Why
We Need to Go Beyond the Classroom
by Stan
Karp
School power comes in many pieces. Those of us who teach have daily opportunities to shape classroom life in ways that reflect a vision of social justice and equality. Whether it's developing curriculum that includes the real lives of our students, encouraging young people to examine issues of race, class, and gender as they build academic competence, or organizing activities that promote cooperative skills and spirit, classroom teachers can often find ways to promote social justice despite the institutional agendas and bureaucratic practices imposed upon us.
But what if we stop at the classroom door? What if we see our role as teachers only in terms of classroom practice? Is our job essentially to create "safe spaces" inside an often ineffective and oppressive educational system? Can we sustain ourselves for years as committed professionals by focusing simply on the 30, 60, or 150 students for whom we assume direct responsibility each September? What about other arenas of educational activity beyond our classrooms: schoolwide change, community and districtwide education politics, teacher unionism, and national education reform? What do these have to do with next week's lesson plans?
One fundamental answer is that teachers will never really succeed until conditions of teaching and learning improve dramatically. We need more resources, better training and support, smaller classes, more effective partnerships with the communities we serve, and, especially in poorer areas, a vision of social change that can replace poverty and despair with progress and hope. We need effective responses to violence, racism, drug addiction, family crisis and the many other problems that surface daily in our classrooms. Teachers will have to help address these problems as surely as our students have to study and do their homework to achieve their individual academic goals.
Whether the issue is vouchers, funding, multiculturalism, testing, or tracking, schools have become public battlegrounds for competing social and political agendas. The voices of grassroots teachers, parents, and students are essential if education reform is going to make schools more effective, more equitable, and more democratic institutions. If we don't help to change our schools from the bottom up, we will have them changed for us from the top down.
Educational activism is also crucial to finding the allies we need. It is naïve to believe that we can transform our schools and our students' lives by ourselves. While we can admire and strive to emulate teachers who through hard work and commitment manage to perform classroom "magic," the real hope for educational transformation does not lie in the development of isolated "superteachers," but in the reorganization of school life. We need better, more collaborative relations with our colleagues and the space to nurture those possibilities. We need better, more cooperative relations with parents and communities, particularly where cultural and racial differences exist. And we need better and more democratic practices in our schools, our unions, and our districts which can only come with contacts and activism beyond our classroom boundaries.
Finally, critical teachers need to move beyond the classroom because to do otherwise would undercut the very efforts we make each day. If we recognize that effective education requires students to bring their real lives into, the classrooms, and to take what they learn back to their homes and neighborhoods in the form of new understandings and new behavior, how can teachers not do the same? Critical teaching should not merely be an abstraction or academic formula for classroom "experimentation." It should be a strategy for educational organizing that changes lives, including our own.
Teachers who find these arguments compelling still face tough practical questions beginning with "where to put the lever?" Fortunately the current ferment around education has widened the space for all sorts of initiatives. Each of the possibilities discussed below offers teachers the potential for creating
Site-based Management
Site-based management and shared decision-making reforms (which invest varying degrees of authority in school-based councils of teachers, administrators, parents and even students) hold considerable possibilities for change. While there is an air of trendiness surrounding it, site-based reform does have the potential to be more than another fad. It's currently on the agenda because there is a near-universal recognition that the system as it now functions cannot satisfy the varied constituencies who look to schools to meet competing needs. Site-based reform draws on both corporate strategies for boosting productivity by promoting joint labor/management collaboration, and the more democratic traditions of U.S. schools as local institutions that should be subject to community control.
At its best, site-based reform can open a credible process for replacing hierarchical and bureaucratic forms of school governance with more representative and democratic structures. Where site councils are given real power and resources, parents, teachers and others in the school community can make significant decisions about budget priorities, curricula, and school policies in ways that can nourish community/ school/teacher collaboration. They can become places where members of a school community try to reconcile different perspectives and priorities, and learn to build mutual trust and respect over the long term.
At its worst, however, site-based reform can become simply another bureaucratic layer in a system that doesn't work. It can consume valuable time and energy in a seemingly endless cycle of unproductive meetings. Instead of representative bodies, site councils can be empty shells dominated by administrative appointees, or bodies that marginalize parents (or classroom teachers) in ways that promote old antagonisms rather than new alliances. They can also become pawns in a cynical process of imposing austerity, breaking union power, or otherwise administering policies of educational retrenchment rather than reform. (Much as African-American mayors have gained access to political power only to find themselves compelled to oversee disinvestment and decay in urban areas.)
Whether or not a particular sitebased project is worth a teacher's investment of time and energy probably depends on the answers to several questions: Has the council been created in response to a top-down directive or is it the product of grassroots, union, or community action? Does the site council have direct control over resources or policies that can substantially impact on the school? Is site-based reform accompanied by a transfer of resources from central office to individual schools? Is the site council a place where teachers and parents really have a chance to engage in dialogue and form alliances? Will participation expand useful contacts with parents and colleagues? Is the process characterized by an increase in communication, access to information, and debate by key constituencies? Is site-based reform accompanied by a tangible investment in the time and training needed to make it work? Have the criteria and timelines for evaluating site-based projects been set bureaucratically or determined by the councils themselves? Is there buildingwide or districtwide discussion of how such reform will change the roles of all concerned, or is it being grafted onto existing structures?
Site-based reform is definitely not a "quick fix,"but given time, resources, and a staff committed to the process it can succeed. Daniel Webster Accelerated School in San Francisco, Calif., an elementary school with a culturally diverse, largely low-income population of about 350 students, used site-based governance reform to guide basic restructuring of the school program. They created many subcommittees connected to a central steering committee, and, through rescheduling and having the principal teach phys-ed. classes, time was created for the committees to meet each week during the school day. With high levels of parent participation, the school used this process to implement a thematic, language-rich curriculum that emphasized "active and interactive learning, discussion, problem-solving and research." Within five years, student achievement showed significant improvement.
Districtwide site-based reform is now underway in such large problemplagued urban systems as Chicago and Philadelphia. In Chicago, local councils of parents, teachers, and community members have been created to direct each of the city's more than 500 schools. In Philadelphia, site-based reform has been used to help break down many of the city's huge comprehensive high schools into smaller, theme-based "charter" schools. Neither of these ambitious reform efforts suggests that sitebased management is a panacea that can miraculously compensate for deeplyrooted educational problems, years of neglect, or inadequate funding. But they do indicate that site-based governance reform can play an important role in mobilizing teachers and parents to reinvest in school communities, particularly in areas where the existing bureaucracies have been exhausted by failure.
Teachers in schools where site reforms are underway can participate in a variety of ways: serving on the council itself, organizing a subcommittee to ensure that a re-examination of instructional practices is part of the reform process, organizing initiatives with parents, or turning the school newsletter or the faculty room bulletin board into a lively source of resources, information, and debate. The key is to seize upon a school's encounter with site-based decision-making as an opportunity to rethink and re-examine all aspects of school life.
School Restructuring and Districtwide Initiatives
While site-based reform of school governance offers one possible road to change, there are many others. Inschool restructuring projects can encourage teachers to rethink areas like curriculum, scheduling, and staff collaboration and move away from the traditional factory-model school towards child-centered learning environments that promote critical teaching. Small steps can lead to bigger ones. For example, social studies or language arts teachers might look for ways to move away from textbook-driven chronological surveys of American history or literature to more inter-disciplinary, thematically-based approaches (including, for example, investigations of students' own family pasts, or the cultural and literary history of the local community). This, in turn, could lead to consideration of ho; day to permit larger blocks of time, team-teaching, or common prep time for staff. Taken further, teachers might develop proposals for "schools within schools" organized around specific curriculum themes or instructional philosophies. The key is to recognize that particular styles of classroom practice reflect, in large measure. a school's assumptions about what curriculum should include, about how teachers should collaborate, and how teaching and learning should be assessed. Raising questions in one area inevitably opens debate in others. By clearly identifying the policies, resources, and structures necessary to support critical teaching in the classroom, teachers can initiate a buildingwide process of change.
The same is true at the district level. Teachers in Milwaukee, for example, began by questioning the district's heavy reliance on basal readers. They formed a Reading Textbook Adoption Committee which challenged both the bureaucratic process by which textbook selections had been made, and the curriculum implications of relying heavily on basals (i.e., fragmented skills drills, rigid workbook sequences, etc.). They succeeded in winning support for a whole language alternative, including formation of a Whole Language Teachers Council with district support, staff development, and alternative materials. The number of teachers using whole language approaches in Milwaukee public schools rose ten-fold.
Wherever possible, critical teachers need to act on the broader implications of their classroom innovations. The public debate over how best to teach reading in Milwaukee schools was followed by an even more basic debate over curriculum reform. (See p.168) In Montclair, NJ, English teachers in the high school initiated an untracked course that began a communitywide debate on ability grouping. Schoolwide or even districtwide debates about curriculum, tracking policies, assessment, or other educational issues are readily influenced by a few well-informed, committed teachers. Successful efforts can both reshape an individual teaching situation and redirect district policy.
Teachers Unions
Teachers unions offer another maze of opportunities and obstacles for classroom teachers looking to effect change. Like public schools themselves, teachers unions are both deeply flawed institutions, and, at the same time, indispensable to hopes for educational democracy and justice. Labor unions in general, and teachers unions in particular, have won essential rights and better salaries for those they represent. In most school systems, unions serve as some check on the arbitrary power of the politicized bureaucracies that manage school districts. More significantly, they are an important reservoir of collective strength and resources that need to be protected from a variety of anti-labor crusades in education today, including privatization, voucher schemes, and legal restrictions on organizing and the right to strike.
Unfortunately, however, in too many cases teachers unions have become bureaucratic partners in the management of failing school systems. Like other labor organizations, they often suffer from undemocratic and uninspiring internal practices which demobilize and fragment their memberships instead of enlisting them in creative campaigns for better schools. And like most other social institutions, they have been deformed by the persistence of racism and sexism which has at times crippled their ability to respond effectively to complex issues such as affirmative action vs. seniority rights, the need to close the gap between communities of color and predominantly white professional staffs, and the building of parent-teacher partnerships.
Teachers unions have too often adopted short-sighted and defensive perspectives on key reform issues. They are typically driven by narrowly conceived salary and contract concerns at the expense of a broader vision of educational justice and change. As a result they often pit the short-term interests of their members against the long-term interests of schools and the communities they serve. Ultimately this undercuts their ability to respond to the current educational crisis and weakens public support for both unions and schools. Whether the issue is helping ineffective teachers, prioritizing scarce resources, including community and parent concerns in contract talks, or otherwise facilitating the transformation of existing school systems, teachers unions have too often acted like they were incapable of a creative initiative or new idea and committed to the most narrow defense of existing arrangements. The consequences can be devastating for both school systems and teachers. In Chicago and New York, reforms to increase community and parent power had to be instituted. to a large extent, against union opposition, weakening the reforms in both cases. Elsewhere unions have intransigently refused to address the issue of "bad teachers," thereby helping to magnify and sensationalize what in actuality is a marginal issue, while at the same time failing to address the dismal state of teacher training and in-school support.
But some of the responsibility for the failure of teachers unions is our own. Too often progressive-minded teachers abstain from union activity, lumping the union with the administration as "them." But teachers unions are our organizations, or at any rate, they should be; and while it would be naive to ignore the obstacles that bureaucratized unions can place in the path of rank and file activism, it is self-defeating to surrender in advance.
Many locals are starved for the participation of committed members. Others may be genuinely committed to the interests of teachers and kids but have no awareness of critical perspectives or alternative strategies. Moreover, it's not necessary to pursue the possibilities of union activism by starting with a frontal attack on the leadership. Most teachers unions have a variety of committees and forums that offer possibilities for initiative and debate. A teacher looking for connections with other colleagues and potential allies should definitely consider becoming a building delegate, reviving a moribund instructional committee, organizing a classroom discussion caucus, or proposing a union-sponsored community forum on some hot educational issue. Even if a year or two of union work leads you to conclude that the space for change in your local is limited, you're likely to have made valuable contacts, and positioned yourself and others for a broader challenge to the union status quo as the education crisis deepens and more unions find business-as-usual strategies unequal to the tasks before them.
Teacher Study Groups
A major reason for critical teachers to look beyond the classroom is to break out of the confining isolation they often face. Most school cultures are not very supportive of critical thought, change, or even collaboration among staff. Starting a teachers study group can be a way of finding allies to sustain committed teaching over the long haul. A teachers group might begin as an informal after-school social hour where teachers trade stories, resources, and ideas. To encourage discussion beyond the "gripe session stage" (a chronic tendency among teachers), it's often helpful to pick a specific topic like tracking, assessment, or discipline, read a background article, and then talk about the issue's impact on your own school and classrooms. Once a group establishes some cohesion and continuity, it can address more difficult issues such as multicultural relations among teachers and students, or differing parent-teacher perspectives. It may be useful to invite outside participants for frank conversations about sensitive issues often avoided in typical "in-service" programs.
Discussion or study groups have a variety of attractions for teachers looking to move beyond the classroom. They're flexible, and can set their own agendas and pace without interference. If the interest in one school is insufficient to sustain a group, teachers from several schools can begin coalescing a local network of progressive educators. They can draw on a variety of national resources and networks for ideas and support, and can develop into a safe space for critical reflection and mutual support not often available elsewhere.
Eventually, discussion and study will hopefully lead to action, public discussion, and local campaigns to improve schools. After several years, a Portland, Ore., teachers study group moved from discussion to taking initiatives through the union's education reform committee and, later, to developing a public citywide school reform document in response to ongoing budget crises. With public attention increasingly focused on education, a local teachers group (or a combined teacher/ parent/community group) has the potential to evolve into an important grassroots institution. One person posting a sign on the faculty bulletin board, or approaching a few colleagues, can initiate a low-risk strategy that can pay big dividends.
Local, State, and National Education Activism
The opportunities discussed above can each be used to promote social justice in education, and at the same time sustain individual teachers in their daily efforts in the classroom. But there are many key educational issues that will be determined, not primarily inside local schools and classrooms, but in the larger context of community, state, and national politics. These include the fate of voucher plans, which threaten to divert public funds to private schools, and privatization schemes, which propose disinvesting in the very concept of public education and turning over schools to private managers.
It also includes legal battles now underway in more than 20 states over school funding inequities which reproduce society's racial and class divisions, create a patchwork of rich schools and poor schools, and breed crippling inequality. And it includes the imposition of state and national testing standards which bureaucratically drive school curricula and limit teacher autonomy in the classroom, often in ways that hinder effective instructional practices. Teachers need to be informed about these issues and where possible, join efforts to resolve them in positive ways.
In the final analysis, however, what's important is not that classroom teachers assume an impossible burden of individual responsibility for solving all the social and educational problems that affect their classrooms. What matters is that they see the connections between those classrooms and the society around them, and realize that efforts to apply critical teaching are tied to broader efforts to promote democracy and equality in society. If teachers can find ways to link the two, they will strengthen both.
Stan Karp teaches English and Journalism in Paterson, NJ.
10 Things You Can Do Beyond Your Classroom 1. Serve on a local school council 2. Become active in your union 3. Breathe new life into a standing union/school committee (e-g., instruction, community outreach, curriculum) 4. Organize a teachers study or discussion group S. Join a group/coalition of education activists 6. Help distribute articles such as this one 7. Join a local community organization with an interest in 8. Investigate and publicize tracking policies in your school 9. Flood your faculty room with provocative materials about critical teaching 10. Investigate and publicize education funding policies in your province |