Right Story, Wrong Questions

In my course about teacher training in the reform context, we have spent a long time talking about what teacher training should look like ... what does good teaching look like, how can we train for it.

I think we are asking the wrong question. Over and over again... we focus on creating the perfect program as though we all agreed with what teaching looks like... I will go farther... that we all agree on the ultimate goal of public education.

For me, the notion that we all agree on what our expectations are for this project we call public education is the single biggest obstacle. From what we have read, and what we can see, the first rupture between reality and perception begins with this question. Is the goal of public education to give everyone an equal opportunity at the brass ring? That is what all of those who claim to be idealistic will tell you. I still think of myself as an idealist, and I know this to be a lie.

We have already identified in class the schizophrenic approach we have towards teachers and teaching ... we claim to value education yet we have consistently undervalued education through the way we choose and prepare teachers, by the amount of money we pay them, and the bureaucratic approach we take to it.

If we cared about education, it would be about education not about warehousing, not about creating factory line workers. If we believed that education is for all the same and about giving everyone the best chance for the future, we would not spend so much time putting down parents or teacher or schools, we would find the problem, and we would fix it. Instead, we believe that not all CAN do it, and we sort and sift according to our biases not ability. We warehouse, we chastise, we numb.

In fact, public education was created in order to contain, control and acculturate workers.

Sorry to burst the bubbles.

The irony is that education DOES have the capacity, despite all of the roadblocks the bureaucrats throw in its way, to transform lives. Despite its many faults, it is the great equalizer. It is the ONLY hope that certain populations have for achieving the so-called American Dream.

There I said it... I believe. I am a realist in the sense that I am willing to name the truth. But I am an idealist in that I believe we can force education to live up to its ideal... just as we have forced "all men were created equal" have more of a basis in reality. There is more work to be done, but naming the disconnect between the rhetoric and the action was the first step.

We don't need Michelle Rhee, we need a reality check and then we can roll up our sleeves and get to work... nothing we do in the name of the present system without recognizing its hypocrisy will do more than put lipstick on that fabled pig.

We might start there by redefining this concept ... it is not the American Dream that anyone can have, it is, in fact, the exception that a few can achieve in order to perpetuate the myth. It is this way whether we like it or not. We cannot wish it away no matter how many times or in how many ways we try to reconfigure it.

Between the myth of the American Dream and the myth of meritocracy, truth hardly has a chance to shine through. Why should any one embrace the truth that recognizes that our system is designed to contain and control workers, mesmerize them into believing that they, too, can be millionaires, and if they cannot attain that goal, then they are deficient in some way... and probably it has something to do with their race or ethnicity.

Even poor white folks know that they have a better chance of slipping through the gauntlet to achieve the American Dream... and this is the reason we hold it so dear.

This is not to say that we should not try to figure out how to make education live up to its hype... if it were, I would certainly not be busting my ass in graduate school right now. I am not here for me... I was one of those exceptions, exceptional some people like to say. Unfortunately for those who hold to the Dream and the meritocracy myth, I did not continue on to the fulfillment of my exception.

I did not become an economic striver... despite myself, actually, since even as a teacher, I consistently earned more than my peers because I figured out how to demand more, I had been trained, after all, to believe in the hype, to believe in what I deserved. It has taken me a long time to unlearn and disabuse myself of this notion.

[Right now, I could use some of that bravado when I am faced with those who would tell me, over and over, that graduate school and the PhD are not for me. They have no idea what they are dealing with. They have no idea where I come from, where I have been or what demons I have already faced down.]

Instead, I have consistently chosen to try to make education live up to its expectations. I have succeeded and failed and succeeded and failed... and finally given in to the understanding that we must face reality, the facts, in order to break open this system to remake it in its own image ... that is in the image of its expectations... that which we claim to want and care about and believe in.

You cannot do it otherwise... train them in rote learning, save the talented forty, feed into the hype, you are not changing anything... and, truth be told, you are not helping anyone that wouldn't have made it anyway.

I was one of those, I am telling you right now. I got some leg ups and I got some shove downs. Ultimately, they were not going to hold me back, and they did not help me.

My drive, my fire and my passion does not come from the system that would call me exceptional (as in you are the exception, not the rule). It comes from my ancestors, from the very real trials they faced in order to survive. They probably never imagined a granddaughter who would go to college let alone graduate school. Their minds were not stretching in that way... they were thinking about surviving, they were thinking about in in the way we say it in Spanish ... sobrevivir... to do more and above living. SOBRE...above, over...VIVIR...live... not just make it, not keep your head above water, it's different...

There's more... sorry to say... it will keep coming out.