Some context: all these teachers should be working in grades
7-12, secondary education; all should be teaching in urban schools,
ranging from inner city to relatively middle-class enclaves. Most
will be in their first 5-6 years of teaching. All will have had
a teacher preparation curriculum some years ago. All secondary school
subjects will be represented.
I will of course be asking them about their priorities re issues.
In the past, in other courses, these have been relatively predictable,
apart from individual interests. Some interests are discipline-specific.
Some are what is currently fashionable in the field. Some arise from
the conditions of classroom teaching, esp. the difficult conditions in
city and inner-city (i.e. poverty area) schools. Not all of these
issues are ones about which theory or expertise can help; some of them
are the result of criminal corruption in the school system (are you
surprised that funds are diverted from teaching programs? that contracts
go to cronies who do not perform? that people are hired on a patronage
basis?), some of administrative incompetence (usually an indirect
effect of political control of schools) or policies not dictated by
the interests of students (e.g. the teachers with least experience are
assigned to the most difficult classes, teachers are assigned to classes
where they know little or nothing of the subject or special needs of
the students, and get little or no help from supervisors, etc.)
We do perhaps need to recognize that malfeasance, not just inevitable
structural difficulties, is central to the problems of many school
systems, esp large ones, those where local politics outweighs
professionalism, those where parents have little political clout
on behalf of children/students. Education is financially one of the
largest sectors of the US economy, and one that lacks both market
regulation and effective oversight. The amount of financial resource
that actually shows up in the classroom, compared to total outlays
for education, can be an appalling small fraction. Students are not
the primary beneficiaries of the money spent on school systems. How
could they be, having no power to ensure that the flow comes to them?
The concept of fiduciary accountability seems to be alien to the
romantic notions of "it's all for the kids" that rule the ideologies
of education in America. They certainly don't see very much of the
money. And our notion of "quality control" is mainly in terms of
output measures like test scores, that can indicate that _something_
is wrong, but have no possible way to show _what_ is wrong. As
compared, say, to a notion like a Schools Inspectorate that actually
goes around, unannounced, and looks to identify problems and needs.
(Genuine teacher-student control of schools, with community advice
and administrative assistance, is an ideal that seems to have little
hope of reality without basic changes in power relationships.)
Sorry for the polemic! it's an annual anger ... and, no, it wouldn't
be as easy as documenting a few egregious cases and having a meeting
with the top administrators ... the malfeasance itself has structural
roots, if not necessarily in its origins, then certainly in the
conditions which permit its continued existence at higher-than-tolerable
levels (is that a contradiction?). In many cases, I think it is
arguable that political democracy at the larger institutional level (e.g.
elected school boards) is the direct condition of undemocratic
practice at the micro-level (e.g. those most affected by decisions,
students and teachers, have least say in those decisions). Too many
modern "democratic" institutions function to preempt genuinely
democratic social practices, as I think many of us understand in
other contexts.
Personally I have no optimism whatever about the reform of these
institutions on the larger scale. They need to be replaced by
successor institutions with entirely different locations in the webs of
political economy in the community. But that's another story! JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU