By Tom White

On the way to the grocery store last Saturday I listened to a wonderful essay called “The
Presumption of Decency.” The essential message was that we should presume
the best in people, even if we disagree with their views, and it was clearly
directed at the current presidential campaign. Then on Sunday I read a
column by Eugene Robinson in which he calls for an end to rampant teacher
bashing, specifically to the penchant education reformers seem to have for
blaming teacher unions for the dismal quality of education in our nation’s
poorest neighborhoods.

I couldn’t help but draw a connection between the two and
ask the dreamy question, “What if?” What if both sides of the education-reform
debate stopped fighting and started working together? (And if you don’t think
these two sides are actually fighting each other, it’s time to come down from
Candyland and read Class
Warfare by Steven Brill and The
Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch.)

What if teachers – and their unions – acknowledged the
obvious and came to terms with the fact that there are stark differences in the
quality of teachers? And what if our unions recognized the fact that contracts
designed to protect their members from arbitrary and capricious principals have
the unintended consequence of preventing decent principals from dismissing
incompetent teachers? What if they realized that not all teachers deserve the
same level of job security? Better yet, what if our unions were able to harness
the expertise of our best teachers and use it to help our struggling teachers?

On the other hand, what if education reformers realized that
none of their ideas will come to ultimate fruition without the support of the
nation’s teachers? And what if this realization caused them to sigh and then
decide to actually listen to the nation’s teachers when they explain to the
reformers why certain reforms – ideas borrowed from the private sector – just
won’t work in public education? What if these reformers accepted the fact that
simply telling teachers to “get better or get fired” won’t do any good when the
vast majority of those teachers are already doing everything they know how to
do in order to help their students learn?

In other words, what if both sides realized that they don’t
have all the answers? What if each side presumed the decency of the other side?
What would that look like?

I’ll tell you what it would look like, because I’ve seen it.
In Washington State, the Legislature recently passed an education reform bill
that revamped teacher evaluation. The Office of the Superintendent of Public
Instruction (OSPI), which was charging with actually rolling out the plan, then
did something spectacularly smart: they began developing training activities
for each of the evaluated criteria.

And they started by looking at the most obvious source: The
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, an institution that owes no
small debt, not only to its conception, but to its continued life, to the
teachers unions. NBPTS recently decided to use their vast vault of videos – the
actual clips submitted by Certified Teachers as part of their portfolios – for
teacher training. Washington’s OSPI partnered with the Center for Strengthening
the Teacher Profession (CSTP; the organization which also produces this blog)
and the National Board to begin producing training modules, or protocols, to
support teachers in certain aspects of the new evaluation system. There’s
nothing magical about these training modules; teachers simply watch good
teachers in action and discuss the implications in their own settings, as it
pertains to a specified aspect of the teacher evaluation system.

There’s nothing magical at all, except when you realize that
it may just be the beginning of a new paradigm in education: the end of the
polarization between hard-core reformists and hard-core unionists, and the
beginning of a polarization between people who want to argue about education
and people who just want to educate.