The Active/Ethical Professional

A Framework for Responsible Educators

Michael G. Gunzenhauser

• Editore: Continuum
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441164667
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education Technology

A winner of the 2012 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA). The Active/Ethical Professional proposes an ethical framework for educators and school leaders who find their practice constrained by the demands of policies and structures created in response to accountability legislation. The framework is derived from Michel Foucault's theories of discipline, surveillance, resistance, and care of the self. Gunzenhauser asserts that an educator's dual position of being normalized (especially in relations with those above them in the education hierarchy) and normalizing (especially in relations with their students) can be troubling and difficult. The book argues that this position requires educators to be both "ethical" and "active." To be ethical, educators not only need to resolve ethical dilemmas in defensible ways, but they also need to recognize themselves as powerful in relation to others. To be active, educators need to be vigilant for moments when they are placed in the position to be "reactive" to normalizing pressures, and they also need to develop clear notions of how they may create opportunities for the cultivation of educational selves - selves that are rich ethically, aesthetically, epistemologically, and politically.

1

The high-stakes accountability
context

Jill after 25 years

Jill Bartoni is an Italian American high school English teacher who taught in the same Western Pennsylvania school district for 25 years. In January 2006, her last year of teaching at Hancock High School,¹ she spoke with a researcher from the University of Pittsburgh about her philosophy of education and how it had been affected by high-stakes accountability policy. Jill said that one of the reasons she was retiring at the end of the year was that she could no longer be complicit with educational practices that over time had become so test-driven that preparing for standardized tests was taken for granted as the school’s purpose.

In Jill’s view, the encroachment of standardized testing into education has been gradual over the years, culminating in the state accountability system that Pennsylvania put in place to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (107th Congress, 2002). High-stakes accountability policy has put so much pressure on teachers and students, Jill believes, that the meaning and value of education has changed:

For me, the testing has sucked the life out of— [long pause]. And I’ve been thinking a lot about this. My impression is that the spark to learn has been snuffed out, and I have been seeing this more and more over the last decades, as the testing has come more into play. I get students who are good students. I teach a lot of what we would call the upper-track students, and they are very academically aggressive. But they are very passive. The mentality is more and more, “Tell me what it is I have to do. Tell me how to do it. Tell me what I have to do to make the high score.” It’s really not about anything deeper or more profound. It’s not making them life-long learners.

In her school, a rural high school in a small district well outside the city of Pittsburgh, students have performed well on the Pennsylvania 9th Grade Writing Assessment, and Jill for many years was responsible for preparing them for the writing assessment. She did a good job preparing them for the assessment, but she did not like giving up six weeks of the first quarter to prepare students for the assessment. Before coming to her, students were largely proficient, based on their eighth grade scores. As she put it: “I am not taking credit, since they had been indoctrinated all the way up. What I have been able to do with them is move them up from ‘proficient’ to ‘advanced.’” Those scores mattered much to her school’s standing in the state’s accountability program, and her principal expected her to continue to do well: “It was a stressful time for me. . . . So the pressure was on, and even though I would talk to [the principal] about [how much] it would cost in terms of the overall curriculum, she wasn’t interested.”

In describing her philosophy of education, Jill says that education is about “what it means to live in the world, to know, to be an active citizen, to be an active participant, to make meaning.” Later, she says that education is “a means of owning one’s life in the world. That to me is where . . . freedom is embedded . . . freeing and liberating and opening possibilities.” As an example of how she enacts her philosophy of education, Jill describes a reporting activity she has done with students to teach them the basic process of conducting research:

I won’t let them use the word report, I tell them it’s research and that they are researchers . . . and that I don’t want them to see themselves as reporters but as researchers. And so we talk about the difference between what it means to report instead of research something. And I guess I’m finding that my own academic background is making my teaching harder instead of easier.

As Jill mentions in this passage, she wants her students to know how to do research and to become stronger thinkers. Her challenge is to get the students to think past the report they need to submit for a grade, to become interested in a topic that is important to them, to locate an important issue in the topic, and to learn how to pose questions. Interestingly, she expresses the value of the assignment as building in them an understanding of who they are becoming, researchers rather than reporters, the implication being that as they become stronger questioners, they will become something new. To put it differently, Jill provides them opportunities to cultivate themselves, to imagine what they can be, and to care for the ways in which they are becoming more. In her words, she wants them to take charge of their own education.

That is not the philosophy of education that she sees being encouraged in her school. Arguing that “so much of what good teachers do with students in the course of a day is very difficult to measure,” Jill is concerned that teachers are discouraged from becoming better teachers, and many of the younger teachers are unaware of how much things have changed and are willing to comply with instrumental teaching and learning.

Increased emphasis on testing has made school “what we do to do something else,” Jill says, preparing students to get good grades and to do well on tests so that they can excel later on. She argues that testing has altered what counts as knowledge in school and how that affects parents and teachers:

The tests themselves make a certain kind of learning or knowledge legitimate, because the powers that be make that claim. So they have the authority. The tests have the authority. And the parents trust the tests and the test maker, who are not us. . . . And we then just become the public servants who are paid by the district to teach to those tests.

Jill is frustrated that tests have become an authority more powerful than teachers in determining how well students are succeeding. Tests seem to have reversed places with teachers, to put it differently. They determine curriculum and instruction.

Uncomfortable with her own place in taking for granted the power of testing, Jill finds herself questioning how it has changed her at times:

Sometimes I feel it’s really almost unethical. Complicit. Complicit with the forces that I’m opposed to, when I find myself taking 6 weeks, doing it well, having them be successful. They want it. Their parents want it. My part in it is—it turns into really an ethical dilemma for me, and it’s counter to the pedagogy that has evolved in my life and what it means to be a teacher.

Jill has continued to teach from her philosophy of education and to focus on giving students the opportunity to grow as thinkers and researchers. Trying to change the system, as the system has tried to change her, has been largely futile. She has participated in district meetings for picking textbooks; over time choices became limited to the textbook companies that have aligned their textbooks with the state standards. Talking to her principal about her misgivings was futile. The principal held monthly faculty meetings to discuss student test scores and to develop interventions to help more students become proficient. The principal held the meetings because the state required her to do so. Teachers eventually became very frustrated with these meetings, because it seemed that none of their ideas for helping students were ever put into place. Similarly, students scoring below basic on tests were required to attend sessions for special assistance, but they were not actually receiving any help during those sessions; the principal organized supervised study halls with instruction so that the school would be in compliance.

Some of us have discussed this and we use the word impotent. We feel impotent. On the other hand, there is anger for us, and I feel that I can speak for them too. There is anger that can infect [us]. It can find [its] way into our teaching, and we try to find a way to keep it out of the classroom, but it comes out in the meetings. The anger at the after school meetings is very explosive.

Engaging with parents is another possible way to try to change the school, but Jill finds them to be just as focused as the principal on test scores. She explains with empathy how she believes parents have come to attribute meaning to test scores:

Parents, by and large, want what’s best for their children. Many of them are in the same place as some of us who teach. They want their children to do well, and if tests become the way to measure the value of success and they are the only way, then I think they see me and [the other] teachers—that if we are doing our jobs, then their children should be scoring well.

Here Jill shows how parents come to expect their children’s teachers to provide them with educational services that result in a desired outcome—scoring well.

Perhaps the one story Jill told that was most bothersome to her about her experience at her school is a reference to a practice that elsewhere has come to be called the “bubble kids” phenomenon:

I will tell you this for a fact, and I would hope that this would make this somewhere into your study. I was told this directly from my principal: “Do not worry about the students who are below basic. I’m not concerned about them. I want you to work with the basic students to move them to proficiency, because that’s where we have the best shot of upping our scores.” I sat there that day and I thought, “How can I be a party to this?” And I’m sure that all of this plays into my decision to retire this year.

Jill’s principal is focused on the school maximizing the number of children who can score as “proficient” or “advanced” on standardized tests. Jill notes that the principal made this statement publicly and without irony:

What shocked me about her statement is that she made it in a public arena. . . . It sounded as if it was a given. It was, “Well, you should feel that way too” . . . . We do the job, then she looks good, then we can be on the list. . . . I’ve stopped caring about those things—that if you are put on the list twice, then the Big Bad Wolf is going to come in to take over, all that scary stuff. We’re supposed to be afraid.

Jill does mention fear again. She is not only concerned for herself and her students but also the implications of this practice for public education:

I’m scared about the future of public education, about moves to privatize it, I’m scared about a generation of students coming out who don’t know how to read between the lines, don’t know how to question. It’s a culture of fear. Everybody is fearful. Fear grips people, and so in the grip of that fear, you act.

Being active and ethical while under surveillance

Jill Bartoni is an educator facing the day-to-day challenges of high-stakes accountability policy in public schools. In this summary, taken from an interview conducted in January 2006, Jill names the real dangers associated with an accountability policy that attaches high stakes to standardized testing. States are required by federal law to develop accountability systems that apply rewards and sanctions to encourage schools to increase the number of students (overall and in key subgroups) who can become proficient in tested areas of the curriculum. Districts are encouraged by state policy to align their curricula and instructional strategies to state standards and the state testing program. Principals are encouraged to enact policies to raise proficiency levels. Teachers are encouraged to enact practices that conform to the policies laid before them. As Jill shows, many of those policies and practices come up against teachers’ philosophies of education and their ethical standards.

This book is about what it means to be active and ethical while under the surveillance of high-stakes accountability policy. I begin each of the first seven chapters with stories from schools under pressure from state accountability systems. The various schools, districts, and states I draw from vary in how they are faring in relation to accountability pressures. In some cases, the effect is much less pronounced than in the case of Jill’s school, but educators I have encountered over the last 16 years agree that some effects can be found in any public school. All over the United States (and in several other countries, like Australia and the United Kingdom, who have adopted similar accountability policies), educators like Jill Bartoni face pressure from state accountability systems, whether or not they are under threat of some sort of sanction. What makes being an educator particularly challenging in the current era is that the pressures are not always direct; instead they infuse educational practice. One of the most compelling and surprising indications, as Jill describes, is when teachers, principals, and parents seem to take the pressure for granted—proceeding without questioning, changing their practice, falling in line, and as later stories suggest, without even being asked to fall in line.

With one exception, the stories come from research studies I have conducted as a faculty member or participated in as a graduate student, starting in 1995, when I joined a collaborative research team studying the North Carolina A+ Schools Program, now the N.C. A+ Schools Network, a group of K-12 public schools adopting a whole-school reform model based on arts integration. Additional stories come from the Oklahoma A+ Schools, a second network of schools based on the model of the North Carolina program and whose research and evaluation team I codirected while a faculty member at Oklahoma State University. A third source of stories is from an extended study of the effects of high-stakes accountability policy on educators’ philosophies of education, begun and codirected in Oklahoma in January 2004 and then continuing to 2011 in Pennsylvania, where I have been a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh since September 2004. This book is not a comprehensive analysis of any of these studies, but instead a philosophical critique and argument for an alternative framework that makes use of stories from the various studies to give examples. More detailed information about these studies can be found in the Appendix to this volume.

I begin with Jill’s story because in one short interview, Jill provides multiple glimpses in just one school of many of the dangerous exercises of power that proliferate under high-stakes accountability. Michel Foucault (1995/1975) would refer to these as examples of how surveillance works to discipline docile subjects into exercising power over themselves, a seemingly mundane exercise of power that he argues is nevertheless the most effective form of discipline in the modern age. I am interested in all of these exercises of power that proliferate in response to high-stakes accountability policy. I am mostly interested in how educators talk about their practice in relation to these exercises of power, what happens to their philosophies of education, and what it all means ethically. I am interested in this key problem: how high-stakes accountability policy proliferates educational practices that displace philosophies of education and professional ethics.

My concern is that accountability policy has had the ironic effect of making teachers, principals, and schools less responsible for students’ educational progress, because it has destabilized educators’ own notions of professionalism. I aim over the course of the book to depict these problems and issues as philosophical problems, questions that require us as educators to rethink fundamentally the meaning and value that we ascribe to education. I argue that without attention fundamentally to the ethical practice of educators as professionals, we’re not likely to improve the situation. By attaching high stakes to standardized test scores, accountability policy has effected what Foucault refers to as a reversal of power relations: a test score that was designed to be one measure (among many) of educational achievement, to be one small tool to help gauge progress, has become the goal. Through exercises of power on a grand scale (in terms of policy) and, perhaps more importantly, on a day-to-day basis (in terms of practices and decisions that educators and administrators make about what, how, and who to teach), educators have supplanted the meaning and value of education for the sake of “student achievement,” as determined by standardized testing.

In this book, I build a critique of the everyday effects of high-stakes accountability policy and offer a framework for how educators may respond through a renewed sense of professionalism. I aim to use the tools of philosophy to construct a series of arguments about the problems of public education and to offer potential solutions, not in terms of policy, for that is beyond the scope of this book, but for the professional practice of teachers, principals, and other administrators.

To focus on philosophies of education and professional ethics, I am interested in the ethics of the everyday—how we treat each other on a day-to-day basis in public schools, how we decide to act in response to explicit and implicit pressure of high-stakes accountability policy, and how we protect what we believe to be the meaning and value of education. Following the theory of disciplinary power of Foucault, I explain the subtle workings of power that proliferate normalization—the establishment of a norm from which all others are judged and disciplined—through the technology of the examination. A danger associated with the use of standardized testing, normalization is a conceptual problem that I explain in detail in Chapter 5. It is evident as an underlying problem in several strata of high-stakes accountability. It is evident in the rhetoric of accountability policy, conflating accountability for scores with responsibility for children, a problem I address in Chapter 2. It plays out in the specific systems that states created to comply with NCLB, the policies that districts put into place to succeed in their state systems, and within school buildings, the actions of school leaders, teachers, and students (and as Jill’s story makes clear, the actions of parents). As educators, we need to draw attention to these phenomena and understand normalization’s reach so that we can articulate alternatives for ourselves and our students. We need robust philosophies of education and professional ethics, strong enough to account for, work through, disrupt, and resist normalizing power relations.

To respond to the dangers of normalization, I offer a two-part framework for responsible educators—the active and the ethical—that work together to resist the dangers associated with high-stakes accountability policy. The framework is not a cookbook or a guidebook for educators, but instead a way of thinking differently about one’s p...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title
• 1 The high-stakes accountability context
• 2 Accountability as a philosophical problem
• 3 Ethics in educational practice
• 4 From accountability (for test results) to responsibility (for children)
• 5 Normalization, surveillance, and the self-disciplined
• 6 Care of the educated self in crisis
• 7 Educator professionalism: the active, ethical, and resistant
• 8 The active/ethical professional in practice
• Appendix: Studies of accountability and school reform
• References
• About the author
• Index