Somethinig rattling around my head from the conference:
Premise: Graduating education majors and newly certificated teachers are recruited into a national organization whose purpose is to maintain professional ethics in the educational context.
Signing up would imply commitment to standards, to inquiry, and to a conversation around good and evil in the classroom and the schoolhouse. The organization would necessarily have no specific agenda other than the moral and intellectual strength of education workers. It would, however, be oriented toward new, idealistic teachers rather than older teachers with vested office-political investments and strong incentives to ass-covering. Actually, it would be worth considering incorporating classified staff as well, not to mention such administrators as can be found who would be interested.
There is a profound incentive for educators to conform to bureaucratic norms, because with conformity comes safety and increased access to resources; the more we play along, the better we do. There is no naturally occurring countervailing tendency to go against the grain, and especially no ethical impulses other than those which are determined by the hoary gods of compliance and economy can appear only when injected into the situation by an act of will stemming from the personal conscience of an individual. The struggles of such individuals typically take place in a vacuum or in total silence — they should be recorded, broadcast, told and retold in the history of a war of good and evil, or of good and mediocrity, which is really the same thing.
Such a society would profit from secrecy in the interest of protecting those who speak the truth; however, it would be a hell of a thing to keep secret.
Analyses of the civil rights movement have shown the necessity of social networks capable of exerting moral authority (i.e., guilt) over members for sustaining resistance to a status quo; many idealistic workers in education are isolated and because of their isolation lose the capacity for idealism.
This would result in a subculture within the existing ortho-cultures, a sub-culture which would probably not be able to leverage open change, but which could sustain a habit of truth-telling and a persistent consciousness of the ethical issues which would otherwise go unnoticed.
Indeed, truth-telling would, I think, be the cornerstone, because it is not a partisan value, but institutional culture oppresses it on all sides. Additionally, and no doubt controversially, there would be a commitment not to displace moral responsibility onto students or parents. This is not to say we should deny the responsibility of any party, but to reject the functionless instinct to refer to the responsibility of others when we could reflect more fruitfully on our own.
it is not necessary to be soft-hearted; medical ethics does not preclude triage, which is a necessarily hard-hearted process without which emergency medicine is impossible….