This post is an essay by Larry Cuban about how educational policy is a mix of policy from above and the pedagogical orientations of individual teachers and the choices they make in the classroom. Here’s a link to the original.
Kindergarten Teachers as Policymakers
Larry Cuban
Watching a policy travel from the White House, a state capitol, or a big city school board to a kindergarten teacher in her classroom has been compared to metal links in a chain, a children’s game called Telephone, and pushing spaghetti. Classroom teachers at the end of the iron-forged links in a chain convey military images of privates saluting captains and duties getting snappily discharged. The telephone game suggests miscommunications that ends up in hilarious misinterpretations of what was intended by the original policy. Pushing strands of wet spaghetti suggests futility in getting a policy ever to be put into practice in classrooms. Which metaphor, then, best describes going from adopting a policy to putting it into practice?
The truth is that for each metaphor actual examples of policies do fit the image. Yet other instances of teachers implementing policies fail to fit. There are other metaphors that better match the wide variation among teachers when they put policies into practice–and variation is a stubborn fact of organizational life. One is the street-level bureaucrat.
Street-level bureaucrats are police officers who decide whether or not to give a traffic citation, social workers who determine what kind of help a client needs and where to find that help, emergency room nurses who decide which sick and injured need immediate attention and which ones can wait. I include teachers because they decide whether to stick with the lesson plan or diverge when an unexpected event occurs. They decide which student to call upon to answer a question.
All of these professionals work within large rule-driven organizations but interact with the public daily as they make on-the-spot decisions. Each of these professionals are obligated to follow organizational rules yet have discretion to make decisions. In effect, they reconcile the dilemma of how much obligation they have to the institution that pays their salary and how much autonomy they have in ignoring, amending, and following decisions handed down by superiors.
Consider kindergarten teachers. Most primary teachers have been trained to see young children holistically as growing human beings needing work, play, and nurturing as necessary ingredients to develop into educated and healthy youth. Teaching the whole child has been a guiding principle central to early childhood programs for nearly a century. Since the early-1980s, however, the standards-based curriculum, increased testing, and accountability policies have flowed downward pressing early childhood educators to make kindergartens into boot camps for 1st grade and preschool programs into learning the alphabet and counting numbers–according to critics (see here and here)
In the policy-to-practice metaphor of the linked chain, one would expect that most kindergarten teachers, feeling strong obligations to school superiors, would have altered their child-centered pedagogy and embraced the new policy by relying on direct instruction while completely abandoning learning centers, sand boxes, comfy reading corners, and free choice time.
For the metaphor of the telephone game, one would expect most kindergarten teachers to have received instructions on implementing standards-based and testing policies from top officials, district supervisors, and school principals. Those instructions and guidance on their journey to kindergarten teachers would have gotten increasingly distorted. These distortions would result in huge variation among kindergarten teachers in implementing these policies ranging from major shifts in pedagogy to minimal alterations in daily lessons to outright mistakes.
The metaphor of pushing wet spaghetti raises different expectations for kindergarten teachers. Because of the futility of the task, adopted policies meander in and out of schools occasionally entering classrooms. Here, kindergarten teachers are fully autonomous and once they close their doors, they do as they please.
None of these metaphors from complete military-like attention to rules to complete freedom to implement a policy capture most kindergarten teachers’ practice at a time when they must cope with dilemma-filled tensions arising from reconciling their obligations to implement state standards-based policies and their beliefs in child-centered practices. And here is where Lisa Goldstein’s research on four kindergarten teachers in two high performing urban schools within a Texas district comes into play.
Goldstein details these four teachers’ different actions in coping with state curriculum standards stressing academic preparation for first grade, annual tests that specifies what kindergarteners were to have learned, and their professional and personal beliefs about what five year-olds should be doing and learning.
What did she find out after observing and interviewing the teachers for two years?
“From Ann’s refusal to use the language arts workbooks to Liz’s holiday celebrations unit and from Jenny’s either/or literacy block to Frieda’s commitment to her students’ self-esteem, all of these teachers’ curricular and instructional decisions were actively shaped by personal understandings of the state standards and DAP ((Developmentally Appropriate Practices derived from the National Association of Early Childhood Education), informed by strategic knowledge and careful thought, and considered in relation to the needs of the particular children in the class and other contextual factors. Every policy decision was unique and deliberate and reflected attention to obligations, desire for autonomy, and the use of professional discretion”
These kindergarten teachers blended developmental practices they had done for years while attending to what their district and state standards required five year-olds to learn by the end of the year. They translated their beliefs in the whole child and many experiences with primary children into hybrid practices that mixed “developmentally appropriate” activities with direct instruction. In short, these four teachers in two schools made policy by creating mixes–they were street-level bureaucrats that hugged the middle.
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