Learning to Embrace Optimism in Troubled Times

How Did We Get Here?

W.E.B. DuBois (1935) published a compelling account of the birth of the idea of American public schools in the 1860s as a phoenix arising from the ashes of a brutal Civil War carrying hope for the freedmen. Reconstruction of the Union enforced under the rule of regional military governors in the seceded states brought out reserves of moral strength and political activism among the freedmen that had been chained for centuries. Even before the war, literacy was on the rise among free blacks and spreading among slaves.

Earnest political work to create a space for a national public school system in society waited backstage in American history, according to DuBois, until Black Reconstruction, 1860-1880, to produce a concept, or at least to discuss a vision, of how a protected, resourced, and well-managed public school system working for all children might become inscribed in reality as a social and constitutional fact across the former slave states and beyond.

It would take freed slaves newly enfranchised, economically motivated, politically active, to force the state constitutional rewriting committees throughout the South in the seceded states to deliver legal protection for education as the doorway to economic freedom for former slaves. As slavery had become a federal problem, no longer a state by state concern, education would also need a federal solution not subject to the fickle winds of state legislatures. Public school was on the radar.

In 1867 the Executive Branch invented the Office of Education, which turned out to be a placeholder for power for a full century. The sole deliverable from this Office was an annual report on the state of public education. For 100 years the Office was ceremonial. The country would wait until 1967 and the development of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) before it would get its first national report.

Since the 1960s, it seems, public schools have tinkered around the edges of the institution, reinventing the wheel, upgrading the polish, sensitizing, remediating, reclassifying. Leaving untouched the essence of the 20th century factory model left untouched a deep design flaw. Factories are good at producing standardized units, but human beings are not units nor can they be standardized.

Walt Whitman, a product not of formal schools but of a print shop apprenticeship beginning at 11 years old as a reporter and typesetter, was never sold on public schools as evidenced by “An Old Man’s Thoughts of School” he delivered at the opening of a new school in 1874:

And these I see, these sparkling eyes,
These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives,

Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships,

Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,

On the soul's voyage.

Only the lot of boys and girls?
Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes?

Only a public school?

Critics have gone back and forth on the issue of children in school pursuing “mystic meaning…on immortal ships…on the soul’s voyage” vs. learning to spell, add and subtract, and find countries on a map. E.D. Hirsch blamed Schools of Education in 1981 for training teachers badly, for teaching teachers to ignore the mechanical, formulaic, routinized pedagogy that learning science now knows to be absurd. Names, dates, concepts, vocabulary—learning for Hirsch means teaching facts as common knowledge without which culture collapses. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and Core Knowledge Foundation is still active in conservative circles with a vigorous online presence.

Regardless of the vision, public schools have been managed so differently across time and across states for most of our history that centralized control at the federal level seems unlikely. Yet without centralized, coherent leadership public schools with equal access and opportunity are more myth than real.

One dire fact is common across state lines. Respected mainstream researchers in reading education acknowledge the truth of Keith Stanovich’s oft cited paper in the field of reading and literacy research in the mid-1980s, naming the Matthew Effect as the chief outcome of reading instruction in schools: The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Nobody it appears is happy about the results of schooling, though the consequences of failure fall hardest upon those who most need to learn. Take the high road, take the low, take any road you’re on. We are in trouble and need change.

If you look at the official position of the U.S. government, there is clarity about its approach. Public schools are the responsibility of the States.¹

For further clarity about the devolution of responsibility and accountability take a quick read of this letter from a Southern State Superintendent of Schools to the Moms for Liberty, an organization working nationwide to criminalize the teaching of or even talking in K-3 classes about lgbtq+ topics.

Troubling times can shut people down, but they also spark action. Michael Fullan, whose work on educational change inspired us during School Restructuring in California in the 1990s, published a piece titled “Six Reasons to be Optimistic about Learning” in March, 2022 (see note below).

In part, his optimism stems from the fact that we may have hit rock bottom. We have to be better, more moral, more patriotic, more strategic, more scientific, more artistic, more ethnographic. We need the federal government to support rebuilding public schools with funds just as it is doing for bridges. We need a national approach to universal preschools.

Once that happens, educators and researchers already have an enormous reservoir of knowledge of how to prepare and support teachers to make schools effective for all children with plenty more knowledge to come in the next ten years. Mature theories of learning, teaching, and assessments are waiting to help.

Public schools could teach all children in all zip codes if citizens demanded it. Schools may never completely erase the correlation between learning inequality and zip code, the Matthew Effect, but they can get much, much, much better. And thereby hangs a tale.

Confirming a Calling

Working in a high-poverty middle school for four years in the Elk Grove Unified School District in California in the 1990s was a clarifying experience for me. I had been educationally naive in so many ways, but my viewpoint on teacher professional development was particularly limited and incomplete.

I had lingering questions from my own childhood about the impact of public schools on poor families and children exploding in my consciousness after reading, rereading, writing about, talking about, living with Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in the early 1980s. Were schools tools of control? Why work in them?

I was teaching writing in a psychiatric prison and remedial reading at a community college during these years, unlikely settings for stimulating confidence in schooling. The early weeks in middle school unsettled me so much so that I might leave teaching. I was on the cusp of starting a PhD in Language and Literacy. Was this a good path for me?

Before the middle school job, I had been doing after school workshops for K-12 teachers in writing instruction in the Sacramento region as an Area III Writing Project teacher-consultant and saw zip code inequities up close and personal as I moved between urban and suburban districts.

Teachers in affluent elementary schools wanted to teach kids to write stories, poetry, I-Search papers, they wanted peer response protocols, content-area writing strategies, etc. Teachers in high-poverty schools wanted to know how to teach spelling and punctuation.

Pedagogy I advocated in affluent schools garnered interest and discussion among teachers. Teachers in high poverty schools rolled their eyes or laughed or looked at me sadly. Too many of their students wouldn’t or couldn’t read or write comfortably.

The 1990s zeitgeist, an enlightened middle school principal whom I miss dearly, a state legislature focused on school reform, and engaged teachers convinced me I was in the right place for meaningful work and for doing a doctorate. I made a commitment to public school that I honor today even in retirement.

James Rutter Middle School

I reported for duty one day in August, 1991, in a first-period seventh-grade English class of 38 teenagers at James Rutter Middle School (JRMS) on a year-round schedule with something like a cool 7:15 AM starting bell, out by 1:20 PM when the sun torched the Earth.

From downtown Sacramento that day where school reform legislation talk was in the air I sensed echoes of the churning of a political energy for school change in California and elsewhere that began in the mid-1980s, a yearning for deep change in a public school system that had clearly, decade after decade after decade, failed to produce equity and justice and stubbornly resisted reform.

A movement known as School Restructuring was afoot in 1991, inspiring California legislation calling for RFPs (Requests for Proposals) with funding attached, that would in its turn inspire real excitement and purpose among the teachers at JRMS.²

Rooted more in empowerment than a surveillance ideology, the movement was happening across the country focused on big changes in the organizational management of schools from a top-down bureaucracy with mandates and edicts and standardized tests to a shared decision-making governance structure maximizing local knowledge, distributed leadership, and engaged parents and teachers in co-creating a living and authentic community culture for learning.

Follow the Money

To become chosen to design, implement, and learn from a local model of a restructured site with funding for several years during the statewide pilot, schools had to write a restructuring proposal with projects, timelines, and deliverables. Distributed leadership was required in the proposals to empower teachers academically in two related ways: 1) giving teachers authority to make decisions about how to use physical assets to create better learning environments, and 2) calling on teachers to collaborate and “examine student work” to find actionable answers to problems of student learning.

The first new teacher-power, using physical resources in innovative ways, could be implemented with minimal demands on external resources at my school. For example, JRMS had been constructed during the “Open Classroom” era; classrooms had been built in pods with walls that folded up accordion style to provide large audience areas for a hundred or more students, closed for traditional classes. Teachers began to think about the appropriate use of very large groups vs. traditional groups vs. small groups in relation to the nature of learning expectations and physical and human resources. These discussions opened up other possibilities like using the school PA system in the quad to present whole-school poetry readings.

The second teacher-power, public examination of student work, cost money because getting teachers to examine one another’s student work samples took time, materials, and courage. Such examinations involved collecting relevant and appropriate samples of student work across a number of teachers, sharpening researchable questions about student learning outcomes, actually examining and documenting student work samples, discussing qualities of learning as evidenced in the work, identifying patterns of accomplishment and opportunity, and reflecting on and updating instructional practices.

Organized reflection carried out seriously, inclusively, and fairly leading to theories of action spurred pedagogical changes in academic spaces beyond the classroom and across disciplinary boundaries, including the library, the computer lab, the gym, and the cafeteria. One example of pedagogical change in history classrooms for every student we called SMART. Teachers across disciplines agreed that students should be able to use SMART, an acronym for cognitive behaviors, to read a passage from a textbook and write a summary of it.

Getting Smart

At the beginning of my third year, I transitioned from a classroom English teacher to the school reading specialist, and I organized and facilitated a retreat for the History Department to orient them to using summarizing as a learning outcome with an assessment strategy and to decide on logistics and a calendar. By the end of the year we had pretest and post test data from holistic scoring sessions of classroom work products giving us insight into student capacity to summarize expository text in writing. We also had a basis for making instructional adjustments based on qualitative patterns in the student work.

As a reading coach I worked with the teachers in their classrooms throughout the year on SMART strategies (no frills comprehension strategies), they sold their kids on SMART strategies, they became instructional aficionados of the summary and the cognitive processes underlying the performance, comprehension test scores went up on standardized measures, and because evidence from our local direct assessments of student summary writing showed growth, the History teachers felt real pride even though they wanted more progress. They trusted the assessment. No teacher scored the summary of his/her own student. Summaries were double scored blindly. History, not English, got the pat on the back—willingly, substantively, with good reason, in celebration.

Schools Getting SMARTer

During this era California had made great strides in its statewide approach to educational assessment especially literacy to better align with the “examining student work” theme in restructuring. The California Assessment Program (CAP) had implemented its state-of-the-art on-demand direct writing assessment system earlier in the mid-1980s built out to fourth, eighth, and eleventh grade in eight genres as per Charles Cooper with field-tested prompts, empirically derived genre-specific rubrics, scoring protocols reality tested with live teachers rating essays in ballrooms in north state and south, etc.

The State Department of Education was rightly billing CAP scoring events as professional development opportunities. Teachers actually wanted to be trained in scoring, to know about the types of writing, to read student work from urban, suburban, and rural cultures, to celebrate with whoops and applause those ‘6’ papers, top of the rubric, when they showed up, to have a parking lot for scoring and teaching issues chock full of sticky notes that were actually analyzed, discussed, and thematized by leadership at the end of each scoring day for a morning check in and briefing.

At my school teachers were assigning students writing tasks built from one or more CAP rubrics and asking their students to examine state-published model Autobiographical Incidents, Reports of Information, Problem-Solution, and all the other genres. Students could read and examine together a writing prompt, read and discuss a model written response, apply the genre rubric collaboratively, and write their own.

At JRMS teachers held mock scoring sessions in class with student judges examining papers sometimes locally written, anonymous anchor papers, sometimes brought in from CAP professional development resources. At JRMS the English Department chair organized a CAP writing resource center stocked with class sets of rubrics and anchors. Teachers used them and compared notes on strategy and outcome.

Keeping Hope Alive

At JRMS I learned that given the opportunity and resources teachers will work together substantively and across the curriculum and step up to co-create a living curriculum for human children to breathe a soul into prefabricated scope and sequence charts designed for abstract children. The cells of the factory matrix isolate and separate teachers and learners into individual units with numbers for names working alone in a crowd. I learned the folly in trying to change schools one teacher at a time.

Middle school taught me that teaching is social, cultural, and political activity. To improve learning requires integrated, organized, and coherent teacher thinking with distributed academic obligations, collective planning and accountability, and a common pedagogical curricular vocabulary to talk informally and formally—agreements and pacts.

Even today as schools stagger under the weight of a receding pandemic; inside a cruel, recurring, morally repugnant political assault on curriculum and instruction; chronically underfunded, under-appreciated, and managed like a factory, my optimism remains. I know that educators know how to reform the core of teaching and learning.

The political will to change the factory template and the funding to assure human and physical resources are missing—that, and federal legal protection from attacks on curriculum and instruction from white supremacists and breaches of church and state.

Working on the CLAS Team

Two years before I started at JRMS, I had been named to a state-level assessment design team related to CAP under the direction of the State Superintendent of Education working on a direct assessment test for reading to complement the writing assessment already up and running. The reading design team (herein the CLAS team) comprised of 25 elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers nominated from across the state faced the challenge of designing a silent reading test of reading comprehension without multiple-choice questions. Such a design was a paradigm changer pragmatically and theoretically. It was a thorny problem.

The English Language Arts Committee (ELAC) had already agreed to look at reading processes grounded in Judith Langer’s envisionment-building theory, a theory the CLAS design team studied in seminar fashion with readings and discussions before their orientation to ELAC’s preliminary test design.

Louise Rosenblatt’s model of aesthetic reading—reading as transaction, as experience (text as sheet music, reader as musician, music produced as meaning)—was a second pillar in the design. What reading behaviors could be found in the written or sketched evidence readers put in the margins as they read? What questions before and after reading would be fruitful? How could we level performances in a useful, reliable, and valid way non-harmful to instructional ecologies?

The CLAS Reading Test was developed, field tested, operationalized, and ready for its first statewide tryout around 1995. Teachers across the state were excited. Then suddenly, California’s Governor Pete Wilson pulled its funding after a nasty controversy. In the blink of an eye, Restructuring was over, CLAS was dead, movements toward curriculum-embedded and portfolio assessment stopped, and multiple choice tests were in the ascendancy. Nothing comparable has happened since. The Golden Moment passed, but the knowledge and insight remain.

Taken together, the CAP writing assessment, the CLAS test, and School Restructuring provided a coherent framework for literacy instruction and a collaborative approach to professional accountability that could have ripened into a renewed system in California. Educational conservatives stopped it in its tracks.

We Shall Get There

Looking back, I understand how the CLAS project of restructuring a new reading test, the CAP writing assessment that restructured the essayist writing tradition, and the School Restructuring process that turned teachers’ eyes toward student work products and performances grew from the same teacher-empowerment core: 1) Teaching is social and cultural activity in historical, physical, and social space and is strengthened through intentional, coherent, resourced, self-determined engagement in local practices with the authority to enact them; and 2) Learning begins in social settings, moves inward to individual selves, and returns to a social setting where its fruits can be examined, assessed, and reflected on to shine a light into future learning opportunity.

Michael Fullan’s comments about optimism are well worth bringing to the attention of teachers as they do their best to make this new academic year a success for learners.³ Here is Fullan’s reason #6.

1. https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/role.html

2. https://www.theedadvocate.org/educators-need-know-1990s-school-restructuring/

3. https://michaelfullan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Six-Reasons-to-be-Optimistic-About-Learning-in-2022-1.pdf