my initial thoughts and feelings about the STEM Solutions conference were very negative. it was unlike any other education conference i'd been to before, and not in an overwhelmingly good way.
it seemed a giant circle-jerk of classic private sector paternalism--coming into the education sector behaving as if they are the great white hope who will save education ... when in reality, their words and framing betrayed that they knew little about how the education community functions or what we believe and hold dear. i mean, c'mon guys. "STEM Solutions"? that's a pretty ballsy (and if i may expand the metaphor) dickish name for a conference about education when you're a media corporation.
but before i get bogged down in the negatives again, i need to get to the point of this post ... that i did walk away having learned a thing or two in this conference. submitted for your approval:
#1. in education, we don't self-promote enough. maybe it's because we largely view ourselves as public servants. maybe it's because we're not used to having to "sell" what we do to other people in order to attract funding and keep our institutions from shutting down. maybe it's simply because as teachers and educators, we've just never worked in organizations with PR or advertising.
i'm not exactly sure they "why" of this situations, but it certainly exists. the result is that we allow others to frame what education in the US looks like. we allow "school report cards" and NAEP scores and outside groups like US news and world report to tell the culture at large what is happening in education.
we need to change this. we need to educate ourselves about PR. we need to write a line into our grant budgets for producing a 30 second video of what the project does and produces. we need to initiate relationships with journalists and pitch them stories and become their sources. (as a side note, the one session i sat in on that was IMMENSELY helpful was on how to get your projects covered by media.)
#2. private corporations who invest in education really like the common core. i was a little surprised by this, because i've sat in my fair share of conference presentations whose subtext is critical of the common core. but not so at the STEM Solutions conference. i'm not sure why this is. it may be because the private sector felt like they were invited in to comment on what "career ready" meant? i honestly wonder if it's also because the private sector largely misunderstand what the standards are or conflate them with curriculum or assessment. anyway, as a supporter of the common core, i was happy to see this.
#3. we who believe strongly in public education need to find better ways to enter the conversation, to speak up, to not let money, power, or influence keep us quiet. too often those of us who believe so strongly in public education are "just" teachers. by this i mean, teachers lack those three attributes: they make very little money, they wield very little power (just look at states like WI or OH to see evidence of this), and individually they have small circles of influence.
in the past, i've been undecided about teachers unions. i grew up and entered teaching in new york, where NYSUT is a very strong teachers' union. but i also grew up in a home and a town where conservative politics and small businesses were celebrated. i learned to think that teachers' unions were a good thing, but that they often were too politically focused, becoming too much a lobbying entity, and not locally-focused enough.
now that i work in teacher professional development, and i watch the way politics and partisan wheeling and dealing affect teachers' daily lives, i no longer can fault teachers' unions for being politically active. since becoming a teacher, we've seen Race to the Top (which ushered in the end of tenure and the age of "accountability" based on test scores), as well as the slashing of funding for schools, and the rewriting of teachers' jobs through the adoption of the common core. teachers have NO recourse, NO voice, save for the teachers' unions. and it seems the unions aren't enough.
i say all this because the voice of the teacher has been lost in this whole school reform movement. they've spoken for her, or cherry-picked the spokes people who agreed with the agenda they were pushing. it's too easy for a bill gates to jump into the conversation and because we know who he is, we all listen, regardless of his lack of experience in education. but if shonda jones speaks up? who is she? money and power become influence where experience and expertise should be. if we don't have unions for teachers, we don't have an organization to represent teachers in these larger debates. education will not survive without teachers or unions to represent them.
i came away from the STEM Solutions conference demoralized, but with a lesson learned. they're right: we educators, as a community, as a field, need to be growing and changing. but the ways we need to grow and change are not the ways the private sector is indicating, pushing, and cajoling. we need to grow and change to be better organized, better at steering the public discourse, better at educating the public on what actually works in education.
that's the message i took back to my boss and will take back to our staff meetings: who on our team is going to spearhead PR? who is going to help us frame and lead this public discussion?
this post was the second in a series of posts on this conference. find the others here.
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