A few weeks ago, a Boston sports celebrity complained bitterly about an article on him in one of the local newspapers. Several days later, after being criticized for his comments by sportswriters in two newspapers and television newscasts, he griped, "Journalists always stick together."
I read that line and found myself feeling a little envious about the profession of journalism. The truth is, educators rarely stick together. In fact, we can often become downright cannibalistic. We get so committed to our pedagogies and new approaches that we become the worst critics of colleagues who do things differently. And when respected people in our profession are attacked in the media, we tend to breathe a sigh of relief and hope the attack doesn't turn our way, instead of joining together to defend our profession and our peers.
Examples of this response can be found in most of our communities. Recently in Littleton, Colo., some very progressive performance-based graduation requirements were put in place. Conservatives in the community attacked them, and before long the school board was voted out of office, the superintendent ousted, and a set of innovative policies tossed out the door. The education community around the country—much more familiar with the rationale for performance-driven systems than critics or the general public—was largely silent.
Education is probably the most highly charged issue in any community. Schools everywhere are now under enormous pressure: to operate more cheaply, to innovate, to replicate, to restructure, and to include everyone while we do it. Yet we are torn at by special interest groups the moment we take on the real concerns of a school or a system as a whole. Many people in our profession have developed a bunker mentality: Keep your head down and take no chances, or the backlash may get everyone.
We don't need to look any further than the superintendency to see how politicized schooling has become in the United States. When the average tenure of school superintendents has shrunk to three years, something is seriously wrong with our commitment to educate. Superintendents are forced into constant political battles. Some of our best leading educators are losing their jobs to political pressures, while our profession as a whole keeps its fingers crossed and hopes it doesn't happen to us. Look at what happened to Joe Fernandezin New York City. No one will ever agree 100 percent with any leader. But most of us will readily recognize that Fernandez is a good superintendent committed to children.
This climate of political pressure and bickering may even get worse. As school-based management becomes more widespread, building-level administrators will increasingly be asked to shoulder the responsibilities that were once the province of superintendents. Will an entire generation of principals be forced to neglect their duties as educational leaders as they enter the growing maelstrom of education politics? It will happen, unless our profession stands together, and stands up for itself when our colleagues fall victim to misunderstanding based on politics, not pedagogies.
Battles Within
The education profession has many critics, but perhaps the most damaging criticism comes from within. Special needs advocates fight with mainstream administrators. Teacher unions fight with independent education consultants. Eurocentric curriculum authors fight with Afrocentric advocates. Public school teachers and charter school entrepreneurs square off against one another. Homogeneous battles Heterogeneous. Traditionalists fight off the Inclusionists. While dialogue and an exchange of ideas and methods are necessary and breathe life into any profession, educators are nearly alone in the extent to which we criticize and throw accusations at each other.
We need to be more tolerant of different ways of teaching and running schools, instead of picking apart each other's work or championing the latest fashion as the only way children can learn. We need to use the fundamental tools of our profession—research and assessment—more often to learn about what works and where it works. Our judgment about the work of others should be based on what we can learn through educational assessment, not whether they conform to the same approaches we support. We need to advocate less for our own methods and more for our profession as a whole.
As the premier education leadership association in the United States, ASCD plays a pivotal role as a forum for the exchange of ideas, especially on what programs are really working, how we measure schools effectively, and what educational practices—whether brand new or well established—make sense for children. ASCD should be an advocate for its members, especially those who have taken risks to test new ideas and who have, as a result, fallen prey to public misunderstanding and political factionalism. Instead of waging or defending against constant political skirmishes, we should be engaged in more serious dialogue.
Knowledge-based professions build upon what has come before; they don't automatically reject what has come before without due cause. We should be collegial about what works and what doesn't, and with an open-book policy on data so we really know what we're talking about. ASCD should encourage this collegiality throughout its broad membership as a real innovation—one that can have profound benefits for children and schools everywhere.
