Reform and Philosphy

The wonderfully titled blog "It's Not All Flowers and Sausages" has a great post about how policy makers discount teachers' opinions.  Mrs. Mimi, the alliterative pseudonym chosen by the blogger, uses an EdWeek article as a genesis to make several wonderfully provocative points.

The EdWeek article begins,

Perhaps at no other time in the history of American education has there been more publicly available information about what teachers think about their profession, their students, and the conditions under which they work.

As advocates pore over the results of teacher surveys being conducted nationally, at the state level, and even at individual schools, observers are beginning to ask questions about how the information can be used to inform policies to improve teachers’ working conditions and promote teacher and leadership effectiveness.

Mrs. Mimi brilliantly observes, 

Just because we're saying it doesn't mean that the Powers That Be are listening, taking us seriously or think that we have anything intelligent to offer. I've worked at educational research organizations and more often than not, the concerns of Real Teachers are met by eye rolling. EYE ROLLING! By people who claim to care about education...

Every teacher who has expressed a good idea to a principal, superintendent, or school board member has had the experience she describes.  She later asserts,

In MY SCHOOL (Friends, one of the biggest arguments used to discredit our words is that they are too contextually bound...meaning, they are too tied to our actual schools rather than the system at large

Finally, Mrs. Mimi asks the million dollar question,

How about we say enough with the surveys? How about we actually invite a REAL TEACHER (or better yet a WHOLE BUNCH OF TEACHERS) to the table when these policies and decisions are actually being made?!?!?

I think I have several answers to that question.  Most of them will make me sound far too bitter to be taken seriously.  Instead, I'll try to sound cerebral, even though that effort will ensure that I won't be taken seriously.

Let's get on with it anyway.  In Democracy in America, Tocqueville writes,  "I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them."

What Tocqueville saw in the early 1830s still holds true today.  It's for that reason that policy makers probably never read books like Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action or web articles like this one that enunciate the following principles that would allow teachers to become more active participants in school reform discussions.

1.  Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse.
2a. Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.
2b. Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse.
2c. Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires, and needs.
3.  No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as
    laid down in (1) and (2).

If policymakers were to follow the principles listed above, teachers would be able to participate.  The people whose jaws drop at the mention of teacher involvement might argue that mere classroom teachers are not competent to participate in important decisions.  These are the same people, however, who argue that nothing is more important than the current cohort of students.  If the latter is true, then it seems illogical to hire incompetent people to husband that resource.

Following these principles means that no constituency in the reform debate will get everything s/he desires, but no one will lose everything.  Further, teachers would not just be survey numbers, they would actually be participants in the discussion.  They could challenge the ridiculous suppositions that led to the current mess.  More importantly, the powers that be could not say "Suck it up and shut up!!!"  Teachers could not be coerced into accepting policies that make it possible to test but not teach.

Teachers lost everything under NCLB and seem set to keep losing under the new proposals.  Using philosophy as tool to get to the table is a long shot, but the results of having real teachers at the table would probably produce workable effective reforms. At worst, it will get the same reception that teachers get when they offer suggestions now.