The Credibility Gap

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I'm in DC this week lobbying for the National Writing Project, and I'll blog on this next week.  Meanwhile, I'm posting an op-ed I submitted to the Courant that they chose not to run.

 

Governor Malloy talks a lot about the Achievement Gap in Connecticut.  His education reform plan, Senate Bill 24, is intended to close the Gap that exists between rich and poor, white and non-white, urban and suburban students.  Setting aside for the moment that the most recent Brookings Institute Report suggests that the Achievement Gap is smaller than reported and, in fact, may have shrunk slightly over the last decade, there is undoubtedly an Achievement Gap.  It might not be the widening chasm that it gets portrayed to be, but no doubt it exists, it is large, and it is persistent.  Teachers more than anyone want to shrink the Gap.

When Governor Malloy began his Town Hall tour to promote his reform agenda, he certainly must have known he was going to encounter criticism, but I don’t think he had any idea just how much resistance and rancor he was going to get from teachers.  And in all honesty, he seems genuinely perplexed by this resistance.  At the recent event in Windham, he kept repeating how incredulous he was, how he just couldn’t understand why the teachers were so upset, why they were focusing on the small part of the bill that dealt with tenure and not with the larger share of the bill that dealt with other issues like preschool funding or cost sharing.

Personally, I don’t doubt his genuine belief that his proposals are in good faith and can achieve their goals.  And in all fairness, the Governor’s anjuran certainly has many elements that should (and could) get the support of the teachers.  The reason why the Governor is not getting the teachers’ support, however, is because the Governor suffers from a Credibility Gap.

And just as the Achievement Gap is intimately tied to the Income Gap, so the Credibility Gap is tied to the Trust Gap.  Teachers don’t trust Governor Malloy because he has largely excluded them and, on occasion, insulted them publicly.

The Governor likes to point out that the two unions, the Connecticut Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, were involved with the development of the new teacher evaluation formula.  That’s true, but it’s insufficient.  Look at the roster of the Board of Directors for the Governor's Connecticut Council for Education Reform:  insurance executives, bank presidents, the President of United Illuminating, and the CEO of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association.  About the closest we get to an educator is Yale President Richard Levin or Roxanne Coady, who owns RJ Julia Bookstore.  Even Commissioner of Education Stefan Pryor was never a teacher.

I am not suggesting that these individuals are incompetent or have malicious intent or hate teachers.  Quite to the contrary.  I am certain these folks are highly competent individuals.  They have families and children, and they probably have teachers among their families and friends.  Much was made of the fact that both of Stefan Pryor’s parents were teachers.  And that’s great.

But these folks are not qualified to reform education, and the teachers know it even if the Governor doesn’t.  Their presence as the driving force behind the Governor’s education reform kegiatan is the source of the distrust that leads to the Credibility Gap.

As a point of contrast, let’s imagine what the response would be if the Governor proposed legislation to reform banking or insurance and he formed an advisory group that included AFT-Connecticut President Sharon Palmer or CEA Executive Director Mary Loftus Levine.  It would be unthinkable. 

As Director of the Connecticut Writing Project at the University of Connecticut, I am involved in budgeting state, federal, corporate, private, and discretionary funds, but I would never presume to be qualified to sit on a committee to reform the finance industry.  My brother is a pediatric nephrologist and the grandparents who raised me were a dietician and a police officer, but I would never assume myself qualified to discuss pediatrics, kidney disease, nutrition, or criminal justice.

If the Governor is really serious about reforming education, and I think he is, he needs to start listening to teachers.  Close the Credibility Gap and we might all be able to start working together to close the Achievement Gap.

Mcteachers

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bandarq terpercayaDid you see that Windham teachers and PTO members raised funds for their school by working at the Mansfield McDonald’s?  It was called McTeacher’s Night.  A principal, several classroom teachers, and members of the PTO flipped burgers, scooped fries, and manned the drive-through window for two hours at the end of the day, with some of the proceeds going to the school.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I think it’s great that the local chain owner wanted to do something to help Windham teachers raise funds for their school, but honestly, is this what we’ve come to?  McTeachers?  Is this even a profession any longer?

I was on the phone tonight with a representative from the Parthenon Group, a private consulting firm hired by the National Writing Project to survey site leaders for information about the future of the organization, particularly the future of funding in the wake of the loss of direct federal funding.  The guy I spoke with was nice, but he got a little snarky with me when I told him that I was uncomfortable with the direction the National Writing Project seemed to be forced into.  Increasingly, the national office is looking at private sources of funding, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which seems pretty close to The Parthenon Group, several of whose members have worked for the Gates Foundation and other charter-friendly education groups), and even Wal-Mart.  And I told him that I have deep reservations about this direction.

My objection is not so much that I disagree with the vision or values of the Gates Foundation or the Walton Family Trust, which I may, but that I object to the fact that these organizations are being put in a position to define the mission of the Writing Project or other professional organizations for teachers.  No longer are we as an organization in a position where we can define what we do, ask the federal government to provide funding, and then prove the efficacy of our work.  Now, with private donors as well as with current competitive grant funding structures at the state and federal levels, it is the funding agent who gets to define the work we are to do, after which we customize a anjuran to conform to their demands, and only then can we receive funds.  This is, to say the least, troubling.

We have seen this sort of thing many times over the decades—notably after Sputnik and after the publication of A Nation At Risk—where the federal government has taken it upon itself to reform public education from the top down, but this time seems worse.  This time around, we’re seeing even greater involvement from the private sector, and we’re seeing much more effort from the private sector to exert control.  Even though, as I wrote last week, financial firms and the president of New Alliance Bank simply aren’t qualified to reform education.  (By contrast, when the Aetna Insurance Company endowed a chair of writing at UConn back in the 1980s, there was no attempt by them to tell the university what to do with the money, other than to trust the faculty to fund programs that promoted writing and the teaching of writing.  The teachers and professors were the experts on that, and so were entrusted to use their expertise).

In a March 20 opinion column in the Willimantic Chronicle, Eastern Connecticut State University Professor Emeritus James Lacey offers an alternative anjuran to corporate reform and privatization.  Professor Lacey urges us to “[turn] the system upside down.”  He suggests that we abandon systems with “a top-down hierarchy” and replace them with “a democratic, bottom-up approach” that values the experience and expertise of teachers, first and foremost, with input from parents and students.

Interestingly, the original charter school act of 1996 made frequent mention of  community interest and both teacher and parent approval.  Many at the time hoped, in fact, that applications to establish charters would come from coalitions of teachers and community members.  And some did.  But that’s not what we’re seeing now.  Now, we’re seeing hedge fund management firms and large corporations pouring millions of dollars into the establishment of charters.  This is anything but democratic, public, or community based innovation.  This is, what, investment?  Speculation?

What we have more and more now is a corporate model where competition rules and democracy takes a back seat. Where 34 literacy programs competed for Title II SEED grant funds, and only three received them.  Where students have to participate in a lottery to go to a school with adequate funding (and if you’re in New York, this might be merely different floors of the same school building!).  And where programs and schools have to hold bake sales, auctions, and cabarets in order to acquire funds that are not ensnared by someone else’s agenda.

Is this the choice we have been pushed into?  On the one hand, degrade ourselves with begging and performing song and dance routines, flipping burgers on second shift, or capitulate to the demands of the wealthy corporations that have the money but might not share our educational beliefs?  And on top of that to possibly offer up our academic freedom by relinquishing tenure?  Ugh.

Television And Other Guilty Pleasures

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For years I have been trying to locate this interview with Norman Mailer in which the author defends television.  I don’t recall where I read it, but Mailer’s main point was that television was just a new form of story-telling.  His only real objection was to commercial interruptions.  Otherwise, TV was just a new medium for the ancient art of narrative.

I suppose one of the main reasons I was excited by that interview was that I grew up a television junkie.  I watched tons of TV.  I loved cartoons and sitcoms.  I was addicted to Happy Days at one time.  I remember it always came on right after my cub scouts den meeting at Trevor Hill’s house.  We’d have the meeting in his parents’ finished basement and then run upstairs to huddle up in the TV room to watch the show.  My grandfather used to love watching wrestling, which I never really got into, but my grandmother loved crime shows, courtroom dramas, old black and white thrillers, and old comedies.  She loved Perry Mason, Columbo, Barnaby Jones, Murder She Wrote.  With her I watched all the Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone as Holmes, or Robin Hood with Errol Flynn as Robin and Rathbone as Guy of Gisbourne.  She and I watched a lot of Abbott and Costello movies, I Love Lucy episodes, and Agatha Christie films.

When I was in eighth grade I had a huge crush on this seventh grade girl that I considered way out of my league.  One day on the bus home from school, she made my day when she confessed that she loved old movies and asked if I’d ever heard of a movie called Some Like It Hot, which was perhaps my favorite movie of all time.  (I still love when Jack Lemmon describes Marilyn Monroe’s walk as “Jell-O on springs”).  Suddenly I forgot all about my preconceived notions and we fell into a great conversation about old movies.

Years later, in college, I went through a phase where I shunned television and aspired to be one of those hip, literate adults who doesn’t own a TV.  But then I read Robert Probst’s Response and Analysis, in which he has a chapter titled Visual Literacy, where he defends TV in much the same way Mailer does.  He challenges teachers to drop their pretensions, admit they read sufficiently trashy beach novels every summer, and accept TV as just a new media.  In that chapter, Probst suggests we assign a show to our students that the whole class can watch as homework and then discuss and analyze as a text in class.  He argues that this will prevent TV from becoming a bad influence upon students’ literacy because it can teach them to be critical viewers of visual texts.

These days I openly watch TV.  Some nights I read in the quiet of late night, after everyone else has gone to bed.  But many nights I want to just chill out and watch a show.  I like to watch DVDs or programs in Netflix so I can avoid commercials.  My favorite shows all have cool anti-heroes and often deal with the supernatural, which strikes me as odd since I’m not a religious believer of any variety.  (I like to tell my son that there’s a lot of mystery in life and that I’m cool with the mystery).

Amy and I have been making our way through the early seasons of Mad Men.  We blew through the first four seasons of Californication.  On my own I’ve been watching Weeds, but lately my real favorite has been Supernatural.

The one thing all these shows have in common that appeals to me is the cool anti-hero:  Don Draper, Hank Moody, Nancy Botwin, Sam and Dean Winchester.  Kinda dark and edgy, conflicted, contradictory, but essentially good people.  I like how their flaws make them sympathetic to other outcasts, kind of like Hester Prynne.  I liked how in season one of Weeds all the messed up high school kids gravitated toward the Botwin residence because Nancy was the only adult who seemed to get them and accept them.  (Though the producers seem to have decided to move away from that angle).

Supernatural appeals to me for a variety of reasons, but I especially love all the literary allusions sprinkled throughout the episodes.  (Californication does this too, perhaps since Duchovny was ABD in English at Yale).  Sam and Dean are basically Sal and Dean from On the Road, and the whole series is a modern take on Paradise Lost, which I think can be said of Kerouac’s novel, too.  Remember that scene toward the end of On the Road when Sal Paradise says, “Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparkling flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again”?

The only thing is that in Supernatural the characters have their roles reversed, so that Sam is the demonic one and Dean is the Michael-like angel.

So these shows are my guilty pleasures, my late night escapes from jadwal reports and budgetary crises and attacks on the teaching profession.  Some day maybe I’ll even get to teach a course on TV anti-heroes.

Ambition In The Afternoon

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I used to enjoy having the same breaks as my wife and kids but now we are on different schedules.  Nonetheless, when Amy and the kids are on break, even though I still have to work, the pace of life and work changes.  Yesterday, for instance, I only went in for some afternoon meetings and then my late afternoon class, and since the day was so nice, I actually walked to work.  (It takes about 35 minutes from home to office).  On the way home after teaching, I bumped into a student on his way to the dining hall.  We walked and talked about class, his writing, the approaching end of the semester.  On the verge of graduating, he just won a nice award.

Today I took the day off, sort of.  Amy and I have a good friend from college who now lives and teaches in Paris.  We hadn’t seen her in years before last summer, when we spent a terrific day walking around New Haven, where I grew up.  As fate would have it, our friend has a beloved student who will be attending Yale this fall, and Amy also has a student who will be there.  To make a long story short, this week was Bulldog Days at Yale, a sort of incoming freshman orientation, and Amy and I—with the kids in tow—headed to New Haven to meet Helene and Kevin (and their mothers), introduce them to each other, and spend the day touring the campus.

Both students were incredibly excited to start this next phase of their lives.  At one point, Kevin and I were crossing Wall Street near the Beinecke Library when he pointed to a bench and said to me, “Just yesterday I sat on that bench to people watch, and some kid sat down at the next bench, broke out his violin, and just started playing.”  Kevin was enthralled by this simple but beautiful experience.

Later, over coffee in Claire’s Cornucopia, Helene said to me that one of the main reasons she was excited to attend school in the United States was because she’d get to live on a campus where students congregate and socialize, and where everyone pursues at least two years of liberal arts courses.  She pointed out that in France there are no campuses, and students make career-oriented decisions about education much sooner, so that you only see students studying the same thing as you, and you only see them for classes.  There are no quads or dining halls where students toss Frisbees or where a pre-med student like Kevin can listen to a music major play his violin.

Both Kevin and Helene were drunk with the possibilities that lay before them, but Helene was perhaps even more so.  Kevin was clear that he wanted to study neuro-science and ultimately go to med school.  Helene, by contrast, had considered a pre-med major, but when I asked her what she was considering now, said, “I think I would like to double-major, perhaps something like math/philosophy [she said this as if it were a unified major] and literature.”  When I asked what literature, she said, “Well, I could do French of course, or British or American, but I’d really like to learn Russian and be able to read Tolstoy in his own language.”  Truly, her height of her dreams were only matched by the breadth of her ambitions.  Not that she couldn’t do it.  Her English was impeccable and colloquial.  She said she learned it in school but also from watching every episode of Friends over and over again.

The other thing that was sweet to see was the reaction of Helene’s mother, who will be sending her only daughter to school thousands of miles and an ocean from home.  Sophie was clearly delighted and contented to know that her daughter was happy and excited, that she was meeting people already, and that there were adults here who were good friends of her daughter’s favorite teacher, and that we could be available in some sort of unforeseen and unlikely emergency.

At the end of the afternoon, the two soon-to-be freshmen walked off together toward an orientation class of some sort.  Kevin’s mom headed home.  Amy and I and the kids walked Sophie up Chapel Street to the British Art Museum, where she wanted to buy things in the gift shop to bring home to her youngest, a seventeen-year-old boy.  And then Amy and I met up with another former student of hers, about to finish his sophomore year.  He’d just gotten out of the last English class of his first year.  He walked us past the library, chatting about his plans for the summer, till it was time for him to head to the dining hall and us to head home.