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‘We Can Make Mistakes and We Can Fix Them’: Countering Cruel Optimism to Promote Public Education

[1] Here I offer what I imagine as a spirited defense of the possibility inherent in public schools and the potential of the teachers who work there to enhance those possibilities. I seek to discover grounds for agency and constructive identity in what most construe as a dispiriting educational age. My talk lies at the intersection, I think, of two conference themes: the role of the teacher -- and democracy and the common school. I hope to escape my own tendency to just “blame late capitalism” and neoliberal ideology, while still acknowledging Wendy Brown’s insight that in thought and action, we have reduced ourselves to homo oeconomicus. I don’t want to lock educators in to any particular analysis. I want to let us out to educate. I try to do that here by diving into the affective economies that schooling enacts for teachers. In particular, I offer a counterexample to the the dominant affects teachers are experiencing and then analyze what is present in my counter example that might be worth a second look.

This is, as Kathleen Stewart suggests, in Ordinary Affect, an “experiment, not a judgment.” You may not make of this the same thing that I have made of it … and then there will be a good conversation when I am done.

Let me begin with my counterexample:

[2] A new, young, inexperienced principal arrived to Bailey STEM Magnet Middle School in the late summer of 2012. He had been a teacher in the district and knew Bailey and its reputation—but he came anyway with a strong commitment to teachers and to equitable education for all children. He also came with a slogan that captured his goals for the kids: 2

Individuals of character, scholars for life, leaders now and tomorrow. It would be recited daily by the scholars.

[3] He inherited a faculty that might be considered problematic, but there were strong characters in the mix, both black and white. The first year was rocky. All he managed to do was stop the bleeding – and plan for the future.

[4] And there was plenty of bleeding. Bailey sat literally at the bottom of the charts in

TN. It will come as no surprise that 90+% of the students who attended Bailey were African

American and roughly the same percentage were eligible for Free and Reduced Lunch, the go-to measure of poverty in US schools. To attract white, middle class students, the district designated Bailey a STEM magnet school, but it was a little like putting “lipstick on a pig.” Few new students appeared.

[5] The students who inhabited the halls of Bailey came largely from one government housing project called Cayce Homes. To say Cayce is unappealing and in disarray would be a wild understatement. It is no exaggeration to say that the Bailey kids witnessed at least one shooting a week.

[6] But it’s important to understand that the kids who attended Bailey were bussed several miles, while the children living in the neighborhood shunned the school. Stand on Bailey steps and throw a stone and and you will hit an $800,000 house. Look at these Zillow maps showing property values enroute. (HIGHLIGHT and cite $$).

[7] The new principal, Dr. Sawyer, arrived with some important commitments: that the

Bailey kids were bright and deserved an education that would acknowledge that, that working 3 toward a staff that reflected racial diversity was important, that Bailey really was going to be a

STEM Magnet school. In the course of his first year, these commitments turned into plans.

[8] And the plans came not a moment too soon. At the end of Dr. Sawyer’s first year,

Bailey’s reputation had not really improved.1 (READ QUOTE?)

[9] The leadership team’s plans included moving toward a model of teaming and teacher leadership that included integrating residents from a local university (mine). Those strong characters I mentioned above were invited to participate in the planning. All faculty – even those who seemed to be “underperforming” -- were encouraged to stay on and help them model take hold. I spent one day a week there for three years. I made copies, covered classes for a few or many minutes, walked unruly children around the building to get them out of someone’s hair and regularly encouraged one and all, reminding them that we there for one reason only – to educate children.

[10] When the new plans were announced, about half the faculty left, but the ones who stayed were intrigued. When the new school year began, there were new, mostly younger and more diverse teachers, -- and a 9 person fleet of white residents who had no idea what they

1 My son, attended Bailey in 2012-13.It is the worse school i have ever encountered in my life. The teachers , Principal , and staff are horrible. The school is 87% black and 13% all other races. The school is full of gangs, bully's , and of parent's that could care less about how their kids act and learn. There was even a student who brought a 9mm pistol to the school. It was so bad my son's doctor pulled him from the school on medical leave for 6 months due to the mental damage it caused him to suffer from bullying and teachers lying to him.I would not recommend sending a stray animal to this so called school. I have seen criminal detention facility's more capable of teaching. So if your a caring and loving parent please take my advice and do not send your child to this mad house. 4 were getting in to. But all regularly took part in figuring out what was working and what wasn’t

[11] The changes were messy but immediate. Teams of teacher had common planning time and scheduled three dedicated sessions a week to sharing planning ideas, monitoring student progress and getting administrative guidance respectively. “Divide and differentiate” became a battle cry. As the residents got their feet under them, they were pressed into service, pulling small groups (sometimes the “troublemakers” but often the kids who needed more stimulation and attention – often the same kids).

[12] Eventually, teams sorted out new schedules for their students combining blocks and re-splitting them into “stations” where smaller groups of kids worked with classroom teachers, teacher leaders, special educators and residents in lessons with common goals but variable strategies. Time and space and people and curriculum were deployed flexibly to meet children’s needs. More caring, intelligent adults challenged the kids to care as well. The principal supported the team’s decisions.

[13] More adults were around to love the living daylights into them, to enhance the relational capacity of the school. And more adults could both model for and demand of scholars that they take responsibility for their own learning and interaction. (THIS BOARD was the brainchild of a resident who stayed to become a full-time teacher.)

[14] At the end of the first year, everybody knew things were better but one big issue loomed for the faculty. They had been teaching across grade levels (5-6 and 7-8) to make teaming possible. They didn’t want to do that anymore – and they made a case that the principal accepted even though he thought they were wrong. This might have been a turning 5 point. Some teachers left after that year), but most stayed – and recruited their friends to join them. New team leaders arrived or emerged. At the start of the principal’s third year, the faculty had strengthened, but more importantly, they found a collective voice.

[15] Nothing external had changed They (and the principal) were under the gun to generate better test scores in all areas. The principal tried hard to shield the faculty from the pressure (which they appreciated), but sometimes he too gave in and offered a “lecture” that brought everybody down. Then he would readjust and so would the faculty and get back to work. But clearly, the scholars were more secure, happier to be in school.

[17] Bailey’s reputation was still negative but starting to improve with the STEM program leading the way as the robotics team won a Samsung National Challenge, the school started a TV station, and STEM (and STEAM) electives once a week brought kids into the applications of science, math and the arts… The football team won a city championship, a talented local director was recruited to provide theater experiences. One teacher leader was a State Teacher of the Year Finalist.

[18] And the teams of teacher leaders, teachers and residents continued to function for the well-being of kids. This is the source of their intoxication. That intoxication was fueled partly by some positive academic results. Math scores jumped up enough that the school won an award for growth: highest in the district.

[19] By the measure of the district’s own “Academic Performance Framework,” Bailey started looking better, even good. (Point out results)

[20] It was not all sweetness and light; folks on teams didn’t get along. People got mad at one another. But nobody felt silenced. They could talk to their team; they could talk to the 6 principal. At the end of that second year, a contingent came to town from the National

Education Association (the largest teacher union in the US) and visited Bailey because they had heard that there was an interesting experiment in teacher leadership and teacher autonomy going on in a state where test scores and notoriously unstable value-added assessments were determining teachers’ future and the quality of instruction and curriculum kids experienced. It was at this event that one teacher leader said – in answer to a question from an NEA official about what made working at Bailey worthwhile -- “We can make mistakes here … and we can fix them.” Her peers on the panel nodded; her colleagues sitting in the room seemed both surprised and gratified by that characterization.

I begin with this little story because it has, I believe, big implications. The teachers at

Bailey were working in tough conditions against big educational odds but they were not demoralized and they were decidedly not depressed. In fact, they were energized. They were recruiting their best friends and most valued colleagues to come teach with them. What were the sources of this energy?

That’s the dynamic I want to explore here. I want to think about what Katie Stewart calls “ordinary affects” to unpack “the embodied process of making solidarity itself” at Bailey.

The school – for a brief shining moment as I explain in the conclusion – became a pragmatist haven of Deweyan democracy. Diversity – of culture, of ideas, of values even -- became a resource for political, personal and professional action. What was going at Bailey? More importantly, what was possible at Bailey? 7

To set the stage for this exploration, I will lay out what I take to be the central problematic of teaching today: a potentially crippling disjunct between teachers’ self- understanding as educators and the systemic (political and institutional) orientation toward achievement construed so narrowly as to be anti-educational. This disjunct locates educators in an emotional and action space that can be – and too often is -- experienced as hopeless.

However, I want to reinterpret this space with the help of Lauren Berlant and recognize educators in a situation of cruel optimism, while suggesting, with the help of John Dewey, that teachers may not be as “stuck” as it seems. I also want to refocus attention – again with

Dewey’s help -- on the very idea of public schools understood differently from government schools, delineating how the reality of today’s government school depresses positive affect while the aspirational notion of public school is, in its very mention, energizing.

Against this background, I come back to Bailey and to the teachers who can say with conviction and wonder, fully aware of the novelty of what they are saying, “We can make mistakes here … And we can fix them.” What they were only coming to understand when this line was uttered was that they were experiencing educational community. They were living public education of the kind Dewey imagined, a space for shared action that Berlant calls “an intimate public.” They were embedded in a daily, embodied process of making solidarity itself.

And it was intoxicating.

The Problematic for Teachers Today

There are, of course, substantial challenges intrinsic to the work of teaching. Gert Biesta and I explore those challenges in an encyclopedic opening chapter to AERA’s Handbook of

Research on Teaching, just published. We make an argument for teaching as purposeful, 8 intentional and relational and draw out the ways this messy reality challenges those who would be teachers, sympathetic as we are to Freud’s (and Deborah Britzman’s) contention that teaching is an impossible profession. It is fraught with predicaments (Cohen) -- a profession that requires trading in uncertainty and unsettling deeply held beliefs and understandings of one’s self and the world. It demands a combination of humility and hubris that is difficult to reconcile.

Despite its impossibility (or perhaps because of it!), teaching has drawn the effort of many educators over the history of humankind. It is intrinsically fascinating to those of us who pursue it as a craft (Tom) or study it as a social practice (Horn). And teaching has provided endless grist for the philosophical mill. To ground our analysis, Gert and I limn six “icons” of teaching well-known to many of you. These include Plato’s midwife, Rousseau’s tutor, Dewey’s designer, Freire’s problem-poser, Noddings’ carer and Ranciere’s ignorant schoolmaster. In each of these icons, there is some useful truth captured about the valued purpose, defensible intention, and optimal relation possible in educational activity. Each recommends that we focus our attention on these or those elements of the teacher-learner-content-context quartet and on specific framings of educational purpose. But none of these icons address directly what presses on today’s teachers most immediately: every day I work harder and harder to accomplish goals that seem less and less satisfying, implementing evidence-based practices with fidelity in contexts that seem to me to call for something different from what is prescribed.

I do this in order to win the coveted rating of “effective teacher.” This is a pyrrhic victory that allows me to maintain my job as a teacher, but leaves me wondering what sort of a teacher I am. 9

In the contemporary scenario, teachers’ judgment is erased and the purposes and intentions that motivated their becoming teachers are too often rendered irrelevant. They are still tasked with encouraging and developing pedagogically productive relations with students, but the academic import of those relations is sundered from the moral impact, as schools take up “social and emotional learning” as if it occurs in a specified advisory period. The net effect is the kind of “demoralization” that Doris Santoro documents so vividly. It is not teacher burnout of the kind made famous to those of my generation in Bel Kaufman”s Up the Down Staircase, not the burnout that Nel Noddings documents when the one cared for is unresponsive to the carer. Rather, for today’s teachers, moral motivation is “dissed,” disrespected and disappeared. How am I to teach with educative integrity in an environment that reduces purpose from “turning the soul” to “college and career ready”? What is teaching when the

“prize” my eyes hold is AYP or League Tables?

The story of how we got to this place is too rich and detailed to be told adequately here, but the impact is clear. It is captured by Dana Goldstein in the plaintive title of the last chapter of Teacher Wars: “Let me use what I know.” Centralized efforts to “fix” teachers in order to improve educational outcomes, outcomes clearly linked to poverty and discrimination, result in endless “trainings,” scripted curricula, regular tests to benchmark progress and a general loss of what we may simply call professional autonomy. That more pointedly means that teachers’ judgment is not only not valued, it’s not allowed.

Those who are currently employed as teachers struggle mightily to reconcile their well- tuned educational motivations and hard-won pedagogical judgment with the constrained expectations and prescribed programs of instruction that mark today’s government schools. 10

When one feels unable to speak back, when those in position to create policy and designate procedure decline to listen, teachers feel handcuffed. Teachers talk with each other, but the talk is not constructive. Community is thinned.2

Individual demoralization is handcuffing and chasing away good, potentially good, and even “good enough” teachers and so is this intentional – structural -- isolation.3 While educational researchers talk about teaching as a social practice, too many teachers encounter their work as “lone rangers.”4

But there’s also a pattern of shared habits of feeling and response evident in a lack of patience and faith, a lack of faith that what I know matters, and little patience to allow what I know to “work.” That we don’t seem to have this patience and faith is, I think, a combined result of one socio-political reality and two developments in the teaching profession. The sociopolitical reality is neoliberalism and I promised I wouldn’t hooked on that. So let me go to

2 Mary Holden’s blog https://maryjholden.wordpress.com/2016/09/04/teaching-a-love-story- part-4-the-final-chapter/ as awareness of impasse, cruel optimism

I knew being a teacher here would be rough. But we moved here anyway. And we love it here. It’s a great place to raise a family. We love the schools in Nashville. Great things are happening here in spite of all the BS. However, as a teacher, I tried to do my best while biting my tongue. But ultimately, I couldn’t do it. I saw my colleagues, unlike me, seemingly more able to not worry about these issues so much. Maybe they were used to it? Or maybe they felt like I did but didn’t dare speak up. But I hated it. I hated that 50% of my evaluation was based on my students’ test scores. I hated that we talked about the damn tests almost more than anything else. This was definitely not the reason I became a teacher. I didn’t want to be a part of that culture. It really weighed on me.

3 Precious Crabtree, November 24, 2014, Teachers can’t Thrive When They’re working in Isolation, E 4 I don’t deny that the lone ranger routine is do-able for some at least in the short run and perhaps more so in environments where cultural homogeneity, privileged backgrounds and family support is evident, but I maintain that too many teachers and their students are not flourishing in today’s schools. 11 realities of teaching: one, we are losing gray hair. Teachers with 25 or more years of experience are retiring in great numbers; teachers with fewer years of experience are leaving disillusioned and demoralized. And, two, we are replacing those retirees and leavers with young folks who are “more accomplished than past generations, but … also more emotionally fragile” (Brooks). “Educational reformers” in the US sport a false sense of what they are going into, an unrealistic sense of what they can do to “fix” things, and a near void about what the reality of modern schooling demands. (Ignorance) The result is an educational community that perverts the point of education. Society can’t be renewed because there’s a too thin experience of what society has been as well as can be.

These are the “ordinary affects” of teaching around the world in those countries who think of themselves as “developed.”5 It doesn’t feel good. As Laurent Berlant put it in another context, teachers are “overwhelmed, forced to change, yet also stuck.” (21) What can we say about this “stuckness”?

Inhabiting/inheriting a Situation of Cruel Optimism

Optimism of some kind is central to the pursuit of teaching. Education is a kind of attachment – of teacher to student, of both to a world – both physical and social -- revealing itself, and attachment is itself optimistic. If change, presumably positive, cannot occur, then why bother? But optimism comes in several and various grain sizes. I want to distinguish the face of an optimism that is itself educative, that is, pragmatist optimism, rather than progressive, naïve optimism or arrogant-ignorant optimism – and to demonstrate how this

5 Awareness when in Portugal in 2008 of NCLB hitting. Socrates and Bush 12 pragmatist optimism might move us beyond the “cruel optimism” that leads inevitably to impasse.

The situation is this: the teacher who aspires to remain a teacher must be “effective” as measured by students’ performance (outright or growth) on one or another set of standardized tests. But being effective can – and too often does – lead to abandoning the role of teacher as educator (as one who initiates her students into ways of knowing and being in the world, and who invites students to recreate the world by building on and going beyond those ways of knowing and being) – and that’s what drove them toward teaching to begin with.

In a book that takes up this phenomenon with respect to the possibility of public and political life, Berlant explores the “relation of cruel optimism [that] exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). She is quick to assert that optimistic attachments are not intrinsically cruel. “They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.” Teachers are stuck in a situation of cruel optimism. The question facing us in the current impasse is whether or not there is a variant of optimism that can transcend cruel optimism, enabling teachers to persist in the profession because they can be educators. I believe the answer is yes and that the Bailey teachers lived what this is.

We are – by virtue of being human -- affected by and attracted to a fantasy of “the good life,” a moral-intimate-economic constellation of desire(s). But by virtue of living in human interaction, our fantasies are subject to “fraying.” Some of the fantasies that Berlant herself explores – upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, meritocracy, equal 13 opportunity and even “lively, durable intimacy” are implicated in the metanarrative that surrounds and powers our thinking about education.

For Berlant, “the present is perceived, first, affectively.” We are affected – personally, politically -- before we understand or name that affect as object.6 The genre of response that lets us perceive this affectively constituted present is, for Berlant, the “impasse.” The impasse is a “stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things…” (4).

Let’s read Berlant back into the problematic I articulated earlier: Teaching as an object of desire. The pleasures of being a teacher are sustaining – economically, emotionally, psychologically – BUT the contemporary demands of teaching call into question one’s motives for becoming/being a teacher. I must have optimism to maintain the attachment that is teaching but its cruelty creates an impasse. The impasse is recognizable because optimism is complicated, presenting itself ambivalently, unevenly, incoherently 14 (as a form of attachment) and doesn’t necessarily feel optimistic!!! Our attachments can cease to make sense but still exert a powerful pull over our actions. That’s because optimism is the thing that keeps the educative event open for better or ill (vii). We can’t do without it.

For today’s teachers, the pressing and immediate danger is “passivity,”7 that the perceived impasse takes over one’s attention and one’s energy. Too many teachers are

“dithering,” simply stalling in the face of impasse until they have somewhere to go or some new

6 doesn’t put affect before cognition so much as it acknowledges a Deweyan world where the response makes the stimulus rather than vice versa 7 “the becoming historical of the affective event” p. 6, Cruel Optimism 14 genre of fully embodied response. Frustration is a constant affective state – and one that takes a toll on the individual and on her practice; it surfaces in action and in inaction.

I note in passing that educational systems have always caused forms of cruel optimism for teachers. The pendulum swing of policy and the tone deafness of policy makers is not new.

What does seem to be distinctive under the sway of neoliberalist reform policy is the disciplining, nay shaming, of teachers who are ferreted out by regimes of reporting and structures of surveillance. No longer can a teacher “close her door and teach.” No Child Left

Behind and similar policies in countries around the world have made that sidestepping impossible.

Consider this range of potential responses with attendant affects:

 There are “principled leavers” who cannot figure out how to educate and will not stay

under the conditions of an ordinary that is “not organized by capitalism but disorganized

by capitalism.”

 There are teachers afflicted with restlessness who shift from school to school thinking

perhaps it will be different somewhere else.

 There are “organized resisters” who spend their time gathering with like minded

educators for support in what feels pretty hopeless,8 the camaraderie of like minded

others keeping depression at bay with the fiction of “fighting back.”

8 Stern, M. & Brown, A. (2016). It’s 5:30. I’m exhausted. And I have to go all the way to f* %#ing Fishtown: Educator depression, activism, and finding (armed love in a hopeless (neoliberal) place. The Urban Review 48, 2: 333-354. 15

 There are some who resort to the “blame game,” shifting blame from administrators, to

parents to the kids themselves, eventually finding themselves in a position of no

attachment at all except to the very idea of being a teacher.

 There are those who remain naively, “progressively” optimistic, who continue to believe

that transformation is possible with no thought about how that transformation might

occur or what responsibility or role they might have in it, who take flight into

sentimentalism, what I here characterize as naïve optimism.9

 And there are ignorant and arrogant optimists who generally misunderstand what

education means, conflate education with schooling no matter what its quality and

believe unquestioningly (at least initially) that the impasse that other educators perceive

is a function of their personal failure to do a good job. This category of response is

mostly inhabited by “temporary teachers,” the legions of those in programs like Teach

for America for whom there is little attachment to the profession of teaching.

The costs of all these genres of response can be considerable depending on the extent to which a teacher’s desire to inhabit the role of educator is woven into her self-understanding.10 As

Berlant notes, “the continuity of [the genre of response’s] form provides something of the

9 Impasse, recognition that optimism isn’t feeling optimistic can cause flight into Sentimentalism 10 24 CO is a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered with to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. Cruel, not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects have have X in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object/scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. CO is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object. (FN both Dewey and Ahmed inform this for me) 16 continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.” To lose one’s sense of meaning is not a minor loss.

I am especially interested here in the naïve optimist and the arrogant optimist and how their optimism enables their avoiding and sidestepping the experience of impasse.

Naïve optimism evokes the progressive educators of Dewey’s era who believed that all problems would be solved if only we attended to the needs and interests of students. As

Jerome Bruner points out in “After Dewey, What?” “It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child’s interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formula of adult society.” Naive optimism is doomed because its root assumption is flawed. It can only move out of cruel optimism -- at the cost of unreality – by neglecting to acknowledge the terms of the impasse. The naïve optimist assumes that good intentions will transform scripted lessons, narrowed curriculum and constant testing into educative outcomes.

The arrogant optimist sidesteps the impasse not because he assumes that the students’ interests can be reconciled with the constrained curriculum of the era, but because he is ignorant of the demands of education. His attachment is not to students nor to the role of teacher but to his own goodness and fitness for the role. He is the hero in a morality play being enacted on a public stage that we call school.

In contrast, the teachers at Bailey live themselves into a pragmatist optimism. I will say more about the nature of pragmatist optimism in the next section, but for now let me say that it is not the trait of an individual but the byproduct of a certain way of living and working, a model of associated living that Dewey characterized as democracy. 17

For the Bailey teachers, the genre that connects fantasy to ordinary life is not heroic, it’s not individualistic, it’s not oppositional, it’s not sentimental; it is, instead, persistently intelligent. They simply recognize an opening, an opportunity, amidst the fraying fantasies of their chosen life story and respond to it constructively. It is their intelligence that unbound them from a naïve optimism and a cruel optimism (they never imagined an arrogant optimism) and reconnects them to their object of desire, as they develop “skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures” (8). They were able to live on, to move beyond impasse.

So far, I have described the impasse and the genres of response that teachers are employing. I now consider the (truly) public school as the site for pragmatist optimism.

Public Education vs. Government Schools

To understand the nature of Dewey’s optimism as pragmatist (acknowledging his failure to analyze distinctive patterns of control and oppression -- Konings), we have to tie it back to his understanding of democracy as a mode of associated living and to the constitution of community through communicative interaction. Democracy and Education is certainly not the only, perhaps not even the best text to work this point, but it is nonetheless useful – and in the spirit of this conference, I turn there first and foremost. Then we can think together a bit about public/government schools and the play of optimism within them. I will commend public schools to you in Dewey’s sense marked by pragmatist optimism that fuels “Yes, we can” not because we will “fix” everything – or even anything at all -- but because we can try/experiment and may make a positive difference. This is the way we inhabit this educational – and educative – space together. This is distinguishable from government schools that are marked 18 not by pessimism but by resignation. Teachers (those with attachment to the work, the subject matter, the student) don’t have the luxury of resignation. They are either caught in cruel optimism or they escape … or they can enact the kind of public school, education and community Dewey imagined.

In Democracy and Education, Dewey set out to connect “the growth of democracy with the development of the experimental method in the sciences, evolutionary ideas in the biological sciences, and the industrial organization” (Preface) In the ensuing phenomenology of education, Dewey notes that education (not schooling) is “the means of [the] social continuity of life” That society not only continues to exist

“by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in

transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal tie between the

words common, community and communication. Men live in a community in

virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way

in which they come to possess things in common.”

These include things like aims, beliefs, aspirations, like-mindedness. Such things are not passed on physically but by participation in communication that results – and this is important -- in similar “emotional and intellectual dispositions – like ways of responding to expectations and requirements.” (4). These like ways of responding constitute community in a way that mere physical proximity cannot.

Dewey makes it clear what all this has to do with education: “Not only is social life identical with communication but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative.” 5 Conversely, education is the construction of community; the presence of a 19 community is prima facie evidence of education. But if “the very process of living together educates,” what about the formal intention to teach? In complex societies, there is a) a wide gap between what adults have mastered and what children must take on, and b) sophisticated sets of disciplinary symbols and practices to be taken on/entered into. Formal “tuition” or schooling seems advisable if not strictly speaking necessary. Dewey, however, warns of the

“conspicuous dangers” that appear when one takes on the intention to teach. The possibility of the “remote and abstract” replacing the “personal and vital” raises the specter of a formal education that is eviscerated by its own intention, yet another form of cruel optimism. We lose education’s “social necessity, its identity with all human association that affects conscious life” as well as the focus on education as an invitation into the practice of human endeavor and discourse. (9)

The outlines of Dewey’s argument are familiar to this audience and I won’t rehearse them here. Dewey arrives in Chapter 5 of Democracy and Education at the conclusion he has so carefully set up: Education is Growth. Growth is both conservative and progressive; that is, we are at once accommodating the future to the past, and using the past as a resource for developing the future. Critique is built in to the backward and forward motion.

This education as communication marking growth is not “direct contagion or literary inculcation.” It is as Dewey gets around to declaring in Chapter 7, a mode of associated living – with an emphasis on “associated.” There are many modes of living socially, but what makes a society (of any size) a democratic community is

“the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and

the fullness of and freedom with which it interacts with other groups.” 20

The question for us today is whether the schools that give rise to teachers’ situation of cruel optimism are themselves offering anything approximating education, let alone democratic education. Dewey himself raises the question.

“Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained and corrupted?” He acknowledges societal stratification as a challenge to a yes answer, (98) And he suggests that patriotism may be in conflict with both individual conscience and cosmopolitanism, limiting the scope of a possible education.

Today too many government schools are simply not public schools, nor are they intended to be. They are publicly supported (though not to the extent that we support prisons, for instance), but they are not about common experience or the sowing of communicative seeds and reaping of community. They are not sites of democratic communication where processes and products are negotiable and negotiated by those with a stake in the issue.

Consider the example of the 3rd grade honors student in Florida who was not promoted to 4th grade because parents opted them out of standardized tests. The child did not fail any standardized test and all other data suggested at minimum that the student might profitably move on to 4th grade. Not surprisingly, the parents have filed a law suit.

There are a million truly educational issues to be raised here. Why do we have systems of schooling that rely on the educationally arbitrary condition of age rather than the actual state of development? Why have homogeneous educational structures generally? What is a

3rd grade “honor student”, how is class implicated in this designation, and who/what does it help to designate any student, let alone a third grader, an honor student? We could talk 21 honestly about these issues, revealing our aims, purposes, values, etc. But what seems not interesting from an educational standpoint, decidedly NOT an educational issue, is whether or not taking a test should be grounds for punitive action toward a child. This reflects Dewey’s concern that a national state will devolve to the abstract. Government schools are not public schools until and unless the educators in them create that very publicness.

I return here to Berlant who critically analyzes the neoliberal restructuring within the ordinary rhythm/melody of contemporary life (something Dewey fails to do) and the way that this restructuring contributes to the fraying of fantasies that have traditionally attracted teachers to the craft and affected them positively. In the fantasy that has been American education at least, teachers lead the charge toward economic security and upward mobility, to equal, engaged citizenship for all, to dialogue across diversity – of ideas and cultures.11 Can the government school be what Berlant calls an “intimate public,” a place where all -- not just the dominant and the privileged -- have a space to act and enact fantasies of the good life?

An intimate public is qualitatively different from what counts as the public (as distinct from the private) sphere12; an intimate public evokes just what Dewey had in mind for public, community-constructing education. The associated living Dewey describes both assumes and relies on the gifts, needs and interests of all. The government school is neither a public school nor an intimate public unless all who “live” there are counted and valued.

Today’s government schools governed by narrowed goals, narrowed curriculum and an implicit ethos as David Labaree puts it that ‘Someone has to fail.’ no longer make sense as truly educational institutions but are still powerful symbols of the fantasies that have fueled the

11 My Pedagogic Creed 12 Berlant, 226. 22 common school from the start. The public school system as an object of desire13 still tracks faith, not just in teaching as a worthy endeavor, but in education itself as the path to the good life, individually and socially. But the experience of schooling reveals a shadow leading to impasse. Institutions that once represented security, predictability and progress now evoke anxiety, contingency and precarity.14 How are teachers to feel? How can they respond? Here

I offer the Bailey teachers as an icon15 of teaching for this time and circumstance precisely because they jointly lived their way into pragmatist optimism. Only too cognizant of their

“stuckness,” they nonetheless were able to create a community where they would do what they could. The results were good – for their students and for themselves.

Back to Bailey (where the climate was intoxicating)

What was going on at Bailey that resulted in remarkably positive teacher attitudes, strong teacher retention (and recruiting of friends), and significant gains – personal and academic – on the part of students? Simply put, they were able to retain and nourish an optimism that was neither naïve nor arrogant, but instead pragmatist. Their optimism was rooted in a sense that they collectively were able to move forward constructively even when their movements were less than optimal – because they knew how to think about and through their own actions.

The Bailey teachers constitute an icon worthy of consideration not because of what any one of them were able to do but because of their common discovery of meaning in their work

13 cluster of promises, endurance in the object 14 Berlant, 19. 15 Icon as a genre (as she uses it), story split from activity (Berlant, 25) 23 in the act of working together. The external circumstances of their jobs didn’t go away: they were still working with poor undereducated kids with too few resources, were still forced to administer and teach to too many tests, still afforded little respect while being subjected to substantial public criticism. Still, the quality of their optimism made constructive communal persistence (dare I say grit?) possible. Unwittingly, perhaps, they were engaged in the embodied process of making solidarity possible. As I watched that scene with the NEA officials,

I realized that they were coming to understand just how remarkable this was.

I can tell you how that realization showed up at the end of the second year when the principal announced that he would be leaving. The district would not assure him that he had a job the following year, telling him that they would have to wait for the results of the test scores

(results that wouldn’t be available until at least July). If the test scores improved enough, he could stay but if they weren’t high enough, he would be released as the terms of the federal

School Improvement Grant demanded. He was highly recruited in Atlanta and Denver and chose a position in Denver. The day he told the District administration he would be leaving, they came to Bailey and offered him a different administrative job – but it was too late. The news that he was leaving came as a blow and prompted interesting reflection about just what it was that they had at Bailey.

Most teachers and teacher leaders decided to stay and keep their democratic community going. They believed that it was about them and not only about the principal.

They might have been right but the district saddled them with a “closer,” a principal who could not be trusted with a good building, sending him instead to a place inhabited by poor Black children where few parents would protest. The teachers held things together throughout the 24 year without much support and with great upheaval, but the other shoe was about to drop.

Bailey was closed at the end of the year and moved to merge with another building. Most teachers chose to find new jobs where they are struggling to recreate the Bailey experience.

The Bailey teachers were never and are not now naïve or sentimental about what they are up against. These were teachers who came to the urban setting with their eyes wide open

– about the challenges their students faced and about the state and the district’s failure to fully understand the work they were doing. Nor could they be arrogant. They didn’t want to be. It was not their job -- nor was it necessary -- to “fix” these bright young people nor to colonize them. But Bailey changed them, marked them with an optimist experimentalist attitude constructed over time. And so we ask how?

The answer, I contend, can be found in the actions of a principal who viewed the teachers as responsible and the ways in which they exercised this pedagogical responsibility.

Let me unpack this.

It is important to acknowledge that the opportunity was only partly of their own making. They were fortunate to find themselves working in a particular place for a particular principal with strong feelings of and about what it is to educate. Some chose this place; others found themselves there almost by accident. Over a period of three years, they began to work through, individually and together, how to take stock of the opportunities present, navigate them and respond, moving toward some opening out of impasse that didn’t rehabituate them, didn’t put them back into the cruel optimism that seems to define teaching today. 25

Together they learned to be responsive to each other and to each individual student while keeping the good of all in mind. Even when they failed – and they did – the fantasy of the

Bailey community did not fray.

They took responsibility, not equivalent to the accountability that has infected government schools throughout the developed world, but a pedagogical responsibility that captures the centrality of interpretive judgment to who they were and are as teachers.

The environment at Bailey was intoxicating – they wanted more and it made them high

-- because judgment was called for and called forth explicitly and regularly (Daniel Pink, autnomy, mastery, purpose = motivation). They were able to come to at least tentative agreement on purpose, over and over again, but they did not demand perfection of each other.

They came to realize that one can only hone judgment through the exercise of initially flawed and incomplete judgment. In “Democracy in Education,” Dewey says, “We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos (229). At Bailey they had the opportunity to exercise judgment; they experienced the freed capacity of thought.

And on those days when it all became too hard to bear – when the instructional demands and the personal lives of children who live in a place where shootings occur weekly became too much, someone else stepped in and said “you take a break, I got this.” (Reggie)

This is solidarity. This is democratic community. Most of us have rarely experienced it.

That’s why Dewey is so hard to wrap our arms around; why he is so often misunderstood.

This is pragmatist because it understands community in the way that Dewey describes it, but more importantly, because the Bailey teachers recognized that they had to look to the result 26 and connect that back to stimulating factors to determine the meaning of their common experience. Over time, this habit of connecting consequences to actions became intuition

They didn’t have to see the results to recognize that an action “fit” who they were individually and as a community. Intuition gave way to trust. And the virtuous cycle of community grew stronger.16

Optimism is not foolish; it’s absolutely necessary if education is the focus. And responsibility is not an option; it’s the choice we make when we accept teaching as a calling.

But the optimism can’t be naïve or arrogant, and the responsibility can’t be individualistic or totalizing. If this is the case, education is impossible. Cruel optimism characterizes the situation in which we find ourselves. Our contemporary consciousness IS marked and constrained by a vision of all humans, ourselves included, as homo oeconomicus. Our systems of schooling ARE perverted by programs that leave out arts and humanities for the sake of skills and STEM. And those emphases DO make it harder to enact education as a teacher in a government school. But the Bailey teachers (and their principal) found their own capacity to respond, to maintain but reconstruct the optimism that brought them to teaching. They understood that error challenges stasis, making growth possible and that acting anew with intelligence is always possible. And they understood their agency and identity as embedded in we. Wherever they are now, they know that they can make mistakes and they can fix them, and probably will. I only hope that they are finding others who will make mistakes with them.

16 National Commission for Teaching and America’s Future. (2016). What Matters Now: A New Compact for Teaching and Learning. (empower teachers, Reorganize Schools for Success.); Chip Wood (June 6, 2016), Trust is the Linchpin for Strengthening Schools. EdWeek Blog