VI. Collegiality, Not Collectivism

To create a professional learning community, focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively,

and hold yourself accountable for results.[1]

So goes the basic creed of the latest educratic miracle-cult, “Professional Learning Communities.” And while this rather nebulous advice has its merits, in the blighted landscape of public education the boundary between sound advice and oppressive ideology is sometimes as flimsy as that between…well, learning and teaching.

Because educrats don’t give a damn about academics, it is a total mystery to them when schools succeed academically. Such schools must be closely studied, their practices gleaned, analyzed, and universally duplicated. Picture the band of proto-humans clamoring around the alien monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—while its presence is obvious, its nature and meaning are lost on them. To the laity and to most teachers, the formula for producing schools with records of high achievement is a no-brainer: knowledgeable and dedicated teachers, motivated students, supportive administrators, and responsible parents working in combination (which is not the same thing as working collectively) to meet a high academic standard set by the school, the community, or the state. To educrats, the formula can’t be that simple…must not be that simple. It must cost millions in public funds, require thirty-five years of research, and above all, it must be a solution for which the educrat class can claim all the credit.

Enter the PLC cultists. Certainly more than just another educratic vaudeville show traipsing through town—like IQ-testing, mental hygiene, life-adjustment, open classrooms, experiential learning, mastery learning, cooperative learning, project-based learning, brain-based learning, Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, Multiple Intelligences, Outcome-Based Education, authentic assessment, invented spelling, Ebonics, New Math, multimodality, Inquiry-Based Science, Critical Learning Instructional Paths, Culturally Proficient Equity Audits, and the Corbomite Maneuver (okay, the last one’s actually an episode of Star Trek)—in many ways PLC is the culmination of a century of Progressive educrat interference with the work of teachers, and it’s also yet another manifestation of their desperate, everlasting desire to redefine teaching as a clinical science rather than a fine art. Teaching as medicine. Because medicine and science are both concerned with absolutes, the search for the One Best Way or the Single Unified Theory—while the fine arts involve individual craftsmanship and a broad, even limitless variety of methods that can be used in limitless combinations—the fine-art paradigm is incompatible with the priorities of educrats. Once established, the One Best Way can be patented, controlled, and dispensed by an elite few; variety is open to everyone. Worse, in the fine-art paradigm, teachers have individual license to be practitioners and innovators both. Like all artists, they can select one method over another, imitate master teachers whose craft they admire, and they can choose from a variety of resources and philosophies of teaching that best suit their own values. Each teacher owns her or his craft individually.

This is utter heresy under educrat dogma. It cannot be allowed. As we’ve already pointed out, intellectual authority over teachers is the educrats’ bread and butter.

It is therefore no accident that the Professional Learning Communities cult, like every educratic fad before it, has spawned a supernova of books, videos, software, and professional-development seminars which is, collectively, worth millions, if not tens of millions of dollars in public money. The majority of these services are provided by educratic think-tanks, consulting firms, and publishing houses, some operating under 501(c)3 tax-exempt status, others as nakedly commercial enterprises. The majority of their clients are public schools and school districts, as well as individual teachers…but it’s the public schools that hold the biggest coffers. And it’s worth taking a moment to define what an educational consultant does, because there are actually two categories of educational consultants operating these days, and the distinction between the two is rather instructive. The first category of consultant provides a service for which there is legitimate public demand: advising parents and students on finding placement in the most suitable private schools and universities. Many consultants in this category belong to the Independent Educational Consultant Association, a nonprofit clearinghouse which sets ethical standards for its members and publishes a membership directory for prospective clients. The other category of consultant provides services mainly to schools, based largely on manufactured demand (as when a new Ponzi scheme is hatched in the bowels of the educrat establishment, then hustled throughout the nation’s public schools), and for these there is no professional association, no uniform code of ethics. These consultants rely mainly on their resumes and endorsements from other educrats when marketing their wares to school districts. And it is this latter category to which many of the most prominent PLC gurus belong. For a group of people so adamant that teachers must submit to a universal standard of professionalism, the leaders of the Professional Learning Communities movement are curiously unconcerned with applying such standards to themselves.

We’re not saying the PLC cultists are engaged in the systematic fleecing of school districts. It would be unethical to make such claims without the appropriate research data. We’re merely pointing out that because of the way the educational consulting business (the second category) operates, the opportunity for such behavior exists. So does the motive to contrive one “research-based” educational reform after another and promote it as Best Practice. We might say that change for change’s sake is the educational consultant’s business, and business is good—a conclusion readily affirmed by a casual survey of the top consulting firms’ web sites. A visit to Solution Tree, one of the foremost marketers of PLC cultism, reveals that the latest PLC summit (at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim) is sadly sold out. At $685 registration per person, plus hotel and travel, no doubt the average attendee would’ve enjoyed a Delphic experience. Luckily, Solution Tree offers a horn o’plenty in books, videos, trinkets, and software (site license: $23,000) for eager PLC initiates, and a scenario-based online course for a mere $340.00. Let the learning begin.

Then there is the HOPE Foundation, where Failure Is NOT an Option™. “HOPE” stands for “Harnessing Optimism and Potential through Education.” The organization is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, honorarily chaired by the Nobel Prize-winning activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Its bestselling book, Failure Is NOT an Option™ (or simply FINO), was authored by HOPE president Alan M. Blankstein. FINO is perhaps the most succinct beginners’ guide to the philosophy and practice of Professional Learning Communities at 276 pages—and at a list price of $32.95, it’s also one of the most expensive. In fact that’s more than double the average list price of an adult trade paperback as of 2003, according to the R.R. Bowker Agency[2]. Just as conspicuous is the trademark (™) symbol following FINO’s title. One can only wonder why a nonprofit group would feel the need to trademark its ideas, unless, of course, it intends to maintain an exclusive franchise. But like Solution Tree, at least the good folks at HOPE offer an impressive array of other products and services for the PLC novice (DVD series: $990; institutes and summits, again $685 a head; on-site professional development—call or e-mail). And after all, school districts should spare no expense when providing training and development from the top minds in education, particularly when these products have the potential to dramatically improve schools, change lives, and generally inspire a new dawn for humanity. And if there are any nattering nabobs of negativism out there…if there are any recalcitrant teachers who harbor doubts about all this frantic learning, training, and spending…they’d better just keep their mouths shut, because this time the educrats have thirty-five years of research behind them[3].

That’s right: thirty-five years of research…from which the educrats have managed to draw nearly all the wrong conclusions. Thirty-five years of research, much of it ideologically motivated and hopelessly tainted. Thirty-five years of research, much of it culled—as the PLC gurus readily admit—not from education but from the world of business, specifically from the Strategic Planning movement of the 1960s. If the term “Strategic Planning” doesn’t ring a bell, the names of its revolting progeny ought to, because SP gave birth to those two ubiquitous phenomena of latter-day corporate America: the mission statement and vision statement. It is here that the collectivist yearnings of the PLC cultists first become apparent, and where their collective undergarments are first exposed. Bureaucracies, unfortunately, are a necessity of life. When organized to serve, not control, a bureaucracy can be an effective means to a greater end. As we’ve already argued, educrats ought to be managing school bureaucracies from the ground-up by providing essential safety and stability, by supporting teachers and students alike—and by keeping their collective noses, beaks, snouts, and claws out of instructional matters altogether. We think this rather obvious step could turn a good many faltering schools into success stories. Rare, though, is the educrat who’s satisfied with such duties as making sure the copy machines work, keeping Johnny from pulling a third fire-alarm prank this week, and patrolling the hallways. It’s much easier and ego-stimulating to sit in the bishop’s chair, hold meetings, and issue ex cathedra pronouncements all day. So what’s a poor educrat to do when one’s dressed for success, quaking with visions of grandeur, but perhaps somewhat disdainful of the tedious tasks involved? Here’s an idea: make teachers “share” responsibility for the whole bureaucracy. Make them do the things you won’t, and make them “share” the blame when the result is a Marx Brothers farce. Make them “share” the credit also when the result is successful. Either way, you win. That’s the beauty of collectivism: when one part of the collective doesn’t live up to its responsibilities, the rest of the collective must work that much harder to compensate, no matter what group or individual dropped the ball in the first place. So it should surprise no one that educrats, who by and large have failed to properly manage the nation’s schools, think the first step in reform ought to be making teachers “share” in that failure.

But we digress. The precursor to transforming a traditional, factory-model school into a glistening new Professional Learning Community is the concoction of “shared” mission, vision, values, and goals. As per numerous states’ laws, most school districts already have such manifestos in place, but that’s not enough for the PLC sophists—now every campus will develop its own mission statement, and sometimes even the departments within every campus. Why all the redundancy? “The sine qua non of a learning community is shared understandings and common values. What separates a learning community from an ordinary school is its collective commitment to guiding principles that articulate what the people in the school believe and what they seek to create. Furthermore, these guiding principles are not just articulated by those in positions of leadership; even more important, they are embedded in the hearts and minds of people throughout the school.[4]” One might nearly conclude that educrats were the first to conceive the very notion of organizational “mission” and “vision,” but sine cura, they merely bought it off the shelf. In the business world, where it actually originated, Strategic Planning was not intended to control “hearts and minds” but to enhance productivity—and it wasn’t a rousing success. Business researchers found that SP’s success or failure depended greatly on the organization’s existing culture, and that it could just as easily “inhibit creativity and adaptability and reinforce the status quo,”[5] probably because one organization’s “shared understandings and common values” can be another’s stifling groupthink and sycophancy. The only tangible benefits of SP seemed to come from its use as a public-relations tactic, as when a food chain like KFC declares its mission to “provide families with affordable delicious chicken dominant meals.”

In The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, author and business professor Henry Mintzberg sharply criticizes SP and its proliferation throughout the public and private sectors both: “At the very least, we have found that [strategic] planning is not ‘the one best way,’ that it certainly does not pay in general, and that at best, it may have some suitability in particular contexts, such as larger organizations, those in mass production, etc”[6]. After exploring SP’s spectacular failures in organizations like General Electric and the Department of Defense, Mintzberg argues in favor of more individually driven, “adhocracy” approaches to management. He also suggests that SP is a misguided attempt to apply Frederick Winslow Taylor’s famous time-and-motion studies of the early 1900s to the intellectual problems of planning and strategy, equating the act of loading pig iron onto a railroad car with making complex decisions. In a related article, Mintzberg observes, “We humans seem predisposed to formalize our behavior. But we must be careful not to go over the formalization edge. No doubt we must formalize to do many of the things we wish to in modern society. That is why we have organizations. But the experiences of what has been labeled strategic planning teach us that there are limits.…Systems do not think, and when they are used for more than the facilitation of human thinking, they can prevent thinking.”[7]

Nonetheless, just as it was dawning on the business community that SP and its various incarnations were no panacea for them, by the early 1990s the educrat community had gotten ahold of the concept, and the race to go all KFC in the schools was on. By 1995 several books and gurus were circulating in the educational marketplace, promoting SP as the new catch-all solution when not a single study had been done that validated its use in public schools[8]. But such has always been the accepted modus operandi within the educrat community: ideology first, proof later. Luckily, late that year one study appeared that seemed to validate at least part of the basic SP philosophy. Successful School Restructuring was a “synthesis” of four studies conducted by the University of Wisconsin, and one of its conclusions was that “the most successful schools …found a way to channel staff and student efforts toward a clear, commonly shared purpose for student learning; they created opportunities for teachers to collaborate and help one another achieve the purpose; and teachers in these schools took collective—not just individual—responsibility for student learning.”[9] Unfortunately, the authors didn’t specify what “shared purpose” and “collective responsibility” meant; these phrases were merely recycled throughout the report with little exploration of their practical implications. Later in the report the authors remarked: “A culture of collective responsibility puts more peer pressure and accountability on staff who may not have carried their fair share, but it can also ease the burden on teachers who have worked hard in isolation but who felt unable to help some students.”[10] This is a wildly optimistic assessment of how collective cultures operate, and one which some sociologists and anthropologists might well dispute.[11] It also ignores the possibility of some staff shirking their responsibilities and others having to compensate for them, as when administrators overload their faculties with multiple, résumé-padding initiatives while disregarding the basic material needs of the school. At any rate, none of these assertions justify requiring teachers and school staffs to hammer out formal mission and vision statements, nor do they justify “restructuring” schools to mimic the Fortune 500.

The PLC merchants will protest that PLC isn’t Strategic Planning; it merely evolved out of SP and other bodies of research like that produced by the Effective Schools Movement. They are better and smarter than their counterparts in business and industry: they’ve bested SP by making “learning,” not necessarily “planning,” the cornerstone of their cult. But have they really?

At its simplest, PLC doctrine goes something like this: in the age of No Child Left Behind, schools no longer have the luxury of offering mere opportunity for all with the result of learning for some; they must ensure actual learning for all. They should therefore be reorganized so that they’ll learn from experience—so that they can recognize as soon as possible when students aren’t performing and adapt and improve in midcourse. To that end, schools should establish a common mission and vision for learning, one that can be understood and applied across all the academic disciplines, and delineate specific and achievable goals to move the whole school towards its “shared” vision. Because collective effort is more powerful than individual effort, faculty and staff should be organized into mutually dependent teams that engage in constant, shared inquiry into best practice focused on continuous improvement. These teams should meet regularly to analyze hard data culled from student performance, and to formulate coordinated strategies designed to enhance that performance. They should also engage in regular experimentation, or “action research,” in the belief that no matter how well their methods work, there is always a better way. To ensure collective responsibility for every student, a series of systematic, school-wide interventions should be in place to identify students who are having difficulty as early as possible. These students should be provided the extra time and support they need to master the academic requirements, and they should be compelled to utilize that extra time and support through collective pressure. Through “shared” governance that involves the faculty, administration, and parents, the true Professional Learning Community will generate a “rising tide” of achievement and passion for learning (like every religious craze before it, PLC is all about the passion, baby) that will inspire every student to achieve to the best of her or his ability—and there is a growing consortium of real-life school examples that proves this. The elusive educrat dream of learning for all will finally become a reality.

Horsefeathers. Although some elements of PLC can indeed yield powerful results when considered separately, collectively they amount to a codification of the oldest and most noxious tendencies of America’s educrat class, a crass reassertion of educratic power over teachers, and yet another round of expensive, fraudulent fad-chasing that is destined to repeat itself in the long years to come. If more teachers would seize control over education rhetoric from the collective hands of educrats, they might find cause to raise each of the following individual objections to PLC cultism:

PLC Claim

Response

§ The mandates of No Child Left Behind have made the restructuring of schools into Professional Learning Communities an urgent necessity. § Schools perform best when united in a single collective purpose. § A common mission, vision, values, and goals are essential to building a true Professional Learning Community. § Research shows that teachers, students, and staff perform best when they work in interdependent teams. § Teachers working in isolation don’t improve and are therefore barriers to school progress. § Teachers should focus on learning, not teaching. § A true Professional Learning Community ensures equity by providing a guaranteed curriculum to all students with the same level of quality. § A true Professional Learning Community empowers teachers by drawing on and enhancing their leadership capacity. § A Professional Learning Community respects the opinions of all stakeholders by employing shared decision-making. § Teachers should hold themselves accountable for the results of their teaching. § Schools should be organized to learn and improve, not to repeat the same mistakes again and again. § The Professional Learning Communities model is backed by thirty-five years of sound research into what works best in schools. § A growing number of schools are achieving impressive academic results through the adoption of the Professional Learning Communities model. § When PLC reforms fail, it’s because the school faculty and staff did not enact the “true” tenets of PLC or did not follow through on PLC reforms. § Failure is not an option. § The Professional Learning Communities model is our one best hope for achieving learning for all.

§ Although the mandates of NCLB have compounded the burdens faced by the public schools, there is no NCLB “crisis” under which schools must all adopt PLC philosophy or perish. Many schools are performing brilliantly without the benefit of PLC indoctrination and “restructuring,” and the fact that the PLC gurus are using No Child Left Behind as a pretext to market their slickly packaged philosophy ought to arouse skepticism, if not outright suspicion. § The public schools exist to serve a variety of collective interests, not a single collective purpose. If unity of purpose were the driving engine behind the most successful schools, such schools wouldn’t offer special services, magnet programs, honors classes, or electives—and everyone would receive the same salary, which would be only fair in a truly collectivist culture. § Because of the site-based management reforms of the 1980s, most schools already have campus improvement plans in place which have to be updated every year. Not only do PLC reforms lead to redundancy, they necessitate more paperwork and committees that can only distract teachers from their jobs even further. As with Strategic Planning, the only immediate benefits from writing mission and vision statements come from their use as public-relations tactics, as when administrators issue pompous press releases boasting that “The Stepford Independent School District is evolving into a Professional Learning Community where failure is not an option.” Great for getting bond issues passed. § This is dogma talking, not research. Just as educrats prefer constructivism in the classroom, they likewise prefer collectivism in school organization. But there is not now—nor can there ever be—conclusive proof that collectivism is always right in any situation, for the precise reason that collectivism and individualism are both philosophical preferences. Strangely enough, this is a distinction that Progressive educrats are either unwilling or unable to acknowledge in their rhetoric. § Blarney. Independence doesn’t necessitate isolation, and it’s a more reliable source of creative inspiration than dependency. Many teachers thrive on independence—as do many students, for that matter—because it allows them to develop their craft in a variety of ways, such as reading, taking graduate courses, and voluntarily collaborating with their colleagues. Educrats, on the other hand, must foster a culture of dependency because without it nobody would depend on them. Therefore, teachers who think and work independently are an educrat’s worst nightmare. § One of the most poisonous insults in the PLC cultist’s rhetorical medicine-bag. The job of teachers is to teach. The job of students is to learn. While good teachers do everything in their power to ensure that students learn, it is ultimately the student’s choice whether to learn or not. The PLC literature uniformly ignores the role of student responsibility in this process, and that means the statement to the left is nothing but a glib slogan. The intended implication, of course, is that it is the teacher’s fault when any given student doesn’t learn. And incidentally, since teachers are charged with teaching, learning, and managing the school bureaucracy in a PLC, the role of educrats in this picture is conspicuously ill-defined. No doubt it involves contriving the inevitable sequel to PLC. § While the substance of a school’s curriculum might be guaranteed, total equity as to how it’s delivered is impossible, because the school and its teachers aren’t the only variables involved—the students are the greatest variable of all. Educrats want teachers to compensate for this problem by working harder. Teachers should respond by inviting educrats to teach their classes for them. § Translation: teachers will be exploited for their knowledge and manpower, will bear all the blame when the results are a failure, and “share” the credit with educrats when the results are a success. But if teachers are to bear collective responsibility for their school’s success, they ought to enjoy full democratic authority in deciding how their school will achieve it—without the benefit of educratic “vision.” § Educrats prefer sham democracies to real ones. No amount of “shared decision-making” will prevent educrats from pursuing their wasteful careerist agendas until fiscal and intellectual control of schools are wrested away from them. § An excellent assertion. And if teachers are to hold themselves accountable for student performance, then they’re also entitled to complete intellectual freedom as to how they achieve it, whether it’s individually, in teams, traditionally, progressively—whatever they prefer. Teacher accountability without intellectual freedom is like taxation without representation; it’s an intolerable state of affairs, and one that will end in revolt one way or another. § We revert to the words of Henry Mintzberg: systems do not think. Therefore it isn’t whole schools that learn; it’s the individuals within them. While schools should indeed use “hard” data to recognize gaps in student achievement, that doesn’t mean every teacher should follow the same remedy to close these gaps. Sameness and conformity lead to groupthink and sycophancy, which lead to schools repeating the same mistakes again and again. § When educrats use conversation-stoppers like “thirty-five years of research” to force their agenda, teachers need to ask an immediate series of questions: What research, by whom, and why? Quantitative or qualitative? Longitudinal or cross-sectional? Publicly funded or privately funded? No field of research is more vulnerable to selective interpretation than educational research. The Effective Schools movement has indeed produced a wealth of studies that deserve individual consideration by schools and teachers—but none of this research is universally applicable unless one uses an ideological base to interpret it. Because every teacher is owed the basic right to freedom from ideology, every teacher must be allowed to interpret and apply research as he or she sees fit. Educrats should not be trusted to mediate it, nor should they ever be allowed to silence teachers with their insulting, self-righteous, and duplicitous rhetoric. § And a longer list of schools is achieving the same thing without PLC ideology. To be sure, those schools that have turned their academic fortunes around while implementing PLC gimmickry deserve praise and prayers both. And those who’ve suffered the waste and indignity of PLC reform, enduring the gurus, the book-studies, the retreats, and the forced dependency only to wind up back where they started (or in the throes of “implementation dip”) deserve an apology. Who will be held accountable in schools where PLC causes more harm than good—the teachers, or the educrats who shoved it down their throats? We’re just asking. § This is the primary defense-mechanism invoked by every religion: You’re not believing enough. Any educational reform movement that employs the same reasoning as Linus in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown deserves to be left back in the pumpkin patch. § No, indeed: failure is a certainty, in life as well as in school. More useless sloganeering from the PLC cultists. § Only hustlers and politicians make such breathtaking, unfulfillable claims. The only remaining question is which category the PLC cultists belong in.

We could go on refuting the complex, sticky web of sophistry that is PLC point-for-point, but let’s not. In Chapter 2 of Professional Learning Communities at Work, authors Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker provide a fictional sketch of a Professional Learning Community in idealized splendor. We begin with Connie and Beth, two first-year teachers assigned to different schools. “Poor” Beth has been issued a death sentence, teaching remedial classes in the old factory-model high school. As her roommate, Connie, watches in mute distress, Beth is systematically ignored and victimized by her school administration, overloaded with behavior problems, grading, and a cheerleading sponsorship. This does indeed happen all too frequently in real life, and the remedy is that no first-year teacher should ever be required to handle special-population classes or extracurricular sponsorships. Nonetheless, the authors purposely choose the most dire of scenarios in order to contrast traditional schools with Progressive ones run under PLC philosophy; this straw-man technique now has Connie and the reader both ready to flee into the loving arms of the PLC cultists. As we might’ve surmised already, Connie, who’s just been hired at a Progressive high school, is about to experience educrat utopia.

Knowing [Beth’s] story as she did, Connie was relieved to get a phone call that summer from Jim, a veteran member of the faculty of her new school. Jim had participated on the committee that had interviewed her for the position. He congratulated her on the appointment to the social studies department, explained that he would be serving as her mentor during her first year, and invited her to lunch to make introductions and answer any questions she might have….Jim told her that the school provided two full days of orientation and another three days for the faculty to work together before students arrived.[12]

So far, no problem. Veteran teachers should always take the lead in welcoming the novices by introducing them to the school’s culture and offering their unconditional support. However, “culture” shouldn’t mean the artificial belief-system imposed by mission and vision statements, but rather the genuine norms and procedures, the key personnel (who can’t always be identified by job-title), and the hazards a new teacher is likely to encounter within that given school—the way things are, not the way things should be. If we presume, perhaps naively, that neophyte teachers come to the profession eager to help their students succeed, then the critical information they need before the first day of school is that which concerns them individually. They need to know, for example, how they will be evaluated, where and how to obtain supplies, what the disciplinary procedures are, the grading policy, and also what can be expected from the school’s student population (How accustomed are they to homework? How supportive are the parents generally? Are most students on a career, college, or vocational path?). While there’s some of this during Connie’s five-day orientation, she’s mostly left to discover these things as the school-year progresses. Meanwhile, there’s also a good deal of proselytizing from Connie’s principal, who divides Connie and the other initiates into groups in order to analyze the school’s vision statement (there’s a morning well-spent). Connie’s place within the whole organization may or may not be important to her depending on her long-term career goals, but presuming (again) that she developed her own philosophy of teaching before entering the profession, she’s entitled to know as much about how the school is going to support her as how’s she expected to support the school. On the plus-side, though: at least Connie gets her own faculty T-shirt.

Meeting with her interdisciplinary team—herself, plus an English teacher and a science teacher—Connie learns that she’s to “share” the same three-hour time-block with the other two, and that her team will have the same seventy-five students assigned to them for the next two years. At this point, the authors take a moment to “share” how elated Connie is with all this:

Connie was excited about this assignment. She believed in the benefits of an integrated curriculum. She felt that the long-term relationships with students would be beneficial, and she welcomed the idea of working closely with two colleagues who shared the same students. She was also enthusiastic about the fact that the teachers were free to schedule the three-hour block as they saw fit [emphasis added].[13]

Disregarding the debatable merits of interdisciplinary blocking, why is it so important to the authors that Connie believes, feels, and is enthusiastic? Presuming (again) that she’s a professional who’ll do the job as she’s directed to regardless of her personal views, what does it matter? And what happens if she doesn’t believe and feel enthusiastic about her assignment? How about a little healthy skepticism? It’s not exactly a shock to see the authors of Professional Learning Communities at Work assuming that teachers should believe every policy they’re handed to the depths of their souls—but it’s interesting to note their blithe assumption that teachers will.

After the school-year begins, Connie detects a problem with Matthew, one of her students. Seems that Matthew won’t do his work. She expresses her concern to him after class one day, and he expresses nothing in return but cold, blank disinterest. Connie is puzzled. Why won’t Matthew engage in the many opportunities for learning which she’s provided? Has she done something wrong? Luckily Jim has a suggestion: alert Matthew’s Student Support Team (SST), which consists of a school dean, a counselor, and a social worker. The SST convenes and brainstorms a solution: they’re going to call Matthew’s parents. The parents come to school for a meeting, and the SST devises a joint strategy by which Matthew’s parents can remember to make him do his schoolwork. By the meeting’s conclusion, everyone but Matthew has agreed that Matthew will do his schoolwork from now on. Problem solved.

One thing Connie will never want for in her PLC is the opportunity to “share” and “reflect.” The educratic preoccupation with psychology and group therapy permeates everything but the school’s tap water. Connie’s department meetings are abuzz with “lively give and take” and “probing” of one another’s thoughts. Her new-teacher orientations, which continue once a month, infuse her hungry soul with a sense of “shared experience.” She’s “invited” to fill out surveys and feedback instruments galore, keep journals, participate in small-group discussions, and “articulate her conclusions about her teaching,” all of which leaves her blissfully fulfilled. Never had she dreamed that her first teaching experience would feel so right, so perfect. And never does the combined blizzard of extra paperwork and meetings appear to discommode her in the least.

But wait, there’s more. As a true Professional Learning Community, Stepford High School is always on the prowl for new ways to improve itself. Connie is agog at the number of “action research” projects going on around her, like the one in which remedial students are split into two groups to see which teaching methods help them to fall farthest behind. (Perhaps the PLC commitment to equity evaporates when ideology is being tested.) Her own teaching team is offered a choice of three research-options to improve its collective practice: authentic assessment, student-centered learning, or Multiple Intelligences. Imagine: in a PLC, teachers have their choice of crackpot gimmicks in which to dabble. Who wouldn’t be overjoyed at such freedoms? And while the PLC priesthood will counter that this is only an example, that doesn’t mitigate the fact that in this ideal scenario, they’re already limiting teachers’ professional-development options to the things they deem most appropriate. This is not intellectual freedom; it’s anti-intellectual coercion.

Ditto for Connie’s individual professional-development options. As a potential career teacher, assuming she isn’t driven from the profession in five years as the statistics show is likely to happen, we might believe that Connie is entitled to develop her craft in her own way, and at her own convenience. But the PLC nobility would have it this way: Connie must submit an individualized professional growth plan to her department chair and principal, who no doubt will expect regular updates on her progress. In effect, Connie must ask the collective for permission to improve her teaching, must obtain their approval of her chosen area of investigation, and must progress according to their satisfaction, not just her own. And what if Connie’s long-term career goals don’t match the school’s or the department’s? Let’s say she plans, for example, to obtain her master’s degree in U.S. history, with a special focus on the Transcendentalist movement, and she wants to incorporate several primary-source readings by Emerson and Thoreau into her class and have her students develop their individual philosophies in reaction. She’s thinking of pursuing a college-teaching career down the road, and she wants the opportunity to gain a closer understanding of Transcendentalist thought herself while learning how to make it more accessible to a younger generation. She develops a unit that includes close, textual analysis of Transcendentalist writings, a formal composition, speech and debate activities, and online research. The composition and speech components require students to do their own work initially, requiring peer evaluation in the later drafting and performance stages. She takes an outline of this unit to her team teachers, who express some enthusiasm but have reservations about how much it will cut into their own lesson plans. The science teacher, in particular, doesn’t see how he can connect his science lessons to the Romantic mysticism of Emerson and Thoreau. Her department chair is more doubtful, in part because the Social Studies department has “action research” embedded in the curriculum which requires students to study their local communities in small teams. He worries that Connie’s Transcendentalist unit will undercut the students’ “real-world” learning by focusing too much on irrelevant book-learning and, as he calls it, “past-ology.” Connie’s principal, Dr. Lilliput, is more emphatic, pointing out that there is very little “best practice” pedagogy in her outline and not enough cooperative learning to guarantee the engagement of every student. She reminds Connie that the purpose of professional development at Stepford High School is to become better teachers, not better philosophers. Connie finally implements a much-diluted form of the idea in her class, though her initial enthusiasm for it is long-lost, having been sacrificed to the needs of the collective.

But all’s well that ends well in a Professional Learning Community. No longer does Connie have to rely on her own intellect to determine what’s right for herself and her students; the collective determines both of these needs for her. Unlike “poor” Beth, Connie is now one with her profession and her school, an integrated synapse in the collective hive-mind of her school organism, happy to service the will of the collective and carry out its unending slate of initiatives…which have a habit of originating with a select few in the collective’s invisible top-down hierarchy.

However, in the spirit of “lively give and take,” let’s rain on the PLC cultists’ parade by adding to this scenario. Given that the ideal can only exist in some Platonic netherworld of which this reality is at best an approximation, let’s explore what can go wrong when PLC ideology is implemented under less-than-ideal conditions, and by less-than-ideal leadership:

· During her many team and committee meetings, Connie began to notice that a great dea