In the sixth episode of Teacher Speech and the New Divide, we turn our attention to Guilford, Connecticut. Guilford is a small town with a big commitment to equity for their students, and serves as a microcosm for the debates surrounding schools in the US. Our host Justin Reich sits down with Amity Goss, Assistant Superintendent of Guilford Public Schools, to learn more about what’s happening in Guilford, how it impacts teachers, and the steps that the district is taking to support educators. And, Professor Meira Levinson, Founder of EdEthics, joins us to introduce educational ethics as a powerful tool and resource for having difficult conversations. Special thanks to our friends at Learning for Justice, and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for their collaboration on this work.
In the sixth episode of Teacher Speech and the New Divide, we turn our attention to Guilford, Connecticut. Guilford is a small town with a big commitment to equity for their students, and serves as a microcosm for the debates surrounding schools in the US. Our host Justin Reich sits down with Amity Goss, Assistant Superintendent of Guilford Public Schools, to learn more about what’s happening in Guilford, how it impacts teachers, and the steps that the district is taking to support educators. And, Professor Meira Levinson, Founder of EdEthics, joins us to introduce educational ethics as a powerful tool and resource for having difficult conversations.
Special thanks to our friends at Learning for Justice, and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for their collaboration on this work.
Resources and Links
Learn more about EdEthics
Take our course on supporting youth activism at www.youthinfront.org
Pre-Order Justin Reich’s new book Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools
Watch our documentary film We Have to Do Something Different
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Credits
Host Justin Reich
Produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley
Recorded and Mixed by Garrett Beazley
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Follow our host Justin Reich on Twitter
Amity Goss: If we don't engage in conversations that have opposing viewpoints, we've missed out on the opportunity to support the next generation of critical thinkers who can have appropriate conversations, not on social media, but in person. I worry that constantly taking this path of least resistance will create a situation where our children don't know how to do that. They don't know how to have a respectful disagreement with somebody and come out on the other side, not thinking the other person is evil, but just maybe disagreeing.
Justin Reich: From the MIT Studios of the Teaching Systems Lab, I'm Justin Reich, and this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching. Welcome to the sixth episode in our series on teacher speech and the new divide. If you're just jumping into this series now, be sure to go back and listen to our earlier episodes. We start by covering some of the legal history, the jurisprudence of teacher speech, teacher autonomy, the rights of school districts to control, the teacher speech that it employs. We talked to teachers at all levels in higher education, pre-service teachers, practicing teachers about the effects of new divisive concept laws, book bans, other kinds of challenges to free speech on teacher practice.
Today, we're headed to Guilford, Connecticut. Since 2021, Guilford schools have been subject to controversy surrounding their equity initiatives, been intense debate about whether critical race theory is being taught in Guilford's classrooms. These conversations have snowballed into challenges related to books, curriculum, teachers. In many ways, Guilford's a microcosm for the debates that are taking place in schools around the country. So, we invited Guilford's assistant superintendent, Amity Goss, into the studio to learn more about what's happening in Guilford, how it impacts teachers, and the steps that the district is taking to support educators.
We'll also talk with my dear colleague, Professor Meira Levinson about her work with Ed Ethics and their ongoing collaboration in Guilford. Meira is a co-instructor on our youth in front course with Learning for Justice, and she's been a big supporter and contributor to our work on teacher speech and the new divide. Let's dive into our conversation with Amity Goss. So, today, in the studio, we have Amity Goss. She's the assistant superintendent in Guilford, Connecticut. Amity has been in public education in Connecticut for 26 years, 15 of them as a building and district leader. Amity, thanks so much for joining us.
Amity Goss: Thank you for having me.
Justin Reich: Amity, describe Guilford, Connecticut for us. If we were to be walking around the town, what would it look like? What would it feel like? What's the heart of Guilford?
Amity Goss: Well, it's your quintessential New England town. It's what you imagine when you think about what a town in New England should look like. We're right on the Connecticut shoreline, so it's a beautiful place to be. We have a big town green and all these historic houses everywhere. It's just what you would imagine.
Justin Reich: What do you think makes Guilford an unlikely place, to be what the Connecticut Mirror has called an outpost in a culture war over the terms of America's racial reckoning and its place in public education?
Amity Goss: Oh, my goodness. Well, I think it's a little bit amusing that we're called that because I think we're doing a lot of the same things that are happening everywhere. I think our schools are not unlike any other public schools probably across the country, but certainly in Connecticut. I think that for some reason, our town has attracted some national attention, and I think that that may be where the Mirror is coming from.
Justin Reich: Guilford also, it's not a particularly purple town. It voted two to one for Biden in the last election.
Amity Goss: Yes, I think of it as a very liberal town, but I imagine that if I were a person who had an opposing political view, I might not feel like I belonged. I wonder if that's some of what's going on here.
Justin Reich: Yeah, I mean, I think as much as we talk about places as red places or blue places, there's this great line that California has more Republicans than Texas and Texas has more Democrats than New York and New York has more Republicans than Florida. I got some sense of this. I did some door knocking for a campaign in New Hampshire, where you knock on one door and it's for one party and then you don't knock on the next door because it's for the other party and then you knock on the next door for one party. We live right next to people who have very different political beliefs than us, and I'm sure Guilford is no different.
Amity Goss: Absolutely.
Justin Reich: So there was some controversy around critical race theory in your town. How did that start?
Amity Goss: Yes, actually, I just joined this district in January, but what I understand of the trajectory of our town is that in 2019, students brought forward a desire to change mascots, because our mascot was an inappropriate representation of an indigenous person. Kids said, "This doesn't feel right to us. We want to change our mascot." So that process became very political, very hotly debated, and very much part of the scene. Then that transitioned in 2020 into a focus on critical race theory. I believe that the district was accused of teaching critical race theory. That is not the case. Then it just evolved and developed from there.
Justin Reich: What's the team name now in Guilford?
Amity Goss: We are the Guilford Grizzlies at our high school. Actually, each of our schools has a different mascot, but our high school is the Guilford Grizzlies.
Justin Reich: In my hometown of Arlington, we're the Spy Ponders, which follows. Yeah, it's a very strange name. We have the Spy Pond in town, but I think part of it is the result of some name changes over time. We also have an indigenous logo that feels increasingly anachronistic.
Amity Goss: Yes.
Justin Reich: When you arrived at the job in January, what were your impressions of the situation? How did you get a sense of controversies, town relationships, how it was affecting your faculty that you were going to start working with?
Amity Goss: Right. Well, so I was attracted to Guilford because of this real sense of community. It really is an incredible place to be. The schools are amazing and we have excellent teachers, wonderful kids. Our community's very supportive, and it's this beautiful place when you get to know people and you have conversations day in and day out. But I recognized very quickly that teachers were shying away from taking on any hard conversation in spite of a statement by our Board of Education saying that we would tackle social justice and equity issues, saying that we would teach children how to think critically and have hard conversations. I found that that was very nerve wracking for teachers. They were very afraid to engage in those conversations, even though the board had put out a statement specifically requiring that they do so.
Justin Reich: Can you give a specific example of someone? You don't have to use the person's name, but just a conversation that you had with someone that made you go, "Oh, they're really being affected in a way that I wouldn't hope them to be affected."
Amity Goss: Yes. We had a teacher responding to a student need. She heard kids talking about a show that they were watching, streaming show, and she said, "Wow, that really reminds me of this Edgar Allen Poe text, so I'm going to include this in my classroom repertoire." Students came in the next day and a handful of students, a small number of students walking in the door to the classroom and said, "Oh, I was uncomfortable with that text. That was scary." She said, "Okay, well, we won't address that today. We'll just put the text aside for today."
Within 24 hours, there was such a maelstrom of communication on social media suggesting that we, the administrators had, banned the book and that we weren't going to engage in book banning in our town. It was almost the opposite of what we had been experiencing with requests to ban books. It really just took on a life of its own. It was truly a teacher move and it was being addressed as really this systemic issue. The teacher just said to me, "I just wanted to go away. I just want to teach the kids." I think that that happens a lot.
Justin Reich: Yeah, I mean, in some respects, it's hard because we want parents engaged in their kids' education. We want them engaged in these conversations about what schools are doing. The ideal, however, is that they're operating, that those conversations are happening at a level where teachers just do their day to day in the context of a set of expectations that they understand and not adjusting from day to day. So, how do you think about managing both the involvement and the expectations of parents, but doing it in a way that it has a healthy interaction with what teachers are doing day to day rather than unhealthy interaction?
Amity Goss: Right. Well, I think that that's the same answer that it's always been. We talk to parents about, "Please, when you have interests and concerns, give us a call, send an email." I think that what we're asking people to refrain from is posting on social media prior to speaking to anyone in the school. If you have a concern about something that's happening in the classroom, call the teacher. This teacher would've been happy to have a conversation about what was going on.
Justin Reich: How would you explain your current equity initiatives and then how do you talk to parents about them who have concerns about them?
Amity Goss: Right. Well, as I mentioned, our Board of Education issued what they called a statement on equity and social justice back in 2021. Really in response to some teacher fear, it was making clear that a Guilford teacher's job is to include social justice and equity in what they're doing in their classrooms. But I think what's interesting about that is when you read that statement, I think any person would be very hard-pressed to disagree with anything in that statement. It really is fundamentally saying that we are all going to care about each other and our belonging here and that we're going to talk about history. We're going to talk about facts and that we're not going to avoid anything.
I don't think that there would be anything in that statement for anyone to disagree with, and that is really grounding I think for many people. It helps us remind teachers, you're supported by the board. This is what the board has asked us to do. This is our value, this is our mission. But when I think about what that means in terms of everyday work, I'm not sure it always gets played out because I think that people are afraid. So, we have worked as a community to provide professional learning opportunities for teachers to increase their self-efficacy around doing that work, to raise their confidence, to empower them, and to make sure that they feel comfortable taking on hard conversations.
Actually, our superintendent said it best. He said, "It's our intention to teach and discuss history in our Guilford Public Schools classrooms in a way that inspires deep thought and critical analysis of reliable sources and information predicated on a mindset of inquiry. Our students deserve to learn and think critically by grappling with nuance and complexity, reconsidering inherent assumptions, and considering deeply the merits of the evidence before them." So I hang on to that statement in my work with teachers as this is what our mission is, this is what we need to be doing. How are we doing that in our classrooms?
Justin Reich: It really echoes what we've had other folks say throughout these conversations. Derek, our colleague at the University of South Carolina School of Law, that the closer your conversations are grounded to primary sources in a sense, that provides some safe harbor for having those conversations, because you're putting the past, you're putting the recent present in front of people and letting them engage it. So, tell us more about the current landscape in Guildford today. What are the controversial issues and moments that you are wrestling with or you're gearing up to work on in your community this summer or this fall?
Amity Goss: Well, so we've had a number of different situations. We have a request to reconsider some texts, some library books. We had a librarian who was targeted on social media. We have what's called the Nutmeg Award in Connecticut. It's just excellent books in Connecticut as recognized by our library association. The librarians regularly purchase the ones that are appropriate for their grade band libraries. One of our librarians did this, and among that collection was the book Flamer. The librarian was very publicly attacked with statements like, "Is this person a parent and should they even be able to be allowed to raise children if they're purchasing literature like this for their library?"
It was a Nutmeg Nominee and purchased for that purpose, because we regularly purchased all of the Nutmeg Nominees in a year. We had the example with the Edgar Allan Poe text. We have had an example of a librarian at the elementary school seeing that her library association, her public organization, her professional organization was asking that librarians reconsider some of the Dr. Seuss titles. She went and checked the circulation and said, "Oh, gosh, those titles that they're talking about haven't been circulated in my library in years. They're gathering dust and I don't have space for that."
So she removed them from her shelves and she's being accused of banning those books. So, it's this ongoing underlying current that I think impacts teachers because they just often make the choice not to engage in these conversations or any activities that might in any way be considered controversial or challenging. It really is chilling their speech.
Justin Reich: As we've heard in our conversations throughout the US, one of the big places that educators are feeling chilled is on the subject of books. We asked Amity about the book challenges that have come up in Guilford. So, can you tell us more about how books got challenged in Guilford and how Guilford has been responding? What was that process like?
Amity Goss: Yes. So, we have, as I'm sure the vast majority of school districts have, the opportunity for a policy that allows for the opportunity for a community member to request reconsideration of a text.
Justin Reich: This long predates anything. These are the kinds of policies that school districts have had forever.
Amity Goss: Yes, yes. Generally speaking, I think the original intent of this was around curricular books, things that students would be required to read and a parent might have a concern about that. But in our case, it has actually began with library books. So, we had four books that were included in our libraries that are on that national list that I think we've all seen circulating, generally written by people of color or LGBTQ authors and generally addressing those topics or celebrating those identities. They were challenged within our libraries. A request for reconsideration was brought to our Board of Ed.
Also, including a text that we use in one of our AP classes, the only book is The Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison. That is a curricular book in that it is part of our AP English class at the high school, but again, it's an AP class, it's an elective class. No one is forced to take this class. You don't need to take it to graduate. It is an advanced placement class. So, the books are going to be at the college level.
Justin Reich: The books are going to be at the college level. Also, teachers know what sorts of books show up on the test. As I understand it, The Bluest Eye is one of the ones that over the years is reasonably likely to be specifically referenced on test questions.
Amity Goss: Yes, yes. That is my understanding as well. They are books that have challenging passages in them, and when you read them without the context of the entire book, they create some controversy. So, some of that was done at our board meetings. I'm sure you can view them online. They're all recorded. Some folks came forward and read some passages allowed at board meetings and chastised us for allowing children to be exposed to them, which interestingly, there were student board reps in the meeting at that moment when they were reading those passages.
So, then a person formally filed a request for reconsideration, and our Board of Education is taking it very seriously. Each member is reading each of these texts in its entirety so that they can make a truly educated decision about whether or not they should be included in our libraries and in the one case, in that AP class. They will then in September look at that more deeply and make a decision about whether or not to take those books off the shelves or not. But as I say, they are simply shelved in our library in most cases.
Justin Reich: What has the circulation of those books been before any challenges to them?
Amity Goss: Well, one of the texts is from the mid-90s, and I don't think has left the shelf since then. It may never have left the shelf at all. It's called It's Perfectly Normal, and it was on our middle school shelf, middle school library shelf. It's really about puberty and kids understanding their own bodies, and that was seen as offensive. I don't think any kids have ever taken that book out. But then our other books, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Flamer also have very low circulation.
I don't believe that Flamer had been taken out until our superintendent took it out to see what the concern was. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, I think, was only available digitally through our state's online digital library. So, these are not books that are flying off the shelves, but they are books that allow kids who might want to see themselves represented, they would be able to see themselves in these books.
Justin Reich: Would there be technical difficulties if the board decided to remove Me and Earl and the Girl? Would you have to go to the Connecticut State Digital Library and ask them to not give you that one book, or do libraries have control over? Do you just have to take the state's whole kit caboodle or do you get to pick and choose?
Amity Goss: The way it is that it's like 10,000 titles or something that just become available to us for a very, very small amount of money. So, yes, we do just take them on. We do have the opportunity to exclude individual texts. So, because it's digital, it gives us the opportunity to go in and check a box that says, "Not this one," but in fairness to the librarian, librarians are not able to read 10,000 books to decide whether or not to shelve them and the state makes those determinations based on publisher's recommendations for age ranges.
Justin Reich: Yeah, no, I think that's really helpful to understand that there are both a lot of books in a library and there's finite library space. So, books are always coming in, books are always coming out. I bet if we talk to your librarians, they would tell us that they've read a lot of books. I've spent some time this summer talking with English teachers around summer reading recommendations and the way they talk about the number of books they read in the year, you just realize how unbelievably devoted they are to their craft. It's pretty remarkable. But one of the things about all of these decisions is that we do trust organizations to help us think through these issues. Connecticut's got a library association. They have the Nutmeg Awards.
If you're a school librarian, you just buy all the books. Somebody read them that you trust. You don't have to go through all that. The state's got people who are reading 10,000 books. Publishers send out summaries, things like that. It's also not dissimilar to how most citizens engage with the management of schools. The vast majority of citizens in a town do not think in detail about school issues. They think every couple of years somebody runs for a school board. For the most part, you just vote for the incumbents because they're doing a good job. If there's a new slate of candidates, maybe research the candidates. Maybe you just call up your friend who does pay really close attention to school board elections and say, "Hey, who should I vote for here?" That's a good feature of democracy.
Outsourcing some of our civic decisions to experts is a totally reasonable way to participate in democracy, but all of these things have to operate differently in moments of intensity or controversy or other kinds of things like that, where it really requires many more people to get much more involved in all of these decisions, which is good for public engagement. It's good for civic engagement. It's also really challenging for a system that's built, assuming that a certain number of people are going to call the school every year. There are going to be no to almost no Freedom of Information Act requests. As all those things ramp up, schools have to build the capacity to manage these conversations too. That must be a big part of your job.
Amity Goss: Yes, yes, it is. It's interesting that you say that though, because I think that that is one of the things that our superintendent has been excellent about bringing us back to. He regularly says, "We are not going to micromanage the books in our libraries. We have librarians who make educated choices based on a lot of input, and we're not going to say as an administration that we're going to second guess that work. We're not going to second guess teachers text choices. They're the professionals, and we want them to be able to do their jobs with the freedom to make the choices that they're educated to make."
Justin Reich: I think that is a great approach. It is the approach that librarians and teachers want. That's why they take these jobs. They're not doing it because they're paid a ton of money. They're doing it because these challenges are interesting and important, though it is the job of the administration to provide clear guidance to the folks doing these roles in part so that they can say as they make their choices, we were following this guidance. This is what the town through its elected and appointed representatives asked us to do.
We have a bunch of discretion within that because we don't want to get the school board involved in every book that we buy at the elementary school library, but you've given us some guidance about what you want the library to look like, what you want our classrooms to look like, and that's what we're going to make happen.
Amity Goss: Yes. Yes. I think it's the role of curriculum is to make sure that teachers have the guidelines for what it is we're asking them to teach and then they're choosing individual resources that match the kids in their classrooms, but they have clear guidance about what standards they're teaching and when and the general resources that we expect them to choose from, because yes, all those decisions shouldn't be left solely to them.
Justin Reich: What's your sense of how the superintendent Paul Freeman looks out for teachers? Can you think of specific examples where he stood up and defended particular teachers, defended particular librarians? It sounds like one of his strong principles is we do not micromanage our professionals. What that means is then teachers make decisions. Librarians make decisions that the public disagrees with. Librarians and the teachers say, "Well, we were told to act as professionals." How does he stand up for teachers when those controversies come up?
Amity Goss: That I think is actually a strength of his strategy. He is spectacular at both doing things like making sure that the Board of Ed has adopted this policy that backs up teachers in making these decisions to have an equitable environment in their classrooms or a social justice conversation or to talk about hard history, but then he does a wonderful job of making sure that if something does occur, he clearly has teachers' backs. So, we had an incident right before graduation this year. Again, I'm sure you can read about online, where a teacher who is both the advisor for our gay-straight alliance club at the high school and our graduation coordinator, she dyed a bit of her hair, a very small segment of her hair rainbow for pride month. She received essentially a threat.
The principal heard that got an email that said that if she were to show up with her rainbow hair at graduation, that there would be hell to pay. So, Superintendent Freeman came out very clearly saying, "That's not okay. This is really, really important that we have this person who is supporting all of our students and our students who identify as LGBTQ. By being who she is, by standing up for what she believes in, that improves our community, that doesn't take away from anyone." So he issued a letter to our community that was part of our public communications. That happens regularly.
When we have had challenges to books in libraries, he has stood up publicly and sent out communications that say, "Our teachers are going to continue to make decisions based on their professional judgment in the best interest of all students. So, we believe that students have a right to these materials, and therefore, we back up our teachers." In fact, he recently said, "I will once again ask, can we please stop with a personal attacks and threats leveled at teachers of our Guilford Public Schools?" So he explicitly asks for teachers not to be personally attacked. It has yet to happen, but he asks regularly.
Justin Reich: Could you say a little bit more about what the professional learning is that you are doing with teachers to help build that?
Amity Goss: Yes. We actually have a plan that I'm pretty proud of this coming year. Our focus as a district is on belonging and making sure all of our students feel a sense of belonging in our schools. As such, there are two layers to that. There's this direct instruction focus on ourselves and what it is we do as adults that make students feel like they belong or don't. Then there's a layer of apply that information to case studies. We're working with the Ed Ethics team at Harvard on using case studies as a tool to create these decision guides that almost become reflexive in our work.
Justin Reich: Guilford Public Schools began their collaboration with Ed Ethics in 2022 when Guilford Superintendent Paul Freeman approached Ed Ethics for helping support teachers grappling with controversial issues in the classroom. To help us understand Ed Ethics and their ongoing work in Guilford, we invited Meira Levinson into this studio. She's the founder of Ed Ethics and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Meira, thanks so much for joining us.
Meira Levinson: Thank you so much for having me, Justin.
Justin Reich: Meira, you've pioneered this field called educational ethics. What is educational ethics?
Meira Levinson: Educational ethics is a field that I am hoping we are bringing into existence, modeled after bioethics that like bioethics is informed by and helps to inform ethical questions arising in educational policy and practice. So, educators and policymakers and parents and students and so forth, we face ethical questions all the time in our work, and it's an attempt to create resources and create a culture of conversation and progress around helping us address those ethical questions that we face.
Justin Reich: Bioethics has been useful because you've got experts who are informed by philosophy and ethics and thousands of years of discussion about that, but also cutting edge knowledge of research of the particulars of disease, of populations, of social conditions. Educational ethics would be the same thing, longstanding conversations plus a deep understanding of a particular field. Is that a good way to think of it?
Meira Levinson: Yeah, I think of bioethics as a good model. One is bioethics has really modeled the integration and cross-pollination of different kinds and sources of knowledge. So, yes, you have philosophers in there. You've actually have clergy in there from the very start in bioethics, lawyers, scientists, doctors, public health policymakers, people with lots of different kinds of disciplinary and experiential background coming together to try to define ethical problems and then address them together.
Justin Reich: So educational ethics is a conversation among academics and scholars, but it's also a set of practical tools, strategy, resources for helping teachers, school leaders. One of the ways that you've worked to engage with schools directly as through this organization called Ed Ethics. Will you tell us a little bit about the work that Ed Ethics does with schools and districts?
Meira Levinson: Absolutely. I do want to clarify. I think ideally, educational ethics from the start is a conversation not only among academics and scholars, but also from the beginning has been with educators and activists and policymakers and so forth. It's very intentionally cross-pollinated and inclusive in that way from the start. But yes, the work that we do with Ed Ethics when we work directly with schools and districts is that they will reach out to us for a variety of reasons. They want to help educators have more open and democratic conversations as a way of helping them build those muscles and those dispositions so that then they can foster those conversations with their students in their classrooms. That's one reason that people have reached out to us.
People have also reached out to us because they face an ethical challenge in their school or district and they want help. So, for example, questions about grading and grade inflation come up a fair amount. We've had people reach out to us, because we have a lot of resources around thinking about race and racism and anti-racism. Although they're often treated as being very simple and straightforward questions, what does it mean to be an anti-racist educator? Those are actually really, really, really hard and ethically complex. So, people will reach out to us to help with that and then also a lot around controversial issues, discussions, and the controversies around controversial issues discussions. So, it's like this double-headed thing.
Justin Reich: Tell us about the work that you do with Guilford as one district that you're working with. How do you engage them?
Meira Levinson: Yeah, I mean, it's such a privilege to be working with them and it's this amazing partnership. So, Guilford came to us really out of the blue, now I guess a year and a half ago. So, I think in the spring of 2021, we got this out of the blue, I think, email saying, "We are wrestling with how to support controversial issues, discussions in our classrooms given the current political context. Basically, we came across your work and we're wondering if you can help."
So the leadership in Guilford, both the leadership in the central office, superintendent, assistant superintendent, et cetera, and the school board are very clear with themselves and with others that they really believe in supporting teachers to support students to have controversial issues, discussions and to have complex conversations about things that are currently tearing this country apart because they clearly believe that that's part of what it means to engage in a good education and to grow great citizens. They have a portrait of a graduate that is a touchstone for them, that includes these kinds of skills and dispositions.
The educators in Guildford also mostly clearly believe in this same vision, and yet they also feel quite worried despite the repeated verbal expressions of support from the school board and from the superintendent's office about their vulnerability when they actually do this work in classrooms. There's political vulnerability. There's social vulnerability as we've heard from educators. They say, "Look, I'm not just a teacher in this district. I am also a parent. I am also a churchgoer. I am also showing up at the grocery store and so forth. So, I have to think about all of these rules."
There's legal vulnerability and then there's pedagogical vulnerability that especially at a time that there's so much divisiveness and polarization and lack of empathy in this country that it's just really hard to support such conversations happening in their classrooms. So, when we were contacted by Guilford, we've been asked to support them in supporting teachers to address these sources of vulnerability, but in a way that's not just hectoring and saying, "No, no, no, they want you to do this, so you should do it." But recognizing again, the complexity that's involved in this work. So, we have a variety of things that we do with and for schools and districts, but one of our key resources is what we call normative case studies. Normative just means value laden.
So, these are case studies that are about values and about hard choices related to our values. They're short. They're designed to be able to be read in about 10 minutes by a native English speaker and then immediately talked about. They integrate a lot of diverse perspectives into the cases. They're often narrative, they're often fictional, although always based on a lot of empirical research, but they're designed basically to help educators, parents, other stakeholders in the school or the district be able immediately to launch into talking about complex ethical choices across lines of difference.
Justin Reich: If I was reading or watching one of these, there'd be a story about an ethical dilemma. The story would be informed by multiple perspectives. Somewhere towards the end, there's likely to be a like, "Okay, what would you do?" moment that the reader is brought into the story to make some choice or to have a conversation with someone.
Meira Levinson: So almost all of our cases have a protagonist that they're focused on. That protagonist might be a single person, a curriculum developer, a teacher, a principal, a superintendent. It also might be a collective body, the eighth grade teaching team or the school board or whatever. They always face a choice point. Yes. So, they are trying to decide do they continue this class or shut it down? Do they fire or keep this teacher? Do they allow this topic to be the subject of debate in the 10th grade high school curriculum, whatever it is?
A large part of what we do is we sit on what are the ethical dilemmas in this case or what are the dilemmas in this case really? Then why are they dilemmas? We spend a lot of time on that right before we move into allowing people to talk about who should do what and why, because in a large way, I think as educators, we are always primed for action and our work is usually on a microsecond timescale.
Justin Reich: The fire must be put out.
Meira Levinson: Exactly. At best, we may have five minutes between classes when we're thinking, "Oh, my gosh, that didn't go well. How do I reset?" So part of what we do is we give people the space to stop and think and talk and dissect with one another.
Justin Reich: What I love about the vision behind Ed Ethics is that they imagine the challenge of talking across difference as a skill problem rather than a will problem. It's not that people don't want to talk with neighbors who disagree with them. It's that we've lost some of our skillset in how to do that. We can strengthen that skillset. We can do a better job in classrooms, in communities talking across difference. We asked Amity to tell us more about Guilford's work with Ed Ethics, and she shared a specific case study that was useful to their team.
Amity Goss: So right this month, we're training our instructional coaches to engage in facilitation of case studies with teachers.
Justin Reich: Can you give us an example of one of the case studies? What's one of the stories that people would wrestle with?
Amity Goss: Yeah. Well, so we did one last week that was about a new curriculum, a social justice curriculum being rolled out in a charter school system and the way that the different schools managed that and how that looked for different teachers. I think that what struck me about why that was so important is it brought in the perspectives of parents. It brought in the perspectives of students and of teachers and of people from all different ideologies and ways of feeling around that topic. It really gave us a structure and a framework for going back to the values that might be in conflict that people aren't acting from some magical evil place. They really are acting on their values and that sometimes our values come in conflict with one another. How do we work through that?
Justin Reich: What are the values in Guilford that you feel like are most in conflict? If you had to put a pair of values in Guilford that are most intention, what were the ones you'd pick?
Amity Goss: Ooh, that's tricky. I feel like we hear regularly from some of these louder voices that we are not empowering all kids. So, there's this value around my kid counts too. Of course, they do, all kids count, but what we are saying is that we really need to recognize that some of the actions that we've taken in the past have really excluded some students and that does not mean we would choose to exclude other students. That means we want to include all students. So, for us, that social justice piece of making sure that all kids have an equal advantage and a level playing field in our classrooms does sometimes feel in conflict with the traditional what my kids have had in the past.
Justin Reich: So a conservatism or respect for tradition. I mean, parents often want their kids to have a very similar experience to the one that they have in school. That's why they stayed in town. That's why they're still there. Challenging that veneration of tradition with some new practices, including new practices that might be specifically designed to address exclusions that schools have had in the past around gay kids or Black kids or other things like that. Yeah, that's a helpful way to frame those things. When you think of the curriculum, what do you feel like is most at risk from teacher chilled speech? What are the lessons or conversations, or when you think specifically about what it is that Guildford students might lose from teacher fear, what are the ones that worry you most?
Amity Goss: Well, I think about our portrait of a graduate and I think about that piece of being a critical thinker and an empathetic citizen and a responsible collaborator. I feel like when you don't really get deeply into any of these nitty-gritty issues, you lose the opportunity to really develop those skills. If we don't engage in conversations that have opposing viewpoints, we've missed out on the opportunity to support the next generation of critical thinkers who can have appropriate conversations, not on social media, but in person.
I worry that constantly taking this path of least resistance will create a situation where our children don't know how to do that. They don't know how to have a respectful disagreement with somebody and come out on the other side, not thinking the other person is evil, but just maybe disagreeing.
Justin Reich: Jason Faye, who's one of the co-developers of Ed Ethics at Harvard, says that the United States doesn't have a polarization problem. It has an education problem. The problem is not that we have different beliefs, we've always had different beliefs. It's that we've lost our ability to have conversations across those differences and that's actually something that we can teach and get better at, but you can't teach that and get better at it if you're afraid to do it. So, that's the challenge.
Amity Goss: Right, right. I've actually been thinking a lot about the teaching of empathy and I've wondered if that's possible, but I have recently learned that it is possible and I wonder how often we don't engage in an opportunity to develop empathy in children because we just don't want to touch that conversation.
Justin Reich: How has your work with Ed Ethics helped faculty navigate divisive concepts? What do you think are the specific strategies or thinking tools that your teachers have learned so far that they've found the most useful?
Amity Goss: I think it's the ability to reflexively make a decision in the moment about where to go, and I think that that comes from practice. That comes from applying these principles regularly, and it also comes from having a case study mindset. A case study is really just a close read of a text and really considering all of the perspectives, and teachers are really good at that.
So, they have this regular practice of considering lots of alternatives in that split second, and being able to do that gives them this 10,000 foot view of the situation in that moment and lets them make a decision based on a much more objective perspective because they stop seeing it as "Yikes, the decision I'm making for these kids in front of me." They start to think of it as, "What does this case look like from every perspective and how are all these people's values potentially aligning or coming into conflict and how can I assist in that conversation?
Justin Reich: As a former social studies teacher, I have to say that talking to you and first hearing the challenges that your district is going through and then saying, "You know what a really practical useful response is? It's training on philosophy and ethics." That's what's really going to help our teachers get through these moments. That's very heartening to hear that Ed Ethics is in part grounded in ancient values, although like bioethics, also it recognizes that the trolley problem is actually not all that relevant to educational settings, but there are all kinds of specific educational issues that come up in an educational context. If they're understood within their specific, professional, scientific cultural context, we can do better ethical work that way.
Amity Goss: Yes. Well, and you see the patterns, right? When you examine a lot of these different cases, you start to see the patterns and the way that conflicts arise and are resolved. So, it gives you the opportunity to make fast decisions. It almost makes it a habit to make those regular decisions.
Justin Reich: How does it affect your job? What new work or new routines do you have to take on when these sorts of things happen?
Amity Goss: Well, some of it isn't new. Some of it is really just remembering that all parents were excited when parents are involved in education and all parents' voices matter, so continuing to make meetings with folks and have conversations and keep the dialogue open and really focusing on staying transparent, making sure that people know what we're doing all the time, but also regularly supporting teachers in making hard calls, regularly sitting down with teachers who are wondering about what it is that they should do next or supporting their instructional coaches in having those conversations directly with them because they might not come to me as an administrator.
Really just making sure that there's a place for them to go where they can be heard, where they can raise issues and have answers to those questions that they have every day.
Justin Reich: Now, you've been doing building leadership, district leadership for 15 years. To you, does this feel like just the same work that is part of the job of a school leader in just a different guise, a different time? Do you feel like you're engaging in conversations this hard, making decisions this difficult 15 years ago, or does this feel like, "Oh boy, this is a new level of work. This is really different in some way"?
Amity Goss: It's definitely different in the intensity. It is definitely different in the amount of time, the amount of both human and physical resources. We had to hire an FOI clerk simply to be able to handle the FOI requests that were coming in related to all of this stuff. I really do try to keep it at the level of these are parents with concerns, this is my job to make sure that they're heard, because it is almost grounding for me to keep thinking about all of this as business as usual. It really helps in taking the edge off. I wish the intensity were a little less.
Justin Reich: The intensity certainly gets accelerated when it moves from local news to national news. I think social media creates a kind of intensity that didn't happen before, both because of the persistence of the messaging. It's one thing if a few folks get together in an email thread or talking and say strong things about schools, but then we know that people don't always have their full inhibitions operating when they post things on social media. Then those messages are persistent that teachers can go back and as they say, don't read the comments, but we do.
Amity Goss: Exactly. Exactly. It's the little things that really are different. It's that when I answer a phone call from a parent who says that they are considering moving in, I think, is this really a parent who's considering moving in? I think it's those kinds of things that you don't realize, but that are really incredibly wearing.
Justin Reich: They're both wearing and they diminish trust. We want to operate our school systems with a tremendous amount of openness so that they're responsive to the public, to people beyond Guilford and all those kinds of things. At the same time, if everything that everyone says can be roped into ongoing controversies, and some of those controversies are fueled by well-meaning parents who care a ton about the educations their kids are getting, and some of those controversies are fueled by organizations that get fundings and clicks and eyeballs from generating controversy, so that's really hard.
Amity Goss: Yes.
Justin Reich: When you're talking to district leaders in other states, I mean, I assume that you're part of Connecticut's superintendent's group or other superintendent networks. What questions are they asking you or what advice are you giving them?
Amity Goss: I think the thing that we do differently here in Guilford is that we're really public about all the things that we do, and we see that as an intentional move to be transparent and to make sure that we're not hiding anything. We're putting it all out there. This is what we believe, this is who we are, and this is what's happening in your child's classroom, because we feel like that takes away the guesswork and it takes away some of the potential concerns somebody might have, just hearing it from a friend.
They actually have firsthand knowledge or secondhand from their own child about what's going on, and we make a real effort to be transparent and communicate all the time about what's going on. Also, there's a little bit of stay the course, right? We know what's right for all kids, and that hasn't changed. I mean, I've been doing this for 26 years. What's right for all kids is still the core value here. So, staying the course on that and continuing to communicate that and continuing to be open about what we're doing.
Justin Reich: One of the things we know about American Public Schools is that parents are overwhelmingly satisfied, to my mind, shockingly satisfied with their local public schools. So, all throughout the pandemic, we surveyed the ever loving bejesus out of American parents. 70, 75, 80% of parents are satisfied or very satisfied with their local public schools. You can ask it a zillion different ways. Are you satisfied with the instruction that you got during the pandemic? Are you satisfied with the modality of learning your kids got? Do any of the topics that are taught in schools contradict your family's values? So we know that the folks who are very frustrated with public schools represent...
Well, we know that the parents who are very frustrated with public schools represent a minority. Most of the decline in support for schools is really coming from non-parents, at least according to survey data. What are your conversations like or how do you hear from the parents in your community that are really satisfied with what's going on and are encouraging you to just keep doing what you're doing?
Amity Goss: That's one thing that is a real shining light in our lives here. Our parents are spectacular. We get more emails here that say, "We really appreciate what you're doing. Keep doing what you're doing. We know what you're going through is challenging, but you're doing the right thing for our children. " We have people who open up and tell us their very personal stories of why this work is so important to them and to their children and how that makes them feel like they belong.
We have people who tell us all the time that they moved to Guilford, specifically because they read all of the news articles about us and this is where they want to be. YOU can go up and down the streets in Guilford and see lawn signs that say, "I stand with Guilford Public Schools." That is an environment that I have never had the pleasure of being in, and I've been in some great places with really supportive families, but to be able to drive down the street on my way to a school and just be reminded that that family stands with Guilford Public Schools is pretty exciting.
Justin Reich: Yeah, it matters.
Amity Goss: Yes, it does.
Justin Reich: Standing up for public schools in this moment really matters.
Amity Goss: It really does.
Justin Reich: Amity Goss, she's the assistant superintendent in Guilford, Connecticut. Amity, thank you so much for joining us today.
Amity Goss: Thank you for having me.
Justin Reich: Listeners, I got to tell you that as a social studies guy, I love this story, Superintendent Paul Freeman running into some real challenges in his district and community tensions, tensions within the student body, difficulties talking about controversial issues, talking across difference. He feels like his educators need some support. So, what does he do? He turns to philosophy. He turns to ethics to develop some skill sets, some habits of mind to help their community do good, hard work, even in polarizing times. I love it. I'm Justin Reich. Thanks for listening to TeachLab. Special thanks to our guests, Amity Goss and Meira Levinson. To learn more about Meira's amazing work with Ed Ethics, visit justiceinschools.org. That's justiceinschools.org.
If you're driving, we're going to put in the show notes. You don't have to write down the link or remember it. Next week, we're going to dig into book bands. We've talked about them a little bit in the series so far. We're going to talk with Pan America. We're going to go deep. We're going to figure it out. Be sure to subscribe to TeachLab so you never miss an episode. In the meantime, we've got some great resources out and forthcoming for educators everywhere. I've got a new book coming out in September, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation In Schools. You can learn more at iteratebook.com. If you pre-order the book, you send in your order number, a little bit of information, I'll send you a signed book plate, beautiful illustration you can put in your book.
You can register for a free online course in October about innovation in schools. It's all at iteratebook.com. That's iteratebook.com. We've got another course that's running right now with our partners at Learning for Justice called Youth in Front, about supporting student activism. You can visit youthinfront.org to learn more and check that out. Then you can see our documentary film, We Have To Do Something Different, teachers on the journey towards more equitable schools at somethingdifferentfilm.com. You can find links to all this stuff in our show notes.
If you like what you hear on TeachLab, be sure to leave us a rating or review wherever you listen to your podcasts. This episode was produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley. The sound was mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe. Until next time.