Frinde Maher talks about testing, teaching others to teach and today's classroom conundrums
You've taught at Wheaton for a couple decades. What's that continuity like?
Frinde Maher If you're someplace a long time, you get a kind of reputation; you become a known quantity in some ways. As an educator I find it very interesting. There are expectations that students assign to you.
They might say, for example, "Oh if you have Frinde Maher, she's going to be big on feminism or big on diversity."
It must be interesting teaching how to teach.
Frinde MaherYes, because it necessarily makes you very self-conscious about teaching.
When did you start teaching at Wheaton?
Frinde Maher1981. Before that I was a high school teacher in Brookline, Mass. Before that, I taught in Wellesley. Between those two times, I taught at South Boston High School before the desegregation struggle of 1974. I had about 10 years of high school teaching before I got my doctorate in education at Boston University.
Was there a moment when you knew you wanted to become a teacher?
Frinde Maher After college, I went to Oxford University and I thought...probably I would have thought of myself as ending up as a history professor. In 1964 or 1965 when I went, it was a big time in this country. There was the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, and I just wanted to be where the action was, I wanted to be more socially involved, and I thought that being a high school teacher would be a really good way of enacting my social and political commitments. Oxford didn't feel to me like the quickest way to do that.
With some other teachers, I worked on a program for urban and suburban youth, and I loved American history and loved teaching American history. My first semester as a teacher, I spent six weeks on the American Revolution [a long time], but it was an opportunity to talk about unjust authority and to compare the 
American Declaration of Independence with the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence and talk about freedom movements and talk about civil rights...a springboard for talking about everything that was going on.
Were you certified when you began teaching?
Frinde Maher I got my certification when I went to Harvard [after returning from Oxford University]. It was a lot easier back then.
I do have some regrets about leaving Oxford. I was on sabbatical five years ago and spent three months at the University of London, School of Education doing a visiting fellowship, and my husband and I loved it .
What's your take on the often-controversial education tests used in Massachusetts?
Frinde Maher First of all, I think assessment is really important. Assessment is about teachers finding out if the students are doing what their teachers expect them to do. I also think that assessment is important for comparative purposes. Teachers and schools need to compare students with each other, cities need compare teachers and schools with each other, and for cities to compare schools with each other, and states need to compare cities with each other.
In other words, I think that the underlying reason people assume testing is important is something they're right about: How do you know whether Brockton is ever going to do as well as Wellesley, that they have wonderful social studies teachers in Brockton (they do) if you haven't got a way of saying, "Look, the Brockton kids did this on this test, and the Wellesley kids did this on this same test." So I believe that some kind of assessment is really important.
What's wrong with the MCAS [Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System] and the teacher test?
What's wrong's with MCAS and all the standardized tests that are being put in place now is that they are the only measure of student success [being taken]. And especially in poor and working class schools and communities, they are beginning to be the only kind of schooling that the kids get--preparing for these tests.
There's a wonderful article in the New York Times magazine April 7 (2002) with a guy who studied 20 different school systems to look at the impact of the New York test. Scarsdale treats the tests as an, "Oh, by the way, you're going to need to take this test. Don't worry about it. You'll be fine." Then they go ahead and make use of their curriculum, which is incredibly rich in critical thinking and inquiry and includes field trips to the Metropolitan Museum and Shakespeare and you name it. Scarsdale can do it. And the tests, they don't want them in Scarsdale. They don't need them. Their kids can go to Harvard anyway. They have to take them, but they think it's a waste of time because they think their children are too bright. They don't need to be bound by these tests. That's fine. A Scarsdale kid can afford to go to the Met on Saturday.
Now, the MCAS might have a question about an artist, but that question about that artist might only be in a kid's head because a teacher told him Degas [whose painting "Dance Class at the Opéra" pictured at left] was an impressionist and the kid wrote it down. And that's just not a substitute for going to the Met. Now, the Scarsdale kid is going to know that Degas was an impressionist because he's been going to the Met since he was 5. So that's one problem.
There was also a working class school in the study and the school just taught to the test. They did nothing but that. And there was kind of a middle class school between this elite place, Scarsdale, and and this working class place. And in the middle class school, they were really struggling because they wanted to teach Shakespeare, but they felt like they had to spend a lot of time preparing for the test because the parents were not as secure as the ones in Scarsdale. They dropped Romeo and Juliet, which the kids used to perform every year, because they wanted to prepare better for the test.
I think these tests, the way they're being run, are very punitive for working class communities, and they wouldn't be if they were accompanied by real curriculum reform and real school reform, which would mean that you would drastically cut the number of kids in class. You would make sure that they got school breakfasts. You would make guidance counselors available at a ratio somewhat less than 400 kids to one counselor. You would make sure that teachers were trained in their subject matter.You would make sure that teachers had connections with the community. You would make sure that parents were involved. What good schools look like is not a mystery to people in the profession.
What we've got instead of all those reforms is a test. It's like saying I'm going to go on a really serious diet and weigh myself every day. If you weigh yourself and you don't change your behavior, you're not getting far.
Do the tests do any good?
I think that these tests are good up to a certain point because, frankly, until they put these tests in place, these poor and working class kids often weren't learning anything at all. It's hard for me to say that I hate the tests when I know that in some places it means that the teachers are actually sitting down and saying, "Who was Degas? Degas was an impressionist." That's better than knowing nothing. On the other hand, the idea that this constitutes ed reform without other reforms is, I think, really toxic.
What about the tests that are required for Massachusetts teacher certification?
In the case of the teacher test, the history test is all mainstream political history. Very conservative political history. It puts forward a set of facts and dates that people are expected to know. It misapplies the kinds of knowledge that history and social studies teachers should concentrate on, which is about helping kids encounter controversies and different points of view in regard to historical issues. And that's all been substituted with what I think is a straight, kind of mindless civics approach.
One of the learning standards is to what degree the candidate understands the principles of American citizenship. I like the principles. But here is no multicultural material in the standards. The history test is not about the struggle of the people who make up this country. It's about the facts and the dates of the Colonial period and who was John Adams. I think that's a big shame. It's not the only story. What about the farmers, the workers, the ordinary citizens and their effect on history, their capacity to make history?
Many educators have found themselves in a position of taking sides on these issues. Where do you stand?
People who like the tests say that you need to know how your kids are doing. People who hate the tests say the tests drive the curriculum and not the other way around. But it is more complicated: If there's no curriculum, then having a test that creates one is not the worst thing in the world. In some other places, the tests have changed the curriculum. In some places, the test is irrelevant and they ignore the test.
When some people say that the test is driving the curriculum, then you have to ask what the test is saying the curriculum should be. The math test was developed by the Massachusetts version of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
On the secondary level, the teacher tests have nothing to do with pedagogy . My candidates take a communication literacy test along with everybody else to establish that they can read and write, which our students [at Wheaton] take before they begin student teaching. The secondary test is only about the content of history, the content of English, the content of math, of Spanish. Nothing that I teach is on the teacher test. I'm in charge of helping my students pass a test on which they're not tested on anything that I teach them how to do. In a way, I'm glad because I don't want others telling me what good pedagogy is. But it's complicated; it's frustrating.
How have the tests affected your approach to teaching education?
Does it affect my teaching? Well, it affects my job in that I need to make sure I send my students to Professor Clark in English, Professor Tomasek in history, Professor Liebowitz in math. In a way my job is easy in relation to the tests, but we have to think all the time about our pass rates.
What do you think is the public's greatest misunderstanding about public education?
Frinde MaherThere are many things. One important one is that people don't understand that teaching is a deeply demanding intellectual activity. And I think that behind that is a kind of misogyny in our culture that I've written about whenever I get the chance to write about. People underestimate teachers because they're often women. I think that if people thought about it, they'd realize that the teachers they had that they really liked were actually very demanding intellectually and concerned about the growth of their minds.
But people tend to have this sentimental idea that makes them think that they loved their teachers which is confusing. Elementary school teachers are seen aspeople who love their kids, take care of their kids--that teaching, like mothering, is natural. That good teaching is something that some people kind of get born with, which makes it awfully close to mothering, as if mothering didn't also take a certain degree of intellectual practice. I think that people think that if you're caring and nurturing and loving, that's the opposite of intellectual activity. Deeply embedded in our culture is the notion that the brain and intellectual activity and rational activity and other adjectives go with males and thinking, feeling, nurturing and being nice go with females. And that there's a dichotomy: You can't be nice and be thoughtful at the same time. You can't be loving and be rigorous at the same time. You can't be caring and demanding at the same time. To me, that is a kind of unexamined foundation for a distrust of and certainly a misunderstanding and even contempt for, what teachers do.
It' s not the only thing that people don't understand, but it's one of the more dangerous things. It means that we blame teachers for the failure of schools, but we tend to take away teachers' power at the place where they need it the most. The testing programs in schools are examples of that mistrust. Furthermore, many teacher tests tests now put all their the emphasis on subject matter. I say, "Why can't you have both pedagogy and subject matter?" Some people think that pedagogy itself is anti-intellectual. I don't think so. I think that figuring out how somebody else can learn what you know is one of the most intellectually challenging stimulating things I can think of to do. How do you teach the civil rights movement? How do you teach the Constitution? The Constitution is an incredibly abstract document.
Can you explain the difference between telling and showing--talk about how thoughtful pedagogy is crucial to a successful classroom?
Let me give you an example. People think that American history teachers tell the students that the Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments of the constitution and that the fourth one is the protection against searches and seizures. 
OK, so you tell students that. But they have no sense of that. It's not meaningful. So pedagogy is about, "OK, Kids, what's privacy mean to you?" And finding out that with some kids privacy is about their locker. Other kids, privacy is about their diary. Other kids, privacy is about the glove compartment of their car. Other kids, privacy is about their thoughts--it's not a physical thing. So you have 15 minute discussion about what privacy is, and then you talk about the 4th amendment and then they get it. That's pedagogy. And they don't get it if you don't do that. And that's an intellectual activity and teachers think about those things, and good teachers think about them all the time. That's professional judgment, and it has nothing to do with whether you're nice.
I think many people also don't understand that, at least in Massachusetts, that teaching kids from many different cultures can make pedagogy especially demanding. You have to figure out where students are coming from before you can figure out how to reach them.
You're a feminist scholar, which is closely related to your work in the field of education. What does feminism have to do with the value our culture places on education?
A lot. I think the deepest misunderstanding comes from having made teaching a semi-profession, having said that it's not worth very much money, that it's not worth very much training. Having said that, once you train people and put them into schools, you then say they can't be trusted to design their own curriculum.
They have to have curriculum guides and people over them telling them which worksheets to use. And then you turn around and blame the teachers when the kids aren't doing very well, when the teachers have very little control over what they're allowed to teach. That's a long answer, but I've thought about this a lot and, of course, I'm a feminist scholar.
So, what's the fact that 80 percent of teachers are women got to do with this?
So the problem with the position of teachers today is this combination of being blamed and not being listened to. We're the professionals in the field. It's like saying to doctors, You have a special interest in how to deliver health care, and therefore we're not going to listen to you. Go figure.
Effective for the Class of 2007, Wheaton is introducing a new curriculum. What do you think of it?
Frinde Maher I am thrilled by it. I think it's wonderful. I think that the Connections are wonderful. The diversity requirement embedded in Connections is wonderful. I think it exemplifies what we ought to be doing with students.
I think that the interdisciplinary nature of it is wonderful pedagogically because in my experience in working with students over the years and teaching women's studies, as well as education, when students see the same ideas coming up in multiple classes, that's when they grow intellectually.
One of things that was striking about the faculty meeting in which we battled through these requirements is that the leadership of younger faculty and faculty of color in working this through. I'm proud to be a faculty member here.
For more about Frinde Maher, see her online faculty profile.
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