Some Things I Believe...

I believe education should be locally controlled—as locally as possible—including decisions about standards, outcomes, and assessment.

As NCLB has marked much of my adult life—my latter years in school and the years during which I have been most attuned to educational policy—I accredit it (and the educational trends and polices that led to it) with much of my distrust of federally mandated education policy. While I could potentially envision myself supporting broad standards that outline absolute core skills we, as a nation, hope any student would have mastered upon graduation (e.g. basic reading and writing skills, foundational math skills, and elementary understandings of science and history), I simply do not understand how we can expect, in a nation as large and diverse as ours, that any set of standards or educational policies could possibly be beneficial to all students (or even the majority of students). Because our country is so geographically, culturally, ethnically, religiously, and socioeconomically diverse, the educational needs and expectations of students in one state, I think, are difficult to compare to those in another, let alone the varying needs of students even within a single school.

Furthermore, because I believe in the wisdom, authority, and professionalism of most teachers (and educational professionals), I believe that teachers and administrators in local contexts (states, cities, districts, and individual schools) should have the autonomy to set specific standards and decide on a curriculum to achieve those standards based on the needs of their students.
  I imagine that if teachers were given the autonomy to negotiate their own standards and create their own curriculum as a community of educators, they would be more likely to take responsibility for what and how they teach, and be able to respond to the needs of their students in effective and innovative ways.

However, in order to have schools that are staffed by responsible and dedicated educators with whom we can entrust decisions about standards and curriculum, we need to create a clement in which teachers are treated and trained as professionals, capable of and expected to engage in critical thought, team work, self0 and peer-evaluation. It seems to me one of the wicked and self-propagating problems education faces in our country, is a national culture that understands teachers as neither professionals or intellectuals. The educational system strips teachers of so much sovereignty, works hard to police teachers rather than perceive them as trusted and intellectual mentors, and as a manifests its devaluing of teacher work with low salaries and compensation packages. These issues combined with our many pre-service teacher training programs which educate future teachers with a “need-to-know” model rather than a “need-to-know-how-think” model, fail to draw the best and brightest into the field of education. The less sovereignty teachers have (both in their own instruction and in their ability to police themselves as a profession), combined with the poor compensation, and the ever-increasing work-loads of teachers; the more likely it seems that even the “best and brightest” teachers are likely to grow frustrated and either drop out of education all together or work to move up the educational food chain, and thus out of classrooms where they are most needed.

If teacher education programs were forced to focus less on instructing  pre-service in “the standards” and “the rules” of the educational system (because practicing teachers had greater sovereignty) and could spend more time mentoring developing teachers, instructing them in critical thinking and problem solving skills, content area information, and theories and practices of pedagogy; then it seems the field would be more likely to attract and retain motivated, intelligent, and qualified teachers.

Alongside localized education policy, I believe in the importance of small, community-based schools. 
 When I consider the problems cited by many teachers—apathetic students, students with uninvolved parents, discipline problems, overwhelming workloads—and those often cited by the media and general public—bullying in schools, violence in schools, poor student performance, etc.—it strikes me that smaller, localized school communities, with small class sizes might help to alleviate some of these problems. It seems that often the public expects schools to provide the parenting for children—a model which I believe only leads to an educational model that is rigid and institutional in nature—however, such expectations are simply unrealistic. If the public wants the educational system to help solve social concerns, then we need to create environments in which students can receive personalized attention that is able to attend and respond to a student’s individualized educational, personal, and social needs. With thirty students or more in a classroom and potentially up to 150-200 students in a given teacher’s teaching-load, how can we expect educators to see bullying, productively address behavior problems, or see a student’s individual academic and personal needs.

Me and the 12A class of the Max-Beckmann Schule

While I disagree with significant portions of their educational system, after a year of working in a German high school, I am convinced that their (or at least my) high school’s community model may be both beneficial and applicable to American schools. In my Frankfurt high school, though the school’s student body numbered nearly 600, each student was part of a small, meaningful community. Each grade level in the school (11^th, 12^th, and 13^th grades) were divided into a series of classes supervised by a single teacher, similar to the American notion of homeroom. Like American “home rooms” students remained in these classes and with the same teacher throughout their three years in the school. However, unlike American home rooms which tend to only meet briefly and primarily seem to serve as a point of information dissemination and clerical work, the German classes were designed to be functional, meaningful, and sustaining communities for students.

Me and my fellow English teaching colleagues. An odd, but loveable bunch.

Not only did students within a given class, have at least one academic course together each day, every year, they also worked as a team to be involved in school activities and even plan class outings and their graduation trip (which is chaperoned by the class teacher). These opportunities to engage in meaningful team work and community activity, at best drew students together as friends, and at the very least seemed to encourage a sense of community responsibility for one another within the class. Even more importantly, because classes rarely exceeded 20 students and teachers remained with the same class for three years, each class teacher was extremely familiar with his or her students. “Class teachers” were able to monitor students’ academic progress, be attuned to their personal and social situations, and were aware of any problems their students faced elsewhere in the school. If another teacher was having behavioral or academic concerns about a given student, that teacher could always go to the student’s “class teacher” to seek advice, context, or to collaborate on solutions. As a result of this network of students and teachers, I had the impression that students who may have otherwise struggled or fallen through cracks of the American model, were often caught by the safety net of their peers and teacher. Even if there was no one available or able to see them at home, students had a community small enough and interconnected enough at school to truly see them.

I believe small communities, similar to the German model, in our schools may lead to both better academic education for students and a more socially just and caring school environment.

I believe in an educational model that is as diverse as our nation’s population, a model that offers a wide variety of learning structures and institutions that can serve a range of students interests and needs. (i.e. charter schools, structured/military schools, “traditional” schools, vocational and technical programs, emersion/experiential schools, and any other number of models that I can’t even imagine).

In our attempts to “standardize” education, we have, in many ways done just that: created a general, basic, flat-line of a standard—an average—educational model that, in the end, does not really fit any student. As we have rushed to define academic success with standardized assessments and a school’s rates of college attendance, we have lost sight of the many learners and individuals who do not fit and do not want to fit in that model. By focusing so intently on a limited range of academic skills (proficiency in which can only be demonstrated in a singular way) and by increasingly structuring curricula around “college-prep” skills, we have entirely lost sight of the usefulness and necessity of mechanical, artistic, and service-industry skills that are better learned through apprenticeship than classroom work. Because we devalue the work of plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, farmers, child care providers, and others, we have created educational environments in which not only are students not having the opportunities to learn these trades, but they, themselves, are being devalued as un-intelligent, un-academic, and/or un-intellectual.

I am convinced that college attendance is not the mark of educational success and rather it is preparing an engaged, curious, and critically thinking citizenry that is prepared to do good and to do the work that interests them and betters their community. In order to achieve this—to provide learning opportunities that motivate, engage, and genuinely educate students—we need an educational system that provides a diverse range of educational models in which students can participate. By providing students with exploratory learning environments, apprenticeships, hands-on learning, real world problem solving opportunities, and more, students—regardless of socioeconomic status, race, gender, or disability—are more likely to be engaged and motivated learners.

I believe writing can be a powerful social tool, can be empowering to students, and can be, for many people, a means of thinking.

 Because I believe that for many people writing is the one way we have to make our thoughts stand still long enough to make them make sense, I also believe that writing instruction should focus on helping students learn to organize their thoughts, think critically communicate effectively through language, and find their voices (and the skills) to use language in order to advocate for themselves and others. Such instruction, however, is not possible when teachers are over-burned by enormous class-sizes, are not treated or trained as professionals, and when the educational system does not allow for the kind of local control that would enable teachers to provide the kind of meaningful instruction that might lead to such learning. Furthermore, I will be the first to admit that such a paradigm for writing instruction is not easily achieved, and that is why teachers desperately need professional, personal and financial support.