What I heard at the conference was exactly what I needed after several weeks of feeling powerless at my school. The pressure of ISATs, conflicts with co-workers, and concerns about the emotional health of my students had unearthed old questions and frustrations about what it means to be a teacher. The speeches and discussions with other passionate education activists has renewed my sense of purpose and reminded me once again of the larger perspective in our fight for quality public education. I would like to share a summary and my takeaways from the first day of the NDSG conference.
One of the themes from both speeches was that the future direction of our country is intimately tied to the state of public education. According to Boggs, we are living in a special time, the end of an era dominated by the belief in the old American dream. She says that it is time to use our imaginations to create a new American dream, one based not on capitalism and a relentless pursuit of cognition, but on more democratic principles and on a kind of knowing based on care and connection to humanity.
Both were insistent on the insidious nature of the current system. The path we are on now leads to destruction. The type of education the government is encouraging will create a country of passive subjects, content to believe and do whatever they are told by the media and politicians or those with power. Narrowing down teaching and learning to tests and quantifiable data not only dumbs down our students, but makes them completely incapable of thinking and acting on their own. True democracy, however, requires involved citizens who are able to think critically, discuss and dissent, be creative, have moral responsibility, and be active in changing the world around them...qualities that can't exactly be measured by a standardized test. Boggs used a quote by Albert Einstein to make the point that we need a total shift in consciousness that has yet to occur in our history: "The splitting of an atom has changed everything save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe."
Stovall brought the concept to the ground by showing how mayoral control, business interests, and the gentrification of neighborhoods have essentially disintegrated many public schools in Chicago. The city has strategically dis-invested in its lowest-performing schools and communities, leaving them vulnerable for years. Then, citing accountability measures and the miracle of charter schools, the city has moved to close the schools and "turn them around" in a supposed last attempt to save them. He made clear how the city's actions are based on assumptions about urban youth, poverty, and race as pathological. None of these tactics have solid research to prove increased student achievement, and actually there is increasing evidence against them. Yet Chicago is used as a model of successful reform that is now being replicated across the nation.
For Stovall, and many others, this is a crucial time. It is the end of public education as we know it. There was a palpable sense of pessimism and cynicism throughout the conference about the direction of the nation and whether we would see our vision as a reality in our lifetimes. What gave everyone hope, however, was the simple fact that our kids, our students have the capacity to change the human condition.
Stovall asked of the educators gathered together, "What are we doing knowing what we know?" For me, this was the crucial question. As a teacher, what does it mean to resist, to empower, to trust, to work with students to imagine and create a new, different world? I want to join in on the discussion of what a complete redefinition of effective teaching would look like based on these values. One of the first things that we teachers can do, which Stovall adamantly suggests, is to be clear about what we do and why we do it. We need to have a voice, we need to find the "cracks" within which we can act upon what we believe, and we need to seek each other.
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