ABSTRACT
In an affluent district on the east coast of the US, elementary school teachers spend every day in the month before state tests are administered giving their students multiple-choice items to review for the English language components. In an urban high school in Arizona, an economics teacher is required to begin the school year by giving students a pre-test that will be compared with a post-test at the end of the year. In a rural school district in the Pacific Northwest, teachers cut back on fiction so that their curriculum is better aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Such practices are slowly but surely draining the magic out of education. Too many US students today are reading mainly informational text, so they will know how to comprehend manuals in order to compete successfully with China and India. One impatient student who was bored with informational text asked me, “Why can’t we ever read something interesting in this school?” When I asked him what he had in mind, his response was, “Something exciting, like something about dragons!” This student pulled on my heartstrings because like many others, I was an indifferent reader until I stumbled upon J.R.R. Tolkien when I was in junior high school. The madcap escapades of the hobbits were a revelation to me. To be whisked away from the awkwardness of early adolescence into the fabulous fantasy of Middle Earth was the ultimate liberation for my restless mind. Teachers who are sympathetic to their students’ cravings to be carried far away from their humdrum lives have had a tough time under the old imperatives. I recently observed an English class of
10th graders in the US where the students were just starting their first novel of the year-in February. By contrast, when I was in high school decades ago, by this point of time our English teachers were throwing all kinds of demanding classical and contemporary authors at us-so we would grapple with issues like death, madness, and prejudice. What are too many students today getting instead? They are reading informational text. An old prescriptive imperative from government at the federal, state, and district levels undermined teachers’ best judgments about pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. This is not just a problem in the US. Roughly one-third of teachers in the most recent TALIS survey indicated that they do not select the curricula that they teach and one in five does not choose the assessments.1 In practice, what this means is that teachers in many systems are provided with a scripted curriculum to follow in preparing students for tests that they have not designed. In some cases, teachers find themselves receiving instructional coaching from the sales agents of the companies that provide the curriculum or that designed the tests.2 In The Mindful Teacher, my co-author Elizabeth MacDonald and I describe such phenomena as “alienated teaching.”3 This is what happens when teachers adjust their pedagogies and their curricula out of a sense of respect for and obligation to higher authorities, even when the teachers know they are eroding their professional judgment. Research by Corrie Stone-Johnson4 has documented that once alienated teaching becomes pervasive in a school it impacts everyone, even school counselors, who just like teachers, are pressed into bureaucratic compliance. If anything can be learned from the No Child Left Behind Act in the US, it is that excessive government intervention in schools doesn’t work. This was belatedly recognized by the Obama administration itself. On the website announcing the passage of the “Every Student Succeeds Act,” the Department of Education acknowledged that “over time, NCLB’s prescriptive requirements became increasingly unworkable for schools and educators.”5 One White House press release decried the “one-size-fits-all mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act” and empowered “state and local decision-makers to develop their own strong systems for school improvement based
upon evidence, rather than imposing cookie-cutter federal solutions like No Child Left Behind did.”6 Quotations such as these from the very authorities that led the command and control strategies that it belatedly criticized indicate that the old prescriptive imperative, like the ideological and imperial imperatives before it, has exhausted itself. But exhaustion doesn’t necessarily lead to change. It can just as likely lead to paralysis. So a battle is underway now on a global scale for a new professional imperative that must be shaped by educators themselves. This has three components:
1 Educators must get smarter and better at the craft of teaching itself, both in their theoretical knowledge base and in practice.
