9: Canaries in the Mine

The juxtaposition of Ivan’s deep-seated cynicism and Isabel’s fragile hope speaks to the tension between the agency of students and teachers and the multitude of structural constraints under which they toil. Ivan’s story and his larger critique of schooling—“It’s a system, it’s rigid!”—reflect a keenly intuitive understanding of structural constraints. Isabel’s larger story is shaped as strongly by these constraints, but her joy-filled memories of teachers like Mr. B. speak also to the power of human agency, kindness, and care in schools.

I’ve spent nearly my whole life in public schools, and I’ve been a teacher, observer, and scholar of public education for over twenty-five years. When I began this project, I already possessed a big-picture understanding of the agency-structure tension in schooling. I was well versed in the competing philosophical aims and cultural contradictions that have shaped U.S. public schooling since Thomas Jefferson first proposed such a system in 1778. I had a sociologist’s understanding of the stubborn workings of bureaucracies. I could juxtapose the language of standards, efficiency, competition, and accountability to the—in my view—far more compelling language of creativity, dialogue, collaboration, and growth that inspires teachers and students to work together with shared purpose. Each language expresses a different common sense, and I could identify the underlying assumptions about the purposes of schooling in both.