I began my teaching career three
months before the turn of the century, at a time when the baby boomers were starting
to retire and bipartisanship was still a thing. We looked forward to a
millennium of changes beyond our imagination, in education and in the world at
large.
Three years into my career, the 21st-century
educational changes began. No Child Left Behind ushered in a seismic shift in
education. Standardized testing, school accountability and educational
standards became required, unquestionable aspects of every state and district’s
educational landscape, and the use of data to evaluate school success became a
fixed part of how we run schools. It took years for school districts to adjust
to this method of evaluation, and many are still struggling to produce data
that reveal a quality commensurate with the education that district leaders
believe they are seeing in the classroom.
Change can be exciting, but it also
can be all-encompassing. In their classic scholarship on organizational
leadership, Lee Bolman and Terrence E. Deal describe four frames of leadership
– the structural frame, the human resource frame, the symbolic frame and the
political frame. A seismic shift in education hits all four frames at once. No
Child Left Behind, for instance, altered the very nature of what schools do
(structural), the job requirements of educators (human resource), the messages
we send about educational equity (symbolic) and the fixes legislators had made
to that inequity (political). For institutions as complicated and bureaucratic
as school districts and school buildings, a seismic shift takes a lot out of
everyone. After all of the meetings, professional development, and readjusted
lesson plans, we hope we’ve found a way to pivot toward improved education for
the students we serve.
Another seismic shift arrived after
the Newtown, Conn., mass shooting of 2012, this one focused on much stricter
school security. In the first decade of the century, yet another seismic shift
began as both smartphones and social media arrived in students’ lives, bringing
technology into our classrooms every minute of the day. And a fourth shift took
place over the course of the first two decades of the 2000s, as many colleges
maneuvered toward higher tuitions and lower acceptance rates, thereby turning
the promise of higher education on its head and leading to a near-obsessive
student/parent focus on the K-12 finish line.
All of these shifts led to countless
research and policy changes, as well as deep challenges to the daily lives of
educators. We know that big changes are coming in our careers, and we know that
rigidity will be of no use. But we do hope that these changes can be spread out
a bit, so as to make the essential job of educating students more manageable. Four
huge changes in 20 years was a lot. But it was actually easy to handle compared
to the past several years.
In this last 5-10 years, the frequency
of seismic changes has increased at a pace few could have expected. While I identified
four such changes over my first 20 years as an educator, four more have fully
developed over the past half-decade or so. For one, we have a mental health
epidemic affecting our children, which existed before the Covid pandemic and
continues to exist after it. Two, we have ever-increasing polarization that
leads to intense divisions and lines in the sand on virtually every topic you
can find. Third, we have rapid increases in the development of artificial
intelligence, coupled with a widening mistrust of source material. And fourth,
we are expected to produce quality education in the midst of catastrophe,
whether it’s from infectious disease or climate-induced crises.
In essence, these four current
shifts are challenging the very nature of wellness, the very nature of truth,
the very nature of learning, and the very nature of survival. With changes this
wide and deep and disturbing, it’s no wonder some are choosing not to pursue
careers in education. These are tough times all over, and the classroom is no
exception.
My doctoral dissertation focused on
two tough yet critical topics in education – media literacy and racial
literacy. One day, while I was conducting my research in an eighth-grade
classroom in New Jersey, students were discussing sources related to
immigration. In a small-group conversation, two boys offered differing views on
how much is too much when it comes to U.S. open-border immigration policies.
When we gathered for full-group discussion, a third boy from that group quietly
shared that he’d been listening to his two friends as they had disagreed over
whether this country should accept more immigrants. He said he heard both
points of view, he believes both classmates to be really good people, and he
was having trouble determining who was more correct in their points of view,
and what to do about it.
We listened to this student, and the
class quietly reflected on his point. He was addressing an issue that has no quick
fixes. And yet he was listening, learning, and sharing. He was engaged in respectful
conversation with his peers as they studied up on the topic. He was ready to
keep learning and talking about the issue. He wasn’t shying away from it, but
he also wasn’t expecting easy answers.
Bolman and Deal’s four frames were
all on display here: the structure (student-centered learning); the human
resource (respectful discussion and discovery among peers); the symbolic
(democratic learning with free exchange of ideas); and the political (fearless
entry into the tough topics, with mutual respect). This was just one
conversation, for sure. But for me, it shone a light on an educational path
that can seem dark and foreboding in 2023. Just as seismic changes can hit all
four frames, so can collaboration and our commitments to learning and growing
together.
The changes are abundant and they are overwhelming.
But I have to figure that if these kids can find a way forward, one step at a
time, so can I. And so can we.