On 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers'

“No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distanced from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models among the oppressors.” Paulo Freire[1]

And here we are. It was inevitable that we would have to land here at some point. I had no wish to. I take no joy in this at all. I have absolutely nothing personal whatsoever against the teachers at this school, wish them and their students well and congratulate them on their wonderful academic results.

While Michaela Community School welcomes visitors, when one is potentially seen as a ‘detractor’, though I don’t recall ever made public mention of the school itself (till now), entrance is not worth attempting to obtain (though I’m not without friends who have eyes, ears and notebooks). But there is plenty of video one can watch as the head teacher clearly enjoys a substantial public profile and, should you so wish, you can waste hours of your life watching countless interviews in which she sits almost beatifically intoxicated on the sense of her own virtue as she extols the ‘harmony’ of the place and how very happy the children are. “Visitors to our school are always taken aback by the painstaking, precise[2] harmonisation.”[3] Imagine these words coming out of the mouth of someone in a uniform and see how things feel then.

First, the positives: in sitting down at my friend, Mark’s house in Aylesbury and reading ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way’, which is endorsed by that paragon of veracity, Boris Johnson and by that highly knowledgeable teacher, Toby Young; after having endured an introduction by the editor in which the word ‘detractor’ is used three times, there are two identical statements about how happy the kids are there, and in which the headteacher speaks, rather unfortunately, of her “struggle” (one might have thought someone genuinely knowledge-rich might have avoided the obvious resonance here), we land on Joe Kirby’s absolutely excellent chapter, ‘Knowledge, Memory and Testing’. In this, we might see, aside from the very specific culture of the place, which appears to have been lifted directlyfrom some of the American charter schools, perhaps why the school has been so successful in terms of academic results.

Put simply, the level of academic expectations that Joe outlines along with a superbly imagined curriculum are almost unbelievable. There are pedagogic considerations as well, and this chapter is very much informed by cognitive science, but the curriculum is organised on chronological lines so that kids start with Ancient Greece and Rome in Year 7. This means that they study Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’ Antigone, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Cicero’s rhetoric, Euripides’ Medea, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar along with Senecan stoicism. Other subjects all study areas related ancient and classical civilisations so the curriculum dovetails. The level of expectations of what inner-city students might understand is off the charts! Joe writes of the vision that they study “only the most challenging topics with the most stretching vocabulary.”[4] This is clearly the key, and I’ve always wanted to implement something along these lines myself, but Michaela has done it. In Year 8, they move time period on, the same in Year 9. The level and depth of education they are providing in terms of curriculum is stunning, and people should be utterly applauding it and asking to see their schemes of work to see if they can nick ideas.

If we don’t think we have anything to learn from this school, we’re wrong and guilty of blind arrogance. I’ve never had any real aversion to the idea of a knowledge-rich curriculum: rather that than knowledge-poor! Sometimes, I’ve felt that it is too often an expression of irony when it dribbles from apparently knowledge-free mouths, but seeing it so well thought out and outlined here is inspirational. “We see a knowledge-led curriculum as teaching them to remember a broad, deep subject expertise that will give them a lifelong curiosity and love for learning.”[5] And hooray for that.

Their idea of taking struggling readers out of French to do reading catch-up lessons is good, though hardly revolutionary, and the desire to create a reading culture is sincere. The insistence that class readers in form time are all classic pieces of literature is a doling out of a very large portion of (seemingly exclusively white) cultural capital. But if you do not read in precisely the proscribed manner, are caught not doing exactly what the teacher wants, you receive the dread demerit, there is much choral repetition of what the teacher has just said which, while not necessarily truly awful, does take the form of a military drill, and the sheer, pulsing self-regard of some of the claims are as stupid as they are irritating: “Michaela teachers read beautifully to children”[6] and “my brilliant colleagues”.[7]

In the chapter ‘Labels Damage Children’, someone who, so it seems, had at the point of publication, responsibility for special needs provision at the school, denies the need for any adaptation of teaching for students with special needs. Its author, from this evidence, someone of meagre experience at the time, outlines the tragedy of special needs students having teachers with the least experience. We are told that “at Michaela we stand firm with a growing number of educators [this is an invention; such people do not exist] who refuse to let labels damage a child’s education.”[8] She refers to a medical condition as “an excuse”[9] and states emphatically that, “for a child to be convinced of some fundamental inability to achieve at such a young and impressionable age is tragic.”[10]

This is stunning. If you follow this logic, a child who receives a diagnosis of dyslexia or autism is damaged by that diagnosis. This is what happens when people who know little of the thing they speak about ascend to positions of minor influence. 

The author continues: “to impose a label on a child is to remove her agency.”[11] So … to recognise that a student has dyslexia and needs special support is to remove her agency. This is patently untrue. Apparently, such a diagnosis makes the child in question “feel hopeless.”[12] Clearly, this is the reason parents don’t fight tooth and nail to obtain such a diagnosis. Clearly, this is the reason a student with oppositional defiance disorder should just be treated the same as everyone else. Clearly, this is why a student with autism should be overloaded sensorily, touched often and forced to make eye contact. The chapter is as intellectually infuriating as it is concerning. Her solution: “the weakest pupils need more rigour.[13]“ Brain injury? More rigour. Sensory impairment? More rigour. Cerebral palsy? More rigour. Down’s syndrome? More rigour. From an abusive background? More abuse. 

The author’s ‘solution’ to dyslexia is horrible: get the dyslexic child to read a piece out loud in class that is too difficult for them. This solution to a knotty, historical and, in some cases, almost irresolvable problem is to put a struggling child into a kettle of public shame and turn the switch on. She follows this up with, “At Michaela, we refuse to allow our children to be dragged down by the label-obsessed status quo.”[14] She denies the existence of ADHD (which is underdiagnosed in the UK: I know this as my son has it, and it can be ruinous), and states that a dyslexic child struggling to maintain focus in a lesson is a ‘choice’. 

This chapter is followed up by the then head of maths enjoying the perverse pleasure of arguing against truth in a chapter entitled ‘Competition is Crucial’. Here the right-wing clichés jump joylessly off the charts! She starts with repetition of the tiresome and clumsy satire of the ‘prizes for all’ culture, and this will might you an indication of the intellectual level of this, but she then argues that the public ranking of students is good for them (!). To say this is hogwash is to unfairly mispresent hogwash. How the hell can it be good for a student who finds themselves always at the bottom of such a list? How the hell is it good for the student at the top? An ex-student of mine in Australia was top of the ATAR rankings (students are put in rank order state by state in some subjects) in English for the whole of New South Wales. He detested being publicly ranked as being better than his friends: it affected relationships which would otherwise have been organic and functional and made classmates, friends and teachers deferent to him. He despised it. 

The author suggests that the following is a good idea: “merits and demerits are displayed to the whole form on as near daily basis with the form tutors narrating improvements, regressions [and look at the deeply ugly use of language here] and particularly good or poor performance.”[15] This public upbraiding is likely to cause serious long-term damage to such a child (but at least we’ve let the struggling child’s peers know that ‘choices lead to consequences’).[16]

In the chapter ‘The Devil is in the Detail’, Sarah Cullen claims that, when she arrived at the school, she “marvelled at how silent classrooms could result in happy, courteous children”[17] – I agree: I’d marvel at it – before expending the usual knowledge-poor drivel about correcting eye contact and a further mention of the ruling class garbage of ‘character’. In ‘No Nonsense; No Burnout’ someone who admits to having been teaching for three years, (in which case, maybe shut up) uses language from banking, “learning return”, “low leverage components,”[18] argues that marking has no impact and is “meaningless”[19] and that expert teachers are “superficially competent.”[20] In ‘Rethinking Initial Teacher Training’ someone who appears not to have been teaching for even three years puts Michaela’s approach up against the whole history of academia, the whole tradition of teaching, and presents Michaela’s approach as “one particular, optimal pedagogy”,[21] adding “there is an optimal way to teach.”[22] In ‘Teaching without QTS’, we are informed by an unqualified teacher that she doesn’t think “QTS is necessary”[23] and that qualified teachers “are no longer experts in their subject, [I beg to differ] but simply ‘experts’ in progressive education.”[24] How does she know? She isn’t a qualified teacher. She has no experience of the version of teacher training she is slagging off.

Jo Facer’s chapter on CPD at Michaela: Question Everything contains a weirdness in it, in that I know Jo to be inordinately well read, but there is little sign of this at all in a chapter that contains many reverberating certainties. Jo states that “the reality is that no single CPD session will directly or immediately improve anyone’s practice.”[25] This is not at all true as anyone exposed to really high-quality training from genuine experts (as opposed to the snake oil panacea that routines are the only thing that counts when they are, in fact, a minor and intellectually inconsequential part of teaching) will know. And let’s have a look at the values as identified in this chapter: “authority, loyalty, sanctity;”[26]then, “culture, authority, sanctity, loyalty;”[27] and here’s the big one, “at Michaela, we reject this complexity, and focus on simplicity.”[28] We have already seen what the desire to simplify the complex signifies, and the demand for loyalty from children is mildly petrifying. Why should they be loyal? What to? What for? The desire for loyalty from children is an extremist position, a statutory enforcement of submission. One would hope that Jo has softened her view now she has more experience.

Reading chapter after horrific chapter of emphatic, juvenile assertions of the professional and intellectual superiority of a group of very recently graduated twenty-somethings causes one to ask an array of questions: had they ever actually stopped and thought that there was a possibility that they might be wrong about anything? How far is Michaela influenced by the American charter school model? How far is it influenced by ‘Teach Like a Champion’? How far do they go to get their exceptional results?

 

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[1] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin: London 1996 [1970]) p.36.

[2] Claims to scientific precision? Tick. Brutalisation of language? Present also. Moral certainty? That’s there too. 

[3] Lia Martin, Changing my Mind in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p185.

[4] Joe Kirby, Knowledge, Memory and Testing in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p21.

[5] Joe Kirby, Knowledge, Memory and Testing in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p26.

[6] Katie Ashford, How Reluctant Readers Learn to Love Reading in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p41.

[7] Katie Ashford, How Reluctant Readers Learn to Love Reading in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p43.

[8] Katie Ashford, Labels Damage Children in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p122.

[9] Katie Ashford, Labels Damage Children in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p122.

[10] Katie Ashford, Labels Damage Children in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p122.

[11] Katie Ashford, Labels Damage Children in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p123.

[12] Katie Ashford, Labels Damage Children in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p123.

[13] Katie Ashford, Labels Damage Children in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p123.

[14] Katie Ashford, Labels Damage Children in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p125.

[15] Dani Quinn, Competition is Crucial in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p128.

[16] This is true. Teachers’ choices also cause consequences.

[17] Sarah Cullen, The Devil is in the Detail in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p138.

[18] Jess Lund, No Nonsense; No Burnout in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p144.

[19] Jess Lund, No Nonsense; No Burnout in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p150.

[20] Jess Lund, No Nonsense; No Burnout in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p150.

[21] Jake Plastow-Chason, Rethinking Initial Teacher Training in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p158.

[22] Jake Plastow-Chason, Rethinking Initial Teacher Training in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p165.

[23] Sarah Clear, Teaching Without QTS in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p166.

[24] Sarah Clear, Teaching Without QTS in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p173.

[25] Jo Facer, CPD at Michaela: Question Everything in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p188.

[26] Jo Facer, CPD at Michaela: Question Everything in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p189.

[27] Jo Facer, CPD at Michaela: Question Everything in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p196.

[28] Jo Facer, CPD at Michaela: Question Everything in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p196.