Yesterday, I met with the School of Education Faculty to discuss the current situation with school reform, teacher education, and ways in which Trinity might take a more prominent role in contributing to new models for educational success in our city.   The faculty is eager to move ahead with genuine transformation of our work in education and counseling — and great ideas abound!  Secretary Duncan's call to action is resonating at Trinity, and this will have a very productive long-term impact on our effectiveness in educating school leaders, teachers, counselors and others.

Dr. Amy Brereton wrote a comment on my previous blog about Secretary Duncan's speech at Columbia, and what she has to say is so important that I'm bringing it forward for consideration here, see below….. And, what do YOU think?   Please join this discussion by clicking on the "comments" link below, or send me your thoughts in an email to president@trinitydc.edu

Here's Dr. Brereton's comment:

Secretary Duncan's speech at Columbia Teacher's College has provided us (schools of education) with an opportunity to reflect on the work we do. Like President McGuire, I agree with several of the points Secretary Duncan made. The faculty in Trinity’s School of Education have embraced this opportunity to discuss our work and how we can continue to support and train the excellent teacher candidates enrolled in our programs. We have identified a need for collaboration.

A culture of blame has dominated discussions about education in the United States. Children are blamed. Parents are blamed. President McGuire’s blog describes the unproductive blame that has been heaped on teachers. Secretary Duncan’s address indicates that schools of education are to blame. This culture of blame cultivates division and operates from a deficit perspective.

It is imperative that we move beyond blame. Parents, teachers, schools of education, and children all have powerful expertise that can inform and transform educational practices. The most innovative and impressive educational approaches and models (i.e. Waldorf, Froeble, Reggio Emilia, Montessori) view children as strong learners, parents as essential partners, and teachers as capable professionals.

We face incredible challenges. We have some choices. We can continue to face these challenges in isolation, doing all we can to deflect the blame that is flung at us, or we can take collective ownership of our children’s education. We can continue looking to the ‘other’ as the source of ‘school failure’, or we can take heart in knowing that we have vast resources at our disposal in the form of parents, teachers, schools of education, and children…especially children.

Unfortunately, collaboration is not easy to achieve. It demands parity. Are we ready to listen and consider the opinions of parents and children with the same level of seriousness that we listen to and consider the views of policy makers? As the faculty’s response to President McGuire’s blog indicates, we recognize the need for civil discourse about improving education and we are keen to take our seat at the discussion table. The question is: What must we do to ensure that we are not sitting there alone?

The faculty in Trinity's School of Education have responded collectively and individually to my previous blog on the state of teacher education and Secretary Duncan's remarks.   While they posted their response on the "comments" section of the last blog, I think what they have to say is so important that I'm reposting it here:

Dear President McGuire,

We in the School of Education whole-heartedly agree with your position regarding who will teach! Teacher bashing is entirely unproductive, as is the non-inclusive approach that Chancellor Michelle Rhee seems to be taking as she attempts to implement the worthy goal of improving the District of Columbia Public Schools. We also agree that to address the school problem without addressing the context in which many students live is not a realistic approach to school reform. Pretending that good teachers alone can solve the problems in DCPS won’t get the job done. Schools do not exist in a vacuum; historic, socio-economic, and political factors including the legacies of racism and disenfranchisement have contributed to their troubles. School reform should be a part of a comprehensive plan to address poverty, adult illiteracy, and all the related issues.

Nonetheless, as educators, we must do what we can in the areas in which we have influence. And we can improve the outcomes for many of the students in our school system. Research points to smaller class sizes, extended school day and year, summer enhancement programs, and wrap-around social services as important contributors to student success. Some districts have found success in intra-district integration while others have decreased the achievement gap through developing high-functioning magnet schools. We know how to be more successful in schools. Whether we have the political will and the courage to collaborate with all stakeholders, including students, are the issues that restrain us.

As you know, faculty members in the School of Education are in the process of re-envisioning our programs to respond to the needs of today’s students and educators. In addition to a more collaborative approach to preparing educators who can work with children holistically and working to better merge theory and practice, we are also talking about what it means to be an advocate for children. On this note, one idea that was floated in a recent meeting was for Trinity to host a forum on what it means to have a child-centered educational system in the District of Columbia. We hear both the City Council and the Chancellor talk about how much they care about the children. They are not alone. In the spirit of true collaboration and inclusivity, we would like to open the discussion on how best to educate our children. Let’s hear from the community, from students and their family members, from teachers and administrators, and other interested parties in the city. Trinity is known for acting locally on its mission of global leadership. We believe a forum that would bring together people with differing views in a civil discussion would benefit the children by galvanizing adults to act more constructively.

Trinity EDU Faculty

Individual faculty also posted comments on the previous blog, and if you want to add your own comments, please click on the "comment" link below and post…. I'm especially interested to hear from students and graduates of our School of Education!

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a provocative address on the future of teacher education when he appeared at Columbia Teachers College on October 22.   Everyone involved in Trinity's School of Education — all faculty and students here, our graduates and partners in the field, our colleagues who take continuing education courses — ALL should read Secretary Duncan's speech and think about how Trinity should respond.   I encourage you to post your comments publicly to this blog, comment link below, or send me an email message with your thoughts if you don't want to post publicly.

I agree with many of the points Secretary Duncan makes.   I especially agree with him on the point that improving public education is THE civil rights issue of our times.   The future strength of our society and vitality of our economic and social institutions depends on great teaching and learning, starting in the earlierst grades.   The ability of individuals to enjoy economic security and the rights and privileges of this democracy depends heavily on their educational attainment.  All of us who work in higher education need to accept a special responsibility to make excellence in teacher education a top instituitonal priority.   Arthur Levine, the former president of Columbia Teachers College, had an interesting column in the Washington Post about Duncan's speech.

While agreeing with much that Secretary Duncan has to say, there are certain parts of the current political milieu for improving teacher education that we have to call out from beneath the rocks where serious dysfunctions are lurking — and threatening to wreck any efforts to reform the system.

For starters, teacher-bashing must stop immediately.   Sure, there are problem teachers — but when I hear a politician or corporate CEO bashing teachers (as I often do at the many educational convenings that are my occupational hazard) and then I reflect on the troubles that some politicians and corporate leaders have visited upon our society and economy, I have to call out that particular brand of hubris.  Just as there are great CEOs and some terrible, corrupt businesspeople (and media pundits and lawmakers and school system administrators), so, too there are great teachers and some bad ones — and the bad ones will not become great ones by bashing everyone else.    However, the great and good teachers will (and have) become demoralized and increasingly ineffective when the constant drumbeat is criticism and dismissal of their voices in the discussion of the challenges of educational reform.

Get rid of bad teachers, absolutely; but do not drive out the good ones by scorning all of them.   Do not discourage the rising generation of potential teachers by sending the message that if they choose this profession, criticism and disparagement will be their constant companions.   Who will teach if we keep sending these hopelessly negative messages?

As a corollary, stop dismissing as wholly irrelevant the pupil's home environment.   I've heard so many educational "experts" dismiss as "excuses" legitimate and deeply serious problems that impede the ability of children to learn successfully.   "All research shows" is one of the most tired sentence openings in the educational reform playbook.   That phrase comes up in just about every official talk — high quality teachers will educate students regardless of the child's environment, they say, but many experienced (and high quality) teachers would beg to differ.  We have all kinds of special care and concern for students with physical and intellectual and emotional disabilities — but if a child is abused or hungry or saw his mother beaten up the previous evening or watched his brother die in a hail of bullets, we are told, "No excuses!"

Excuse me.  Elegant educational reform plans created by educational elites need real world tempering and tailoring, as so many well-intentioned-but-naive urban school reform efforts have proven.   Those of us who have some modest real-world experience with the results of failed urban public schools are not puppets for the teachers unions when we say that the reform plan must also include action plans to counter at least some of the effects of poverty, racism, classism, violence, familial drug abuse, parental illiteracy, teen pregnancy and the hardcore generational skepticism of institutions that diminishes the lifetime ambitions of too many children and youth.    Too many children are raised in households where educational attainment is actively discouraged.   Too many girls (the mothers and principal parents of the next generations) are specifically and sometimes brutally prevented from pursuing their dreams of a college education — so they drop out before finishing high school.

Educational reform must include the education of parents.  This brings me to the situation in D.C.   More than 35% of the adults in D.C. are functionally illiterate — this in the capital of the free world, a city that also has the highest per capita rate of advanced degrees in the nation.   The adults who cannot read are the parents of the children in the public schools where the eyes of an entire nation are focused on the unfolding drama of educational reform.   In the boiling cauldron of argumentation over what works and what doesn't, who's at fault and who's going to fix it, there seems to be no time and no forum for discussion of something as important and useful as upgrading adult education to address the adult illiteracy problem in our nation's capital.  Yet, "all research shows" (!!) that when Mom can read, the children will learn to read, and the educational level of parents has a direct positive impact on the educational attainment of children.

If I had Secretary Duncan in my office right now (I might even do some dusting for that!), I'd like to ask him to take the lead in convening the D.C. Education Summit that Washington Post Writer Valerie Strauss calls for today in her column on the skirmish this week between D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the D.C. Council.  I'd ask him to include the local Schools of Education in that summit, since we have not generally been included in any of the discussion of educational reform in our city.   Standards for D.C. teacher certification have changed considerably, with little input from the universities — we tried to participate, but somehow the notices of the hearings last year often arrived the night before the meetings.   Efforts to get various meetings with public officials have been difficult, as the article this weekend about the UDC situation reveals  — there's just not a lot of dialogue going on among the educational leadership of the city broadly.

Trinity educates more D.C. residents than any other private university in the nation.  We know a little something about the educational challenges of this city.   We are as concerned as anyone with making public education in the nation's capital a highly successful venture for students and teachers alike — we are "all about the kids" as fervently as local leaders say they are, but we also know that a healthy educational environment must pay attention to, listen to, respect and learn from ALL of the stakeholders and participants in the total process of education.   We ALL own that process, not just the various discrete parts we play.   The health of the educational environment is everyone's responsibility — let's find more productive ways to clean it up.   Secretary Duncan's call to action is a good place to start.

Read:  Jay Mathews on Summer School

Read:  Robert McCartney on Michelle Rhee

Read:  Marion Brady's "10 False Assumptions"

Maybe it's just because Halloween is tomorrow, but the news has been full of scary things this week.  And I'm not even counting the Redskins.  As if you needed more reasons to hoard your Hershey's Kisses from the trick or treaters so that you can curl up on the couch and enjoy them yourself, here's just a short list of recent scary headlines:

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Occasionally on life's journey, we are fortunate to cross paths with someone so extraordinary that we find ourselves walking along the way with her, heedless of direction but feeling that, somehow, we must be heading to the right place.  Before I met Sue Ann Shay in 1988 — before I became Trinity's president, but when I was first a member of our Board of Trustees and she joined our board — I had never met a Sister of Notre Dame who was also a lawyer.  Or a sailor.  Or such a talented professional woman who had heard the call to her vocation at mid-life.   I knew many Sisters of Notre Dame who were passionate about the congregation's mission in action for social justice, but few left me as routinely astonished with her firey commitment to the world's underdogs as Sue Ann Shay.   We became fast friends, and soon co-conspirators in our belief that our beloved alma mater, Trinity, should embrace new directions for the education of the world's women as a matter of social justice.

When I learned that Sue Ann died last week after a long illness, I smiled at the thought that she was now, at once, at peace after a long struggle, but also probably raising hell in heaven about some injustice on the other side of those pearly gates.  She surely would not sit around for long letting some souls have great mansions while others have only small flats.   She might have a word with St. Peter, or even The Boss, about equalizing housing opportunity up there.

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