Risk Averse And Still Believing

I guess you really need to be a classroom teacher to understand thoroughly what’s involved in the learning process. And yet multitudes line up to offer their simplistic solutions (see Kristof below) to the problems besetting (besieging?) what, how and why public education (learning) continues to founder in the US. Some of these visionaries even speak from exalted positions of influence and power.

Mayor Bloomberg of NYC is one of them. When one thinks of Mike, one doesn’t connect him with naïveté. And yet there he was in his State of The City speech (heavily larded with education solutions) claiming that NYC will entice “the top college graduates” to sign up to be urban educators. Don’t hold your breath, Mike. You might want to check out the cubicles in your old haunts around The Street to see the faces of those “top college graduates.” They are not as naïve as you. They have friends and former classmates who face the humiliation and frustration of being public educators. You also mention a desire to reward “highly effective” teaching, as much as a $20,000 bonus after two years of such teaching. Do you know anyone who can confidently spell out precisely what that is? Is it getting students to excel at fitting a standard answer sheet, a standard established by whomever? Do you want standardized answers from the people who work for you?

There is nothing standard in any public classroom when the teacher enters the room, closes the door and faces those expectant and challenging gazes. Some need parenting, some need convincing that learning is fulfilling, and all bring personal, singular issues to that classroom each day.

A well-kept secret within the confines of our benighted culture is that, as a group, America’s classroom teachers are a singularly risk-averse class of people. I say “class” with pun both intended and unintended. To clear the air, I’m well-aware of the conventional “wisdom” that teachers are “lucky” because they work only 180+ days, 6 hours per day and because with tenure they have absolute job security (discounting lapses into moral turpitude, the meaning of which even attorneys are unsure of these days). Of course, they get paid only for those 180+ days; July and August are not paid vacations. Nonetheless, they have a pretty comfortable situation…compared to say the hard labor of financial cubicle dwellers or sales managers or telephone answerers.

But there’s the irony. Because they have it so easy and comfortable, they are risk-averse regarding change and challenge. Ask any teacher—especially outside the school building—what the problem is with American education, and she’ll bend your ear as long as you keep buying the drinks. But then ask her what she thinks she can do about those problems, and she’ll say that teachers’ hands are tied by the administration and the contract. She has been winnowed to an acceptance of the status quo waiting for intelligent, sympathetic, confident leadership. But she continues to show up hoping that something, someone will change.

Now think about this for a minute. According to Nicholas Kristof, classrooms are led by either good teachers or bad teachers. He doesn’t account for average teachers. That is, he doesn’t know about this huge risk-averse group. Good teachers take risks. They push the learning envelope, and most of the time the students, the actual learners, and their parents are thrilled by the experience. The administrators, not so much. They suspect outside the lines or outside the box thinking, challenges to the standards, to the system, because most of them were severely risk-averse until they figured out that, as such, they could conform to whatever the latest “standard” of educational leadership (i.e., administration) they could fit in at much higher pay and squeeze themselves into one of the comfortable niches in the hierarchy and simply drift away. No risk takers in their ranks. And bad teachers are frustrated because they made a bad choice and have tenure (they’re vested in the position, the school and the community), and they can’t adapt to the lack of certainty that enters the classroom with them each day, each class period. It’s far more challenging than they could ever have imagined. They’re stuck, dissatisfied, self-loathing and would leave if they could figure out the way. They’re not bad people; they’re misplaced people, and, yes, they don’t belong there.

But what about these risk-averse, average teachers, who, despite the disparagement they face from their students, parents, administrators, colleagues and especially know-nothing pundits (see Kristof above) and politicians, continue to believe that what they’re doing or trying to do has purpose? Each time they close the classroom door behind them, they believe that learning will be possible in the next period of minutes, that who they are and what they’ve trained for can reach someone even if not everyone. They don’t have the luxury of thinking about a race to the top or about being highly effective. If a teacher can surprise one student about how much that student knows, that can be enough. That can be enough for today, and maybe, if she can get through the night without too many wake ups, this average, neither good nor bad, teacher will do a little better tomorrow. Yes, she will do a little better tomorrow. She believes that.

BTW—"To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while."

-- Josh Billings