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Subject: Teachers: Be subversive
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:07:19 -0400
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http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/08/30/kozol/print.html
Salon.com
August 30, 2007
Teachers: Be subversive
Jonathan Kozol, author of "Letters to a Young Teacher,"
talks with Salon about why No Child Left Behind
squelches learning and reading Rilke's sonnets to first
graders.
By Matthew Fishbane
School days, writes Jonathan Kozol, should be full of
"aesthetic merriment." But instead, too many of
America's 93,000 public schools, particularly those in
the inner cities, are what the poet Gwendolyn Brooks
once called "uglifying," brimming with demoralizing
indignities. Those indignities -- and also the acts of
"stalwart celebration" that surface in classrooms
across the country -- are the topic of Kozol's latest
book, "Letters to a Young Teacher."
Kozol, who will turn 71 this year, has written about
race and class in the classroom before, most recently
in 2005's "The Shame of the Nation" -- and in his
latest work, an undercurrent of anger still simmers.
But rather than descend into polemic, Kozol returns in
"Letters" to his teaching roots, using a correspondence
with a teacher he calls Francesca as a chance to pay
tribute to the men and women who devote their lives to
children every day.
Francesca herself is "semi-fictionalized," a stand-in
for the young educators -- almost all women -- who have
been writing in remarkable volume to Kozol over the
years. Still, Kozol insists that Francesca "is a very
real person," "marvelously well-educated" and certified
as a teacher. Written for an audience that is just
becoming politically engaged, their exchange gives
Kozol a forum in which to address No Child Left Behind,
high-stakes testing, vouchers and other privatizing
forces in public schools -- while at the same time
leaving ample room to praise and celebrate the
inspiring, human qualities he encounters in teachers,
"empathetic principals" and, of course, kids.
From page to page, the focus of Kozol's "Letters"
shuttles from the mundane to the profound -- from loose
teeth to the democratic aims of education -- in a
thoughtful first-person that echoes another "buoyant
spirit" of New England: Henry David Thoreau, who wrote
in "Civil Disobedience," "as for supporting schools, I
am doing my part to educate my fellow countrymen now."
And in fact, Kozol's goals -- in calling for "a
sweeping, intellectually sophisticated political
upheaval" -- are no less lofty.
Salon spoke to Kozol from his home in Byfield, Mass.,
about the fun of first graders, the trouble with
"utilitarian" teaching, and why No Child Left Behind is
"the worst education legislation" in 40 years.
Unlike some of your previous books, "Letters" strikes
me as being more about teachers than students.
Yes, that's true, although the students -- especially
because they're young and so delightfully impertinent
-- force their way into the story repeatedly. Like most
teachers, Francesca talks about the children all the
time.
But it's true, the main purpose of the book is to
describe what it's like to be a young teacher just
beginning in an inner-city school at a time when there
are unprecedented pressures, in part because of No
Child Left Behind. It records a year of correspondence
and visits with an irreverent young woman who also
happens to be an excellent teacher. I think of the book
as an invitation to a beautiful profession.
Can you really call it an "invitation" when a huge part
of your work is describing the many challenges teachers
face in urban schools?
Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in
recent years and are often treated with contempt by
politicians. There's a great deal of reckless rhetoric
in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching
profession -- and I don't find that to be true at all.
We are attracting better teachers and better-educated
teachers today than at any time since I started out in
1964.
I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out
of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come
from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs
to be "fixed" -- I hate such a mechanistic word, as if
our schools were automobile engines -- ever asks the
opinions of teachers. By far the most important factor
in the success or failure of any school, far more
important than tests or standards or business-model
methods of accountability, is simply attracting the
best-educated, most exciting young people into urban
schools and keeping them there.
In your letters, you spend a lot of time reassuring
Francesca that it's OK to follow her instincts, or even
encouraging her to be subversive, to disregard school
policies if they don't make sense to her.
I would say pleasantly subversive. In part that is
Francesca's character anyway -- but I do recommend an
attitude of irreverence on the part of teachers who are
having tests and standards shoved down their throats
from Washington. We try so hard to recruit exciting
teachers into these schools, but nearly 50 percent of
them quit within three years. In order to survive, they
need to keep their individuality, their personalities,
intact, and they need to fight to defend a sense of
joyfulness that brought them to this profession in the
first place.
In most suburban schools, teachers know their kids are
going to pass the required tests anyway -- so No Child
Left Behind is an irritant in a good school system, but
it doesn't distort the curriculum. It doesn't transform
the nature of the school day. But in inner-city
schools, testing anxiety not only consumes about a
third of the year, but it also requires every minute of
the school day in many of these inner-city schools to
be directed to a specifically stated test-related
skill. Very little art is allowed into these
classrooms. Little social studies, really none of the
humanities.
In some embattled school systems these high-stakes
tests start in first grade, or even kindergarten, in
order to get the kids used to the protocol of test
taking -- yet a vast majority of low-income kids have
no preschool before they enter kindergarten. According
to Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense
Fund, less than 50 percent of eligible children are
provided with Head Start nowadays, and it's even worse
in the poorest inner-city districts. Meanwhile, the
children of my affluent Harvard classmates, or their
grandchildren, typically have three years of
developmental pre-K education. Then a few years later,
they all have to take the same exam -- presuming the
affluent kids go to public schools -- and so some are
being tested on three or four years of education and
some on twice as many years.
Is that what you said recently when you went to speak
to the Democrats on the Senate education committee?
Yes. I think the tests in their present form are
useless, because although President Bush promoted them
by saying, "All we want to do is help these teachers
see where their students need more help," the results
typically don't come back before the end of June. What
is the teacher supposed to do when she finally sees the
test scores in the middle of the summer, send a
postcard to little Shaniqua, saying, you know, "If I
knew last winter what I know now, I would have put more
emphasis on the those skills"?
I recommended to the Democrats that they replace these
tests with diagnostic tests, which are given
individually by the teacher to her students. They are
anxiety-free and you don't have to wait six months for
McGraw-Hill or Harcourt to mis-score them, as they
often do. The teacher gets results immediately. And
it's not time stolen from education because she
actually learns while she's giving this test.
After the Supreme Court decision last June on
segregation in Seattle's school districts, you wrote a
critical Op-Ed in the New York Times about a transfer
provision in No Child Left Behind that says that if a
student is in a perennially failing school, that child
must be permitted to transfer to a high-performing
school. Can you explain your argument?
The idea of the provision is that a child's parents
should be able to transfer the child to a successful
school in their district if the child's school has
proven to be a hopeless failure. The trouble is, there
aren't enough schools in overwhelmingly poor and
minority inner-city districts to which a child can
transfer. So less than 3 percent of eligible kids have
transferred during the years since No Child Left Behind
came into effect.
I proposed that the transfer provision be amended not
only to permit but to require states to make cross-
district transfers possible -- so that a student in the
South Bronx could be transferred to Bronxville, which
is, I have tested in my car, only about a 12-minute
drive. It would be a very simple amendment to add and
it would drive a mighty blow against the deepening re-
segregation of our urban schools, without making any
reference to race. Justice Kennedy, in his partial
concurrence, pointed out that strategies like these,
which are race-neutral, would certainly be
constitutional.
How would those changes help to retain the wonderful
young teachers you write about?
First of all, it would immediately relieve that sense
that there's always a sword above their heads, and that
sword is empirically measurable testing. It would
relieve the sense that every minute of the day has to
be allocated to a predesignated skill. It would free
them from the absurdity of posting numbers and the
language of standards on their blackboards, which are
of absolutely no benefit to a child. As Francesca once
pointed out to me, no child's going to come back 10
years later and say, "I'm so grateful to you for
teaching me proficiency 56b."
It would free the teachers from all of that, and it
would allow these young teachers, most of whom have
majored in liberal arts, and who love literature and
poetry, to flood the classroom with all those treasures
that they themselves enjoyed when they were children,
most of them in very good suburban school districts.
You use a lot of military language like "combat,"
"assaults" and "capitulation" and return again and
again to the idea that the administrative brass doesn't
know what the grunts are living through. Are our
schools really war zones?
Yes, they are. You rightly called teachers "grunts," in
that they are the ones who are doing the actual work.
In the inner-city schools these classrooms are not
simply the front lines of education: They're the front
lines of democracy. No matter what happens in a child's
home, no matter what other social and economic factors
may impede a child, there's no question in my mind that
a first-rate school can transform almost everything. So
long as the teacher is energized and highly skilled and
her personal sense of exhilaration in the company of
children is not decapitated by a Dickensian agenda.
I've received at least 30,000 letters, calls and e-
mails or written notes handed to me from young teachers
in the past two years alone: These teachers by and
large are very well-educated and they are highly
idealistic. And they know something that the testing
and standards experts don't seem to know: namely, that
the main reason for learning to read is for the
pleasure it brings us, not for the utilitarian payoff
of being able to read your orders.
So you take issue with the argument that children need
to be prepared for the realities of the marketplace.
But isn't that what they will face?
Yes, children do have to be prepared for the economic
world -- but the invasion of the public schools by
mercantile values has deeply demoralized teachers. I've
been in classrooms where the teacher has to write a so-
called mission statement that says, "The mission of
this school is to sharpen the competitive edge of
America in the global marketplace."
Francesca once said to me, "I'm damned if I'm going to"
-- I don't think she said "damned," because she's too
polite; maybe "darned" -- "treat these little babies as
commodities or products. Why should they care about
global markets? They care about bellybuttons, and
wobbly teeth, and beautiful books about caterpillars."
I think we have to protect those qualities.
Most of the teachers we're trying so hard to recruit
into these schools, then driving out, tend to be the
children of the 1960s generation, and they are steeped
in civil rights values, and those who have gone to good
colleges and universities come into these schools with
what I would call almost a preferential option for
minority children of the poor. But no matter what
they've read beforehand, they're generally stunned at
the profound class and racial segregation they
encounter. It's not as if they didn't know that this
was the case, but when they're suddenly in a class, as
Francesca was, with not a single white child and only
three white kids in the entire building, it hits them
hard.
Is that how Francesca experienced it?
Francesca and I once had a long talk. I tend to say
that we've basically ripped apart the legacy of Brown
v. Board of Education, but it was she who first pointed
out to me that we haven't even lived up to the mandate
of Plessy v. Ferguson, because our schools are
obviously separate but they're certainly not equal.
Now, especially with the recent Supreme Court decision
[on segregation], there's a sense of profound anger
among these teachers. A sense that everything they grew
up to believe is good and right is being discarded by
our society. They also note that despite all the
fatuous claims from the secretary of education, the
achievement gap between the races has not closed. And
even worse, the cultural gap has actually widened
because of the narrowing of the curriculum in these
schools.
Francesca, despite the fact that she refused to teach
to the test, managed to be very effective in teaching
skills, and her children did well. Apparently you don't
need to hire Princeton Review to come into your school
and use scarce education funds to pay them to create
artificial test-score gains.
You're an advocate now. Have you ever considered going
back to the classroom yourself?
All the time. When I was visiting Francesca's class, I
was jealous of her. When I give lectures what usually
happens is some teacher or principal in the audience
will grab me at the end and say, "Do you have four
hours tomorrow morning before you leave? Would you
visit my school?" and I always try to do it. And then I
don't want to leave because it really brings my spirits
back. I love the unpredictable. I love the whimsical in
children. I love it when a child asks me what you might
think is a funny question, like, "Do you feel sad
because you're old?" Or, "Is it lonesome to write?"
It's a wonderful question, don't you think?
I'm still very healthy and I sometimes think I would
love to go back and teach first grade or second grade.
First grade, under the best conditions, is what I call
the miracle year, because that's the year when -- if
you're in a reasonably good situation, and if your
children have a little pre-K, and if they've had a good
kindergarten year -- it's in first grade that you see
the children go from knowing letters only as images,
the shapes of the letters, to suddenly writing and
reading. Writing real sentences and reading real books.
That's a miracle to me. To me that's more dramatic than
anything that happened to me at my four years at
Harvard.
This book revisits some of the topics -- like dealing
with unsupportive administrators -- from your 1981
book, "On Being a Teacher." Why did you feel the need
to return to those subjects?
Well, I've spent more time with other teachers since
then and spent so much time in classrooms that -- I
can't quite explain why. I know this book has a
political cutting edge and it's going to make me a lot
of enemies in Washington from the right-wing think-tank
types. I'm sure they won't be sending me any bouquets
from the Heritage Foundation, or the Manhattan
Institute. But it's the first book I've ever written
where I actually enjoyed it every day, and it's because
there's enough in it, and because I think of it sort of
as an invitation to the dance. I think the book, in a
strange way, is kind of a cheerful book. Wouldn't you
say so?
Somewhere between naive romance and sophisticated
idealism.
I hope it's not naive. It's not a theoretical book,
like, wouldn't this be wonderful? or something. It's
based on being there. Francesca's kids did well. At the
same time, she did not stick to the standards. I don't
think there's anything in No Child Left Behind about
reading the sonnets of Rilke to first graders.
-- By Matthew Fishbane
Copyright (c)2007 Salon Media Group, Inc.
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