teacher voice

A. Phillip Randolph and Who Really Controls Teacher Voice

by Jose Vilson on February 28, 2013

A Phillip Randolph

A Phillip Randolph

This week, I had the distinct please of listening to Norman Hill speak as part of a panel of activists and organizers that worked on and around the Civil Rights Movement, specifically with Bayard Rustin. In one of my favorite moments, Hill quoted A. Phillip Randolph:

“At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything, and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.”

? A. Philip Randolph

I’m reminded of this every time we talk about teacher voice, and getting an invitation to this imaginary table.

After listening to that quote, I then wondered, if all these people are at the table and there are no reserved seats, then why are we as teachers still talking about not having a voice? Why wait until someone grants it to us from on high?

Why seek validation from the assortment of “education experts” like mayors, chancellors, politicians, millionaires, billionaires, presidents, random people off the street, corporate CEOs, actors, musicians, artists, and the occasional athlete? Or anyone else with an opinion on education?

Professors and union leaders sometimes fit in this category, too, because they should know better than to talk down to K-12 practitioners, but some do, and forget to invite teachers to their events and panels even when they say they’re advocating on behalf of us.

We don’t always want “on behalf of.” We want to do a lot of this ourselves.

(Don’t misconstrue this as me dissing my union. If anything, we need one, now more than ever. But there’s more we can do, too.)

We know enough teachers who want to elevate their voices beyond the current issue du jour or the hottest edubuzz word. Yet, some of us prefer to see teachers as weak and incapable because it lets us market to a disempowered constituency.

In other words, if we’re going to raise teacher voice, we can’t expect that nature has reserved that seat for us. We must take it.

We must do whatever we can, big or small, to shake the very foundation of society’s understanding of what it means to teach children. You have every right to speak up, apart from the inner sanctums we create within your circle of friends. Once you’ve relinquished your right to the belief that you have a say, you’ve lost.

A. Phillip Randolph chose to organize massive amounts of folk when he wanted to organize. The least you can do is help spread the word for this movement.

Jose, who doesn’t want to pull punches …

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A Quick Note on Student Voice [Because You Need To Hear It ... Again]

by Jose Vilson on February 7, 2013

Everything Is Coming Up Millhouse

Everything Is Coming Up Millhouse

A couple of days back, I saw an incident with one of my student ambassadors and a teacher. Nothing to write the Post about, but tempers flared, and misunderstandings ensued. Yelling and consternation spill over to the hallway. Frankly, a huge misunderstanding only inflated by the fact that other adults who felt like pushing the buttons deeper instead of pulling them back. The only phrase that kept ringing in my mind, “He SHOULDN’T BE A STUDENT LEADER!” Shaking my head while I headed home, I thought I would have to do my first intervention of the year between student and teacher to get to the truth.

Yesterday, during one of my breaks, the student ambassador came to me and said he had a discussion with the teacher afterward, which he prompted. The student resolved the situation with the teacher on his own. Thank. You.

Moral Of The Story: Believe it or not, your job isn’t about you.

It’s not about any of us, really. We’re allowed to ask for things that allow us to do the best job possible: reasonable salaries, job security, and good professional relationships with our colleagues and supervisors. We’re allowed to tell people off when they suggest that our jobs as educators see easily with all the pseudo-vacation days and altered working hours. We’re allowed to feel the warmth of the spotlight when most of America likes their child’s teacher way more than most of the political figures who seek to devalue the teaching profession.

Yet, every moment educators step into a classroom (if you’re in a classroom, that is), we gave the obligation to put our best foot forward by taking a few steps back … and let the kids talk.

Unfortunately, too many adults, educators included, still see themselves as the primary foci of all their endeavors. They don’t bestow lessons on children because they ought to learn, but because their students’ learning is a reflection of their own awesomeness, a self-gratification that gives them cool points with colleagues. They see children as means to an end, little people that can do their bidding so they can worship a false idol. They listen not to actually listen, but to use later, to bargain, to hold over as a means of control.

If you find yourself in the above group, excuse yourself.

Rather than constantly finding ways to manipulate kids in ways that don’t help them, let’s teach them how to advocate for themselves in times when they don’t have an adult to back them up immediately. Let’s have kids pick their own projects for school and set the guidelines. Every so often, they have to learn how to make good decisions, and we will just have to be there when they don’t.

We as educators ought to hope that, when they make good decisions, a domino effect takes place and they continue to make those decisions, but if our hand keeps pushing those dominoes, we never get the full effect. Neither do they.

Mr. Vilson, who strives for fairness when he can …

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Heart Matters When You Speak

by Jose Vilson on February 5, 2013

Excerpt from my latest at The Future of Teaching:

Instead, what the audience got that night was me speaking from the heart. Sure, I prepared, but I hoped to convey the passion and love I have for teaching as I do in conversations with you, or in my own writing. Sometimes, while striving for perfection, we forget the delicate balance between divinity and humanity. What makes any “talk” we give isn’t knocking out the “umms” and “errs” from our speech, standing up straight, or speaking in a slow ans steady tone. It’s the connection we make with people who listen to us. We have an opportunity every day to speak to people and make an impact one way or the other about them. These young people will have an idea they’d like heard, and you might be their first audience member.

To read more, click here. Read. Share. Comment. Thanks!

Jose, who wants you to listen more than speak this week, please …

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The New York Times and Why Adding More Educators To Your Panel Matters

by Jose Vilson on August 21, 2012

Last year around this time, I criticized the New York Times for not having many K-12 educators on their panel. Excuse me, for having maybe three current teachers and another handful of former teachers out of a possible 70 panelists. I laughed at the prospect of a public education system without any educators, and my own suspicions about the composition of last year’s panel made me laugh harder. It felt like the schools of the future would just have a suite of products thrown at kids with maybe a couple of people overseeing these third-party modules, collecting data on iPads while Joel Klein sits in a hub like the architect.

It feels like someone down at the New York Times heard this and the ensuing chorus of complaints (thanks in no small part to all of you who decided to retweet, big and small), so a couple of my colleagues got into the conference as panelists and audience members and reported back about the events. I nodded in approval.

This year, in an act of good faith, I decided to check the early list of panelists, and I gotta say, I’m happier with the list (notice the modifier). Since I’ve already undertaken the role of unofficial education panel ombudsman, I looked at the list and noticed a couple of improvements. First, they added a teacher and made that a prominent part of the program. They’ve also added Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera, two of the Save Our Schools rally speakers from 2011. More importantly, there seem to be a few more school-based people on the list. Not that I agree with all their points of view either, but at least I feel like the organizers concentrated more on people within education and not simply wizards and gadget-wielders.

Frankly, I would hope a panel like a New York Times panel would have all sides of an issue represented, but that’s often not what happens. What we often see is a cavalcade of right-to-center “heroes” and AFT President Randi Weingarten, or 20 corporate deformers and NYU scholar Diane Ravitch. You rarely see a balance of all the voices that matter. Come to think of it, that includes students, parents, guidance counselors, and social workers as well.

Alas, I won’t demean progress.  I also have to admit that, percentage-wise, not many of us who teach K-12 put ourselves out there as viable candidates for panels like these. I leave that for another post.

In the interim, I’ll just say that we as teachers have a long way to go before all these major conferences recognize teachers as a critical part of the conversation, not just as participants in the conferences but as the sages on the stage. We’ve already come a long way in redefining teacher voice; now we have to activate it. I remain critical until this is so.

Jose, who will take questions now from the audience.

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I Went Through Hell, So I’m Expecting Heaven [On Speaking Up Again]

May 6, 2012 Jose

Colleague Carrie Kamm commented on my last post with this: [quote]“Something prompted this blog post from you. I am sure these thoughts and ideas have dwelled within you, but I’d love to know what you observed, heard, or felt that made you need to write this post this week. For me, reading Lisa Delpit’s latest [...]

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New York Times: Future Schools Don’t Have Many Teachers In Them

August 11, 2011 Jose

Setting the clock back to June 20th, 2011 … *** takes a break from ranting about the New York State Math Test, opens e-mail *** thinks to self: Hmm, this is interesting. A panel about schools of tomorrow by the New York Times. OK, I’m curious. Maybe I’ll get to go. Wait, on a school [...]

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My State of the Teacher Voice Address 2011 [The Huffington Post]

February 17, 2011 Guest Posts

Excerpt: We as a whole need to transform our vision of the professionals who spend on average $400 of their monies to the 30, 60, 90, 150 students in front of them for the majority of the year. We should listen to this group not just when they need to give your child a report [...]

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