This is the personal statement I am submitting to my administrative credential graduate program. Some of it was borrowed from previous entries, so please forgive the repetition.
Every President in my adult life has tried to give America’s public schools a sense of direction.
In 1994, the Clinton administration gave us “Goals 2000”, the first mandate for states to develop and publish specific curricula in the form of content standards. Eight years later, Bush ratcheted up the testing requirements – compelling not only the states to assess students to their standards, but also the schools and districts to make adequate yearly progress on those assessments. Now, the Obama White House is offering bountiful cash rewards for states that adopt his Education Department’s own Common Core standards.
I began teaching high school English in the Fall of 1999, shortly after California published its set of standards (one of the first states to do so). Our administrators exhorted us to learn the standards, know them well, and build our pedagogy with those standards as our foundation. Perfect scenario for a young teacher, right? I am defining my own approach as an educator just as the standards provide a new sense of precision for our school, district, and state. With such clarity of purpose, our school would surely leave no child behind in the race to the top.
In the dozen years since, my school and my entire district seem listless and lost. When I helmed the committee that examined our school’s vision and purpose for our WASC accreditation in 2009, we saw no clear evidence of either. Our school’s programs – many of them quite successful and supervised by excellent staff members – were largely a disorganized amoeba of approaches. Even our staff development held no consistent arc from one year, or even one meeting, to the next. Despite a precise and detailed set of curricular standards in nearly every subject area, there was neither a system nor even a coherent set of principles guiding our practice. Inside and outside the classrooms, our instruction, interventions, and extracurricular activities remained separate and adrift.
I think I know why.
When our district first fell under the federal pallor of “program improvement”, every teacher was introduced to the work of Robert J. Marzano, a prominent researcher who has repeatedly criticized the number of standards American students are asked to learn. He recommends no more than twenty unique standards per course, yet California asks its twelfth-graders to learn eighty-two standards in just their government and economics class! If any teacher wishes to be truly effective, Marzano proposes that they start editing their curricula.
Which standards stay? Which ones go? The best teachers have a well-honed pedagogical point of view that makes this kind of sorting easier. These teachers know what kind of students they wish to see at the end of each course, and if a few of their colleagues happen to teach in the same department with enough time for true collaboration, a coherent and consistent vision will emerge and permeate every level of language or math or science or art.
However, if a school or district really wants to improve its program, then the language and math and science and art teachers need to have this conversation together. Coaches, counselors, parents, and students also need to participate in the dialogue because the standards alone are almost meaningless – and they are certainly impossible to teach in any meaningful way – without a common context. That context should emerge from the population a school serves. Administrators should function as their own academic department, too, and develop what I call a “meta-curriculum” that applies to the development of a young person as an interdisciplinary student (with standards that may refer to his/her ability to research effectively and independently, to access technology, and to organize themselves) as well as a burgeoning adult (standards that could assess a student’s development of ethics, responsibility to the community, and ability to reflect and make sound decisions about the future).
These meta-curricular standards can only be developed at the level of a community’s school; each neighborhood’s unique persona and values puts the task well beyond the reach of any government official. When these principles are mixed with the learning goals of the faculty, a school develops what Marzano calls a common language for teaching and learning. I would call it a tangible, useful vision. I would call it a well-defined purpose.
I wish to guide a school through this process of self-realizaiton. I may be confident in the pedagogical point-of-view that I’ve developed over the past twelve years for my own classroom, but as an administrator, I would anticipate the collaboration with much greater enthusiasm. The grassroots investigation of a community’s ideas and aspirations, the marriage of those goals to the shared academic foci of talented instructors, and the meta-priorities that a school’s leaders collectively adopt as the guiding principles of everyone’s practice all represent fascinating turns in a profound journey.
I laugh when I hear the phrase “no child left behind”. It makes the learning process sound like getting on a bus. I see children running to various stops on the route to wisdom – “History Station”, “Multiplication Table Plaza”, “Conjunction Junction” – and if their poor feet can’t get them through the bus door before it slams shut, they are left behind to wallow. “Race to the top” sounds equally absurd –school buses in the Daytona 500. Both mottos presume that all students, classes, schools, and districts are riding the same path of student enlightenment. In truth, each school can map its own route along the education frontier. The passengers – every staff member and every family – request their stops until a consensus course is charted. The instruction at each grade level provides the memorable moments wherein students get out and explore the route to learning. Each course contributes to the school’s chartered course, of course.
Give me the keys. I want to drive that bus.
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