Chapter Three

Democratic education is a threat to the bureaucratic structure because teachers, as transformative intellectuals, actually challenge the system to conform to their own rhetoric. Acting as a transformative intellectual means helping students acquire knowledge about basic social structures, such as the economy, the state, the work place, and mass culture, so that such institutions can be viewed from a critical perspective.  This is not to suggest that teachers are merely acting as agents of banking education but rather, having students use new knowledge critically to transform their reality. 

Apparently this approach is disdained by the power structure because of their complicity in acknowledging the merits of banking education and support of administrators who permit,  encourage, and often demand the perpetuation of teaching practices that reflect the promotion of essentially core Euro-centric knowledge.  We are enslaved by a system that tells us that all kids can learn, but whisper in our collective ears that there are some who better than others. If we are to be a truly democratic society we must not control what people think; rather, we must try to encourage them to come to their beliefs and understanding of the world, and discuss their views with people who think differently (Miller). 

Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander School in Tennessee, espoused a philosophy that grew out of a learned realization about the inherent inequity and unjust practices in this country.  He states, “When you believe in a democratic society, you provide a setting for education that is democratic.”  On the surface, this statement seems simplistic, but when taken in the structural context of institutionalized education, Horton is threatening.  Despite the rhetoric of shared decision making and site-based management, schools are, as has been shown, not hotbeds of democracy.  Teachers, students, and parents are frequently not trusted and they are often victims of intimidation.

How then, taking into account the considerable amount of ammunition aimed against them are democratically minded teachers, parents, and administrators going to achieve desired goals?  What people need are experiences in democracy, in making democratic decisions that affect the lives of their children and the school environment.  A problem though is that the majority of us are not allowed to make decisions about most things that are important in schools.  The system has trained generations of managers for this explicit purpose and has, up to this point, been quite successful in maintaining efficient factories dominated by top-down strategies filtered through layers of loyal bureaucrats.  The bureaucratic system is an inevitable disease that afflicts all organizations and governments.  Often it is spread by good people who are made to do bad things-or less than good things-because of their separation from the people who [are] the original source of their power (Horton).

According to Marion Brady, educator, author, and frequent contributor to numerous journals and op-eds, American education suffers from system problems.  And until those system problems are fixed, even the schools that Americans point to with pride and pay big money to live near-upscale, high-tech schools with lots of accelerated courses, will continue to barely scratch the surface of student potential, continue to turn our mostly “C” students, continue to dump rejects on the street, continue to graduate people who, in a few months or years, cannot pass the exams they once aced.  Schools at all levels continue the top-down bureaucratic management system borrowed from 19th century Prussia.

What prevails is a moral belief that defines education as a tool of corporate avarice.  Responding to the needs of post-modern phallocentric corporations, state boards mandate their narrow view of the official core curricular knowledge to local school boards who comply by passing it on to individual schools and their administrative teams for their expected compliance.  Brady continues, “But the worst problems lie deeper.  There are two of them, one  dealing with WHATS taught, the other with HOW what’s taught is taught.”

Research indicates that it is what the teacher knows that is one of the primary factors in influencing the learning of our students.    This is not to dismiss myriad factors that do influence student learning such as poverty, wealth, abuse, enriching environments, marginalization, and dysfunctional as well as functional families.  However, in a 50 state study done by Linda Darling-Hammond (2000) the following items were found to be related to teacher quality and increased student achievement: verbal ability, content knowledge, using a broad repertoire of approaches skillfully that respond to students and curricular needs, ongoing voluntary professional training, flexibility, creativity, adaptability, opportunities to work with colleagues, access to curricular resources.  As a group, teachers are doing a pretty good job considering the abysmal pay and for some, terrible working conditions, lack of resources, and lack of support from parents, the district, and the state.  However, there are still instructors who need a lot of direction.  There are a number of teachers whose professional growth is so limited that they would be deemed unsuitable in many other careers.  Many of these same teachers do not do outside research of their own, do not read professional journals, and have content knowledge limited to what is in a district approved text.   One teacher in our district who has taught Advanced Placement United States History and a Differentiated United States History course took one undergraduate course in college that related to the history of this country.   He was my student teacher and I have copies of his transcript.  I fucked up with this one thinking he showed promise. Now, this does not necessarily mean that this teacher does not have a passion for history and perhaps reads volumes on the subject (which is questionable) but, we must be concerned when he tells his students that slavery was not a cause of the Civil War and that John Connelly, the governor of Texas, was killed on the same day that Kennedy was assassinated.  I am not kidding.  I absconded with a couple of copies of the test and his study guide from the building copy center. You want this person teaching your kids?

I am pretty sure that you can walk into any school and ask most teachers, under the assurance of anonymity, who in the building should not be teaching?  Face it; there are teachers who reflect the attributes I listed above.  Yet for me, as a teacher, does it go against some unwritten code of behavior to point it out?  In some professions, like police work, there seems to be an acceptance of a philosophy that you do not criticize others like you.  There is a code of silence or a reluctance to provide information about the intransigence of fellow officers.

In an article about this topic, Glenn Slacks, himself a former teacher, reveals that there are studies that estimate the number of failing teachers at between 5% and 18%.   In a similar study by California attorney Mary Jo McGrath of more than 60,000 school administrators nationwide, principals tell her about 18% of their teachers are marginal, with 3% to 5% so egregious they are harmful to children.  In a high school with one hundred and fifty certified teachers this means that there might be up to thirty or more staff who are marginal or worse. Our silence serves to keep failing teachers in the classroom, to the detriment of hundreds or thousands of students per teacher.  Cherie Allen, a veteran science teacher from Seattle, Washington says it is profoundly offensive to work side by side with a poor teacher who doesn't make the effort to improve.  But, the purpose here is not to investigate why the "dance of the lemons" is perpetuated (moving incompetent administrators and teachers from building to building because no one wants them) but rather to look at alternatives to the system I have outlined previously.