The Ethic of Care, Part 4: On the Measurement of Care (and the Messiness of Humanity)

Part 4 in a 4 part series based on, Drop Outs and Push Outs: Finding Hope at a School That Actualizes the Ethic of Care, by Wanda Cassidy and Anita Bates.

In light of our obsession for measuring, quantifying, holding accountable…, consider:

One time I had to send a senior boy home from school. (We’ll call him by the pseudonym Jeff here.) I didn’t think there was much of a choice. He had been struggling with addiction issues and was strung out, irritable, argumentative, disruptive to everybody. He wasn’t having a very good day. I called his dad to come and get him.

It was no surprise that Jeff blew up as I walked him out to his car. He escalated, called me every name you could think of. He screamed that I didn’t care, I didn’t understand, I was an idiot. It went on and on, and was interspersed with every word my mother told me never to say.

I stayed calm. I didn’t react in kind. I didn’t tell him what I was thinking at that time- that, of course, his habits created this situation, he had to take responsibility, he was sick, he needed to get better. I didn’t react to his pain by adding to it. I didn’t add to his shame. This wasn’t easy- I was hurt. I was angry. But when Jeff finally got in the car with his befuddled father, I was proud of myself. I’m no hero- I can write lots of stories that wouldn’t put me in a positive light, and this certainly wasn’t much, but in a unique way I had cared for him at time when, despite his behavior, he really needed it. And at least this one time, in this one instance, that care was displayed by a lack of response to his anger, frustration and deep pain. I refrained from piling on. I acted from this care, rather than reacting from my own vulnerable, hurt ego.

A half hour later, Jeff called me sobbing, ashamed and apologetic.

Working with a great staff, we finally were able to help his family get Jeff into a full-time drug rehabilitation program.

Before he left, Jeff stopped by my office to give me a ceramic work that he had made. He just said, “I want you to have this.” He didn’t try to voice anything more, or he couldn’t, it was kind of like a dog bringing its owner the gift of a dead bird on a porch, unspoken but so loyal. After all we had been through together, it meant a lot to me. He knew I cared.

I keep it on my book shelf still.

Another time a student left a note on my desk.

“Dear Bill,
Love Liz no matter how much she pisses you off.
Signed,
God”

Words to live by.

Hard to test for.

You see, we work in the real world, with real students. Things are complex, people can be messy.

The poet, William Stafford, wrote in A Ritual To Read To Each Other

“If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star….

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”

The darkness around us right now is indeed deep. As educators in the trenches, we must be awake and be clear. There is no doubt that there is a pattern that others are making in an attempt to prevail, a pattern of those with money and institutional power, but not the power of experience of genuine care that we attempt to enact daily.

Let’s stay awake.

The Ethic of Care, Part 3: Caring in the Face of the Corporate Reform Movement

This is part 3 in a 4 part series based on the study, Drop Outs and Push Outs: Finding Hope at a School That Actualizes the Ethic of Care, by Wanda Cassidy and Anita Bates.

With this understanding of care in mind (see The Ethic of Care, Part 2), I would like to address the question of how the ethic of care is impacted by the current testing culture, which supports the contrary ethic of achievement.

As the authors note, “It is individuals and not organizations that care.” A school doesn’t care for a child, but a teacher does. However, “…schools can and should be organized in ways that support he efforts of teachers and others to care for children and adolescents.” The unwritten corollary of this, is that schools can also be organized in ways that do not support the efforts of teachers to care for children and adolescents.

Any school cultural practice that asks us to view our students as anything other than fully human, that objectifies them in order meet some abstract need (e.g., sufficient test score data), works to undermine all of our humanity. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to always treat the other as fully human- it would be too much to ask a fallible humans to do so. However, we do need to recognize the ways that patterns of behavior create a culture that encourages behaviors of objectification, “I/It” relationships, as opposed to a culture of humanity, “I/Thou” relationships.

Cassidy and Bates write that their study, “…reinforces the notion espoused by Greene (1991) and by Noddings (1988) that care, if implemented, will break apart existing structures, policies, and practices and manifest itself in less hierarchical and more student-centered ways.”

The move towards standards and towards a test driven accountability system enacts a culture that moves in the opposite direction away from a “less hierarchical and more student centered” culture. Testing and standardization are dependent upon a scripted culture of compliance (most exemplified by the behaviorally driven KIPP charter school system) rather than a culture of student centered relationships. A data driven, objectifying culture that views students’ wholly individual, and thus unique, talents through a set of superficial, standard normed data destroys the whole idea of “student centered” and replaces it with the business outcome language of “achievement,” “results” and “outcomes” that may work when the goal is to produce profit, but not so much when the goal is to nurture children and adolescents. A culture that privileges achievement also undermines care because it values the illusion of the clean abstraction of data over the flesh and blood messiness of humanity. In No Excuses and the Culture of Shame, Paul Thomas writes:

“… the school perpetuates a culture in which only numbers and quantitative data matter. The focus on quantitative data within the school and the broader public discourse allows ‘no excuses’ advocates to mask their means by trying to justify their ends. To shift the gaze away from the children involved is to dehumanize the discussion and hide that those same children are being dehumanized in these schools.”

This “no excuses” approach that Paul Thomas critiques is dehumanizing exactly because it doesn’t consider what Thomas calls “the social context” of our humanity.

The question thus becomes, how can we act from an ethic of care in the face of current corporate reform movement? Where are the spaces that allow us to expand our humanity, and the humanity of the students we work with? This requires each of us to understand ourselves, our context, the culture we work within, and the students we work with. It requires, of each of us, a whole lot of critical thinking, and a whole lot of heart. And it requires that we recognize and support others we see doing this work.

Let’s get to it.

The Ethic of Care Part 4: On the Measurement of Care (and the Messiness of Humanity)

The Ethic of Care, Part 1: The Irony of the Achievement Ethic

A friend forwarded me this study, “Drop-Outs” and “Push Outs”: Finding Hope at a School That Actualizes the Ethic of Care, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It gets to the crux of so much of what is necessary in developing schools as humane institutions, and to the crux so much of what is happening in the ed reform movement that creates obstacles to that.

We tend to look at schools through the ethic of achievement. Students’ purpose is to achieve success, and this success is measured by grades and test scores. Part of the hidden curriculum in this view is that students are valued in accordance to their level of achievement. This valuing is not overt, but it is nonetheless real. And achievement becomes the means to garnering future economic success. This, again (see Schooling for Economics or Citizenship?), reinforces a privatized view of student as consumer, and sees the purpose of schools as being the production of economic achievers and consumers.

This study, on the other hand, shows the much deeper purpose of valuing all of our students through the ethic of care. Its authors, Wanda Cassidy and Anita Bates, write:

“The positive social, emotional, and academic development of children and adolescents depends, to a considerable degree, on whether the contexts in which they develop, including schools, are reliable sources of caring relationships (Noddings 1984, 1992,2002; Rauner 2000). Unfortunately, in today’s schools, caring is rarely placed at the center of policies and practices (Noddings 1005, 2002). Instead, educators are under pressure to increase students’ academic performance, as measured by high stakes standardized tests (Kohn 2000). Finding spaces for caring is becoming increasingly difficult as administrators, teachers, and students are pushed toward preordained goals set by distant bureaucrats.

Noddings (1984, 1992, 2002) claims that the need for care is universal and that young people suffer when schools become less caring places. Those most severely affected are those who can least afford to be in an uncaring environment, that is, students whose social background and academic history put them at risk for school failure, or dropping out of school prior to high school graduation (Croninger and Lee 2001; Deschenes et al. 2001; rossi and Stringfield 1995).” (Emphasis added)

There is so much that can be said about these two paragraphs.

For now, let me just point out the faulty logic of the current, achievement oriented corporate education reform movement in light of this study:

* The logic of corporate education reform says that student achievement is most important (and note that this achievement is invariably measured through the superficial ease of test score results)

* The logic of reform says by increasing student achievement, we benefit students

* However, those most likely to achieve are those least in need of a caring school environment (though all students benefit from an environment that places care at its center)

* Those most likely to be hurt by the ethic of achievement are those we all agree are most in need of support, and those who, ostensibly, this reform is designed to benefit

* Thus the logic of the current school reform movement is that it benefits those least in need of that benefit, and hurts most those that it is designed to help

Isn’t it ironic? It would be hilariously so if so many students and educators weren’t traumatized by it.

The Ethic of Care Part 2: The Enactment of Care