Chapter 8C

Taking a Chance

The annual science department meeting for course placement for next year was wrapping up when I raised my hand.
“Yes, David?” Deb, my department chair, replied.
“I want to recommend Maddi for honors physics.” I said.
There was a general stirring among the group.
“She’s only recommended for regular math.” Deb said. “The department policy has always been that any child taking regular math automatically gets placed into regular physics.”
She paused. “It’s been that way since even you were head of the department.” She reminded me.
“I know.” I told her with a quick nod of my head. “But maybe it’s time we reconsidered that—at least with this one child.”
Ereni, one of the physics teachers, interjected.
“But the reason for the policy is that the girls in regular math don’t learn all of the math they will need for honors physics. We could potentially be setting Maddi up to fail if we do this.” She stated.
I shook my head vehemently. “This is one of the hardest working students I have ever taught.” I replied. “She has one of the most challenging learning profiles of any of my students this year, and she has a 98 in my class! She is the embodiment of what grit will get you.”
It was Deb’s turn to shake her head. “We have never had a student move up from standard biology to honors physics.” She repeated.
“Well maybe it’s time we did.” I answered; I had returned from my sabbatical in Santa Fe determined to change some things, and this was one of them.
I turned to Ereni. “Could you teach her any differences in the math between regular and honors?” I asked.
“Yes, if she’s willing to put in the extra work.” She responded. “The girls in regular math eventually learn what the ones in honors need. They just learn it toward the end of second semester in regular math and we use it in first semester in physics; so the two curriculums don’t align.”
Ereni sort of bobbed her head, thinking. “But if Maddi is willing to commit to coming for extra academic help, I could certainly teach her the extra material she needs to know for honors.”
“This child lives for academic help.” I responded. “I have never had a child want so badly to do her very best all the time.”
Ereni shrugged her shoulders. “You know that I’m philosophically on board.” She said.
I turned to Deb.
“David, I’m not antagonistic to the idea.” She answered. “I just think we need to ask ourselves if we want to set a precedent that could come back to bite us?”
I pushed back.
“Look,” I said, gesturing with both arms. “We’ve been talking for years—under both my tenure and yours—about how we might be better optimizing our placement system. And we’ve always said we want to stretch our students without crushing them; to have each of them in the section of a course where they can best thrive. Here’s our chance.” I implored. “Maddi will be bored out of her skull in regular physics!”
“Ereni?” Deb asked.
Again, Ereni shrugged. “I’m on board.” She answered.
Deb turned back to me. “And she’s the only one you’re recommending this way? I’m not saying we can’t revisit the entire topic next year, but it is a little late in this year to turn over the entire apple cart.”
I nodded emphatically, in part because I knew exactly what she was implying about the larger potential parental response when knowledge of this decision got out.
“She is the only one.” I responded. “And her grade average is almost a grade-level higher than any of her classmates in any of my sections. I’m confident we have the necessary data to explain why we made this one exception.”
I grinned at Deb. “And I will gladly take on any of those parental conversations directly if you need me to.” I told her.
She smiled back. “I think I’ll be okay.” She replied.
Gesturing to the rest of us in the meeting, she asked, “All in favor of allowing Maddi to take honors physics next year?”
“Aye,” came the chorus of replies.
“Then, David, you’ve won your case.” Deb said. “Any other business? No? Then I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have plenty of grading to do.”
She dismissed us then, and as I e-mailed Maddi to come see me, I couldn’t wait to see the excitement on her face when I told her.

“The Master’s Tools”

Good teaching and learning do not just have the potential to threaten our egalitarian delusions; the actual nature of the accountability to which it holds students is equally dangerous to the status quo as well.  If I am right that real learning is a consequence of both students and teachers participating together in the practice of composing reality’s metaphors, then what we must assess in a truly functional educational system is how well our pupils engage in this process and not necessarily which specific metaphors they actually make.  We must stop penalizing misunderstandings and mistakes about a given subject and instead turn evaluation into an on-going transaction of student production and teacher feedback in which a child steadily refines his or her ability to fashion meaning about the world in a certain way—an evaluation process which, interestingly enough, corresponds exactly with what have been identified as the seven key critical 21^st Century learning goals.¹⁴

But such an approach to the assessment of learning means that ultimately accountability is no longer about whether children necessarily construct a specific understanding of the world; it’s about how well they actually participate in a particular knowledge constructing process.  In other words–to use my “bowl” analogy from earlier–what students are accountable for in the ecological paradigm of education and which good teachers hold them to is the struggle to make “bowls” in a certain fashion–not what the final “bowl” looks like or what it’s made of.  Thus, authentic accountability in education is ultimately more about performance rather than product, about “how” instead of “what.”

The trouble is: how do you grade a “how?” How do you grade a struggle? The “What” of learning is a lot easier to grade and a lot easier to test, and since “today, the purpose of U.S. education is to rank human potential, not develop it,”¹⁵ then the other danger authentic engagement in schools presents is clear: it employs an understanding of assessment and accountability that undermines the very foundation of the traditional concept of grading on which our society depends for its self-image.  For example, if we can’t grade people numerically, how will we rank them to justify where they belong in the cultural hierarchy? If we can’t assign an “impartial” value to the possession of a random body of knowledge, how will we sort out the “good” students from the “bad” ones? If we can’t punish those who have slower memories with “objective” grades placed in permanent records, how will they know their “inferior” worth to the community? If “our children should study what’s important to learn, not what’s easy for you to test,”¹⁶ how will we maintain the socio-economic echelons that keep the “have’s” possessing more and the “have-not’s” scrounging for what’s left? 

What it boils down to is:  if we can’t grade everyone in the traditional way, then how can we possibly justify, vindicate, and defend our “democratic” illusions of a just, free, and equitable society? The answer, of course, is that we can’t, and that may be the ultimate threat authentically engaged schooling of the kind presented in this project poses: not only does it force us to confront when we have failed as a society to provide our children with what they need to avoid “[leaving] K-12 schools with no hireable competencies;”¹⁷ it strips away the institutional mechanism we use to exonerate this failure in the first place.  Good teaching reveals not only the “master’s house” for what it is; it reveals the inherent truth of Audre Norton’s observation about the nature of the “master’s tools” as well. 

Little wonder, then, that so many of our educational institutions fear and resist the changes needed to bring good teaching and learning to all students.  If they ever actually promoted–or even tolerated–the “conditions that are ‘hospitable to human learning’,”¹⁸ they would have to reflect, like the character of Dorian Gray, on their true image, and I suspect those in power wouldn’t like what they’d see any more than he did.  The simple truth is that authentically engaged teachers in properly supported schools can be a threat to the status quo.  They are like candles in caves, illuminating not only the inequities and injustices of our society, but—worse from the point of view of those in power—illuminating the way out of this darkness by providing the very tools that can “dismantle the master’s house.”¹⁹

Interestingly, this fear of change is equally true even in our properly financed schools such as the private and wealthy suburban public ones, if for somewhat different, possibly ironic, and definitely potentially self-defeating reasons.  That is because real learning which the kind of reforms I am suggesting produces requires real risk taking.  But that demands that students “attempt something where there is a real and serious possibility of failure,”²⁰ and since most private and wealthy public schools in this country are about “raising the floor” and not “the ceiling,”²¹ the authentically engaged teaching and learning described in Parts I and II of this project can seem very risky to the stakeholders of these institutions.  Indeed, in my own experience, I have seen firsthand that there can be a wide-spread culture of “pathological caution”²² in both the private and public sectors of education in this country.

Yet, as journalist Paul Tough points out, the “kids who worked very hard [in these schools] but never had to make a difficult decision or confront a real challenge”²³ produce “very few world-changers,”²⁴ and that is where the irony may come in:  the resistance to change that would raise the “ceiling” rather than the “floor” has produced a world where “there are fewer entrepreneurs graduating from our best colleges these days, fewer iconoclasts, fewer artists, fewer everything, in fact, except investment bankers and management consultants”²⁵—and AI is already coming for those latter two careers.²⁶  Hence, the very stakeholders in education who are traditionally stereotyped as being most vested in the status quo are simply at risk for a different type of consequence of preserving a dysfunctional education system that clearly harms the “have-nots” significantly more but does not leave even the “haves” unscathed.

The blunt truth is:  an ecological paradigm for education threatens the society we currently live in from all sides, and that makes it dangerous.  As Parker Palmer reminds us, “part of us prefers being hopeless to taking the risk of new life:  if we believed new life were possible, God knows what we might be called to do!”²⁷  Authentically engaged education shows us we can change—that it is possible for us to grow, mature, and transform into the “angels of our better nature”—and that’s frightening because it would involve a lot of hard work, sacrifice, and personal change on everyone’s part when it is far easier simply to focus on test scores, passing rates, percent attendance, and other “objective” factors more easily manipulated and controlled.

There are people and schools out there trying to do it, trying to make the change toward more authentic engagement in their schools, and I hope you will consider reading their stories (for inspiration and hope if nothing else!).²⁸ But until there is a critical mass of education’s many stakeholders demanding the necessary change, voting the necessary individuals into office, and investing the required proverbial “blood, sweat, and tears” in our children, the looming crisis of which I spoke in the Introduction will become a cliff.

Which, as we will explore next, we might all walk over the edge of anyhow if we don’t look up from our screens.

Author’s Note: The topic of privilege is a touchy, difficult, and challenging one to talk about in our culture, and I would like my readers to know that as someone who possesses privilege, I am fully aware that some may question the veracity of me as a cisgender, heterosexual, fully-abled, white male discussing the dangers authentically engaged education presents to privilege.  But for two decades now, I have strived to use my privilege to address the under-representation of women in the sciences and, in the decade before that, my students of color.  Thus, I respect deeply that examining the relationship between privilege and education is always a complex undertaking, and I have endeavored to do so with as much nuance, respect, and self-honesty as possible.