By John Thompson.
For a generation or more, school reform has been driven by the faith that better teaching can drive transformative and sustainable improvement of schools. I have no doubt that this hypothesis has potential for improving low-poverty schools, but the contemporary reform movement has placed a risky (and I’d say silly) gamble on searching for the cure for generational poverty inside the four walls of the classroom.
Hopefully, Jack Schneider’s From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse will be read as the last piece of a trilogy of 2014 books that explain what it would really take to create a system where teachers are the point of the spear in overcoming the legacies of extreme poverty and trauma. It should join Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars and Elizabeth Green’s Building a Better Teacher in explaining what it would really take for instruction-driven, curriculum-driven school improvement to work.
Schneider describes four successes in implementing ideas from the ivory tower, Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy, Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, William Kirkpatrick’s The Project Method, and Direct Instruction. These three progressive concepts, and the final behaviorist approach, took root in public school classrooms, even though they did so “without altering the nature of the teaching profession.” In contrast to similar concepts that failed to influence teaching, these successes shared four characteristics: Perceived Significance and Philosophical Compatibility with teachers’ world views, Occupational Realism and Transportability to actual classrooms.
Bloom’s Taxonomy, for instance, exemplifies the pattern which Schneider discerns. As with the other innovations, “the taxonomy matched the lived reality of those involved in schools.” It was easy to add on to existing practice, and it did so “without altering the nature of the teaching profession.” Moreover, it allowed for “multiple, even oppositional constituencies [who] could read their particular viewpoints into the taxonomy.”
I will leave it to the reader to further explore Schneider’s nuanced and realistic account of what it takes to transport ideas from the ivory tower to the schoolhouse and, instead, stress the importance of the last point which applies to most, if not all, of his case studies. His narrative is full of approaches that took off (or failed to take off) in response to attacks on education by ideologically-driven, reality-challenged non-educators. Bloom, Gardner, and the various pedagogical progressives who embraced project-based learning were battling administrative progressives and behaviorism. Conversely, Direct Instruction advocates often were consciously assailing teachers. As its champion, Siegfried Engelmann, retorted “We don’t give a damn what the teacher thinks, what the teacher feels.”
As was explained in the chapter on Multiple Intelligences, Gardner’s concept was especially attractive as a defense against policy makers who “rejected the simplistic prejudice of the early twentieth century – that only some children could learn – in favor of an evenhanded, overgeneralization about student potential.” For those sincere but misguided reformers, “the phrase ‘all children can learn’ suggested that low student achievement must, by definition, reflect a kind of teacher failure.” Even today, reformers who began with the once-rational (though always dubious) hypothesis that holding teachers accountable for raising test scores could help poor children of color are still trying to impose a pedagogy of test, reward, and punish. In fact, many are still doubling down of the ultimate teacher-bashing tactic, value-added teacher evaluations.
Schneider’s analysis is doubly important today because data-driven reformers, in the quest for transformative” change through “disruptive innovation,” want to either overhaul the entire public education system or “press for eliminating teachers entirely.”
It would be nice if we could create a “research-to-practice superhighway (rather than relying on a series of detours and back alleys).” Schneider focuses on the way that academic researchers and public school teachers could serve each other by creating “a research-to-practice pathway.” Writing in the tradition of Larry Cuban, David Tyack, and David Cohen, Schneider’s work is consistent with the work of Goldstein and Green, and his analyses and proposed solutions are very similar to those of Jal Mehta. Like those writers, he also does a service by raising the consciousness of people like me, who have not appropriately appreciated the work of Robert Sternberg and Lee Shulman.
Schneider calls for research efforts comparable to the Consortium on Chicago School Research, as well as “networked improvement communities” proposed by Anthony Byrk and Louis Gomez. So, I’m reluctant to quibble over some of his wording.
Perhaps Schneider is correct and “policymakers tend to be more connected to the world of scholarship than teachers,” but I question whether that is true today. Especially over the last two decades, corporate reformers and the officeholders they lobby have known just enough about schools to be dangerous. The Billionaires’ Boys’ Club has funded a system of interconnected and like-minded think tanks, pushing the same data-driven, market-driven agenda. They have listened to true believers in Big Data and rejected the methodologies and the mores of university-based social scientists. As Elizabeth Green notes, some even made it a point of pride in refusing to read the social science on school improvement.
Corporate reformers have already created an infrastructure that is the first cousin to the type of organization that would be required to implement Schneider’s proposals. The problem is that they are founded on the principles of corporate governance, not the respect for the clash of ideas. Their institutions are based on the belief in “convergence,” holding that everyone in their networks are supposed to be “on the same page,” spouting the same soundbites, drafted by their public relations teams, as opposed to research.
If reformers were willing to look in the mirror after reading Schneider, they could easily transform their “astroturf” think tanks into learning communities by embracing the principles of peer review and collegiality that are the basis of the Ivory Tower at its best. If the TNTP, the NCTQ, the MET, and the rest of the alphabet soup of reform true believers were reconstituted and “recultured,” they could be reopened as vehicles for improving practice. They would have to be restaffed, partially or fully, with people who respect teachers and speak to us with a straightforward language. They would need to be much more modest when trying to scale up their new policies. In other words, they would need to be willing to listen respectfully with persons who disagree with them.
Who knows, perhaps Bill Gates or, more likely, Warren Buffett will get tired of funding “change without improvement” and read From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse, along with the year’s other narratives that explain why we have failed in the effort to “deputize” teachers as the agents for overcoming the legacies of poverty. For that reason, I would offer the following suggestion to Schneider.
Creating a system to support and improve teaching effectiveness would be a multi-year process. It is hard to believe that policy-makers will find the patience for building teams of researchers and practitioners. Who knows how long it would take before teaching could become effective enough in the most challenging schools so that its benefits would not be washed out by the conditions that created the mentality that Schneider appropriately describes as Occupational Realism?
The better approach would a pathway aimed towards the challenge of creating schools that make teaching and learning a team sport. Everything that Schneider calls for, though worthy, could be made more beneficial by studying ways of improving the quality of teachers and creating full-service community schools where a “second shift” of caring adults are integrated into the process. Rather than depend upon individual superstar teachers to heroically overcome the legacies of poverty and trauma for every single student, let’s research better ways for everyone to work together to transform lives. Yes, let’s research better approaches to teaching and learning in the classrooms, as we also investigate how schools can better function as whole, organic institutions where we all help educate each new generation.
What do you think? Could better research save the teacher quality approach to school reform? Can top-down reformers learn to listen? Or, should social science research be dedicated to full-service community schools?
Featured image by Tony Webster, used with Creative Commons license.
chemtchr
?!?
“For a generation or more, school reform has been driven by the faith that better teaching can drive transformative and sustainable improvement of schools.”
No, it hasn’t. “School reform” has been driven for two decades by private financial power, greed and subterfuge. Their tenacity in destructive policy has nothing to do with faith. Pretending otherwise, at this point, marks you as an instrument of the subterfuge, John.
Ray Brown
You are so correct John.