So Long Ago, But Still True

Statement to Representatives of the Michigan State Board of Education
Presented at Public Hearing
Oakland Community College, Royal Oak Campus
November 17, 1994

I arrived at my school at 7:00 am this morning and left around 5:00, a briefcase full of ungraded papers dangling unceremoniously from my callused and beleaguered hands. I am an educator. I have been an educator for only nine years, but have taught in public schools, private schools, and universities. It is my hope to continue for another twenty-nine or so. And it is my hope to be as active a member in the dialogue on educational reform as I might in the time my career permits. Yet with every fifteen minutes that passes tonight another of the essays written by nearly 120 writing students goes ungraded. A phone call to a parent is not made. A progress report is not filled out. The duties of a curriculum committee, a school club, an administrative edict, a student-intervention report, or a letter of recommendation are left undone. Somewhere in our accelerating culture my Grail is time to consider my profession and its mission thoughtfully, to reflect.

I would like to thank the state for this opportunity to speak for five minutes on how it will mandate change in my life.

Perhaps I have started on a sarcastic note. Yet I think first and most important the state must recognize and prepare for the dynamic initiated between it and its educators, a dynamic thats breadth stretches far wider than a mere core curriculum. I recognized at this week’s staff meeting --and my life is replete with such epiphany these days--that I and our guest speaker, a guru of North Central assessment techniques, were not speaking the same language. As an educator I felt I spoke the language of human learning, what my colleague described as the attitude of the shepherd, while the guru spoke of random samples and the assembly language of Demming, a quality control expert of the 1960s who taught the Japanese how to beat the U.S. in efficiency modeling. The pendulum of curriculum reform swings again, and the State of Michigan has found its new Sputnik to rally its troops.

Again, however, I fear I am taking on the role of the curmudgeon. I have spoken for two minutes, and my point is hardly lucid.

Let me say, then, that I am largely a supporter of the new core curriculum standards as they are written here. I am impressed with their effort to be inclusive of differing belief systems, to encourage the kind of teaching innovations practiced now only at the university level, and with the boldest of good intentions, to demand true critical thinking in all of our students. I hope that, as I continue, my support for this work is not lost as my briefcase spills its papers, as Sputnik at last falls from orbit into a nostalgic pastiche, and as my overwhelming concerns about mandated change absorb my remaining two and one-half minutes.

Our lives, Thoreau said, are “like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with [a] boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment.” The dynamic of any system is in constant flux, there are no constants, no matter how we may cling to them; no truth can stand overlong. This makes standing still an extraordinarily dangerous pastime; it makes moving backwards fatal; and it means that if we are to respond to change effectively, reflectively, we must be given the time and resources to do so. And I now have about two minutes.

With this in mind, I will say that I agree with most of the concerns already stated tonight. They are indicative of the citizen who feels she has a voice unheeded and ideas undervalued. They are indicative of the classroom educator, the questing shepherd, who held a revealing minority voice in the drafting of this document. They are indicative of a history of public education where local knowledge and the needs of the student are second to the political aims of a state which insists upon a particular path for socialization: national and economic development, vocational development and, of course, patriotism. I would be curious to know how many of the designers of this curriculum have read both Demming’s work and those of Dewey and Whitehead.

And now I add my own concern in most plain terms. We cannot, must not, pretend for a moment that any educational system comes without values or is somehow accepting of all values. There is a moral mission to our state’s mandate for change. In all of our dialogue thus far, at every meeting I have attended, I have yet to hear this discussion. But it must take place. For without it, there are two key dangers:

1) The resistance and frustration that the state will encounter as the new system is finally enforced will be misread by them. It will not come primarily from a resistance to change, but from what educators will consciously or unconsciously perceive as an attack on their humanity, their identity in this democracy. Misread, the state will likely (if it has not already) devise another hard-nosed policy to punish those who seek the same Grail of quality schools;

2) The language of the standards and benchmarks, as accepting as it is of differing belief systems, is also extremely vulnerable to appropriation by agendas different from those of its designers and ultimate implementors. To make this language more concrete is, perhaps, to exclude possibilities meaningful for learning and incite a fiery revolt. Yet to leave it as it stands without a continuing and significant dialogue by educators and legislators and citizens is to render it one of the most dangerous weapons in this state’s history pointed directly at the students of an essential public education system.

As an educator and shepherd, as an active researcher and theorist in composition, as a citizen who will one day place my own children in the public schools, I demand that this dialogue continue longer than the thirty seconds I have remaining or the meager minutes allowed Michigan citizens tonight. I demand that it continue for the life of my career and beyond. I have listed numerous ways to contact me so that I may be included in such a dialogue. Even so, I have found that listing my address on every survey and response sheet I could find has, in the past, brought me too little satisfaction.

And what happens to those who feel excluded? In my last few seconds, I wish to recall Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience. “What I have to do,” he said, “is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn. . . . I have other affairs to attend to. . . . A man has not everything to do, but something . . . and if they do not hear my petition, what should I do then?” It is my sincerest hope that my career as an educator will continue and that I will not meet a core curriculum changed at the last moment by an ignorant legislature nor one tagged with penalties for my gradual, resource-famished efforts to meet change effectively.

Thank you for granting me these seven minutes of reflection.

Sincerely,
Steven R. Chisnell

Postscript: As of July 2007, 13 years later, the MDE has still not contacted me for further dialogue.