Our in-person meetings are rare. Even our email exchanges aren’t as frequent as I would like, but she is one of my favorite people. We first met in Chicago in the late 90s, at a point when we were both working our tails off to get new schools off the ground. Bureaucratic obstacles deprived her school of the rich future it deserved. That shared struggle led us to cooperate on a book – a compilation of accounts by us and others about the joys and trials of starting new schools.
Her life post-Chicago has had its ups and downs. She completed a Ph.D., helped create a project in upstate NY that engaged youth in community projects that are healing and transformational. She held an administrative position in a prestigious private school in New York City that was disillusioning to say the least. Later, she became a member of the education faculty at a small liberal arts college that provided no outlet for her innovative ideas about teaching for social justice; it focused instead on the uninspired task of getting students through the burdensome state requirements for certification.
Last week, she was in Chicago for an event that Rosellen and I attended; we knew she would be there and were eager to reconnect with her. After the event, we had a few minutes to catch up with her. During those precious brief moments, I told her about the project I was working on with several colleagues. I explained that I was part of a team of veteran educators who were conducting conversations with teachers and other education professionals about what drew them to this work, what has sustained them in it and what words of encouragement they might have to attract others to consider a life in education. The group wanted to convey a hopeful message in a dark moment when schools are branded as failures and teachers as indoctrinators, groomers who are just plain bad at their jobs. There’s a desperate need for a counternarrative, one that will repopulate the empty seats in teacher preparation programs and lift morale among the hardworking teachers who are working against a powerful head wind.
Usually when I deliver my elevator speech about the project, I hear words of encouragement from my audiences of one or two. But this time, my beloved friend’s face signaled disapproval, and her responses were vivid. She was done with all that. The system was broken beyond repair; we had to devote ourselves to doing something different. What existed was harming kids and teachers and needed to be dismantled.
My friend had to rush off, so I was left to process her reaction. I know her history well enough to recognize that her words grow out of a history of unfortunate, even bitter, experiences with schools, public and private, as well as teacher preparation programs that were not committed to nurturing and creating healthy environments for either students or teachers. She had seen the very large hind end of the educational enterprise.It’s easy to see how she would conclude that earnest efforts at improvement often do more harm than good.
I, on the other hand, had lived what feels like a charmed life as a teacher, school director and teacher educator. I had met few obstacles to my efforts to do right by students and teachers, to encourage them to be creative and questioning members of their community, however they defined that. Make no mistake, there were bumps and challenges along the way, but none so high as to be unnavigable.
But, and this is a big but, I completely understand where my friend is coming from, and I agree with most of her critique. I understand that schooling as it exists reinforces all the inequities of the larger society and in many ways impedes efforts to reconstitute the culture at large. The eminent historian Dr. Adam Green recommended to the students in my teacher preparation program, many of whom were preparing to teach in predominantly Black schools, that they take a course in the history of Black education where they would be confronted with all the often well intentioned efforts of white teachers and administrators that did not move the needle in the direction of equity.
One of the major dilemmas in my life is being caught between two polarities — the radical revolutionary and the pragmatic social worker. I dream the romantic dream of being part of radical transformation, but I wake up to the daily struggles that so many in our society face, struggles that can’t await the revolution for relief. Think of health care, a system that is perhaps even more broken than education. Yet doctors, who are painfully aware of the need for radical change, must go to work every day to bring relief to patients who present themselves with broken bones, cancerous tumors and life-threatening fevers, none of which can await the revolution for relief.
The best I can say is that what’s required is split vision, living simultaneously in the world that is and the world that could/should be. And that is where I part company with my dear colleague. The project I described to herthat aims to draw people back into the classroom and the schoolhouse despite all the dysfunction they will face, still holds the possibility of changing individual lives and inspiringtransformativeexperiences. Every teacher, especially those we’ve already conversed with as part of the project I described to my friend offered examples of the good they have done, while at the same time railing against all the flaws of the system in which they operate. I continue to believe that we must continue our work, imperfect though it may be, while we await better times.
