When, and where, should we enforce hierarchies in schools?
The disparity in schools' approaches to hierarchy reveals an ugly disparity in the power we invest and train in our students.
A friend and colleague sat with me in the cafeteria yesterday morning. We both had the first period free, because of a scheduling anomaly, and devoted our freshly caffeinated morning energy to conversation about a range of topics. One of them picked up a thread from last week’s newsletter, about the value of hierarchy in education. We landed on the idea, ultimately, that the difference between schools’ values about hierarchical and behavioral respect is an avenue to both reify and extend social stratification.
A few important caveats before I open up this position - one that has crystallized for me recently, but is also incomplete and under development. The first is the limitations of my own experience: the only teaching jobs that I’ve held for a full school year have occupied on extreme end of this spectrum, the one that takes a generally loose approach to hierarchy. The schools at which I’ve taught have also been extremely wealthy and largely catered to children grown up with great wealth; this fact central to my argument. The nature of my experience means that I’m hoping to open up this question, but I’m incapable of answering it myself. The other caveat to name is that the nature of my job requires me to stay vague when discussing my own experience; I won’t be speaking about my current school or any other schools I’ve worked at in specific detail. This has nothing to do with the argument, but everything to do with preserving my career.
Let’s start with what I (and my colleague) know best: schools that train students to perceive hierarchies as suggestions. Current and recent students of independent schools would, I imagine, vehemently deny this claim, but it’s justified. First, and most essentially, I consider classroom approaches: in classrooms at each of the schools I’ve worked at, student voice and opinion is a central consideration for both curriculum design and classroom design (the success of that consideration varies, of course, but culturally it is the center of pedagogical conversations). The independent school classroom fosters an environment in which disagreeing with one’s teachers, identifying holes in their ideas, or teaching them new information is not only commonplace but also generally encouraged, to the point where teachers arriving from new environments who don’t foster that atmosphere are often required to attend professional development meetings that will shift their styles accordingly. Most independent schools want students to have a voice in curriculum and its delivery, requiring teachers to collect feedback surveys several times each year to help them adjust to students’ responses. Students are taught that they are partners in education, and teachers put in significant legwork to foster relationships in which students will engage with them as much as equals as they can with someone who assesses their work in the course. Beyond the classroom, and especially at elite boarding schools, students interact with teachers on a profoundly personal level, orbiting in the same spaces and sharing the intimate details of, opinions about, and grievances toward their lives. Teachers are encouraged to build such relationships in order to foster an environment in which students feel they’re cared for, listened to, and valued for more than just their academic prowess. In turn, a student can see and imagine herself as a person with authority, and she can practice the skills to take on that authority effectively as her brain develops and encodes those skills into habit.
In many ways, this is ideally responsive pedagogy. Research informs trends toward student-centered classrooms, inquiry-based education, and the treatment of teenagers, specifically, as agents and actors in designing their own courses of study. Past generations of students wish they’d had such a chance in school, and that sense of agency is the reason that many parents pay an amount approaching a teacher’s yearly salary to send their child to such a school. There’s a hidden curriculum when your school puts lipservice to and moves, repeatedly, toward such student agency: in schools that can center student voice, students receive the message that they can and should approach and shatter hierarchies of influence and power, equipping them to replicate that action after they graduate.
It’s much easier to center student voice and to foster close, and close to peer-to-peer relationships, between teachers and students in smaller classrooms and schools. Smaller class sizes come with wealthier schools; such a connection to teachers requires that teachers have time to interact with students closely enough for those students to feel that their opinions and thoughts matter. If we really wanted all students to gain these skills, and really believed that they represent best practices in education, then the critical priority for education in the United States would be to hire and compensate far more teachers in any given school. Instead, we tend to focus on the heroism of teachers who, despite their challenges, still create belonging for their students. Lionizing a few teachers who accomplish what is nearly impossible - successful relationships with hundreds of students at a time - both backhandedly acknowledges the root of the problem and avoids facing it by suggesting that “all teachers should be this way.” The correct answer is: education shouldn’t be this way.
The argument I just made, though, relies upon the assumption that flattened hierarchies between teachers and students are healthy and productive. I believe that they are, though I’m open to reforming this idea. Many booming charter school networks rely on strict discipline and behavioral systems, as do many public school systems, especially those that are understaffed (my definition of understaffed, in this case, would be any school that regularly has to place forty or more students under the leadership of one teacher). My general perception is that a strict behavioral system, especially one that ritualizes uniformity (e.g. disallowing colorful hair accessories, punishing students who cannot stand in lines, etc.) can be very successful to guide students’ energies and help them to achieve success on mastery, state-level exams. Friendships and relationships with many teachers who have fostered outstanding relationships with students within these systems tell me that disciplinary structure does not, at all, preclude students’ sense that they are cared for and valued. What I’m concerned with here is not an argument about student learning or success, because I know that the limitations of my experience give me no authority in the subject. What I want to focus on is the hidden curriculum that comes with detailed rules of uniformity and discipline: in schools that function with structures to enhance uniformity and collective behavior, students receive a message that they can and should represent themselves only after they’ve submitted their own desires, opinions, and instincts to the demands of those in power.
Compare, then, the two hidden curricula:
In schools that can center student voice, students receive the message that they can and should approach and shatter hierarchies of influence and power, equipping them to replicate that action after they graduate.
in schools that function with structures to enhance uniformity and collective behavior, students receive a message that they can and should represent themselves only after they’ve submitted their own desires, opinions, and instincts to the demands of those in power.
What matters most, to me, is the compounding reality that schools (independent and public) with the first hidden curriculum are mostly attended by children who come from wealthy and powerful backgrounds who are mostly white, where schools (with few exceptions, public or charter) with the second hidden curriculum are attended by mostly middle-class and poor students, often students who are not white, and whose families do not occupy positions of power. As schools with the first hidden curriculum stress student voice and more and more, loosening disciplinary practices year by year in pursuit of restorative justice, schools with the second hidden curriculum seem to move in the opposite direction. Higher test scores are touted as the great equalizer, and schools that achieve them through any means treated as the greatest avenue to equity in education. But, my colleague and I thought yesterday, doesn’t this disparity in hidden curriculum matter too? Maybe, we realized, what’s touted as our best avenue toward educational equity is actually what’s driving and perpetuating class disparity the most.
American culture tends to value the bold: those who can question, speak with confidence, interrupt, disrupt, and innovate. To do so effectively, one needs practice and training. If the most privilege students gain this training, and the least privileged are denied it, who’s really gaining access to lasting success? It’s undeniable that higher test scores that come from high-discipline schools can help to diversify the backgrounds of students who arrive on college campuses. That achievement is one that should always be celebrated. But if we focus on it too hard on just getting kids to college, it becomes easy ignore the fact that the skills that often equate to leadership, executive suites, directorships, and fellowships are trained into our most privileged and trained out of our least privileged students from an early age. Preserving a flattened teacher-student hierarchy as the defining hallmark of the independent school or the wealthy public school ultimately serves an outcome of social reproduction. Encouraging the opposite in cost-free schools serves the same end.
The disparities in the way our schools work, in the long term, tells us more about our society even than disparities in test scores do. When we train students for leadership and subservience along the preexisting lines of their families’ social class during their most important developmental years, we defy claims that the United States operates as a meritocracy.
I’m presenting this position not with finality but still with urgency. It’s easy for me to imagine that the model of flattened hierarchies in which I’ve operated makes sense and optimally allows for students to gain critical skills, but that’s because I’ve seen it work well. I’ve also seen what happens within a school with loose and vague visions of student expectations when a student does transgress and betray community trust, and it is often messy and laden with bias in a way that is not scaleable to the extraordinary numbers of students who need educating. As with everything, there’s no easy answer. But beyond educators, as voters, I’m presenting a question here that I see as critical: what do we want our students to learn about their relationships to power? They will become us faster than we realize.