A Family Affair: Or, Six Degrees Of Education

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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.”