The Reform We Wish To See

Now in my 16th year as a public school teacher, I have never been more certain of the following notion : the profession of public school teaching is in crisis. 

It seems to me that our citizenry tends to speak of our public school system as a sort of ineffectual whole, referring to "our education system," or "our nation's schools."  My ears and heart hear this deep, collective concern that our education system is failing.  And there certainly are a ton of troubling facts associated with this concern.  High school dropout rates are extraordinarily high.  Funding is drying up.  The achievement gap is sustaining itself.  As a nation, we do worse than many countries that we used to do better than...the list goes on. 

I, for one, do not think our education system is failing outright.  I feel and share the collective concern, to be sure.  However, I think that the current national dialogue is too simplistic, and unhelpfully cynical.  I do think that our profession is in the midst of a crisis, not unlike many of our nation’s well-intentioned institutions; and that being in the midst of a crisis often feels like failure.   Public school teaching is experiencing a crisis of identity, of mission, of culture, and of confidence.  And the current revolving door of platitudes, politics and initiatives in the name of “reform” only add to our collective panic rather than moving us towards long-term, sustainable change. 

In this blog my aim is to help in some small way to refocus our national dialogue away from its current cynical haziness about the system as a whole, and towards the system's beating heart -- each classroom.  Put another way, I want to explore the notion that reforming the profession of teaching is key to reforming the whole system.  This may sound somewhat obvious, but I mean to say that the specific elements of our professional practice, the teaching moves we make on a day-to-day basis, the traditions and rituals of institutional practice, the way we conceive of teaching and learning -- how we live our work -- need foundational transformation.

And in this work, I find tremendous energy and hope. 

With this blog, entitled Teaching Moves (where the word “moves” can be both noun and verb) I hope to develop several themes over time:

• public school teaching is not yet a true profession in this country.
• our system tends to limit excellence and reward mediocrity in the classroom.
• the changes needed will require sustained efforts; there are no quick fixes.
• there are many assumptions about how teachers teach and students learn that must be examined and revised.
• a vital part of education reform is providing opportunities for teachers and administrators to see teaching and learning differently.
• the work of teaching is a fundamentally human tradition, and its deepest nature must be recovered and implemented.

Ultimately, I intend to argue that the meaningful and sustainable reform our nation hungers for (however much its complaints don't really understand the inner workings of teaching and learning) must be embodied within each teacher across the country.  We, as educators, one by one, must be the reform we want to see in our nation's schools.