Whom Do We Trust

One of the unending underlying challenges in education is that parents and taxpayers have to trust somebody.

Back In The Day, the default was to trust teachers and administrators. That would be back when the default was to trust authority figures as a whole-- but that pendulum has swung far in the other direction (on behalf of all the Boomers, let me just say, "You're welcome"). Heck, even within the more recent past of my own career, a shift has been visible. In my first job (1979-1980) parent-teacher-student conferences often involved a parent absolutely taking my side, even though they didn't know me from a hole in the ground.

The erosion of trust has been widespread and has resulted from a variety of causes, and many of them have been--and continue to be--legit. Some of it is not an actual erosion at all, but simply finally hearing the voices of people who have never had a reason to trust authority. And some of it is the result of baloney, the kind of thing we see when someone explains that a youtube video deserves far more trust than an actual trained medical doctor. And some of it is the result of deliberate attempts to break down trust.

Education has been hit by a trust problem that really kicked off in 1983 with A Nation At Risk, a work which had as its singular purpose to deliver the message that public education, and the people who work in it, cannot be trusted. "Those folks," it said none-too-subtly, "are no more trustworthy than a hostile foreign power."

For thirty-six years, that drumbeat continued. Teach for America launched with the premise that teachers and the programs that produce them cannot be trusted. Common Core was sold as an antidote to untrustworthy teachers who just randomly pulled up standards for their classes higgledy piggledy. Reformsters boosted High Stakes Testing with the message that parents couldn't trust teachers to accurately report student achievement.  Charter advocates sold their business with the idea that public schools couldn't be trusted with anyone's children. And ed tech continues the pitch by suggesting that teachers can't be trusted to do their jobs.

Though some folks have turned down the volume a bit, one continuing thread running through all of modern ed reform is the notion that public schools and the people who work there simply can't be trusted.

It's not like some schools, administrations, and teachers haven't broken trust with parents and their community. Institutional racism, institutional inertia, just plain bad choices--public schools and the people who work there are capable of all of it. "Look, just trust me to do  my job," doesn't really cut it any more.

And yet, we have to trust somebody.

Reformy organizations like TFA ask us to trust their training, their process, their claim to really know what they're doing. Common Core asked us to trust the people who wrote and pushed the standards. Charter operators ask us to trust their intent and their methods. Rich education dilettantes ask us to trust them to run the whole edubiz.

Some reformy tools are sold as some sort of objective view. Your teacher's test might be biased, so that's why we need a standardized test to tell us the truth. The computer delivering the lesson won't be biased in any way, because, you know, computer magic.

But that's a lie and an illusion. High stakes testing, particularly in states like PA where teachers aren't allowed to see the test items and students must pledge  to keep them secret, asks us to trust the test manufacturers. Every kind of computer based lesson delivery system asks us to trust the people who wrote the software. And in these cases, parents and taxpayers are being asked to trust someone who is far away, separated from the students in both space and time. How many Black and Brown test manufacturers do you suppose the company employs?

In short, I don't care how scientific or evidence-based or expert-created or whatever your educational thing is-- you still have to trust somebody. The dream may be a system that depends on completely scientific objective elements, but that's simply never going to happen. It may look like systems and computers  and the like dispense with those untrustworthy carbon-based life forms, but behind every system, behind every piece of software, lurks a live human being who is no more or less trustworthy than any of the rest of us.

Trusting a whole bunch of teachers who each bring individual issues and perceptions to the table may well seem foolish. Trusting folks who support an institution that has consistently treated you and others like you badly is a bridge too far for most normal humans.

But you have to trust somebody.

You have to trust a politician who swears they're going to wrote policy that will make it better, and then you have to trust the people who will implement it. You have to trust the standardized test makers or the standards writers or the software engineers. But one problem with so many of these folk is that they aren't here to answer your questions or complaints.

You have to trust somebody.

It's almost impossible to operate a system in which the default assumption is that your front line workers can't be trusted. To effectively monitor and micro-manage all those untrustworthy teachers would require an enormous amount of humanpower and technology--a huge expense that requires you to somehow come up with a 100% trustworthy workforce for the task (otherwise, who watches the watchmen?). And while you'll effectively hamstring the people who could have been trusted, the less trustworthy folks will still find a way to gum up the works.

Plus, a school that soaks its employees in a constant soup of distrust cannot avoid slopping that soup all over the students. How effectively can students be taught in an atmosphere of distrust. What lessons do they learn in an institution where everyone is considered untrustworthy until proven otherwise? What kind of human beings does such a school produce?

You have to trust somebody.

We talk about earning trust, but I'm more inclined to think in terms of growing it. It does have to be nurtured and fed and watered and cared for and if you screw up you can kill it. But like any other plant, you can't grow it from nothing. There has to be a seed.

I have to plant that seed and start to trust someone, so I pick the teachers and other educators in the school. Not blind trust. Not I-will-ignore-the-evidence-of-my-eyes-if-you-say-to trust. There has to be an accountability piece. There also has to be a piece that allows me to speak up when I believe something is wrong. There have to be some checks and balances in the system (starting with this question-- if you have a bunch of untrustworthy employees, who hired them, and why?) There has to be a means for dealing with the misplaced, the racist, the misguided.

But teachers have chosen to be there. They have chosen to get (and continue) training. They have chosen to work through all the daily grinds and nuisances of this particular career. They are there in the trenches, and they have spent the most time right at that magical spot where learning and young human minds meet. Those factors alone mean that teachers deserve, at least provisionally, our trust.

We have to trust someone, and lord knows, sometimes it's hard to find people that can live up to that trust anywhere. Trusting educators, not blindly, but with eyes wide open and paying attention, because trust can never be a substitute for paying attention-- well, trust is scary. And it is a the worst possible way to operate an educational system. The only thing worse than that is every other possible system.