Dr. Peter Smagorinsky talks to us about standardized testing, listening to diverse voices, realities of the school day, and the impacts of politics on education. Peter is known for his work in teaching and learning English, writing methods, and inclusive instructional practices. Dr. Smagorinsky is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Universidad de Guadalajara.
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2021, Jan. 19). A conversation with Peter Smagorinsky. (Season 1, No. 11) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/9514-8926-D02C-BDB6-BA13-8
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Dr. Peter Smagorinsky talks to us about standardized testing, listening to diverse voices, realities of the school day, and the impacts of politics on education. Peter is known for his work in teaching and learning English, writing methods, and inclusive instructional practices. Dr. Smagorinsky is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Universidad de Guadalajara.
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2021, Jan. 19). A conversation with Peter Smagorinsky. (Season 1, No. 11) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/9514-8926-D02C-BDB6-BA13-8
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Education Research has a problem. The work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom caffeine is here to help. Each week I invite a top education researcher to sit down and talk with teachers about what they have learned from years of study. This week, Dr. Peter Smagorinsky talks to us about standardized testing, listening to diverse voices, the realities of the school day and the impacts of politics on education. Peter is known for his work in teaching and learning English writing methods and inclusive instructional practices. Dr. Smagorinsky is a distinguished research professor at the University of Georgia, and a distinguished visiting scholar at the Universidad de Guadalajara. You can learn more about Peter at the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite morning drink. And join me your host, Lindsay Persohn. For classroom caffeine research to energize your teaching practice. Peter, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show
Peter Smagorinsky:Thank you.
Lindsay Persohn:From your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Peter Smagorinsky:So before we started, Lindsay and I were talking about how hard this question is to answer. I'm 68 years old and I've been in the ED business in my early 20s. So it's kind of I was wondering where in the world do I find one or two things that are worth talking about? And so I'm going to answer that beginning when I was a high school student. And I was, I had to take SAT PSAT to take a small, relatively small set of standardized tests, all of which I hated. And then after that, when I was done with college, I was working at grad schools, I had to take the GRE. And every time I took these exams, I would score about 150 points higher in math than my verbal test, and to project my life out after that. So keep in mind, my verbal score was okay. My math scores were always kind of elite. I'm actually a terrible math student. And I've made a living as a writer. So that you know, there was just, it just didn't add up to me. Why do I keep getting good math scores? Why do I struggle in math classes, when I went to Kenyon College as a freshman, I was put in a, I took a placement exam and was putting the Advanced Math group. I lasted about two weeks, transferred back into basic math and got a C in it. I mean, this is a story of my life as a student. And again, then I'm done. I became an English major, and ended up being writing, publishing many hundreds of things over the course of my career in academia as a teacher. And so standardized tests to me, always were misguided. I think I figured out later that my math scores were largely attributable to the fact that they focus on geometry, which isn't math. And I, I'm good, I'm good with shapes. I'm a landscape architect, in my private time, and I make I create collages of things based on what how they're shaped. And I think that that was a real benefit. I had some natural ability with shapes that made me look good in math, even though I always struggled with particularly the abstractions of numbers. And then I fought that the My poor verbal scores were fact were due to the fact that the that I was being asked to get correct answers for, of questions posed about readings that I wasn't interested in. And I'd often find myself drifting off during the test when I was reading these passages. And as a result, I appeared to be okay verbally, when most people who know me consider me to be a highly verbal person. So going back to when I was when I was young. In my mid teens, there was I hated standardized tests. And then early in my career as a teacher, I had to do, I had to stop and do maybe a week of SAT test prep, and I thought this was the biggest imposition of my time that I could possibly imagine. I did it very soon. cynically, I did it very carelessly, I was supposed to do it, I was kind of rebelling against the fact that my teaching was being interrupted to prepare things for people that I considered invalid. And if I had only known how bad things would get, I'd have considered myself lucky that I only had to give up a week for test prep that didn't reflect on me at all. You know, the whole idea was, I was going to take this time out so that my students would get better scores for themselves, although, of course, the test scores reflected on the communities. And one thing I recall about the one of the three jobs I had was someone successfully ran for the school board on that with a campaign of we want to maintain the appearance of excellent education with high test scores. And you know, and I always rolled my eyes at all this stuff and thought it was a waste of time. But as my teacher Ed career developed, the teaching profession increasingly became subjected to this sort of assessment. And everybody knows the problems that it's created for teachers, now. They have to spend so much of their time doing test prep, they get tested, they get evaluated on the basis of either their students test scores, or maybe someone else's. So my sister was a math teacher in New Jersey, and she was held accountable for the test scores of students whose tests she proctored, even though they weren't her students. And, you know, there are a million to one stories like that in the profession. It's just, it's just so ridiculous. In response to one of your later questions, I'll talk about the role of the Department of Education. But it just seems that every Secretary of Education we've had has gotten taken, tests more and more seriously. Even though it's not clear what Betsy DeVoss thought of tests, because her whole agenda was on something else, she was worthless, in a very different way, from the way Arnie Duncan was completely worthless, but in a really immediately destructive way to the everyday lives of teachers who had to continue to do all this test after test after test after test, and you know, it's demoralizing, and it takes time away from teaching and learning. And I still think it's invalid. You know, I think it says invalid now, as it was when I was mis-measured when I was 15 years old, versus many years ago. So I guess if I were to look at one kind of thread, in my, in my story of going from being a student to being a teacher, to being a teacher, educator, it's my resistance to the role of testing and the validity of testing in determining how teachers go about their work and determining how kids get evaluated. So that's how I start to answer the question, and I'm happy to elaborate if you if you want to ask any follow ups?
Lindsay Persohn:Well, I think your point here is probably one that's very validating to teachers, you know, to hear someone who has done so much work in the field of education to say that, you know, these tests are disruptive and not in a good way. They're, they're truly invalid in multiple ways. And I think they forced teachers to, to really try to bend over backwards to meet mandates that in the long run, I would say they're not productive, but it's worse than that, you know, they they've really taken away from what can happen in schools,
Peter Smagorinsky:right. And then, you know, and, you know, I was literate, semi affluent white kid. You know, we're, though I'm part of the population that it's supposed to do a good job with. And it's still screwed up. But, you know, imagine I then I think, well, what if I'd grown up in a housing project, the assumption is the level the playing field is level between those kids and the ones that the you know, the ritziest schools, you know, if kids are hungry, and wearing the same clothes all week, how are they supposed to be thinking about multiple choice items on things that they don't care about? And how is that supposed to reflect anything about who they are, who their teachers are? Kind of school, they go to practice, they're just, there's a lot more important going on to those kids, then taking these tests. So I think that the testing, of course, everybody, everybody know thinks the same thing. These tests are disruptive, they're invalid. They're offensive. And I think that they're driving a lot of people out of the business, because that's not what people do. Every teacher I know, says, I got into teaching because I love kids. If I want to help kids, because I care about students. I love my subject matter. No one gets in says I want to go and practice. Why would anyone want to do that. And so if you're paying poorly, and they've been treated poorly, and I, first of all, I'm a public school advocate. But my fiance was in a public Middle School last year that was so oppressively test driven that she couldn't stand it and got out. And she got a job in a small little Catholic school for this year. And she applied to many schools as the one that offered her a job. She wasn't looking to get out of public and private, that's she took the job that was offered. And it's just a different environment much smaller. Not so many tests, not a centralized curriculum, not prescriptive. And she doesn't, she gets paid nothing, but she's happy. And, you know, it's I think that's, it's the kind of work that people wanted to get to get into teaching for. And the kind of work that they're often required to do in schools is not enjoyable. So I want I don't want to do is be too discouraging, but the landscape, because of policymakers, not because of kids, you know, people sometimes people say, well, the kids are so terrible, I don't think that kids are all that terrible. They're no worse than I was. But the conditions are so different. The top down nature of everything, the centralized nature of everything is discouraging,
Lindsay Persohn:Well, I see a real issue, whenever we think about what we're really doing in schools is trying to teach kids how to think. And if we expect teachers not to think themselves, and instead just to follow the script and follow the plan that's been handed to them. I think that task becomes even more difficult, you know, how, how do you teach someone to do something that you aren't able to exercise yourself?
Peter Smagorinsky:Right? And how do you how do you how do teachers perform when they believe no one trusts them to make their own decisions based on their own judgment and knowledge of kids teaching learning, schools and all these things. And I'll just give one of the examples from the school that she was in last year, they were very subservient to books written by Lucy Caulkins. And there was one lesson that was scripted for 10 minutes. When she taught it, it ran 12 minutes and she got written up for it. And you know, that sort of micromanage. And needless to say, she got out. Who's going to teach in a school like that, who's got initiative and judgment and creativity and imagination, and a personality, when what you're really looking for is a robot who can teach her 10 minute lesson in 10 minutes, whether the kids need 30 minutes or not.
Lindsay Persohn:And I think that that you've just really hit one of the saddest things in my mind about education right now is that loss of, you know, being able to drive your curriculum and your school day based upon the needs of kids
Peter Smagorinsky:On the needs of kids and your judgment, your training, your intelligence, your initiative. When I look back on my teaching, I had all that, I mean, I've that I look back on that and think Holy smokes, as much as I complained about being managed, you know, it was a liberation city back then. Well, I did complain a lot of the time about being overly managed and having to do this week or test prep, I complained bitterly about all those things,
Lindsay Persohn:right. And who would have thought that that that week would bleed into an entire school year? So Peter, I know you've done a lot of work to try to solve some of these challenges of education. So what would you like teachers to know about your research?
Peter Smagorinsky:So I've done actually a lot of different things. But I want to focus on something that I think is not attended to enough. So I did a lot of work, studying teachers moving from teacher ed programs out into the workforce and the original impetus for that work. And Pam Grossman and Sheila Valencia were my PI Co-PIs at different sites, Principal Investigator ti. And our initial question was, what's common in teacher education, which is all we teach them to do all these cool things, and teacher read, and then two years later, they're out in the schools, and they're teaching by the book or, you know, they're doing what they call traditional instruction, you know, lecture tests, and blah, blah, blah, you know, what, what happens? Why does that happen? And so we, we had a pretty robust set of case studies that we that we were able to do over a five year period, what ended up being three institutions, and a total of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 programs. And what I found from going over these cases Again and again and again. And it took me 20 years to go through all this. And the book that just came out this year or something I forget the title of the Godspeed concept development or something like that I really became interested in I think the question of this transition feeds into a bigger question is how do people develop conceptions of how to teach effectively? I think the mistake made in teacher education is thinking that the thing that we're emphasizing in that methods class is the only thing that they'll ever be influenced. But the fact is that teachers are being at one point I said, they're not being drawn and quartered. They're being drawn in 16. They're being pulled in dozens of different directions at the same time, all the time. So there's sort of Dewey and progressivism that tends to be emphasized throughout teacher ED. But kids have gone to schools, and then a socialized into understanding teaching to be pretty authoritarian. So they have this, this, this deep image, this schema for what teachers do based on our apprenticeship of observation, their experiences as students, which product which Now, one of the things we found in this work is, if you go back to Dan Gordy who who introduced the concept in the 70s, really based on research from the 60s, it was a very conserving the apprenticeship of observation was pretty similar to everyone. And he, he found it to be a very conserving effect. teachers do have greater far greater exposure now because they have the internet that, like when I got my teaching credentials in the 70s. Pretty much what I knew was what I've learned in my classes, there weren't like, there were no zoom meetings, back then there was an email back then, no podcast, No podcast back then you either had to buy a book, or go to a conference, just to have contact with anyone outside your bubble of influence. Then when you go from your program into a school, you go home, look at all these people went to different schools, they have different beliefs. Although by and large, everyone comes in with these brilliant with the foundation of Dewey and progressivism in their formal approach, but at the same time, then it gets that gets layered on top of what I've started calling the deep structure of schools. And the deep structure of schools is everything that holds that provides continuity across time in a school and it tends to be very conservative. So if you go back to the original conception of schools in the mid 1800s, by Horace Mann, it was they were designed to be assimilated. They were schools, where the whole purpose of message mass education was to take all these European immigrants from all these different cultural backgrounds, largely European, and meld them into a nation to have a national identity where everybody saluted the same flag, everyone spoke the same language. Everybody were in the same facts, kind of a cultural literacy approach to their, at the same time, the whole notion of a normal school. That's what teacher Ed schools, that's what a teacher ED school was, it was called a normal school, think of Illinois State University as in normal, normal life. And it's a weird name until you realize that that's what it meant. The whole idea was to perpetuate norms. And then the question is, well, whose norms? so we're trying to assimilate purpose of schools and becoming a teacher was to assimilate to what we all would probably call now white middle class norm. And that structure has never budged from the conduct of, of school. And it's realized in the kinds of things you're allowed to say, the kinds of turn taking that are allowed in class, the kinds of clothes you're allowed to wear, the way you're allowed to wear your hair. So you've probably seen stories, there was a story of a black wrestler. And the referee said, cut your hair or you forfeit. So much for celebrating diversity. And so you have you have things like celebrate diversity is in every mission statement of every school, when you respect the culture, the blah, blah, blah, and then they get there. But I can't wear their hair like that. They can't, they can't dress in a certain way. There are schools where people who wear headscarves are called gotta take them off. If you if you've ever seen the difference between a black church and a white church, one's much more participatory and louder and passionate and involved. And the kids are socialized to understand that. That's actually acceptable behvavior in a formal setting. They do that in classroom and they're sent to the discipline, because the deep structure of the school is very on unbudging. And so the all that there are so many things that are at odds with each other and teaching, you're constantly amidst contradiction. And it's not just polar opposites, you might be told, okay, standardized testing here. But we're also going to have a cultural diversity. And we're going to have character education. And we're going to do this, and we're going to do that. And they don't, the pieces don't fit together. And then they gravitate to the assimilative functional schools, because that's what that's the, that's the center of gravity to everything. One of the things I've heard often very often is Oh, teachers are so inconsistent. And I say, No, teachers are inconsistent environments, that pull them in different directions. And so they might emphasize the official meaning of a story, while also having open ended interpretation. The two don't mix theoretically. But what you have is competing traditions, that teachers kind of shift them on in their instruction. And sometimes those contradictions can be experienced in in unsettling ways, like kids who are trying to figure out what they're supposed to do to do well, in that class. And in my background, says English teacher, I really don't know how a math class would work. So the one that when when we, I was reading an article on this on this sort of thing. And a lot of educational research is depicted in graphs and charts. Never been very good at graphs and charts, diagrams, I don't even get. And so we were trying to figure out how do we show the set of contradictions that people that teachers have to work within and I ended up enlisting the service of a former student of mine named Michelle sauce, who does has done a number of cover art things, we asked her to draw a picture of a teacher walking down a pathway that is more or less as different things shouting at her from different places, telling her to do different things. And instead of walking forward, her head is turned as though she's being distracted. And to me that that captures what teachers go through. And so my original goal was to study concept development as a path. But the problem is, that path isn't even there. Because there are multiple paths that cross each other and circle back and go straight up, and some go straight down. And there, it's just, it's a very perplexing profession, because the clarity of purpose is not there. And meanwhile, you have the deep structure of a school, privileging certain values and priorities. So I would say, if I have any wisdom to share is don't expect consistency of yourself. Because the reward system doesn't doesn't work that way. The approval system doesn't work that way. You're just being torn in many directions at the same time, all the time,
Lindsay Persohn:Peter, you've really got me thinking about where I would call them, the internal conflicts of teachers really come from, you've got me thinking about how teachers are sort of set down in the middle of this system that wasn't designed to meet the needs of all students. It was designed to meet the needs of those who want to normalize folks and kind of get them all together in one place. And when you say, you know that every school has diversity and inclusion in their mission statement? Yes, I think you're absolutely right. And like you said, the deep structures of our schools aren't set up to help us meet those missions. So, of course, we're going to feel torn and pulled in many different directions. How do we navigate that?
Peter Smagorinsky:Well, there you know, one of the problems of being really democratic, is that everybody gets a voice. And if you legitimize everyone's voice, it's hard to have agreement. So we're kind of victims of our own our own efforts at equity, even though those efforts in equity tend to silence certain voices. You don't have to be a genius to know which ones they are there are people on the margins. And I've always believed that the real value of diversity is not in its celebration, but it's in the admission of perspectives. That the The people at the center of authority don't ever don't have the life experience to even think about. And that's why I think it's very important not just to have different colored people, but to have different life experiences present in any discussion of how to operate a community operation like a school. I remember when I was a high school teacher, my black students would say, would tell me how often they got pulled over by police. And these were not crazy kids running around, you know, firebombing the city hall. These were the student government, kids, the student athletes, kind of, you know, the good kids. And they said, Oh, yeah, we get pulled over all the time. And I don't get pulled over all the time, I would never have known that if I hadn't been exposed to the kids listen too. And that was really my first experience, understanding what now people are starting to see in the Black Lives Matter movement and the problems that have caused it. Yeah, black people Sure, go get pulled over a lot, beaten up a lot, and all these things. But if we, if it's, if I look at the Georgia Board of Regents, it's all old white men appointed by Republicans, they're never gonna think of these things. It's completely outside their life experience. And I think that the the regions are all the poorer, for being all the same. So it's very important for these multiple perspectives to be available. It's also important to understand that celebrating diversity is a dumb idea, because it's really hard. It's hard to accommodate all these voices in one effort, they're often intense disagreements. The people who have lacked access to these decision making opportunities are often angry. They often feel marginalized, they're often treated as marginal people. And celebrating diversity is sounds good. And it looks great on a poster with a lot of different color and kittens snuggling together. If it were that easy, we'd all be doing it. But diversity is hard. And you've got to work at it, you've got to be committed to listening. And I don't think that that is not just a southern problem. There was a problem in the Chicago area schools I worked into.
Lindsay Persohn:Right. And I know you're in Georgia, and I'm in Florida. And certainly we do see some of the same kinds of issues in the places where we live. But I think you're right, I think this idea of celebrating diversity, it's just not enough, there has to be more than a celebration, we need everyone to actually have a seat at the table so that they can share their diverse experiences and help us understand what life is like through the eyes of someone else.
Peter Smagorinsky:That's right. That's right and do something about it. Right, right. But you have to be willing to listen, and a lot of people aren't what they want to do is tell everybody how right they are. And that tends to be a trait, particularly for people who don't want to give anything up, you know, who have the authority and don't want to share it. Right. So there's that level of commitment is very deep, required in order for diverse communities to function effectively, and achieve some kind of common cause in education or anything else. And show me that show me where that's easy to do.
Lindsay Persohn:And yet celebrating just isn't enough?
Peter Smagorinsky:Well, to me, it's a distraction, and it puts a smiley face on a hard problem.
Lindsay Persohn:I think you've certainly shared with us a bit more about why you don't like standardized testing at all. It certainly is not designed. It's not designed to meet the needs of everyone.
Peter Smagorinsky:That's right. That's why they're called standardized, right? And who writes them? Don't Don't go take a walk through ETS sometime. It's pretty white. I've been there. I've done work in ETS, and I don't remember meeting any black people, or anybody else for that matter. They may have had some Asian number crunchers. But no, they're not involved in items. Right? nutrition and the test item developer are different characters. And and so unless you share decision making, and and make a real effort to go on it, not just get a black person who fits in very well already with the white establishment. But people who can come in and say, wait a minute, Ya'll are wrong about this.
Lindsay Persohn:So how do we how do we translate that to something at a classroom level? How can teachers take these ideas and empower theirs? Students and really also empower themselves to support diverse groups of students.
Peter Smagorinsky:Well, I always look first to context because the context may not allow it. There may be a standardization movement. Not I shouldn't over sell the experiences of my fiance too much, she came home with a story. And this is from the new school, she's in the one she loves. She had had her students read an essay about how the film The Black Panther, that it was a twist on genre, on the superhero genre. That was it, because she had the students read that essay, a parent complained that she was promoting the Black Lives Matter agenda, and was a historical revisions, and complained to the principal and all the stuff. So there, there are a lot of forces that that weigh in on teachers and what they can do. And I think a real problem will be with what we do in teacher ed is pretend that there are things like that. Because these constraints, the context tells you what you can do. If you have an authoritarian principal, who is down here in the south, there's no fee for humans, if you get fired, for this being disobedient, I can tell you all the cool ideas in the world and I wouldn't be any good. So the first thing I think everybody needs to do is learn the context, you know, what does what is available in this place. And sometimes you do find that there are, if not loopholes, at least, side doors. So a teacher I knew back in Norman, Oklahoma, wanted to teach the color purple, which is controversial, because they're both lesbian Oh, my God. And she, she just went through a process to get the book adopted. It took her a lot of time. But she was able to do it. This was in Norman, Oklahoma, which, by standards of Oklahoma as a progressive city, but by the standards of it, it may be a little less so. But she she found it, I don't want to say in emphasizing context, I don't want to suggest that they're impenetrable, and immovable. But they're there. But part of their their thereness could be these loopholes or side doors through which you might be able to get something done. But the idea of just closing your door the way I could do, that door is almost always open. Now, somebody is watching everything you do, by some means of surveillance. Just as teachers have to be surveillance kids all the time, to the point where some of them are supposed to be collecting data with a clicker while they're reading discussions, man. How can you be involved in the discussion? If your folks who's in attendance quit? You know, someone's looking out the window? Somebody is reading a novel between? You can't leave the discussion? And do that? Well, I don't think but they're required to because what matters most is the data get collected. And I'd be a pretty poor fit in a school like that.
Lindsay Persohn:That idea of working within the bounds of our own context, of course, understanding what those those boundaries are. But it sounds like maybe what you're suggesting is that we not so quietly push against those boundaries a little bit.
Peter Smagorinsky:Well, to the extent that you can, because you can't teach anybody if you're fired. And once you get hired as true and rehired. So when she announced that she wasn't returning to that job, she was effectively banned from the county for you.
Lindsay Persohn:And I know our listeners can't see me, but my eyes just got really big.
Peter Smagorinsky:If you want to be a teacher, you have to understand that being a teacher involves certain compromises. And if you can't make them might not be the best work.
Lindsay Persohn:But it it's a dance we do, wouldn't you say where you you play by the rules in order to remain where you are yet, I think we do have to push against the boundaries when we don't agree or when we don't think it's good for kids.
Peter Smagorinsky:Well, I guess it depends on the kind of, first of all the kind of leadership in your school and the kind of faculty organizations available. So I there's a person that I've been in sessions with in the last few years and the person is from New York. And his solution to everything is to go talk to your union rep. Well, that's great if you've got your unions but you know, Georgia is what they call right to work which is really right to hire. And they have no job protection. I know people who've gone to work and been told their jobs are gone because they weren't fitting in. Which means I want to medium. So I don't like to encourage people to be so independent that they, they get fired and can't get another teaching job because these, these things can follow you around. And I want to be, I want to sit here and say get pushed back, yeah be a rebel, you know, tear down walls and you know, be a 16th radical, but it's a good way to get fired where I live. And that's why I think you need to know your context to know, is this a place where I can do that? Is this a place where pushback is even possible? For me, and I've been to university and every time I push back, people get really mad at me things in particular.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, you know, higher ed has certainly been subjected to a lot of the standardization that has happened in our K 12. schools as well. So I don't know that anyone can really escape this, which is why I think we do have to, maybe, as you suggest, gently push back wherever we can, in order to say, this isn't right. And this isn't what is good for my students.
Peter Smagorinsky:Yeah, but the last thing I'm going to do as a university professor is say that I'm in the same boat as a teacher. Because it's, we've got it easy. Absolutely. terms of autonomy. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I bitch and moan about yesterday and MK now its the TPA, all these things I complained bitterly about because I don't think these things make me but they make me do is waste time that I could better be put, putting into my doing. Research, service, anything. And your time gets eaten up by writing reports justifying your existence, sometimes in internally with the institution, sometimes with these external audits. None of which I've ever made me a better educator, none of which have ever improved the quality of life for my students. All they've done is provided reports, I don't think anyone ever reads paperwork and checklists. But again, I It's a piece of cake relative to the daily micromanagement that teachers have to want to do.
Lindsay Persohn:And I think that for, for me, my public school experience is not terribly far behind me. And I think that you really hit the nail on the head there with the word daily. Because, you know, while in a university setting, we're inconvenienced by these things periodically, I would say, but certainly in a public classroom, it is a daily imposition of someone else's ideas and agenda, and endeavors that teachers are then then left to deal with. So we've talked a lot about the challenges of education. So given those challenges, today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Peter Smagorinsky:Well, I was thinking about this, none of them try to give a practical answer. President Carter created secretary of education as a cabinet position. I think it was largely symbolic, at first, I don't recall them really doing anything. Increasingly, they've gotten more invasive. And Biden has promised a person with teaching experience in that role. I believe that Person wouldn't be the first person, ron page with a gym teacher, who became a school administrator. You know, he did his doctoral dissertation on the reaction time of offensive lineman in football. That qualified him to be the United States Secretary of Education. And, you know, he was even, but he has the superintendent in Houston that we've become, you know, there was some Houston miracle which of course, like all these miracles turned out to be a fraud. It's, it's all based on gaming the system. But I think if I go back to when Obama became president, and he had Linda darling Hammond as head of his transition team, I thought, well, this can only result in a good appointment. Because, you know, Obama's humanistic person cares about the quality of life, thoughtful and empathic, and all these things. They picked Arnie Duncan, it's hard to say whether he or DeVosst is the worst Secretary of Education we've had. He was the worst in terms of this daily pressure to produce on tests. You know, kindergarteners taking college and career readiness test. I mean, give me a break. I didn't decide to teach until I was out of college. I don't know what my kindergarten assessment would have shown. Maybe it would have been, unless there was a career in going down to the creek and chasing frogs, because I mean, that's about all I, that was my whole life. But, and then DeVoss, her whole thing was trying to ruin public education by investing all the money in privates. Two terrible secretaries, in very different ways. So I think that these people do turn out to be consequential. And you know, when I look at Betsy DeVoss and think, one time, at a time when what we really need was for that education budget to be put into buses going and bringing internet to communities. So the kids don't have to drive to McDonald's and try to do homework off of a telephone by leeching off of their Wi Fi. There still is a huge infrastructure gap that the Secretary of Education should have recognized during the COVID shutdown, and done something about, to me that's much more important than standardized testing, or, or giving all the money to private schools, undermining public education, there was a real pragmatic need for things to be practical, concrete things to be done to get us through 2020. And they weren't none of them were done. Right? Because that's what do you have? How can you not zoom them if you can't get online? Right? And if you know, teachers, you know, that seems like half their day was just spent trying to get kids successfully to log in. And so what's the secretary doing, going, going and talking to other billionaires about, you know, the need to cut their budgets even more? So I think that what, I pay attention to these things, I pay attention to who's appointing whom, for what to what ends because it does end up mattering, it's those are just empty seats anymore. Those are now positions of authority with money behind them. That could be invested. Well, I mean, anybody who thinks that we don't need a better infrastructure right now, for schools to operate is crazy. We did a study. Lindy Johnson, was one of my graduate students. And I was a research assistant on a project in a rural school about an hour from here. And it was on it was a digital writing, intervention, writing 2.0 or something like that, that a summer program, the teachers were really stoked all these possibilities for using digital tools and for writing instruction, they went back in the fall. And the state had gone to online testing that occupied bandwidth almost all the time, to the point where nothing we did was possible. So why is the secretary of and that was before COVID. That's the sort of thing that just needs to be done, and that you can commit education dollars to make education more responsive to the times. So I guess, you know, this is something I used to just ignore all that national policy stuff. I there's just a bunch of people far removed from schools arguing about things, but it turns out, they do matter. And I think teachers should pay attention to it and lobby for and support people who will, who understand teaching. And I sure hope Biden is right, or follow through on his promise to put an educator in charge of education, or any document, I think, was a superintendent Chicago schools but had never been a teacher. And he was not a very good superintendent. And then he became a lousy really destructive Secretary of Education, even though he's still going around, claiming that he was incredible. And he's still wrong. So I guess that's that's my parting message. I think if there's a form of activism, it's to make sure that the right people are making the right decisions to make schools work better in ways that teachers and kids believe in.
Lindsay Persohn:So maybe our days of just disassociating with bad policy and bad practice are over and just like celebrating diversity, maybe ought to be a first step. I think disassociating is also a first step here and really becoming more active in the the policies and decisions that end up impacting all of us.
Peter Smagorinsky:Yeah, and I know and I don't want to suggest that teachers have all this spare time, because I know they don't want they're not preparing for tests, calling parents and anyone from duty and a million other tasks right? There's no way I would suggest that they should just start doing this. But I do think that there are avenues of participation, that that may, that I hope become important enough to them to take action with because I think that they're their most important voices and all that, even though they're the most muted voices in the public. And they're not controlling the mute button. Somebody else's. Yep,
Lindsay Persohn:I would agree with that. Well, Peter, thank you so much for your time today. And thank you for your contributions to the field of education. And thank you for your message to teachers.
Peter Smagorinsky:Well, thanks so much. I've really enjoyed talking with you. And I wish anybody going into the business, happy career and I hope that the profession emerges from these times to be one that people want to do
Lindsay Persohn:teaching really is one of the most fulfilling and certainly the most important job in our democratic society. We just have to find a way to reclaim our individual thought and to like I said before, meet the needs of individual students. Right on Yep. Well, thank you again, Peter. Okay by Dr. Peter smagorinsky, is known for his work in the field of English literacy, education, Teacher Education and inclusive teaching practices. His research and teaching take a socio cultural approach to issues of literacy, education, literacy, teacher preparation, and related social concerns. He has published more than 100 articles and 70 book chapters, and authored or edited 30 books, including two in 2020. Learning to teach English and language arts a vygotskian perspective on beginning teachers pedagogical concept development, and developing culturally hidden historically sensitive teacher education, global lessons from a literacy education program, co edited with Yolanda Gale, and Patricia Rosa's. His interest in new neurodiversity has also produced two recent edited collections, creativity and community among Autism Spectrum youth, creating positive social uplifts through play and performance from Palgrave Macmillan, and dismantling the disabling environments of education, creating new cultures and context for accommodating difference, co edited with Joe Tobin and kangwon Lee. From 2012 to 2020. Peter served as the faculty advisor to the student led Journal of language and literacy education at University of Georgia. From 1996 to 2003. He co edited with Michael W. Smith, research in the teaching of English. He was recently awarded the 2020 Horace Mann league outstanding public educator award, and has notably won the 2018 International Federation for the teaching of English award, and the 2018 distinguished scholar recognition from the National Conference on research in language and literacy. Dr. smagorinsky is a distinguished research professor in the Department of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia, and a distinguished visiting scholar at the Universidad de Guadalajara and Halle sko, Mexico. For the good of all students, good research should inform good practice and vice versa. listeners are invited to respond to our guests. Learn more about our guests research, and suggest a topic for an upcoming episode through this podcast website at classroom caffeine.com. If you've learned something today, or just enjoyed listening, please subscribe to this podcast. I raised my mug to you teachers. Thanks for joining me