Teacher Power

Teacher Power
By Deborah Sumner

It’s now been 20 years since the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Maybe this is a good time to read or reread Václav Havel’s powerful essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” written in 1978.

I recently found my way to it via David Swanson’s Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, and his recommended reading of A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict by Peter Ackerman and Jack Duval.

What struck me hard was how closely Havel’s experience of “living within the truth” paralleled mine as a teacher.

His essential question matched the one I faced when there was a change from democratic administrators to authoritarian ones: Does the system serve human needs, or do humans serve the system?

I left teaching in 1986 because it hurt too much to care and I didn’t want to stop caring. That caring about children and wanting to do my job well had unintentionally put me in direct confrontation with “the system.”

“How can I be an effective teacher,” I wrote, “when I know that everything I believe will be held against me? Such a contradiction to me that as educators we are not expected to question when we don’t understand or say when the orders from above go completely against what we have learned from experience.

“...How do I teach children to respect each other and to be tolerant of differences when I realize that’s not the real world? Do I teach them that power lies in authority alone, not subject to question when your own life experiences tell you differently? Do what I say because I tell you, not because there’s a reason you should expect to understand.”

Enter the current and continuing debate about merit pay for teachers that now wants to link pay with how well students do on standardized achievement tests. It doesn’t matter that research and the experience of millions of educators have shown this makes no sense, given the nature of teaching and learning. Those who control the political system want it.

In addition to continuing the Teacher Incentive Fund (grants for performance-pay programs), “the best thing the previous administration did,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said recently, the new “Race to the Top” initiative includes additional incentives for states to develop merit pay plans.

States and school districts that comply will be rewarded with more money.

But here’s the basic problem.

Teachers are on the front lines every day in schools across this country. They know intimately what is happening in the lives of individual children and what can positively impact their learning. They know and have said through a variety of surveys and research reports over the years, and most recently in comments to the “Race to the Top” proposal what they need to be able to their jobs better. It’s not merit pay.

They want trust, respect, openness, honesty, a say in decisions that affect them and a sense of everyone working together for the children. They want the same things I wanted in 1986. So why aren’t the politicians listening to them?

As Havel points out, the human system, which meets real human needs, is different than the political system which sustains itself by pretending to meet human needs and using the system of rewards and punishments to stay in power. That’s not so easy for teachers who face young people every day. Children’s honesty tends to keep us honest.

No one has ever pretended that schools are democratic. And yet, if part of schools’ responsibility is to prepare citizens to participate in a democracy, teachers have to be honest about what they need to do their jobs well. They can, of course, but if their situation values appearances and public relations over truth, they will be punished.

Havel sees an individual labeled as a “dissident” as I saw myself, one who simply wants to live in harmony with his or her best self, who “is unwilling to sacrifice his own human identity to politics, or rather, who does not believe in a politics that requires such a sacrifice.”

The alternative to feeling and acting like “hired hands” as Ted Sizer feared in 1984, and feeling no responsibility for their collective work would be teachers who see themselves as fulfilling a higher calling in working for their nation and for their world. They would champion an education system that fits human needs, not the needs of the system.

And if they don’t? A recent news article snapped me to attention and is why I’m writing this. The headline said, “Too Few Youths Eligible for Military, Leaders Say.” Retired military leaders had appeared with Duncan to influence the Senate’s vote on money for early childhood education.

What’s happening in preschools today matters for future national security, they told the Senate. “To ensure a strong, capable fighting force for the future, America’s youth must succeed academically, graduate from high school, be fit and obey the law,” their Mission Report stated. I felt a chill move up and down my spine.

Don’t get me wrong. The military is a fine profession and some of my relatives and former students have chosen to serve our country this way. But can you imagine teachers advising the military or Congress on the defense budge or how to “win hearts and minds” in Iraq and Afghanistan? That’s what good teachers do every day in earning the trust, respect, cooperation and love of their students.

As Havel and I know, these kinds of communities are full of positive energy and a creative potential that draw people because they want to be part of it. They are, he says, “motivated mainly by a common belief in the profound significance of what they are doing…” And through the trusting relationships developed in working through their challenges, a human, democratic political structure emerges.

What a different world we would have if, instead of going along with the political system based on rewards and punishments, all of us lived ”within the truth” and worked with teachers and young people to make a better country and a better world. Could we change the vision of perpetual warfare that now clouds our future or would a political system structured to meet human needs come up with a better alternative?

Since teachers’ work is so essential to our national security AND our democracy, here’s something they can do:

1) Interpret the Obama administration’s Race to the Top “assignment” as: “Linking pay to student test scores is the best idea the political system can come up with to improve student learning and get administrators and teachers to work together FOR the kids. Does anyone have a better idea?

“Specifically, there’s an additional $4.35 billion of federal money that will go to schools, maybe on a one-time basis or maybe it will continue. We don’t know yet.

1) How would your school use some of that money to improve student learning, including achievement test scores 2) How much money would you need?”

2) Share your ideas widely and apply for Race to the Top Funding.

Our students, our country and our world need teachers to take charge of our working lives and say what we know is true. We can show the political system how living within the truth provides its own rewards as we struggle with others to fulfill the potential promise of democracy.