Classroots.org

My wife, Bethany Nowviskie (@nowviskie), has posted on the University of California’s moves to boycott Nature Publishing Group. Essentially, the publishing group takes the work of professors – authors and peer reviewers – and then sells subscriptions back to the professors’ institutions at exorbitant rates that force further cuts in library systems already savaged by budget crises.

Nowviskie compares the situation to Tyler Durden’s soap-making scheme in Fight Club. Durden steals human fat from plastic surgery clinics and renders it into soap that he sells to high end beauty counters.

Nowviskie’s post is sharp and urges librarians and professors to share responsibility and work together to reform the journal subscriptions system.

I’ve been sitting on this post at CoopCatalyst, wondering if it was all just a bit too much. But, inspired by my wife, I posted it. My email sig file will now read, “Chad Sansing, Educational Conspiracy Theorist.”

What we teachers need to see in public education is a nearly identical program of systematic extortion committed by K-12 vendors and their accomplices: us.

We are field-testing test-prep materials for the vendors who are writing the tests. These vendors have a financial interest in researching and developing “more rigorous” standards, materials, and assessments so that an achievement gap always exits. The gap will be measured and confirmed by the tests the vendors sell. The silver bullet for low test scores will be materials aligned to state or common stan standards, sold by the same vendors. Some of these materials will look new and shiny and carry labels like “adaptive” or “blended,” but you will know them by the way they tie students to desks, chairs, screens, and schoolwork as ably as consumable work books do.

We paying to validate the tests that determine how badly we are punished.

We have to subvert school board policies about officially adopted materials whenever we want to use unapproved materials with an entire class.

We are told to teach authentically and asked to assess harmfully. Our school divisions have placed us in a position of moral hazard. No wonder we so often transfer similar mixed messages about learning and behavior to our students and punish them for mounting the kinds of challenges we do not make to our “superiors.”

Our students are a captive audience undergoing curricular experimentation that they have not chosen for themselves. At best they must operate under two sets of expectations – our expectations that they love learning and the system’s expectations that they do what they’re told. At worst, they suffer solely under the latter.

How are we complicit in this? How are our schools complicit? Our divisions? Our leadership? Our unions? Our politicians?

When was the last time we called for a strike – or for a teach-in, or for any kind of division, state, or national action – over pedagogy? Over what’s best for kids?

Are we ready?

It’s past time for a Do It Yourself (DIY) curriculum. It’s past time for teachers to break free of prescribed materials and scripted curricula. It’s past time for teachers to take back control of teaching.

It’s time for the Do It Ourselves (DIO) classroom. It’s time for students and teachers to assemble curricula, materials, and assessments together. It’s time for teachers to trust students with control of their schooling – it’s time for students to trust teachers with stewardship of their learning.

Are we ready?

We have the summer. Will we act without expecting a return on our investment?

We need to break out of the vendor’s shipping container. We shouldn’t be pursuing pass rates or attacking one another. We should be pursuing passions and attacking systematic obstacles to learning. We will never be allowed a flat 100% pass rate. If we ever achieved it, anyway, it would mean that learning’s pulse had flat-lined in our schools.

We need to start new conversations, especially with our students. Let’s go.