Controlling Teachers
The notion of a social contract has permeated political science and philosophy for centuries. Some scholars regard Thomas Hobbe’s “Leviathan” (1651) as the first fulsome articulation with international traction of this concept of social contract. Hobbes described human existence in its natural state as a chaotic, violent, nauseating condition (cf: Jean Paul Sartre) where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." A social contract was an agreement between a sovereign and thousands of pitiful brutes living together in a space wherein the people out of self-interest surrendered their freedoms and desires for protections and provisions from the Elite.
Of course, along came the Enlightenment ushered in by the likes of John Locke. An English philosopher, Locke was rattled by the English Civil War and began to think deeply about a way to organize a government which would do more than defend and feed human beings continuously under the thumb of a King. Locke thought about, well, happiness, meaning, fulfillment.
Locke wrote about rights to life, liberty, and property; he thought it might be good if the government gained its powers from the consent of the governed. He imagined a government with checks and balances, a legislature, a judiciary, an executive, saturated with the liquid nectar of altruism—or at least a few nods toward the common good.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, a global think tank with tentacles reaching deep into worldly financial complexities (check out their site) in Bronfenbrenner’s macrostructure and chronosphere, has deemed the United States a “flawed democracy” for the past eight years. Furthermore, its crystal ball, the “democracy index” for the world, is murky.
The Leviathan is loose.
Democracy Index 2023
“It was an inauspicious year for democracy with the average global score falling to its lowest level since the index began in 2006. Less than 8% of the world’s population live in a full democracy, while almost 40% live under authoritarian rule—a share that has been creeping up in recent years. The increasing incidence of violent conflict has badly dented the global democracy score and prevented a recovery after the pandemic years of 2020-22.”
To what degree has the erosion of access to democratic participatory learning activities in public education beginning around 1996 contributed to our earning a grade of “F” for “flawed democracy”?
Erosion of Democratic Participation in Classrooms
The proliferation of state laws restricting what can be taught in classrooms has been described as a "legislative war on education" by organizations like PEN America. Many of these laws censor discussions on important social issues, limiting students' exposure to diverse perspectives and critical thinking opportunities. Content bans interfere with instructors' ability to construct classroom spaces that invite deep learning and prepare students for life in diverse communities. Performance-based accountability systems, often externally designed, produced, imposed, and analyzed, and scripted lesson plans further constrain teacher autonomy. This control affects the ability of teachers to foster student-led inquiry and collaboration.
What Happened in 1996
National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (1996): This commission operated on the premise that improving teacher quality was central to school reform. It emphasized that what teachers know and can do is crucial for student learning, highlighting the need for recruiting, preparing, and retaining qualified teachers. Of course, what constitutes a “qualified teacher” from the perspective of politicians and journalists would carry weight later when this idea found its way into legislation. These ideas influenced the teacher qualification requirements later embedded in NCLB.
Some of the actual recommendations for teachers were ambitious and might have been a step forward if they had not gotten fed into the political distortion machine. "What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future" made some good suggestions:
Get serious about standards for both students and teachers. This included establishing professional standards boards in every state and licensing teachers based on demonstrated performance.
Reinvent teacher preparation and professional development. The report advocated for more clinically based teacher preparation with extended graduate-level programs, including a full year of student teaching/internship.
Fix teacher recruitment and put qualified teachers in every classroom.
The first recommendation used loaded words that make me skittish today—standards, boards, licensing, demonstrated performance. But in historical context they might have been construed in favorable ways for teacher professional autonomy. A professional standards board made up of practicing teachers could be powerful. Demonstrated performance could take on the depth and breadth of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (in fact, the Commission encouraged the states to reward teacher knowledge and skill, including creating incentives for National Board certification in every state and district). Fix teacher recruitment… The Commission must have been tired and overwhelmed. Just fix it, people.
Federal Reports and Recommendations: Throughout the 1990s, various federal reports highlighted the need for educational reforms to improve student outcomes and close achievement gaps. These reports underscored accountability, higher standards, and teacher quality as essential reform components. Teachers who had taught for many years were suddenly required to take and pass subject matter competency exams. Dianne Ravitch, an interesting figure in the education reform ballroom for many years, reportedly said that “in the 1990s, elected officials of both parties came to accept as secular gospel the idea that testing and accountability would necessarily lead to better schools.” And Then There Was NCLB
I assume most readers of ltRRtl have a detailed memory of NCLB. Phonics. More phonics. MORE phonics. Each year, each school was required to reduce its gap between poor performers and proficient performers according to the following formula: Yearly expectations of growth on standardized tests = size of the gap between proficient and basic performers/14 years. This was the era of phonic scripts, phonics police, phonics gurus.
Even before NCLB could go gently into that good night, the Common Core State Standards blessed by no other than Jeb Bush rolled out, a half eaten plate of sushi. Lately, I am astonished to find this raging energy everywhere online for writing a thesis statement, making evidentiary claims, and supporting those claims. Yes, I know, the counterargument. This in itself is evidence of controlled teachers in the writing classroom.
I remember being mystified by what I was reading about the National Reading Panel report in 2000, the Cite of the Five Pillars. It may have been more of a compromise document than we know. As I think about it now, I see comprehension as indestructible. No one argues about prior knowledge, text structure, metacognition, etc.—oh, vocabulary, too. This part is settled.
The progress the field of reading made between 1900 and 2000 is stunning. But there was no way the panel could satisfy the Science of Reading brokers, some of whom were selling commercial materials and still are. The federal government in a bipartisanship fashion assumed federal control of teaching reading in 2000 followed by federal control and homogenization of the iconic k12 curriculum in the technical and repetitive Common Core State Standards headed up by David Coleman, an Oxford educated literati now running the College Board, Advanced Placement Division.
The following excerpt from the Undergraduate Research Journal for the Human Sciences, Vol. 16, Issue 1, 2023, written by Hill-Cloyd and Miller titled “The Challenge of Teacher Autonomy” provides a superb snapshot of what we had and what we lost:
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We need a teacher-control index, robotic to responsive, to document levels of interactivity in different ideological contexts as background data for educational researchers building the theories the future will need for answers to better maximize the benefits of improvised teacher actions using professional teacher judgment in the moment. Teaching is highly creative, improvisational, organic.
Engaging with young people in profoundly meaningful ways can’t happen under academic surveillance in the service of accountability, fidelity, under external control. Maybe the teacher-control index could be used in connection with a learner-control index which might be tied to increased confidence in democratic participation?
Who knows what might happen if we get well-prepared, responsive teachers with the authority to do their jobs developing their expertise over a career. I’ve taught in schools and classrooms before the federal clampdown. I’ve supervised and done workshops with teachers after the clampdown. As Bob Dylan might offer, there’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.