Marco Polo describes the rhetorical environment around edu-blogland discussions in which participants are sometimes framed as, among other things, victims and con men. He cautions:

I think everyone involved in this debate needs to be real careful. The issue of education is one that people feel passionately about, and have deep-rooted, what I can only call ideologies about this, making reasoned debate extremely difficult and rare.

Caution. Good advice. He left a comment here about differences between the norms for social and adversarial discourse. I appreciate his reminder that challenging conversations can be a catalyst to growth. Miguel wrote a couple of days ago about the rewards and “crappy side effects,” and emotional downside of blogging, recommending that we develop some cyberspace survival skills, which I hear as more good advice.

The public blogging environment is problematic for teachers - especially elementary teachers - because we work in a cloistered environment. There is a lot that we can’t ethically discuss. Our understanding of the problems in working with difficult children is shared knowledge that doesn’t - and shouldn’t - travel very far beyond the schoolhouse.

With that isolation comes a lack of opportunity to engage in honest give-and-take with people who might just happen to peek in on us, which rarely happens. Mostly we interact with children, parents, administrators, and other teachers. And teaching tales make lousy party talk. Historically, we haven’t spent a lot of time justifying our practices to people outside the profession - or even professionally with each other. Blogging about The Work represents a new professional challenge for some of us.

Going online to write about teaching is the first experience I’ve had making public statements about my work. A friend of mine, a physicist, once told me that he was thinking about becoming a schoolteacher. I told him that he should think about how it would feel to work in a place where everyone knows your job as well as you do, because everyone has been to school. He decided to remain a scientist. That said, the feedback I get from blogging is a good antidote to intellectual laziness, and I’m sure it’s helping me keep my head in the game during this latter part of my career.

There’s a new blog called Bridging Differences, hosted at Education Week, in which Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier are debating education policy. This is interesting because they explain in their introductions that their discussion is a public extension of a long term collegial conversation they’ve been having. I’m looking forward to following it. Deborah Meier acknowledges that she opened a can of worms with the statement:

All this leads to my current worry: the threatened future of public education itself. I worry also about the ties that bind my colleagues together through their unions. These two powerful common concerns connect Diane’s work and my own. That we still disagree on so many other matters fascinates me; hopefully it will interest others as well.

Ravitch, in a bid to find common ground with Meier, mentioned her unease with the desire by some to privatize public education, which is turning many schools into “test-prep factories.” Meier responded by contesting “scientific” claims about methodology:

Despite widespread rhetoric requiring teachers to only use Federally approved “scientifically proven” reforms in their classroom, no one requires the Big (mostly) Boys from trying out their unproven ideas on other people’s children. Of course, I believe that “scientifically proven” methods of teaching is also one of those unproven ideas—a claim you and I might disagree about?

I’m interested in this discussion. I’m also reading other pieces available online by Ravitch and Meier to help me better understand their positions. As I see it, claims about evidence-based instruction (and whose and which evidence will count) is one of the core issues in education these days.