Phi Delta Kappan

Suspicion about rhetoric has in recent years given way to greater interest in deliberately shaping narratives to suit advocates’ particular purposes. However, Kappan editor Rafael Heller notes that changing hearts and minds requires more than finding the right metaphor, telling the right story, or using the right communicative platform. Persuasion takes time and effort, and it’s especially challenging in the current environment when there is no clear rhetorical leader in the education world.

In this monthly Kappan column, Teresa Preston shares a sampling of what past Kappan authors have written about the interactions between schools and the media. In the 1940s, authors began encouraging educators to build relationships with local media outlets, both to show they were meeting community expectations and to counter false narratives. In later decades, authors analyzed how schools and teachers were depicted in newspapers, in fiction, on television, and in movies. The picture painted was often grim. An especially persistent narrative that several authors across the decades sought to debunk was the idea that schools are failing. This idea doesn’t necessarily stand up to close scrutiny.

Since its founding in 1979, one of the U.S. Department of Education’s primary missions has been to promote civil debate about the condition of our schools and colleges. Our past secretaries of education — 12 of them in all — have recognized that they have important rhetorical responsibilities, not only to call attention to the urgent educational topics we face as a nation but also to model and lead an inclusive process of deliberation about those topics. However, Betsy DeVos — our 12th secretary of education — has chosen to reject those responsibilities. In this article, communications scholar Mark Hlavacik describes how previous secretaries have used their bully pulpit, what sets DeVos apart, and why it will be important for future secretaries to return to form.

Societal stories about school do not just reflect our current views and values, they also shape our political preferences and the realities that result from them. In recent decades, stories of the traditional common school and its more collectivist, shared culture have given way to newer stories oriented around competition and choice. Sarah Stitzlein and Kathleen Knight Abowitz suggest that telling new stories that foreground the public or shared purposes of public education may lead people to choose candidates and back policies that better serve our children and our communities.

Preservice teachers base their expectations of teaching on the cultural images that surround them. Unfortunately, these images tell an incomplete story, and preservice teachers’ expectations of teaching often reflect a narrow understanding of a fantastically complex endeavor. Jeremy Delamarter explains that, to help their candidates thrive, teacher preparation programs must respond to incomplete expectations by gathering useful information about aspiring teachers’ expectations, providing analytical frameworks for questioning their expectations, supporting effective reflection, and recognizing candidates’ demographic differences.

When teachers talk about leaving the profession, they are commonly described as “burnt out.” But for many, argues Doris Santoro, that’s not the real story. In truth, most teachers enter teaching because they want to pursue moral commitments to the well-being of their students, colleagues, and communities. In-depth interviews with experienced teachers as well as studies of teachers’ resignation letters suggest that moral concerns are what led many of them to quit, as well: They leave not because they’ve become exhausted by the demands of the work but, rather, because school policies are preventing them from doing the good and just work they aspire to do.

In this month’s interview, Kappan’s editor talks with Paul Kuttner and Kevin Coe about their recent research into how network television news programs have covered preK-12 education. They found that, over the last 35 years, coverage of education has been rare, well under 1% of total coverage. Stories tend to focus on individual teachers and schools, with less discussion of the big picture behind those stories. The tone of coverage has varied over time, with about 54% overall being negative and 43% positive. Overt criticism of teachers was rare, and teacher voices were included in a slim majority of stories.

Current career pathways initiatives recapitulate in many ways both the issues motivating the school-to-work movement of the 1980s and 1990s and its recommended solutions, notably more work-based learning, especially apprenticeship. But that movement’s energy dissipated in the face of college for all. Nonetheless, some of its achievements and many of its advocates persisted. Stephen Hamilton explains what the current movement can learn from the past while embracing some contemporary developments, including the goal of college and career readiness, the practice of dual enrollment, and reduced reliance on federal leadership.

As students compete for college admission, some are tempted by invitations to join honor societies that promise learning opportunities, scholarships, and a leg up in the college admission process. Yvonne Vissing explains how these organization target millions of students each year, encouraging them to purchase “opportunities” that fail to deliver on their promises. The frauds are often difficult to spot, because many use the slick marketing tactics of lucrative businesses. Despite lawsuits and consumer complaints, they continue to proliferate, often forming partnerships with businesses that have a financial interest in marketing to or manipulating students.

Parents and teachers alike express concern about how much time teenagers spend on their cell phones today, but what do the teenagers themselves think? Andrew Housiaux, a philosophy teacher at a boarding school in Massachusetts, asked his students to give up their cell phones for three days and write about the experience. Their reflections showed them grappling with issues of anxiety, identity, and humanity that they encountered in the work of the existentialist philosophers they were studying in class. The experiment brought the work of those thinkers to life and showed that students are interested in thinking deeply about their inner lives.

The move toward assessments that measure student growth, rather than just proficiency, has been perceived as an improvement in state accountability systems. However, Michael Watson explains that, for many students, these measures present an incomplete picture. Because they are based on grade-level assessments, any growth achieved by students who are above or below grade level is lost. He recommends the use of adaptive assessments that incorporate material from multiple grade levels.

Anne Bruder recalls how, when she was in 5th grade, she asked so many questions, so frequently, that she was put on a behavior contract that required her to limit the number of questions she asked. She began to see questions as something to budget carefully, an attitude that shifted when a college professor welcomed her questions and encouraged her to keep asking, without seeking permission. Today, as an associate professor of literature at Berea College, she uses questions to invite students into conversation, and she seeks to help them craft questions that get beyond simple facts to find more complex meanings.

PDK’s CEO, Joshua Starr, observes that the incoming generation of teachers seems far more ready and willing than their older colleagues to talk explicitly about race. School and system leaders should actively support young educators’ eagerness to confront the history of racial inequities in our public schools.

As more students attend college than ever before, higher education remains inequitable, with low-income students and students of color shut out of what many perceive to be top schools. Maria Ferguson discusses what Paul Tough’s new book, The Years That Matter Most, reveals about the college admission process and considers recent efforts to help students from less-privileged backgrounds gain greater access. According to Ferguson, policy solutions, such as the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act or some form of student debt relief, do not appear to be high priorities in Washington.

As schools continue to deal with growing concerns about safety, some teachers and administrators are having to grapple with how to handle student speech that seems threatening. Julie Underwood reviews a series of cases that dealt with this issue. If a reasonable person would perceive student speech as a threat and the student intentionally communicates that threat, then the students’ speech may not be protected by the First Amendment.

Phyllis Fagell offers work advice to teachers, administrators, and other education professionals. In this column, a teacher seeks advice on what to do when parents won’t seek an ADHD diagnosis for a student who shows signs of the condition, and a principal who is frustrated at their job wants help figuring out whether to leave.

A Pew survey reveals how much and what kinds of religious expression students encounter in U.S. public schools. Teachers surveyed by the Data Quality Campaign say they value data, although learning to use data well requires time and training. An interactive website from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University enables users to explore average test scores, improvements in test scores, and trends in test scores in schools and districts across the United States. A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research looks at the relationship between schools’ suspension rates and the future lives of students in those schools.

PDK International’s 2019 travel program offered scholarships that enabled teachers to learn about the world and bring those lessons back to students. PDK member Kimberly Woods reports on her trip to South Africa. PDK’s new membership portal gives members easy access to benefits.

Mindfulness practices have become increasingly common in the United States and elsewhere in the world. The fact that mindfulness originally emerged out of Buddhism raises questions about whether public school teachers using it in their classrooms are violating the separation of church and state. Thomas Armstrong argues that contemporary mindfulness rests on a solid foundation of scientific research and can help students improve their self-regulation, executive functioning, sustained attention, and other school-worthy skills. There is a danger, however, that injecting Buddhist or Hindu-associated gestures, postures, words, or concepts into the teaching may violate the First Amendment. Public school teachers are enjoined to be scrupulously vigilant in presenting mindfulness practices in a totally secular way.