div><div> </div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>So, if one recognizes a pattern, is one compelled to spread the word? I realize most of my paintings are exactly that. They are expressions about the sudden recognition of a pattern. I know I often feel something like compulsion when I approach the canvas -- not to capture something of myself there, but to capture a moment of recognition before it blinks by.</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>As if I can see, however briefly, what a vast collection of individual movements (thoughts, memories, reactions, words) looks like as a whole. And as if capturing that perception is worthwhile.</div><div>
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</div>Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-57434586011081337022023-03-02T18:40:00.001-05:002023-03-02T18:43:59.964-05:00Aphelion is Imminent Too<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhozKe-2sfhndpChm2-ex04J0hQw5LxYJIvF2E6b_vCE23EY-wqhNiPZrDF7zMRPgqKvJhNlfrFjk9wuBJZVM88HrVehSObS__iswluwJo9PQB1jxLhQH6KSb-9AnoSVMz8GBXn3Ghg9B0/s1600/Lovesong.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5463805970515113106" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhozKe-2sfhndpChm2-ex04J0hQw5LxYJIvF2E6b_vCE23EY-wqhNiPZrDF7zMRPgqKvJhNlfrFjk9wuBJZVM88HrVehSObS__iswluwJo9PQB1jxLhQH6KSb-9AnoSVMz8GBXn3Ghg9B0/s200/Lovesong.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 199px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 200px;" /></a>Can one really understand how fear acts on the motion of belief? <div>
</div><div> </div><div>One NASA scientist who is tasked with answering the public's questions about the 2012 Doomsday end-of-the-world hoopla has named this unique fear; he calls it "cosmophobia." Every day he hears from people who are actually fearful that an invisible planet (<i>possibly</i> guided by aliens) is on a collision course with the earth right now. Or that solar storms will cause a polarity shift in the sun and cause an earth-wide electromagentic pulse to wipe out all electronics in about two years. They fear the event, they fear for their lives, and they fear "the government" is covering up the truth.
Sure, people claim that they are scared of imminent death, but is that the root cause of the force that is fear? I see people react with fear to passive, non-threatening things all the time -- particularly to "challenging" works of art, and, of course, to abstraction. And anything in the cosmos is also an abstract idea, in the sense that it is out of the realm of our immediate experience. But why does it follow that the response is fear?
Is it that all fearful people think communication of any sort is an expression of a belief system, and therefore an inherent challenge?</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>This morning I encountered a man who challenged me on my "belief" that we are all made up of atoms. "Don't believe it" he said, "you are made of the spirit!" I honestly had no idea what to say. It is tempting to dismiss his challenge as evidence of his ignorance, but if he does not regard himself as ignorant, what point is there in me claiming so? What is more interesting to me it the idea that he is threatened somehow (or his belief system is destabilized somehow) by...atoms.
If you want to change motion, you need a force which will act on an object and cause acceleration. But if you want to maintain the status of a belief, is a forcefield of fear required?
I wonder about that as the Catholic Church sex-abuse story grows globally, and as the impact of Arizona's new immigration status law plays out here...and as veil-wearing women in Yemen protest <i>in favor</i> of the practice of granting men child brides. The same atom-fearer mentioned above also believes that rape is "not always bad" since it is God's prerogative that sperm is destined for a unique egg, and man must follow God's law without question. </div><div> </div><div>
What is it like to live a life of submission? And if you submit to life within that forcefield of fear which is required to maintain your beliefs about weird art, or African American Presidents, or alien-guided killer planets...can you really ever view yourself as a free human being, as free as any of the rest of us?
</div>Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-69860748867762523612018-12-12T13:15:00.001-05:002023-03-02T18:48:30.235-05:00Solid Universe Theory and being an abstract painter<br />
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Notes from Abstraction
and Solid Universe Theory: An Artist Talk given at DaVinci Art Alliance,
Philadelphia, PA by artist Martha Hope Carey / November 28, 2018 </i><b><o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I wondered about what you need to have in place in
your mind to believe that the universe is solid rather than what it is - which
is pretty much empty space and things we can’t fully describe yet. I read a science
fiction short story a few years ago that explores the impact of this belief
being shattered. The beings in this story discover, using technology they developed,
that the universe they believed or “knew” was solid (which they based their
philosophies, their physics, their predictions on) was, in fact, not. They <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actually</i> existed in a pocket of space
within a solid sphere which was afloat in our universe. Which, mostly empty space
and mysteries. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Both ends of that are fascinating to me: the systems
and strategies we use to define and refine the universes we exist in, mentally
and emotionally; the changes that happen when perception changes; reactions to
traumatic change; what kinds of things push accepted thinking to new levels;
how resistant we can often be to stark realities. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And it made me think about seeing. I mean, before glass
was ground and used in eyeglasses, every person on earth who had any visual
impairment short of blindness saw the objects in the real world around us as
reality. The way they saw things, however distorted by nearsightedness or
astigmatism, was the way those things <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">were</i>.
For them. Before the microscope showed otherwise, there was, in the Western
world, a belief that each thing in the natural world was symmetrical – had been
made that way, in fact. But, nope. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The moment we are living in now, in the U.S., we are
being led by a person who sees solidity where there it in fact empty space, and
whose nearsightedness has him continually describing objects of all kinds in a
distorted manner. And this is disconcerting and enraging and absolutely a call
to anyone who can see clearly to challenge this. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Those were some of the thoughts I’ve been having,
putting together the paintings in my recent show Solid Universe Theory.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Because abstraction itself is a challenge to any solid
universe thinking.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I have been painting for 17 years now. Always
abstraction, no “phases.” Canvasses are resilient planes onto and into which I
extend my ideas, reactions, history, body, feelings, mind. It comes naturally
to me to do this. And it feels like the opposite of many other things. By which
I mean, much of life is figuring out strategies that gain one a sense of
satisfaction or clarity in relation to others. Encounters with new people, for
example: we “place” them, they remind us, they sound or look like, we go along
with or against their identity or energy. All the time. We take in knowledge
using strategies that satisfy, too. Ways of learning. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">During the last 17 years of painting, I also got a PhD
– not in art. My dissertation work was ethnographic research in a school, where
I was learning how a group of teachers made shared meaning of an experience.
The work they did to make sense of things, and the work I did to make sense of
their processes, involved lots of strategies, to get to a point of
satisfaction. This is common sensical, since we are all contingent, and
knowledge is as well. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Abstraction, to me, is…not that. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When I paint, I get to the edge of that plane in front
of me and my brain must open, and suspend, in a way. I must get to a tense and
aware place – or I am in that place and then grab a canvas – where it’s as if
the unconscious habits of mind are like big airport automatic doors, but intentionally
stalled open. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What does that do? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I stop having strategies. I stop seeking for something
that is contingent to be satisfied. I am not social or engaged or thinking
about another person. I barely think about my body. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That tension is fuel. I work and shift and move and
drag and pull and grab tools and work and work. There is no representational
aim, since I am not thinking about strategies that may make things recognizable
for anyone (including brush strokes or styles). There is no recognition. My
mind is the stalled-open door for as long as I am in the work, and frankly,
every time I look at the work from there on. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Which is abstraction.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When one looks at an abstract painting, the viewer is
pulled in, sometimes by color as a trigger or a feeling, but the viewer uses
strategies to immediately find the familiar and…finds none, and so creates
some, and tries to apply them, but there is no place for anything to rest. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So, you try again – is that an object in there? I see
a window! Maybe a train track. An aerial map? But those things are not there. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And if you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">stay</i>
in engagement with abstraction, you wear out your strategies, eventually. Which
means the possibility is there for you to bust through the solid universe, and
out into the real one, which is lots of empty space and things we don’t have
words for yet.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In that moment, you get a view of the capacity of your
own mind. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For some people this can be very uncomfortable. After
all, there is a lot of space and unknowable stuff in there, too. And in my
opinion as a human and an artist, that is glorious. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The titles of my paintings are markers, for me, markers
of what the thing was that activated the weird tension, that made the doors stall
open. And it is never a question that does this. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Questions are strategies to
get to satisfaction. It is, rather, just a moment of comprehension about things I can
never fully understand or even imagine clearly – like what thoughts and
visions one would have, to get to the point where you could conceive of sending
a probe into space to take photos of the moons of Saturn. This has been done, which
is fantastic, but <i>holy shit</i>, the creative thought and acts of imagination that
went into making that happen. To strive and build and plan a way to capture
images of objects which reside so far out in space that no human in our
lifetime will ever see with their own eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That is an achievement of mind that awes me. The vast
leaps of thought that had to be taken to even imagine <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">maybe</i>, and then <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">if</i>, and
then <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">yes</i>, and then <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">how</i>. And to take those leaps for the
sole reason of expanding the known, for the benefit of all of us. Remarkable.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Abstraction allows me to stay in that tense, aware,
and in this case, amazed moment of awe. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">glorious</span>.
It works my mind. And I paint. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-38890435642179094402016-01-05T18:00:00.000-05:002023-03-02T18:49:34.040-05:00Equivalence<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvnJiFl-JoK7eZZdXykH2FiQmonAl6T8bGznmAHRWXVJFWBg_A-5aiCm1GV5W2VL3qB5bxWKUif1-8gT8ofVc8Gjr9pzmjbkXUh2kUrJ5l60LpP3t6Os9UIAbXRTqZ2XviBoiD883nlZo/s1600/WIN_20151230_15_51_29_Pro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvnJiFl-JoK7eZZdXykH2FiQmonAl6T8bGznmAHRWXVJFWBg_A-5aiCm1GV5W2VL3qB5bxWKUif1-8gT8ofVc8Gjr9pzmjbkXUh2kUrJ5l60LpP3t6Os9UIAbXRTqZ2XviBoiD883nlZo/s320/WIN_20151230_15_51_29_Pro.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Reading science fiction tends to reaffirm for me that the law of mass-energy conservation (that there is a constant amount of both in the universe, and the two can interconvert) really applies to all things emotional as well. In emotional exchanges you also have products and reactants and, as in all things universe-physics-Einstein-y, the energy generated in such an exchange exists and goes ... somewhere. It does not suddenly just blink out. But the rub is always, <i>where</i> is the somewhere? Who does it land on, sink into, impact, or change?<br />
<br />
And what about the sub-level stuff, the actual electron level stuff -- is it possible that there really are humans who are inviolate energy expellers, never absorbers? Which of course would have to mean there are an equal opposite number (well, in pristine physics thinking, anyway) of energy absorbers. Does one get trained for this in childhood, I wonder, or is it really a genetic thing? And if it <i>is</i> genetic, can we develop a sci-fi kind of solution, some trippy procedure, which might reverse one's 'natural' state as expeller or absorber? I wonder about just who would sign up for that.<br />
<br />
To me science fiction is psychology, abstracted out; sci fi makes it easier to face the limits and constraints of human being-ness in the present moment. Unlike, say, classic murder mystery novels, which offer psychology <i>parsed</i> out; killers have clear motives (well, most of the time), pain is pain, there are specific steps to redemption, and closure is possible. Both offer a kind of weird comfort.<br />
<br />
They seem to always be about closed systems, though, about emotional constants that must balance, as hope with despair, violence with calm, imaginative leaps with limits. Because we all are in a closed system, causing and reacting, expelling and absorbing. Which makes me wonder how many writers are more absorber than expeller, or vice versa. And about what it would be like to inhabit my opposite number out in the world. I feel like this is a deep failure of imagination on my part; I find it much easier to spend time imagining the inner lives of absorbers, generally. Because I am pained by expellers, especially the truly oblivious ones, I feel a lot of anger and lack of trust about them. The energy has to go somewehere, after all. But I want very much to be able to imagine the joy expellers must experience. They must go through time and space with such <i>lightness</i>.<br />
<br />
I know now that painting is an interconversion. Looking over my work over the past dozen years recently, I came across a fuzzy photograph of the first painting I ever sold...I had a seriously crappy camera at the time. The piece was called 'Found, grounded' and I painted it, and sold it, in 2002. It was actually four small canvasses (16x16 each) composed as one piece, and I painted it in early 2002 while my studio was set up in a tiny section of the tiny living room area in our tiny apartment in Seattle. A friend of a friend very kindly allowed me to hang some of my work at a coffeehouse downtown (I had just started painting about 6 months before) and a writer, visiting town from Chicago for a few days, saw the painting and wanted it immediately. I met her when I delivered the packed-for-the-plane painting to her, and she told me she had to have the painting hanging on her wall above her writing desk, that it would fuel her.<br />
<br />
What the painting was to me -- the discovery that I had found that I could paint, and that this could be my work, my life -- seemed evident to this writer, without me explaining it. But in truth it mattered not at all to her, and rightly so. What mattered to her was the way she felt when she looked at 'Found, grounded' and the way she knew she would always feel when she encountered the piece. I have met only a handful of the people who have bought my paintings over these past 13+ years, but she fits with what I know of the others. They are absorbers too.<br />
<br />
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<br />Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-70775806098085911392015-11-30T13:21:00.000-05:002023-03-02T18:50:15.342-05:00Integration Phase<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh48xMD__7C_4MSg3UIuyQYnbK6pR52CKriA6j-Z_YJViJeuhchico4yawT3L8BJk8lA8rzeu4SmkwEMcdqX_yBdLYT4-T0PBlDxq1SWEyEHCqEkwMzaPBUQwVNBRxlGj9P0RgQRr4whZM/s1600/spring+and+summer+2006+038.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh48xMD__7C_4MSg3UIuyQYnbK6pR52CKriA6j-Z_YJViJeuhchico4yawT3L8BJk8lA8rzeu4SmkwEMcdqX_yBdLYT4-T0PBlDxq1SWEyEHCqEkwMzaPBUQwVNBRxlGj9P0RgQRr4whZM/s200/spring+and+summer+2006+038.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
Yesterday I worked on finishing a painting, the subject of which was an old friend. The work was fueled by my own recognition of her as someone who is not well emotionally, and/or psychologically, and by the further recognition that she has, most likely, never been. I just had not seen it until now. Which maybe says something ominous about my own ability to see people for who they actually are, or says something wonderful about her ability to manage and perform in a way that conveys to others, especially new acquaintances, that she is ok. Possibly both.<br />
<br />
Seeing things, people, patterns, places for what they are is difficult if one is trudging through the world making your own meaning. There is always the temptation (or perhaps it is just the habit, after all this time) to fit perceptions into your self-made structure. Maybe it is easier for folks who have a ready-made structure or system to rely on, an external system that filters and organizes meaning for you? Then again, their commitment to this type of structured thinking seems to task them; life seems to be a continual stress test, for believers, to stay true to the language and rules of their chosen system. I can see why people are concerned that Donald Trump may blow a gasket at some point.<br />
<br />
I suppose the upside of a commitment to the ready-made is that you are socially knowable, since most of what you communicate are signals and signifiers to others in your group. And yes, those of us outside your group can read your signals, too. So you can be seen clearly for <i>who you are</i>, because you have allowed this idea of self to be defined by the belief system you adhere to and promote. And, speaking of Trump (and speaking with no authority on the subject other than a childhood spent around exclusive rich white narcissists who were motivated by the acquisition and promotion of wealth) there is truly nothing else there.<br />
<br />
But my old friend has not adhered to one system or structure outside of herself for her identity, and I do not either. So our intermittent engagement with each other has been one of slow-motion discovery, as if we were binary stars rotating around a shared past experience but not really interacting with it or each other, and so never seeing the full surface at any time. She is both lovely and strange, and I realize now that her self-perception scares me too. Perhaps it always did, but I had not created enough of myself yet, way back then, to recognize that.<br />
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Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-66479785759368901372015-09-22T12:01:00.001-04:002023-02-21T08:30:43.339-05:00We're in the basement, learning to print<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiurBk9jejXqGJ2_tuRY2lVUFlijSoK8Fq456Fx7F7pndO5qMjNzqqNPm3dKtBCE-Djw7G_-85nFrowjE7pTeuGitDL4KiWbOe0tLgNh3T1Wd_I0VhDGYyKaa0HzCbsTPUQzwtTbtwwyeQ/s1600/unnamed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiurBk9jejXqGJ2_tuRY2lVUFlijSoK8Fq456Fx7F7pndO5qMjNzqqNPm3dKtBCE-Djw7G_-85nFrowjE7pTeuGitDL4KiWbOe0tLgNh3T1Wd_I0VhDGYyKaa0HzCbsTPUQzwtTbtwwyeQ/s1600/unnamed.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">When the film <i>Boys
Don’t Cry</i> was released in 1999, the film’s director said that
the main character, Brandon Teena, was compelling because the way Teena
navigated his transgender identity was, in the director’s view, the <i>most </i>complicated way possible to resolve
a problem. This made the director feel compassion for Teena and reflect
on how often it happens that we, especially when under duress, build up layers
of complexity for ourselves on our way to solving a problem.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">I thought about that yesterday when listening to an
interview with Dale Russakoff, the author of the new book <i>The Prize: Who’s In Charge of America’s Schools?</i> Russakoff was a
reporter for the Washington Post for decades; she chose the school reform
movement as the subject and Newark, NJ as the site for this book. More
specifically, she chose to really dig into the experiment that played out in
Newark when Mark Zuckerberg granted the city $100 million to “do” school
reform, an idea that was approved by Governor Chris Christie and was to be
overseen by then-mayor Cory Booker and managed by then-Superintendent Cami
Anderson. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">The details are fascinating, and most
of us already know how that story played out. The community of Newark parents, teachers,
and education leaders was shut out of the process, consultants charging large
fees were brought in, the Superintendent re-arranged students, closed schools,
paved the way for charters in the name of choice, etc. And Zuckerberg’s ideal motivation
– to upend teacher contracts and provide merit bonuses to the “good” teachers –
ran smack into the reality of state tenure law in New Jersey (which protected
seniority) and a strong teachers’ union. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">This group of people working to solve a (perceived) problem
chose the most complex path to do so, in part because, as Russakoff notes, they
did not avail themselves of the knowledge and experience of people who had
already navigated education in Newark for generations. Reading about the
decisions and the thinking of those involved in this scheme is fascinating –
much like reading about Mayor </span><a href="http://deadspin.com/whos-funding-kevin-johnsons-secret-government-1731005808"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Kevin
Johnson’s</span></a><span style="line-height: 107%;"> approach to school reform in Sacramento – and also
actually really frightening. Because unlike the character of Brandon Teena,
these people are not under duress, and are not in a fight for their lives and
safety. The school reformers are, if anything, in an ideal position to be
broadly informed, reflective, and even patient as they learn about public education.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">But what stopped me short as I listened to the
interview with Russakoff was her response when asked why she thought the new charter
schools in Newark perform better than the traditional public schools in that
city (and indeed, better than most charter schools nationally). Her answer was
not at all complex and required no navigation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">She said charter schools in Newark get a lot more
money into their classrooms and buildings than the traditional public schools
do. There are more staff in charter schools, including learning specialists,
tutors, and social workers. So students do better in those schools.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">When she said that, I nearly drove off the road. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">The “problem” to be solved in public education has
always been about resources, no matter what words are put around it, no matter
what layers of complexity are added. This has been clear since people argued
about the use of tax monies to fund schools and teachers back in the 1820’s.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">I am happy to think Russakoff’s work as a reporter
led her to keep digging and keep exploring to get as complete a story as possible about Newark,
school reformers, and the whims of a billionaire who looks on the Newark
experiment as a personal learning opportunity for himself. But I am dismayed
when I think of all the voices of all the education leaders, researchers,
district workers, and experienced teachers who are just routinely ignored when
these kinds of experiments in reform are undertaken. And I continue to be
weirdly mesmerized by those who create complicated schemes to solve a problem,
because, I suppose, they think complexity will lead to the most palatable (or
marketable) resolution. But as Russakoff affirmed, schools can provide more for
students when schools have more to give. It really can be that simple.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
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Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-82755563571743504802015-09-14T15:29:00.000-04:002023-03-02T18:50:35.725-05:00Bubbles of Belief<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_JR7WebBbX6U1yTv8c_MbdEBWikS3BheDdQmjXVOgi9kM9rYVyCNKmQdi3E-cOzXuxtBdKUMi6zSeK3JiUG0IIpWComGFtsCqA9PsuuPCP4ddWWlZoe5IeuMAIMtSqelNXxhXKR4n1oc/s1600/IMG_0029.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_JR7WebBbX6U1yTv8c_MbdEBWikS3BheDdQmjXVOgi9kM9rYVyCNKmQdi3E-cOzXuxtBdKUMi6zSeK3JiUG0IIpWComGFtsCqA9PsuuPCP4ddWWlZoe5IeuMAIMtSqelNXxhXKR4n1oc/s200/IMG_0029.jpg" width="149" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 107%;">Based
on the recent </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html"><span style="line-height: 107%;">article</span></a><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 107%;"> about life inside Amazon,
it is clear that the company is rigorous (to say the least) in its efforts to
align employees with a set of ethical and social standards that define,
support, and promote the community that is Amazon. What is so creepy, though, is that
these are clearly out of alignment with the ethical and social standards of our shared community of human beings. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">Folks
who do not adhere to (or are not aligned to) the standards of behavior commonly
found to be acceptable in a civil society are identified as sociopaths. Yet within
the “society” that is Amazon, it sounds like a sociopath would be someone who
chooses sleep, loved ones, balance, calm, socializing, health and
self-awareness over a full-fledged psycho-emotional commitment to how 1) the
company defines what matters and 2) how the company defines an employee’s roles
in fixing whatever the company determines is broken. Or, as one deeply
committed employee quoted in the article put it, “Once you know something isn’t
as good as it could be, why wouldn’t you want to fix it?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">But who gets to define what's good? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 107%;">And who
defines the ethical and social standards of a community? </span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 107%;">In
the case of a business like Amazon, the answer is obvious. In the case of
public schools, it should be equally obvious, and also <i>entirely distinct</i>, since public schools are and always have been the models for and reflection of
the ethical and social standards of the community of human beings. They are not
mini-societies with enclosed systems of reward that serve to promote a product
or brand or stock price.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">Schools
are a public service, and students within schools actually have a property
right to education (they are required by law to be educated, and also cannot be
denied their right to an education without due process). Amazon employees have
no right to employment. And Amazon has minimal obligation to employees. This is
not an emotional issue; this is factual – no company with at-will employment
really owes its employees anything much at all, and the employees don’t have a
basic right to fight dismissal, unless they have union protection. Which Ambots
do not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 107%;">Public
education in the U.S. is being re-shaped by school reformers who would define
the good, and the ethical and social standards for schools, in much the same
way leadership at Amazon does. But this approach requires modelling something
and then applying it to something entirely different, and expecting positive
and/or universally applicable results. Like doing breast cancer research
exclusively on male patients, for example. Or writing contemporary standardized
test questions that require knowledge about </span><a href="http://pisa-sq.acer.edu.au/showQuestion.php?testId=2300&questionId=7"><span style="line-height: 107%;">animal husbandry</span></a><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 107%;">. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 107%;">By way of explanation, here's a quick story: </span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 107%;">A
few years back, while living in Silicon Valley, I heard a story shared by the
(infamous) design firm IDEO at a training session: IDEO sent out new design
staffers on a quest where they had just a few hours to come up with research on
and an effective design for a really useful shopping cart. The IDEO office they
were at is in Palo Alto, CA, and located just down the street from a Whole
Foods. As the IDEO trainers told it, the new design staffers went and did “speed
research” at the Whole Foods and came up with a new cart design of which they
were quite proud, a design based on the needs of the midday shoppers they had
spoken with. And the shoppers they had spoken with, and kept in mind when
designing, included a cluster of <i>personal
shoppers</i>, people hired by busy local tech folks at Facebook or Google or
Apple (or IDEO) to do their errands for them. </span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 107%;">Several of the personal shoppers
were doing a multi-shop trip, buying items for several customers at the same
time, and for them the ideal cart would have separate segments so that they
could keep customers’ items accounted for. This is the cart the new designers
created.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">There
is nothing inherently wrong with developing an idealized shopping cart for a
particular type of customer. But the outcome of the “research” was not
applicable to actual real-life grocery shoppers, or rather to grocery shoppers
existing outside of a certain enclosed system. Which is where the idea of
objective data-driven decision making (a key tenet of Amazon’s culture, and a
key concept in contemporary school reform) enters the picture…and becomes
laughable. As another Amazon employee noted in the article, “Data creates a lot
of clarity around decision-making…Data is incredibly liberating.”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">Data
is defined by the place and time that you are looking for it, and data is
infinitely malleable. So what does the use of data “liberate” us <i>from</i>? A sense of responsibility for
anything outside the data we chose to look for? Confronting ambiguity or
subjectivity? A sense of connection, social, ethical, or otherwise, to other
people and their unending diversity of experience? Or does it really just
liberate one from the fear of being a dictionary-definition sociopath?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 107%;">I
can’t know all that an actual individual Amazon employee feels liberated from by using employee
metrics and data to shape other employees’ lives, other than tongue-lashings
from his superiors. But the recent hyping of the use of data for all things
(student success, teacher effectiveness, classroom value-add, school success) seems
to “liberate” contemporary school reformers from any sense of obligation,
commitment, or professional respect for teaching, teachers, and students alike.
Just as data has been used to “liberate” folks from thinking on how actual
people use a shopping cart. Or how actual females experience breast cancer. Or from
knowing that 81% of the p</span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 107%;">opulation of the United States lives in urban areas -
no farm animals in sight.</span></span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-87512250047538796492015-09-11T11:47:00.000-04:002023-03-02T18:50:48.371-05:00The Hardness of Diamonds<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbGKLLiEmX78PgcnZt3Nkg2N6iRYXolhgi5HuiHNQ7ijFb4fR6iV6-Y_uJh1mFUJh1HPcraleAjB2B0ohgKFA24TXlXAtjapTKHS4WH7rF0kK7ZIUuAioiUEHWUutXhCxZ5xkgSqaeIAs/s1600/WIN_20150911_10_39_15_Pro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbGKLLiEmX78PgcnZt3Nkg2N6iRYXolhgi5HuiHNQ7ijFb4fR6iV6-Y_uJh1mFUJh1HPcraleAjB2B0ohgKFA24TXlXAtjapTKHS4WH7rF0kK7ZIUuAioiUEHWUutXhCxZ5xkgSqaeIAs/s320/WIN_20150911_10_39_15_Pro.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In the studio the other day I did a tool switch in the middle of working on a painting and then everything else changed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">That is my 'normal'; I use whatever tools are at hand (including my hands as tools) to get a painting to a completed state. Not being particularly constrained by habit or ritual in the studio means I explore a lot, in very tactile ways, with tools and with materials. This also means I don't have a belief about tools or materials that constrains my brain. I don't have a system of good-better-best, or a belief that certain steps must always be followed to get to an outcome in creative work (in building canvasses, yes, but not in painting them). I know there are certain </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">realities</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> in the studio, a key one being that paint flies and time does not. But I am not at all dogmatic about the knowledge patterns 'required' to create a good painting. </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Exposure, practice, fearlessness, and consciousness seem much more important to understanding many things than the required knowledge patterns, really.</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />Which makes me realize I am not really committed to the 'required' knowledge patterns about most things. And this came up repeatedly in graduate school. Qualitative researchers are supposed to thoroughly code their data, much like statisticians do, and ideally use software tools to help organize all the coding. If you have an interview with a teacher as data, for instance, a qualitative researcher will code the content of that interview, identifying themes or ideas that arose in the conversation which may also arise in other interviews. Coding is essentially an organizing process. Or so we were trained. But coding is actually a limiting process about applying the knowledge patterns that are 'required' for good research. And in this process, each interview is <i>not</i> its own painting, its own universe, its own emotional experience, its own interaction. Each interview is, in the end, a series of codes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />Your task then is to clearly explain to the world what the patterns of codes tell us about the context (the people, place, time, event) you have studied. This explaining is based on the acceptable knowledge patterns required to make good data, i.e. rigorous and thorough coding which can somehow make the subjective objective. So, you have to use coding to then explain to the world what the patterns of codes mean, which is like removing the meaning from something so that you can then clearly describe the meaning of something.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />What are you left with in the end? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />Dogmatism is constraint, but it seems constraint leads more quickly to familiarity, comfort, replication, prediction. Safety and sureness. Affirmation. Acceptance. And if you switch tools right in the middle of something (including a thought process) it can knock this whole thing out of whack. Or delay you on the route to safety. Or possibly put a belief system in peril, or change a perception about what is true or good or real. And <i>then</i> where would you be? Other than free, that is.</span><br />
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<br />Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-28086594278263079792015-08-18T12:48:00.001-04:002023-02-21T08:30:30.091-05:00Why are K-12 anti-tenure people anti-tenure? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihaqwp8hyXSWPWDcy3NIFGSBAaF4uvlbCvHHIhq62ZO5jX1j1Q_uRVzZKdnryvG7wqGA2qo11oBuJlFC1wwxLd6Ylz6nctqajaqYvYgtnAibghxkRXNAQXhRnsGo79yfwTglWo3zjPT2M/s1600/Martin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihaqwp8hyXSWPWDcy3NIFGSBAaF4uvlbCvHHIhq62ZO5jX1j1Q_uRVzZKdnryvG7wqGA2qo11oBuJlFC1wwxLd6Ylz6nctqajaqYvYgtnAibghxkRXNAQXhRnsGo79yfwTglWo3zjPT2M/s200/Martin.jpg" width="196" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">After the Brown v. Board of
Education decision in 1954 affirmed that separate but equal schooling was a
fallacy, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was signed into
law, guaranteeing federal funding to schools and school districts to help
offset the damage that had been done through generations of segregation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">From almost the moment that
law was signed, states undertook legal action to deny, dismiss, and de-couple
themselves from any de-segregation efforts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">Between 1965 and 2007,
dozens of suits were filed by states on behalf of school districts claiming
they really did not have to undertake any actions (like having a busing plan,
hiring plans, student placement plans) that would make a unified, integrated
schooling system. Cases arguing that states faced an undue burden in trying to
rectify segregation in schooling, from Alabama, North Carolina, Colorado,
Virginia, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma and Georgia, were heard by the U. S. Supreme Court; the states claimed that the work of creating equity in schooling
was both an undue financial burden, and that the federal government was too
intrusive in its assessments of integration plans. States claimed, generally,
that the regulation of their actions (and demand for change, subsidized by the federal
government) was unfair, and the punishment (withholding federal funds) for
failure to integrate was also unfair. At core was the argument that the way
schooling had been (racially segregated, state-defined and underfunded) until
Brown v. Board of Education was acceptable.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">In the late 1990’s,
anti-choice activists developed a new approach in their fight against abortion
and access to abortion: they started a push to change the state laws that
regulated clinics and the requirements placed on doctors that performed
abortions. Before Roe v Wade resulted in the decriminalization of abortion, no
“official” abortion clinics existed. After the procedure was legalized, medical
schools provided training, Planned Parenthood provided safe clinics, and the dilation
and curettage process became as regulated as any other minor non-invasive
process – and we have now even developed a pill that stops an
early pregnancy from progressing. But the anti-choice approach to using over-regulation
as a financial impediment to clinics and doctors has been effective in closing
clinics, and, in a sense, driving women to less safe alternatives. At core is
the argument that the way abortion had been until Roe v. Wade (criminalized,
unseen and unsafe) was and is acceptable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">The anti-tenure “movement”
got a huge push from the <i>Vergara v. California</i> decision in 2014, where the
state found for the anti-tenure group, agreeing with their argument that state
laws regulating tenure (defining the probationary period as 2 years,
guaranteeing teacher rights in dismissal actions, protecting teacher seniority
in layoffs, etc.) actually hurt students by denying them “good” teachers and
leaving them stuck with teachers who were hard to get rid of. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">How does this connect to
Brown v. Board, or Roe v Wade? One direct link is this: those who think tenure
in K-12 education is inherently negative are pushing an argument that the way teaching
should be done should be more like business, and having all teachers as at-will
employees (untrained, non-unionized and always replaceable) is acceptable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Another connecting point is
in how these issues are defined by those who wish to undue certain protections
(racial equity in schooling, a woman’s right to privacy, a teachers’ civil and
civic rights) as those definitions are, inherently, <i>directly beneficial to those who are not in the class seeking protection</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Put another way, the states arguing they should not have to provide equitable
education are not represented by the class seeking protection (victims of the
impacts of segregation) but rather the privileged class denying the need for
protection. Similarly, the anti-choice activists pushing for more clinic
regulation are not members of the class seeking protection (doctors, clinic
workers, patients) from the undue burden of regulation, they are rather the
privileged class denying the burden exists. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">And the anti-tenure “movement,” led
as it is by David Welch and Eli Broad (the two multimillionaire entrepreneurs
and proponents of school privatization who brought the <i>Vergara</i> suit) is at core
an anti-union action, layered in language about students’ rights, interpreted
by the court as an issue of state laws that regulate a unionized profession as
being unconstitutional – as being unnecessary as a form of protection to a
class (teachers) because the court denied that class deserved protection.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">When the argument descends
into what tenure is, whether abortion is “right” or how groups should be
responsible for educating themselves, the privileged group pushing the denial
of protection or the denial of burden wins. When you engage with a non-educator
about what tenure is, and means, as one of the only forms of employment
protection in a deeply de-professionalized, majority female profession in the
United States, and they respond dismissively about the very idea of
tenure, you are speaking with someone who does not recognize others’ humanity
in a very specific, legal way. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">They aren’t just talking about
something they don’t know about, they are talking about the denial of
protections and the denial of the existence of burdens in the same way
anti-integrationists and anti-choicers pushing for clinic regulation do. They
will argue a specific case (a “bad” teacher, the movie <i>Waiting for Superman</i>, a “good” charter school they know staffed
with Teach For America trainees, how what we need now is more of a focus on
grit, etc. etc.) as a means to this de-humanizing end. The more they stay in
specificity, the quicker they get the argument away from the broad,
demoralizing purpose. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 107%;">Who does eliminating tenure
serve? The question should be, who does removing unions and workplace
protections serve? Who does removing regulation about de-segregation efforts
serve? Who does denying reproductive health care to women serve? And if the
answer is, it serves none of the people in those classes, none of those people
coping with those burdens, then you know the argument itself is about denying
something very essential: that others’ experiences, needs, skills, professions,
lives, decisions, and most of all rights matter as much as their own.</span></div>
Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-68145935737432752092015-06-11T11:54:00.001-04:002023-03-02T18:35:51.187-05:00Intoxicated by the Scent of Blossoms<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This post is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my dissertation, the final chapter, which focuses on arguments about charters and implications for further research. This project is a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability. The first posting in this series is <a href="http://www.careythinking.org/2015/05/the-worth-of-work-is-open-to.html">here</a>.</span><br />
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<b>Chapter 7: Intoxicated by the scent of blossoms</b><br />
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The Pence charter school Board has plans to expand the school’s presence and impact in Philadelphia and, if successful, to evolve into a small charter management organization in the near future. The School Reform Commission reviewed applications for new charters and charter expansions in Philadelphia in December 2014, and the Pence Board and CEO put together a bid for another K-8 school (to be located on the other side of the city) as well as a bid for a new high school.
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At the opening of his presentation to the SRC about this proposed high school, Pence’s CEO quoted journalist Thomas Friedman. In his 2005 treatise on globalization (The World is Flat), Friedman wrote about seeing what he claimed was an African proverb posted on a wall in an auto factory in China which read: “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.”
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The Pence CEO referenced Friedman, and this particular proverb, in connection to the work skills preparation program he and the Pence Board have identified as a product differentiator and key feature in the proposed high school’s curriculum.
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That the presentation about Pence’s expansion was introduced with a story from a proponent of the positive impacts of technology-driven global market competition was not surprising. The contemporary school reform movement has taken ideas and methods from the business world and applied them to schooling since charter schools emerged on the scene, and every teacher at a charter school is familiar with them. Every teacher at Pence is familiar with them as well. When I spoke with Teacher Molly about the purposes of teaching, to cite just one example, she said her daily goal was for what she called “value-add” (a term used in both economics, regarding how revenue is calculated, and more generally in business, related to the competitiveness of certain product features) in that “every interaction we have [in the classroom] should be value added and not value taken away, although sometimes easier said than done, let’s just be honest” (Teacher Molly, personal communication, March 13, 2014).
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The organizational language of Pence is the language of contemporary school reform, which is in essence the language of products and features. And though it is independent, Pence’s longevity makes it an important participant in the discussion of charter-based reforms in Philadelphia, and its school culture, as with all charters, is infused with the vocabulary favored by the reformers. Aspects of this are woven into how teachers at Pence talk, think, and make meaning about their practice. And aspects of this contour the visible, marketable features of Pence, and the invisible features as well.
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My research at Pence revealed that a point of connection between those invisible features of the school – the placement of responsibility for organizational issues (like a curricular choice that led to the social segregation Pence teachers observe) onto teachers by framing it as a racial proficiency problem, the promotion of an ideal of autonomy without actual empowerment, the framing of accountability (on posters and school guidelines, in professional development sessions) as being about personal interactions and behaviors rather than as tied to a charter’s economic imperatives, the reiteration of hopefulness about impacting students holistically when the future plans for and goals of the organization are based on quantifiable, disparate elements – is the internalization of these features by the teachers at Pence. And these teachers work together within a school culture where several of the shared common sense understandings actually work to preserve those same invisible features, those bugs deep in the code.
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Teachers at charters like Pence are impacted by the language of contemporary school reform and by the multiple contexts which shift and shape their professional selves. As part of their working lives they create meanings out of interactions within these contexts (the social, emotional, psychological, political, structural, organizational and visual contexts) in their school and continually must navigate those meanings as well as their own values, ethics, and sense of purpose as teachers. Simultaneously, as charter teachers, they are by definition actors within the ongoing phenomena of the redefinition of their profession. Since the first charter school law passed in 1991, teacher identity has been impacted by a new franchise approach to schooling. And the majority of charter school teachers have been (and continue to be) trained to perform functions of teaching in school contexts that are informed by business ethics and goals, and without necessarily inhabiting what has been referred to in the literature as “teacherness” or, as in Akkermen and Meijer’s research (2010), being “someone who teaches.”
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In a 2013 study by Schultz and Ravitch about the self-reported experiences of first year teachers, the researchers divided the subjects into two groups. One group was in an alternate certification program (Teach For America, or TFA) and one group was in a traditional teacher-training program at a university. The researchers findings in this study reflect much of the current literature, noted earlier, on teacher identity and teacher preparation: unlike those in a traditional teacher training program, alternate certification program participants did not necessarily view themselves as teachers, but “conceptualized their involvement in TFA as a form of civic engagement or community service for two years” (Schultz and Ravitch 2013, p. 40). One outcome of this attitude is that teacher identity may now be more defined by the idea of being short-time staffer rather than as professional educator in a career. This is reflected in the high turnover rate of teachers at charter schools (Stuit 2010). As one education journalist described it, charter schools, which tend to hire teachers with little experience and who have come through alternative training or certification programs, “are developing what amounts to a youth cult in which teaching for two to five years is seen as acceptable…even desirable. Teachers in the nation’s traditional public schools [in contrast] have an average of close to 14 years of experience” (Rich 2013).
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The teachers I observed and interviewed during my six months at Pence overwhelmingly described themselves as educators in the profession of teaching, regardless of their training, years of experience, or grade level taught. Most expressed the belief that they were in their chosen career for practical as well as philosophical reasons. As Teacher Rob told me, “I think that education is the most important tool for social justice that we have. So for me that’s what I want to do” (Teacher Rob, personal communication, May 6, 2014). Like Rob, many Pence teachers identified themselves as agents of change, and they connected this to being teachers at an urban charter school – to being part of “the solution.” They recognized the constraints and issues associated with charters, but also that, as Teacher Karen noted, charters are key players in urban education today, and if you have a personal investment in urban education (as Pence teachers do) you have to work within the system that now exists.
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Pence teachers holding this point of view about the inevitability of change in urban education (specifically in the direction of charter growth) makes their work and workplace both meaningful and palatable. It also reflects what Everdell (1997) noted about the modern fragmentation of life that occurs in a sped-up, globalized world – that the new state of being which emerges out of this change is seen as something virtuous simply because it is happening.
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Based on her research on charter schools, corruption, and the pressing need for financial accountability in Philadelphia charters, legal scholar Susan DeJarnatt addresses this quite succinctly: “Charter schools bask in the warm glow of positive rhetoric and political support. They are seen as positive and as run by good hearted, well intentioned people. The key though is that they are run by people, who are subject to ordinary human frailties like greed, selfishness, and disconnect just like anyone” (DeJarnatt 2012, p. 38). And as her research shows, those human frailties can and do morph into what can become corrosive invisible features of charters. Awareness of that possibility influenced teachers, parents, and community members at one Philadelphia K-8 school who voted in June 2014 to reject a management bid from a charter operator and remain a traditional school under management by the SDP. The charter management organization they rejected manages a cluster of schools in the city; each of the schools they currently manage has a School Performance Profile in steady decline.
Soon after this vote to reject charter management, the previously mentioned Walter D. Palmer charter school had its charter revoked by the SRC over accusations of fraud. The SRC then revoked the charter of the Imani Education Circle School (a charter school which opened just before Pence did) over concerns about academic performance and the school’s finances. And this past April, teachers at another K-8 charter in Philadelphia (one of only five charters in the city represented by a union) voted to strike if unable to obtain a new contract; this would be the first strike ever by charter teachers in Pennsylvania (Woodall 2014).
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A recent analysis of the available data on the enrollment trends, demographics, academic performance (based on the PSSAs), and finances of charters across Pennsylvania showed that students who moved from a traditional public school to a charter school most often moved to a school with lower academic performance in reading and math than that of the traditional public school they opted out of (Schafft 2014, p. 52). The same study also showed that charters across the state continue to be a drain on public education; by the 2011-12 school year, “the annual increase in the traditional public school district tuition payments made to charter schools exceeded the increase in revenues generated from real estate taxes” which means districts had to “divert funds from existing programs and services to pay for charter school student tuition” (Schafft, p.1).
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Despite these facts, a proposal was presented in late 2014 to the school board of the district of York, Pennsylvania for it become the only city in the country where public education is provided entirely by a charter management organization. Even in its post-Katrina, transformed state, charterized New Orleans still operated a few traditional brick and mortar public schools (RAND 2011, p. 80). Due to a state court allowing the district to appeal, this charterization proposal is now momentarily on hold. But if the transition in York were to be completed, it would mean that all of the current district teachers “would have to re-apply to the [charter] company for their jobs” and that all “students living in York would have the choice to go to schools operated by [charter management organizations only]. High school students…would only have the option of attending the charter-run [high school]…they wouldn’t have another brick-and-mortar option because there is no high school operated by another charter company in York, currently” (Allen 2014).
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Supporters of the charterization of the York, PA school district promoted the same idea as supporters of charters everywhere: that charters offer an alternative to loss, improved accountability, enhanced efficiency, and increased productivity. Given what we know now about charter outcomes and how and why charters operate it is worth continued and persistent research into who has benefitted from this thinking.
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My research was done in part to explore how urban charter teachers’ professional identities are impacted, in often subtle ways, by the aims and ongoing efforts of contemporary school reformers. I was interested in how a new prerogative in American education insinuates itself into the daily life of teachers. What this ground-level process helped reveal was that there are no directly obvious benefits to educators in this process. And that there is a great deal of internalization by teachers of language, aims, and efforts that actually are more associated with product marketing than with educating, even at a charter that is not part of a charter management organization. This research, at this one site, shed light for this researcher on the potentially negative effects of such internalization, and begs the question of how broadly this is occurring in charter schools, and if it is now a hallmark of contemporary teaching.
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This study also has implications for teacher retention and training research, as most teachers currently in the workforce were trained via traditional teacher training programs, not via alternative training, charter-centric models. Proponents of the continued expansion of charters would no doubt claim that developing teacher training programs that enhance teachers’ entrepreneurial skills, marketing savvy, and awareness of product features testing and implementation would benefit charter operators. It is easy to argue that there would be little benefit to teachers in this, which underscores the value of continued and persistent research on the framing and reframing of the aims of alternative certification programs.
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Proponents of the contemporary school reform movement continue to have a strong and very public voice in decisions about schooling Philadelphia. The teachers they impact do not, and of course neither do the students. The locus of control is very much with stakeholders and business owners who would see the use of a quote from Thomas Friedman in the promotion of an education project as inherently, and perhaps unquestioningly, positive. This particular kind of thinking is necessary, if one’s aim is the eventual elimination of traditional public schools in urban areas. And I would argue this kind of thinking is an essential invisible feature in all pro-charter arguments. To that end, further research into the impacts of freezing the charter momentum in urban districts, even for a short time, seems warranted – if only to provide a counter to this thinking, and perhaps give some weight to arguments for the persistence of (and continued resource allocation to) traditional public education in Philadelphia.</div>
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<b>Postscript, June 2015</b><br />Pence Charter School’s application to the SRC to expand and develop a second K-8 charter on the other side of Philadelphia – was approved, but its bid for a high school was not. The new Pence school will incorporate an intensive language instruction approach, where every student will be taught in English for some courses and in Spanish for others. Pence is not replicating the 2-track system in the new school, which will open in 2016. The York charterization proposal is still under review by the courts. And the School District of Philadelphia is now considering outsourcing both substitute teachers and medical staff for the district (giving contracts for these services to private agencies) in a cost cutting measure. This measure is being fought by parents, the teacher’s union, and several members of the Philadelphia City Council. <br /><br />For those who are interested in this topic, two great sources for the most up to date information about education in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania’s approach to school funding can be found here: <a href="http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/blogs/288">The Multiple Choices podcast</a> and <a href="http://thenotebook.org/">The Philadelphia Public School Notebook</a></span></div>
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<span href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school</span> by <a href="http://careythinking.blogspot.com/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">Martha Hope Carey</a> is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.
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Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-69930087885722260162015-06-10T13:42:00.001-04:002023-03-02T18:36:04.546-05:00Hope as a Presumption<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This post is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of my dissertation, a chapter on perceptions of accountability, failure, charters, and choice. This post continues the introduction of my dissertation. This project is a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability. The first posting in this series is <a href="http://www.careythinking.org/2015/05/the-worth-of-work-is-open-to.html">here</a>.</span><br />
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<b style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Chapter 6: Hope as a Presumption</b><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Accountability in education can be achieved at the macro level, according to school reform proponents (and as detailed in No Child Left Behind legislation) using an approach that is fairly basic in business economics. The formula is: education spending levels should be set based on the notion that productivity is equalized across all groups (advantaged students and less advantaged students), and such productivity is measured through an outcomes-based assessment of student achievement based on equalized outputs (student test scores) rather than equalized inputs (variability in the provision of educational resources and services) – so accountability in this context means that 1) education spending is premised on ensuring productivity, 2) spending is equalized across groups equitably and 3) spending is kept efficient by redirecting resources (if you spend less there, you can spend more here) to achieve maximum productivity (Aske 2013, p.112).</span><br />
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The authors of this analysis of accountability conclude that the formula is not actually sustainable. The trade-offs between equity and efficiency can never be balanced. This is in part because continually higher levels of resources need to be re-allocated to groups with initial lower marginal productivity (less advantaged students) in order to achieve any parity on productivity with more advantaged students, so that “if compensatory education is used as the metric of equity, it is impossible to achieve equity and efficiency simultaneously…thus the desired objectives of NCLB are inherently mutually exclusive” (Aske, p. 117).
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Working within the parameters described above, there is not really a solution to this problem, unless initial lower marginal productivity is raised without somehow tapping shared resources. Or unless those who exhibit lower marginal productivity are simply not counted in the data used to determine resource allocation. Or unless those less advantaged students who exhibit lower marginal productivity are denied resources all together.
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Two researchers from the University of Pennsylvania recently analyzed this issue of resource allocation impacting educational outcomes and found that an adequacy gap (“the difference between the resources that districts need for all students to achieve academically and the amount districts actually spend”) persists across all school districts in Pennsylvania, but is more prominent in districts with larger percentages of poor students, and is most prominent in the School District of Philadelphia. The researchers found that the SDP had an adequacy gap of “more than twice as large as the average district serving the same share of economically disadvantaged students” and the SDP “spent approximately 48% less than would be necessary to educate all students to meet performance expectations” (Steinberg 2014, p. 2-3). And the most recent data on student test scores in Pennsylvania (using the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment or PSSA) show declines in every grade level, across all groups, compared to 2011 PSSA test scores.
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This decline in scores over time has paralleled both the reformulation of education funding first enacted by the Pennsylvania state legislature in 2008 and education funding cuts put in place by Governor Tom Corbett in 2011, which resulted in staff layoffs and increased class sizes in over 60 percent of districts across the state. Today “school districts are still operating with hundreds of millions” less than in previous years, and it is “the poorest school districts where we often find the largest concentrations of students who are English language learners and who are in circumstances of economic disadvantage, those kinds of school districts disproportionately lost greater amounts of state money” (Chute 2014).
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Pauline Lipman describes this focus on educational accountability as “not a policy of public engagement in the improvement of schooling” but rather as “a panoptic system of surveillance that teaches people to comply and to press others into compliance” and as a means of assessing school quality, it is fraught with “a highly racialized discourse of deficits” because accountability measures are most often used to sort functional from dysfunctional schools predominantly along racial lines (Lipman 2004, p. 176-8). The state-level policies aimed at ensuring accountability which have been put in place since 2001 have had a range of negative impacts nationally, explored by Lipman and elsewhere in much detail. But one specific impact on the professional identities of teachers today can be easily summarized: the “history of this reform movement [around accountability] has been built not on teacher development but rather on a punitive accountability system of high-stakes testing” (Katz 2013, p. 19). As the former head of the National Education Association commented recently, “as we are all so painfully aware, the current accountability system…is totally driven by high-stakes standardized tests” and teachers know that, for the present, “our lives revolve around testing” (Van Roekel 2014, p. 3-4).
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When teachers at Pence talked with me about what accountability means, it was often talked about in emotional and personal terms – and the idea of compliance was ever-present. For Nia accountability means “making sure I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And accountability takes the ugly face of standardized testing today” (Teacher Nia, personal communication, March 26, 2014). When Leah reflects on accountability, she thinks about “our supervision and evaluation, I think that’s accountability, and I think it’s really smart… I like that we’re being held accountable” and she explains “when [the former CEO] walked in the room, everybody sat up. I appreciate that we’re all going to do our jobs and someone’s watching. I kind of like it” (Teacher Leah, personal communication, March 31, 2014).
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Teacher Diane’s perspective is that accountability involves scrutiny from all sides, including self-scrutiny. It “stretches to parents. And I believe…to teachers as well as the administration. And for me personally, I need to be able to go home at night and know I gave everything that I could possibly give today” (Teacher Diane, personal communication, April 11, 2014). For Teacher Tina, accountability is basic; it means simply that “I am accountable for whatever happens in the classroom, what they learn, what is delivered” (Teacher Tina, personal communication, March 28, 2014).
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For Teacher Lisa, accountability is slightly more distant, more of “a checks and balances system” that ensures that “people are living up to the expectations set for them, whether [they are] administrators, teachers, students, parents, Board members, just that people are checking in to make sure that everyone is doing their job for the success of the kids” (Teacher Lisa, personal communication, April 29, 2014). And for Teacher Molly, who has been teaching middle school math at Pence for six years (after working for several years in the juvenile justice system), accountability is multi-layered and impacts language use at the school as well as her own perceptions of language and of time: “[W]e’re held to those standards. I think we’re accountable for making sure that our kids are safe and happy and educated and have opportunities for the future in terms of getting into decent high schools in the city…And on the federal side, us making AYP, is like, we have to do that so that we can continue to do what we do well. Like we have to follow those [annual] benchmarks that they’ve set for us, we have to get here…We don’t want our charter revoked. We don’t want people coming in and saying ‘you’re not doing the job, because you’re not meeting these grade levels that we’re expecting you to meet at some point’…And it changes the way we talk, have conversations about things. It’s always there in the background of every conversation we have” (Teacher Molly, personal communication, April 13, 2014).
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The ideal of accountability is also expressed by some at Pence as compliance to a particular order, and about a future good. Administrator Jason has been a middle school math teacher at Pence for three years, but this year he is the acting Dean of Students. For him as an administrator, accountability means “children being accountable for their actions. As a teacher, I would say it’s making sure students are mastering the skills at the grade level that they’re currently in” (Administrator Jason, personal communication, March 6, 2014). James, the current Student Data Coordinator (and former Pence teacher), defines this as holding schools accountable for making students gain what they need for college or careers (Administrator James, personal communication, April 2, 2014). For other Pence teachers, the intersection of accountability and compliance is seen as purposeful and inherently negative. When Teacher Hannah and I spoke about the issue, her response was clear and firm: “I think it’s punitive. It’s like a punitive kind of trying to measure what happens in a classroom, and too often it’s used against a particular teacher as a tactic of intimidation” (Teacher Hannah, personal communication, March 21, 2014).
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For Hannah this idea extends to students as well. The standardized tests “which change every year, of which [teachers are] not given any information of what’s going to be on them…these tests are going to matter for the kids getting into high school or not…And it’s crazy that can be the case” (Teacher Hannah, personal communication, March 21, 2014). Teacher Karen explained that for her accountability was “a very politically charged word” and that her experience with it in her former charter (which was run by a charter management organization contracted by the SDP) was personally and professionally debilitating: “I think that one of the big motivators for me leaving [her former charter school] was the accountability pay-for-performance system was so stressful and it was unpleasant…you had someone coming in in our observation notes every about minute or two they would list a percent of students on task. One student has their head down, ‘89% on task.’ I mean, the level of under-a-microscope accountability created an incredibly stressful environment that was, like, crushing. It was not easy to work there. And I think that when accountability creates a punitive environment, which it can both in the classroom observation realm, but also in the testing, AYP- funding realm, I think that that’s when it’s a runaway train, when people are scared into cheating on tests, because of ‘accountability.’ When people leave observation debriefs crying because they’re so stressed out that they’re going to have a pay cut next year or lose their job, because they happened to be observed on the wrong day, and a kid flipped out or something like that. Those are when people become desperate and things don’t go well and both adults and kids, I don’t think it’s good for when it’s that extreme” (Teacher Karen, personal communication, April 10, 2014).
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Teachers at Pence, like all teachers today, are fully immersed in an ideal of accountability transmitted from the business world to education. Accountability in language, actions, metrics, data, testing, behaviors, expectations, and communication permeate their practice and also frame the terms of their employment. It goes without saying that teachers themselves cannot exert direct control over the lives of students outside the classroom, or control over parent engagement in students’ lives, or control student health or income level or cultural or racial background, which are all elements that impact students’ ability to achieve “maximum productivity.”
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Yet the overarching aim of accountability, as outlined by corporate interests and now re-branded in education, is the financial health and success of the organizing entity. The focus is not actually on the health and success of individual students. Enhanced efficiency and productivity are goals that benefit the organization and aid in the process of developing new products to market. Regardless, many Pence teachers share the view that there can be a direct connection between their own ethical sense of accountability as practitioners (and modeling this for students) and how accountability is framed in the era of charter schools and school reform, which they hope results in long term success for their students. This is despite the reality that the accountability measures and testing practices put into place over the past 25 years have yet to show that they ensure, or even promote, student success out in the world.
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In the contemporary school reform era, schools that do not meet certain performance metrics are seen as unaccountable failures that should be closed because they will not provide a future return on the investment in them by interested parties. The portfolio model (multiple organizations competing to operate schools in one district) of school privatization which was brought to Philadelphia in 2002 by former Superintendent Paul Vallas is alive and well in the city today. This model is supported in part because it gives Pennsylvania, the School District of Philadelphia, and the School Reform Commission opportunities to, as one school reform proponent recently stated at a national education conference, “keep dumping the losers” – just as one might dump bad stocks (Gym 2014).
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The metrics used by the State to evaluate success in Pennsylvania’s schools include test scores, attendance, graduation rates, and student improvement, which are combined into a School Performance Profile score. Over the 2013-14 school year, all but three of the city’s charters were given a score, and of these, 58% saw decreases in their scores from the previous year, including all of the schools run by one particular charter management organization (McCorry, November 10, 2014). But for teachers at Pence, failure is not a disgruntled investor, or a missed metric, or poor test score. Failure can be personal, internalized, and heartbreaking. It can be about students’ perception of their own capabilities, and their own futures. And interviews with Pence teachers revealed that failure has a shared meaning, one connected to the purposes of teaching, the idea of equity, and the ethics of the school itself.
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Teacher Sam sees failure in terms of students’ experience and emotional well-being. For him, it’s “when kids, like, shutdown…when they’re sad and it’s like nothing turns them around, you know. To me that’s failure, because it’s like they’re not working towards anything…they don’t care at all” (Teacher Sam, personal communication, May 19, 2014). Teacher Rob describes failure as “when a student gives up on something. It’s when they no longer believe that they’re capable of performing a certain task. Or they’re no longer capable of being in a certain situation or dealing with certain people. And being able to turn them from that, because it’s so often that they’ll give up on something, but usually they’re pretty resilient. But for me failure would be that they walk away just thinking ‘I can’t do that’” (Teacher Rob, personal communication, May 6, 2014).
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And Teacher Nia describes failure in similar terms: “I think when a child feels defeated, to me that’s failure. Not for the student, but for me professionally that somewhere I have not stepped in to tell this child that he has potential, that he or she has capabilities of succeeding. And then that might not be in Math class, but that his presence is of value. And so I think when a child internalizes that defeat, internalizes that low self-esteem I think that’s when I have failed professionally” (Teacher Nia, personal communication, May 29, 2014).
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For Administrator James, the scope of failure is broader, and connects directly to the mission and history of Pence. His concern is that Pence faces a future where funding from the SDP is reduced, which would mean increasing their focus on fundraising and donations. This would mean the school would have to market itself to parents of higher socio-economic status, and James thinks this would fundamentally change the culture and goals of Pence, and result in less equity. He explains, “That’s going to be I think the failure for us. That we’re going to end up – I think Pence will end up still as a school, but it’s going to end up being a school that doesn’t have a community that mirrors the city where the ethnic and social economic balances are similar to the city. It’s going to probably end up being more of a school that pulls more middle class and local right from this particular neighborhood of students versus throughout the city” (Administrator James, personal communication, May 28, 2014). And given the demographics of the Pence Kindergarten class this year (down to only 22% African American, and up to 45% Caucasian), James’ concern may well be warranted.
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For Teacher Patty, failure means accepting a statistical status quo about students’ futures: “I feel like though if you ask the teachers around here, we have to be concerned about the state standards, but really [failure is] to not produce students who are successful in life as in completing high school, completing college. I feel like there’s a really big drive here to not accept the fact that a lot of these students, you’re traditionally, statistically going to drop out of high school and don’t go to college…like here it’s almost like there’s a culture where the expectation is you will get through high school. You will get through college. So I feel like that’s one thing is that just having students that generally would be considered to be successful in life that they are able to continue with their education and navigate these different situations with the skills that we’ve given them”(Teacher Patty, personal communication, May 29, 2014).
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Pence teachers perceive that student failure is often connected to a lack of compassion, awareness, motivation, or engagement. These teachers feel a sense of personal failure as professionals when students’ needs are not attended to in a holistic way. Yet as employees they work in an environment that measures failure as the absence of specific quantifiable components in student achievement, just as every other charter does.
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Teachers reiterated to me that their school is not as driven as other charters by the typical de-contextualized accountability measures which are then converted into product differentiators in the urban charter market. As noted earlier, Pence uses a responsive classroom approach, and the teachers also value reflection and responsiveness both in their practice and in the school community. This translates to notions about the culture of Pence, in which the values and voice of teachers have been perceived (by the teachers I spoke with) to play a large role in the past, particularly under the long leadership of the first CEO. But Teacher Lisa notes that in the present, with changes to the Board and a new CEO, this is changing: “I hope that Pence continues to like follow in the footsteps of its history…But it seems as though more teachers are unhappy. More teachers are a little frustrated. And because of that the students are acting out in different ways like where we found more fights this year than we have in the past and things like that. So because there is now starting to be a relatively high turnover where there wasn’t before, and that’s turnover in administration and in teachers, I can see our mission statement crumbling a little bit, because you might not have the same community feeling among the like educators if they’re constantly turning over…So it’s a different feeling, and there has definitely been murmurs that Pence is deviating from what it started as and potentially worsening” (Teacher Lisa, personal communication, April 29, 2014).
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The idea that there could be a visceral distinction between what teachers are held accountable for in the contemporary school reform era and in the current political climate (like test scores) and what teachers actually feel personally/emotionally accountable for is not unique to Pence, or to charters. This distinction is an invisible feature in many school cultures. Yet observing these teachers work, and hearing their descriptions of what accountability and failure mean, I was struck again by how organizational aims often superseded the professional ethics of the practitioners within that organization. Because in the accountability era, a teacher failing to foster a sense of self-esteem or self-respect in one individual student is fairly irrelevant, unless this is shown to directly impact test scores, the AYP, and marginal productivity.
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Nonetheless the committed teachers at Pence consider that part of the ethics and purposes of the job is to shape students into good citizens, to encourage students to be responsible to their community, to be progressive human beings, to care for others, or simply to have self-respect. For these teachers, this is their professional identity, and they stay tied to it despite the accountability-era reframing of educational priorities happening around them.
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One such educational priority that has been reshaped and reframed over the past decades is choice. In a discussion about the concept of choice in education (which laid the groundwork for the development of charter schools), historian Daniel Rodgers explored how the 1960’s idea of school vouchers was reframed politically in the late1980’s into a debate with “democracy and choice moved into its center. Local public school governance had long been one of the most distinguishing features of the American polity” but “in the new turn in conservative writing on education, public schooling had become synonymous not with democracy but with a new authoritarianism” (Rodgers 2011, pp.217-18).
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This shift in language was used to push a shift in perception about democratic processes in educational decisions, and about how public education should be organized. Historically school boards had been arenas “for democratic deliberation, compromise, argument, tax referenda, and election. But ‘voice’ in the arguments of the new voucher proponents was not the essence of democracy. What mattered was ‘exit.’ Give unsatisfied education consumers the power to walk away” through school choice (Rodgers, p. 218). As Nia said to me during one interview, choice in schooling (of which Pence is a prime example) means “[b]eing able to choose a school that fits your philosophy of learning and teaching” (Personal communication, 3.26.2014).
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This same sentiment was captured in a remarkable policy essay penned by Ted Kolderie back in 1990, a policy essay that was used as the basis for the America’s first ever charter school law enacted in his home state of Minnesota in 1991. In his essay, Kolderie called for a change to the process of education on a broad scale. He proposed that in order to improve, if not perfect, public education, all states should give up the old idea of school districts as franchises and instead give more power to individual education consumers instead. “A State canting to create incentives for improvement will want first to withdraw from the district its ability to ‘take customers for granted’” he wrote, proposing that the state should “transfer the attendance decision from system to student…shifting from assignment to choice as the basis on which the student arrives at the school…Choice alone is not enough. But choice is essential” (Kolderie 1990, p. 5-6). He advocated for diversification in education offerings, with schools established by one local district in other locales (a city district running a school for at-risk youth in the suburbs, for example) and run by “Perhaps a business firm. Or an investor group. Or a group of parents. Or perhaps educators” which would be held accountable by “its sponsor, through the contract, and to its families, through choice” (Kolderie, p. 7-8).
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This point of view, centering on educational choice as a form of consumer empowerment, was reiterated by Teacher Ella when we spoke. But as a practitioner in a charter school she sees the practical implications: “I’m someone who’s like very sympathetic to, like, anarchist ideals. I love the idea of a school being a single, autonomous unit that responds to the community. So in that respect I think charters are awesome. I don’t want a big district. I don’t want someone far away telling schools what to do. I think schools need to be responsive to the people that are in them. So, yeah, in theory that’s grand, but that’s not – when people who are running a school don’t know how to run a school, or aren’t responding to the community of the school and its surroundings, then it’s just as much of a mess as when someone in the state capital is doing it” (Teacher Ella, personal communication, April 20, 2014).
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Teacher Diane sees the development of charters (as the embodiment of choice) as the best solution to a very real problem. Charters evolved in Philadelphia because “the school system was failing, they were failing the children…And I feel like, so, parents should have their choice to be able to say ‘you’re not performing very well, and I want my child to go somewhere where people care about what’s going on with them.’ And it could be that because of financial reasons the teachers are overwhelmed by the amount of students that are in the classroom, which of course rubs off on how you interact with them. If you have 34 kids in a class I’m thinking you might be like ‘I give up, I can’t’ and then you don’t have the support of your administration. You don’t have the proper resources…But somebody has to be accountable for that, and parents should have a choice about where their kids are” (Teacher Diane, personal communication, April 11, 2014).
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And Teacher Rose, who has taught 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders at Pence over the last nine years, has a similar perspective: “Because I think it’s like any problem…if you encounter a problem people are going to try to find solutions to their problem, and that’s why I believe that charter schools are a good solution. Like they encountered a major problem with education for so many years and nothing was happening that someone thought about let’s do a charter school, and it’s a business too. So from the business perspective you want your business to be successful. So a charter school is offering that choice to parents” (Teacher Rose, personal communication, April 9, 2014).
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Choice and accountability intersected in Kolderie’s vision of public schooling; citizens could be empowered to open independent schools, and parental choice would keep those schools accountable in some manner, as would the “contract” the schools have with whoever funded them. This approach was informed by the influential1983 education reform report, A Nation At Risk, which opened with a stark statement of fear – “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world…What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur – others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments” – and whose authors (members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education) concluded that “declines in educational performance are in large part the result of disturbing inadequacies in the way the educational process itself is often conducted” (U.S. Department of Education 1983, pp. 1-4). The report proposed education reforms that focused not on social mobility or equity, but rather on regaining a foothold in the ongoing global competition for knowledge, advancement, and commerce.
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The authors of the report proposed changes to the educational process that included but were not limited to: school days and years being extended; moving “continually disruptive students” to alternative classrooms, schools, or programs; consistently sanctioning students for tardiness; and integrating work skills instruction into the curriculum as early as possible (U.S. Department of Education, p. 4). The idea that choice could be presented as a solution to the problems A Nation At Risk outlined made sense, as it aligned with the report’s premise about changing “the way the educational process itself is often conducted” to improve America’s competitive edge and restore its global preeminence.
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That educational choice could link with outside/for-profit interests also echoed one of the report’s recommendations – private interests should play a larger role in both leadership and financing for education, and the Federal government a smaller one – and led, over time, to the creation of schools like Pence. Choice and charters were marketed to parents and communities by highlighting a very visible feature: your lack of choice in schooling can lead to failure, and charters and choice could give you a pathway to success, which you as individuals will now be empowered to take. As sociologist Renata Salecl has noted, “Capitalism has always played on our feelings of inadequacy, as well as on the perception that we are free to decide the path we will take in the future…And capitalism, of course, has encouraged not only the idea of consumer choice but also the ideology of the self-made man, which allowed the individual to start seeing his own life as a series of options and possible transformations” (Salecl 2011, p. 19).
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Despite Kolderie’s (and others’) presentation of a new choice-centered approach to organizing schools, the reality is that the American educational system is “one of many institutions that link individuals’ residential locations with their life chances…The fact that schools are typically organized and partially funded by residential districts means that the quality of one’s educational opportunities depends directly on where one lives” (Sharkey 2013, p. 14). In his recent work analyzing patterns of wealth and income inequality, economist Thomas Piketty examined the connection between education and the promotion of social mobility, which had been the stated aim of public education over the twentieth century. The earliest incarnation of American public education was seen, in the early 1800’s, as a “levelling engine” that had the potential to equalize social power and reduce class distinctions (Kaestle 1983, p. 91).
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But Piketty found that even with the considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth century, earned income inequality did not decrease: "As technologies and workplace needs changed, all wage levels increased at similar rates, so that inequality did not change. What about mobility? Did mass education lead to more rapid turnover of winners and losers for a given skill hierarchy? According to the available data, the answer seems to be no: the intergenerational correlation of education and earned incomes, which measures the reproduction of the skill hierarchy over time [meaning the division between highly paid/skilled and less skilled/lower paid workers], shows no trend toward greater mobility over the long run" (Piketty 2014, p. 484).
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This is in part, Piketty explains, because those American institutions of higher education which provide students with the training, skills, and networks that best predict success in high wage jobs have been, and continue to be, prohibitively expensive to attend for those of lower socioeconomic status. Research has shown that the proportion of college degrees earned by children whose parents belong to the bottom two quartiles of the income hierarchy stagnated at 10-20 percent in 1970-2010, while it rose from 40 to 80 percent for children with parents in the top quartile. In other words, parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access (Piketty, p. 485).
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In a recent national study of trends in educational choice, the data showed 90 percent of students enrolled in private schools in the United States in 2007 were considered non-poor, versus 60 percent of students in public schools, and 88 percent of the parents of the students enrolled in private schools had some college/training post-high school, versus 68 percent of parents of public school students (Grady 2010, p. 14-16). And in terms of the social mobility of African American students in particular, a review of data from the 1960’s to the 2010’s shows that only about “35% of black children advance upward in the income distribution” in the United States and that a “majority of black families that begin outside the poorest quintile of the income distribution are not able to transmit this relatively advantaged position to their children” (Sharkey, p. 101).
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A Nation At Risk presented the country’s lack of global competitiveness (not the population’s lack of social mobility) as the most pressing educational process problem, and proposed that we change the process. New approaches to organizing schooling, including school choice, were developed to address this perceived competitiveness problem. Whether this was the most relevant problem that needed to be faced in American education is still debated – but for the teachers at Pence today, that issue is not very pertinent. They are working within a system that was offered as a solution and therefore they tend to view Pence as an example of a positive response to a problem. And their professional identities are linked to the idea that they are part of a solution.
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The teachers I interviewed and observed at Pence were not, however, unaware of the varied impacts of the broader charter/choice “solution” and how this has affected them as professionals. They see that the juncture of accountability, failure, charters, and choice is that most visible feature of schooling: money. Teacher Molly takes the view that Pence is a distinct and better environment (and thus a better part of the solution) than most other charters in Philadelphia, but it is unfortunately trapped by the resource allocation decisions that impact all schools in the SDP: “[W]e’re a charter school, but we’re different than the other charter schools…and we’ve always put ourselves different, and separate, and we got the [award from an investment bank’s foundation]…and now it’s like we’re just getting thrown in the mix…but we’re not like – it’s not who we are…And it’s hard to separate when the news doesn’t separate, the media doesn’t separate, you don’t have people in this school who are standing tall and separating us. And we’re just going to get thrown into the hot mess that’s happening [regarding school funding in the SDP]” (Teacher Molly, personal communication, June 13, 2014).
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When we discussed his perspective on teaching at and funding for a charter school in the city, Teacher Kevin was typically pragmatic: “I think some charters are great and some suck, I mean, that’s just the way the world is. Obviously, in the last few years there have been some shut down because of mismanagement of funds. There are some that are, in my opinion, way too militaristic, but there are some great ones, and kids have a great experience, and they learn, and they grow. As far as funding goes…there’s the lack of resources in a lot of urban settings, and they’re taking it away, and now we have to buy all new curriculum to get ready for Common Core, and it’s supposed to be computer based, but many schools have no computer in their school. I just don’t understand how you can cut education funding” (Teacher Kevin, personal communication, March 10, 2014).
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Teacher Karen’s pre-Pence experiences at both a charter and at a school in the SDP impact her perspective on how the “solution” actually functions, and how this can fail: “[T]hat’s a reality that charter schools are expanding and the district is contracting. I don’t think that’s a good thing overall…It’s deregulation. You get some people who can flourish, and innovate, and shine, which I think Pence does, but it’s deregulation in the sense that you also get people who take advantage of that. And we have crooks in Philadelphia charter schools, people paying themselves triple salaries, and running bars out of their cafeterias, and engaging in horrendous nepotism…right now charters are public schools. They’re part of urban education…they definitely are a player, and you can’t ignore that” (Teacher Karen, personal communication, April 10, 2014).
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And Teacher Hannah described the broader cultural implications of the charter/traditional schooling split, the social implications of how resources are allocated, and who this fails: “[T]he creation of charters is leading to kind of a segmentation of the system, and it’s creating kind of an us-versus-them mentality, as far as district-versus-charter. It’s also creating more inequality…resources are very concentrated it seems like, and not equitably distributed. And it’s created in the system where it’s like it’s a last resort to go to a local neighborhood school unless you live in very specific neighborhoods. And so that creates a whole culture of kind of disrespect towards those schools I think, and it kind of, yeah, you make a certain perception about those teachers, and the principals, and the students who go there” (Teacher Hannah, personal communication, March 21, 2014).
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Teacher Charlotte reflected on the idea of choice as the catalyst for a shift in how education is funded in Philadelphia, but also more broadly as a shift that is changing the culture and future of the city itself. Like many at Pence, she is torn between striving to provide something of quality to urban students (who might not get it elsewhere) and feeling a sense of control or accomplishment about that, and the choices about schooling being made all around her that have a greater cost: “I think charters can be a great thing, are a great thing for the city as far as – we’re going back to the word – choice. But as far as School District of Philadelphia, I think that there’s an agenda definitely coming – I don’t know if it’s from the State or from the new school district superintendent, but they are breaking it down. They’re trying to privatize it, and they’re doing it slowly but surely. It’s like they’ve given up on the city of Philadelphia” (Teacher Charlotte, personal communication, March 27, 2014).
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In conversations and interviews, many Pence teachers acknowledged the direct (and seemingly unalterable) connection between charters, resource allocation, and inequity. But they did so with the recognition that they personally are part of a “good fight.” They work to provide a safe, stable, motivating, and academically rigorous environment for students. These teachers aim each day to create good citizens who have dual language skills and a sense of their place in a connected world, while as employees they have to respond to the seemingly ceaseless demands of the accountability era. They are acutely aware of the potential for corruption and failure within the system of charters in Philadelphia, and also that they work in a growing charter system within a larger education system that is being slowly dismantled because of its perceived failings.
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The meanings these teachers make of accountability and failure, and of charters and choice, reveal yet another invisible feature of Pence that affects teachers’ professional identities: a persistent hopefulness about their immediate actions, mingled with a persistent sense of resignation about the inevitable. Teachers work in community with each other within both a time and place, and teacher identity is framed by time. Ideas about the past impact actions and language use in the present, and the past and present impact individual and communal perceptions about what exactly might come next, and who shapes that future.
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Philosopher Calvin Schrag, writing about modern perceptions of identity and self, states this far more eloquently: “The self in community is a self-situated in the space of communicative praxis, historically embedded, existing with others, inclusive of predecessors, contemporaries, and successors” he explains, and though each individual self may be conditioned by contexts, they are not determined by contexts, and therefore (ideally) are able to make ethical choices and take decisions about “a particular tradition, a particular conceptual system, or a particular form of behavior” (Schrag 1997, p. 108-9). Yet Pence teachers’ sense of engagement in, or power over, what comes next for their school is not particularly strong, and the school culture does little to promote such engagement or empowerment around determining strategies for the future. This is because the future of Pence will be shaped primarily by market forces, by reform efforts centered on an ideal of accountability taken from the business world, and by the politics of resource allocation. Not by practitioners.
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During one interview, Teacher Rose and I discussed her experience of growing up in a socialist country which has become, in recent years, more open to capitalism. She has witnessed fundamental changes to how resources were allocated to health care and education in her country as a result, and this made her reflect on what she sees happening in education today. “This State is a reflection of the country” she said, and “they’re not doing anything to try to solve the situation…They talk about it, because of course they have to show that they’re talking about it. They cannot just be ‘no we don’t care.’ They have to pretend that they care, but they’re not moving on. They’re not moving forward to make any changes. The opposite, they’re getting worse and worse. The [Philadelphia] school district is closing the schools. They are taking personnel. They don’t have nurses. They don’t have counselors. So that’s what you want for your children? The children of your country, the free country for all? No, that’s not right…but I think, in some sense of capitalism, it’s just for rich people. And then, sadly, not everybody’s rich” (Teacher Rose, personal communication, April 9, 2014).</div>
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<span href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school</span> by <a href="http://careythinking.blogspot.com/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">Martha Hope Carey</a> is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</div>
Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-69301896844614965472015-06-05T12:04:00.000-04:002023-02-21T08:30:16.990-05:00Intermission<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I am so grateful to any and all who have read dissertation excerpts posted here over the last few weeks...there are two more chapters to come, but I will pause in the posting for a time. Because the place for words crafted into academic work -- it is a delimited space. Limiting too. Unlike the usual blog posts. Unlike so many other things. The requirements and rules to be followed for the formal written presentation of academic arguments, or at least approved-by-the-academy persuasive arguments, never ceases to amaze. That, and the idea that some writing is objective.<br />
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But now that it is basically election season again, the days to come will be filled with contenders (recycled from the last time around) re-generating sentences made up of words that are ordered just slightly differently from that last time around (crafty!) to make what they feel are persuasive arguments -- sentences which are also so often pretty wackadoo. Certainly this can shake one out of feeling bounded by words. Or at the very least give you the giggles. (Thank you, Rick Perry.) Should be fun.<br />
<br />Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-73762247927963941352015-06-05T10:49:00.001-04:002023-02-21T08:30:14.326-05:00At the Waterfall, Part 2<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This post is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of my dissertation, a chapter which focuses on race and perceptions of equity among the teachers. This project is a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability. The first posting in this series is <a href="http://www.careythinking.org/2015/05/the-worth-of-work-is-open-to.html">here</a>.</span><br />
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<b style="font-size: 12pt;">Chapter 5: At the Waterfall, Part 2</b><br />
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The teachers at Pence are tasked with generating an interpersonal solution to an embedded organizational problem (the two-track curriculum) at their school. They are taking part in ongoing self-education through professional development sessions, which is both difficult and admirable, and they are doing so based on their perceptions of the disruptive and destructive social/racial segregation at the school. But Pence teachers were not the original proponents or developers of the policy that actually caused the extant segregation of Pence. They were not the authors of the organizational choice that has led to the problems they are tasked to solve. Nonetheless, over the past year they have been doing emotional work, both as individuals and as a community, around the problems that resulted from that original organizational choice.
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The new Pence racial equity task force evolved from the professional development sessions on race, and its goals and mission statement were developed over the summer, before the start of the 2014-15 school year. Members of this task force (which will meet throughout the year) will be tasked with the development of a supervision and evaluation system that assesses teachers’ cultural competency, the development of further professional development sessions which will equip teachers with intervention strategies to hold colleagues responsible for racially equitable practices, the development of training for all staff on handling student behaviors in non-structured settings, and the examination of institutional practices that have led to segregation at Pence – but there is no call for a dismantling of the current program structure. And, according to the task force mission statement, Pence employees will be asked to provide the administration with guidelines about hiring practices and assessment tools about cultural competency to use with school employees, and to use intervention strategies to hold others accountable for racially equitable practices. Such requests for teacher/staff surveillance of teacher/staff behavior mirrors the “pervasive monitoring” approach most charters (particularly those operated by charter management organizations) use with students, only in this case applied to adult employees, with an expectation that they will be compliant informants. (Goodman 2013, p. 90)
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To paraphrase Teacher Kevin, one of the things that the Pence community needs to have a conversation about is why they have maintained the current curricular structure at all. The product differentiator (conceived of by parents and the first CEO at the school’s founding) of fully immersive bilingual education gave way, a few years in, to the reality of the two-track system. After the first year in operation Pence started attracting urban parents who were not necessarily interested in immersive language learning for their children, and at that time the school could have opted for a language intensive model (providing second language instruction to all students who attended) instead of sticking with the Fluency Track/Language Instruction Track split. As an independent charter, Pence had the flexibility to make that choice. But this was not the choice made. And now, more than a dozen years later, Pence teachers are being tasked with finding resolutions to problems (among both students and teachers) which stemmed directly from that original, organizational decision. And the creation of the racial equity task force makes an overt and vaguely punitive connection between the psychoemotional work teachers are currently doing as employees regarding racial proficiency, the purported organizational aim of equity for Pence students, and how Pence markets itself as a successful, diverse school in the city.
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During my interviews with Pence teachers I asked each of them to personally define equity in the context of the school and in their roles as educators. Their answers were very clear, and revealed a widely shared value and meaning about the issue. Teacher Diane, who has been teaching Kindergarten at Pence for three years, and worked at two charter schools before then, described equity as “making sure that every student gets what they need” (Teacher Diane, personal communication, April 11, 2014). Rob said equity meant “receiving what you need to be successful” (Teacher Rob, personal communication, May 6, 2014). Rose said it meant that “everybody should be having the same chances to learn” (Teacher Rose, personal communication, April 9, 2014). Karen described equity as “different students need different things, and in order to support them, you can’t have a one size fit all” (Teacher Karen, personal communication, April 10, 2014). Nia described equity as “giving what the students need when they need it” (Teacher Nia, personal communication, March 26, 2014). Teacher James, a long time Pence ELL teacher whose current position involves school-wide data coordination, said “I think the adults in this building really understand that fairness is giving everybody like whatever they need to be successful, and that’s going to look differently for every single child in this school” (Teacher James, personal communication, April 2, 2014). And Teacher Patty, who has been teaching Spanish at Pence to grades K-2 for two years, explained “When I think of equity related to education it’s almost like ‘everyone has what they need in order to be successful’…I don’t think you’re ever going to reach a point where students have everything equal coming into the school, but at least we can do our best to kind of make sure they have what they need” (Teacher Patty, personal communication, May 29, 2014).
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When each of these Pence teachers defined equity, they centered the idea in their classrooms and on student needs. In the classroom teachers attend to issues of equity and equality at every turn. When Pence as an organization grapples with the issue, the focus differs. As employees of a charter school with a particular curricular differentiator, teachers here have to work on issues of equity both as an aspect of the business ethic of Pence and to support the school’s brand. But how do those involved make an ethical decision about resolving the equity “problem” Pence has? How can they make an ethical decision?
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Teachers and staff are all aware of this internal feature of Pence. There are differing imperatives about resolving the issue. The racial equity task force and professional development sessions are seen as actions taken resulting from awareness. But “awareness does not necessarily promote responsibility” and can lead instead “to oversimplified and direct applications of knowledge” that, in this case, focus on the employees’ perceptions of race and racism rather than on structural or organizational solutions; those in a position of power (to promote and then require engagement in professional development sessions on race, etc.) support approaches that are, in fact, basic mechanisms for the shifting and sorting of employees, not substantive approaches that are a result of facing an aporia (Koro-Ljungberg 2010, p. 606).
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And this essential, impassable issue is embedded in the school culture, and in teacher identity, at Pence. It impacts decisions about the future and impacts daily interactions. It also impacts perceptions of the ethics and purposes of teaching. As Charlotte describes this, ”I just think about the substance of it. Like as far as equity, as far as in our classrooms, like how fair is it…just because the two classrooms are given equal amount of instructional time, but how equitable is it if this is a brand- new teacher with two more students because their classroom is bigger as opposed to this classroom with a teacher that’s been there for eight years? How equitable is that learning as opposed to that learning? So in theory it’s there, but in reality is it really? So are we providing supports to make it more equitable over here than over here?” (Teacher Charlotte, personal communication, March 27, 2014)
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This idea of the provision of supports connects to another aspect of equity in charters: how they attend to students with special needs. The Pennsylvania charter school law provides charters with a fixed amount of special education funding, redirected from public schools, to offset costs associated with special needs students. Until the most recent version of the state education budget approved by the Pennsylvania legislature (which modifies the formula somewhat), the allocation formula was based on a fixed cost per special needs student/fixed population percentage of 16, meaning that 16% of students are assumed to have special needs and money is allocated to each district in the State based on that number.
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This formula has “generally discouraged [school] districts from identifying too many special education students” because when those districts calculate “per-pupil district special education expenses to determine payments to charters, the state bases the number of students – the denominator – on the 16 percent rule. So districts with more than 16 percent special needs children pay charters a larger amount than if the actual numbers were used” which ends up rewarding the charters (Hardy 2014). Charters are also not required by the state to specifically provide tracked expenditures per individual student, and one recent analysis of data on the subject showed that “Pennsylvania charters received close to $200 million for special education students that was not spent on services for them” (Hardy 2014; Browne 2013). As another report put it, “Under the current funding formula for special education tuition payments [in Pennsylvania], the charter schools received substantially more in tuition payments for special education students than they reported for spending for special education” (Schafft 2014).
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Though operating within this questionable funding structure, the two Special Education teachers whom I observed and interviewed at Pence also had set definitions of equity, and these were tied to their daily work. For Teacher Sam equity means “everyone is kind of treated the way that fair should work for them” (Teacher Sam, personal communication, March 12, 2014). For Teacher Kay, who has been at Pence for eleven years, equity means “giving people what they deserve regardless of who they are, what they are, and what skills they have…students, teachers, parents – you assume nothing” (Teacher Kay, personal communication, March 27, 2014). Both teachers expressed that the purposes of what they do were linked directly to their professional actions, which impact the social and emotional well-being of their students and, in turn, the culture of the school.
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Teacher Sam explained that “At this school – and, you know, we have a lot of students with behavior issues – as a Special Ed teacher I see a lot of that. But I never have felt disrespected by a student. Like even a student that hasn’t been a positive exchange, I don’t ever feel like it’s been personal…I think that students kind of realize that there’s no one here that’s out to get them. At least that’s the impression that I get from my kids, and I hope that it’s true…It feels safe, I think. I think that people feel really, really comfortable here. We have kids that don’t want to leave here, because maybe their home lives aren’t that great. We have kids that have great home lives, and they still don’t want to leave either, because they have a lot of things that they can get involved in. Kids love to stay for office hours. They love to come up here for lunch. It’s nice that they like the support of their teacher. They don’t see it as like the authority. They see it kind of as someone who’s there to help them” (Teacher Sam, personal communication, March 12, 2014).
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Teacher Kay’s perspective was that “we have a responsibility to educate students in all areas, the whole child. So I think of, when you say ‘whole child’ that’s where you’re helping them socially, emotionally, whether you’re helping with academics, it all kind of goes hand in hand. And my approach, and I feel Pence’s approach, has always been to educate the whole child…like, just doing what we’re supposed to do, educating our children, in the best way we can and keeping it about the kids and not so much about the numbers, the money and everything else…actually sticking to our mission and vision to the best we can” (Teacher Kay, personal communication, March 27, 2014).
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For Sam and Kay, providing the necessary supports to students with special needs means enacting a professional identity that is other-focused and holistic, and an identity as an employee that is only marginally connected to the complexities of funding. Because they work at a charter, both feel they have resources they might otherwise not have, resources that allow them to provide supports that help students and also affirm these teachers’ professional ethics. As Sam explained to me, “The caseloads here are very small. In the past I’ve had much larger. When I taught at a different charter school in Philly I had over 30…So this is a nice size. Last year I think I had 12 students” (Teacher Sam, personal communication, March 12, 2014).
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The idea of equity as expressed by all of the Pence teachers I spoke with informs what they do every day and, from their vantage point, the goal of equity also shapes the culture of the school. This is their shared perception, and their hope. These teachers take actions around equity and engage in self-reflection which informs their professional identities. But issues related to equity at Pence are not resolvable by teachers. This is in part because the two-track curriculum which has led to segregation at Pence is an organizational/policy issue, not simply an individual, psycho-emotional one, and for this to change it would have to be addressed by the Pence Board, funders, and administration.
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Another reason teachers at Pence cannot rectify issues of equity at the school is that there are structural inequities “baked in” to charter school legislation which have a lasting impact on equity across all schools in Philadelphia. As former School Reform Commission member Joseph Dworetzky has explained, each time a student enrolls in a charter school, the local school district must transfer the costs for that student (minus non-education budgeted district expenditures like adult education, student busing, facilities costs, etc. as outlined in Section 1725-A of the Pennsylvania School Code, 2002) to that charter school and in some manner then reduce the district costs in order to maintain a balanced budget.
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But students do not enroll in charters in whole class groups. One student may leave a public school kindergarten class, another a third grade class, and another a sixth grade class to attend charters, but just because each of these classes has one less student this does not mean the school district can directly save staffing costs by immediately laying off a kindergarten, third, or sixth grade teacher. It simply means those classrooms will each now have 31 students instead of 32.
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Precisely because there are a range of fixed and variable costs for schooling, and there are also costs that change only over considerable time, there is budget constraint in any district as long as charters siphon funding. Imagine, for example, that the per student “all-in” cost in the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) is $10,000 and that charters siphon off about $8,500 of that when a student goes to a charter school. Using this example, Dworetzky notes that “historically, the [SDP] has been able to shed only about $4500 in costs per student” in any given year when there is a charter transfer, leaving the SDP with a large net loss each time a student leaves. And this cycle repeats every year.
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This funding formula holds true for charters whether they are “brick and mortar” or cyber charters. Each and every charter school, even if they have no costs for maintaining a building, busing students, or after school activities, gets funding from the district at the same level. Similarly, if a student who lives in the SDP transfers from a private or religious school to a charter school, the Pennsylvania charter law requires that the SDP send that charter $8,500 for that student, but “because the student was not in a District school before transferring, the District had no prior costs associated with that student that can be shed” so the net loss for the SDP in that situation would be the full $8,500 (Dworetzky 2013). Add to this the realities of special education funding noted above and the 2013 decision by Governor Tom Corbett to eliminate any reimbursement from the state to public school districts to ease this funding issue and the funding inequities become structural. As one school superintendent in western Pennsylvania put it, “The more money that we have to pay out for charter school expenses…we’re experiencing increased class sizes [in traditional public schools], less money to pay for textbooks and programs, less money to pay for staff” (Delano 2013).
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The Pennsylvania Department of Education withheld nearly 9 million dollars from the SDP budget between 2011 and early 2013 and redirected those funds to six charter schools in Philadelphia that, it turns out, enrolled more students than they were contracted to enroll. Or in some cases, reported enrolling more students on paper only. Over 5 million of the withheld amount went to just one school, the Walter D. Palmer Charter (Herold 2013). But in October 2014 the Walter D. Palmer Charter school was shut down. The school’s charter had been revoked by the SDP, a decision reached after years of “poor academic performance, unstable finances and failure of its associated foundation to maintain its nonprofit status” as well as mounting evidence that “Palmer had fraudulently charged the District for students that did not exist” (McCorry, September 23, 2014). And this is not a singular occurrence among Philadelphia charters; dozens of charter schools in the city are under investigation by federal authorities for precisely this type of fraud (DeJarnatt 2011).
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Beyond the fundamental inequities of the charter funding system which has led (at minimum) to divisions and constraints around school resource allocation that hamper efforts toward equity, and beyond the organizational/curricular issue at Pence which has led to some racial segregation within the school, another reason teachers are limited in their efforts to resolve issues of equity at Pence is that any teacher action around this or any other issue at the school that is not sanctioned by the administration (as the various task forces and strategic planning committees are) can always be responded to with termination. Pence teachers currently have no collective bargaining rights. That Pence teachers believe that their actions reflect professional autonomy, trust, and empowerment which can lead to real change in how the school operates, and thus enhances their sense of satisfaction as employees, is actually an invisible feature of the school culture that works to the benefit of the employer. Not the teachers.</div>
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<td style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.careythinking.org/2015/06/intermission.html">Intermission</a></td>
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<span href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school</span> by <a href="http://careythinking.blogspot.com/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">Martha Hope Carey</a> is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.
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Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-5532085576053732402015-06-04T10:54:00.001-04:002023-03-02T18:36:35.095-05:00At the Waterfall, Part 1<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This post and the next are excerpts from Chapter 5 of my dissertation, a chapter which explores perceptions of race and equity among the teachers. This project is a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability. The first posting in this series is <a href="http://www.careythinking.org/2015/05/the-worth-of-work-is-open-to.html">here</a>.</span><br />
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<b>Chapter 5: At the Waterfall, Part 1</b>
<br /> </div><div style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12pt;">“It’s always been a discussion at our school” explains Teacher Charlotte, “our school culture in general…everybody’s opinions can be said and heard. And with that a lot of feelings come up and a lot of things come up.” We are sitting at a coffee house around the corner from Pence, and Charlotte is describing her decade at the school and the key structural issue that in her view impacts the culture of Pence the most. “There was a lot of things about race” she continues, "and it was a time I was the only African American teacher period. And when I say period, well, we had like African American [teaching] assistants. We did have a black nurse. We had support staff and like office staff, but as far as classroom teachers there was a year or two where I was the only African American classroom teacher…So there was times when I was like ‘I’m not doing this anymore. I’m going to dental school. I don’t want to do this!’ [Laughs] So this was hard at times. I’d take it home and my mom would say, ‘you can’t leave, like you have to stay there. When you look at the makeup of your students and they need somebody there to start looking up to that looks like them or someone that’s behind a desk that looks like them.’ So I felt like I needed to stay. But I enjoy working at Pence. I mean, with any teaching job it’s always hard, there’s always things, it’s frustrating, and you’re underpaid, but for the most part I don’t hate coming to work every day” (Teacher Charlotte, personal communication, March 27, 2014).
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Charlotte has moved from being a fulltime classroom teacher to a Teacher Leader at Pence over those ten years, and she views herself now as a both a teacher and a mentor. Her role is part administrative, part classroom; she teaches part-time (third grade, Fluency Track), trains, observes, and mentors new hires, acts as a liaison between the CEO, Principals, and teachers, and helps define and present relevant professional development sessions for the Pence staff. Race is the most pressing and most pervasive topic in those professional development sessions, and teachers at Pence have been engaged for more than a year in a structured discussion (led in part by outside consultants) on race, privilege, and teaching students with backgrounds different from your own. The aim of this ongoing series of professional development sessions was for teachers to gain “racial proficiency,” meaning they would become more skilled at recognizing how race and racism intersects within Pence culture and in their own teaching practice.
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Ella is a co-coordinator of these sessions, and she defines racial proficiency as having to do with awareness, meaning “how aware I am of my own racial identity, how conscious I am of how that…impacts my teaching…how much space I create in my classroom for students of all races and backgrounds to be academically and behaviorally successful” (Teacher Ella, personal communication, October 16, 2014). According to Ella, part of the impetus for this work was the observed disparity (which is just now starting to be analyzed by the administration) in disciplinary action between white students and students of color. More students of color regularly receive negative disciplinary actions at Pence, which the coordinators of the professional development sessions on racial proficiency believed was correlated to the cultural competence and awareness levels of staff and teachers.
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Charlotte and I discussed how Pence has approached this problem and where the story of this particular feature of the school began. The invisible (to outsiders) feature of social segregation is, as Charlotte describes it, an outcome of the choices made by the former CEO and the school’s founders about how to approach bilingual education. “I think it started – honestly, the race talks started years ago, again, because I’ve been here, I’ve seen the evolution – started off with the blatant line of division between [Fluency Track] and [Language Instruction Track]” she explains, a division which was present almost since the day Pence opened its doors: “All the rich, white kids [were in Fluency]. And [Language Instruction] was all the black kids of all backgrounds. Like financially it was like you had the blacks who were doing fine, and then there was the ones that were living in shelters. Like it ran the gamut. So then when they started encouraging, because this is how they would present [Fluency to parents], ‘this is immersive, it’s really hard, you have to do a lot outside of school. You have to do this, and this, and this, and this, and then you homework in Spanish…’ Well if I’m a single parent of three kids, and I don’t get home until 7:00 pm, it’s hard enough just doing regular homework. I can’t do that. So it’s really hard for the dynamic of the parents…But then they started to sell it differently, so then you started to see a little bit more of the speckles into both [Fluency and Language Instruction]. So like I remember a couple of years when I started having like more than one or two black students in my class…and that blows my mind, that I remember when it was so blatant”(Teacher Charlotte, personal communication, March 27, 2014).
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Charlotte has been actively engaged both in the creation of professional development sessions for teachers on race, and in working with the administration to find ways to alter the two-track system. She is a member of one of several strategic planning task forces the new CEO has formed to review plans for the school’s future expansion. And the message that Pence is “one of the only schools [in the city of Philadelphia] successfully teaching an integrated student population” (as noted in the school’s new racial equity task force mission statement, shared with me by Ella) is a prominent school feature, a prominent aspect of Pence’s current marketing approach, and part of their argument for expansion. But as Hannah explained to me, students in the Language Instruction Track have always been viewed through a “deficit model” by Pence teachers.
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Compounding this is the evident social division of students who “have been in the same grade for five years…and don’t even know each others’ names” because their academic lives have been so separated by the two-track approach (Teacher Hannah, personal communication, March 21, 2014). Charlotte reiterated that in her view everyone is missing out if students (and teachers) are starkly segregated by track. “I just remember a crucial time when it was like we had to figure out how to make it stop feeling like ‘us and them’ or ‘them and us, and them’” Charlotte says, “so discussions happened, ‘how do you all think as teachers we can start to blend in the two, [Fluency and Language Instruction] and that’s when the [blended art and dance classes in the lower school] started.” And making this core change in Pence’s organization after years in operation has meant that the administration and teachers have had to face the impact of that division, and the language used around and about race:”[T]here were teachers – it was beyond the students. It was the culture of the teachers also, and the teacher in the middle of this conversation said ‘well it’s just, my students are afraid, because a lot of the [Language Instruction] students are aggressive and loud, and my students are scared of them.’ And that was my deciding moment of, ‘wow, it’s beyond the parents.’ They always say it’s the parents, the parents, the parents. And it was like that moment, and someone called them out on that, and said ‘do you realize what you just said about them, they’re scary, them?’ It turned into ‘a group of students are scary.’ And so that’s, that’s when the conversation I feel like really was like administration was really like, ‘okay, we need to figure this out.’ I don’t think they were fully equipped on how to deal with it”(Teacher Charlotte, personal communication, March 27, 2014).
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Charlotte describes her understanding of the purposes of teaching succinctly: “No student doesn’t want to learn. It’s my job to figure out how to make them want to show that they want to learn…Every child wants to feel good about themselves and their learning.” But like many other Pence teachers, she is continually in a position of responding – in interpersonal interactions and with her own inner dialogue – to Pence’s organizational ethics: “It’s a scary thing to have to do self-reflection on [race]…but I can honestly say to this day even it’s still an issue. It’s beyond just having a culture disconnect with the non-white teachers with the African American students. But it’s also me, as an African American teacher, with my non-African American students…It’s still a culture disconnect, and it’s a different thing, people are just different, culturally. But it’s not a bad thing, but it’s like I recognize it, and that’s the only way I can admit it and say it out loud and fix it. But if you’re not going to admit and say it out loud that’s where the problems are lingering, like ‘It’s not me. It’s not me. No, no, no, I love all my students. I don’t see color.’ Those comments are coming up [in professional development sessions]. So that is very frustrating"(Teacher Charlotte, personal communication, March 27, 2014).
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For Charlotte, the story of Pence’s issues with “racial proficiency” comes into play as she makes meaning of her professional self in the context of the school. As Perinbanayagam (2000) notes, “class, race, caste, and gender, etc. are inescapably meanings derived from various discourses and assembled variously…and richly articulated in the mind and memories of the self” (p. 46). In Charlotte’s case, the social/structural element of race interplays with organizational responses and language use at Pence in which she, as an employee, is continually immersed. The actions Charlotte takes are informed by her own history, memory, and experience, and these shape her professional identity in this context. She had a hand in planning the August 2014 induction for new teachers, where one of the topics covered is how to build a racially proficient community at Pence. And during the summer of she also helped to create the mission and structure of the new Racial Equity Task Force. One stated mission of this task force is to increase racial proficiency among staff and faculty, with the goal of achieving racial equity in students’ behavioral outcomes.
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Teacher Ann has been at Pence (on and off) for ten years total, first as a long-term substitute for all grades, then as a teaching assistant, and now as a 6-8 grade classroom teacher. Her subject is Spanish and she teaches students in the Lower Track. She sees her role as helping her students “make connections between themselves and others, make connections between their culture and others while also learning the language.” We talked about the culture of Pence, the history of the two-track system, and her perspective on that as a teacher and as an African American woman. She explained that for her there is a problematic intersection between the ethics of teaching and the culture of open discussion around race that the school is attempting to promote. In her view, the biggest ethical issue is teacher/student confidentiality, because “I think , teachers just talk or just feel like you need to share and we don’t always think about whether it’s appropriate to share, even with a colleague” (Teacher Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014).
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Pence uses a community-focused responsive teaching approach. This “responsive classroom curriculum” was developed by the non-profit Northeast Foundation for Children and this teaching model is implemented at Pence in grades K-4. The model promotes respectful interpersonal interactions and the fostering of students’ emotion management. Proponents of this model strive to reiterate positivity across the school culture in order to build and sustain a stable school-wide community. This is reiterated in Pence’s middle school grades by another approach, the Developmental Designs curriculum, which also forefronts social-emotional skills building and adherence to classroom and school rules and cultural norms.
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Ann strives to integrate Developmental Designs concepts into her own teaching practice, specifically encouraging students to be self-aware and that when they encounter an issue they should “work it out themselves…that’s what it’s all about. So they’re evaluating, they’re analyzing, they’re discussing, they’re being empathetic, they’re putting themselves in the place of someone else, they’re collaborating…to expose students to expressing their ideas without being really judgmental” (Teacher Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014).
As for the teachers, Ann’s view is that the ongoing push to get staff to engage in this same kind of critical thinking and self-expression around the issue of race through the directed professional development sessions is linked to a perception about teacher-student relationships: "I think [the Pence administration] started [the professional development sessions on race] because teachers were requesting it...I think that teachers said 'we need someone to come in, like we need some outside to come in...to give us some guidance and some thought questions, facilitate some discussions.' So like how useful its been, I don't know. I think the teachers were complaining to the administration that we need to talk about things. And to relate better to the students"(Teachers Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014).
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But this effort is constrained, in Ann’s opinion, by two organizational realities, two long-term tensions, within the Pence culture. These tensions impact how and how much teachers at Pence talk about and share understandings on a range of issues, including race. The first is the exclusion that teachers who only work with one track experience and how this exclusion shapes perspectives on students, parents, and other teachers. That exclusion also shapes Ann’s view of Pence community values and how she talks about her work at a school with a two-track curriculum. She explains that “I’m one of only two teachers [who teach 6-8 grade students] who never works with the [Fluency Track] students…So because it’s a different dynamic between the two programs, between the students and the [Fluency] and the students in the [Language Instruction] program, it’s different because I never see the [Fluency] students. So the only reason I know most of them now is because I’ve been at Pence so long, so I’ve had them all when I was a sub. I remember when they were in second grade. But four years from now I won’t know the [Fluency] students, because I never worked with them…So like it’s very different – there’s different parental involvement, there’s different part of knowledge the kids are coming in with, like different backgrounds amongst the students in the two programs”(Teacher Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014).
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As sociologists Brubaker and Cooper (2000) note, this kind of reification is a social process and “it is central to the process of ‘ethnicity,’ ‘race,’ ‘nation,’ and other putative identities” which can “crystallize, at certain moments, as a powerful, compelling reality” (Brubaker, p. 5). This socio-organizational reality of Pence impacts the story of Ann’s past, present, and future, and thus her story of the school culture as well. And her perspective on the two-track system was shared by the majority of the teachers I spoke with.
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The second organizational issue Ann describes, and which in her view directly impacts her role and experience at the school, is that Pence was founded on another form of exclusion. “I think that the founders of the school were upper middle class,” she explains, “and like, a lot of the first families were upper middle class, that they weren’t as concerned about salary, because they had comfortable salaries,” she tells me and “I feel that for them it wasn’t as much as a priority as making sure that they had like this dual-language program, and, you know, they had the global citizen curriculum. I think for them, well, you know, yeah, their teachers when they started, making $36,000 or $38,000, like that’s okay, because like ‘the school is awesome’…I’ve had several conversations with teachers here who have had to borrow money from their parents or move in with their parents. Or one teacher who was eating peanut butter sandwiches and apples every day, because that was, like, her protein. She couldn’t afford to buy meat. So she would eat lentils and make a dish or something out of the lentils. That’s crazy…As a Pence teacher, we just don’t get paid enough…[it’s] one of the main factors with our turnover, more than anything else” (Teacher Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014).
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This concern was also expressed by several of the other Pence teachers I spoke with. Ann explained to me that she persists at Pence despite these issues by thinking about, speaking about, and acting on solutions. She has acted on the pressing issue of compensation by becoming a member of a newly formed teacher task force on teacher pay and turnover, which the new CEO just agreed to meet with on a regular basis.
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As Akkerman and Meijer (2010) noted in their research of teacher identity development, teachers continually engage in processes (external and internal, active and reflective) and through these find their own identity positions. This activity results in the acquisition of insights and information that in turn help form professional identity. Ann’s action on an issue that matters to her is evidence of this, and gives her a sense of empowerment because being on the compensation task force gives her an opportunity to speak to the CEO. But unlike their colleagues in traditional public schools, teachers in charter schools generally have no group affiliation (like a union) or broader educational bureaucracy in place that frames the basic ethics of education, supports the development of their professional identities simply as educators, or provides protection for them when they take action. And any actions do they take are done at the risk of unemployment.
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Pence teachers are positioned, as are all teachers in charters, to have to negotiate around (or navigate priorities based on) business ethics, organizational processes, and policies and practices for which they have no training and about which they have no leverage. Ann explained that on policy issues, Pence teachers generally lack both voice and choice, which was yet another point she raised that was echoed by many other Pence teachers. Regarding the decision the CEO and Board eventually made to shorten spring break and to add President’s Day as a work day (due to the winter weather closures), for example, Ann asked “Did we have a choice? No, there was no discussion about it…some decisions we know do come from the Board, or from the admin, so we’re told there isn’t really room for discussion, so it’s like teachers, we might feel like we didn’t have a choice. Why didn’t we vote? Why couldn’t we extend a day in June? The choice was made for us” (Teacher Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014).
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In a similar vein, regarding compensation at Pence, Ann describes that the pay scales and incremental increases for teachers and counselors is a matter of public record, while the pay scale for administrators is not. “I have no idea how they [the administration at Pence] figure base pay,” she tells me, “it could be a like a handshake in a backroom.” As Ann’s experiences with the compensation task force and around the professional development sessions on race convey, Pence teachers push for equity from below (for themselves and for students) and are continually made responsible, as employees, for changing on behalf of the organization.
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From Teacher Kevin’s perspective, Pence’s ongoing professional development on race, led by “a couple of professors from [a local university] who are allegedly experts, it’s okay. I mean, I think we, in some ways, some of us are resentful about it. Why focus on race when there’s so many other things that you need to have conversations about” (Teacher Kevin, personal communication, March 10, 2014). Kevin came to teaching after a long career outside of education and has been at the school for eleven years. His self-definition is “teacher/coach/dad” and he sees that his role at Pence changes depending on who is looking. “I teach math, but my job is way bigger than that” he explains, “My job is to try to teach them how to be responsible, mature young adults…helping prepare them for the world…I think [my role] is defined by different people differently. I’m a math teacher. I hope and I think that I’m a molder of young adults. I think that’s how I see myself, and I think generally that’s probably how other people see me, and hopefully that’s how people see most of us here” (Teacher Kevin, personal communication, March 10, 2014).
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Regarding his pedagogical practices at Pence versus other schools (he taught previously at what he called “hellholes in North Philly”), Kevin tells me “I can’t imagine that I would be any different in no matter what setting I was in. You go in and you teach [students] things that you think are important, some of them are aligned to the standards, some of them are aligned to your personal philosophy of life” (Teacher Kevin, personal communication, March 10, 2014). And regarding the impact of the ongoing professional development sessions on race, Kevin notes the psychological and emotional aspects of the process, and its limitations. "I guess some of the conversations that have come up" in the sessions on race "are interesting because, some of the things [the session facilitators] say to me, its like 'that's ridiculously obvious. Why does that even need to be mentioned?' But then other folks from different backgrounds, and didn't understand the impact race has on African Americans in particular. They grew up in white, suburban neighborhoods and barely knew any African Americans their whole lives" he explains. "So I think given that experience it's pretty impossible to know how an African American feels day in and day out, dealing with the things they have to deal with. I mean, we had, during one of those sessions, we had a circle, and everybody had to share about something, and when it got to be my turn I kind of broke down talking about my life. I had a pretty tough childhood. And I grew up in the projects, and I could go on forever, but I was poor...but ultimately not black, so I can't know what it feels to be black" (Teacher Kevin, personal communication, March 10, 2014).
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For Kevin, teaching is not a process of self-discovery.“When I started working here” he explains, “I was already who I am…you know, hopefully we all evolve, but I don’t think my social or political views have changed much in the last 30 years” he tells me. He did not (and Pence administration would not have allowed him to) sit out the professional development sessions on race, for example, and he explored his own memories and experiences while taking part in those sessions. That he makes sense of that engaged narrative process through an individualist, slightly detached, stable/static lens is an aspect of his professional identity (teacher/coach/dad) as well. This is one example of how “signs of identity, with their logical structures” are “put into practice in everyday life to organize the world in which an individual has to live. The signs become elements of the acts, the meaning and significance of which may change as they proceed…to claim an identity by an act is also to claim a place in an evolving narrative”(Perinbanayagam, p. 105).
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Although he tells me that his identity is fully formed, Kevin is, like all the other teachers at Pence, part of an evolving story within the school about race and how teachers must become more skilled at identifying racism and its impacts. The organizational narrative about how to address these impacts places the resolution squarely on the shoulders of teachers, each of whom is required, as employees, to engage in a personal reflective process about what is actually a structural issue.</div>
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<span href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school</span> by <a href="http://careythinking.blogspot.com/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">Martha Hope Carey</a> is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.
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Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-5765475767305647192015-06-01T19:47:00.000-04:002023-02-21T08:30:07.734-05:00Taking on the Color of Our Surroundings, Part 3<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Continuing with the process I started on May 22…this is the final excerpt from Chapter 4 (on the visual culture inside the Philadelphia K-8 charter school. This project is a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability. The first posting in this series is <a href="http://www.careythinking.org/2015/05/the-worth-of-work-is-open-to.html">here</a>.</span><br />
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<b>Chapter 4: Taking on the color of our surroundings, part 3</b>
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Soreide (2007) has found through her research on teacher identity constructions that the development of visual culture within classrooms, with content generated and chosen by teachers, is a way of using narrative resources to construct autonomous, contextual identities. Creating and posting visual culture content is both a process and an act, a presentation of signs that reflect both the inner dialogues that teachers have with themselves and the dialogues teachers are engaged in within the culture of Pence. It is a way of expressing intersubjectivity and also individuality. Perinbanayagam (2000) puts this same idea in another light: “The self, it turns out, is not elusive nor is it mysterious” he writes, “rather the self is manifest in the acts, the individuated product of a mind, that the actors and others recognize and classify as the issue of an embodied identity…The self is not a static thought-way but a recursive sign or system of signs” (Perinbanayagam, p. 45).
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Like every school, Pence as an organization provides teachers, students, visitors, and parents alike with signs and systems of signs that signify the organization’s “self,” the meanings of which can be interpreted broadly – in part because Pence is not a franchise of a larger chain of charter schools. Pence has not sold itself as a place that promotes the very visible feature of global citizenship and which also has, for the teachers, an invisible feature of implied autonomy, because the interpretation of meaning about visual content in the classroom and its relevance to teaching is perceived to be up the individual educator.
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In interviews with Pence teachers this carried over into perceptions of independence about teaching practices, and how such practices impact students. As Teacher Sam (who has been teaching students with special needs for seven years, and working at Pence for the last two) described this, “I think that that is what people predominately see around here…they just kind of feel inspired by teachers who kind of decide what it is that they’re going to do with their classroom, and how they’re going to organize data, how it is that they’re going to teach their class…You go into a lot of different rooms, and you see that teachers have many different styles. It’s not that everyone’s doing the same objective. I do, we do, you do…And I think it’s great, because the kids get a pretty well-rounded education”(Teacher Sam, personal communication, March 12, 2014).
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Teacher Karen taught at a charter school for four years before she came to Pence in 2013, and that school was operated by one of the key charter management organizations contracted to run multiple school sites in Philadelphia. Her experience there was of constraint. At Pence, she explains, it is of autonomy. “The central office [at her former charter school] micromanages the teachers, and the teachers are supposed to micromanage the children. So that didn’t give me a lot of room to try to grow as a professional and explore the things I wanted to explore and do the things that I knew create those rich, authentic learnings experiences. I definitely, within my building and with my colleagues, found some opportunities to do that, but was never really able to really meet my professional goals, because they’re just really rigid…Here you have autonomy and with that you have independence. And there’s absolutely collaboration, and there’s absolutely support, and there’s absolutely camaraderie…it’s a little more relational here…you as an educator need to build your relationships and find your collaborators where they’re going to resonate with you, and where you think they’ll be beneficial, and where you put the effort” (Teacher Karen, personal communication, April 10, 2014).
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What became evident from my interviews and observations of teachers at Pence was best summarized by Karen: teachers at this school build, find, create, and engage in ways that help them to sustain themselves, because the school culture conveys to them that they have the autonomy to do so. The posters in the hallways and the school guidelines in classrooms serve a function but teachers did not describe feeling constrained by these signs and systems of signs. As Teacher Lisa (who is in her first year teaching English Language Arts to middle school grades at Pence) explained to me, “[The] school guidelines [poster] needs to be in your classroom. So there are some things…like, ‘every classroom needs to have those to continue to build as a community.’ And that thing? I never look…That means nothing to me”(Teacher Lisa, personal communication, April 29, 2014).
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Embedded in this response is an aspect of professional self-identity. As Perinbanayagam notes, acts that help to define identity are individuated but also shared, and the meanings of acts are shared. The culture of Pence is one where teachers’ actions about visual culture, and choices about how and whether to engage with it, are enactments of not just their professional identities but also a reiteration of one of those features that seemingly differentiates Pence from other urban charters: teachers’ sense of autonomy. This is the shared perception about which Pence teachers express pride. But the perception of autonomy, or at minimum the ability to distance oneself from some of the ever-present signs and systems of signs in Pence’s visual culture by sarcastically referring to them (as Leah did) as “global citizenship proverbs,” is not actually professional autonomy or freedom. Just as the perception of empowerment or independence within the classroom is not the same as organizationally-sanctioned teacher empowerment/self-governance.
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One very overt example of this distinction is a story Leah shared with me about how the Pence administration responded to missing their AYP goal last year. “[T]here was a genuine concern. And the administration addressed that concern by moving towards something that I definitely disagreed with, which was every six weeks we did testing. And we were supposed to write these tests and then use the data to analyze what the kids needed. I mean, there was best practices involved in it, and I could see the good in it, but I have a hard time figuring out how to discretely test English Language Arts concepts anyway on a multiple choice test. I see it as an art, and so it was kind of making me crazy. And I felt like every six weeks we couldn’t get the – the administration helped a lot that they got a Scantron machine, and they gave us time outside of class to write the tests or put the tests together. But all of that time I would’ve been rather creating the next project the kids could work on. And so it did feel like it took time that I would rather have been doing something else. And I didn’t see that it was helping the kids all that much”(Teacher Leah, personal communication, March 31, 2014).
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By the end of the year, the administration relented and the testing pressure eased. Leah perceived this as a win; “to me, the administration tried something, it didn’t work, we all talked about it, and we changed” (Teacher Leah, personal communication, March 31, 2014). The teachers also suggested that the school integrate after-school tutoring into their early dismissal Wednesdays, then developed the structure to provide this tutoring and worked it into their own schedules for the 2013-14 school year. In Leah’s description of this experience, the administration of Pence was responding to teachers’ voices. Teachers did not feel the supplemental testing was useful or effective, and asked to change the newly implemented policy. The change that occurred was teacher-driven, and Leah conveyed a feeling of pride about that in her discussion with me. But the need for change was predicated on an organizational decision that did not include teacher voices at the outset, which reflects an organizational ethic.
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That the Pence teachers saw copious testing as disruptive and ineffective and it took a full school year for the administration to concur (or to gather enough data on test scores to find the policy ineffectual) reflects the reality that their perspectives on the policy’s effectiveness were not considered when the policy was being developed. The teachers’ response to being forced to implement the policy was to find a way to meet the needs of students with minimal disruption in the classroom, but which disrupted teachers’ schedules, an action which reflects the teachers’ view of their ethical obligation to students. The Pence administration did not find the ideal solution to AYP panic, but Pence teachers did, and in the process developed the structure for an ongoing tutoring program that serves those students most in need of support. The solution has so far been effective. But Pence teachers were not empowered agents through this process, because the choice was made for teachers by the administration about the organization’s response to missing the AYP for the first time. That choice amplified a problem, and the solution to that problem then had to be developed by the teachers.
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Feeling autonomous and empowered at Pence, as Karen and others explained, means to act on one’s own to make connections that are professionally sustaining, or to post messages in one’s own classroom that are self-sustaining, or to feel free to be creative with how you implement the required curriculum. The fact that Lisa can and does ignore the signs in her classroom, and Tina posts them too high for any student in or visitors to her classroom to even see – these are individual acts in individuated spaces within the school culture. But this does not mean teachers can autonomously self-govern, or have a seat at the table when policies that directly impact the business are devised and implemented.
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For much of its existence, Pence was led by one CEO, who was also one of the school’s founders. Her vision for the school’s identity is conveyed in the school guideline statements in each classroom, the listings of acceptable behavior posted in the stairwells and hallways, and in the ubiquitous posters on what it means to be a member of the Pence community. The legacy of her vision is what every teacher is responding to, both in terms of visual culture content, in terms of how the school administration forms policies and makes decisions, and in the school’s curricular focus. The former CEO and the founding parents sought to promote global citizenship as a school theme and supported this theme with a firm commitment to the idea that all students would be taught a second language, ideally with an immersive approach. But like Leah’s AYP example above, this commitment did not involve teacher voice at the outset. And the implementation of this idea has had a fundamentally disruptive effect (explored more in Chapter 5) on teachers and students alike, and which Pence teachers are now being tasked with changing.
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Pence (as a workplace) clearly promotes the idea that the teachers who take on the responsibility for changing some aspect of the school culture should perceive it as personally empowering, and as a reflection of their autonomy, which is something many teachers who have worked at other charters have never experienced. Because this is a charter, however, the teachers in this organization are tasked with finding solutions that both align with Pence’s business ethics and are reflective of thinking about future growth strategies predicated on product differentiation in an ever-growing urban market. And this is a job they have not been trained for. As educators they have instead been trained to attend to the tangible needs of any and all students, and to engage in the most effective pedagogical practices to meet those needs, in the here and now.
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<span href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school</span> by <a href="http://careythinking.blogspot.com/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">Martha Hope Carey</a> is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</div>
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Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-91270638006554271892015-05-29T10:14:00.000-04:002023-02-21T08:30:06.094-05:00Taking on the Color of Our Surroundings, Part 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Continuing with the process I started on May 22, the next few posts are from Chapter 4 of
my dissertation. This project is a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability. The first posting in this series is <a href="http://www.careythinking.org/2015/05/the-worth-of-work-is-open-to.html">here</a>.</span></div><br />
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<b>Chapter 4: Taking on the color of our surroundings, part 2</b>
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My starting point for the research was an analysis of the visual culture of Pence, which incorporates how Pence presents itself as an entity and which, when found in classrooms, can also reflect teachers’ individual expressions of their professional selves. Visual culture critic Paul Duncum explains that visual culture is a generalized term for postmodern everyday aesthetics, what we encounter visually in schools, stores, “city streetscapes, and tourist attractions as well as mass media images” along with images streamed to us over the internet – all of which are now part of ordinary daily life, and part of the daily life of a school (Duncum 1999, p.296).
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Duncum describes the comprehension of such visual contexts as a psychological counterweight, and a balancing of self-identity, against the “aestheticization of everyday life [which] involves…how we all construct our appearance for ourselves and for others” (Duncum 2007, p.288). The function of visual culture is to transmit values and beliefs, and to do so in an unconscious manner; “[i]deology works because it is unconscious,” Duncum notes, “it operates behind our backs. Hegemony…works its way through ordinary social exchanges [and] establishes the parameters for thinking and feeling outside of which it is not possible to think or feel or act alone” (Duncum 1999, p.299). And as educator Patricia Amburgy describes this, with respect to the interpretation of visual culture, “viewers may actively and critically interpret what they see but viewers may also passively accept dominant constructed meanings” (Amburgy 2011, p.6). And in her work, Lipman suggests that the educator, particularly in contemporary urban education, must ask whom this passivity benefits.
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Signs, lists, and messages for a range of audiences are on almost every wall at Pence. The school’s visual culture content reiterates ideas about and the ideals of the school in a pervasive and direct manner, primarily with text. Each classroom and hallway contains bilingual postings of the school mission statement along with a list of directives for expected student behavior at the beginning of each class (called the “First Five Minutes” list). There are also additional posters, in two languages, directing students to follow three key rules when in hallways and on stairwells, and other posters identifying the five aspects of being a Pence citizen, which include “using Pence actions” and “being a team player” and “making everyone feel welcome.”
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On the staff room bulletin board, several lists are tacked up including one outlining the acceptable student behaviors at recess (students are to stay away from cars, slide one at a time on the recess yard slide, no playing tag on the mulched areas). Other notices remind teachers of the school’s maternity leave policy, announce job openings and teacher awards, list when students should or should not see the school nurse, and detail the appropriate responses to bullying behavior or anti-LGBT language used by students. Also posted in the staff room, and above the lockers in several hallways, are glossy laminated signs that list what one teacher laughingly referred to as the “global citizenship proverbs” – Pence’s version of employee workplace motivational posters that have questions for teachers to ponder, such as “Did you know that when you make students responsible for their belongings you are nurturing global citizenship?”
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Along the main hallway on the ground floor, near the front door to the school, there is a large wall space used as a display area for projects that promote the culture of Pence. For one week in March the wall was covered with notices about acts of kindness which students in all grades had engaged in; each act was printed onto award which was then posted. The awards listed “Lining up for recess quietly so that other classes could focus” and “Deciding to read a book while his classmates watch a movie he could not watch due to family beliefs” as examples of acts of kindness. A small poster on construction paper, with words in magic marker written by a second grader, was also attached to the wall next to the awards. It read “Don’t act up. Help out.”
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From April through June this same wall was gradually covered with a growing number of black and white copied photos of K-3 graders. Each photo was of an individual student holding up a card that stated what they wanted to be when they grew up. Their aspirations ranged from artist to soccer star to doctor to biologist to judge to police officer to President. One happily grinning student wanted to be a “ninja y maestro.” The display was in the most visible area of the school, near the front door and right next to the main office, right down the hall from the cafeteria, where everyone – all Pence students, teachers, staff, parents, visitors – could see. The concept and placement seemed a heartfelt reflection of school pride. But the images were also visually evocative of something else: each image contained just the head and shoulders of a child, facing the camera, each one holding an 8 x 10 card with writing on it, directly in front of their chest, much like mug shots.
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On the wall across from the display area is a permanent mural, created years ago by Pence students and still bursting with color, which states in Spanish that the school is all about global citizenship. Next to this mural are the emblems from the Pennsylvania Department of Education that certify Pence has achieved AYP in consecutive years. And near those emblems are notifications of awards to the school, including a plaque from a prominent international investment bank’s foundation, given to Pence in 2008 for its focus on promoting global cultural awareness. There are also wall-sized maps by the stairwell on each floor of the school.
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Pence has no art program in grades 6-8, and only one period of art class per student per week for students in grades K-5, so older students’ classroom projects (on geography, literature, math) make up much of the school’s artwork. Multiple map projects, designed by students, line the hallway near the 7th and 8th grade classrooms, including one outlining how resources and populations are dispersed around the globe. The question “How do maps affect your thoughts about the world?” is printed on white paper and posted near a cluster of these resources maps. I found myself re-reading that almost every day that I was at Pence. This was one of the few questions I saw posted in a public area of the school that did not refer to actions and behaviors, but rather to critical thinking and intellectual engagement.
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Listings of the “right” behaviors, school guidelines, “proverbs” about citizenship, posters on human rights and global religions, Pence’s achievements on State tests, the images and statements presented on the display wall, and status recognition from an investment bank and student- work-as-art all intermingle in the space inside Pence, and teachers are saturated by this all, every day.
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As part of her research, Lipman examined the focus on testing in school reform policies in Chicago and how this pacified both pedagogy and the actual language of teaching and learning. “As accountability measures exert real authority over student, teachers, and school administrators and permeate instruction,” she found, content and context become dis-embedded; a “staff development session on ‘critical thinking skills’…was about teaching children how to think about test questions…[an] example of ‘making students part of the educational process’ was students making up their own multiple choice test questions” like those on a State test (Lipman 2004, p.80). These examples reveal acquiescence to the accountability mindset that can permeate educational settings. But this type of acquiescence is not limited to how textual information is formally structured or delivered within the classroom.
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The aspects of visual culture that Duncum critiques are typically dis-embedded symbols, but they can also include physical environments, and images of those environments. An example of this is photographer Richard Ross’ Architecture of Authority, a collection of images of specific public places that were designed for constraint: jails, the lobby of a Secret Service office, border crossings. But the book opens with a photograph of the Montessori circle at his children’s school, a reminder “that coercion starts young and wears many disguises…The legendary open-classroom approach of the Montessori method is curiously contradicted by the big white circle on the floor…Does the circle have to be literally drawn to make the point about fitting into a system?” (Ross 2007, p.10) Lipman addresses this idea as well, by noting how urban spaces in our globalized society often become both a visual fetish and an element of social control, explaining that as “global economic processes make gentrification ‘the cutting edge of urban change’…education policies become a material force supporting the displacement of working-class and low-income communities, the transformation of others into urban ethnic theme parks, and the consolidation of the city as a space of corporate culture” (Lipman, p.179).
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Pence is part of that corporate culture space in marginal ways, via small visual reminders, such as the colorful sign attached to its entrance gates listing the corporate sponsors who helped to pay for and build the school’s playground. But in terms of the organization as a whole, the school has never been part of a charter management organization, is situated in an extant 100-year-old public school building (as opposed to an office building), and was founded by a group of community parents (not an outside organization or business group). The examples of the visual culture in the wide Pence hallways capture the visible features the school wishes to promote. They also echo aspects of the more subtle, sometimes invisible features of the school that can impact teachers’ professional identities.
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Since Pence is not part a chain of urban charter schools, it does not have on display consistent, pre-packaged marketing messages framed by a larger corporate entity. But Pence does use its visual culture to present the ethics of the organization – both the educational ethics, represented by the school’s curricular focus and policies, and also Pence’s business ethics, as represented by those organizational structures, actions, and messages to employees that promote adherence to actions and values that best ensure this school’s longevity. When asked about the case for charters in Philadelphia from a business ethics standpoint, a former member of the School Reform Commission explained to me that the best case is when charters are viewed as “a repair and recovery strategy” for the city, “a response to a crisis” and a means of finding best practices to implement in traditional schools, rather than as a long-term or stand-alone solution (J. Dworetzky, personal communication, February 7, 2014). Pence does not present as a temporary solution, a test case, a laboratory for best practices, or a means to recovery for the School District of Philadelphia; it presents as a stand-alone solution.
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You come to know about how Pence views discipline and self-discipline (of teachers and of students), expectations of interpersonal relations within the space, and the value it places on the cultural capital of global citizenship when you read what is posted on the hallway walls. But alongside the school mission statements, guidelines posters, and examples of student work, the school’s classrooms also contain teacher-generated visual discourses. Such in-classroom examples of visual culture express to others something about that teacher’s sense of values and purpose. But these also reiterate to that teacher who they are as professionals within the school culture, and how they make meaning of themselves within this setting.<br />
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In Teacher Rob’s 7th grade social studies classroom, for example, he shares a personal creed on posters in the front of the classroom, written in both English and Spanish: “I believe that you are all capable of doing great things. I believe everyone is smart in his or her own way, and we all deserve respect. I believe that hard works leads to success. I believe there are no shortcuts on the road to success. I believe we were all meant to love and be loved. Life is hard, and I believe true success lies in making this world an easier place to live in.”<br />
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Rob, who is in his third year teaching at Pence after teaching at another charter for one year, describes his professional identity as an educator rather than as a teacher. “I mean, for me, when I think of a teacher I think of someone specifically in a classroom that is up in front of the room talking to people” he explains, “and when I think of ‘educator,’ I think of it being a little bit more well-rounded, and that it addresses more elements of the students and their lives. So not just, you know, their academic growth, but also social emotional, you know, their self-confidence, their self-image, and I feel like that…that’s probably for me the more important part of my job…if they leave and feeling good about themselves and having a positive self-imagine, and believing that they’re smart, and believing that they’re capable, and interacting with their peers, and believing that their voice is worth hearing then those are the things that are really important to me…and I think that the academic learning comes as a result of the other things that we do, making kids feel comfortable, making them feel like they’re listened to, that kind of thing”(Teacher Rob, personal communication, May 6,2014).<br />
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Rob’s choice of visual content, so prominently displayed at the front of the room, aligns with both his self-description and with his view of the values of Pence. Like every other teacher in the building, he must teach to the standards, but he sees his key role as an educator as aiding in the development of emotional maturity and confidence in his students.
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I observed Teacher Ella, who has been at Pence for four years, discussing (in Spanish and English) constitutional amendments and what an ACLU “bust card” is with her 8th grade social studies class. On one of her classroom walls was a large poster with a quote from the writer David Foster Wallace: “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people, and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” Ella says she teaches best through connecting content to students’ experiences and by encouraging their participation, rather than through direct instruction. She views herself “first and foremost as a teacher” and explains that “[t]he longer I’m in the position the more I…think about teaching as encompassing…relationships with my students and less about what specifically I teach them. So I’d say that [my role] is ‘in progress,’ or that it’s like ‘in motion.’”
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Ella also believes that “the kids have to really care about what I’m trying to get them to learn. And if there’s no reason for them to care then there’s no reason for them to learn it, and there’s no reason for me to be teaching it…So I would say that’s key, like [content] has to really be directly meaningful. They have to want to know about it. So relevance is huge for me. And I would say the other thing, although I struggle with it…is like them being able to have a community of learning with each other. So the idea that they want to ask each other questions and help each other find the answers. And they want to work together and tackle something together…I want very much to have a classroom where like, you know, when someone has a question they don’t just ask me. They’re asking each other, and they want to help each other, and they want to learn together, and they want to figure out what things mean, and like tackle issues together. So that’s a big part of like my dream of how teaching and learning works”(Teacher Ella, personal communication, April 20, 2014).
Teacher Nia is in her first year at Pence, and she self-describes as both an educator and an advocate. She says her primary responsibility is “to educate my children to be successful in the world that they live in…but also to be able to advocate for them and with them or at least teach them the ability to advocate for themselves when necessary.” For her this approach to pedagogy aligns with her philosophy about the profession: “I’ve always been told that a teacher can never be ordinary, because if a teacher is ordinary that means your students are ordinary. And the purpose of teaching is to help mold the minds of these young children who will then go onto shape the world. So as a result you’re responsible as a teacher is to shape the future…I truly think that my role as an educator is to help these children develop into good and progressive human beings…When I first started teaching I wanted to give them the skills they need to be successful in life. And now I have learned to differentiate between the two. That being progressive includes the skills that you need to be successful in life, but that it can’t be limited to that…to be a progressive human being you have to have the skills to hold down a good job. You have to have the skills to be able communicate with your peers. You have to have the skills to be able to navigate the information that you’re getting. So it’s a part of it. But the big picture here is to help them become progressive human beings”(Teacher Nia, personal communication, March 26, 2014).
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Nia attributes part of her understanding of the purposes and meanings of teaching to the Moral Sciences classes she attended as a child in school in India, classes which stressed both religious and secular moral actions (be polite, be respectful of elders, obey your parents, be truthful). This is similar to what U.S. educators call character education, which emphasizes, among other things, student docility, dependence on adult approval, respect for authority, and the acceptance of hierarchical structures of power as natural (Halstead 2010, p. 305).
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At the charter school where she taught previously (before moving to Pennsylvania), they had a specific curricular focus on character education, which Nia describes as particularly relevant when teaching a population where many students are “from a divided household where parents are working hard to make ends meet or sometimes there is no adult in the picture that is actually taking care of the child. The child is basically raising themselves…the values that they need to become good human beings aren’t coming from home, so they have to be taught somewhere. And so they had decided that school is the place that that needs to be taken up, and to a very greater extent I agree with that”(Teacher Nia, personal communication, March 26, 2014).
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The visual culture content in Nia’s classroom is consistent with her perceived role as a conveyor of values, ethics, and morals. Posted in Nia’s 5th grade classroom there is a large sign across the back wall, next to the Pence behavioral guidelines, which reads “Remember, we all have choices. Choices have consequences. So be smart and make the right choice.” And near the front door there is a large poster reminding students of the ways they can show character – through wisdom, forgiveness, accountability, patience, and cooperation.
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Teacher Tina studied visual communications in her home country, worked for some years as a graphic designer, and taught design at the high school and college levels before moving to the United States and getting a job teaching K-3 at Pence four years ago. She feels her visual arts background helps her when teaching young kids with low literacy skills. Her self-definition is that she is a “teacher and entertainer who performs each day” and her pedagogical approach aligns with her view of Pence’s teaching model: the responsibility for the learning process is on the students, and for them to learn, they have to be in control of themselves and know what consequences are. She tries to “encourage exploration with self-control, so that their brains can work better in two languages” through “a combination of toughness and high expectations and a creative and hopeful and positive attitude” (Teacher Tina, personal communication, April 28, 2014). Her current Kindergarten classroom is covered with images – of animals, plants, colors, etc. – all posted at the height of an average 5-year old. The classroom rules are posted high up on the wall, above the whiteboard, which you would not find if you were not looking for them.
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In Teacher Hannah’s 4th grade classroom the space is divided into the working area (shared student work tables) and the reading/group seating area, which is a typical Pence classroom setup. The room is bright and very organized, particularly in the reading area and around the badge board by the classroom door; the badges are for students to quietly excuse themselves and take a badge when they need a hall pass to the restroom. All the posters listing class rules, school guidelines, class goals, etc. in the classroom are in Spanish, as is the day’s agenda, which is listed on the whiteboard at the front of the room.
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Above her desk in the back corner of the room, however, is a poster in English, with a quote on it attributed to Albert Einstein: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Hannah’s view of her professional self is that she is a guide more than a traditional teacher, particularly because the students she teaches are at an age where they are starting to become independent people and independent learners. This is her third year teaching at Pence.
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When it comes to her pedagogical practice and her perspective on the philosophy of teaching, Hannah explains, “[My approach] is focused around student voice. So trying to let students have as much power in the classroom as possible and giving them as much responsibility as possible... like the way we run the school with responsive classroom, it puts a lot of responsibility on the students, and they create their own classroom rules as part of the design, and they create their own school rules as part of the design too. So it’s kind of a little bit of both... I usually find whenever I teach something new it’s hard for me to think about it through that lens. Like we were teaching protractors, for example, in Math, and so those couple days of lessons were very like teacher-driven, direct instruction, ‘this is how we do it, now you practice, now we do it together, now we check.’ And classroom management-wise it’s never very successful for me, like it’s not the way I want to be teaching, and it’s not the way that they’re used to learning in this room. It’s always a little more frustrating, and then I get frustrated with them. So it’s the kind of thing where I have to remember that part of it when I’m teaching”(Teacher Hannah, personal communication, March 21, 2014).
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The Pence school guidelines and mission statement are posted prominently in Teacher Leah’s classroom, just above where students’ daily writing workbooks are stored, and the mission statement poster has also been signed by each student in the class. At the front of the classroom, on one portion of the whiteboard, directions for expected student behavior are listed. And on the other end of the whiteboard there is another poster, connected with a recent content unit Leah taught, which reads “What are Civil Rights? What are ways to prevent conflict? Who has the power?”
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Leah has been at Pence for four years, and describes herself as a teacher and a guide who enjoys that part of teaching where “I can kind of come along side and listen in and kind of advise from the side and find the thing that I need to teach.” This is a self-perception she has evolved into after over a dozen years in the profession, teaching first in a Christian school and then in the Philadelphia public schools before coming to Pence four years ago. She explains “When I first started teaching I didn’t have any teaching background. I was an English major and kind of fell into teaching. And I was strictly by the book…as I got more comfortable and took more classes I would say that I kind of have taken bits and pieces of everything. And so I think I want to see where kids are at, and I want to help them get to the next place. I really love books, and I love writing, and so I want them to love books and writing too, and I think I’m way more interested in that than figuring out what the Common Core [new national education standards] says right now. I’ve read the Common Core, and I’ve tried to think how that fits in, and sometimes I don’t quite understand what it’s asking me to do, and I much more want kids to love books and reading and writing…to me that’s introducing them to great things, sharing great things with them, encourage them in their writing, writing a lot. And to see their power in it, their choice, what they can do with it, that they can explore the world more, that they can make an impact on the world”(Teacher Leah, personal communication, April 7, 2014).
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Teacher Audrey has been in the profession for almost 30 years, and at Pence almost since it opened. She views herself as a teacher, a resource for students and for her teaching team, and, because of her tenure here, as an informal school historian. Her role includes modeling emotional responsibility and truthfulness to her students so that they can “learn a confidence about their own abilities” which for Audrey “involves not just math but speaking, writing, articulating how you feel, communication…how to be responsible…how to speak to one another respectfully…just being civil, learning to take care of one another in a way that’s nice” (Teacher Audrey, personal communication, February 24, 2014). And in her classroom, the walls are almost entirely covered with student math projects, which are organized and lined up neatly, as are all the books and other materials in the room. The only messy space in the room is her desk, which is so laden with books and papers you cannot see its surface.
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One coordinated example of how Pence shares its school culture visually (and socially) is through the end of year global citizenship concert. For the 2013-14 school year, the concert theme was identity, and student drumming, dancing, and singing performances were each linked to this theme. To publicly signal cohesive school identity to the students, teachers, and parents in attendance, the students wore a rainbow of Pence school t-shirts, each grade level in a different vibrant color. Events like this obviously have visual elements (and motivations or aims) that are far harder to ignore than posters or maps on hallway walls that one passes by every day. Through my role as researcher I noted every aspect of Pence visual culture incessantly, and individual responses to (or participation in) the visual culture context varied widely. Yet I observed that every teacher in the school was very aware of it at least once: when they had to block it out. For testing week during spring semester, teachers spent hours taping up construction paper in their rooms, as all text and every image on every classroom wall had to be completely covered for testing periods, per Pennsylvania’s state mandate.</div>
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<span href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school</span> by <a href="http://careythinking.blogspot.com/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">Martha Hope Carey</a> is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.
</div>Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-13265762039180936172015-05-27T13:54:00.001-04:002023-03-02T18:37:01.435-05:00Taking on the Color of Our Surroundings, Part 1<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuMRkvSxok-Fx3yuH1iKb1wb92zE86BsWv1DcXNV0tAjX-he7MwPL6ynsySGbV6LOyBxjTYNGpKvzsi1chuLX3cWUEZ6FqAdevXVrOkM9laY2yLsx7fUIoLaOVEF7RrP2mUigrMC8mbog/s1600/ICS+2014+019+%25282%2529.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuMRkvSxok-Fx3yuH1iKb1wb92zE86BsWv1DcXNV0tAjX-he7MwPL6ynsySGbV6LOyBxjTYNGpKvzsi1chuLX3cWUEZ6FqAdevXVrOkM9laY2yLsx7fUIoLaOVEF7RrP2mUigrMC8mbog/s320/ICS+2014+019+%25282%2529.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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The next few posts on the blog will be excerpts from
Chapter 4 of my dissertation; this chapter explores the setting and the visual culture inside the Philadelphia
charter school where I did my research, and teachers’ perceptions of autonomy at that school. This project is a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability. The first posting in this series is <a href="http://www.careythinking.org/2015/05/the-worth-of-work-is-open-to.html">here</a>.</span>
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<b>Chapter 4: Taking on the color of our surroundings, part 1</b><br /> </div><div style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; size: 12pt;">A few minutes before the start of the Pence Charter teachers’ meeting on this snowy February afternoon, the new school CEO is unstacking chairs and setting them at student work tables. As he moves around the classroom he talks to me about the possibility of tomorrow being another weather closure day – the sixth so far this winter – and how this will impact the academic calendar. Readying the room is a familiar task for him, one he is used to from his years as a teacher. And, like most teachers, time is very much on his mind.<br />
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His words and actions would not seem at all discordant in this particular setting except for the fact that he is engaging in them while wearing a suit and tie. As the Pence teachers start to enter, singly and in pairs, the noise level grows, as does the contrast. Every other person is dressed in jeans or pants, casual shirts and sweaters, and boots or sneakers. They talk with one another and choose seats while the CEO waits at the front of the room. But, just before he begins the meeting, he suddenly looks down at his feet. He tells me under his breath that he forgot to switch out of his outdoor shoes and into his dress shoes, which he has to remember to do before the Board meeting tonight. This is a crazy meeting day, he says, like most days.<br />
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The CEO begins by announcing that there will be some follow-up on the issue of teacher pay, since he had heard the feedback from teachers that receiving only a percentage of their contracted raises this year was both unexpected and dispiriting. He also reminds the assembled teachers that the Board will be discussing the Pennsylvania State renewal application process Pence Charter is required to complete this year. Another topic of discussion with the Board that evening will be the possible future expansion or replication of Pence and how to market the school’s strengths. Pence has not requested any increase in enrollment (referred to as new “seats”) for several years, and the school is at capacity, but development of another K-8 school site or expansion into a high school is in the offing.<br />
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With regard to whether Pence will have its charter renewed and whether the school will continue to operate, the teachers see no impediments since the academic performance of the school has been solid, though it did miss the required Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goal (part of No Child Left Behind legislation) in the 2012-13 school year. But teachers have little impact on the range of factors reviewed by the School Reform Commission (SRC) regarding charter operations, factors which can and do impact the SRC’s and the State Department of Education’s decisions about charter renewal. This process can be unpredictable; when Pence first applied for a charter nearly 15 years ago, the application was denied by the School District of Philadelphia but approved by the State.<br />
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A cluster of issues that continually impact charter school teachers arose in just this one afternoon teachers’ meeting at Pence: the insecurity of pay and contracts, Board control of strategic planning, the fact that charters have to be renewed by the School District of Philadelphia (and reviewed by the SRC) in order to continue operating, questions about the need for growth and the possibility of expansion, which hinges on competition with other schools for enrollment. The CEO is always working to define Pence’s most marketable differentiators. He explains to me that he perpetually has to think about what is most relevant when it comes to marketing Pence’s future and possible growth, and that what really makes the difference is finding ways to stand out in the ever-expanding urban charter market.<br />
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Pence Charter was originally brought into being as a small, dual-language K-3 school by a group of parents who first met in a playground in one of the tonier neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Most of them had young children, and each of them wanted their children to have quality educational experiences. These were parents of privilege, intent on developing a way of providing private/suburban school quality without having to either pay or move out of the city; they sought to create a publicly-funded school to meet the needs of their own children and those like them. As one longtime Pence teacher put it, “I am convinced that our founding people, having met them all and worked with them…they thought they were going to get like Friends Select [a well-regarded private school in the city] for free” (Teacher Audrey, personal communication, February 24, 2014). The 1997 charter school law in Pennsylvania (the PA Act 22 Charter School Law) allowed a variety of groups to seek funding from the State and from the public school system in Philadelphia to create schools to meet their specific needs, and this group of parents chose to do just that. In the most literal sense, they opted out.<br />
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By making the choice to start their own charter school, the founders of Pence were responding to the sudden availability of resources through the charter school law. Accompanying this availability was marketing (still prevalent today) about the promise of alternatives to traditional public schools, along with a push from the State legislature for an outside, for-profit contractor to manage all of the city’s schools and operations (Denvir 2014). Many structural arguments were made at the time to justify this shift, but the messaging about charters was (and is) fueled by something less tangible: the idea of loss. Marketing drives the search for options in schooling, and messaging loss or absence fuels that drive.<br />
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Charters were and are still positioned as products, each with a features list containing on it what parents perceive as being absent from another school option. Charter marketing frames non-charters as missing essential features and targets parents using language that reiterates, in both overt and subtle ways, the loss they and their children will encounter should they choose differently. No doubt for the Pence parents, the sorry state of Philadelphia’s public schools (or at least their perception of this) presented them with a clear picture of loss.<br />
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Twenty years into the charter experiment, even a cursory review of reports on charters (Carroll 2010; Grady 2010; Fergeson 2011; RAND 2011; Kahlenberg 2012; Lake 2012; CREDO 2013; Squire 2014) conveys that what charters actually offer, what truly differentiates them from traditional public schools, are not consistently high test scores or consistent student academic successes, but rather their less visible features. These can be features that parents desire but may not always be able to list on a form or survey: whether a K-8 school has strict teachers, for example, or many teachers of a particular race, or many students with special needs; whether the school is perceived as a pathway to social improvement through the “right” high school acceptance; the school’s reputation within its neighborhood (which outsiders may never hear about); the relationships between school staff, parents, and the community, particularly those in the community with the greatest needs; and aspects of the school’s interpersonal culture, including how teachers and staff are regarded by (and addressed by) students, and the method used to maintain noise levels, order, containment, protection, and control within the building. Some of these features may be entirely hidden from view to parents and teachers alike, visible only to the administration or the Board, or to funders or other outside interests – yet they impact the school’s culture and how teachers make shared sense of that school’s culture.<br />
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Charters market themselves through productizing what they offer (such as high standards for academic achievement, or a unique curricular focus, or low tolerance for misbehavior) and identifying for the consumer what they will not lose by enrolling their children there. The Pence parents chose this path. They worked to develop a school that prioritized certain aspects of cultural awareness they themselves valued and similar to certain features of the private school in the city mentioned by Teacher Audrey earlier; the Pence founders identified global citizenship as a school theme and placed a curricular focus on second-language acquisition. They sought to promote the idea of the school to like-minded parents. But they found within the first two years that a fully bilingual school could not be sustained, because, as one Pence staff member put it, “the realities of whether or not you could quickly build up the student base were questionable, whether people would be afraid, you know, ‘what is this model? Would I send my kid there? Do I think they're getting the same education? I don’t speak Spanish, how am I going to support my kid?’”(Administrator JH, personal communication, June 3, 2014).<br />
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In alignment with both the visible, promoted feature of global citizenship and the desired but less visible feature of a certain social status/capital associated with having culturally diverse staff, many of the teachers hired in Pence’s early days were fluent native Spanish speakers from other countries. This meant most “were not trained teachers. Or if they were trained teachers in the country they came from and they didn’t have equivalent certification in Pennsylvania” and that because of their native fluency, “there have been excuses and exceptions made from the very beginning of the school”(Administrator JH, personal communication, June 3, 2014). The idea of a new charter school with an immersive focus on language acquisition, taught to all students by non-white teachers from Spanish-speaking countries, devolved over time into a two-track system where some students would get fully bilingual education in every class, and some would get second language instruction for a portion of each day, four days a week. And the focus on hiring native speakers from abroad also shifted over time, so that Pence now hires local bilingual teachers, most of them white. In the first eight years of Pence’s existence, white students of privilege filled out the Fluency track of this program, and African American students, who were also often socio-economically disadvantaged, filled out the Language Instruction track. Over the past few years track enrollment has gotten more diverse, but the two-track system is still firmly in place.<br />
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Today Pence’s enrollment is larger than the local public K-8 school closest to the park where the Pence founding parents met one another. Pence adheres to the required School District citywide school choice lottery policy to fill seats, and enrolls those students whose parents choose to send them to an alternative to their neighborhood school, drawn from all over the city. According to the school data collected by the SDP, about 50% of the students at Pence are considered economically disadvantaged, which is on par with that local K-8 public school, but across the District as a whole about 87% of the student population is considered economically disadvantaged. Currently Pence has an overall student population that is slightly more than 50% African American but due to that same computerized District lottery draw – and which parents chose to put their child’s name into that system of choice, or were even aware of its existence – the incoming Kindergarten class for the 2014-15 school year at Pence is 22% African American, and 45% Caucasian. In the 2013-14 school year, these numbers were 39% and 26% respectively (Administrator JH, personal communications, June 3, 2014 and December 4, 2014).<br />
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Pence provides for students from across the city, and the families that send their kids to Pence are assured that what it provides is vastly better, safer, more rigorous, and more effective than a typical Philadelphia public school, or than a charter school managed by a charter management organization. Many know this in a subjective way, from personal experience (as many have had other children who have attended District schools or have had other charter experiences) and they know this in a purportedly objective way, given that they hear the perpetual bad news about budget constraints, school closures, and poor performance in the Philadelphia public schools. And as one sixth-year Pence teacher put it, “I just think our issues wouldn’t even be thought of as issues in someone else’s program…There’s so many other bigger issues, that ours are like – everyone wishes they had our issues, I’m sure” (Teacher Molly, personal communication, June 13, 2014).<br />
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Yet the Pence two-track language instruction model has resulted in a deep racial and socioeconomic segregation of the student population. There are few African American teachers on staff, and the teachers are currently engaged in ongoing professional development about racial proficiency. As of the 2013-14 school year, Pence was rated in the mid-70s (out of a possible 100) on school performance by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (McCorry, November 10, 2014). And the school has no empirical data on how and whether its graduates succeed in high school or college.<br />
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What is indisputable is that Pence is a vital, clean, vibrant, colorful space. The school building has wide bright hallways, large windows, colorful locker bays, and an enclosed play yard and garden space. It shows well. Yet my first impression when I began observing at the school was that this was a space in which white professionals spend a lot of time setting standards for the noise level and behaviors of non-white students. Having been in charter environments that are much more controlled and controlling of student voices and actions, I could see that this school was disruptive by comparison; in contrast to a large Philadelphia middle school, however, Pence was as peaceful as a Quaker meeting.<br />
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These initial reflections about the space further fueled my curiosity about how teachers here make meaning of their experience. Who are you as a Pence teacher, at this independent charter school which operates in a competitive environment much like a small business? How does this all work within the backdrop of a “failing” public school system, in this racially and socioeconomically diverse city, and at this particular moment in American public education? Given that all these things come into play in your daily work life, what are the features, both overt and invisible, of this school culture and of the teachers’ roles within it? Do the teachers here always know which shoes they have on, and for which audience they are dressed?</div>
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<span href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school</span> by <a href="http://careythinking.blogspot.com/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">Martha Hope Carey</a> is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</div>
Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-81213048177266895462015-05-26T09:18:00.001-04:002023-02-21T08:30:01.302-05:00The Worth of the Work is Open to Interpretation (continued)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This post continues the introduction of my dissertation. The project was a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability. The first posting in this series is <a href="http://www.careythinking.org/2015/05/the-worth-of-work-is-open-to.html">here</a>.</span></div>
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<b>Background/framing the local research context: Philly schools and reform efforts</b><br />
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Philadelphia is a pivotal urban site in the implementation of new educational models that embrace free market aims. This has been the case since the state of Pennsylvania passed a charter school law in 1997, subsequently took over management of the Philadelphia schools in 2001, appointed a School Reform Commission (SRC) which replaced the district’s Board of Education, and then hired former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas to lead the district (Gold, et al. 2007; Bulkley 2007; Whittle 2005). Vallas promptly introduced a new school improvement program in Philadelphia, one based on educational privatization, expansion of charters, and defining school effectiveness via test score outcomes, which was a model similar to the reform program he had implemented previously in Chicago (Gold 2006; Burch 2006; Lipman 2004; Socolar 2002).<br />
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Today this model (referred to as the portfolio model) is still followed in Philadelphia and continues to be supported through both law and policy, though the school district has been almost continually in crisis over this same period of time (School District of Philadelphia 2013; Derstine 2013; Boston Consulting Group 2012; Denvir 2014). Governor Tom Corbett (2010-2014), who was interested in limiting funding for traditional urban public schools, dramatically reduced state and federal aid to all districts in the state, and withheld 45 million dollars from the School District of Philadelphia in 2014 until it complied with new work rules that allow traditional public schools to bypass union-endorsed teacher seniority in hiring decisions, as is already the case in non-unionized charter schools (Mezzacappa 2013; Mezzacappa 2014).<br />
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Governor Corbett had previously revised a law that allowed traditional public schools to be reimbursed for a portion of the cost per student when students choose to attend charter schools and removed that reimbursement, a change that left every district in the state facing budget revisions, and left the Philadelphia school district with a 110 million dollar reduction in the 2011-12 budget (Delano 2013; McCorry 2015). The current Mayor of Philadelphia is interested in expanding the number of charter schools in the city and redeveloping closed public school buildings (Herold 2013; Greco 2011; McCorry, November 10, 2014). But many of the charters he has supported have a tainted history; as of mid-2012, there were nineteen charter schools in Philadelphia under investigation by federal authorities, mostly for fraud, misuse of funds, and inflating student enrollment numbers in order to receive increased payments from the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) to the charters (DeJarnatt 2012, p. 49-50). The School District of Philadelphia today employs 8,500 fewer staff than it did in 2011(Gym 2014). The SDP Superintendent has just overseen a rash of school closures which accompanied these broad staff and teacher layoffs in the face of yet another serious budget crisis, and the SRC controls any pathways to a long-term funding solution (Blumgart 2013; Gold et al, 2007). And just one month into the 2014-15 school year, SRC members voted unanimously to cancel the union contract with Philadelphia teachers and redirect 44 million dollars allocated for teacher health benefits directly to schools (Leach 2014; Madrak 2014; Mezzacappa 2014).<br />
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Crises such as these have been hallmarks of neoliberal school reform efforts in a number of cities, Chicago and New Orleans foremost among them, and the impacts of such crises resonate at the ground level within each district, affecting every school and every teacher to varying degrees (Cuban 2013; Steele, et al 2011). Lipman examined the positioning of teachers operating within this framework in Chicago and drew a straight line between neoliberal policies and teachers’ experiences in their workplaces. She found that “In the schools I studied, imposed pedagogical practices corrupted relations with students and ran counter to the intellectual and ethical purposes at the core of teachers’ professional identities” (Lipman 2011, p. 130). Other researchers have also explored this often problematic shift – specifically, how urban charter schools define and redefine the functions and roles of teachers in the era of accountability.<br />
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Charter school administrators see their schools as locales of choice for both students and teachers. In their view, teachers are researching market options and choosing these schools for employment, meaning “[t]eachers have market power and can’t be ignored” – but this also means that teachers can be easily replaced by charters depending on the whims of the market and how desirable a charter’s product features are (Hill et al, 2006, p. 6). All charters have product features, as all products we are persuaded to purchase do. The most visible features of a product tend to be those that promote a positive spin on its usefulness or functionality and ideally promote a desire on the part of the consumer to be associated with that product. This holds true for how charters and charter management organizations market themselves to districts, and to parents and communities, as well. And some of the most visible features of charters concern teaching and teachers, from how they are assessed, how they instruct, and what they teach, to the terms and conditions of their at-will employment. But there are also invisible features in every product, those things that are hidden from view, sometimes intentionally.<br />
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In software, invisible features are those bugs that were identified as issues but never really fixed after release and testing of the beta version and they are now simply embedded in the structure of the code, and impacting the product, in perpetuity. And in schools such invisible features (which may be connected to a range of issues, such as levels of teacher empowerment, or decision making about curricular choices, or approaches to student data use) can become so deeply embedded in a school’s culture that identifying them and their impacts on policy decisions, strategic planning, student life, or teacher identity can be difficult even for those within the organization. In charter schools this can be particularly acute, as they are generally less regulated and less transparent about process and policy (per most current state charter laws) than traditional public schools have been. Acknowledging the existence of, or making overt, such invisible features in charter schools also begs the question of who, in the end, is accountable for fixing those bugs – or even if they should be fixed.<br />
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Leaders of school reform initiatives are highly motivated by an ideal of accountability that is promoted as a very public and very visible feature of schooling. Since the first state charter school law passed in 1991, charters have enacted policies that reflect the idea that “to get accountability, we need to ‘get tough’ with teachers by controlling their behavior, choices, and quality from the top-down” which is an approach that “focuses on standardizing curricula, tightening licensure requirements, offering merit pay, tying teacher evaluations to student performance, and attacking unions for policies governing tenure, pay, work hours, and role differentiation” (Education Evolving 2013). One upshot of this is that teachers who may base their understanding of the practices and purposes of the job on the traditional model of teaching as a broadly unionized public service profession instead become, when they are employed by charter schools, the responsible parties in market-based accountability efforts.<br />
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Teachers who may have been trained to work within a centrally-administered government organization are instead workers in autonomous entrepreneurial organizations generating products the market will support. Both environments may well have organizational policies and/or pedagogical practices that teachers object to, but in charter schools these are widely variable and poorly regulated, and these policies and practices can change dramatically and without teacher input depending upon market forces, local or state-level political realignments, changes in school leadership, or changes in charter management organizations (Fergeson 2011). And in the majority of charter schools across the country, with recent exceptions in Chicago and Los Angeles, teachers cannot collectively bargain for changes in their working conditions or salaries and expect to remain employed by their school (Abowd 2009; Maxwell 2010). Such redefinitions of teaching are echoes of the larger effort to redefine public education at the core of neoliberal school reform and provide compelling reasons to this researcher for the exploration of how teachers navigate the various contexts and concepts that impact their professional identities in a school that was created during (and is reflective of the aims of) the accountability era.<br />
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One impetus for this work is related to the issue identified by educational researcher Pauline Lipman in her work on Chicago schools: how the “intellectual and ethical purposes at the core of teachers’ professional identities” are presented to teachers at and by an urban charter school. But what is primarily of interest to this researcher is how the less overt aspects of the school culture, those embedded and often invisible features, may be engaged in or reacted to by the teachers within a school. How do teachers with a strong pedagogical stance balance this against the market-driven aims of their public charter school? What are the common sense meanings these teachers share (and describe to themselves and others) when faced with contrasts between the organizational aims of a business and their own training as educators? And how do these teachers understand the varied meanings of autonomy, accountability, equity, choice, and failure at their school?</div>
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<span href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school</span> by <a href="http://careythinking.blogspot.com/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">Martha Hope Carey</a> is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.
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Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-38426568522076089642015-05-22T12:25:00.000-04:002023-02-21T08:29:58.788-05:00The Worth of the Work is Open to Interpretation<div style="text-align: left;">
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I am posting sections of my dissertation on the blog. I begin at the beginning (the abstract) and also post the context/background section. The project was a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability.<br />
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I conducted in-depth interviews with 22 staff at my chosen site (18 full time teachers, 4 administrators) over my 6 months at the school. I observed
16 of those teachers in their various classrooms (grades K-8) and I attended staff meetings, new teacher induction, school events, and took 200 photographs of the visual culture of the school over that same period of time. When I describe it that way, it sounds really boring. But it was emotionally engaging and exhausting, intense and wearying too. And now that it is done, I can say that I continue to have deep respect for educators and the emotional energy it takes for them to navigate the self-involved hypocrisy of contemporary school reform efforts, and for the selflessness with which the good ones always protect and encourage the students in their care.</span></div>
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<b>Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school</b>
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The reconfiguration of public education around free-market aims means that each charter school must define its product, and its product features (specifically their school’s pedagogical practices, aims, and goals) around marketability. Yet how these are defined may not align with how teachers perceive of the aims and goals of teaching. This in turn impacts how individual teachers make meaning of their roles within a school culture, and how they talk about what the purposes and practices of teaching are for them. This descriptive phenomenological study explores how one group of teachers at an urban charter school in Philadelphia react to phenomena (such as how the various product features of their school are presented) and how they make meaning of the prominent concepts in contemporary school reform, including teacher autonomy, accountability, failure, choice, and equity. This study also examines how, and how broadly, these perceptions are shared among these teachers, and how these concepts are internalized by them. One key finding from this study was the clear agreement among these teachers around the idea of equity, as each of the study participants defined equity in the same way.<br />
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[Chapter 4-7 titles in this dissertation are taken from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, 1: A Book for Free Spirits, 1878 edition]<br />
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<b>Background/framing the broader research context: neoliberal school reform</b><br />
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Proponents of contemporary school reform initiatives are essentially proponents of productizing public education and claim that countering the perceived failings of traditional public education requires accountability to the consumer market – and that charter schools model this ideal of accountability, as they can be closed and teachers fired if the product underperforms (Gawlik 2012). Lipman succinctly describes this as part of a neoliberal political agenda aimed at bringing “education, along with other public sectors, in line with the goals of capital accumulation and managerial governance and administration;” within this agenda, neoliberal school reformers who view “education as a private good” support a form of school administration “geared to management techniques designed to meet production targets” and teaching that is driven and defined by performance indicators (Lipman 2011, pp. 14-15).<br />
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Lipman, among others, has noted that this approach to education is an outcome of epistemic closure. Linda McNeil reiterates that view, describing the neoliberal school reform project in Texas as “a self-contained system that permits critique aimed at fine-tuning the mechanism but does not permit critique that challenges its premise” (McNeil 2000, p. 268). And a premise that goes unchallenged is the primacy of the “noncognitive” values that support a free market, consumerist democracy, and the idea that the “job of education for neoliberals…is not to convey knowledge per se as it is to foster passive acceptance in the hoi polloi toward the infinite wisdom of the Market” (Mirowski 2013, p. 80). Neoliberal reforms shaped by this perspective have been implemented in school districts across the country for just over two decades. Such education reforms, conceived around free market aims and which frame pedagogical practices as products, have not yet been shown to directly impact either teaching or learning in a consistent or even a positive manner, to markedly improve test scores, or to ameliorate inequality in schooling (Cuban 2013; Robelen 2011). These results may actually be well-aligned with neoliberal views, but can be misaligned with teachers’ perceptions of their professional roles and even the purpose of schooling itself.<br />
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The Center for Research on Education Outcomes recently published a 27-state study of charter schools and found that in a number of states, the standards for performance for charters were set too low, that “sub-sectors” of charters exist and these produce very different outcomes, that the trend in existing charters is that they do not make strong improvements over time, and that charters that do not perform well tend to be closed, which has mixed results depending on the district (CREDO 2013, pp.88-90). The Poverty & Race Research Action Council found that charters are more likely than traditional public schools to be high poverty or racially isolated for minorities, and that while “in theory, charters schools, as schools of choice, could be far more integrated than traditional public schools,” in reality, “many state charter laws provide an incentive to create high-poverty charter schools. Plus, current federal law requires charters to use blind lotteries for admission in order to qualify for start-up funds” which limits the tools schools could use to create mixed-income and diverse schools (Kahlenberg 2012, pp.2-3).<br />
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A 2011 study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education/ Mathematica Policy Research of 22 charter management organizations across the country found that middle schools managed by a charter management organization have “students’ test scores that are marginally positive but not statistically distinguishable from the effects of other public schools nearby” (Ferguson 2011, p. 61). A recent study of charter schools in Ohio (which serve over 120,000 students) noted that fully 88% of the state’s charters were graded at C or below on measures of student performance by the Ohio Department of Education (Squire 2014, p. 9). And educational scholars Larry Cuban and Jane David noted in 2010 that “[f]or the immediate future, no clear answer to the question of whether charter schools are better than public schools can be found in the research” (David 2010, p. 37). With regard to charter school teachers, this absence of empirical data means there is little support for the idea that charters are better educational settings than traditional public schools, and therefore little to support an identity narrative premised on the idea that charter school teachers are working in settings that promote well-proven or more effective pedagogical practices.<br />
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The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report shows nominal improvement in reading and math test scores across all schools in the United States from the previous survey, but that a racial gap in performance (a 26% difference between white and African American students in fourth grade math, a 21% gap between white and Hispanic students in eighth grade reading) persists (National Center for Education Statistics 2013). The report reiterates several other long-term issues in public education which educationists have been researching and writing about for generations, and which link to issues of poverty, resource allocation, and structural inequality in the United States. With these in mind, education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond has suggested five school improvement policies aimed at enhancing “quality and equality” in public education overall: creating meaningful learning goals that align with “the content and skills needed for success in the twenty-first century;” having supportive accountability strategies that undergo continuous review and improvement to provide students with good learning standards and teachers with good standards of practice; reviewing federal and state resource allocation for schools, developing strong professional standards for teaching, and having schools organized around good pedagogical practice and good use of technological resources (Darling-Hammond 2010, pp. 279-328).<br />
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Lipman has offered suggestions for improvement that focus on combatting inequality, including the promotion of social equity through giving students an education that “instills a sense of personal, cultural, and social agency” and promotes critical thinking (which would involve a serious reorganization of school resources and comprehensive and “massive reconstruction and renewal project” for urban schools), a reframing of “deficit notions about the potential of low-income children and children of color” and connecting the transformation of urban schools to “a larger local and global social struggle for material redistribution and cultural recognition” (Lipman 2004, pp. 181-3).<br />
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Educational researcher Anthony Bryk and his colleagues also worked with Chicago schools for their research on schools as organizational systems and offered what they see as the essential organizational supports that influence student learning in urban schools: professional capacity; the school learning climate; parent, school, community ties; and the school’s instructional guidance system (Bryk et al 2010, p. 50-78). Their suggestions about school organization were premised on the idea that all schools can improve, but that not all schools and school communities “start out in the same place and confront the same problems,” he explains, and that “unless we recognize this, unless we understand more deeply the dynamics of school stagnation, especially in our most neglected communities, we seem bound to repeat the failures of the past” and so those invested in school improvement must pay “more attention to how we improve schools in these specific contexts” (Bryk 2010, p. 30). Of note is that each of these suggestions for the improvement of public education (made by experts in and practitioners of the subject) emphasizes contextually-informed decision-making, and that the “answers” to school improvement can be found within public schools and school communities – and such improvements do not hinge on the creation of a new system of market-accountable schools. These educationists connect school change to broad social issues unconstrained by the parameters of one socio-economic theory. They also allow for the voices and experiences of teachers to play a part in school change.<br />
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This tension between the market-based aims of neoliberal school reform proponents and the actual school improvement ideas put forth by educational scholars plays out in local sites (as in Philadelphia), in political discourses, and at the national policy level. From its inception, the idea propelling American public education was “to take a vast, heterogeneous, and mobile population, recruited from manifold sources and busy with manifold tasks, and forge it into a nation, make it literate, and give it at least the minimal civic competence necessary to the operation of republican institutions: and that the “most irresistible way to ‘sell’ education was to stress its role not in achieving high culture but in forging an acceptable form of democratic society” (Hofstadter 1962, p. 305). Teachers have always been viewed as essential to this project, but that they are “not well rewarded or esteemed is almost universally recognized in contemporary comment…The educational enthusiasm of the American people was never keen enough to dispose them to support their teachers very well” (Hofstadter, p. 312).<br />
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As a nation we have argued over the implementation of public education, teacher pay, school organization, “the administrative apparatus [of urban public education], and the income taxes proposed for their support” since as far back as 1825 (Rury 2005, p. 51). But we had not fundamentally challenged the entire premise of education as a centrally-administered public service in any large-scale manner until contemporary neoliberal school reform efforts were undertaken. Over the last few decades traditional public education in the United States has been described primarily in terms of its perceived limitations and failings, to the point where this “universal access” approach to education is no longer viewed as an inherent social good or even as necessary for the development of future citizens, or future workers (David and Cuban 2010; Fruchter 2007). Each charter school that has opened since that first charter legislation passed has been, to some degree, part of this postmodern shift in perceptions of public education.<br />
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This philosophical shift has been accompanied by a shift in the “education sell” Hofstadter described, and by political and legal changes which continue to open up spaces for educational privatization. These have proven to be effective. The number of charter schools in the United States grew from just under 1000 in 1999 to nearly 6000 in 2011, and by 2012, 42 states had passed laws which allowed for the development of charters (Lake 2012). And despite the lack of data to support the idea, one 2013 national study showed that the majority (52%) of those polled regarding their views on public schools say that students receive a better education at public charter schools than at traditional public schools, and 59% support a large expansion of charter schools in the United States (Phi Delta Kappa International 2013).<br />
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As explained by sociologist Colin Crouch, historically it was assumed that the tension between the egalitarian demands of democracy and the inequalities that result from capitalism can never be resolved, but there can be more or less constructive compromises around it. Today these assumptions are seriously challenged, and increasingly powerful lobbies of business interests ask why public services and welfare policies should not be available to them for profit-making purposes just like everything else…why not schools? (Crouch 2004, p. 79).<br />
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If one views traditional public education as a universally accessible social service, or simply an expression of an ideal of an equalizing democracy, privatization of schooling means “[p]roviding goods or services through markets [which] involves an elaborate procedure of creating barriers of access…Sometimes the character of a good itself has to be changed to do this” (Crouch, p. 85). As the direct providers of these services, one “good itself” that has had to change significantly in light of contemporary school reform efforts is teachers. Veteran teachers are leaving the field (300,000 retired between 2004 and 2008) and are often replaced by new teachers with alternative or no certification and minimal training, leading to “an emerging conventional wisdom that ‘experience doesn’t matter’” in many school districts (Carroll 2010, p. 3).<br />
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Two recent studies have shown that the rate of both involuntary attrition in charters and the rate of charter teachers leaving the profession altogether are significantly higher than in traditional public schools, and that the rate of teacher turnover in charter schools is twice that of traditional public schools (Stuit 2010, 2012). These researchers found that the “low unionization of charter schools was the single most important factor” in explaining high turnover rates in charters, followed by the relative youth and inexperience of charter school teachers (Stuit 2012, p. 277). Studies such as these attest to marked changes in the profession sparked by accountability-era school reform initiatives, and spark questions around how teacher professional identity is impacted and shaped in light of those changes.<br />
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Looking at the shift Crouch describes from a political vantage point, philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard predicted in the late 1970’s that the coming information-technology age would fundamentally change the relationship between what the state sees as its role as a provider of services, how that state activity is perceived by citizens, and what the aims of education should be from the perspective of corporations making decisions beyond control of the state. In this context, [k]nowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold…the mercantilization of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning. The notion that a society falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or the mind of society, will become more and more outdated with the increasing strength of the opposing principle, according to which society exists and progresses only if the messages circulating within it are rich in information and easy to decode. The ideology of communicational ‘transparency,’ which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and ‘noise.’ It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers threatens to arise with a new urgency (Lyotard 1979, p. 4-5).<br />
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In the present day, anthropologist Jill Koyama describes how the messaging about accountability in education has “recently become amplified in response to globalizing processes, characterized by the increased availability of comparative data and the circulating discourse about increased productivity” in first-world countries, and “the relative standing of a nation’s academic achievement has become an obligatory passage through which any discussion of global competition and comparisons of the twenty-first century must pass” (Koyama 2013, p. 78).<br />
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A recent example that underscores Koyama’s point: when the most recent PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) scores came out and showed the U.S. student rankings on math, science, and reading literacy as “still well behind their peers in top-performing nations.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan explained that [t]he problem is not that our 15-year olds are performing worse today than before. The problem instead is that they are not making progress. Yet students in many nations… are advancing, instead of standing still. In a knowledge-based, global economy, where education is more important than ever before, both to individual success and collective prosperity, our students are basically losing ground. We're running in place, as other high-performing countries start to lap us” (U.S Department of Education 2013).<br />
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For Lipman, globalization is the “connection of markets, production, sites, capital investment, and related processes of labor migration” which is guided by the hypermobility of capital and which leads to severe urban social stratification (Lipman 2004, p. 6). In this view “corporatist” school reform efforts in the United States are taking place in an “ideological environment that supports or contests global trends to deepen economic and social polarization;” and charter school teachers are actors within that ideological environment, and therefore part of such polarization, whether they are aware of this or not (Lipman, p. 12).<br />
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Political theorist Chantal Mouffe states that globalization is used to justify the status quo. “When it is presented as driven exclusively by the information revolution, globalization is deprived of its political dimension and appears as a fate to which we all have to submit,” she explains, and “this technical revolution required for its implementation a profound transformation in the relations of power among social groups and between capitalist corporations and the state” so that today global corporations benefit from lenient regulation and taxation and “have managed to emancipate themselves from political power” in a manner that allows them to restrict resources needed by governments to fully support social welfare programs, among them public education (Mouffe 2000, pp. 119-20). Teachers are part of this new status quo premised on a shift in relations of power, and teacher professional identity is impacted by this shift. Just how, and to what extent, calls for deeper research into teachers’ perceptions, and their levels of intersubjectivity within charter schools.</div>
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<a href="http://www.careythinking.org/2015/05/the-worth-of-work-is-open-to_26.html">Next</a>
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<span href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school</span> by <a href="http://careythinking.blogspot.com/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">Martha Hope Carey</a> is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.
</div>Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-15459689027557853732015-04-06T11:45:00.000-04:002023-02-21T08:29:56.352-05:00What will you put your mind to?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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For the last four years I have put my mind to a thing (urban education) so intently that I forgot how to operate a motorcycle. I don't mean I forgot to go out on the bike, I mean that I got on the bike last summer and <i>could not remember </i>how it worked. My brain was too full of every possible thing I could stuff in there about my chosen subject.<br />
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Stuffed in there too were all the rules and confines of academic study and research rigor, and all the subtle cues one picks up in graduate school, those constant small pushes toward conformity in thought and process. Which was painful, as conforming has never resulted in anything fruitful, or connected to joy or possibility, for me. But I think I was as free as I was allowed to be in my research approach, and the result is a completed and defended dissertation about the experiences of a group of urban charter school teachers navigating compromise, constraint, and the mental juxtaposition of their student-centered pedagogical training against the market forces that now define their profession.<br />
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I will graduate in May, as a PhD in Urban Education. And as someone who knows perhaps much more than I ever wanted to about the forces at work in the contemporary "school reform" movement; I have now to turn the burden of that sad knowledge into good work. And maybe remember how to twist the throttle again.</div>
Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-70713192498178456392013-05-30T21:51:00.000-04:002023-03-02T18:38:29.479-05:00Where You Come To<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Working my way through the clutter of the last two years of grad school paperwork, I came across a favored quote (which I have noted before) from a book on how we see and how we create what we want to be seen. The author frames this around abstract artists who step away from the rules of convention that govern representational painting, but it's applicable to many forms of thought. He describes the process of stepping away from those rules and into abstraction as going down a ladder, letting go rung by rung, subtracting, until you find yourself in a place where you can be fully skeptical of the visible world. As he states it: "The ladder of disorder leaves conventional representation behind, in favor of images that explore inadequate representation." I love that sentence, and the notion that this sort of descent allows one to more freely act on what one favors -- because this sort of descent allows one to see beyond certain structures, and beyond the <i>need</i> for certain structures.<br />
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This is not a way of living, not some form of enlightenment or whatever. It is rather a forging of new connections in the brain, using vision as the tool do so...a sort of <i>un</i>-training while also rewiring. The author is addressing the mesmerizing idea of encountering abstraction or content of any kind that can't adequately be pictured. He positions you at the top of the ladder encountering something incomprehensible; do you climb down, subtracting as you go? And what does the world look like to you when you reach the last rung?<br />
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When one is fully skeptical of the visible world, skepticism about other things comes fairly naturally. For if you can see (without the aid of super-special <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096256/">They Live</a> glasses) the difference between what the author James Elkins calls "the machinery of realism" and whatever else there is, you kind of train your brain to <i>hear</i> the difference too. Meaning you become better attuned not simply to hypocrisy but to how people actively construct ideas about and identities for themselves. And what becomes remarkable (at least to me, and I am maybe late to this game) is the sort of oddly beautiful, reliable, limited rhythms that people use to reify their identities. Like the beautiful, reliable, cirumscribed brush strokes representational artists use to show us the known and knowable. (Possibly this is also on my mind because of the imminent arrival of cicadas on the scene; listening to their sound is like listening to the earth thinking.)<br />
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This is something I realize is probably an after-effect of going back to graduate school at my age. I have emerged halfway through the process very far down the ladder, having let go of more rungs than I can count, but with a much better ability to assess constructions of any kind. This is especially true of theories, which are rampant in education -- theories of teacher motivation, student identity, knowledge acquisition, brain development, learning styles, affect in the classroom, etc. I see why they are rampant, see the comfort that comes from descriptions of the structures in the visible world, like the comfort we all find in our descriptions of ourselves. These are the rules of representation in my field; these are the familiar rhythms. Having now climbed well below the world of conventional representation that these generate, I am not aligning with or embracing any. Instead I am viewing them from below, as images of fascinating, incomplete, always inadequate representations. And this is yet another weirdly happy place I feel lucky to have come to.Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-25657323703528569742013-03-06T12:15:00.001-05:002023-03-02T18:38:08.447-05:00I Wait for the Water<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">News out this week about efforts by Rupert Murdoch and the Gates Foundation (inevitable efforts, given the players) to go down the road of turning all K-12 student data into a funland for </span></span><span style="line-height: 24px;">entrepreneurs</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"> prompted me to post my own view, from inside:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The research director of
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) co-authored a report in January in which
he explained how he and his colleagues had miscalculated the impacts of fiscal
multipliers (“the short-term effects of government spending cuts or tax hikes
on economic activity”) within the various economies which were bound by the
austerity policies the IMF promoted during the recent global economic downturn.
The IMF had used “empirical studies from 27 economies the 1930’s” (another
period when interest rates were near zero) to establish a baseline for what
fiscal multipliers <i>should </i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">have been in 2010, and forecasted a
model that under “rational conditions” would have a “coefficient on the fiscal
consolidation” that was quite low – or in other words, held an expectation that
the fiscal multipliers for these economies would be very small and would remain
fairly static over time. This was coupled with an apparently willful blindness
to another context, wherein “lower output and lower income, together with a poorly
functioning financial system, imply that consumption may have depended more on
current than future income, and that investment may have depended more on
current than on future profits, with both effects leading to larger
multipliers.” Or in other words: Greece.</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The IMF then realized,
after prioritizing debt-repayment and austerity policies that had devastating
impacts on these economies, that “a number of empirical studies have found that
fiscal multipliers are likely to be larger when there is a great deal of slack
in the economy…[and] fiscal multipliers associated with government spending can
fluctuate from being near zero in normal times to about 2.5 during recessions.”
A Washington <i>Post</i> story from January 3rd provided some
perspective on the IMF’s policies and on this recent report by stating that:
“The Fund has been accused of intentionally underestimating the effects of
austerity in Greece to make its programs palatable, at least on paper” and
noted that the projected fiscal multiplier number used for policy formation was
“a background assumption rather than a variable that needed to be fine-tuned
based on national circumstances or peculiarities.” The IMF essentially
apologized in their report for the consequences of policy decisions that were
not bounded by reality, or context; these decisions were not, in the end,
trustworthy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Along these same lines,
the Economic Policy Institute, in collaboration with Stanford University’s
Graduate School of Education, published a report in January that claims comparisons
of international tests of students do not<i> </i>provide trustworthy
premises on which to base currently popular U.S. school reform policies, in
part because of a very basic item: “social class inequality is greater in the
United States than in any of the countries with which we can reasonably be
compared…If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar
to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently
compared, average reading scores in the Unites States would be higher than average
reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France,
Germany and the United Kingdom).” The authors do not simply use income, race,
ethnicity, or parental education level to define social class groups. Instead,
the authors use household literacy, specified by the number of books in a
child’s home, which they find “plausibly relevant to student academic
performance” within an accepted social science research frame, and they posit
that “children in different countries have similar social-class backgrounds if
their homes have similar number of books.” By making this
choice, the authors implicitly encourage policy makers to broaden their
definitions of social and class distinctions, and to be aware that “countries’
social class compositions change over time” so that “comparisons of test score
trends over time by social class group provide more useful information…than
comparisons of total average test scores at one point in time.” And they
encourage policymakers to think about a range of contexts, including time, when
forming policy, the hoped-for result being policy based on more trustworthy
assumptions about data.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Policymakers do often
choose to sidestep contexts, or base decisions on a specific or static state without
any expectation of or comprehension of change, when forming policies that they
nonetheless believe are rational and therefore ethical and beneficial.
Policymakers also tend to be removed (or by intention keep themselves removed)
from the problematic environment they are making policy about. The two examples
cited above speak to this; they are also examples of how such thinking can be
challenged in a reasoned manner. And these examples also connect to the current
accountability era in school reform in a particular way, as they forefront both
how persuasion can be and is used to make policy arguments that seem rational
and trustworthy but are not, and how this might be countered. For <i>how</i> one
counters these reforms – the calls for accountability in education as measured
through tests, “objective” evidence-based policies, “objective” data-driven
decisions, the primacy of standardized testing, the commodification of teaching
and learning, for the general overhaul of public education to align more
closely with business priorities – <i>matters</i>, not simply because time
and data have shown these reforms to be more about exercising power than
enhancing student experience or skills, but because these policies and tenets
were from the outset based on hypocritical conceits. And hypocrisy, as Hannah
Arendt once noted, “cannot be met with what is recognized as reasonable
behavior. Words can be relied upon only so long as one is sure that their
function is to reveal and not to conceal. It is the semblance of rationality, rather
than the interests behind it, that provokes rage. To respond with reason when
reason is used as a trap is not ‘rational’.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">So perhaps these
policies need simply to be challenged outright, to be met with the emotion
suitable to them, and their “rationality” denied. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Because if one were to
reverse-engineer the IMF policy formation process, one could clearly say (and
the report’s authors </span><i>do</i><span style="font-size: small;"> say) that the policy makers engaged in
that process were entirely capable of imagining varying contexts, pressures,
and “peculiarities” in national economic systems had they chosen to, and were
capable of incorporating these into the thinking that fueled their policies,
but for political or other reasons, they chose not to do so. One can also look
at contemporary school reform policies that, at their inception, incorporated
the fearful predictions of 1983's fear-inducing screed </span><i>A Nation at Risk</i><span style="font-size: small;"> and ideas on
education from Ross Perot, and say that policy makers engaged in
that process were entirely capable of envisioning American public education as </span><i>not</i><span style="font-size: small;"> being
a threat to global competitiveness and capable of envisioning its “chaos” as </span><i>not </i><span style="font-size: small;">needing
to be managed like an enterprise IT system, but for political or other reasons,
they decided not to. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">This may seem an extreme perspective, but it is a position
that is actually given weight by much of the thorough, methodical, and
decidedly </span><i>not</i> extreme analysis of school reform initiatives
provided by educational researchers in the past decade. Much of this research
addresses the very things that school reformers see as problematic about public education
(such as agency and control in educational practice and management, choice in
educational environments, accountability in educational processes, access to
educational resources, and equity in education) and finds that while these are
issues that directly connect with and impact both teaching and learning,
designing profit-promoting reforms that commoditize the intellectual capital
around pedagogy has <i>not</i> been shown to directly impact either teaching or
learning in a positive manner. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-312715127519566334.post-73861695327564080082013-01-10T12:31:00.001-05:002023-03-02T18:38:15.581-05:00And My Limousines Are Black<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Watching <i>Frontline's</i> interview with/expose on Michelle Rhee, the former DC schools chancellor, education reformer, and "educator," helped me to see just how lucky I am to work with and research <i>actual </i>educators. Unlike them, Rhee did not study education in college, nor does she have any advanced degree in education. She was spawned by Teach for America, given the very brief training that organization provides, and then taught in the "worst" school in Baltimore. As is typical of TFA graduates, she spent only three years in the classroom, but used the experience to leverage something better for herself -- an educational consulting firm/Michelle Rhee professional networking organization. Which led to her job as chancellor. How 'bout them apples.<br />
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In the interview, Rhee refers to the 2nd grade students she taught, briefly, in Baltimore as "my kids," a sentiment that any actual educator who has spent some time in the field knows is usually a new teacher's mask for insecurity. She also became infamous for a classroom episode where she, in a straight up act of aggression, killed <i>and ate</i> an annoying bee in front of her class of seven-year-olds. She could not, after all, swat and swallow the annoying and unruly students in this urban elementary school.<br />
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Rhee presents herself as being compelling because she is a lonely warrior in a fight for student success. Of course the only thing compelling about this is that Rhee repeats the mantra so often you start to think she is simply hypnotizing herself into believing her motivations are good. Or worse -- that she is trying, perhaps, to wrestle some deep anger into a positive sales slogan. Because again, its not like she could kill and eat those pesky "urban" kids.<br />
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But the thing I found most fascinating about her self-presentation is how removed it was from the actual experience of being an educator, particularly in an urban school. Setting aside what one thinks the core function of a school is for a moment, one thing most urban educators do share is the experience of having to be many selves in many situations to many people. And this is done in a manner entirely unlike the self-shifting one has to engage in in a corporate setting. This is done in a work environment where the actors are relatively powerless and not rewarded well, and where the subjects they have to respond to are not present by choice and range in age, developmental level, skills, etc.<br />
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And yet there these teachers are, morphing themselves on any given day into social workers, disciplinarians, narcs, protectors, legal counsel, sex educators, emergency workers, advisers and guides, resource managers, stand-in parents, what have you. The strength it takes to be that flexible and responsive is not easy to comprehend, and is not generally respected by leaders like Rhee who pin their personal success on having a very fixed self-identity.<br />
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The Rhee interview also made me think of another interview, one with a surviving first-grade teacher from Sandy Hook, who struggled after the fact with the professionalism of her decision to tell all the children she had hidden in the closet that she loved them all so much. She said, in the interview, that she knew this was maybe a violation of some kind, in terms of keeping a professional distance as an educator, but at that moment of total fear she could only think of this: if I were a six-year-old and very afraid, what would I want most to hear? And, she thought, what if the last words these children ever heard in their lives were whatever words I spoke? So she just told them, repeatedly, that she loved each one of them.<br />
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Aside from the amazing compassion and awareness she displayed (and the remarkable control of her own fear in that moment) what I appreciated about this teacher's story was that it conveyed so powerfully exactly what good educators can do. They can allow themselves to be<i> in others</i>, without<i> </i>risk to their own identities or their integrity.<br />
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That this teacher was concerned about how this ability would be perceived by those who assess the the profession in the manner that Rhee obviously does speaks to the patriarchal nature of education reform initiatives, on the one hand, and to the limited nature of how "reformers" like Rhee think about the self. It is likely this is something Rhee found out in her brief and contentious tenure as the leader of an urban school district -- that equating a static, immovable self with strength is both limiting and destructive.<br />
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When I watched Piers Morgan's recent<a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/01/07/alex_jones_vs_piers_morgan_1776_will_commence_against_if_you_try_to_take_our_firearms.html"> interview</a> with right-wing conspiracy theorist and gun fan Alex Jones, I could not help but think the same thing. Jones and his ilk speak of the traumatic consequences that will befall us all if we don't stick to "who we are," a static and unchanging notion of self that must be defended at all costs, against all imagined tyrants. I could not help but listen to his rant as a projection of his visceral fear of self-flexibility, as if his very sense of self was under threat, so much so that near the end of the interview his fear compelled him to mock the British accent "identifier" of Piers Morgan.<br />
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I really saw Jones' self-presentation in the same light at Rhee's. Both seem to be fighting for the definition of self to be inviolate, and both seem to make a living by aggressively projecting this need onto everyone around them.<br />
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Plus, I think Alex Jones would have happily swatted and swallowed Morgan if he had had the chance.Martha Hope Careyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17107732629146032938noreply@blogger.com0