The Denial of Science: Be Very Afraid

About ten days ago, I read an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled Why Republicans Keep Telling Everyone They’re Not Scientists. Here

As I do in the autumn of every year, I had a flu shot a few weeks ago. When a couple I know returned from South Africa in early September, I did not fear catching Ebola from them. When a friend was able to start a new therapy for her advanced breast cancer in late October, I felt happy that she qualified for clinical trials.

Some of us are old enough to remember how our relieved parents took time off work one summer day in 1954 to take us to queue up in a school cafeteria for our first polio shot. Haven’t most of us used our smartphones in the past 24 hours to send or receive a text, talk to someone in another part of the country, check email, or use a net-based app?

Do we have to be scientists to benefit a thousand ways from science every day, to make informed science-based decisions? Do we need to be scientists to take flu or polio shots, to use our mobile phones, to be alert to the predicted tracks of dangerous storm systems, to seek out the best treatments for our cancers, to understand how unlikely it would be to contract Ebola from someone who’d been thousands of miles from any reported cases?

I won’t accept that science is optional, a matter of opinion, I'll-take-my-flu-shot-and-reject-evolution-of-species (without which there could be no flu shots). As an educator, I completely reject the ignorance that drives school districts to cower before parents who demand that the science curriculum be sliced and diced or confused with ignorant and superstitious counter-possibilities.

My last few years as a principal were enlivened by our school district’s DESERT Project. A handful of intrepid science-loving educators landed over $5 million to bring to our teachers and kids engaged, hands-on, inquiry-based, thought-provoking REAL science. Beginning in kindergarten, kids would do science and learn to observe systematically. They’d think and talk about what they were seeing, smelling, touching, hearing, then write and draw in science notebooks, and become immersed in authentic scientific method. They would not just read about science in pre-digested and boring paragraphs as I did through my own years in elementary school.

But then I retired and the Twenty-First Century arrived, accelerating the ascendancy of nonsense over science. I didn’t notice how extreme this had become until a 2013 trip to Australia and New Zealand, where the natural world was persistently described and discussed by scientists, science teachers, and zoo managers without apology or pulled-punches. No, “In my opinion,” or "I hope I'm not offending anyone" buffering, but “this is how it is.” This is the history of volcanic eruption and earthquakes here, this is the evolutionary biology of this animal, this is why our planet is experiencing increasing weather extremes.

Be afraid of how American schools are backing away from science and informed interpretation of natural phenomena. Speak up about anti-science and pseudo-science just as you would about racism.

Sacrifice: The Unfortunate Persistence of Monastic Tradition in Public Education

During my first year as principal, 1986-87, an unmarried teacher I’ll call Morgan came to my office and told me, “I’m pregnant. On purpose. I’m due in April. I’m not getting married.”

When this happened in the 1980s, public schools were still sorting out the collision between individual employee rights and traditional social values. Morgan gave birth to her child less than two decades after Tucson began allowing married teachers to stay in their classrooms once the pregnancy was obvious.

Before public schools existed, teachers often came from monasteries and convents, where they were bound by vows of poverty and chastity. As schools have developed into secular institutions and the profession has overflowed the bounds of the religious orders, I wonder if an expectation of personal sacrifice continues to undermine not only teachers' salaries but also their status as professionals.

 Once I became a principal, I found that it was part of my job to help maintain the illusion of the chaste and bland teacher. Even as teacher celibacy stereotypes have faded, we as a nation may not have stopped regarding the call to teaching as an implicit commitment to living in worthy poverty, some willingness to occupy a subordinate and humble role.

Ironically, today’s teachers must do far more parenting in their classrooms than previous generations of educators—yet another aspect of the work inside the sacrifice paradigm but outside the job description. Imagine an accountant or a book editor or an architect, both high-intensity professionals, having to work with all their clients together in one room, six hours at a stretch, five days a week. 

Does the tradition of teacher as sacrificial instrument infect public policy and educational decision-making in America? In all the discussion of teacher compensation, does the abstemious monk or the virtuous nun hover in the background, the images against which today’s teachers are judged? I’m not sure we are beyond that yet.

Another Scene from the Book: A Tuesday in March, 2001

I sit for a few seconds staring at my computer, watching my own personal mission statement march across the screen, hoping I can live up to it today.

Caring Profoundly, Enacting Community, Inspiring Inquiry, Illuminating Possibility.

Two summers ago, in 1999, I composed these phrases for my screensaver during a workshop on the topic of “visioning.” I don’t recall what motivated me to give up the four June days for this topic, but I knew I needed to re-focus after the Columbine killings. The workshop refreshed me for the final two years, reminding me why I had walked through the door marked Principal in the first place.

Much of the time, the stream of events, kids, and conversations just flows forward, finding its own channel. Today, riding that flow, I will make many more small choices than big decisions. Choices are the infinitesimal adjustments that come from the place where my individual disposition meets my life experiences. Fundamental to my doing of this job, these choices, these units of inclination, are the subatomic particles of daily decision making.

Decisions, the currency of school leadership, are more administrative than choices, more about the public yes/no, now/later, this/that. Choices are the corrections, amendments, right or left turns, and adjustments in vocal tone that I make in each of the thousand moments that make up a day. I wish I could say that I only make good choices. Like decisions, choices not only express ideals, knowledge, wisdom, and good intentions, but also reflect misunderstandings, blind spots, and prejudices.

Today, will I stonewall? Will I lie to anyone? Will I weasel to avoid doing something that I really don’t want to do? And today, will impatience trail off into anger, my own particular defense against the frustration that can come from never finishing anything, from encountering one more thing I am supposed to pretend is other than what it is? Maybe. 

How Does Life Become a Book?

One day in January of 2001, a friend of a friend passed my name along to an editor at USA Today. This editor asked me to write a one-thousand word Day in the Life piece to go along with a story they were going to publish about the work of school principals. Eager to expose the inner workings of a job that just kept on getting harder, I agreed.

Within a few weeks, I realized that a thousand words wouldn't even come close to showing what actually happened in a typical day, or even an easy day.That short a format wouldn't have allowed me to summarize or list the hundred conversations, the hundreds of people, the sounds, smells, mishaps, surprises, small and large victories, that never stop happening in a public elementary school. 

By the time I started writing what turned into my memoir Principal: A Personal History, I had put in fifteen years as leader of first one elementary school, and then another, in Tucson, my hometown. I had grown puzzled and frustrated by how much more difficult my job had gotten over that time. You might expect that it would be a simple matter of accumulating experience and then applying the wisdom gained as each new school year came around.

I believe that school leadership is crucial to the success of our democracy, and that if we don't get this sorted out pretty soon, our troubles will grow. My book, Principal, does not provide the answers, but provides for the first time in the current era an inside look at what happens in schools from the perspective of the school leader. The answers to the questions raised, I believe, need to come from informed conversation, one that I hope to start. 

In future posts, I'll include some excerpts, some thoughts about what's not in the book, the occasional rant or thoughtful reflection about current issues, and updates on the process and progress of publication.

Since this is my first experience blogging, I hope you will bear with me as I figure it all out!

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