"All Thin Lips And Flinty Glares"

In a recent piece in New Republic by Nicholas Lemann on corporate education reform champion and snake oil salesperson Michelle Rhee, he quotes her writing about the teaching style she adopted after a rocky first year in the classroom:

"I wore my game face. No smiles, no joy; I was all thin lips and flinty glares." She describes making her students line up and walk into the classroom four times, until they had achieved a state of perfect order. "My mistake the first year was trying to be warm and friendly with the students, thinking that my kids needed love and compassion. What I knew going into my second year was that what my children needed and craved was rigid structure, certainty, and stability."

Wow. Let me tell you, if my daughter had been in her classroom she would have had me in her face. Not only is this kind of punitive, "tough love" approach not supported by any of the research, it is the opposite of what I've found in my experience as a teacher. Yes, children need "structure, certainty, and stability," but they need love and compassion even more. As is chronic self-aggrandizer Rhee's pattern, she has since had to walk back her exaggerated claims about the test score improvements she achieved using these teaching methods, and there is no mention of the emotional, social, and developmental damage that was certainly caused by what I consider to be the equivalent of bullying.

I suppose there has always been a strain of thought in America that all kids these days need is a little more strictness, and as Rhee demonstrates, if your goal is obedient kids, the kind who will "achieve a state of perfect order," then "(n)o smiles, no joy" is the way to go.

In response to yesterday's post, indeed in response to many of my posts, a reader or two will point out that I'm "blithely" or "naively" forgetting how lucky I am to be teaching a certain category of privileged child, ones who come from households that understand and support education. If I only taught a population of underprivileged kids, then I'd see the error of my ways. These kids, it's argued, live in neighborhoods in which it's too dangerous to play outside, in which parents are not home, and even if they were, they are perhaps illiterate themselves or otherwise unwilling or unable to support them. Maybe your typical middle class kid doesn't need the Michelle Rhee treatment, they assert, maybe they can thrive with Teacher Tom's progressive-hippie-dippy approach, but these kids need an iron fist.

Of course, people like Rhee and her corporate-style backers, including guys like Bill Gates and US Education Secretary Arne Duncan, aren't talking about confining their drill and kill methods to the kids who "need" it, but rather trying to transform our educational system so that this kind of "rigid," "flinty" school experience is the norm for all of the kids. And this is why a middle class guy like me would have been in her face: no one treats my child like that.

But do underprivileged kids really need this? Is this really the only way they'll learn? There is some evidence that the approach creates marginal improvements on standardized test scores, it's true, but does it really improve their education? Does it really lead to better social, emotional, and economic prospects? Are these kids so different than middle class kids, so alien that we must essentially treat them like prisoners, a fate that is, after all, statistically far more likely for a child who grows up in poverty in the US?

My instincts tell me "no." My instincts tell me that all people thrive when treated like, well, people; that structure, certainty, and stability emerge from love and compassion much more readily and enduringly than from bullying. That's my theory, at least, one that's supported by decades of psychological and educational research, and my own experience. But you know what? I really don't know, because there is no actual data on what Michelle Rhee is advocating other than marginal, and temporary, improvements on standardized tests of dubious value.

As Lemann writes:

Rhee simply isn't interested in reasoning forward from evidence to conclusions: conclusions are where she starts, which means that her book cannot be trusted as an analysis of what is wrong with public schools, when and why it went wrong, and what might improve the situation. The only topics worth discussing for Rhee are abolishing teacher tenure, establishing charter schools, and imposing pay-for-performance regimes based on student test scores. We are asked to understand these measures as the only possible means of addressing a crisis in decline that is existentially threatening the United States as a nation and denying civil rights to poor black people.

Listen, I'm not insensitive to the challenges of parents and teachers and poverty. In fact, if there is one thing we could do to improve our schools it would be to tackle the challenges of poverty head-on. If a child lives in a neighborhood in which it's too dangerous to go outside and play, that's not something we can expect schools to address, and no amount of bossing kids around is going to improve their situation. It will only teach them that people who are in positions of authority have the right to tell you what to do. If a child lives in a household that does not include books or whose families don't have the time or ability to help them, then doesn't it make more sense to address those issues rather than turn our schools into practice prisons?

I will not admit, at least not based upon the testimony of chronic liars like Rhee, that because poverty makes educating some children more challenging, and that because she was able to bully 8-year-olds into walking in straight lines, we need to turn all of our public schools into the kind of drill and kill operations envisioned by the corporate reform movement.

When I write about the opposite vision for education, I'm not forgetting the poor children and I'm not denying the special challenges of poverty, a problem so huge and complicated that it's likely going to take a transformation of our entire society if we are going to solve it. What I won't do in the meantime, however, is back down from the ideals of a progressive, play-based education just because it is harder to attain for some than for others.

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