Activist in (teacher) training: Educator training programs need to do their part

Abstract

In Trump’s America, the profession of education is under attack. The privatization of public schools and the deprofessionalization of professional teachers has become even more dire than in the past. In this article, the authors discuss the need for preparing future teachers to embark on their careers in such an inhospitable time. They believe that part of the role of teacher educators should shift into preparing teachers to be activist educators as well as professional educators. The authors use concrete examples to discuss why and how teacher education programs should help prepare pre-service teachers to be activist educators.

Introduction

In Trump’s America, the profession of education is under attack. The nomination and subsequent confirmation of businesswoman, campaign donor, and charter-school proponent Betsy DeVos acts as a bellwether for the next four years. That an individual with no experience in public schools, either as a parent or as an educator, was even considered, let alone confirmed, is troubling (Strauss, 2016). The privatization of public schools and the deprofessionalization of teaching has become even more dire than in the past.

The attack on teachers and public schools is not new. Ronald Reagan’s administration was certainly not the first to politicize American public education, but his Secretary of Education, TH Bell, was the first to expressly look at teachers as people to blame. The 1983 publication A nation at risk, controversial at the time of publication, was seen by many in the field of education as a direct attack on teachers, and is considered the first brush with mistrusting teachers to do their jobs (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). This mistrust persisted within the culture through the early 2000s. Similarly, the advent of No Child Left Behind under George W Bush in 2001 led to an increasing pressure on teacher professional identities (Barrett, 2009) and ushered in the era of charter schools. And, of course, we have Common Core and Race to the Top, a push for national standards, pitting states against each other for increased funding throughout K–12 education, spearheaded by the Obama administration. While, on the surface, Common Core and Race to the Top could be seen as an empowering process for teachers and the public school system, instead what has occurred in school district after school district is an over-reliance of administrators on a boxed curriculum and a further distrust of professional teachers to know how to teach.

Why “teacher activists”?

The current political climate in the USA is not only inhospitable to a professional workforce; it actively encourages the deprofessionalization of the vocation of classroom teaching. Through the push toward the privatization of public schools through an increased role for charter schools and organizations, the checks and balances which are in place in each state to assure an educated and professional teaching populace are being actively eroded. As Valerie Strauss points out in her Washington Times article:

[Betsy Devos] is, in essence, a lobbyist—someone who has used her extraordinary wealth to influence the conversation about education reform, and to bend that conversation to her ideological convictions despite the dearth of evidence supporting them. The DeVoses have helped private interests commandeer public money that was intended to fulfill the state’s mandate to provide compulsory education. The family started the Great Lakes Education Project, whose political action committee does the most prolific and aggressive lobbying for charter schools. (Strauss, 2016)

Charter schools are not the only way policymakers are circumventing a professional teaching force; voucher systems that would divert funding from public schools to private ones are another favorite of the current administration. School vouchers are state-funded scholarships that parents can use to send their children to the school of their choice, including private schools and religiously affiliated schools. Before the election, candidate Trump called school choice the new civil rights issue of our time. However, as the vouchers allow parents to use public money to pay for private schools, the voucher system would undermine the vital function of public schools, which are open and non-discriminatory in their acceptance of all students, including those with disabilities, those who are gifted, and those who are English language learners. Indeed, the vouchers divert desperately needed resources away from public schools without offering any actual reforms (Arsen et al., 2015; Bifulco and Reback, 2011; MGT of America, 2014, 2016).

Privatization in and of public education is not a unique trend to the USA but has been reported in countries across the globe (Ball and Youdell, 2009). Similar to the US charter school and voucher programs, for instance, the academy school program in the UK has been criticized as creeping privatization of the state school system. Academies are independent schools that receive funding directly from the central government instead of the local school authority. As such policies to promote privatization are often introduced as necessary solutions to the problems and deficiencies of public education (Ball and Youdell, 2009), the policy that promoted academies originally aimed to improve struggling schools (Learning and Skills Act, 2000). However, the charitable bodies called academy trusts, composed of people from a variety of backgrounds such as businesses, faith communities, higher education, and individual philanthropists, have been criticized for having inadequate financial use and governance of schools. Additionally, with better facilities and fewer students in economic distress (Andrews et al., 2017), academies tend to attract better teaching staff and middle-class families, while denying pupils from low socio-economic status or who struggle academically. While it is true that post-2010 data seems to show an increase in pupil test scores, it is impossible to know if this is a result of the educational approach of the academies’ programs or “a result of competitive pressures or other interventions targeting schools likely to be subject to ‘forced’ sponsored academy conversion” (Andrews et al., 2017: 16). As a result, this has created an ever widening gap between academy schools and other schools in the community, increasing educational inequalities based on social class and academic ability.

Accompanied by privatization, a number of countries have introduced performance-based evaluation and/or pay for teachers, in which teachers are evaluated using student test scores (Ball and Youdell, 2009). This has had negative consequences for teachers’ job satisfaction and morale, and resulted in a deprofessionalization of teachers (Ball, 2003). Performance-based evaluation along with privatization also leads schools to try to attract students with higher academic achievement while avoiding students who have special needs or who are English language learners. Schools which fail to attract “valued” students experience poorer resources and personnel, and thus have greater difficulty in terms of achieving performance benchmarks (Ball and Youdell, 2009: 78). These patterns grow gaps between higher and lower socio-economic groups, as well as between ethnic majorities and particular minority groups. In fact, privatization, like choice and vouchers, has led to increased social segregation.

There is no clear basis that supports the argument that privatized schooling is better in terms of students’ performance and achievement. For instance, research on voucher programs in Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio has reported that the voucher programs actually lowered the academic achievement of the students (Abdulkdiroglu et al., 2015; Figlio and Karbownik, 2016; Mills and Wolf, 2016; Waddington and Berends, 2015 ). The US Department of Education has also reported that the District of Columbia (DC) voucher program was proven ineffective and failed to improve educational outcomes for students, especially those who were from schools in need of improvement (Wolf et al., 2010). The Department of Education report further proclaimed that the voucher program had no effect on student satisfaction, motivation, or engagement, or on student views of school safety.

Charter schools and private schools are often not required to hire professionally certified teachers, and are allowed in most states to set the criteria they will use for teacher qualifications “in-house” (Education Commission of the States, 2017). As a result, these underqualified teachers are often paid less than licensed teachers, further depressing the already low wages afforded to classroom teachers. While licensure or certification is not necessarily the only means to produce a brilliant teacher, the process of licensure does require candidates to pass some sort of teacher education program, and in some way demonstrate competency in their area of expertise. Teaching is a profession that requires a high level of competency in academic content, knowledge, and the application of learning theories, and a high level of emotional intelligence. For deep, meaningful learning to occur in the classroom, professional teachers must simultaneously control and give up control of the learning for their students. Contextualize the need for certification in this way: many other professions require some sort of license. For example, lawyers, real estate agents, medical assistants, and accountants must all adhere to professional licensing standards. Imagine if nurses were allowed to learn on the job, without ever taking a class on the practice of nursing care? However, when it comes to teaching, there seems to be an underlying belief that anyone can teach.

The deprofessionalization of teachers affects how society perceives teachers and school education, and how it treats teaching professionals, their job status, and salaries. This can be a recipe for lowering the quality of the education system. Before Finland became a country with one of the most reputable education systems, it faced a crisis, with low-quality education and large inequalities in education similar to what the US education system is facing currently. However, the way it tackled the crisis was different from what the USA is heading toward now. Finland professionalizes teachers by investing heavily in teacher preparation programs and, as a result, elevates teachers’ job status and the quality of education (Darling-Hammond, 2010). Indeed, the education reforms undertaken by high-performing countries such as Finland, China, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan all emphasized strong teacher education programs by increasing investments and ongoing professional development for teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Zhao, 2009). The professionalization of teachers helps society perceive teachers as experts who know how to lead children’s learning and development (Hargreaves et al., 2006). This should naturally lead communities, families, and students to trust, value, and respect teachers as high-performance professionals. If teacher education programs want to ensure the quality of education, reversing the deprofessionalization of teachers is a critical first step (Mathis and Welner, 2015).

The current global trend in educational practice and policy that promotes deprofessionalization of teaching professions and privatizations in and of public education is strongly influenced by neo-liberal ideology, which emphasizes the values of market efficiency, individual self-interest, and liberty (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010; Ross and Gibson, 2007). Neo-liberal education reforms emphasize creating more efficient and effective education systems by narrowing the curriculum and pedagogy, evaluation, and accountability (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). They employ an “outcomes-based bureaucratic” accountability system relying heavily on the results of high-stakes testing (Ross and Gibson, 2007: 4), accompanied by policies that punish low-performing students, teachers, and schools instead of providing the necessary supports (Darling-Hammond, 2010). These accountability-driven and investment-based decision-making systems are the foundation of neo-liberalism (Ball, 2015). Neo-liberal education reforms also stress international competitions and use the results from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to inform “consumers” about how well their system is doing (Grek et al., 2009). The PISA reports influence policy debates as high international rankings are believed to have a strong link with competitive economics (Grek et al., 2009).

In this overall context, teachers feel pressured to teach to the test and rush through instructional materials by following strict implementation guides. As the growth of a nationally adopted “boxed curriculum” has increased, teachers are less likely than ever to be “allowed” to modify lessons to best meet the diverse needs of their learners, but instead are pressured to implement the curriculum “with fidelity.” Trust in the ability of teachers to meet their classroom’s needs has diminished. The use of a scripted and narrow “boxed curriculum” is one of the three main influences on teacher deprofessionalization (Mathis and Welner, 2015).

The privatization of public education has major power over the way in which education is organized, managed, and delivered. The privatization of education and deprofessionalization of the teaching profession also has profound implications for the future of teachers’ careers, pay, and status, the nature of their work, their degree of control over the educational process, and the identities of what it means to be a teacher (Ball and Youdell, 2009). Privatization reforms change what is important and valued and necessary in education. In order to prepare future teachers to embark on their careers during such an inhospitable time, we believe that part of our role as teacher educators should shift into preparing teachers to be activist educators who stand for the profession’s rights and practices, and defend education as a public service that protects children’s right to access quality education.

Defining the “teacher activist”

Now that we have introduced the “why” for teacher activists, we must define what we are talking about when we say “teacher activist.” By popular definition, an activist is seen as someone who stands up for their personally held beliefs in a way that is very public. In dictionary terms, “activist” is also one of those words which can be a noun (“an advocate for a cause”) or an adjective (“advocating or opposing an issue”). ¹ Often, the action is seen through protests, written letters, and other widely viewed tangible objects. Think about the Women’s March on DC, the March for Life in the same area, the March for Science, and the marches nationally supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. Activism has taken on a new normalcy in our collective culture. It is not abnormal today for an individual to have a very strongly held set of beliefs and adhere to those beliefs very firmly.

Drawing from the work of Quinn and Carl (2015), we have constructed a list of the dispositions necessary for a teacher to be an effective, engaged activist. For the purpose of this article, we will define a teacher activist as the following:

A professional teacher who stands up for their individual rights as well as the profession’s rights.

A professional teacher who does not advocate just for the needs of children, but for overall developmentally appropriate practices in teaching.

A professional teacher who does not leave advocacy to the bigger union groups at the national and state level, or rely on the school administration to act on their behalf locally, but instead advocates in their individual community in a public way.

A professional teacher who understands that there are risks in being a teacher activist and acknowledges and accepts those risks.

In our experience as teacher educators, we have come to realize just how much influence trainers of teachers have on the perceptions of good practice in the classroom of future educators. The issue is not between the children and teacher, or the instructional methods and approaches that are best for children and families, but instead between the policies—both state and federal—and the way local school boards interpret and implement those policies (Quinn and Carl, 2015). Since the A nation at risk report (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), US educational policies have been transformed to focus strongly on academic achievement as the result of school education, and academic outcomes have been directly related to national economic growth (Mehta, 2013). Educational reforms have introduced an accountability system, coupled with increased control over schooling by the federal government. Classroom instructions have been controlled by top-down policies of standards, high-stakes testing, external assessments, and rewards and consequences for teachers and schools based on external test scores (Ball, 2003; Mehta, 2013). We have seen a substantive shift in both state and federal understanding of what makes good teachers and an educated populace. From our perspective, children seem to be erased and dehumanized in much of the current policy, and this has become even more evident under the current administration’s priorities. The policies that evaluate teachers and schools based on standardized test scores ignore the very core of human nature: diversity (Dorn, 2007). Each child experiences his/her development at a different pace and in a different way, and each child experiences learning differently. However, the bureaucratic accountability system pushes schools or school districts to use a scripted, boxed curriculum and values shallow academic achievement measured by standardized testing. It dehumanizes the learning process of each student and a diverse way of development and growth of the child. The standards-based reform also emphasizes the “data” of students’ learning rather than the education of a whole child (Dorn, 2007).

Politicians whose own ambitions in education are often tied up with other political interests tend to focus on short-term improvement. The government has largely been driven by an economic agenda to be able to compete in the global market when it considers education, and it has tended to forget about individual students’ holistic education. The government’s attempt to improve education through an intense competition based on standardized testing has accelerated inequalities in education and the deprofessionalization of educators. Pre-service teachers have grown up in this standardized system. They could become complicit and sometimes beneficiaries of this system without realizing it. They might unreflectively and competitively take responsibility for working harder, faster, and better to feed the system as part of their sense of personal worth and their estimation of the worth of others (Ball, 2015; Meng, 2009; Robinson, 2012). This accelerates the construction of their own oppression, as if the caged bird helped build its own cage (Gibson, 1999). Our role as teacher educators should be to help teachers understand the need to be an activist for what they know to be best for themselves, for their students, and for their craft.

As Paulo Freire (1980), a Brazilian educator and philosopher whose theoretical framework has been widely employed by teacher activism around the globe, repeatedly insisted, no system of education is neutral (see also Gibson, 1999). “The activity of teaching is an inescapably political process” (Montaño et al., 2002: 266). School education is designed for and taught to serve the political agenda of the dominant culture and the elite (Freire, 1980). What we teach and how we teach it is shaped by that political agenda. Equally, education practices can be a democratic, egalitarian weapon to change the system and the political agenda (Freire, 1973, 1980). What teachers do matters. What teacher educators’ vision for the future is, and how we communicate that to our pre-service teachers, influences their wishes for their future and the future of the teaching profession and education system.

Training “teacher activists” in educator programs

Training teachers to think like activists requires teacher educators to both design assignments to prepare students to think about their greater role as teachers and to step back and allow students to find their own voices and causes. It is not necessarily teaching students “what to think and do,” but rather preparing them to evaluate problems, information, political climates, and legislative movements with activist eyes so that they can advocate for children, themselves, and the education profession. It is because of this juxtaposition of needs that we have included some specific, concrete examples.

Modified from the social problems literacy proposed by Lowry (2016) for teaching social engagement, we have created a set of skills that pre-service teachers need in order to develop their activism literacy:

Identify and locate information about the problem around public education.

Evaluate the information.

Recognize multiple and complex social and political processes, patterns, and dynamics through which conditions become widely recognized as problematic.

Formulate one’s own view of the problem, including its causes, consequences, and potential resolutions.

Publicly, compellingly, and with integrity present one’s understandings, views, and opinions on the troubling condition and potential solutions.

Merely presenting these competencies is not enough; teacher education programs also must develop these competencies in their pre-service students. Since we believe that the end goal of teacher activism is to teach teachers how to think and advocate for solutions, and not to teach others what to think, the assignments detailed below are specifically designed to assess all the social literacy competencies listed above and give pre-service teachers multiple, diverse ways to demonstrate their competence. Additionally, the assignments have been designed to increase students’ confidence in their activist abilities. While there are multiple assignments and activities that could be used for this end, we have detailed some ideas that provide pre-service teachers with opportunities to practice these competencies.

Fake news 101

It is critical for teacher activists to locate appropriate and reliable information related to the problem. As the “fake news” epidemic since the 2016 presidential election has alerted us to the dangers of trusting unreliable information, it is important for college students to learn how to identify valid information. As college educators, we must encourage students to become fact-checkers. We can apply the concept of triangulation, which is a qualitative research method technique that validates certain data through cross-verification from two or more sources (Carter et al., 2014), to teach students to collect multiple sources to validate information. However, just verifying fake information is not enough, but detecting bias, missing points of view, misleading positions, and economic influences behind the information is necessary to critically evaluate the information and develop problem-solving lenses.

As a first step, students need to stay connected with up-to-date sources of information. Faculty in teacher education programs could assign students to sign up for SmartBrief and weekly e-newsletters from leading organizations such as the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development or the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), as two examples. ² Students “like” organizations or political figures (e.g. the National Association of Special Education Teachers, Betsy DeVos, US Senator Elizabeth Warren, state boards of education, the US Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the National Education Association) on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.

The next step is an entrance discussion. Start the class with a short discussion on a topic of the week of the students’ choice from SmartBrief, weekly e-newsletters, social media newsfeeds, or Twitter, as discussed previously. Students take turns picking a topic each week. The student has to collect information from at least three different sources, and one of them must come from the opposite side. In this discussion, students are encouraged to evaluate the information and discuss the complexity of the problems through social and political processes, patterns, and dynamics. This discussion must involve asking the following questions: Who is the author? What is the author’s position? What is the purpose? What is the context? The discussion on the context must include political, cultural, social, and historical contexts (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). Then, each student writes his/her own view, questions, and/or potential solutions, and sends them or posts them as a comment to the political figures or organizations/or organizations via text message.

Using a professional code of ethics to inform advocacy

The next assignment we suggest is attached to a professional organization for teachers (National Education Association, National Association for the Education of Young Children, The Commission on English Language Accreditation (CEA), CEC or others) and its code of professional ethics. Most professional organizations include guidance for advocacy. Faculty in teacher education programs could use case studies for students to practice an ethical approach to advocacy. Perhaps an in-class debate, where students can also practice making an argument, would be the culminating assignment for the lesson. Knowing about the political system and their place within it, pre-service teachers should also be scaffolded in the political hierarchy of the US education system.

Promoting teacher-activist literacy in critical communication and advocacy

One of the important skills as an activist is to communicate one’s thoughts and opinions effectively, so that one’s voice is heard or understood by the people who one is fighting against or working together with. Becoming familiar and fluent with activism languages is the first step. For instance, special educators know that teaching specific languages of self-advocacy to students with autism-spectrum disorders is critical for them to advocate for themselves. It is not only teaching them what to say, but how to say something effectively. Teacher education can do the same to prepare pre-service teachers to be knowledgeable with activism languages and how to present them.

Faculty in teacher education programs could assign students to gather “talking points” documents from different activist groups and organizations, and find the common languages they use. For instance, to oppose the Better Care Reconciliation Act, which was the proposed Senate bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act in 2017, several organizations have created “talking points” and resources that people can use to contact senators or attend town-hall meetings to voice their concerns. ³ Teacher educators can let students analyze and discuss what kinds of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs were used, and how and why those words could effectively communicate their messages. If there is an opportunity, students could write a letter themselves to contact senators or attend a town-hall meeting to practice their activism languages.

Students could actually run a town-hall meeting as part of a course project. The active learning exercise Lowry (2016) proposed to promote public presentation of social problems could be used for pre-service teachers to have first-hand experience being activists advocating themselves. Lowry (2016: 183) suggested letting students “name a current campus issue in public terms, frame it in a way meaningful to diverse campus populations, and devise questions that allow for inclusive deliberation.” In this exercise, allowing students to choose the issue they are really interested in and they want to advocate for change is important. The activism project does not have to be related to education at this point. Learning how to plan and run an activism event and use activism languages should be the focus of this exercise. Once they have experience of being activists and advocating to improve the situation, they are more likely to feel confident participating in or leading activist events or organizations in the future. Through this process, they can develop and transform their identity as activists (Montaño et al., 2002). By reflecting through this experience, students can analyze critical communication skills for advocacy and effective ways to act to solve actual issues. If there is an opportunity for students to run a town-hall meeting related to school education, it could be a great project for an education course.

Conclusions

Teaching as a profession can be defined as a career for the greater good. Teachers work for children. Their jobs are to help facilitate not only academic learning, but also social, emotional, and physical development, as well as to scaffold the younger generation into the leaders of tomorrow. Since children are traditionally a marginalized population who do not have the same rights as adults under the US Constitution, activism for practices in the classroom that will help them grow and develop falls to the teacher. Also, one of the necessary roles of teachers is to defend education as a public service that promotes greater equality in society. As UNESCO’s Reason for hope stated:

Education is a right, not a privilege or a favour. Children’s rights are a collective responsibility; public education is the key element in democratic public policies … Good quality public schools, open to all, contribute to social cohesion through the integration of children from different social, religious, or ethnic groups. (UNESCO, 2001: 26)

Pre-service teachers should be given training not only in teaching, but also in advocacy. It is not widely regarded as the role of a teacher education program to help professional teachers navigate this role as an activist. Teacher education programs are generally focused on what makes good teaching, the content knowledge teachers must acquire, and practicing the art of teaching through a mentored model. However, as faculty who teach within a teacher education program, we believe that this focus is exactly what makes teacher-activist training a likely next step.

Teachers who are also activists are more likely to feel a sense of agency and power in their classrooms (Quinn and Carl, 2015). There seems to be a body of research supporting teacher activism as a cultural-shift creator and as in need of a group dynamic to be effective in enacting change. Indeed, that there is still a debate as to whether teaching is indeed professionalized amongst policymakers demonstrates why teacher training programs must step up and begin advocating for their programs to become teacher-activist training programs (Sachs, 2003). We believe that the way to instill the importance of participation in activism is before teachers enter professional practice and are still considered pre-service. As Barbara Madeloni (2014: 15) states: “we need to challenge entrenched institutional norms in the academy, including norms of politeness, decorum, and ostensible neutrality.”

System change can emerge from what professionals do at ground level. Education is a grass-roots process (Robinson, 2015). Teachers are, indeed, the system for their students, and education happens in each classroom by an individual teacher. It is imperative for teacher education programs to explicitly communicate this idea with pre-service teachers. We believe that by helping pre-service teachers internalize this before they enter the workforce, they will understand that they have the power to make the system change. This will help empower them to practice their professional judgement in their classrooms, as well as the larger system. “If you’re involved in education in any way you have three options: you can make changes within the system, you can press for changes to the system, or you can take initiatives outside the system” (Robinson, 2015: xxv). Teacher education programs should understand that everyone has an obligation to teach students who are becoming teachers that they will operate in this system, and that they can be agents of change.