Why Stanford Tried to Boot Me

The new US News Ed Schools Ranking reminded me I hadn’t yet reposted the piece I wrote explaining what happened, from my perspective. I’ve edited it down slightly; you can read the original at the link. In case I didn’t caveat it enough, I’m interpreting Professor Lotan’s behavior, not asserting her motives as fact.

I was a little more bitter back then; the fuss that the dean made over my blog cost me at least one teaching position, and there are certain districts I’ll never be able to work at because of an unofficial blacklist (and I’m not the only one suffering from that). I’m mostly over it now. In fact, I now think ed schools are much maligned. I enjoyed my time at Stanford, and STEP, as we call the ed school, produces excellent teachers. But if my opinions on ed school have become milder, my beliefs about why I was targeted remain unchanged. Any prospective teacher who gets targeted is going to have a difficult time escaping. I’m proud I escaped, proud I went public. I like to think it made a difference, that ed schools are more cautious about enforcing ideology. Hey, let me dream.

But none of this was possible without FIRE. Thanks again Adam, Will, Greg, and the rest.

PS–The misdirected email—known to me as the “OMG letter”, was sent accidentally to me in response to my polite refusal to meet with Professor Lotan. The person in question thought it had been forwarded to her, when in fact I had copied her on the original letter.

PPS: NCATE is now CAEP.

Published 8/25/2009.

An Opinionated Pragmatist Survives Stanford

I recently graduated from Stanford’s Teacher Education Program (known as STEP), after facing down two administrative attempts by the director, Dr. Rachel Lotan, to derail my candidacy.

The first attempt was straightforward. At a meeting for accepted applicants, a STEP staffer asked me my plans. I mentioned my concern about Stanford‘s cost, given my general disagreement with progressive education. Based solely on this comment, Dr. Lotan tried first to discourage and then to rescind my acceptance. Even after her efforts embarrassingly came to light through a misdirected email, she continued to seek legal means to rescind STEP’s offer. I sought help from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and as soon as FIRE wrote a letter on my behalf, Stanford agreed I could matriculate.

The second attempt doesn’t lend itself to an easy explanation. Near the end of the fall quarter, Dr. Lotan expressed “concerns about [my] suitability for the practice of teaching,” based on charges that I was tardy to class, failed to turn in “authentic” reflection papers in a timely manner, and was the subject of classmate and instructor complaints.

Unmentioned in the “concerns” letter but much in play was an earlier reprimand to me for writing a blog (still password protected) that ostensibly violated teacher ethics. The blog focused on my strong disagreements with aspects of STEP philosophy. The “concerns” letter also didn’t discuss my classroom management plan, which just a week earlier Professor Lotan said had grossly violated the California Teaching Standards on professionalism.

I wrote two grievances. FIRE wrote a letter to Stanford officials, making it clear the organization was watching my case closely. With FIRE’s support, as well as the backing of family and my fellow students, I fought back the attempt. After I graduated, I went public with my story.

Given the weak gruel of the formal complaint, some assume Professor Lotan was employing genteel understatement. I was really an obnoxious, argumentative troublemaker who alienated students and staff by attending the program simply to cause trouble. Others assume my academic freedom was broadly under assault: STEP professors were liberal ideologues seeking to drive out anyone with an opposing view. Both assumptions are, for the most part, inaccurate.

I was far more concerned with cost than ideology in choosing Stanford. STEP’s ideology was a given, as it would be at any ed school. Anyone who wants a teaching credential has to attend a program promoting progressive education. I had no intention of causing trouble. I resolved in advance to doodle madly whenever the dogma got too thick, to restrict my comments to facts and my own experiences, and to look for elements I could agree with and incorporate into my teaching. My resolute vow of silence would fail, of course, but I had faith that Stanford’s commitment to academic freedom would provide protection when I inevitably slipped up and offered my actual opinion.

And I was right. I wasn’t able to keep my mouth shut all the time, but never suffered academically for presenting my ideas. Instructors routinely called on me, and often confirmed facts I offered–which, over time, increased my credibility. Apart from my classroom management plan, I was never asked to resubmit an assignment, a relatively common occurrence for some classmates.

I did well academically, including Professor Lotan’s course on heterogeneous classrooms. Until the “concerns” letter, I received no emails or verbal complaints during the fall quarter from anyone about classroom interactions, tardiness, or late assignments.

Few of my classmates complained about me, Professor Lotan told me, in our meeting about her “concerns”. Those who did were upset at my views and the certainty with which I expressed them, not because of personal interactions. I made many close friends. Over half my classmates in the secondary school cohort supported me with information when I asked for help establishing my supervisor‘s disparate treatment.

At no point were my teaching abilities an issue. My assessments were always excellent. Dr. Lotan assured me on several occasions that her concerns were entirely “communication-related.” In no small way I owe my survival to support, both tacit and explicit, provided by the principal and teachers at my placement school, which surely wouldn’t have been forthcoming had my teaching been weak.

So if the easy culprits aren’t responsible, why did I have trouble? In my view, the “concerns” letter and the problems it purported to document were a pretext.

Education schools are required to brand themselves—the official term is “conceptual framework”—in order to receive the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education seal of approval. To gain NCATE accreditation, each ed school must develop its own “shared vision” that “provides the bases that describe the unit’s intellectual philosophy and institutional standards, which distinguish graduates of one institution from those of another.”

Dr. Lotan cares passionately about the STEP brand, because she created it. I was seen as wanting in this regard. The director saw a “discrepancy” between my application essay and my “actual” opinions; apparently, only progressives want to work with underprivileged students. My application was originally deemed worthy of first-round admission and a $9000 fellowship; Dr. Lotan saw it as a façade that had sucked her in to accepting the wrong kind of person. A month later, she said furiously, “You can get a credential anywhere. Why go to Stanford?” Reviewing my rejected classroom management plan, she wondered why anyone holding such views would waste time and money trying to become a STEP graduate, and worried that a hiring principal would blame her upon discovering the depths of my heresy.

I was reprimanded for my blog, even though neither Stanford nor STEP has a blogging policy to violate. Both Dr. Lotan and Associate Dean Eamonn Callan made it clear that they wanted to control my observations not only of my placement school, but of my fellow students and instructors. After I brought the blog down, renamed it, removed all references to Stanford, and password protected it, Dean Callan still demanded that a Stanford professor review the blog to ensure that there wasn’t anything offensive about “students in the STEP program.”

The problem wasn’t really my performance, or even the blog, but rather the desired image of a STEP candidate.

I’m an opinionated pragmatist who is often cynical about education policy, and was quite effective in communicating my doubts. Had I been a conservative Christian hoping to start an inner-city charter school dedicated to improving moral character through the word of God, Dr. Lotan could reassure herself that she’d turned out another teacher leader, however misguided. Instead, she had a candidate who renamed her dissenting blog from “Surviving Stanford” to “Hating Dewey.”

My theory: Professor Lotan felt I’d be bad for the brand, and worried she’d be explaining me away until one of us retired. If so, this was a foolish concern; my opinions are exponentially stronger than my ambition. Ironically, my Stanford experience story has guaranteed me far more exposure than I’d have had if she’d just ignored me.

I doubt Rachel Lotan ever anticipated the trouble she had trying to get rid of me. Prospective teachers can pass their classes and teach skillfully, but all that counts for nothing if the program director decides against recommending them. The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing requires that a candidate “be formally recommended for the credential by the college or university where the program was completed,” and the director has complete control over that recommendation. STEP’s procedures allow the director to threaten expulsion by invoking the “Guidelines for Reviewing Concerns Regarding Suitability for the Practice of Teaching”:

Such substantive concern or violation of professional conduct might include, but is not limited to, inappropriate interactions with students, colleagues, school personnel, or STEP staff and instructors, disrespectful behavior or behavior that reflects negatively on the profession or the schools, or erratic participation in required courses or in clinical placement.

You might think this behavior would be captured through school grades and placement assessments, but the Guidelines make no mention of assessments or grades.

That’s the entire point of the “concerns” letter. Even if the candidate navigates STEP’s academic and clinical structure the ed school director can expel that candidate from the program using these guidelines. The “concerns” don’t even need to be documented, either verbally or in writing.

After meeting about the “concerns,” Dr. Lotan then gave me a laundry list of generic requirements—only one of which had anything to do with the original complaint. This letter clearly implied that these behaviors were the source of the concerns, when in fact most of them had never been at issue. But now that they’d been written up, any purported violation of this laundry list could be used to move to the next step of declaring me unsuitable.

From what I’ve been told, the STEP program has rarely needed to resort to a “concerns” letter. Most candidates seem to get the hint without the strong-arming. I was just too stubborn—or too stupid—to comply.

In my cohort, one candidate was told to leave a few weeks into the year for an amazingly trivial reason. Three candidates passed all their classes, student-taught twenty hours a week for a year, took on thousands of dollars in loans, and were denied a credential within six weeks of graduation. At the same time that I, with excellent teaching assessments, was fighting a “concerns” letter, these candidates had no warning that in a few months, they‘d be denied a credential—although two of them were not deemed ready to take over their class in January, as is the norm. These candidates had entirely STEP-safe views, but in their own way, they threatened the program’s well-being or the brand just as much as I did. Since Jay Mathew’s article came out, I’ve heard from previous cohorts with similar tales of early expulsions.

As a professor, Professor Lotan handled dissent easily, often agreeing with my comments. As an administrator, she discussed my opinions dispassionately. I did not see her as a petty tyrant, and I thought she was a particularly good professor. But she always cycled rapidly from surprise to anger when I asked for documentation of her charges; I’ve concluded that she goes through the fake administrative nonsense—the meeting to warn me off from accepting STEP’s offer, the “concerns” letter—for the candidate’s benefit. My interpretation: I was supposed to understand her authority and bow out gracefully in order to spare myself added expense. Only an ungrateful lout would refuse to understand how hard she was working to ease me out in order to save me embarrassment.

I always told people that her only two weapons were moral suasion and intimidation. Alas, she ran into someone who was completely immune to those tactics, and years of easy victories left her without any backup strategy.

I can understand why people don’t fight. When I filed my non-academic grievance with Stanford‘s School of Education, Dean Deborah Stipek didn’t respond to the merits of my complaint, or even investigate it. Given proof of Professor Lotan’s deception and animosity in her original attempt to rescind my acceptance (the misdirected email), knowing that FIRE had taken an interest, Dean Stipek took politically sensible action. She removed everyone in supervising team–Lotan, Callan, the director of clinical placement, and my supervising teaching—from any control over my academic or clinical outcome. If I still had problems, I couldn’t claim pre-existing bias. If I didn’t have problems, then all was well.

I had no further problems. My life at Stanford improved spectacularly, and I will always be grateful to Dean Stipek for that second chance. But she never reviewed my charges for merit.

My academic grievance, filed to challenge my practicum grade, had a different outcome. I documented the utter lack of consistent standards at STEP in case I needed to protect myself against expulsion. I provided numerous examples of discrepant treatment by supervisors throughout STEP, proved that I had actually met standards that few supervisors bothered to use, and provided evidence, I believe, that Professor Lotan largely invented my practicum grade. The grievance was rejected. The investigation ignored the crux of my complaint and had no comment on STEP staff’s ignorance of its own documentation, failure to treat all students equally, and questionable grading procedures.

The academic grievance results hint at what might have awaited me without that misdirected email. Would Dean Stipek have waved her magic wand to improve my life if I hadn’t had proof of ill will?

When Stanford allowed me to start school, I asked Jay to hold off writing about my story until after I graduated. I was determined to go public at that point, even with the risks this would entail. I have a long history of online discourse with a brutal, if funny, persona that I knew would be revealed; many people might confuse that persona with my milder and kinder (no, really!) real-world self. But surviving my year at Stanford required an odd combination of personality traits, and a less polarizing version of me was unlikely to come along and make a better poster child. Happily, I was able to find a teaching position. It’s easy to forget in all the drama of my saga, but that’s the outcome I was fighting for.

Stanford may be a private institution, but teacher credentialing is a matter of public policy. Those of us who have the skills and desire to be teachers need more protection, regardless of the degree to which we embody a desired image. Ed schools have a clearly defined academic and clinical framework to prepare teachers. If they aren’t happy with an accepted student who successfully negotiates this framework, they shouldn’t be allowed a trap door.

New Teacher Types

I was reading the Melancholy Math teacher’s plaint to planning at 1 am, and am reminded that there are two sorts of new teachers.

First, you have the stereotype, Type I, which the Melancholy Math teacher lives up to nicely: well meaning, dedicated to helping the community, and generally stunned to discover that kids weren’t just one good teacher away from success. In fact, they are shocked to learn of the depth of the gaps in their knowledge. Even more difficult to accept is that many kids were not in search of a great teacher, and in fact are just marking time. Some of the kids are simply uninterested in school, except as a social activity. Others work hard and get nowhere, while some of the biggest troublemakers have excellent skills. In short, everything they thought was true about school turned out to be wrong.

These new teachers are also characterized by their insane attitude towards working hours. They start by putting in 16 hour days, and go up. They talk about planning, while other teachers wonder what the hell is so hard about planning? They are ever in search of the mythical perfect lesson, the one that will engage students and move them towards success. In fact, these teachers confuse engagement with learning time and again.

Finally, these teachers are terrible at classroom management, in part because they never really anticipated the possibility that their students wouldn’t be hanging on their every word, enthralled and excited by the first teacher, ever, who cared about them. But also in part because their social class doesn’t allow them to exercise authority, and it takes them a year or so to figure out other methods of keeping control.

It’s easy to spot this type in the Teach for America blogs. Here’s one, and here’s another, both of them pulled from the front page at random when I went to the site for this piece. Gary Rubinstein noted TFA critic, often says he was such a teacher his first year.
Teach for America pulls from a population that’s almost doomed to be Type I, since they start from the premise that schools are broken, that teachers don’t care, that kids fail because they’ve never had good teachers. But it’s certainly not unique to TFA.

Stanford’s STEP program which, like all elite schools, pulls from much the same population as Teach for America, puts all of its teacher candidates through an entire year of student teaching, both at the middle school and high school level–20 hours a week, every week. Like all ed schools, they have trouble finding enough schools with low achieving populations that also have teachers embracing the ed school’s constructivist, heterogeneous philosophy as well as teachers willing to “cooperate” with a student teacher. But the year-long dose of reality gives its teacher candidates a far better chance of starting the job as Type II teachers.

Type II teachers have far fewer illusions. They might even be called cynical, but only by people who don’t know better. They want to help students, they want to improve academic outcomes. They just don’t kid themselves.

It may or may not be significant that many of the “born” type II teachers I’ve known are either working class or spent a lot of an otherwise privileged childhood in an economically diverse environment. They know better than most that not all kids are interested in learning. Some Type II teachers were the smart kids being ignored or bored in out-of-control classes and aren’t interested in repeating the pattern. But others just entered the profession with a good idea of what they could and couldn’t achieve.

Type II teachers are clearly different on two vectors: classroom management and working hours. They do a much better job on the first, and spend far less time on the second. Thus, they are less likely to get burned out, and less likely to have out of control classes. However, I suspect they are no more likely to be retained than Type I teachers–even less so, in some cases—because administrators luv them some Type Is, anxious to be mentored, eager to contribute, ready to give it all.

My first year teaching included the best day I’ve had, so far. Granted, that was in English/History, which is easier for a novice to teach than math, but even now, as I look back, it counts as a great day. As a math teacher, I was good enough. Not great, but my classes were well-managed—and I had a tough crowd. More importantly, I learned essential information that first year. I learned that my students didn’t always learn what I taught them the first, second, or even third time. I learned that contrary to my ed school beliefs, I didn’t much like using text books for everything. My kids learned well enough, for that first year, and I learned how to improve for the next year.

Well enough! Fighting words. We need better than “well enough”! No. We really don’t. Not every time, not every minute. In many ways, I was much better than other teachers. My top kids got more attention. My struggling kids learned how to make sense of math. I did no damage, and a fair amount of good—and while that was going on, I learned how to be better.

But it’s that type of thinking that makes Type II teachers less attractive to education watchers. Type II teachers don’t get much press because they don’t feed a narrative. Progressive educators and teacher unions want to push the story that teaching is hard, demanding, draining, difficult to master, and thus need more money, more training, more appreciation. The reform narrative, on the other hand, is not served by effective teachers who don’t think hard work and great teachers are all we need to improve academic achievement. So those people who paint a narrative, who make money from selling that narrative, want a better story—and they aren’t terribly impressed by teachers who show up, enjoy the job, slowly improve their own performance as they gain experience, and don’t break down or cry out of exhaustion or disappointment. Where’s the drama? Where’s the urgent drive and dedication that will end the achievement gap and put us ahead of Singapore?

Yeah, yeah, broad outlines. But if teacher burnout is a problem—and it is, in the very schools everyone worries about—wouldn’t it be better to profile teachers? Instead of looking at external factors that might lead to stress and anguish, why not look at internal ones? What expectations do teachers have when they begin, and how does that influence their experience?

Meanwhile, a note to the Melancholy Math Teacher: go home. Stop working so hard. Throw a few more kids out of class. Get some sleep.

Ed School Writing: Reflections on Lisa Delpit’s “Silenced Dialogue”

One of the things I hope to do in this blog is write about ed school. Many people want to change it, but they’re usually wrong in both goal and method. I’m also interested to see if my views have changed much. Since I kept a lot of my early writings on my blog–the one that had to be shut down–I still have electronic copies of them. Some of them are pretty good, I think. So this piece was written for Literacies class, July or August of 2008. Five years. Gleep. They are copied verbatim; if you spot any typos let me know.

Lisa Delpit’s “Silenced Dialogue”, a seminal article in education literature, offers a number of piercing insights into a perceived flaw of progressive education. However, Delpit chooses to frame her arguments through a dichotomy of race and culture that ultimately distorts her message in a way that probably ensures it won’t be heard by the audience that most needs to hear it.

Delpit aims at a fundamental tenet of progressive education: the “guide on the side” position of teacher as “co-learner” and adviser, questioner and consultant, as opposed to the “sage on stage” model (teacher as dispenser of knowledge). To Delpit and other non-white educators, the hippy dippy froufrou passive-aggressive control of progressives is so ineffective for children of color, so “coded” in white power structures, that in their admittedly paranoid moments they wonder if white, liberal educators have devised this method purely to ensure that the power circles stay intact, with their children protected and the outsiders kept out.

I am deeply skeptical of the “guide on the side” approach , and I applauded wildly when Delpit pointed out the degree to which teachers using the “guide on the side” method are relying on passive, unstated authority. I have, on more than one occasion, pointed out that certain “norms” in progressive classrooms are little more than lies. For example, many teachers will review a student’s work and say “I have a question about…..” But this is simply untrue. The teacher has found an error. She doesn’t have to point out the error and she can make the student aware of the error with a question. But she should not imply that she is questioning the student’s work. (Worse, many teachers require students to point out what they believe are mistakes with the “I have a question” construct.). Delpit herself points out another pet peeve of mine–the verbal directive framed as a question. “Would you like to get your books out?” leaves the literal student a chance to say “no”. The teachers believe that they are modeling polite behavior, but the iron fist is right there behind the velvet glove.

However, Delpit apparently sees the progressive tradition as stemming from racial culture–specifically, the white race has established these norms and are now insisting that all other races follow along. Her stance completely ignores the enormous debate about progressive methods that exists within the overall educational community, independent of race. By framing it as a racial and cultural debate, Delpit lumps all white educators and parents into a belief system that many white parents, at least, profoundly oppose. (I wouldn’t be surprised if 50% or more of white parents would rather an expert teacher than a “co-learner”) Asian American opposition to progressive education tops that of whites. Likewise, many African American and Hispanic teachers strongly support progressive methods.
In class, I noticed that our discussion centered on the “silenced dialogue” and the “culture of power” metaphors in Delpit’s work, thus validating her framework of race and culture. This plays nicely into the “liberal” (Delpit’s word) world view and thus we spend another lesson on how we can “norm” our classroom to accept all cultures and try not to enforce our white values on other people. I have read other responses to Delpit’s work that also focus on the racial and cultural aspects. I have yet to see a discussion on whether or not the progressive tenet of “student-centered learning” might need adjustment or even abandonment.

Had Delpit aimed her barrage directly at progressive education, educators would have been forced to defend their methodology. Had she made more of her point that no data exists to support the notion that progressive methods are superior learning tools, she could have started a dialogue on whether or not progressive education itself meets the needs of all students. By framing it instead as a racial and cultural debate, she placed the war in comfortable terrain for the progressives themselves, who are able to ignore the implications of her argument. Delpit is correct that dialogue is silenced, but she’s got the players wrong. It’s not whites who are silencing dialogue, but progressive educators.