Scott McCleod pointed to Richard F. Elmore’s UCEA conference presentation a few days ago and hosted the mp3 on his site. I gave it a listen. (His presentation is a bit dry, but substantive … and McCleod’s list of examples of misalignment are also helpful.) Elmore provides data and studies that support what many of us already know: from top to bottom, common sense and best practices do not run the world of education.

This is a large part of my reason for taking a break from education. I think I did some good in the classroom, but the problems seem so widespread that my own efforts seem futile in comparison. It’s frustrating and defeating to work within a system that is, in my estimation, stubbornly and persistently failing. It often felt like I was working really hard to clean the interior of a car that was racing down a hill and heading for a cliff.

One side of me says: take a break, refresh, rebuild, and then “once more into the fray.” However, another side–what I fear may be a wiser side–says: working within a failing system, even if your individual work is beneficial to a few, only serves to perpetuate that system and therefore to spread harm to many more than you help. This internal debate will be one of the things I focus my reflections on during my time away from the classroom…

I’d like to comment on two of the points Elmore raises. The first is his clarification of what it means to be a professional. A professional is someone who can separate his/her personal identity from his/her practice and thereby step back from that practice, consider its effectiveness, discuss it critically and openly with others, and make adjustments as necessary. This approach to practice is rare in public education and the source of much continued bad practice. It is also, I suspect, the source of many personal flare-ups between edubloggers. One reason I respect Dan Meyer, for example, even when I don’t agree with him, is that he is mainly concerned with analyzing practice as practice, not as personal identity. I know too many educators with whom I couldn’t even begin to discuss aspects of their practice that might be ineffective or damaging.

The second point is Elmore’s discussion of what a properly-aligned professional educational organization should look like. From the top to the bottom, every member should be involved in the practice of pedagogy and should be working with students every day. Those who make it “to the top” should be true experts of pedagogy (as chief practitioners are in their field of medicine, analogously). Again, I know far too many administrators who are administrators because they wanted to get out of the classroom, or because they were not competent enough to remain in the classroom. I have nothing against P.E. teachers, for example, but why are so many administrators in my school distrcit former P.E. teachers?

If I could find a school district that was organized in this manner, and approached teachers as professionals in the manner described above, I’d probably be eager to return to the classroom after my sabbatical and would strongly support that educational system. The problem is, I don’t yet know of any school districts that operate this way.

The audio files from McCleod’s website:

• 2006-11-11 - Education leadership as the practice of improvement (Dr. Richard Elmore, UCEA conference presentation) (1:03:26)
• Excerpt 1: Resilience of teacher culture (6:20)
• Excerpt 2: Teacher professionalism (4:35)
• Excerpt 3: Clueless about instructional improvement (5:27)
• Excerpt 4: Practice equals identity (9:04)

Some points and quotes from the presentation:

• Most educators feel they are professionals within a profession, but much of the public and the majority of political leaders don’t think of educators in those terms.
• The absence of “a practice” is currently a major problem for education.
• “Educators have a way of trivializing the most powerful things in the world of practice.”
• “Educators are people to whom things happen. We do not control the terms and conditions of our own practice … [Our practice is] controlled by people who have no specialized knowledge in the field, who have no understanding of the empirical realities of practice in schools and classrooms, and for whom the main interest is in creating electoral credit, not in producing outcomes in schooling.”
• “If schools succeed under the terms and conditions of No Child Left Behind, elected officials will take credit for it. If schools fail under the terms and conditions of No Child Left Behind, policy makers get to blame the institutions and the practitioners in them, which produces at least as much, and probably more, political credit than success.”
• “There’s a profound misconception in the culture of education about the meaning of professionalism. Professionalism in education equals autonomy, so that anything that compromises the individual’s judgment in their practice is considered to be anti-professional or non-professional … that is a profoundly anti-professional point of view. Professionals are not people who exercise autonomy in their practice. Professionals are people who subscribe to a body of knowledge, they use that body of knowledge to control entry to the work, they deliberately get rid of people who have not mastered the body of knowledge, and … autonomy of judgment gets exercised within pretty-well-established protocols … and on the margins of existing knowledge.”
• “[Educators] believe that the practice is inextricably connected with the identity of the person. That is, ‘we are what we do.’ The mark of a profession is that people can dissociate themselves from their current practice, examine it, analyze it, get rid of it when it doesn’t work, and still not have their identities … deeply challenged. What this means is that in order to change the practice, we have to get rid of the people, and you can’t do this in a mass profession.”
• Protocols help people distance themselves from their practice and structure discussions around the practice, not the person.
• 80% of the work in classrooms is at the factual and procedural level, and students have no idea what it means. Worse, students aren’t even procedurally fluent.
• “You don’t change a culture like this, you replace it … The way you do that in the initial stages is not pretty. It involves requiring people to do things that they think are impossible to do.”
• If you ask people to do high-level work in the current culture, they will do low-level work and call it high-level work. Teachers tend to teach high-level content with low-level pedagogy.
• You want a social structure that selects for high levels of organizational, professional, and substantive expertise and that forces practitioners to be involved in the work daily. Also, teachers shouldn’t be doing all the teaching and administrators all the observing.

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