The “Mea Culpa” Culture in Public Education: failure is the worst sin.

updated 4/14/19

Mea Culpa, Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. (Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault — Prayer of Confession, RC Church.)

The media has something similar, except it’s known as ‘mea culpa’ culture. Essentially, it allows them to print and broadcast any amount of utter codswallop and then later hold their hands up and admit: “We got it wrong.” A good example of this phenomenon is the case of The New York Times and Saddam Hussein’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” — Bryan MacDonald, RT Question More, 8-17-14

A Teacher’s Mea Culpa. On July 14, 2014 the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a front page story about a teacher who — after a seven years in teaching — had decided to leave her job in the School District of Philadelphia.

Originally with ten or so friends from Teach of America, she decided to stay beyond their original two-year commitment and work in Philadelphia. “Starry-eyed” and looking forward to a decades-long career teaching in the School District, she started teaching in a middle school. (Teaching middle school is a hard way to begin. My first day was rough. See My First Classroom Teaching Experience.) She really seems to have worked hard at reaching her students. She spent a lot of her own money to buy needed school supplies when they were not provided by the school district.

She began her Philadelphia career in a middle school where I had supervised education students from Widener University in 1994 and ’95. The school was big, crowded, architecturally very difficult to provide supervision for and, by my observations, full of disorder, rough-housing and bullying in the stairwells and secondary halls.That she persisted as a teacher there is an indicator, I think, of her dedication — or hubris?

Then our teacher was transferred to a troubled high school (my wife spent a year there, ’95-’96) where she had to cope with trying to teach algebra to classes with special education students mixed in despite her never having had the training to teach them. Electronic teaching aides — with missing pieces — were provided. She bought what she needed to make them work. Most of her “algebra students” knew nothing above the third grade level of math. Fire alarms would go off frequently, necessitating either evacuation of the school, or illegal disregard by administration, risking a catastrophe. When she called for help with students’ fighting, it would take “seven minutes” for someone to come.

After being transferred again to an even more troubled high school, she needed to take a leave for medical reasons. After a 10 days’ absence for oral surgery, she was told by a school district doctor that she could not return to work for three months for fear that she might “get hit in the face.” The Inquirer printed a statement — on page 1A — she made after deciding to leave:

My students weren’t able to make progress this year. I did them an injustice. The School District did them an injustice. They did not get the education they should have.

One wonders whether the moral education she has as a child had ever sunk in: how could she possibly confess to having inflicted an “injustice” — an “injustice”! — on her students when she had continued work so hard and long with them under very difficult conditions? What about administration? Did they have no responsibility? The teacher “corrects” this tendency on our part to spare her a martyrdom:

It’s not the administration’s fault. “My principal was working hard, but there was one of him.”

The Evidence of Fault? There are several issues here:

a. What has the teacher construed as evidence of such injustice?
b. Has an injustice actually occurred?
c. Is there a deeper issue she’s just not ‘fessin’ up to?

What did that teacher take as evidence of injustice being suffered by students? Their behavior:

"Students don’t verbalize it. They act on it. They run the halls. They smoke in school. They cut class."

In other words they acted like many students in schools, both public and private, in affluent neighborhoods; also, as well as in colleges and universities.

Has injustice actually occurred? Usually the justness of a person’s act is judged by whether they have the ability and resources to prevail in a situation. If the circumstances they faced would be normally overwhelming, their failure is not a case of injustice. Patients who die from ebola have not been unjustly treated if they die despite earnest and professionally correct treatment by their doctors.

There is a deeper issue. Another comment the young teacher makes points to ambition, a motive, which, — though not uncommon in newcomers and often admired — throws a different light on the whole story. “I’m going to get a nursing degree. Teaching degrees just don’t get you anywhere!”

Was this teacher’s mea culpa really a sincere confession of injustice? Or is it a strategem to acquire new employment by showing herself ready to make excuses to obscure administrative and organizational faults? “Hire me and I’ll cover for you!"(See The Social Consequences of Defensive and Counterdefensive Attributions.)

"Buffering" personnel, who "run interference" for their higher-ups, are much in demand. (See Buffering: Enhancing Moral Hazard in Decision-Making? ).

Failure is the Greatest Sin. In this Land of the Free and Home of the Brave have appeared over the years numbers of — shall we be generous and call them — “confused, misguided or misinformed people,” who have promulgated the idea that despite all external circumstances that impede us, the positive thinking person will prevail in achieving whatever his or heart truly yearns for.

Failure is the fault of the individual who fails in life, because positive thinking, alone, is sufficient to avoid failure. Many education departments in many a university teach this dogma despite otherwise fervent secular commitments. (See Lurpofactsomosis: Reinvigorating American Education).

The teacher featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer seems to have a “positive attitude” of that ilk. Initially, she joined Teach for America, helping her to avoid the training period and costs of more conventional university access to experimenting with public school pupils. (See Can Education Be Made A Science?). She was probably inculcated with the attitude that her above average personality and intelligence — as proven by joining TFA — , as well as avoidance with “typical educators” would, if coupled with “positive thinking” allow her Michelle-Rhee-like ascent into to the upper echelons of educational reformers and policy-makers.

Far from the problems of dealing with “unjustly” troubled kids in middle- or high school classrooms.

For more information and to examine these issues further, see Cannonfodder: preparing teachers for public schools.).


Cordially
--- EGR

Teaching & Chronic Scarcity: Dodging the Need for Triage. by Gary K. Clabaugh, Ed. D.

New teachers routinely have to deal with too many students, insufficient time and too few resources to thoroughly do their jobs. In short, they struggle with chronic, severe scarcity. And that struggle leads to a centrally important question. Whom can they help without unduly shortchanging others?

I’ve spent 46 years as a teacher educator and have long wondered why so many of my colleagues fail to alert novices to this most difficult issue in teaching? Namely, how to deal with chronic scarcity?

I imagine some ignore this issue because their ivory tower is too far removed from reality for them to realize it even exists. Others dodge it because they don’t want to scare off candidates and thus lose their job. Still others simply are sappy sentimentalists intoxicated by the fantasy that pathological optimism and unreserved self- sacrifice will overcome all.

This is the very nonsense that Hollywood peddles in feature films about education: self-sacrificing teacher surmounts every difficulty through force of will, uncommon devotion and relentless optimism. But this happy horse manure only works in the movies. In the real world even the most dedicated teachers routinely face situations where their resources are so inadequate to the task that difficult, if not impossible, decisions have to be made.

Imagine you are in your initial year of teaching in the state abandoned School District of Philadelphia. Thanks to conservative up-state legislators both your school district and your inner city school are catastrophically underfunded. That is why you have a class of 45 first graders. And, thanks to mainstreaming, it includes a child severely handicapped by Down syndrome. Some administrator decided that your class was the “least restrictive environment possible.” The youngster is low functioning and has serious behavior problems. His uncontrolled actions ruin many lessons and he assaults classmates who obstruct his desires. Sometimes he even strikes out for no apparent reason. Once, while seated in the Caring Circle, he even impulsively kicked a classmate in the face.

You can forget about getting him transferred to special education. Such assignments do not begin until second grade. You have no aide. They all disappeared, (along with the school nurse and guidance counselor) because of draconian budget cuts. When you try to teach this youngster something it takes an enormous amount of your time and yields comparatively little. Meanwhile you have 44 other inner city youngsters to teach, each with their own needs, problems, interests and abilities.

The plain fact is, in a situation like this there is no way to adequately address everyone’s needs. So what is one of the first things you must do? Figure out how to distribute your time and resources to maximize learning for the greatest number while dealing with the guilt that these imposed choices induce. Unfortunately, your training never even suggested you might face such choices, much less explored how to deal with them. The romantic drivel that was handed you is no help. You urgently need to know what to do.

Fortunately, there is a time-tested method for coping when urgent demands exceed existing supplies. It is called triage, and those dealing with mass disasters practice it routinely. Here is how it works. All the casualties are sorted into three categories. Those requiring immediate life-saving attention receive it. They are assigned first priority. Those that can wait must do so. The dying is left untreated until the needs of the others have been satisfied.

Emergency medical personnel simply cannot afford to pretend that their time and resources are limitless. This grim but essential allocation saves lives. Yet teachers in training are rarely taught that they too will likely lack the time and resources to do everything that needs to be done and thus must perform triage. This lack of candid preparation tacitly encourages new teachers to expend unjustifiable time and resources on the most needy youngsters, while neglecting those who would most profit from their help. Such misappropriation is understandable, but ethically indefensible. (1)

Ignorance of the necessity of triage causes many potentially good teachers to blame themselves when they cannot do everything that needs to be done. This is one reason why, five years in, nearly half of newly minted teachers will have either abandoned the occupation or transferred to a new school.

Moreover, maintaining the fiction that triage is never necessary plays right into the hands of the politicians who, by perennially short changing public education, put teachers in situations where triage is ethically unavoidable. Then, making matters worse, these very same politicos demand that no child be left behind or, currently, that every child succeeds.(2)

It is past time to end this humbug. Teaching is just like any other occupation requiring extensive time and resources. Short-changing either results in sub-optimal performance. But at least the very worst outcomes are avoided when triage is employed.

Sincerely, GKC


1. See Edward G. Rozycki, The Ethics of Educational Triage: is Special Education Moral?

2. In December 2016 President Obama signed into law the Every Child Succeeds Act. It replaces the unlamented No Child Left Behind Act.

School Reform: It’s not bricklaying; it’s juggling.

Policy is not made once and for all; it is made and remade endlessly. Policymaking is a process of successive approximation to some desired objectives in which what is desired itself continues to change under reconsideration.

... A wise policymaker consequently expects that his policies will achieve only part of what he hopes and at the same time will produce unanticipated consequences he would have preferred to avoid. -- Charles E. Lindblom, "The Science of 'Muddling Through'", Public Administration Review, 19, Spring 1959, 79 - 88.

Lindblom's comments are highly pertinent because school reform depends importantly on policy-making, on the goals we set for schools. But goals, themselves, can be reached only when consensus on three basic items stays put long enough to get things to “gel.” Consensus itself is an often short-lived thing, especially in a culture where so many different opinions claim our attention.

In addition, with the advent of superquick communications like Twitter and Facebook, consensus on an issue may be here today and gone tomorrow. (Will the hordes of enthusiasts who chanted “Yes, we can!” in 2008, show up at the polls in November 2010?)

Three “balls” need to be juggled, kept aloft at the same time:

a. expectations – what do (which?) people (think? say?) they want? Is there sufficient consensus on this? Will it last?

b. resources – how much money (whose?) is available to pursue these (which?) expectations and for how long will it be available? Is there a different consensus, on this item also?

c. tasks – what actual productive skills (whose?) have to be exercised and how long will they be available? Is there a different consensus needed here?

You can guess why its easier to get small, private things done with small groups than big, public things done with big groups.

Much of American political talk attempts to paper over this difficulty.

To examine these issues further, see POLITICS, CONSENSUS AND EDUCATIONAL REFORM


Cordially
--- EGR

Politics in Schools: does it affect productivity?

When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body.-- C. Northcote Parkinson

Politics is practically inevitable in most organizations.

Politics is the accommodation of individual interests by means not normally sanctioned within an organization. Needs often arise which cannot be handled within given rules and practices, so "adjustments" are often made with an eye to "discretion" and the avoidance of "setting a precedent."

But productivity, too, is far from being an absolute good. Productivity narrowly conceived and overenthusiastically pursued, particularly where resources are scarce, may cripple important organizational capacities.

To examine these issues further, see Productivity, Politics and Hypocrisy in American Public Education


Cordially
-- EGR

Is Special Education Fair?

The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people's children. -- Marian Wright Edelman

Most people try to do what they are aiming for at the minimal cost to their own energies and resources. To expend time and energy pointlessly is thought to be inefficient, certainly no virtue.
Teachers -- though they dislike the simile -- are like battlefield surgeons. They have limited supplies, time, and energy, and demands greater than they can handle. Thus, if they want to be efficient, they divide their potential patients into three groups:

1) the Gifted: those they can neglect because they will get well (learn) anyway -- they don't need it, whereas others do;

2) the Subnormal: those they should neglect because all (or an unfair proportion) of their resources will not help anyway, the resources available are insufficient to help them and would be wasted;

3) the Normal: the group that will show maximum improvement (learning) for the resources used. Allotting resources to this group optimizes their effect. 
 


This is called triage in medicine. In education it is called teaching to the middle. A common Principle of Equity, Fair Share, requires that no one receive more of a scarce resource than any other -- all things being equal.

Special education identifies both the Gifted and the Subnormal as Special Students, exempting them not only from the particular rules that support triage, but also from the Fair Share principle. This invariably shortchanges the normal student.

Should we give up on efficiency? When resources are scarce, which kids should we deprive?

To examine these issues further, see, The Ethics of Educational Triage

Cordially

--- EGR