'The Service of Democratic Education...' Columbia University Commencement Address Reminds America that Public Schools are about Democracy, not promoting 'Entrepreneurship'. Current struggle put into context of capitalist attack on democracy a hundred years ago...
[Editor's note: The following was send to Substance by a reader who thought it was very well done and stated a position which our readers needed to share. It is by Linda Darling-Hammond, May 21, 2011. At the commencement ceremony for Columbia University's Teachers College on May 18, Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond—a nationally renowned leader in education reform and former education adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign—was awarded the Teachers College medal for distinguished service. Professor Darling-Hammond marked the occasion by delivering the following address:]
Teachers College graduates celebrate at Columbia University in May 2011. Columbia University photo.PROFESSOR LINDA DARLING HAMMOND'S ADDRESS FOLLOWS HERE:
I could not be more honored than to be awarded this recognition from Teachers College, one of the places of all those I know in the world that holds the tightest grip on my heart and best represents my values and beliefs. Thank you for this recognition—and, more important, thank you, Teachers College faculty, trustees, students and graduates, for who and what you are.
My first real glimpse of what Teachers College is and does occurred not in New York City but in a school in Washington, DC, where one of my children had transferred into a first grade classroom to avoid the truly terrible teaching that was literally undermining her health in another school. In her new school, Elena’s teacher, Miss Leslie, had created a wonderland of stimulating opportunities for learning: children experimenting and investigating in the classroom and the community, designing and conducting projects, writing and publishing their own little stories (one that my daughter wrote after the birth of her little brother was entitled “Send Him Back”). This teacher—who was in her very first year of practice—not only had created a classroom that any mother would want to send her child to, but she also had the skillful eye and knowledge base to figure out within weeks that Elena was severely dyslexic, to teach her to read without her ever being labeled or stigmatized, and to instill in my daughter a lifelong love of books and learning that has led to her being a literacy teacher working with special needs students today.
One day, I asked Miss Leslie how she had learned to do this miraculous work as a brand-new teacher. And she told me that she had learned to be this kind of teacher at Teachers College, Columbia University. She listed the courses she took in the Curriculum and Teaching department and the Special Education program that built her knowledge base and described what she learned with intensive supervision in a carefully designed clinical placement. It was then that I knew that a profession of teaching was possible, and I learned much more about what is possible in building a profession from my colleagues here and in our partner schools when I later came to teach at TC. I became persuaded that policy-makers needed to understand how to enable all educators to acquire the knowledge and skills that could truly allow all children to learn—rather than to try, as so many have, to manage teaching through mind-numbing, and ultimately futile, prescriptions for practice.
Stanford University Professor Linda Darling Hammond (above left) receiving her honorary degree from Columbia. Columbia University photo.Teachers College has, for more than a century, represented the heartbeat of the education profession in the United States and our deepest aspirations for a democratic system of education. When TC was founded by Grace Dodge in 1887 as the New York School for the Training of Teachers, it was intended to provide a new kind of schooling for the teachers of the poor in New York City, one that combined a humanitarian concern for helping others with a scientific approach to human development and learning. At that time, when most teachers had little more than a high school education (and were frequently taught primarily to follow scripted textbooks that were popular at the time), TC teachers—a group of extraordinary women and men of all races, who came from all parts of the country—were earning masters degrees and were prepared for a research-based practice that was informed by the educational research also planted in the college: in psychology and sociology, in the content areas and in pedagogy. They, along with administrators and researchers in training, were also expected to develop a deep understanding of the history, philosophy and purposes of education and to be grounded in a set of strong values and ethics that guide all professionals.
Then, as now, the creation of truly professional educators was subversive business. As scientific managers were looking to make schools “efficient” in the early twentieth century—to manage schools with more tightly prescribed curriculum, more teacher-proof texts, more extensive testing, and more rules and regulations—they consciously sought to hire less well-educated teachers who would work for low wages and would go along with the new regime of prescribed lessons and pacing schedules without protest. In a book widely used for teacher training at that time, the need for "unquestioned obedience" was stressed as the "first rule of efficient service" for teachers.
No wonder that obedience was prized, when the scientific managers’ time and motion studies resulted in findings like the fact that some eighth grade classes did addition "at the rate of 35 combinations per minute" while others could “add at an average rate of 105 combinations per minute"—thus schools were to set the standard at 65 combinations per minute at 94 percent accuracy. One speaker at an NEA meeting in 1914 observed that there were “so many efficiency engineers running hand cars through the school houses in most large cities that the grade school teachers can hardly turn around in their rooms without butting into two or three of them.”
During that decade, precisely 100 years ago, nationally distributed tests of arithmetic, handwriting and English were put into use. Their results were used to compare students, teachers and schools; to report to the public; and even to award merit pay—a short-lived innovation due to the many problems it caused.
Does any of this sound familiar?
In the view of these brilliant managerial engineers, professionally trained teachers were considered troublesome, because they had their own ideas about education and frequently didn’t go along meekly with the plan.
As one such teacher wrote in The American Teacher in 1912:
We have yielded to the arrogance of "big business men" and have accepted their criteria of efficiency at their own valuation, without question. We have consented to measure the results of educational efforts in terms of price and product—the terms that prevail in the factory and the department store. But education, since it deals in the first place with human organisms, and in the second place with individualities, is not analogous to a standardizable manufacturing process. Education must measure its efficiency not in terms of so many promotions per dollar of expenditure, nor even in terms of so many student-hours per dollar of salary; it must measure its efficiency in terms of increased humanism, increased power to do, increased capacity to appreciate.
Sounds suspiciously like John Dewey and Maxine Greene, doesn’t it?
While the scientific managers’ foolishness was creating a stranglehold on schools under the banner of education reform, TC teachers, school leaders and professors (ranging from John Dewey to William Heard Kilpatrick to George Counts and more) were creating progressive schools in which students engaged in intellectual inquiry, hands-on projects and activity-based curriculum—guided by an understanding of child development, the new sciences of learning and emerging practices of pedagogy. These schools practiced democracy in action and provided a counterpoint to the factory model schooling that Dewey called “mechanical, dull, uninteresting, and hardly educative in any meaningful sense.”
Then as now, TC graduates set the standard. Highly educated and deeply committed, you and your colleagues have gone out to plant the ideals of democratic, progressive education as leaders in schools, colleges and governments all around the world. TC has always represented what a profession is meant to foster: 1) a strong ethical commitment to serve clients well—in the case of education, to make decisions based on what is best for students, not what is cheapest, easiest or most expedient; 2) mastery of a common body of knowledge and skills—and a commitment to always seek more and better knowledge to meet students’ needs (and oh, how I love that magical moment at TC when the doors fly open at around 4 pm and thousands of dedicated educators from all over New York, and even New Jersey and Connecticut, swarm into the building with such a thirst for professional knowledge to serve their students more fully); and 3) a commitment to define, transmit and enforce standards of practice—a community that pledges to work together to “do the right thing,” as Spike Lee put it.
That commitment is more important now than ever before. We live in a nation that is on the verge of forgetting its children. The United States now has a far higher poverty rate for children than any other industrialized country (25 percent, nearly double what it was thirty years ago); a more tattered safety net—more who are homeless, without healthcare and without food security; a more segregated and inequitable system of public education (a 10:1 ratio in spending across the country); a larger and more costly system of incarceration than any country in the world, including China (5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its inmates), one that is now directly cutting into the money we should be spending on education; a defense budget larger than that of the next twenty countries combined; and greater disparities in wealth than any other leading country (the wealthiest 1 percent of individuals control 25 percent of the resources in the country; in New York City, the wealthiest 1 percent control 46 percent of the wealth and are taxed at a lower level than in the last sixty years). Our leaders do not talk about these things. They simply say of poor children, “Let them eat tests.”
And while there is lots of talk of international test score comparisons, there is too little talk about what high-performing countries actually do: fund schools equitably; invest in high-quality preparation, mentoring and professional development for teachers and leaders, completely at government expense; organize a curriculum around problem-solving and critical-thinking skills; and test students rarely—and never with multiple-choice tests.(Indeed, the top-performing nations increasingly rely on school-based assessments of learning that include challenging projects, investigations and performances, much like what leading educators have created here in the many innovative New York public schools.)
Meanwhile, the profession of teaching and our system of public education are under siege from another wave of scientific managers, who have forgotten that education is about opening minds to inquiry and imagination, not stuffing them like so many dead turkeys—that teaching is about enabling students to make sense of their experience, to use knowledge for their own ends, and to learn to learn, rather than to spend their childhoods bubbling in Scantron sheets to feed the voracious data banks that govern ever more decisions from the bowels of the bureaucracy.
These new scientific managers, like those of a century ago, prefer teachers with little training—who will come and go quickly, without costing much money, without vesting in the pension system and without raising many questions about an increasingly prescriptive system of testing and teaching that lines the pockets of private entrepreneurs (who provide teacher-proofed materials deemed necessary, by the way, in part because there are so many underprepared novices who leave before they learn to teach). Curriculum mandates and pacing guides that would “choke a horse,” as one teacher put it, threaten to replace the opportunities for teachable moments that expert teachers know how to create with their students.
The new scientific managers, like the Franklin Bobbitts before them, like to rank and sort students, teachers and schools—rewarding those at the top and punishing those at the bottom, something that the highest-achieving countries not only don’t do but often forbid. The present-day Bobbitts would create “efficiencies” by firing teachers and closing schools, while issuing multimillion-dollar contracts for testing and data systems to create more graphs, charts and report cards on which to rank and sort… well, just about everything.
And the new scientific managers cleverly construct systems that solve the problem of the poor by blaming the teachers and schools that seek to serve them, calling the deepening levels of severe poverty an “excuse,” rewarding schools that keep out and push out the highest-need students, and threatening those who work with new immigrant students still learning English and the growing number of those who are homeless, without healthcare or food security. Are there lower scores in under-resourced schools with high-need students? Fire the teachers and the principals. Close the schools. Don’t look for supports for their families and communities, equitable funding for public schools or investments in professional learning. Don’t worry about the fact that the next schools are—as researchers have documented—likely to do no better. This is the equivalent of deciding that if the banks are failing, we should fire the tellers. (And whatever you do, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.)
But public education has a secret weapon—a Trojan horse, if you will: the members of the profession like yourselves who have mastered a strong body of professional knowledge, who hold a strong ethic of care and who are determined to transmit this knowledge and this commitment to others throughout the education system.
At Teachers College are those who are leading the fight for more equitable funding for public schools (and who won a major victory in New York state); there are those who are leading the efforts to create more thoughtful and creative curriculum and instructional strategies; and who are developing more effective teacher and leadership education and professional development.
Among those of you who are graduating are many who have created and will create more exciting and empowering schools for children; more useful and appropriate assessments of learning; and more just and humane policies to guide a system focused on learning, not selecting and sorting, rewarding and punishing. You will do this in the strong professional communities you have created here at TC and in your work in the field. You will carry on the work of building a profession that serves democratic education—one that provides for all children what the best and wisest parent wants for his or her child, as John Dewey put it.
Many of you have arrived here today with significant debt and at considerable personal sacrifice. But you are here because of the work to which you have committed your lives, and because you know that it is the right thing to do.
And doing the right thing—meeting that professional commitment—is not easy. Whether it is standing up for a child who is mistreated, or finding the energy to go that extra mile to reach out to a troubled parent, or taking up a challenging issue in the research, or taking on a difficult concern in the public discourse, doing the right thing is often hard. As King reminded us:
On some positions, Cowardice asks the question "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.
Take heart in knowing that the arc of history is long, as King noted, but it bends toward justice. Take courage in knowing that where a community of hands comes together to work toward justice, a freedom seed will grow. And take pride in knowing, when the work is challenging and setbacks come—as they must when anything important is happening—that you are building a better future for every child and family and community you touch. And remember, as Robert F. Kennedy observed:
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.
Thank you for each and every time you do what is right for our children and for each ripple of hope you create. Thank you for your courage and your commitment. And thank you for spreading the spirit of Teachers College. Keep your hand on the plow…. Hold on!
A REPORT ON THE ENTIRE COMMENCEMENT WAS PUBLISHED BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ON LINE AND FOLLOWS:
At Commencement, an Educators' Call to Arms, Published: 5/21/2011, The College’s 2011 graduates are urged to pursue both excellence and equity
“I don’t just want you to teach the children of our society – I want you to fight for them.”
Former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert was addressing the second of two master’s degree ceremonies, but he could well have been speaking for all those who took the podium during Teachers College’s two days of commencement exercises on May 17th and 18th in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Speaker after speaker -- from the three recipients of TC’s Medal for Distinguished Service (Herbert; Baltimore public schools chief Andres Alonso; and Stanford University education scholar Linda Darling Hammond), to the two student speakers, Akilah Reynolds and Traci Leigh Johnson, and TC President Susan Fuhrman herself -- sounded the call for graduates to advance the cause of education, both by creating new and better solutions to learning challenges, and by fighting a rising tide of inequality in American society. “The talent for blending new ideas with well-grounded knowledge in order to produce effective new educational strategies and methods is embedded in TC’s DNA,” said Fuhrman, who over the course of two days reminded the more than 2,000 master’s and doctoral degree recipients that the College was the birthplace of many fields of inquiry, including comparative and international education, special education, social studies, and the study of gifted children. She predicted that “TC’s dynamic partnerships with local schools in Harlem and communities throughout the world will enable us to promote equity and transform urban education in a time of scarce resources,” and called on graduates to” join our global network of innovative leaders in the task of shaping the learning century.
” Still, Fuhrman did not mince words in describing the current climate. “We are fighting to reverse a nationwide high school dropout epidemic that condemns more than a million American teenagers to lives of poverty, despair and drift,” she said. “We are fighting to reduce ever widening gaps in education opportunity and scholastic achievement within our country – even as we simultaneously struggle to catch up in math and science literacy with competitor nations.” The battle extends to the health arena as well, which includes “a global obesity epidemic fed by a toxic brew of economic, cultural and behavioral forces.
” To succeed in combating these forces, Fuhrman said, “we cannot bicker and blame our way to success. We can – and we should – put our heads together, pool our perspectives and specialized areas of expertise, and craft powerful and enduring solutions to the challenges facing our nation and our world.”
Others described the nation’s educational health – and its condition more generally – in starker terms. “There is real suffering out there,” said Herbert, the long-time social commentator for the Times and other venues. “The American dream itself is on life support,” he said, with “an extreme and growing” income gap between the wealthiest members of society and working and poor Americans.
That state of affairs has come about because of organized, well financed attempts to systematically dismantle the Great Society public assistance programs of the 1960s and New Deal programs dating back to the Great Depression, Herbert said. “When you fire up the wrecking ball for Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security at the same time that you’re shielding the wealthy and the great corporations from having to pay their fair share of taxes, you’re doing great harm to the ordinary and working people, the struggling families of America,” he said, drawing applause from the audience.
Educators must apply their content knowledge, pedagogical skills and research-based innovations to the many problems in public education, Herbert said, “but they must also organize and form alliances to counter the “outsized political influence of the very wealthy.” Teachers need to “let the world know that money isn’t the be-all and end-all,” he concluded, his voice rising as the audience began to clap again, “and that your commitment to serving the interest of those children will not be derailed.”
Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford’s Charles E. Ducommon Professor of Education and a former TC faculty member, began by sketching a portrait of American education nearly 125 years ago, at the time of the College’s founding. A cadre of “scientific managers” was looking to make schools more “efficient’ via a “factory model regime of prescribed lessons and pacing schedules,” a heavy regimen of standardized tests, and merit pay for teachers – the very things that some education reformers are now proposing.
“Does any of this sound familiar?” Darling-Hammond asked. But countering that tide of small-mindedness, Darling-Hammond said, TC teachers, school leaders and professors were pioneering a very different approach founded on “intellectual inquiry, hands-on projects, activity-based curriculum” and other learner centered practices.
Today, the College is again a bulwark as “the profession of teaching and our system of public education are under siege from another wave of scientific managers who have forgotten that education is about opening minds to inquiry and imagination, not stuffing them like so many dead turkeys – that teaching is about enabling students to make sense of their experience, to use knowledge for their own ends, and to learn to learn.”
All of this is occurring at a time when “our nation is on the verge of forgetting its children,” Darling-Hammond said, citing a U.S. poverty rate for youth that is higher than that of any other industrialized country, a defense budget “larger than that of the next 20 countries combined” and greater disparities in wealth than any leading country. “
Our leaders do not talk about those things,” Darling-Hammond said. “They simply say of poor children, ‘Let them eat tests.’ ” Yet amid all the talk of international test score comparisons “there is too little talk about what high-performing countries actually do: fund schools equitably, invest in high quality preparation, mentoring and professional development for teachers and leaders, and organize a curriculum around problem solving and critical thinking skills.”
Nor do other nations seek to solve their education problems by firing teachers and principals and closing schools, Darling-Hammond said – a practice she likened to “deciding that if the banks are failing, we should fire the tellers.” Darling-Hammond, who said she is “enormously proud to be a continuing member of the TC community,” urged the graduates to take heart it in knowing that, as Martin Luther King said, the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice. She reminded them that, in Robert Kennedy’s words, “each time a person stands up for an idea… he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope,” and concluded, “I think you in advance for each ripple of hope you will create.”
Perhaps the most hopeful note was struck by Alonso, who reminded his listeners of Henry James’ declaration that “to believe in a child is to believe in the future.” Alonso recapped his own story of coming to the United States from Cuba as a boy who spoke no English, earning a Harvard law degree and then leaving a promising legal career to become a special education teacher in Newark.
“Twenty five years ago, I changed course in my career and I became an educator,” he said. “It has been the single most important and right decision in my life. In the schools where I have taught and led, the act of educating children is often a struggle against many things that belie our belief in children. You believe and you serve – I salute you as a brother in arms.”
Alonso said that his own teachers – including his parents, who gave him a birthday gift of four books when he was six years old – “helped calibrate my moral compass” and “are responsible for what I have done right.” The memory of their positive influence moved him to seek an arena in which he could exert a similar effect – one he has found in his current position. The Baltimore school system, he said, is “the fulcrum of everything good that can happen in the city. We touch, every day, not only more than 80,000 kids, but through them also their families, their communities, and every social institution that responds to them.”
Alonso celebrated the system’s accomplishments during his tenure, which includes students across all categories achieving their highest-ever outcomes on state exams, highest-ever graduation rate and lowest-ever dropout rates; elementary and high school students in all sub-groups making Adequate Yearly Progress; a dropout rate that has fallen by half; and, for the first time in decades, a gain in the total number of public school students. “We have given hope to the city about what is possible in our schools,” he said, but added that “everything feels fragile. We know that every setback means we go back to the bottom of the hill again.”
He concluded by urging the graduates to “be true to your essential self on behalf of yourself and your students, and yet remain open to what others will teach you, especially the kids and families you will serve” – and to be “willing to put and leave skin in the game to make certain things happen that are often very hard to accomplish given the conditions of our schools and communities, without becoming cynical or leaning to blame others for the inevitable defeats along the way.”
Traci Johnson, who received her master’s degree in International Development and Education (with a concentration in Peace Studies), spoke at the second master’s degree ceremony of “the transformative potential of education.”
Johnson said her work at TC provided her with her first encounter with both the evidence and consequences of poverty and educational inequity. She learned, she said, that “inevitably we will enter spaces that are shaped by inequity,” requiring us to “question our own roles in supporting, ignoring or dismantling” the structures that perpetuate injustices.
TC graduates leave the College not only with an excellent education and training, but also with the tools to construct their own agenda for social justice, Johnson said. She encouraged her classmates to embody both of those legacies in their personal and professional lives.
Earlier in the day, student speaker Akilah Reynolds, who was receiving her degree in Counseling and Clinical Psychology, said that at TC she learned that “before counseling others, I first had to learn about myself,” because “our work demands the kind of empowerment that comes only by looking at our own identities.”
Reynolds said that, partly as a result of her time at TC, she has been able to overcome a childhood fear of public speaking. But she has also realized the need, as a professional “to practice what we preach.
“Some people are fascinated by action heroes like Superman and Batman – but heroes are people who believe strongly in a cause and walk the walk,” she said. “Heroes embodied the things they profess.”
She reminded the audience that the date – May 17th – was the 57th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which began the process of striking down school segregation. That decision began, she said, “with people who believed in their right to access to equality quality education” and had the courage to pursue it at great personal peril.
For her own part, Reynolds said, she has come to realize that “courage is having fear but doing something despite that fear” – particularly “doing something radically different, like those who fought for equality in education.”
Reynolds said that being at TC has helped her to “challenge her fears,” and said that she persevered in her work here “because people helped me recognize that on the other side was the evolved me I wanted to become.
“Change is infectious,” she concluded. “It starts with one person who wants something so much they dare to be different. Change starts with you and me.”
The student presentation at the doctoral hooding ceremony was not a speech but a musical performance. Victor Lin, who received his doctorate degree in music education at the ceremony, played a violin arrangement of the traditional folk song, “The Water is Wide.”
