I have not written in a long time. For one thing, it has been such a dark time. Education seems to be falling apart around me, doomsday imminent as here in New York City the mayor continues his destructive plan to close schools and open cookie-cutter charters, bleeding the very life out of a precious public institution which has withstood the tests of time despite its many flaws. As Diane Ravitch led the charge to awaken the sleeping masses and try to make people at least take notice if not actually DO something, Occupy Wall Street had its strange and glorious bright light moment, only to fizzle out without a clear plan or purpose. At least that’s how it felt to me. The mighty 1% plowed on while the rest of us realized we’d been had and we were too busy trying to survive to figure out collectively if there was something to be done about any of it.

There were a few other interesting cracks in the concrete though. When the Komen Foundation said they would withdraw funding from Planned Parenthood, the sleeping feminist giant woke up and said, “Hell, no!” Even Mayor Bloomberg had to get on board that wagon to save face. And while the GOP had a free fall down the rabbit hole with their personhood rhetoric and “war on women,” it took Rush Limbaugh going so over the top  to bring the slut rage fully to the forefront of the national dialogue and tell the idiot to shut up and quit already.

Suddenly, and really without much warning, the battles and threats of war and doomsday around me took their personal physical toll, and I ended up in the hospital with a perforated appendix. Normally, when this sort of thing is caught in time, you get better after a super dose of antibiotics and eventually surgeons can go in and take the useless organ out. But I was one of those complicated cases with kidney failure, pulmonary edema, and my body didn’t start to settle down until I had liters of green pond slime pumped from my stomach and got some superfood known as TPN that finally helped me recover. I’ve only been home from my nearly 3 week hospital stay for a few days, but the healing is wondrous, and like others who have a serious brush with illness, my mind is racing and I can’t seem to stop THINKING about everything.

During my time in the hospital, which was adorned with spring and Easter flowers and the extraordinary support of the nurses and doctors and others watching over me, a little miracle occurred. A short gem of a film called Caine’s Arcade about a 9-year-old boy living in East Los Angeles, who, with the help of his father, turned the back of dad’s auto shop into a handmade cardboard game arcade, went viral. It went viral the way things do these days: suddenly it’s on your Facebook newsfeed; on the Yahoo front page; and on the NBC evening news. As I watched on my iPhone thanks to a tip from my friend Kathy (my extraordinary lifelines to the world outside), I cried tears of joy at the pure miracle of it and immediately made a contribution via PayPal (what a handy service that is!) to Caine’s scholarship fund, which the filmmaker had wisely set up. Each time I watched I felt renewed hope, that maybe, just maybe, this could represent a national “a-ha” moment. Surely parents, perennially worried about their children’s future and education, would be drawn back to memories of their own childhood when they made things out of whatever was handy, and were driven by the need to just PLAY. Teachers and administrators, worn out from being on the defensive for so long, could finally point to Caine and say, “See, that’s what you’ve taken from our children you horrible nasty corporate heartless bastards!” Others might simply smile and say, “Hey, let’s go to LA and play at Caine’s arcade!” (and they did).

So Caine is my new hero, and I can’t wait to have a Caine’s Arcade t-shirt and look at his wonderful smiling face over and over again in the charming film, but I also have to worry about what’s next. We can’t have another Occupy Wall Street crash and burn, or worse, made-for-Hollywood movie version of Caine’s story to once again anesthetize the masses.

We have to do what concerned and active citizens in a democracy have done through the ages – get together and deliberate. We need to discuss the pros and cons of proceeding in certain directions, and it’s clear our political establishment is too corrupt and gridlocked to do it for us. No, if there’s one lesson from Occupy Wall Street, it’s that to make something happen the ground has to start shaking. We can’t just shake with doom and gloom though either. We need to start planting the seeds of hope and showing them off as if they were the most precious flowers ever to bloom. 

Summer is traditionally a time for teachers and kids to recharge. Sadly, we live in tough times. Many city kids are forced to attend dreadful summer school, where they get to do mostly more test prep, even if it turns out they were unnecessarily flagged for those programs, as happened to almost five thousand New York City students this summer (this news was buried in the second to last paragraph of Mayor Bloomberg's press release on test score results). Many city teachers have spent the summer wondering if they will have a job in the fall. Those who have jobs are probably worried about the chaos that surely awaits them, as new job performance measures that use student test scores to evaluate teachers go into effect despite the outcry from national experts that this is just plain wrong. Daniel Koretz, author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us (2008), says he is noticing a "growing unease" with standardized testing since the publication of his book. I wish that were so.

Yesterday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced a plan to offer states a waiver from the NCLB requirements of 100% student proficiency by 2014 if they can show that they are doing the things the states that won Race to the Top money are doing, including tying teacher performance to student test scores. Also in the works are attempts to move the preparation of educators out of universities, as New York State has done . University schools of education are also being reviewed by NCTQ and U.S. News and World Report in an effort to make them accountable in similar ways for student learning outcomes.

Not surprisingly, there is a growing outcry in the teaching ranks of "STOP THE INSANITY!" Last month, I attended the Save Our Schools March and rally in Washington DC, and the two day conference that preceded it at American University. Despite the scorching heat, several thousand people listened to and cheered on a top-notch line up of speakers including Linda Darling-Hammond, Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, Pedro Noguera, and, heavily covered by celebrity-loving media, Matt Damon. Damon got a lot more attention for a backstage interview with Libertarian Reason TV than for his excellent podium speech. He was introduced by his mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige who is a well-known author and teacher educator. 

This event was energizing and brought together people from many states to argue for four principles of real educational reform:

-       Equitable funding for all public school populations  

-       Ending high-stakes testing for student, teacher and school evaluation 

-       Curriculum developed for and by local school communities

-       Public education policies formed by teachers, families and local leadership

It's likely that a fifth principle of high quality early childhood education will be added to the group's agenda as their work moves forward. Coinciding with the conference and rally were several film screenings. I managed to see two documentaries. The first, August to June, is a beautiful portrait of classroom life that is hard not to love. The second is a homegrown response to Waiting for Superman entitled The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman. It really makes you want to get up out of your chair and go on a march or get to a protest rally. Those behind the latter film are teachers and parents arguing for ten "real reforms" that echo the sentiments of the Save Our Schools agenda.

The problem moving ahead as I see it is going to be finding good ideas that can be implemented at low cost. Protest movements are good at letting politicians know what constituents want and don't want, and at getting some publicity for their cause. What's needed now are people on the ground who have a way of moving forward towards making the needed changes happen in their communities. Until the testing beast is tackled, I just don't know that this will happen on the necessary scale. We can't just say no to the tests, tell parents to opt their children out of them, get states to refuse the NLCB waivers, and undo all the harm that has been inflicted as a result of the high stakes testing fiasco without a plan to put something else in place. For that to happen, we need good ideas. We already have some very smart people working on this, but what they are trying to do will take lots of money and time, and we don't have either of those things right now. Here are a few ideas I propose, please add your own in the comments. Let's build a list! 

1)    Ask the question, "Is this really in the best interests of our children?" It's hard to answer this question with a, "No, but…"

2)    Engage people in discussions about what we value about public education. Liven up dinner parties, get parents talking about their hopes and dreams for their children and what it means to be educated. Make the outcomes of those conversations visible to the community and to those in schools.

3)    Debunk the myth of the test as a measure of anything. All a multiple-choice test tells you is that a student knew how to bubble in an answer. Period.

4)    Invest time in being informed. The best way to knock down phony talking points is with solid research, expertise, and compelling evidence.

5)    Use social media to spread the message (that's right, Twitter and Facebook are useful for more than just procrastination!)

6)    There's strength in numbers. Don't fight the good fight alone. Find others, meet up, share, talk, strategize, get new perspectives on what's going on.

7)    Go visit schools. Volunteer, grab every opportunity to be around students and see for yourself what's going on so that you can use that to inform your actions.

8)    When you find something that's powerful, persuasive, informative, pass it on, post it, share it, review it, write about it.

9)    Learn to be a good storyteller. Stories are often how we make sense of the world. Stories can change people's minds. Powerful stories are hard to forget.

10) Collect examples of just how idiotic the tests are. People often forget this and just assume that the tests are reasonable. They are not.

I had the opportunity to attend two inspiring education events in New York recently. The first was a celebration of a new book entitled Dear Maxine: Letters from the Unfinished Conversation and published by Teachers College Press. Maxine Greene, a renowned philosopher and beloved friend and colleague to many, was honored in the intimate setting of the Samuels Studio inside the Lincoln Center Institute with readings from the book, speeches, and many expressions of deep gratitude. After speaking briefly herself, she was showered with affection, and hugs and smiles filled the room.

The second was organized by a new organization, Parents Across America, and featured a provocative talk by educational historian Diane Ravitch, followed by various parent activists involved in the new organization. The panelists all then took questions and comments from the audience. I brought my class of graduate students from Mercy College (yes, even they can go on field trips!) and they listened carefully and took lots of notes. It was clear that the fury over school closings, coming budget cuts, federal policy including NCLB and RttT, and the efforts of the venture philanthropists such as the Gates and Broad Foundations to shape an education agenda in this country are creating what Ravitch called "a perfect storm." She told the audience that parents are a "sleeping giant" that have the potential to fight two hallmarks of the corporate takeover of education: privitization, and deprofessionalization.

These two events stirred some deep thinking in me, and I found myself reflecting on something we tend to shy away from when talking about education: love. Yet it is there, all the time, expressed in countless relationships between students and their teachers, parents and their children, across all ages and communities. I was reminded of the powerful moment in Madeline L'Engle's brilliant novel, A Wrinkle in Time, when Meg is battling IT.

She knew!

Love.

That was what she had that IT did not have.

She had Mrs. Whatsit's love, and her father's, and her mother's, and the real Charles Wallace's love, and the twins', and Aunt Beast's.

And she had her love for them.

But how could she use it? What was she meant to do?

These forces that seek power and influence over our nation's public schools, and are waging a bitter battle with teacher unions, may have impressive amounts of money and political influence. But we have something they do not have: love.

            The parents, teachers, educational scholars, and activists who continue to defend and uphold the promise of a high quality, free public education for all students regardless of economic means have a moral conscience, they value and believe in public education as a civil and human rights issue. They know that media and PR campaigns that seek to portray teachers as lazy, incompetent, greedy, and irresponsible have ulterior and questionable motives for doing so. They know that those on the front lines of the struggle to help students make it to graduation are facing heartbreaking realities of what Jonathan Kozol called "savage inequalities" and the devastating effects of poverty. They know that pitting groups against each other to compete for scarce and desperately needed resources, as RttT has done (see Schott Foundation's response to Obama's State of the Union here), and as programs such as merit pay do, will undermine trust, which is a crucial ingredient in bringing about positive change in schools and communities.

            If we are going to get through these tough times, and all indications are that things are going to get worse before they get better, we need to remind ourselves constantly of the value of love. Love doesn't cost a thing; as Paul Simon has sung, "it's free as air…the medicine is everywhere." And as the Beatles put it long ago,

            I don't care too much for money

            Money can't buy me love

"We wanted to show the human face of the system. By getting to know these children -- and the mothers and fathers who are fighting for them -- then maybe people will be outraged enough to demand real change in their own neighborhoods. The idea of education reform becomes a lot less abstract and a lot more compelling when you see these beautiful kids and realize all their potential."  -- Davis Guggenheim

I did not rush to see Waiting for Superman as soon as it opened in New York. In fact, I've been sort of dreading it. I haven't even read all of the reviews, although some were detailed enough to help me know what to expect. I knew there'd be some footage of the city's now defunct "rubber room" which I always thought of as the Guantanamo Bay of New York's Department of Education, a guilty-until-proven-innocent purgatory nightmare. I had also read on John Merrow's blog website, Learning Matters, about the controversial use of PBS footage of Michelle Rhee firing one of her Washington DC school principals. (The controversy was not about the ethics of such a thing, it was over fees promised and then denied.) I knew there would be very little screen time devoted to teachers or teaching, but that education celebrities like Geoff Canada and Michelle Rhee would be quoted extensively. I suppose what I dreaded the most were the scenes of charter school lotteries where families in attendance have a 5% chance of getting what they came for. Lewis Black's biting satire in a Daily Show commentary in early October perfectly captured my sentiments regarding these public spectacles.

Most of my friends in education had similar misgivings about seeing the film, so a few of us decided to go together last night and debrief afterwards over dinner. Davis Guggenheim, who made an interesting documentary on new Teach for America teachers in 1999 called The First Year, now turns his lens from the classroom to the family, and the central narrative thread of Waiting for Superman hinges on the hopes of five children: Anthony, a 5^th grader from Washington DC who lives with his grandmother; Bianca, a kindergartener from Harlem who attends a Catholic school; Daisy, a 5^th grader from Los Angeles; Emily, an 8^th grader from Redwood City in California; and Francisco, a first grader from the Bronx. I wish I could credit the filmmaker for constructing the compelling scenes of these children, but he proves to be a very mediocre interviewer. He just happens to have lucked out in choosing interesting children to film. I realized he was not exactly cut out for the role of narrator and guide when Anthony says to the camera poignantly,

"I want to go to college and get an education. Because if I have kids, I don't want kids to be in this environment. Like around here. Like, I mean I want my kids to have better than I had."

Guggenheim replies incredulously, "You're already thinking about your kids?" Clearly, he's out of his league. The urban children I know and work with in schools begin dreaming about their hopes for the future from the time they can talk and draw. Guggenheim uses his subjects to make you love them, but it's a hollow love, built on guilt for what he tellingly describes in the last part of the film as "other people's children." (I couldn't help but wonder what Lisa Delpit would say about that). Whatever tears are shed by the audience in the film's final scenes spring from the contagiousness of the families' despair. If the film has a message, it's that yes, even these parents care deeply about their children's future.

Perhaps the film will succeed in getting some to take action, and there is certainly nothing wrong with the suggestions on the film's website. Writing to politicians, posting comments online, donating to classrooms and schools, and volunteering or mentoring a young person are all potentially useful, but these exhortations are also, as scholar Aaron Pallas pointed out, "hopelessly vague." The graphics and animated sequences are overly simplistic, and although they may have been vetted by expert educators, as claimed on the film's website, they are blatantly meant to serve the agenda of charter schools and reformers like Rhee. The anti-union rhetoric is so heavy handed that even those in the dark about the truth would know they weren't getting a balanced picture. The sequence describing how teachers move from school to school and are labeled "lemons" or "turkeys" or even "trash" is particularly offensive. It's easy to see why the film has so enraged teachers and even some parent groups. The people at Rethinking Schools have even started a website entitled Not Waiting for Superman. Lately rage is all the rage.

While I'm thinking about what's outrageous, the favorable light shone on Washington DC's recently resigned superintendent Michelle Rhee is especially irksome. For those not familiar with her media images holding a Blackberry or broom, she made her mark in part by firing all those lousy teachers and replacing them with bright-eyed newcomers ready to do her bidding. Valerie Strauss recently compiled some of her better-known remarks, including two stories she told to teachers newly recruited. In the first, she spoke of how nearly two decades ago, as a new teacher desperate to control her students, she taped their mouths with masking tape on the way from the classroom to the cafeteria. The second was about how she neglected to bring the address of a student she was driving home from an after school trip. The audience understandably responds with ripples of laughter. If you're still not quite shocked by this, take a look at the video. Notice how Rhee exaggerates the dialect of the child who worries his friend won't make his way home. It's offensive to the child, to the new teachers made to laugh at his expense, to the teachers Rhee fired or labeled as incompetent when she was guilty of past actions that seriously called into question her professional judgment, and then used them as bait to win over her audience of new teachers. Was this a justifiable way to allay their fears of coming foibles and mistakes? Is this her idea of helpful professional development?

What is most depressing about the film and the national dialogue that has ensued since its release, is the overly simplistic notion that we know what works, and putting it into practice isn't rocket science. The inequities of our educational system are complex and intractable. Geoff Canada is leading an ambitious social project in Harlem, and there is good reason to hope that the expenditures of money and energy will produce promising results. But it's premature to declare that his charter schools have closed the achievement gap, as David Brooks did, especially when such analysis is based on standardized tests, which are lousy proxies for knowledge, and are prone to validity issues when tied to high stakes (for more on the HCZ story see Aaron Pallas again here). If only those depressing children with all their problems, packed into failing "dropout factories" and destined for prison or worse, could be magically rescued by federal funds and foundation grants. The dark underbelly of Waiting for Superman is the guilt of the haves when faced with the problems of the have-nots. There are undoubtedly some who fear that if the playing field were truly level in public schools, and there was no tracking and segregation, perhaps the children of privilege and wealth wouldn't sail through onto college and careers quite so easily, especially in the fierce global competition and devastated economy in which we currently find ourselves.

Making matters worse are those who are supposedly in charge of fixing this mess who go so far as to publicly tell parents not to send their kids to schools they want to close. Over at Gotham Schools they have partnered with WNYC to cover the stories unfolding at three such schools. The first one, about Columbus High School in the Bronx, is heartbreaking and gripping, with details that help you feel their pain. These brave teachers, students, and parents persist in seeking solutions and getting by as best they can. Hopeful change happens small steps at a time, and sometimes arrives with an emotional punch that can knock the breath out of you. I stumbled on just such a story, and I plan to share it with everyone. I won't spoil your delight in reading Stephen Lazar's account of a special graduation ceremony. Go ahead and make your day. Forget Superman. Thank a teacher.

Have you ever experienced a week so insanely busy, so physically exhausting, so charged with political crossfire and intellectual debate that you find yourself wondering if you’ve landed on two feet on the other side of that tumbling sequence? For the last ten days, I’ve been at the annual meeting of AERA in Denver, followed by a conference at Hunter College on Thursday, with a lunch date in between where I got an earful about a well-known charter school in Harlem from a former student who quit and is moving to another state. Since I believe it’s always best to start with the “so what” of your insights, let me sum up my sense of the pulse of the field right now based on these last few days: dread, with a little bit of hope.

Teachers are clearly under siege. The layoff numbers across the country are staggering, and here in New York I have just learned that the 6,400 teachers who will lose their jobs are most likely to be elementary teachers hired since 2007, which means about half of my former graduate students at CCNY will face unemployment. When you can put faces to the numbers it really breaks your heart, especially when there is such an urgent need for minority teachers. On the other hand, all of the talk about reforming the seniority system so “bad” teachers can be the ones to go masks the fact that those experienced teachers cost a lot more than the new ones. Thus there is a hidden incentive to lose the costly teachers and keep the cheaper ones. The current evaluation systems have no way of identifying large numbers of “bad” teachers as most teachers get perfectly satisfactory evaluations. Research evidence suggests the teachers rated as unsatisfactory nationally are less than 5%. Things are so tense that even the very best teachers I know are terrified of doing anything to change their jobs because they know it will be nearly impossible to get rehired as they cost the schools too much. This particular debate is getting very nasty, from the now infamous Newsweek magazine cover story to the parodies that followed, and at the Hunter event sparks flew between the city’s Department of Education representative, Eric Nadelstern, and Ann Rosen, a UFT representative. WNYC’s Beth Fertig made their exchange the heart of her story.

Teachers are not just under siege because of the current tenure and promotion systems that reward seniority and advanced degrees. Merit pay, a bad idea that was largely dismissed by research that showed teachers cared far more about their working conditions and opportunities for learning than financial rewards that pitted them against their colleagues, is now transformed into the new basis for evaluating teachers. We know the “bad” teachers are out there, so this logic goes, it’s just the way we evaluate performance that is the problem and explanation for why we can’t find these people and fire them. The solution is to test kids at the start and end of the school year and compare results by teacher to see who is failing to make the scores go up. An even more ominous extension of this faulty logic is to use this same measure to find the “bad” teacher and principal preparation programs and close them down. For some reason, unions and teacher education organizations are taking a largely fatalistic stance to these erroneous policy proposals, and this lack of support for those who feel they are under attack is creating even more defensiveness, rancor, disgust and hostility in the ranks.

My thesis advisor at the University of Michigan, Virginia Richardson, made compelling arguments for why this way of measuring teacher and teacher education program quality is misguided. For one thing, she describes the use of standardized tests to determine if students learned and if the teacher taught as inadequate, and even immoral. I too am concerned about whether the risk of increasingly questionable means to very dubious ends would then become the norm in schools where the stakes were high (and the “turnaround” strategies for low-performing schools are mostly about dismantling). Evidence that schools cheat and states lower the cutoff scores is mounting. What we don’t know much about is how all of this is affecting classroom life. Judging on the behavior of high school students in New York City when they get out of school and flood the subways, I’d say they’re not exactly enjoying the school day. At any rate, it’s not as though everyone can’t get on board with the idea that we need to know what good teaching looks like so we can develop more of it. But what makes for a successful school or classroom has also to do with the effort put in by students, by the climate that is created to support and encourage people, and by the resources and environment that provide opportunities to learn.

As for teacher education, there has always been an uneasy relationship in schools of education between the typical higher education expectations of scholarly work and the special requirements to partner with and improve public preK-12 schools. Although beginning teacher educators are told their involvement in the “field” will count towards their evaluation for tenure, time and again it’s still always about the prestige of the publication record that really counts, and the dirty laundry in schools of education is the labor exploitation that occurs in junior faculty, graduate students, and adjunct ranks. These are the people doing most of the needed work in schools. The degree to which this is the case varies however from institution to institution, and is also dependent on the demographic profile of the school districts working in partnership with the colleges and universities, and even the state requirements for teacher preparation. Using students’ tests to measure and evaluate program effectiveness is therefore completely inadequate given all the other intervening factors. The notion that closing down the “bad” teacher preparation programs and replacing them with new experimental ones formed outside institutions of higher education is particularly troubling because the rhetoric used in proposing these changes suggests a need to be more “practical” and less “theoretical” as SUNY recently declared.

If anything, what’s needed in teacher education is greater clarity on how the various demands on the beginning teacher are addressed in programs, and whether or not there is a logical sequence to the experiences students have in those programs. David Steiner, the New York State Commissioner of Education, in his keynote address at the Hunter College event last week, held up the 800 page report from AERA, Studying Teacher Education, and got a laugh by saying the examination of extant research didn’t find much. Although he claimed not to be facetious, his point was we don’t know much. I would argue that we know a lot, we just haven’t decided how to use what we know to make needed changes, and that change is painfully slow in institutions of higher education. That may explain the enthusiasm for trying to do it elsewhere, and the New York State Board of Regents has just granted approval to do so. At first these experiments are likely to happen on a small scale at venerable institutions like the American Museum of Natural History. But the Teach for America graduate degree in education can’t be far behind. The pressure to scale up prematurely is everywhere.

At AERA, noted researcher Tony Bryk said it’s a “time of a great earthquake in America – the plates are moving and moving fast.” On a hopeful note, he said in the urgent work ahead there needs to be more teacher voice given the current policy context. Everyone seems to be in agreement that we need to be more connected and listening to each other, but the organizational structures will continue to make it difficult to do so. Gloria Ladson-Billings, who is always one of my favorite speakers at AERA, compared teachers to football linemen, for they are treated as replaceable. That might explain why there is so little concern for the hemorrhage and exodus of new teachers, who in urban contexts are as likely to stay as they are to leave within the first five years. Ladson-Billings didn’t know whether the reformers’ inability to pay attention to the process of teaching, to what goes on in the classrooms, is attributable to a more general disdain for pedagogy, or to our inability to make sense of the work of teachers. But the end result is we resort to small structural changes such as longer school days and succumb to the abandonment of the public good as privitization becomes the name of the game. In another session, she ended by saying when she gets frustrated she takes the long view, and remembers how far we’ve come. Then she gave us a bit of her own personal inspiration, from Grandmaster Flash: It’s like a jungle sometimes/It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under.

In the past month I have had the opportunity to attend two senior recitals at the School of Sacred Music, Hebrew Union College in New York City. This institution is an old and important Jewish seminary that prepares rabbis, cantors, educators and others working in Reform Judaism. The graduate program in the School of Sacred Music is rigorous and prepares students for all facets of the cantor’s role. The senior recital represents a culmination of five years of study, including a full year in Israel. 

What made these recitals worth writing about on a blog about educating teachers? For me they represent the very best example of a meaningful, challenging, collaborative and highly personal project to showcase a trajectory of powerful learning and development. Unlike the dissertation in education, which also takes about five years to complete, and is bound in a big black book where it gathers dust in the library on the bookshelves of professors, a senior recital involves other musicians, family, friends, professors, fellow graduate students, and others in the school community who contribute in big and small ways. Both of these students developed a concept for the recital that was musical as well as intellectual, deeply rooted in personal history, yet they could not have been more different.

The first recital, by Galit Dadoun Cohen, was entitled Reinventing the Songs of the Sephardim. The program featured music of twentieth century composers, especially Sephardic and Judeo-Spanish folk songs, and the printed program contained fascinating history, biographies of the composers, artworks, and photos of Galit’s relatives. The recital involved three pianists, one of whom is my good friend David Deschamps, two other musicians, narrators and dancers. As Galit’s haunting resonant voice filled the space, I was struck by the beauty of the poetry in these songs, such as Simon Sargon’s folk song A La Una:

            At one I was born

            At two I grew up

            At three I took a lover

            At four I married.

            Soul, life and heart.

            Going off to war

            I threw two kisses in the air

            One is for my mother

            The other for you.

As the recital ended triumphantly with a world premiere by Jonathan Comisar, who accompanied Galit on the piano and dedicated the song Moroccan Wedding to her, the grateful audience gave her a standing ovation as she rushed from one person to another with hugs and flowers for everyone. In the program she wrote in the lengthy acknowledgments, “The greatest part of preparing this program has been in the unbelievable collaboration of so many wonderful souls and minds.” A delightful reception followed with Morrocan food prepared by Galit’s mother, whose “love and generosity are infinite.”

Today’s recital, by Rollin Simmons, was entitled Common Ground, Uncommon Sound: The Music of our Faith Journeys. Interwoven throughout the recital were documentary film clips of personal stories from the school’s community, featuring honest and touching accounts of their experiences with faith, God, grief, and hope. The mix of faculty and staff, black and white and brown, Jewish and Christian, made the perfect backdrop for a rich mix of modern and contemporary music that was divided into five themes: Faith Is…; Watching, Listening, Learning; Questioning, Struggling, Grieving; Awakening, Affirming, Accepting; and Praising, Honoring, Giving Thanks. Accompanying Rollin were other singers who sometimes provided just a second voice in a duet, and for several numbers a full choir of nearly twenty. The audience was invited to sing in three pieces, including a rousing traditional song, Down to the River to Pray, and a Chassidic finale of Ki V’Simcha. In Rollin’s acknowledgments, she wrote of the choir, “my vision for this recital perhaps seemed overly ambitious, but you helped me realize it – with your patience and your hard work.” The back page of the program features the painting The Lawrence Tree by Georgia O’Keefe, with a quote by Emily Saliers, author of A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice:

We speak of how music can deepen human life beyond measure and bring us closer to the transcendent power of love beyond our understanding. Music, we keep saying, is some kind of mysterious mediator between us and the God we seek.

As I reflected on these marvelous manifestations of collaboration, hard work, expertise, love, the bonds of family and friends, and the sharing of knowledge in this extraordinary community, I couldn’t help but feel saddened by the contrast of much of what goes on in our public schools. All of this nauseating push for standardization, accountability measured by stupid tests, and compliance through policy made by non-educators, is so downright ugly compared to the beauty of these two women’s musical, spiritual, and intellectual accomplishments. My hope is that all learners can find a way to experience the power of ownership of their learning in ways that might be personal, aesthetic, collaborative, or any other way that makes it special for them and those who share it with them. And that they might then pass it on. 

On Monday, March 22^nd, I had a balcony seat for a one-night-only performance of Ricky Ian Gordon’s epic opera, The Grapes of Wrath, at Carnegie Hall. The opera is faithfully adapted from John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer and Nobel prize winning book of the same title, a canon in American high school literature studies. I think in my own high school years we read Of Mice and Men instead, for now, in my enlightened adulthood, I am convinced that had I read The Grapes of Wrath as a teenager, it would have made an impression to last a lifetime. The Minnesota Opera premiered the piece in 2007 in St. Paul, and it was preserved in a PS Classics recording.

Monday night’s performance was special for me because my friends were involved, and were loyal supporters of the composer’s music, which they had frequently performed and recorded in their professional careers. Ted Sperling was conducting The Collegiate Chorale and American Symphony Orchestra; Victoria Clark had the lead role of Ma Joad. They have been friends since college days at Yale University, and won Tony awards for their brilliant work together in the Lincoln Center Theatre production of the musical The Light in Piazza (and I saw that three times). On stage with Clark were other major talents from the world of opera and musical theatre; the narration for the story was provided by Jane Fonda.

There are many reasons to love Carnegie Hall. Its history, acoustics, architectural beauty, and obstructed view seats for a mere $12.50 are some of mine. I have been going since I was a young girl, a flutist, and obsessed with Jean-Pierre Rampal, who not only performed in memorable concerts at Carnegie Hall, he willingly let all his young fans wait patiently in line after the performance for an autograph and a kiss. I also remember the two-part concert of the complete suite of sonatas for solo cello by J.S. Bach, performed by Yo-Yo Ma. There was also the unforgettable excitement with the Berlin Staatskapelle’s performance of the Schumann symphonies, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, which ended that evening with an explosive standing ovation. Although I am known for speaking in hyperbole, I am certain of one thing: this was my most memorable evening ever in Carnegie Hall.

What makes a work of art particularly captivating? It’s not just that you are hooked with a laser-like focus on the details before you. Your brain seems to accelerate with thoughts and connections and questions. You become more aware of your breathing, and even though you are usually rooted to the spot (a chair, or standing before a visual work of art) you can feel in your body the desire to move, to embrace what your mind and heart are taking in. Suddenly your eyes are leaking water, your mouth is dry, your nose is running, and as these physical manifestations take over, you succumb to the experience in helpless surrender. At appropriate intervals you are granted the audience privilege of expressing all of this by slamming your hands together, and if so moved, by using your voice to shout, exclaim, even whistle. You can also use these moments to whisper a few words to your neighbor, short as a tweet on twitter: wasn’t that amazing? Oh my God!

The thing about Victoria Clark, and on this the critics all seem to agree, is that she brings to each role the serious commitment of an actress who has done her research, as well as her extraordinary musicality. In other words, it’s not just that her beautiful voice floats up in the air with perfect pitch, vibrato, tone, sustained by a muscular breath and earthy physicality. It arrives and burns its way into your soul. On Monday night, as her son Noah decided to drown himself with a bucket of stones, Ma Joad sang him a childhood lullaby: No innocence, no innocence as the dream of a simple child. Even in its devastating tragedy, her artistry was uplifting, so exquisitely moving that everything seemed suspended in the watery depths, trapped in the inevitable loss that is death. Participating in the deservedly resounding and long ovation the audience bestowed on her was thrilling. I can only imagine what it meant to her, given that this was her Carnegie Hall debut.

Moral of my story: we need more art, more beauty, more music, more literature. We need reminders that speak to our contemporary problems, surfacing from our troubling past. As the former preacher Casy asked in The Grapes of Wrath opera,

Why not attack the need

            instead of the needy?

Why get involved in a blog about teacher education? Aren’t we already busy enough with email, work and family obligations, catching up on Facebook and the news, and making time for a regular workout? We seem to live in a time of information super-saturation that even our graduate educations didn’t prepare us to handle. Yet blogs offer a tantalizing enticement of freedom from academic jargon, pesky citation conventions, and a potential virtual interaction with the audience for our writing. In the movie Julie & Julia, the blogger Julie is delighted to notice her first comment on a blog entry, only to discover a click of the mouse later that it’s her mother. The audience laughed in recognition; we know our mothers will listen, but will strangers respond to our writing? What might they say?

Now that we’ve gone a bit public with our learning, we feel emboldened to broaden our audience, to share what we know, how we think we came to know it, and to pose new questions we are grappling with. Freed from the political quagmires of our individual work contexts, we have found it was possible to resist the endemic isolation of educators, and to share our strategies for overcoming familiar hurdles and constraints, and managing the dilemmas of practice. We talked openly of failures and disappointments, and helped each other to see how it might be possible to make productive use of resistance, conflict, developmental and contextual diversity, and even cultural insensitivity. Our hope is that an online community might grow that works to get at and make sense of the complexity of teachers’ knowledge, be they preK-12 teachers, university teachers, or instructional leaders in schools. We’d like to see educators everywhere work to reclaim the intellectual and moral dimensions of teaching that are buried in the test-driven culture that has taken over like a weed.

Last summer, during a work retreat on Block Island, we took a break from a day of intense conversation and brainstorming to watch a brilliant film directed by Mike Leigh entitled Happy-Go-Lucky. The protagonist, Poppy, is an elementary teacher in London with an irresistibly cheerful demeanor and a wacky fashion sense. We roared in laughter as images of teaching tumbled from one scene into the next, each paradoxically iconic yet unique: teacher and children trying out newly painted paper bag bird masks with squawking and wing flapping; driving instructor shouting mnemonic acronyms at a terrified first time driver; flamenco dance teacher putting words to stomping feet (“My space! My space!”) as students joined in a collective frenzy of noisy delight. Poppy’s driving instructor, Scott, is prone to shouting accusations at her and is perpetually critical of her “inappropriate boots” because of the difficulty of driving with high heels. One day, in an explosion of bad temper, he accuses her with the phrase, “You celebrate chaos.” This is precisely why we cannot help but love Poppy, for she is genuinely curious and open to knowing people, and as director Mike Leigh says in the DVD’s bonus features, she has a generosity of spirit. “She’s paying attention, she’s caring…she’s loving,” he says, his affection for this character betrayed in his adulating tone of voice. I too cannot help but feel inspired by Poppy. As Maxine Greene said when she accepted yet another honor for her advocacy for the embattled arts from the Children’s Theatre Foundation, “I’m feeling a little rebellious.” It seems like the perfect moment to start a new blog.