Sorry For The Cynicism, But ...

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Lagi Di Blog Ini
bandar ceme terpercayaDid anyone read Governor Malloy’s latest tawaran for educational reform? Quite a mixed bag. Looks like he’s out to eliminate certification requirements as well as tenure. If he and Stefan Pryor get their way, superintendents will be able to run their schools like the private boarding school my wife worked at when we were first married. Half the faculty was 22 and fresh from school. They were smart kids but had no idea how to teach, and the turnover was incredible. One trustee actually floated a tawaran to house the ingusan faculty in a college style dorm where they could party, thinking that this would retain them. But of course they were cheap. Room and board were provided, lousy as it was, but salaries were around $10,000 a year. I know this was almost twenty years ago now, but even twenty years ago I started at $30,000 in a district where salaries were modest, at best.

All these proposals are in the name of eliminating the red tape that prevents superintendents and boards of education from hiring the best, most talented people out there. Now I’m sure most of us can think of a situation or two when someone talented was entangled in some certification red tape. My wife had a teacher a few years ago who just couldn’t pass the math portion of the Praxis I, who actually got such test anxiety that she once vomited on the keyboard at the test site, and this prevented her from getting certified. The super at the time supported her and did everything he could to emergency certify her and retain her as long as possible, but ultimately the state called his hand and she had to be let go. She landed on her feet in a community college, but the district lost a talented teacher over a test that was irrelevant to her subject area. But let’s face it, this is not what Malloy is really opening the doors to. He wants districts to be able to hire people who aren’t certified, just as the elimination of tenure isn’t really about empowering superintendents to fire poor performing teachers. It’s about empowering boards of finance to eliminate the highest paid teachers. And if they successfully tie job performance to student performance on standardized tests, then the only thing one has to do to get rid of veteran teachers is assign them the lowest performing kids, set them up for failure by giving them kids with a history of failure. It’s that easy, isn’t it?

Sorry for my cynicism, but honestly, even if Malloy and Pryor aren’t thinking these things, we all know there are administrators and board members and local politicians who are, who are just drooling at the prospect of replacing the teachers at the top of the pay scale with a bunch of new, young, uncertified teachers who don’t have to be paid peanuts.

The only thing I liked in Malloy’s latest iteration of his plan to save education by scapegoating the teachers is his tawaran to improve continuing education programs by replacing “generic continuing education programs presented in large auditoriums” with “high-quality programs … tailored to a teacher's particular needs.” Now that would be wonderful—if he can manage it. I remember when I got my first job, and my mother, a veteran elementary school teacher, sent me a sign that read, “When I die, I hope I die during an in-service aktivitas so that the transition from life to death will be seamless.” I put that up in the faculty room at my new school. Everyone laughed, but most had seen it before.

Professional development was never meant to be this way. When the educational enhancement acts were passed almost thirty years ago now, no one intended for us all to be packed into the auditorium for some generic, canned program, or for the offerings to change with every shift of the educational wind, or to be held captive to another lecture on blood-born pathogens, or to have our principals tell us to meet as a department or team and ‘come up with something.’ Me, I get calls all the time to provide PD, but ninety percent ask me to help them raise their CMT or CAPT scores. That’s not really PD. Typically, I ask to talk to the teachers, use the discussion as a sort of diagnostic, and then I propose something I think will be useful. And I assure the direktur that it WILL help scores, however indirectly. Which isn’t a lie, really, but it takes some persuasion. Often the direktur seems overwhelmed, underfunded, and at a loss. They, too, are under such pressure to raise scores. They’re just desperate.

Can Malloy and Pryor eliminate this mess? I’ll tell you one thing, it will cost more to provide “high quality programs tailored to a teacher’s particular needs” than it does to provide something canned and generic. Somehow I see this cost getting passed onto us. We’ll be required to get this new Master Educator Certificate to stay employed and at the top of our district’s pay scale, but we’ll have to pay for the coursework ourselves. Just watch.

Mandates And Bedeviling Details

Jejak PandaKembali Lagi Bertemu Di Situs Kesayangan Anda
situs bandar cemeThis Sunday, the Courant ran an editorial by Philip Streifer, who is Superintendent of Schools in Bristol and Chairman of the Connecticut Association of Urban Superintendents. In this piece, Streifer calls for more communication and coordination between high schools and colleges in the development of high school curricula that prepare students to meet college expectations.

I agree with Streifer’s main point and, by and large, with his argument. His selesai conclusion, however, is that the state legislature needs to mandate such coordination. And while this may be so, there’s no attention given in the article to the complicated details of how this would look in practice. I’d also add that some existing state mandates interfere with the very goal of coordination, at least in perception.

First of all, who would be responsible at the university level for this coordination? At the high school level, this could be handled by a curriculum director (not that all schools have those, but at least there’s widespread precedent for such a position). But who would be responsible at the college level? I don’t think Streifer is suggesting that schools of education be responsible for this. For one thing, schools of education already have a great deal of communication with high schools in the form of clinical placements and student teachers, though this does not typically include curriculum development. Another thing is that specific departments—English, Math, Biology, etc—should be the ones in communication with high schools in order to develop discipline-specific curricula.

But right now, such positions don’t exist within university departments. At UConn, the closest we probably come is the Early College Experience program, but even then we’re talking about a specific course or two being offered in the high schools, not wholesale curriculum alignment. And even then it can be hard to find someone at the university to be the ECE coordinator. Regular faculty are disinclined to serve in this capacity because the time commitment takes away from their own scholarship and teaching. And faculty like me, who perform lots of service, professional development, and outreach, are in short supply. I can think of one Biology professor who, like me, was a high school teacher for a long time, and who does work with the ECE program. But would faculty like us be able to take on the load of working not just with a few schools offering one course, but the load of working with all Connecticut high schools on full scale curriculum revision and alignment? Of course not. It would require a tremendous investment in personnel at the university level, as well as a certain realignment of the culture of the university to make such positions integral to the academic lives of departments.

Other obstacles, as I said before, exist as a result of other state mandates, such as CAPT. For instance, a community college colleague and I went to a local public high school a couple years back and did a full day workshop on ‘college-level’ writing where we discussed expectations at our respective institutions. We talked about the academic essay, the importance of student inquiry, of drafting and revision, of avoiding formulaic approaches such as the five paragraph essay, and such. On the whole, the group of teachers was very receptive, but a core group of about four veteran teachers in the department felt strongly that such emphases would undermine their necessary efforts to prepare students for CAPT, as well as to prepare them for the writing required on other standardized forms of assessment, such as the SAT and AP tests. At one point, our discussion bordered on getting heated, and I had to walk away after telling one particularly vocal teacher that we were showing him what the expectations were at our colleges. I didn’t necessarily think that preparing students for these expectations was incompatible with or detrimental to preparation for CAPT, SAT, or AP tests, but if he felt so, then he simply had a choice to make.

I’ve run into similar if less vocal and hostile responses at other schools, too. And in the work I have done with the ECE jadwal doing site visits to schools, the tensions between ECE and AP emphases are particularly strong, and though that is one not truly caused by the State, it is one reinforced by many superintendents, principals and boards of education. The pressure to offer AP courses, as well as the temptation to chase after the money dangled by Project Opening Doors, lures many administrators away from the more sound, truly college-preparatory work done by the ECE program. If we were to mandate something even more comprehensive, could we break administrators and classroom teachers from their infatuation with multiple choice questions and timed, short-answer essays? And would this jeopardize the state’s plans for assessing teachers if there were no canned assessments to use as data?

I’ll state clearly that CAPT and AP don’t have to be incompatible with academic or college-level work, and that it is not only possible but worthwhile to have greater coordination between high schools and colleges, but any mandate to do so is going to need a great deal of creative planning and, sorry to say this, financial commitment. And then, after all, the biggest obstacle might be the attitudes of teachers and professors and the entrenched cultures of high schools and colleges.

A Family Affair: Or, Six Degrees Of Education

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Kembali Di Blog Kesayangan Anda
bandar cemeIt was Saint Patrick’s Day, 1986. I was seventeen years old and celebrating the day with a few friends at the Knights of St. Patrick, where my paternal grandfather, a long-time New Haven city alderman, was the permittee. One of the men tending kafetaria was a New Haven cop whose daughter was dating my good friend Jack. I introduced myself as a friend of Linda’s boyfriend. Officer Mahan asked my name and of course recognized my surname when I said it. My father was the fifth of ten children. Officer Mahan asked me, “Whose son are you?” I told him I was Gary’s son, number five. His eyes widened, and Officer Mahan said, “The one who married Captain Fitchett’s daughter?” Captain Fitchett was my maternal grandfather. He was on the New Haven police force for thirty-five years, and had served as both Chief Inspector and Chief of Police at different times in his career. I said yes, and what ensued was like the scene out of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper appear in church after everyone in town believed they had drowned. I was like the long lost Dauphin returned to claim the throne. Both families used to be like lesser royalty in New Haven, and I was the only son born to both lines. Among all the Irish cops, I was a prince.

My family had lots of cops within my grandparents’ and parents’ generations. Besides my grandfather there were also my uncles Billy, Mike, Ric, and Wayne. But for all those cops, we were (and are) mostly a family of teachers. My mother, father, and step-father were teachers, and so were my aunts Winifred and Betse, and my uncles Red, John, and Joe. Within my generation, in addition to my wife and myself, my cousin Brian and his wife Jackie, and my cousins Jennifer, Nikki, Stephanie, Karyn, and Kevin are all teachers. My brother Steve is a PhD candidate in Math who teaches Introductory Calculus here at UConn, and my cousin Gabby is a UConn freshman who hopes to become a high school math teacher. More than likely, I’m also forgetting someone.

So there are days when I feel as if I belong to teaching royalty, or as if I am playing a game of Six Degrees of Education. I used to joke that if you were from New Haven, someone in my family had either instructed you or incarcerated you. Now, as I work with more and more teachers each year, I know that if I ask enough questions, sooner or later I will find a connection to one of the teachers in my family.

Earlier in the semester I discovered that my cousin Gabby was taking the same Calc class my brother was teaching, though a different section. Steve and Gabby are not related to each other, and before this semester didn’t know one another, but now Steve tutors Gabby. She gets some free help and he gets some practice being a teacher. And just a week or so ago I discovered that a student in my Advanced Composition class had been a student of my cousin Jennifer’s at Lyman Hall in Wallingford. He even traveled with her to New Orleans on a field trip.

But that’s not as surprising as an incident that happened several years ago. I had a student named Lauren who mentioned in her literacy narrative that she had attended elementary school in Hamden. I asked her to name her first grade teacher, and she said, “Mrs. Zito.” That’s my mother. I asked Lauren to let me borrow her cell phone, and without explaining what I was doing, I called my mother. As soon as she answered, I handed the phone to Lauren and said, “Say hi to Mrs. Zito.”

Even today, I learned from my son’s third grade teacher that one of my advisees and current students is doing her clinical placement in her class. The three of them only just figured out today the relationships among us, and then it was like a race among the three of them to see who could tell me first. (The teacher won).

With such a large family and so many teachers, I should get used to this sort of thing, but it continues to fascinate me. Like the time last semester when my colleague was singing the praises of one of her students, and when she named the student I just smiled and said, “Oh, that’s my cousin.”

It Only Takes One

Jejak PandaHai.. Bertemu Lagi Di Website Kesayangan Anda
situs bandarqAll these attacks on tenure are really getting me angry. I resent the implication that tenure makes us lazy and complacent and if we just eliminated it we’d all magically shape up or be shipped out. There’s relatively little discussion about professional development for teachers, especially those in critical needs districts. No, just make it easier to fire us and hire people from other states with lower standards, or even to hire other professionals with no educational training.

Look, I know as well as anyone that some teachers besmirch our profession by abusing tenure to remain employed even though they’re doing a poor job. We could all name a few of those. But I know they are not the norm. Yet the public and the legislature and the governor and the commissioner and the journalists seem to think they are the norm. They seem to think that we sit around and do nothing for four years, get our tenure, and then do even less—just to paraphrase our governor.

I’ll tell you what tenure is about. In my twelve years as a high school teacher, I was in one district. In that time, I had four superintendents and seven building principals. They were not all created equal.

Early in my career, the year I was up for tenure, I had a ridiculous run-in with a new principal over an issue I actually supported him on. I made the mistake at a faculty meeting of voicing my support, with a caveat. He wanted to extend senior privileges, and I believed this would be manageable if he and the assistant principal were better about disciplining the students we wrote up when they abused these privileges. I had the gall to suggest that we would support his tawaran if he would assure us of administrative support. I was not the most vocal or critical voice at that meeting, but I was the least senior. Colleagues came up to me afterwards and expressed incredible levels of concern because they knew I was not tenured yet. Honestly, I was surprised, till the next day when he accosted me in a hallway in front of students and went up one side of me and down the other, screaming, swearing, dropping f-bombs. I was speechless. Thank goodness we had a strong union president at the time, and she marched into his office and lit into him like a mother upbraiding her misbehaving son. In the end, he offered me a half-hearted and private apology, but I walked on egg shells the rest of the year because I was so scared he would find some excuse to get me. And with good reason.

The following year I was accused by a girl’s parents of sexually harassing her—because I was too explicit in the way I taught Romeo and Juliet. Basically, after reading Act I, scene i, I explained that a maid was not a cleaning lady but a young virgin. Long story short, they wrote a scathing letter and insisted that the principal put it in my file, which he was more than happy to oblige. Thankfully, I did have tenure by this time, and I still had the same union president. She insisted on a little more inquiry in the matter, and threatened a grievance. Turns out, the student had made no complaint, and in fact loved my class. The parents even admitted that their child had no idea they were making any complaints about me and would, in fact, be upset with them if she did. Furthermore, we were told that these parents belonged to a group that had been petitioning the state department of education to remove certain texts they found objectionable, and one of them was, of course, Romeo and Juliet. In light of this information, their attack on me now seemed part of a predetermined strategy. But were it not for tenure and my union president’s insistence on due process, that man would have gladly ruined my reputation and my career because he was still angry a year later about what he perceived as my insubordination on a minor issue.

So, maybe Governor Malloy and Commissioner Pryor’s intentions can be trusted, but not everyone else’s can. I tell my undergraduates all the time that tenure is not about job security. Tenure is about academic freedom. It is about being protected from petty administrators, vindictive parents, and politically ambitious members of boards of education. And it only takes one to ruin a career.

The Case Against Sb 24

Jejak PandaSelamat Membaca Di Situs Kesayangan Anda
judi bandarq onlineIf you didn’t get to see it, The Hartford Courant ran an op-ed piece by me on Sunday as the lead article on the front of their Sunday Opinion section. You can access it here: http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-courtmanche-ending-teacher-tenure-wrong-fix--20120226,0,5934612.story.

It’s a defense of teachers and tenure. The basic argument is that tenure cannot be cited as the cause of the achievement gap. There’s another piece by a colleague from the Law School that argues that teachers’ unions should not be allowed to participate in education reform talks because the unions only advocate for teachers, and “the interests of children are not part of that discussion.” He got pretty slammed in the blogosphere.

Anyway, the opportunity to publish the piece came about suddenly. I had wanted to attend the hearings at the Capitol on SB 24, Governor Malloy’s education reform bill titled An Act Concerning Educational Competitiveness, but I was unable to do so. I thought to write a letter to the editor on the issue, and, long-story-short, I ended up writing the op-ed piece.

The response has been amazing. Besides all the friends, acquaintances and colleagues who have written me in Facebook or by email to thank me for the piece, the online edition of the Courant has gotten tremendous traffic, with over three-thousand shares, recommends, and tweets, etc, which only account for a fraction of the views. I say this not to toot my own horn but to call attention to the relevance of the issue and to the affirmative response to my defense of teachers. Teachers, of course, but, more importantly, the public in general are not buying into the scapegoating, no matter what the governor, legislators, journalists, and pseudo-reformists like Patrick Riccard claim.

Sunday, February 9, the Courant ran the results of its own poll in its Weekly Buzz section. Question #1 asked, “Should teachers have to re-earn tenure once they’ve earned it?” An overwhelming 84% of respondents replied No. Of those respondents, 56% said that “Tenure protects teachers from arbitrary firings. Without tenure, school systems will save money by getting rid of better-paid tenured teachers and keeping cheaper teachers.” An additional 25% of those who replied No to the first question said that “This [SB 24] is a ploy to get rid of tenure altogether. What’s the point of granting it in the first place if it has to be re-earned?” There were a total of 2,102 responses to this question. By contrast, the third question, on the death penalty, drew the second most, with 679 responses.

Today’s “Issue of the Day” section of the Courant was also dedicated to tenure. The question was, “What’s The Problem With Education? Is It Bad Teachers?” The response, again, was overwhelmingly in defense of teachers. Respondents repeatedly cited poverty, lack of support for education in the home, and lack of funding as the root causes of the achievement gap.

No one’s buying what the Governor is selling except the legislature and the media (and they probably like the sensationalism more than they believe the Governor’s claims).

One colleague wrote to me today and asked what I thought could be done. I told him simple things: write letters to the editor, contact your local representatives, attend the upcoming Town Hall Meetings the Governor plans to hold. The schedule for these can be found here: http://www.cea.org/issues/news/2012/governor-announces-education-reform-tour.cfm.

If you do any of these things, both the NEA and CEA have lots of helpful information on their websites. The NEA can be accessed at http://www.nea.org/. The CEA is at http://www.cea.org/. The CEA has even developed its own “comprehensive education reform plan” that was “developed by teachers” (imagine that!). You can download it here: http://cea.org/viewfromclassroom/. The AFT has good resources, too, of course, and you can access their site here: http://aftct.org/.
And if you want to slog through Senate Bill 24 itself, there are lots of places to access it from. Here’s one: http://www.mygov365.com/legislation/view/id/4f337ea949e51b5a636d0200/tab/versions/.

I hope there’s still time to stop or significantly revise this bill. I’d like to see education reform. I think we all would, but I think that means something very different to teachers than it does to the Governor and the Commissioner, neither of whom have ever taught. As I say in my article, we want and expect support in the form of funding and professional development, not blame, reprisal, watered down standards, and privatization. They seem more concerned with cost savings.

Daniel Ward, editor of Language magazine, a journal for teachers of world languages, states the case succinctly in his February editorial: “it is about time that we all stood up against teacher bashing and insisted that our media affords them the respect that they deserve.”

Check out Kristal Bivona’s article on professional development and self-determination in the same issue: http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=3380.

Guarded Optimism

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Di Blog Kesayangan Anda Dan Selamat Membaca
bandarq terbaikThe good news is that the National Writing Project succeeded in being awarded federal funding for 2013. The NWP, along with the New Teacher Center and Teach For America, received a combined $24.6 million dollars in Supporting Effective Educators Development (SEED) grant funds, part of the 1.5% Title II set-aside we lobbied hard for after the cuts to direct funding. You can read the press release here: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/education-department-awards-246-million-grants-support-teacher-and-principal-dev. The excitement is muted by the fact that the NWP received only $11.3 million, which sounds like a large amount but is significantly less than the $23 million it last received in 2011. And next year is still going to be an exceedingly lean year.

However, the CWP is fortunate, as always, to have Aetna Endowment funding to help us sustain essential programs like the Summer Institute, and we are holding two fundraising events to help establish an endowment for ourselves as well as raise some additional operating funds. One will be the May 11 30th Anniversary Reunion, and the other will likely be a fall cabaret with Barry Lane, though this is still very much in the earliest stages of planning. Nonetheless, some programs will have to be tabled for a year, and others that were put on hold a couple years ago, like the Teacher and Student Writing Conference or the Academy for Young Writers, will have to continue to wait for the economy to improve. (Federal funds for teacher professional development cannot be spent directly on student programs, which is why these were the first to suffer).

The SEED funds have three priorities: “Increasing the number of teacher-leaders prepared to improve the teaching of writing; increasing sustained professional development services in the teaching of writing to
 high-need schools; and developing and piloting new online professional development resources to improve the
 teaching of writing.” The former is clearly intended to help support Summer Institutes. The latter builds on the investment in technology that began with special funding for Technology Liaisons and the development of the Technology Initiative: http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/programs/ti. The second initiative gives the NWP the opportunity to partner with Title I schools, and also gives it the opportunity to collaborate with Teach For America, which it was already doing in places like Philadelphia, where the Philadelphia Writing Project was working with TFA teachers in Philadelphia schools to provide ongoing and advanced professional development intended to improve the instruction of TFA teachers and, hopefully, get more of them to stay both in the profession and in Philadelphia.

Much of this is consistent with federal and state initiatives—Race to the Top and SB 24 proposals—to improve teacher training. Some of Malloy’s teacher pelatihan proposals, as you all know, I’m sure, are controversial, to say the least, but I am guardedly hopeful about one component that was announced Wednesday. The Board of Education voted to create an advisory council intended to improve teacher education programs. At face value, this might sound frightening, but the advisory council appears to be fairly well balanced. The Educator Preparation Advisory Council will include the new commissioner, of course, but also representatives from the Board of Regents for Higher Education, the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE), superintendents and other building-level administrators, and both teachers unions. For my part, I am glad to see building-level administrators and the teachers’ unions on that board, as well as the president of the BRHE, and that groups like ConnCAN and the Connecticut Business and Industry Association are not included. Honestly, I don’t think they belong in the discussion, and this council, as constituted (or at least as it appears to be constituted) seems more balanced than, for example, the one that made recommendations on tenure. We shall see. As I said, my hope is guarded.

Part of my hopefulness comes from the fact that, at UConn, the CWP has been very involved in the preparation of at least the future English teachers, and I would be very excited to see the CWP use its new funding to be more and more deeply involved in teacher pelatihan and professional development, and perhaps to earn opportunities to work with TFA teachers in places like Windham, where Special Master Stephen Adamowski has announced plans to hire twenty TFA teachers. I think that the Neag School of Education at UConn is already doing many of the kinds of things Malloy and Pryor would like to see become more wide-spread and characteristic of teacher pelatihan throughout the state, and certainly the US Department of Education has recognized that the Writing Projects are capable of providing the professional development necessary to train new teachers and support veteran teachers.

So today was warm and sunny. My son did not have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, as he did yesterday. I received good news on a tawaran I made related to my fellowship (that I will withhold discussing till I learn more). A colleague and friend I wrote a rec for got a big promotion. Six undergrads I wrote recs for got into grad schools. Neag just announced its new students, and I am very happy for the twelve students who got in for secondary English, the seven Elementary Ed admissions who are also pursuing English degrees, and the one Special Ed student who is. And four additional students I wrote recs for received a scholarship, a grant, admission to study abroad, and acceptance into TFA. And now the CWP will have federal funds again in 2013. So maybe circumstance has tinted my glasses rose, but I’ll take it for the time being.

Spring break is next week, and I am going to take a week off from blogging. See you in two.

What Barbarians At The Gate?

Jejak PandaHallo Jumpa Lagi Kita Di Website Ini
judi bandarqLast Saturday I went to see Jeff Wilhelm speak at Rhode Island College. The Rhode Island Writing Project Conference was ostensibly on the Common Core, but Jeff was there in part to promote his new book, Teaching Literacy for Love and Wisdom. For those of you who don’t know Jeff or his work, Jeff was a high school English teacher for 15 years before getting his PhD and moving to higher ed. He started the Maine Writing Project and then the Boise State Writing Project. I first saw Jeff speak in Vermont at the inaugural New England Writing Projects Regional Network Retreat, in about 2000, a few years after You Gotta BE the Book first came out.

I have known Jeff for years and have really enjoyed his work. Jeff has always promoted engaged and interactive approaches to teaching and writing, but his new book goes much further than any previous. Some aspects will strike some readers as too touchy-feely or quasi-spiritual, but Jeff’s intentions are solidly humanist and democratic, and he backs up his ideas with a lot of research, including cognitive science.

I was particularly struck by the way Jeff and his co-author Bruce Novak framed their argument in the context of political and social movements and consequent pedagogical responses. For instance, Jeff and Bruce talk about two important conferences, familiar to most students of composition but not necessarily familiar to most teachers. They are the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966 and the English Coalition Conference of 1987 at Wye Plantation in Maryland. Without getting into too much detail, the Dartmouth Seminar responded to the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, which was a politically conservative response to Sputnik. The Wye Conference responded to the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk , which was another politically conservative call to educational arms. Both the NDEA and the A Nation at Risk report pushed education toward standardization, assessment, and, especially for the field of English, a narrowing of the profession toward a skills-based understanding of literacy. Dartmouth and Wye were both push-backs against conservative trends.

In Teaching Literacy for Love and Wisdom, Jeff and Bruce identify the current climate under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race To the Top (R2T) as one that demands another push-back. Their book is a clarion call for teachers, and especially teachers of English. And although Jeff is originally a New England guy, he’s in Idaho now, so he’s not particularly aware of Governor Malloy’s education reform proposal, but this book addresses exactly what’s going on now in our state.

In the late 50s, the NDEA was driven by a militaristic mindset that stressed the need for math and science to help us defend against the Soviet barbarians at the gate. In the 80s, A Nation at Risk spurred President Reagan to form the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which was largely comprised of private sector and government figures with a few token educators, and they too were charged with defending against the new barbarians (still the Soviets but with the Japanese on the ascendant). The 2001 NCLB act had similar private and governmental backing but little support from the education community, and it took aim at defending against foreign threats such as the Arab world and China.

And if you look now at the individuals influencing Governor Malloy’s Senate Bill 24, you will see once again that ConnCAN is private sector and the Connecticut Council for Education Reform, the main body behind Malloy’s education agenda, is comprised of bankers, insurance executives, and members of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association. Nary an educator to be found. And while Malloy might not be influenced by a concern for outside threats, his proposals are clearly an attempt to get R2T money and a NCLB waiver. So the mindset of reforming education in order to compete against rising economic powers and defend against threatening military powers remains operative.

By contrast, Jeff challenges us to reform education, especially the field of English, so that we reclaim and reassert the goals of the humanist and democratic traditions—nothing less than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He urges us to resist the corporate reformers who would reduce Education in general and English in particular to a barren field of “information and skills delivery and test preparation,” and he insists that we regard teaching as “an artistic, creative, and imaginative endeavor” that shows students how to regard “reading, writing, and living as creative and imaginative pursuits.”