accounting for teachers

Music: Fields of the Nephilim: Revelations (1997)

To be an educator in these times requires one to navigate a certain apocalyptic mood. I don’t care who you talk to---primary, secondary, or post-secondary teachers---these days the good folks who decided to make education a career choice have had to weather waves of dire news and tidings of doom. Much of this mood can be traced to the spooks of finance capital, of course, and the way these deceitful shadows have poltergeiszed state governance. Because education is a component of the commonweal, and because the weal is not well (financially), cuts in public education funding are now widespread. This has resulted in all sorts of "bad news" for educators, from public high schools to universities.

Most of us in education know that there is a tacit understanding about teaching: because it is bodily and interpersonal, because so much of teaching occurs in that strange, ineffable space between bodies and minds and feelings, it cannot be reduced to a science. Teaching is often compared to magic, as so many "inspirational" Hollywood films attest. The labor of teaching is often invisible. The tacit, cultural agreement about teaching has thus been "measured" in terms of results: let me alone with your student and, if all goes well, she will be educated. Of course, that's not how education actually happens, but the cultural fantasy of education is nevertheless akin to magic (a very, very bad movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer comes to mind, as well as a good but troublesome one titled Precious). This fantasy flies until the economy goes south---then accountability measures come into play, and these come, almost always, from those who are not teachers. When the world is uncertain, we retreat to the solidity or certainty of the number.

To preview: doing politics means that one must intone the motto, "never waste a crisis."

Back when Adam Smith was contemplating The Wealth of Nations, and long before this well-meaning (and by most accounts a decent) chap could have ever witnessed what Marx did, "political economy" was considered a bad thing. The notion meant that civil society had been infiltrated by the political (understood as state regulation) and thus had been sullied. Today, of course, "political economy" refers to a perspective on media and culture that examines the way in which the economic, broadly construed, participates in the production of culture (or superstructure). "Political economy," in other words, no longer has a negative connotation. All of us start from the premise that economic matters are shot-through with the political---that questions of power are unavoidable. Today, political economy represents a particular perspective on cultural production keyed to economic influence (quite the 180, I reckon). We have yet to come to terms with the fact that education is similarly political.

Education has never not been "political," however, in recent times one might say the meaning of "political education" has been in negotiation. Most teachers would take the notion of "political education" as a given---that politics, broadly construed, is deeply embedded in educational policy. A cursory review of educational policy from the nineteenth century in this country reveals that politics and education are something like an Oreo cookie: the act passed in congress that established land grant institutions in the 1860s was unabashedly political and tied directly to the Civil War (it was part of an economic recovery strategy, to be sure!). Somewhere along the way both educators and the "public" alike came to position that education is an apolitical pursuit, that teachers would somehow be "transmitting" pure knowledge devoid of power. This notion is absurd, of course, but there is no denying that the ideology of "objectivity" dominates our educational fantasy in the United States; all of us who teach, from Kindergarten to the college classroom, labor under the ideal that what we present to students is in some way, fashion, or form a version of the truth.

Of course, anyone who has spent time in the classroom knows that "the truth" is not what we're teaching. We're teaching thinking, or styles of thought. We're teaching skills. Most teachers subscribe to a certain ideology of "independent thought," meaning that we are concerned with teaching students to think for themselves. Educators come from across the political spectrum, but in my experience all of us are generally concerned with the well-being of students and their ability to adopt and use the tools human beings have developed to navigate daily problems. For example: in a fifth grade classroom, a teacher is probably much more interested in having a student solve a mathematical calculation than identify what president passed a progressive reform. This is a political interest, undoubtedly: it's about empowering someone regardless of class affiliation or racial or gender affiliation. There's no doubt in my mind that teachers inflect their own cultural politics in the classroom; teachers are human beings---that's gonna happen. You cannot "hide" that---people, especially young people, are very perceptive and they'll smell out your cultural politics no matter what you do. But regardless of a given teacher's cultural politics, at the end of the day, we all aim toward engendering thinking. If Jack and Jill are reading, we've done our job.

This is to say, I think most folks who want to pursue teaching as a career are idealists. Teachers are not rewarded with money. Period. Everyone knows this. And most who teach know this (and those who don't are quickly weeded out). We see ourselves as doing an important kind of cultural work that isn't measured in terms of number or degree or money. There is a certain romanticism to teaching that entices new teachers. That romanticism involves, I think, precisely this ineffable "magic" that is not reducible to the number, to "the account."

With these assumptions in mind, I'm troubled by two trends. First, I'm troubled by the ascent of the "for-profit" university in the United States, like the University of Phoenix. The educational model of for-profit universities is that one can "purchase" an education---that you pay money and endure an online series of courses and emerge with a degree. Notwithstanding the fact that for-profit universities are actually more expensive than traditional universities (or community colleges), there is simply no way one can equate an in person, classroom experience with a virtual class or words on a screen. Learning is bodily; so much of what is "taught" in a classroom in not reducible to words (on a screen). The assumption underwriting for-profit education is that feeling, something experienced by bodies in space, is not part of the educational experience. Call me sentimental, but love, broadly construed, is part of teaching. When I think about the most transformational classroom experiences in my education, it had something to do with love, the kind of feeling of care a teacher imparts to a student that is not possible in an email message. Hell, you can blame my conviction on Ruth Bailey, my third grade teacher. She's the teacher who taught me multiplication tables in third grade, and who made me want to come to class after recess because she was going to read James and the Giant Peach aloud.

Second, I'm troubled by the ways in which politicians believe teachers should be made "accountable" economically. The inspiration of this post is a new policy that has apparently went into effect at Texas A&M University this fall. Goaded by a "conservative" group in Texas politics---and apparently with ties to state Governor Rick Perry---faculty at my neighboring university will now be judged on the basis of their economic viability. As this story details, professors at A&M will now have a "bottom line" assessment: monies professors have brought it from grants will be added to the amount of tuition revenue their teaching brings in. Their salary will be subtracted from this sum, yielding their value for the university as a corporation.

When I first read about this new measure of "accountability," I thought it was some sort of satire from The Onion. That it is true is, well, astonishing and simply hard to believe. Yet, that it is true is also cause for deep concern among those of us who have chosen education as a profession: when teaching is reduced to the number, when the idealism of teaching is evaporated into degrees, when what we do is reduced to the dollar, who will want to teach? Or rather, when "accountability" is reduced to the account, what does teaching become? In primary and secondary education, "no child left behind" has transformed education into teaching for the test. Is higher education going to become teaching for the dollar? I don't mean to be alarmist, but, such a measure of a teacher's worth at the university level seems to me, in a word, absurd.

I don't disagree with the notion of accountability, in general. But to use the measure of the dollar seems antithetical to the reason teachers become teachers in the first place.