Reviving Our Democracy and Revitalizing Our Schools and Communities: Reframing the Work of Teachers by Dr. Brian Charest

This post was adapted from the forthcoming book, Civic Literacy in Schools and Communities: Teaching and Organizing for a Revitalized Democracy, published by Teachers College Press. 

What’s my job, again?

There is an old joke that teachers like to tell about teaching. It goes something like this: I signed up to be a science (or a math, or an English) teacher, but instead I became a psychologist, a nurse, a disciplinarian, a parent, a brother or sister, a social worker, a referee, a confidante, a role model, a guidance counselor, a life coach, and a mentor. I’m sure, if you wanted, you could add more roles to this list. This joke interests me for two reasons: first, the joke says something important about what many people think the job of teaching is all about; and, secondly, this anecdote makes it very clear that a lot of people (lots of teachers, too) believe that teaching really isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about any of the things listed above. It seems that for many people, teaching is simple enough: it is about giving something (our knowledge and skills) to someone else (our students). Perhaps more interestingly, though, the joke suggests that despite what many people think teaching is supposed to be about, it turns out that in practice it is already about something else.

This piece is about that something else. More specifically, it is about challenging our collective assumptions about what teaching is, as well as what it could be about, and why we might want to do it differently. This post responds to the questions that the anecdote above presumes to answer: How should we define the role of the teacher? Where should the job of the teacher begin and end? What do we assume about students and their communities when we define the role of teacher in only certain ways? And, given the often impossible odds that teachers and students face in many of our underresourced schools and communities, what should teachers and students spend their time doing, and why?

Exploring questions like these means interrogating what we believe about the purposes of schooling and the role of teachers in our schools and communities. It means interrogating our ideas about what it means to prepare students to live in a democracy. It also means questioning what we think makes someone a “good” teacher as well as what makes for a “good” school. How, for example, have we come to understand and define the role of the “good” student? Of equal importance, it means asking difficult questions about the three decades of failed education reforms in the US (Anyon, 2014; Lipman, 2011; Payne, 2008; Ravitch, 2014). It would also mean asking ourselves what we can honestly say to a low-income student of color who knows that when she graduates there will be no living-wage job for her in her community, and she will not have the skills or support to complete college (Marsh, 2011). 

When thinking about our work in schools, we might begin by asking ourselves what our most important concerns should be and how we should go about addressing them. Should we consider questions about systemic racism, inequality, and economic opportunity (or the lack of) in urban and rural spaces when we design schools and curricula? Should we ask tough questions about what real learning looks like, as well as how we do or do not provide opportunities for such learning in schools? Should we consider questions of how to prepare students to participate in a democracy? Or, as many have recently suggested, should we focus on raising standards and developing a uniform curriculum for all students, no matter where they live and no matter how few (or how many) resources their schools and communities might provide?          

Many of our fellow school reformers believe that all we need to do is teach students how to write good sentences and make good arguments and the rest will take care of itself. These educators often promote a “no excuses” approach to academic achievement, where students are punished for not living up to a set of external standards and rewarded if they do so. Of course, in this scenario, there’s no mention of the individual needs of students living at or below the poverty line, or students with disabilities, nor is there any mention of the collective concerns of local communities that may be suffering from a lack of economic opportunity, or from years of intentional disinvestment, or from a culture of violence and militarism, or racism and neglect, or police surveillance and brutality, or from the effects of the opioid, or some other, epidemic. As educators, we must confront the following questions: Should these things matter to us as we go about the work of doing school? Does it matter to us if the parents of our students are opioid addicts? Does it matter if we are living through a global pandemic and our students may not have reliable technology or internet access? What if the student has a parent or a sibling who is sick, or dying, or incarcerated? Should we ask teachers and schools to address any of these issues—to do more to help students, even when the job of teaching is almost an impossible one already? And, what are we to do when the needs and concerns of students and their communities conflict with official pronouncements about what schools and teachers should be doing from one day to the next?

Some years ago, when I began working as a high school teacher on the South Side of Chicago, I began to ask myself many of these questions. What was I attempting to do with my time in schools and why? Was it enough? Was I making a difference? What did my students think we should be doing? How was my work connected to promoting more democracy and justice, or the health and well-being of my students and their community? What would best prepare my students for the life they wanted to live? And, why didn’t we have more time or more resources to ask these questions and do this work? All of these questions, it seemed to me, were critical for understanding the work of an educator. Our work requires that we pay attention to the connections between our schools and communities and provide opportunities for our students to transform their world. As educators, we must continually return to the question of whether or not our practice aligns with our values. 

Curricular Assumptions: Who are your students?

When we take a step back and examine the approved curriculum given to us by our state or local district, we learn a lot about what our education system assumes about our students. But, educators need to consider what it means to make these assumptions about students. What, for example, do such assumptions miss or leave unsaid? When I was a younger teacher than I am now, I began a process of looking into these questions. The more I looked, the more frustrated I became. I felt overwhelmed and exhausted by the issues I saw around me. I wanted my students to have the same opportunities that students in well-resourced communities had, but how could I make this a reality? After all, I was just one teacher working with hundreds of students? Was I wasting my time thinking about these questions? Given the circumstances in our school and the surrounding community, I thought, maybe sticking to the official curriculum and just trying to get it right was the best that my students and I could hope for. The more I focused on finding solutions in the curriculum, though, the more I seemed to lose sight of my students and the lives they were living. In fact, the official curriculum often worked to erase the humanity of my students and encouraged me to ignore their life circumstances. The answers to the questions I was asking, it turned out, were not to be found in the official curriculum. All of this made me question why there were so many of us insisting on doing school in ways that have been proven to fail so many of our young people for so long (Anyon, 2014; Dewey, 1916/1997; Lipman, 2011; Love, 2019; Payne, 2008).     

Like any teacher starting out, I had access to official job descriptions, national and state standards, and curriculum plans, all of which were supposed to help me figure out what I was supposed to be doing and why. But, very few of the answers I gleaned from these official sources seemed to address the concerns that were seeping into our school from the community outside (concerns like unemployment, crime, gun violence, pollution, mass incarceration, racism, poor nutrition, mental and physical health issues, etc.). In fact, none of the answers that I was offered through official channels seemed to show any understanding of, or have any connection with, the realities that students, teachers, parents, and administrators faced on the South Side of Chicago where I worked.

The curriculum that I was given always assumed a mentally and physically healthy, well-resourced student who arrived to school well fed and well rested, and with all the necessary resources, ready to engage with the demands of traditional schooling and standardized examinations. And, what if they weren’t? What if this ideal student did not show up to my classroom in the morning? We were encouraged to adopt a “no excuses” approach to our teaching, which meant punishing kids for being poor, or without a home, or tired, or hungry, or injured, or traumatized, since those things were not really our concerns. Those were private (or individual) concerns to be dealt with by someone else at some other time. But, who? No matter, we were told. Get back to the work of teaching. Get back to the tests. We weren’t there to help students thrive, we were there to teach our academic subjects. In my case, that subject was English. So, I was supposed to teach students to read and write and communicate across various contexts. While my teacher education program had encouraged me to build relationships with students and parents and to teach in culturally relevant ways, nothing in that program had really prepared me to do the necessary work of helping students build the circumstances wherein they could thrive. Nothing had truly prepared me for teaching in a setting where the challenges that students faced in the community came into the school with them every day–where the realities of the neighborhood structured opportunity for so many of the young people I came to know.

While I understood the importance and necessity of mastering certain academic skills in order for students to succeed in school and in the workplace, my students and I were being sold the idea that the only way to achieve success in the world was to acquire this predetermined set of academic skills and escape the local neighborhood as quickly as possible. We weren’t there to nurture the mind, body, and spirit, or ask big questions about what it meant to be a good person or how to live in the world with others (hooks, 1994; Ginwright, 2016; Meyer, 2001). There wasn’t time for that, and, ultimately, we were told that wasn’t our job. We were there to give students something useful. By all accounts, that something useful was the set of skills that we believed students needed to get out of their neighborhood and succeed in college or the workplace. We encouraged them all the time to do just that: stay focused on the academic material so they could go away to college and leave the community behind.

I was struck by how different this was from what we told students in predominantly White, middle-class communities, where the notion of going to college was ubiquitous (no one really has to tell students), but the idea of getting as far away as possible from their community in order to succeed (or survive) was never part of these conversations. Success for students in middle and upper-middle class spaces meant learning the grammar of schooling (i.e., how to play the game of school) and taking standardized test that were designed to validate their economic and social positions, and then moving on to new spaces (i.e., colleges and universities) that looked a lot like the high school environments from which they were graduating. This made sense for students who came from well-resourced communities, where their parents could purchase tutors or send them to see a therapist when they needed additional help or support, and where things like summer camps and enrichment activities were the norm. And, where, for the most part, safety and security were not daily concerns.   

As a teacher working on the South Side of Chicago, I wondered how educators and administrators could suddenly be asked to imagine our school as a space that was so disconnected from place, particularly when this is never the case for middle and upper income schools and communities. In our most well-resourced communities, it goes without saying that the schools (as well as what goes on inside them) reflect the strengths, abundance, and priorities of those communities. We don’t often hear discussions about how well our public schools are doing in these spaces. The truth is, however, that there are many public schools in high wealth communities across the US that are succeeding extraordinarily well, especially if we consider graduation rates, test scores and college acceptance rates the most important measures of success. These schools are most often found in communities that are thriving and where enrichment opportunities, as well as second chances are plentiful. So, it took great imaginative effort for my fellow teachers and me, on the South Side of Chicago, to imagine that place didn’t matter, when the realities of the neighborhood were all around us.

I often wondered if we were really doing our students any favors by simply sticking to the college-prep curriculum, when for so many of our students, college was anything but a sure thing. Many educators are not taught the fact that only about 33 % of Americans have college degrees (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016). For youth of color, the statistics are even less promising: for Hispanics (age 25 and older), only 15.5 % of the total Hispanic population have a bachelor’s degree; for Black students (age 25 and older), that number is closer to 22.5 % (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016). Once you understand this reality, the question for educators and education leaders is this: If only 20 to 30 % of students can be expected to go to college and graduate with a degree, what is to be done with the remaining 70 to 80 % of students who will not graduate from college? If we take these statistics seriously, what are we really up to in schools across the US?

Some educators believe that speaking this truth (that most Americans, including many low-income and underserved youth of color, will not go to college and will not find high paying jobs, even if they graduate from high school) is doing a disservice to these students—that saying this is somehow lowering our expectations or promoting a sense of hopelessness. But, I believe the opposite to be true: I believe that ignoring this truth is more problematic (and damaging), because it perpetuates the false notion that wealth (or poverty) has no effect on student outcomes. The now famous phrase about the “soft bigotry of low expectations” belies a deeper and more cynical narrative within our hyper-individualist and consumerist culture: that all poor students, regardless of their circumstances, can compete with students in well-resourced schools. In other words, it reduces all successes (and all failures) to acts of individual effort in school, which we know is not true. This is the story that we tell our students about merit and success in America, and it’s one we need to confront in all its complexity.

The truth is that no one succeeds alone, that context and culture matters, and that all people make mistakes along the way. It’s also important to point out that academic success alone should not determine whether or not one can live a healthy and fulfilling life, or live in a safe and supportive community. We need a vision for schools and communities where people who want to go to college can go at little or no cost and where people who want to work can find jobs that pay more than a living wage. As Shawn Ginwright (2016) reminds us in his book, Hope and Healing in Urban Education, the community where one lives operates on individuals—the community is a space where opportunity can be nurtured or diminished:

There is a relationship between the structure of opportunity in urban        communities and collective well-being. Toxic policies and practices like zero-tolerance in schools and stop and frisk police practices result in accumulated trauma and ultimately erode young people’s sense of hope (p. 20).

Our vision must include a way forward to revitalize both schools and communities. We need to recognize that an individual’s successes, achievements, and learning are never solely the results of that one individual (Anyon, 2014: Ginwright, 2016; Dewey, 1916/1997; Love, 2019; West, 2017). As Dewey (1927/2016) notes in The Public and Its Problems, “Singular things act, but they act together. Nothing has been discovered which acts in entire isolation” (p. 22).

Yet, so often in our schools and classrooms we imagine the opposite: we valorize individual student achievement based on test scores, school assignments, college acceptance letters, etc., while downplaying (or ignoring) the myriad ways in which the neighborhood environment, peers, mentors, teachers, and parents have contributed to that student’s successes and well-being. We tend to elevate and then fixate on the individual, seeing individuals as the cause and the solution to all of our social problems, while diminishing the role that our communities can and do play in individual achievements and successes. If we insist on seeing our schools only in traditional ways—as sites for individual development in competition with others—we will continue to ignore the importance of social context and relationships with others in the work that we do. We will continue to miss out on the opportunity to work collectively to solve our most persistent problems.

Looking at the world through this lens of hyper-individualism is also a way of understanding teaching and learning as a competition between individuals and steers us away from addressing larger socioeconomic problems. This is the way most of us have been taught to view our work: students compete against each other, teachers compete against their colleagues, and, schools compete against each other. This way of understanding education also pushes us to see our disciplines and knowledge as fractured and separate from the experiences of our students and their communities. We need to move in a different direction: I want us to see our work in schools differently—I want us to acknowledge that what we do in our schools is connected to communities and to ideas about the public good and democratic participation (Ginwright, 2016, Horton, 1997; Simpson, 2012; Warren & Mapp, 2011); and, I want us to consider the health and well-being of our students and their communities as equally, if not more important than the academic subjects we teach. In other words, I want us to embrace the idea that we need to work with our students and their families to create healthy and sustainable communities—to see school and community development as reciprocal projects. I’m not saying that competition between individuals is inherently bad; what I am saying is that our first priority is to recognize that your success is tied to mine and that when you do well that’s good for me, too.

 The idea of teaching my students the academic skills that they need to succeed outside of their neighborhood, while certainly an understandable goal in our current political and economic climate, still strikes me as a rather narrow vision of our work as educators. In fact, this idea is really just a way of perpetuating a false promise of equal access and opportunity and a dishonest narrative of self-blame and personal failure. I say this because by sticking to this script that we have been given, it means that we can simply tell the majority of our students that the reason they aren’t going to Harvard is because they just didn’t work hard enough (i.e., they just lacked a growth mindset and sufficient grit to get in). This is the equivalent of telling students that whatever comes next in their lives is really their own doing and their own doing alone (and has nothing to do with social context or access to resources). As a society, we are condemning entire generations of children and young people to a lifetime of poverty and low wage work (or worse, lifelong incarceration), simply because (and for whatever reason) they did not excel academically at a young age. At the same time, we are telling these young people that they alone are to blame for this outcome. This, of course, is a denial of circumstances and context. It denies the power of systems that have produced persistent poverty and inequality and reduced these problems to individual concerns. This other side of the story is important and we need to tell it. We also need to challenge the idea that the only road to happiness and fulfillment is for our students to leave their neighborhoods to go to college. We need different notions of success where success is not a zero-sum game.

Imagining Possible Futures: Centering Students and Communities

Imagine for a moment what our schools might look like if students, teachers, and parents came together to create schools that centered on the health and well-being of students and their communities. Imagine what could happen if schools were also designed around the idea of community revitalization and democratic engagement. Imagine what could happen if we commit to fully invest in our schools and communities to revitalize the local economy and embrace a culture of mutual respect and support. This work means imagining alternatives, while also listening to others (i.e., our students, families, and community members) as we figure out how to work collectively and creatively for the public good. This work is about the ongoing struggle to create healthy and sustainable communities with strong schools in all of our neighborhoods. This is the struggle for more democracy and justice that should guide our work, and this is the struggle that starts with you today.

If you are looking for ways to connect the work you do in your school to the concerns that you and your students face in your communities, then I encourage you to pick up your copy of Civic Literacy in Schools and Communities today, where you’ll find practical strategies for getting started on this work in your own school. The book is available now for pre-order and will be in wide release on April 9.

References

Anyon, J. (2014). Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and A New Social Movement (Critical Social Thought) (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Radical-Possibilities-Public-Policy-Urban-Education-and-A-New-Social/Anyon/p/book/9780415635585 

Dewey, J. (1916/1997). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of  Education. Free Press. Democracy and Education 

Dewey, J., & Rogers, M. L. (2016). The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (Originally published 1954). Swallow Press. https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/The+Public+and+Its+Problems 

Ginwright, S. (2016). Hope and Healing in Urban Education (1st ed.). Routledge. Hope and Healing in Urban Education: How Urban Activists and Teachers 

Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Harvest in Translation). Routledge. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom 

Horton, M., & Kohl, J. A. H. (1997). The Long Haul: An Autobiography (1st ed.).Teachers College Press. https://www.tcpress.com/the-long-haul-9780807737002 

Lipman, P. (2011). The New Political Economy of Urban Education (Critical Social Thought) (1st ed.). Routledge. The New Political Economy of Urban Education 

Love, B. (2020). We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press. http://www.beacon.org/We-Want-to-Do-More-Than-Survive-P1446.aspx 

Marsh, J. (2011). Class Dismissed. Monthly Review Press. https://www.amazon.com/Class-Dismissed-Cannot-Teach-Inequality/dp/1583672435 

Meyer, M. A. (2001). Our Own Liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian Epistemology Amerasia Journal, 29(2), 139–164. https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.29.2.6412231414633728

Payne, C. M. (2008). So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. Amsterdam University Press. So-Much-Reform-Little-Change-Persistence 

Ravitch, D. (2014). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (Reprint ed.). Vintage. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reign-of-error-diane-ravitch/1114975619 

Simpson, J. S. (2014). Longing for Justice: Higher Education and Democracy’s Agenda  (1st ed.). University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. https://utorontopress.com/us/longing-for-justice-4

U.S. Census Bureau. (2016, March). Educational attainment in the United States.https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.html

Warren, M., Mapp, K. (2011). A match on dry grass: Community organizing as a catalyst for school reform. Oxford University Press. A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform 

West, C. (2017). Race Matters, 25th Anniversary: With a New Introduction (Anniversary ed.). Beacon Press. Race Matters, 25th Anniversary Edition