! ! BLACKBOARD BODHISATTVAS: ! NARRATIVES OF NEW YORK CITY TEACHING FELLOWS ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! A DISSERTATION ! SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION ! AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES ! OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY ! IN PARTIAL REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF ! DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Brian D. Edgar June, !2014 © 2014 by Brian Douglas Edgar. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/kw411by1694 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. John Willinsky, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. David Labaree, Co-Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Ari Kelman I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Raymond McDermott Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost for Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii bodhisattva |ˌbōdiˈsätv$, -ˈs$t-|(also Bodhisattva ) noun (in Mahayana Buddhism) a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings. ORIGIN early 19th cent.: Sanskrit, ‘a person whose essence is perfect knowledge,’ from bodhi- ‘perfect knowledge’ (from budh- ‘awaken’[see Buddha]) + sattva ‘being, essence.’ ! BLACKBOARD BODHISATTVAS: ! NARRATIVES OF NEW YORK CITY TEACHING FELLOWS ! ! BRIAN D. EDGAR ! ! ABSTRACT! ! Since the founding of Teach for America (TFA) in 1990, alternative routes to teaching have proliferated. The New Teacher Project (now TNTP), the consulting and advocacy wing of TFA, has been a key actor behind many Teaching Fellows programs in a number of settings across the U.S., the largest of which is the New York City Teaching Fellows (TNTP website). Using a life history approach (Goodson, 1992), this dissertation investigates the experiences of three New York City Teaching Fellows who have remained in the classroom for eight to thirteen years, well beyond the five-year mark by which point 50% of urban teachers quit. This dissertation argues that the inadequacy of the Fellows’ preparation for taking on the challenges of urban teaching speaks dramatically to how the alternative-certification model is far more successful at recruiting and placing young, ill-prepared teachers in classrooms than it is at training or retaining good teachers, with the resulting turnover only leading, in the course of these teachers careers, to more emphasis on recruitment rather than training and retention. The three Fellows in this study, lacking the easy-exit strategy of TFA teachers (who come from the best schools), found the means of becoming better, more engaged teachers by eventually developing a personal point of connection and commitment with the students and the school system. This was despite, and not because of, the system’s increasingly bureaucratic efforts at professional development for improved test results. These teachers’ stories speak, not only to the difficulty of being an urban teacher in a era of accountability, but the need to provide a more supportive induction process and setting for teachers to find their places and their talents as professionals within the schools and American culture more generally. "1 Acknowledgements: There were many people who helped out in various ways during the writing of this dissertation. I would like to first of all thank the guys in this dissertation who told me some honest, brave, infuriating and hilarious stories about becoming teachers. Thanks so much Christian Patrick Clarke, Jim Groff and Sam Innes. AKA Chris, Jason, and Saunders. Lolz. You gave me so much good material. If this dissertation is a drag to read, it’s totally my fault. Thank all of you for our many conversations about education over the past 12 years. I would also like to thank Craig !Dorsey for his insights and our conversations over the years. Next, I would like to thank my advisers John Willinsky, David F. Labaree and Ray McDermott who were always available to offer advice, read crappy drafts and offer suggestions, guidance, encouragement along the way. There were many points along this journey when I would’ve !bailed had it not been for their faith in the project and in my ability to finish it. Thank you Ari Kelman for reading and being on my committee. Thank you Steve Cooper for !serving as chair at my defense. I would also like thank the many friends who have been there to listen, commiserate, rally, read drafts, etc. First of all thank you Eric Shed. We spent many days toiling in coffee shops in San Francisco and Oakland. Thank you Nelly Mensah, Ethan Hutt, Aurora Wood, Alexis Charles, !Amaya James for reading drafts. Guy Capuzzo. Cut the mullet and stay off the hell city bus. I would also like to thank my mental health support team. Thanks to Dr. Peter Bradley and Dr. !Janet Spraggins. I would like to especially thank Tsahai Wilson for your encouragement and support over the years. You were there from the beginning. Kristina Hanna, Lyndsey Williams, Jodi Phillips, thank you so much for your encouragement. You tolerated my foul moods, rumination and !obsessions about this project. William C. Dowling thank you for getting me started on this journey. Thank you Bill Damon for offering me a chance to study at Stanford. Thank you Linda Darling-Hammond for having faith in me. Adam Johnson, thank you for your incredibly generosity. Arnetha Ball, Anne Newman, Deborah Stipek thank you all for your support over the years. Sam Wineburg, thank you for your !compassion and understanding. Last but not least, I would like to thank my mom and my brothers Robert and Matthew for their continued encouragement and support. "2 ! ! ! ! What do you do with a B.A. in English? What is my life going to be? Four years of college and plenty of knowledge have earned me this useless degree. I can’t pay the bills yet because I have no skills yet, but somehow I can’t shake the feeling I might make a difference to the human race. ! -Avenue Q ! ! ! ! “I couldn’t get them to sit in their chairs and now they’re reading Kafka.” ! -Chris "3 ! ! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS ! ! ! !1. INTRODUCTION 4 ! ! !2. TEACHING AS A REVOLVING DOOR PROFESSION 14 ! ! 3. AN AURA OF STATUS AND SELECTIVITY 22 ! ! !4. TRAUMATIC LEARNING 48 ! ! !5. ESTRANGED TEACHING 75 ! ! !6. ELEGANT REBELLION 108 ! ! !7. BLACKBOARD BODHISATTVAS 139 ! ! !8. APPENDICES 151 ! 9. BIBLIOGRAPHY 158 "4 ! ! INTRODUCTION ! When the solid citizen of our times looks at the state of education--if she looks at all--she usually finds much to deplore. If she reads the papers, she finds teachers blamed for every social and economic ill. A recent “Room for Debate” column in the New York Times that sought to understand the scorn was called “Why Blame the Teachers?” An article in New York magazine explains, “How Teaching Became our Culture’s Most Vilified Profession.” President Obama has said that there is an “assault” that has “denigrated” and “vilified” teachers even as others make the same accusation of him. But it’s not just the press, everyone seems to agree that the teachers are no good. Harold O. Levy, former schools chancellor of New York writes that “nobody wants to talk about it, but the quality of teachers has been declining for years” (Levy, 2000). Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, writes that “fixing schools of education won’t be enough,” we need to get better teachers (Kopp, 1992). A recent report developed by a right wing group that calls itself the National Center for Teacher Quality declares that colleges and universities that train teachers are “an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms with ever-increasing ethnic and socioeconomic student diversity” (National Council on Teacher Quality, 3). Policy makers speak of a “teacher quality gap” to go along with the “achievement gap” (Haycock & Crawford, 2008).1 1 If we look at an N-gram, we can see that “teacher quality”entered the lexicon and more or less parallels the “achievement gap.”See Appendix A. "5 Even Hollywood, which has been a big producer of teachers hero movies (Ayers, 2001), especially the popular sub-genre of the white, hero teacher movie (Cann, 2013) has seemed to sour on the teacher as hero trope. A critical roundup of a number of recent film and television shows that feature teachers found that teaching was shorthand for a character’s “dysfunction” or even “cosmic disenfranchisement”: It’s no coincidence that anyone teaching on television these days tends to be broke (Ray Drecker on “Hung”) or sick (Walter White on “Breaking Bad”) or both. No one, these shows imply, would teach because she wants to, because she likes it or is good at it. Despite the lip service regularly and dutifully paid to the profession, within the lexicon of 2 !contemporary visual culture, it seems clear that it remains a career of last resort.