The Worth of the Work is Open to Interpretation (continued)

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 here.

Background/framing the local research context: Philly schools and reform efforts

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school by Martha Hope Carey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Worth of the Work is Open to Interpretation

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.

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.

Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school

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.

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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]
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Background/framing the broader research context: neoliberal school reform

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).

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.

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).

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.

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).

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).

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.

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).

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.

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).

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).

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).

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.

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).

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).

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).

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).

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.

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Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school by Martha Hope Carey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

What will you put your mind to?

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 could not remember how it worked. My brain was too full of every possible thing I could stuff in there about my chosen subject.

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.

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.