Small Town Accountability

One of my mother's nurses is a former student of mine who now works at the assisted living home where Mom now lives.

My car used to be serviced by a former student. When we eat out, we're often waited on by a former student. I taught side by side with many former students. Yesterday, the Board of Directors had a playdate with their friend, who is the son of a former student. I go to church with former students. I meet former students in the grocery store. 

My lawyer is the father of one of my former students. So was my previous doctor. So was the presiding judge in county court. We could discuss a whole category of families where I have taught multiple generations. The guy whose company painted our house is the father of former students, and is married to a former student.

I could go on and on. This is teaching in a small town. 

Not everyone cares for it. Some teachers deliberately live away from the community in which they teach, hoping for some privacy and a life that is separate from their teaching work. 

It's a level of transparency and accountability that no system cobbled together in a big urban school district will ever match. If parents (or other taxpayers) want to ask you, to your face, why you are doing X or what was the point of nY, they can do it. As a teacher, you have to live with the knowledge that you may have to really explain and justify yourself. And as your students grow up and graduate, many leave, but many stay, and even the ones who leave come home for family holidays. You get to have conversations with former students while they are in college, talking about what they did or did not find themselves prepared for. And the challenge becomes personal, too. If you were an unbearable jerk to your students-- well, you are going to be living around them literally for the rest of your life. Are you a highly effective educator? There are a whole lot of people who have an assessment, and they have shared it. A VAM score is a tiny fart in a big wind compared to, "My kids and my grand-kids had her for class, and she was absolutely [insert adjective here]."

Your students do not apear out of the mysterious mists, to return to some great unknown at the end of the day. They are real humans who live in a real neighborhood.

This can also help you do your job. When you know more about the family's challenges, you can better appreciate where your students are coming from and what they're carrying with them on the journey.

When folks talk about teachers not bringing their personal stuff into the classroom, small town teachers chuckle. You want LGBTQ persons to stay closeted and invisible? Lots of luck. In a small town, your students know where you go to church, who you marry--heck, who you date, where you go to eat or drink. Unless you never mention your politics to a soul, they know that, too. I've been writing a local newspaper column for almost 28 years. For many years, one of the social studies teachers in my school was also the mayor of the town. 

It's not always a great thing. Rumors can fly, and you may at times wish for the space and privacy to deal with your own problems and mistakes. And sometimes you have to watch some of the process play out in front of you. Here's a real conversation from my classroom many years ago:

Me: Expressing some admiration of a female artist

Student: Watch out. You'd better not let Mrs. Greene hear you talking like that.

Another student: He's divorced, you dummy.

Being closely tied to a small community can also be difficult if it's a community that does not collectively value education all that much ("My family has never needed all that book learning.") But at least you know what you are working with (or resigning from).

I have never been able to think of how to scale up the small town model of accountability, to create a system where teachers and administrators have to deal face to face, on a daily basis, with the taxpayers that they serve. I sure wish I could. It's more personal, more immediate, more effective than trying to collect a bunch of "data," mold it into some sort of consumable shape, and that get those data patties served to people who ought to care. 

You will find small town school systems out there trying hard to act like they're big city districts, working to be more impersonal and cold, on purpose. That seems backwards to me. But then, most of modern education reform is aimed directly at large city school systems and is poorly suited to small town education (but that's another post). 

I'd love to see a day when large districts try to learn from small ones. We could have an education conference, do meetings in local fire halls, house attendees at a couple of local hotels, eat at some local restaurants. I know a few people who could help set it up.