We get a newsletter every few months from our state Professional Teaching and Practices Commission (PTPC). Over the years I’ve mostly thrown them away with barely a glance, but the last two have been interesting because they’ve included lengthy excerpts from a book called The Ethical Teacher. The Spring 2007 newsletter arrived today, and I want to snag a little something from it to file away here in Borderland before I lose it in my classroom, a bottomless chasm for official communiqués on salmon-colored paper.

This installment is called Ethical Knowledge Defined:

Ethical knowledge is the awareness and recognition on the part of educators of their role as moral agents in their capacity as professionals. This awareness pertains to how they see core ethical principles - such as honesty, fairness/justice, kindness, and respect for others - as embedded in their day-to-day practices and as influencing their formal and informal interactions with students and others. Ethical knowledge enables educators to make the conceptual and practical links between what they know to be good more generally in life and the choices and actions they take in the classroom or elsewhere on behalf of students.
-Elizabeth Campbell

Campbell notes that some educators (I’d say, some people) have a heightened awareness of the moral significance of their moment to moment decision making. She proposes that this awareness be made more visible to the professional community so that it might become the foundation for a principal-based professionalism in teaching.

The PTPC is an ethical governing body which defines and enforces ethical standards, which most of us recognize as ideals for professional conduct. This quote from The Ethical Teacher caused me to think about “the conceptual and practical links” between what I know to be good in life and what I do on behalf of students, and I read it as a manifesto for teacher accountability to a higher moral authority than base measures of testing and AYP. It’s important to remember that ethical knowledge is not only applied by the teacher in practice, it is also communicated to students as a part of their character development.

Measuring teacher performance on the basis of achievement test scores alone ignores the fundamental moral considerations that are part and parcel of teaching young people. When I think about issues of political corruption and official incompetence in educational policy making, I see principle-based practice as a challenge to the emphasis on scientifically-based methods. The two standards aren’t necessarily antithetical to each other. But because ethics are not scientifically measurable, we have to acknowledge their importance in educational processes, and recognize that there are important dimensions to teaching practice that remain outside the scientific model of effectiveness.

However, when we look at these guys, explaining the Reading First mess, we see that maybe someone besides political cronies should be defining the terms for effective practice.

Read Mike Klonsky’s Small Talk, in which he points out that even as they are being investigated for marketing their own reading programs to schools, the experts are claiming that their programs are a success - the definition of conflict of interest.

It looks like the reform community needs a a heightened awareness of the moral significance of their moment to moment decision making.