Classroots.org

The “blob” wins according to Tom Vander Ark (@tvanderark). President Obama’s ESEA reauthorization blueprint gives all but the lowest-performing 5% of schools “a free pass” on fixing schools for our most under-served students.

What is the “blob?” Teachers’ unions? Teachers? Mediocre schools? Mediocre teachers? All of the above? The soft bigotry of low expectations?

As much as I agree with Tom on the need for clear accountability rules for schools and teachers – and on the need to root out and eliminate systematic and individual bigotry in education – his decision to blame the blob bothers me. After all, I’m part of the blob, right? However, regardless of what I believe or how I teach, the ESEA reauthorization blueprint is President Obama’s, even though 3 days ago, according to Tom, he had backbone.

The real problem is our systematic inability to agree on where the locus of control for school reform belongs.

Is it in NCLB? Is it in the RttT? The ESEA reauthorization? The Common Core Standards? The charter movement? Charter vendors? School choice? Teacher firings? Teacher quality? Parental involvement? Poverty? Innovation? Standardized testing? Global comparisons on disparate industrial nations’ test results?

Let me rephrase that: the real problem is our refusal to foster in students and teachers personal responsibility for learning. Nothing above does anything to discourage students and teachers from gaming our current system of wait-and-see-and-fear. In fact, we hobble educators trying to do this by advancing the standardization of students’ education and test-based teacher evaluation.

We will never have the educational system our students deserve so long as we strong arm external measures of control on students and teachers. We’re not going to attract brilliant Gen Y teachers with baby-carrot-and-spiked-club approaches, the ranch dip of socially significant work or not.

We will never have buy-in to shared vision of democratic education for the innovation age so long as we undercut our rhetoric with behavioral conditioning from sit-down-and-shut-up to open-more-charter-schools-and-shut-up.

We will never have a society that lives up to its democratic ideals so long as our schools and government do such a good job at showing kids who the “winners” and “losers” are from birth.

We school for an inequitable society. We graduate a banded citizenry. We use capitalism and democracy interchangeably, to the detriment of our way of life.

President Obama’s “new” college or career readiness policy sounds right, but until we have performance-based assessments that authentically bridge students from public education to higher education, service, entrepreneurship, and/or employment, we wait and see and fear.

In the meantime, teachers, teach and learn for the world you want to live in, not for the world we live in now.

• Share power with students. Gift them your attention.
• Share responsibility for curriculum, instruction, and assessment with students. Give them a say in directing your shared, relevant work.
• Share information with students and parents. Let them know what you’re doing, how you’re doing, and why.
• Share your plans with your administrator. Find out how much room you have to teach and learn with students free of the educational obsolescences the ESEA reauthorization is going to repackage for another generation; find out what waivers you can secure.
• Share your work with us. Help us hack our culture of blame and punishment so we can foster responsibility and joy in learning instead.

I know this is hard; I know this is an ideal. If we didn’t need this, we wouldn’t need us.

Above all else, don’t be a part of the blob. Whatever it is, it sounds really bad.