Coaching Letter #211
On refusing to be gaslit
Thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter. I am very grateful to you for reading my writing, especially in this moment.
I’m just squeezing another Coaching Letter in before the end of Black History Month… lots of things to say, especially since the 14 days of the “Dear Colleague” letter are up today. Someone has a sense of humor. Indeed, the Dear Colleague letter is one long exercise in irony and gaslighting; it is so brilliantly done, in fact, that I almost wish I’d written it.
So this Coaching Letter is not a take-down or an attack on the Dear Colleague letter, but how it has intersected with my life and made me think about my own choices.
I heard about the Dear Colleague letter when it became public, of course. But I was avoiding even thinking about it. And that, of course, is my privilege. Privilege, as I wrote in CL #210 is having the option to ignore, deny, or minimize any problem, challenge, or indignity because it does not apply to you. I have, therefore, many potential options to ignore the Dear Colleague letter: I don’t work for an educational institution, we don’t receive funds from the federal government, I don’t consult on any projects that are defined as “DEI” initiatives, etc. I didn’t want to think about it because I knew it would just annoy me, and I have that privilege.
And then I participated in a session run by my colleague, friend and co-author Rydell last Friday. So just a little sidebar about Rydell; he brings to any given situation multiple reservoirs of declarative and procedural knowledge. For example, he went to divinity school to become a pastor, so he has all those skills, but he also has the academic background to go with them, so that in one conversation with Rydell you could find yourself talking about pragmatic philosophy, hermeneutics, and the history of the Black Church. It can be a little challenging to keep up. His facilitation, then, is deep and subtle in ways that I greatly admire, although it can also be loud and rich and in-your-face in a way that I can’t come close to replicating.
Anyway, as he took the group through the conversations he wove together, I was thinking lots of things, and the rest of this CL is about some of those things, in roughly the order I thought about them.
First, I was annoyed at myself for avoiding thinking about the Dear Colleague letter, because it felt cowardly. There are many wonderful and committed people doing amazing work in service of equity, and it was ridiculous to think that I could just not pay attention to the insult and disrespect that the Dear Colleague letter represents. So, to those of you in that category, I am sorry, and I will do better. And then I remembered that I have often advocated for us to stop thinking about equity as a separate strand of work, because then it allows one part of the organization to abdicate responsibility for equity because it can be seen, as Douglas Adams would say, as an SEP, or Somebody Else’s Problem. And I realized that I was doing the exact same thing, making me stupid as well as cowardly.
Timothy Snyder wrote a short but powerful book called On Tyranny, and one of the things he talks about is the concept of “anticipatory obedience.” People do what they think a more powerful person or entity wants them to do, not because they have been told to do it, but because they think it is in their best interest to comply with what they think is likely, or even inevitable. “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” is attributed to Henry II, and led to the murder of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170, when four knights decided that they wanted to make the king happy, and so traveled from France to England to kill the bishop. They exhibited anticipatory obedience. The same thing happens when school leaders decide not to do something that they believe will be unpopular, explaining that the union/the parents/the school culture will be perturbed. They may be right, or they may not, but their anticipatory obedience means that a certain way of thinking will be made manifest, and perhaps it may have been inevitable, but now we won’t know.
Reading the Dear Colleague letter, but especially reading the rebuttals, made me realize that the point was not to ensure that educators are complying with the very narrow directives that the letter actually gives, but to curtail equity efforts through anticipatory obedience. Here, for example, is an article from the New York Times, about language policing in the sciences; the article actually uses the language of “obeying in advance”. Snyder draws on historical examples to illustrate how early, voluntary compliance by citizens and officials helped oppressive regimes consolidate power. The concept suggests that by resisting this instinct to conform, people can help prevent the erosion of democratic institutions. We should take this to heart, and resist anticipatory obedience.
Then I also thought about how much I used to care about losing readers of the Coaching Letter. Back when I only had a few hundred subscribers, I was very aware that whenever I wrote about equity, I would see a spate of unsubs. And here I’m going to write about something I really have no business writing about, because I don’t even begin to understand it, but gains in followers, comments, and likes trigger dopamine release, which makes you feel good. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, motivation, and learning; it plays a key role in reinforcing behaviors that feel rewarding, such as eating, socializing, or achieving a goal. And yes, I did have to look that up. But I do know quite a bit about rational and irrational decision making, and one of the features of our minds is loss aversion, so when we lose likes and followers, it’s a double whammy. We experience a dopamine dip, for one, and then the loss aversion means that we feel the pain of losing something—in this case, followers—more intensely than the pleasure of gaining it. Losing followers can feel like losing social capital or status, which is especially impactful since humans are wired to seek social belonging. And so, despite myself, I would be tempted into softening my language around equity. I could justify that with the argument that finding language that more people would find palatable would mean that they would stick around, which would mean that they would hear all the great and persuasive things that I have to say. I know that sounds hubristic, but it was really more of a defence mechanism. But I like to think that I’ve grown up over the last few years, and can see that if people really don’t want to engage with ideas about equity and social justice, then the Coaching Letter is not likely to revolutionize their thinking.
And then I brought myself back full circle. Equity is not a separate strand of work. Equity is integral to excellence. I even wrote about this recently. Here’s a paragraph from the manuscript-in-process for the new book on, of all things, equitable instruction:
The term “equity and excellence” is in common usage in education, with the implication that these should be twin goals, or that excellence should somehow be extended to encompass more students. We assert that it is not possible to have excellence separate from equity—excellence that is experienced and demonstrated by some students and not others is incompatible with the definition of excellence. Likewise, realizing the vision for equity necessitates excellence—for all students. Logically, then, there is only one goal, and educators who think of equity as a separate body of work that applies only to some students in some situations fail to grasp that the only path to excellence for all is through equity. For us, the path to excellence, and therefore equity, is in classrooms, which is where students spend most of their time. It entails reducing variation in instructional quality as well as reducing variation in how students experience instruction and school in general. Where there is variation, there is likely inequity, whether that variation lies in the curriculum adopted, how the curriculum is implemented, who gets access to grade level tasks, who is placed in low track classes, the quality of instruction enacted, the resources (both physical and human) a school or district has available, the belief in what students are capable of, who belongs, or any other number of possible factors.
Therefore, anyone who makes any claim to working on educational excellence has to also be working on equity. It’s not a separate thing. It is core to what we are trying to achieve.
Having spent quite a bit of time with the Dear Colleague letter over the last week, I do at least feel recalibrated. Don’t think that you can ignore issues of equity because they don’t apply to you. Don’t think that you can have excellence without equity. Don’t give up your power to make a difference. Don’t base decisions on your unwillingness to upset people or lose followers. The Dear Colleague letter is a brilliant distraction—don’t let it distract you.
Thank you for all you do in service of the success, health, and happiness of all students. There is no greater mission. Let me know if I can help you in any way. Best, Isobel