For this Occasional Paper, we invited teachers to respond to the ways in which proliferation of standards and testing combined with their own loss of professional control is altering the landscape of American education....Our goal is to raise questions about whether and how educators are balancing the demands of high stakes testing, scripted curricula, and a focus on performance outcomes with the emotional complexity of classroom life. --The editor

Boldt, Gail M.

Salvio, Paula M

Taubman, Peter

English

EDUCATE (Bank Street College of Education)

Occasional Paper Series Volume 2009 Number 22 Classroom Life in the Age of Accountability Article 1 March 2009 Introduction: Classroom Life in the Age of Accountability Gail M. Boldt Penn State University Paula M. Salvio University of New Hampshire - Main Campus Peter Taubman Brooklyn College Follow this and additional works at: https://educate.bankstreet.edu/occasional-paper-series  Part of the Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Disability and Equity in Education Commons, Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Commons, Educational Methods Commons, and the Education Policy Commons Recommended Citation Boldt, G. M., Salvio, P. M., & Taubman, P. (2009). Introduction: Classroom Life in the Age of Accountability. Occasional Paper Series, 2009 (22). Retrieved from https://educate.bankstreet.edu/occasional-paper-series/vol2009/iss22/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Educate. It has been accepted for inclusion in Occasional Paper Series by an authorized editor of Educate. For more information, please contact kfreda@bankstreet.edu.  occasional paper series boldt, salvio, taubman 3INTRODUCTIONgail masuchika boldtpaula m. salviopeter m. taubmanIn the opening to her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of ShockCapitalism, Naomi Klein renders a searing portrait of what she describes as theauctioning off of the New Orleans school system soon after Hurricane Katrina.Although most of the city’s poor still lived in exile nineteen months after thestorm, the public school system had been just about completely replaced by pri-vately run charter schools. In a matter of a few months, New Orleans was trans-formed into what the New York Times described as “the nation’s preeminent labo-ratory for the widespread use of charter schools,” while the American EnterpriseInstitute enthused that “Katrina accomplished in a day … what Louisiana schoolreformers couldn’t do after years of trying” (Klein, 2007, p. 6).The ongoing educational experiment in New Orleans highlights some ofthe most salient issues facing U.S. educators today: the erosion of the public edu-cational system, the systematic resegregation of public schooling, and the loss ofteachers’ professional authority to make decisions about the quality of life andlearning in their classrooms (Orfield, 2004). Students living in rural and urbanhigh poverty areas continue to attend schools in dire need of sustainable infra-structures and are subject to some of the most restrictive interventions. The nar-rowing of the curriculum to test preparation or performance objectives alignedwith high stakes standards has impoverished the intellectual, aesthetic, and affec-tive dimensions of life in classrooms. Students’ interests, curiosity, and play, as wellas teachers’ passions and questions fall by the wayside as they work together tofollow directives and meet production quotas. Meanwhile, parents who can affordthe costs can opt for private schools that support a wide range of inquiry-basedcourses, critical conversations, arts programs, and opportunities for communityinvolvement.For this Occasional Paper, we invited teachers to respond to the ways inwhich the proliferation of standards and testing combined with their own loss ofprofessional control is altering the landscape of American education. ClassroomLife in the Age of Accountability carries a special urgency as schooling becomes pri-vatized and federal support continues to decline. Our goal is to raise questionsabout whether and how educators are balancing the demands of high stakes test-ing, scripted curricula, and a focus on performance outcomes with the emotionalcomplexity of classroom life. Is it even possible in today’s climate for teachers tosustain their commitment to nourishing the aesthetic and psychic lives of chil-dren?More and more, it has seemed to us that various reforms promising greaterprofessional autonomy and status as well as student success are not only disem-powering teachers and impoverishing intellectual life in schools, but are serving asa portal for the marketization of teaching and education. Teachers are increasinglytold that the measure of professionalism is not the development of their ownexpertise and responsiveness to the individual children in front of them. Rather, itis bought through their fidelity to uniform, commercial and heavily scripted cur-ricula that promise (but often fail to deliver) greater student success. For many ofthe teachers represented in these essays, the concerns raised about the logic of anew teacher “professionalism” are brought to life by the wry and impassionedobservations of the British educational visionary Jimmy Britton. He writes that itis the space for play, conversation, private and shared passions, and simply muck-ing about with life that enables human passion for living. The critical importanceof these things is precisely what is “lost sight of in the rush and greed of a con-sumer-oriented world, often sacrificed when resources of time and money areinsufficient, and when the purposes of education are read off in terms of a marketeconomy” (Britton, 1970, p. 316).An approach to education that is driven by the desire to replace the idio-syncrasy of the daily life of classrooms with “the development of cognitive andpractice skills, of problem-solving and data handling; of number work and envi-ronmental studies; scientific, historical or geographical” reflects what Brittonnames as the misguided and impossible desire “to produce men and women withthe efficiency of machines. It must fail … because a man is a poor machine”(1970, pp. 152–153).That teachers and students are indeed poor machines – and determinedlyso – is reflected in the essays by the teachers whose research and reflections wepresent in this collection. In “Squeezed, Stretched, and Stuck: Teachers DefendingPlay-based Learning in No-nonsense Times,” Karen Wohlwend eloquentlydescribes how playful and inquiry–based engagements in kindergarten and first-4 bank street college of educationoccasional paper series boldt, salvio, taubman 5grade classrooms eventually gave way to the demands of district-mandated teacherevaluation plans that called for targeted reading strategies, seat work, and instruc-tion using basal reading materials. Wohlwend’s description of the resultingimpingement on children’s emotional lives and the professional authority of teach-ers in these midwestern classrooms resonates across zip codes as teachers work toget through the day “juggling the paperwork generated by the need to documentour compliance, and generating a range of compromise strategies to find moretime for play-based learning.” What emerges in this essay are a set of core con-cerns that challenge us to think differently about what cannot or refuses to becontained by rubrics and performance objectives.“Invisible Ink: A Psychoanalytic Study of School Learning” by Lisa Farleyand “Mouthy Students” and the Teacher’s Apple: Questions of Orality and Racein the Urban Public School” by Alyssa Niccolini speak to how we might strategi-cally put apparent excesses—excessive talking and the excessive rush of memo-ries—to work in the name of creating a pedagogy that challenges the logic of con-trol and the surveillance of learning. Writing about her high school students andtheir penchant for “mouthing off ” and “contested desires,” Niccolini observes that“schools are spaces marked by desire, and I have become a guardian of themouth.” While the mandates established in the name of No Child Left Behindclaim to “nourish urban minority youth, and low income students in particular,”they do so through discourses that medicalize and pathologize. Minority studentsare pushed to reach numerical benchmarks, held accountable for their talk, andmaster what is mistakenly understood to be standard English (Stubbs, 2003).The pedagogical event, like any artistic performance, is a collaboration thatcalls for inquiry as all participants work toward animating the material. Whether astudent is learning to read, speak a new language, or use an algorithm, what worksto bring the subject alive is not always visible or apparent—and certainly, it is oftennot planned, as Farley makes evident. Teaching, she suggests, is a form of memorythat calls forth the adult in the child and the child in the adult, and each intrudesin unsuspecting ways on the work of education and induces us to symbolize whatour conscious memories cannot fully contain or comprehend. What would itmean for educators to respect that which cannot be possessed or understood?What might it mean to direct our attention to creating a curriculum that worksaccording to a system of production and reproduction that cannot be replicated oreasily measured, but that moves us emotionally and civically and directs us outinto the communities that call for our substantive participation and commitment?Peter Nelson locates this form of curriculum in the woods, twelve yearsago, before accountability and testing measures had eradicated “subjects associatedwith playfulness: art, music, and physical education.” In his defense of playfulness,Nelson argues that the loss of play has unwittingly provoked a loss of criticalthinking and civic engagement. Like Nelson, Gillian McNamee argues that play isin fact central to the development of a literacy that is both personal and sociallyresponsive. She paints a picture of young children at work and play that is simul-taneously utterly familiar to those of us who have been in education for a longtime and utterly remarkable in that it has all but disappeared in contemporaryclassrooms.McNamee’s championing of play and imagination and Nelson’s call for“playful world traveling” are in stark contrast to the disciplining ethos thatemerges in Elizabeth Park’s essay, “English Language Learners and High StakesTesting.” As her students prepare to take their tests to exhibit English proficiency,the atmosphere, writes Park, “becomes military at best, prison-like at worst.Regulations are distributed. Teachers are warned that state examiners may appearunannounced to look for infractions of the myriad rules…” Scare tactics are usedto try to assure that the testing activity remains uncontaminated by human desire,fear, or simple boredom.Each of our contributors offers us generous narratives that contain whatmatters most to them. In their portrayals, we too have found a repertoire of peda-gogical methods and insights that illuminate what it means to be engaged—attimes enraged—public intellectuals.While we began our comments with the charter school experiments inNew Orleans, we end with a different image, one of hope and integrity. Inspiredby the “people-managed tsunami rehabilitation” in Thailand, a small delegation ofhurricane survivors from New Orleans initiated waves of direct action in NewOrleans and are working toward taking back their city and the public school sys-tem they so highly value. Rather than relying on government support, members ofthese delegations are restoring their lives and taking part in communal recovery.“Reopening our school,” announced the assistant principal of Dr. Martin LutherKing Jr. Elementary School in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, “says thisis a very special community, tied together by more than location but by spirituali-ty, by bloodlines and by a desire to come home” (Klein, 2007). These words andthe project of “people-managed rehabilitation” taken up by so many courageous,imaginative citizens, offer, we believe, one of the finest examples of how educators6 bank street college of educationoccasional paper series boldt, salvio, taubman 7might begin to consider reclaiming their own professional authority. We hope thatClassroom Life in The Age of Accountability contributes to reviving our public educa-tional system in ways that inspire the practice of a democracy that refuses to betempered by the insidious grasping after efficiency, compliance, and uniformitythat is the false promise of the age of accountability.ReferencesBritton, J. (1970). Language and learning. London: Allen Lane.Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York: HenryHolt and Co.Orfield, G. (2004). Dropouts in America: Confronting the graduation rate crisis.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Stubbs, M. (2003). Some basic sociolinguistic concepts. In L. Delpit & J. K.Dowdy (Eds.), The skin that we speak: Thoughts on language and culture in theclassroom (pp. 63-86). New York: New Press.

Introduction: Classroom Life in the Age of Accountability

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