The New Normal . . . or a Better One?

For months now, we’ve been hearing about the “New normal.” A fiscal plague on both federal and state budgets. Everyone—from the Secretary of Education on down to local reporters covering the education beat (and others) in their beleaguered states and districts—has warned educators and the public of what will happen when the money gets really tight. Many of these speeches, op-eds, reports, and all manner of documents and media then go on to urge policymakers and school administrators to search for the opportunity in this new normal of limited resources.

As stimulus funding quickly runs out this year, and the new budget offers no relief, educators will need to do much more than maintain the status quo. As the subtitle of Secretary Duncan’s November 2010 “New Normal” speech suggests, schools now have to “do more with less.” The policy community has taken this trope and run with it, as has the mainstream media. While the general awareness and attention given to public education at this most critical time is a great step, something is missing. Teachers.

What with rampant teacher bashing (and general public worker bashing), sufficient attention has not been paid to how this new normal will look and feel for teachers. And I am not talking about pink slips, salaries, or the anathema known as pensions. I am talking about the new realities teachers will face in the classroom—larger class sizes, fewer teacher aides, not as many computers . . . Not to mention how teachers’ responsibilities will multiply even further when school social workers and counselors are let go. This is a short list of new realities for teachers and does address the elimination of innovative professional development and education technology initiatives. All this is to say, teaching, which was already hard, just got a lot harder.

No amount of policy discussion will take care of the fact that teachers, and by extension students, will bear the brunt of this new normal. Teachers need training and support to deal with new challenges. It wasn’t until I read a recent article in Education Week that it became apparent to me how little talk there has been about ways in which teacher education and school staffing models will need to respond to the simultaneous tightening of budgets and the raising of expectations for student learning outcomes. This is a time of upheaval for the teaching profession the article says, and colleges of education face the task of training teachers to deal with bigger class sizes with an ever-more diverse set of learners. In addition, less and less money is available for the observation and feedback for student teachers (and all teachers for that matter).

This Education Week article is important because it delves into an aspect of the new normal that hasn’t had much time in the spotlight. However, I would like to take the ideas further and argue that the new normal should get us thinking, with teachers leading the way, about how to reorganize the education workforce and the structure of school to create a better normal instead of being forced into a new normal that looks remarkably like the old minus a good deal of money.

The current way we “do” education—from the way teachers are recruited and trained to the way instruction is delivered by a stand-alone hero—is very clearly unsustainable. We cannot ignore this, and we certainly cannot continue to patch up the old system in an effort to keep it going as long as possible when we know students are not getting the education they deserve despite the best efforts of so many individual teachers.

The budget disasters have jarred policymakers and education leaders to think hard and fast about educational productivity. There is an unprecedented need to re-evaluate resources, and this could lead to opportunities for imaginative redesign of school. This is opportunity we’ve been told about, the glass half full side of the story of the fiscal debacles we’re witnessing—the need to change the “way we do school” because school as we know it can’t work anymore.