Monthly Archives: February 2013

CCSS, Education, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, No Excuses Reform, World War Z

Lessons from the Zombie Apocalypse

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At the intersection of horror and science fiction (SF) lies a haunting lesson in the allegory rising from narratives such as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956): By the time the apocalypse happens, it won’t look like we expect, and political and public recognition of the event will come way too late.

As a life-long SF fan and educator for three decades, then, I have found that Max Brooks, in his World War Z, has inadvertently written a series of lessons for the education reform apocalypse that is already happening, and almost no one is willing to admit it.

I think we must not ignore that the zombie genre is a mythology about the brain: The infection attacks the brain and the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain. For an educator, these are not trivial matters.

Brooks crafts an oral history that looks back on the human race barely surviving a zombie apocalypse. As the snippets of interviews reveal, the political and military elites around the world failed to act with clarity and often hid the rising zombie plague from the public in calculated and horrifying ways: Decisions were made, for example, about who should survive and who was expendable.

In one section we learn that to identify infected zombies, air planes killed hundreds of people so that the infected could rise from the carnage and be easily identified.

Another response to the zombie outbreak involves the government and Big Pharma. Initially, the zombie infection is identified as rabies so a rabies vaccine is mass-produced, primarily to allay fear although the government and pharmaceutical companies knew the vaccine to be ineffective. Money was to be made and the ends justified the means.

But one of the most powerful lessons to me is in the Great Panic section, an interview with Maria Zhuganova. This oral history focuses on the actions of the military in conjunction with civilian oversite, a man call “Rat Face.”

In Zhuganova’s explanation, we discover that the soldiers are forced to enact decimation, as she explains:

“To ‘decimate’…I used to think it meant just to wipe out, cause horrible damage, destroy…it actually means to kill by a percentage of ten, one out of every ten must die…and that’s exactly what they did to us….

“We would be the ones to decide who would be punished. Broken up into groups of ten, we would have to vote on which one of us was going to be executed. And then we…the soldiers, we would be the ones to personally murder our friends….

“Brilliance….Conventional executions might have reinforced discipline, might have restored order from the top down, but by making us all accomplices, they held us together not just by fear, but by guilt as well. We could have said no, could have refused and been shot ourselves, but we didn’t. We went right along with it….We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say ‘They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.’ The freedom, God help us, to say ‘I was only following orders.'” (pp. 81-83)

And here we sit in the second decade of the twenty-first century, with a film version of World War Z and pretending that a horror/SF tale has no value beyond our entertainment.

While our government conspires with Big Testing to implement scorched-earth policies with our children because the public is afraid of our international competitiveness and does not question the effectiveness of testing, despite the evidence to the contrary.

And like the soldiers, teachers are compelled to be accomplices in Common Core State Standards implementation and preparing our students for the tests to follow.

The decimation of public education has infected us all.

The only real antidote, unlike the zombie apocalypse, is that educators, students, and parents must all choose not to follow orders, not to become the accomplices that allow the decimation.

Education, Educational Research, Teaching, Testing, World War Z

Recommended Reading for Educators Trapped in the Machine

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from World War Z, Max Brooks

“From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say, ‘They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.’ The freedom, God help us, to say ‘I was just following orders.'” (p. 83)

from Engel, M. (2000). The struggle for control of public education: Market ideology vs. democratic values. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

“[I]t is nothing short of disastrous that more than ever before, one antidemocratic system of ideas—market ideology—almost exclusively defines the terms of educational politics and charts the path of education reform

“…[I]deology is important in understanding educational change….Ideology is nonetheless often overlooked or at best misapplied by mainstream social scientists as a factor in politics. This is due in part to the dominance of quantitative methodologies in political science, which leads to the trivialization of the concept into conveniently measurable but irrelevant labels….Market ideology has triumphed over democratic values not because of its superiority as a theory of society but in part because in a capitalist system it has an inherent advantage.” (pp. 3, 8-9)

from Callahan, R. E. (1962). Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the social forces that have shaped the administration of the public schools. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

“For while schools everywhere reflect to some extent the culture of which they are a part and respond to forces within that culture, the American public schools, because of the nature of their pattern of organization, support, and control, were especially vulnerable and responded quickly to the strongest social forces. . . .The business influence was exerted upon education in several ways: through newspapers, journals, and books; through speeches at educational meetings; and, more directly, through actions of school boards. It was exerted by laymen, by professional journalists, by businessmen or industrialists either individually or in groups. . ., and finally by educators themselves. Whatever its source, the influence was exerted in the form of suggestions or demands that the schools be organized and operated in a more businesslike way and that more emphasis by placed upon a practical and immediately useful education….

“The tragedy itself was fourfold: that educational questions were subordinated to business considerations; that administrators were produced who were not, in any true sense, educators; that a scientific label was put on some very unscientific and dubious methods and practices; and that an anti-intellectual climate, already prevalent, was strengthened.” (pp. 1, 5-6, 246)

CCSS, Daily Kos, Democracy, Education, Educational Research, NCTE, Testing, Truthout

Educators: “[N]ot the Time. . .to Follow the Line of Least Resistance”

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In a major journal from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), a teacher and scholar laments the current state of implementing the research in language: “A brief consideration will indicate reasons for the considerable gap between the research currently available and the utilization of that research in school programs and methods” (p. 87). [1]

And the discussion of that gap between research and classroom practices leads to this conclusion:

“Most thinking persons agree that the existence of civilized man is threatened today. While language is not food or drink, and will not satisfy the hungry and thirsty, it is the medium by which we must do much of our learning and panning, and by which we must think out solutions to our problems if we are not to solve them by the direct method of force. No sensible person believes that language will cure all difficulties; but the thoughtful person will certainly agree that language is a highly important factor in promoting understanding, and a most dangerous factor in promoting understanding between individuals and between the countries individuals represent. Moreover, language is a significant factor in the psychological adjustment of the individual. This is not the time for the teacher of any language to follow the line of least resistance, to teach without the fullest possible knowledge of the implications of his medium [emphasis added]. Before we, either as individuals or as a Council, experiment with methods of doing specific things or block out a curriculum, let us spend some time with the best scholars in the various fields of language study to discover what they know, what they believe uncertain and in need of study. Let us go to the best sources and study the answers thoughtfully. The game of Gossip is not for us.” (p. 94)

While those of us living our lives as teachers, especially teachers of literacy in K-12 settings or in teacher education, may recognize many points above in our current debates about education reform—including some of the debates that simmer below the surface of the workings of NCTE—this piece is by Lou LaBrant and was published in the January 1947 issue of Elementary English (now Language Arts).

More than six decades after LaBrant wrote about the gap between research and practice, More than six decades after she implores us that “[t]his is not the time for the teacher of any language to follow the line of least resistance,” educators across the U.S. are faced with the failure of leaders, the public, and professional organizations in the face of the promise of universal public education and its potential to drive the great hope we call democracy.

The Locus of Authority: Our Time for Resistance

At the 100th anniversary annual convention for NCTE in Chicago (November 2011), I presented during a panel on the Council’s century of leadership in the field of literacy—reading from the essay above by LaBrant and suggesting how she would have responded to the current calls for Common Core State Standards (CCSS), increased testing, intensified value-added methods (VAM) for teacher accountability linked to those tests, and accelerating mandates driving teacher preparation and accreditation of colleges and departments of education.

I know from my work as the biographer of LaBrant that she was a powerful voice for the professionalism, scholarship, and teacher autonomy—including herself and every teacher with whom she interacted. LaBrant, in fact, during the early 1930s when enrolled in her doctoral program at Northwestern University, faced pressure while teaching English to implement required reading lists, textbooks, and benchmark testing, all of which she knew to be flawed practices.

What did LaBrant do?

She fabricated lesson plans with her roommate, the foreign language teacher, and submitted them each week while practicing the pedagogy she embraced—student choice in what they read and wrote, holistic instruction and assessment of literacy. At the end of the year, LaBrant and her students (yes, in the early 1930s) faced end-of-course testing, and LaBrant’s students received top scores. Consequently, she was praised by the principal in front of the entire faculty for her dedication to the prescribed policies.

This tension between bureaucratic mandates that seek to shift the locus of authority (consider Freire’s distinction between “authoritarian” and “authoritative”) away from the teacher and within the standards and tests designed and prescribed by the state is not entirely new (except for the intensity), but neither is the need for teachers to own their autonomy, their professionalism—to be that resistance.

Also at the 2011 NCTE annual convention, a convention of celebration, Susan Ohanian, Stephen Krashen, Carol Mikoda, Bess Altwerger, Joanne Yatvin, and Richard J. Meyer proposed a resolution: NCTE will oppose common core standards and national tests. [2] This act of resistance, this act of teacher autonomy and professionalism resulted in what Catherine Gewertz in the Curriculum Matters blog at Education Week describes as: “The National Council of Teachers of English was asked by a group of its members to take a strong stand against the common standards, but it declined to do so.”

This is a time when political leaders, the public, and national organizations have abdicated their moral obligation to create and maintain universal public education for all children as a sacred trust between a free people and the promise of democracy.

As the faculty of Garfield High School (Seattle, WA) take a principled stand against MAP testing as a beacon of hope in the fog of corporate education reform, this is also a time for all educators to shine every light of our autonomy on what is right and what is wrong in the day-to-day pursuit of teaching children.

“This is not the time for the teacher of any [student] to follow the line of least resistance, to teach without the fullest possible knowledge of the implications of his medium.”

References

Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare to teach. Trans. D. Macedo, D. Koike, & A. Oliveira. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Trans. P. Clarke. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

LaBrant, L. (1947, January). Research in language. Elementary English, 24(1), 86-94.

[1] Originally posted at Daily Kos (November 21, 2011) and cross-posted at Truthout (November 28, 2011). Reposting here as a call for solidarity among educators inspired by the resistance of Garfield High School faculty (Seattle, WA) to the corrosive impact of MAP and other elements of high-stakes testing in U.S. education. The original piece has been revised.

[2] Revised resolution passed: Resolution Proposal to Support: No Confidence in United States Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan

Charleston Post and Courier, Charter schools, Educational Research, Media

Charter Schools: A Primer

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Stakeholders in education include virtually everyone in a democracy—students, parents, teachers, politicians, business leaders, the media, and more.

Historically, public education in the U.S. has experienced two continual popular narratives: (1) public schools are failing, and (2) [insert reform here] is needed to overhaul schools for (a) international competitiveness and (b) a stronger workforce.

Recently, charter schools have seen a significant rise in advocacy and implementation as a complex mechanism for reform. Along with that rise has come a new wave of research on the effectiveness of those charter schools, particularly as they compare with traditional public schools (TPS).

Most stakeholders in education receive their information about charter schools from the media; thus, when the media covers the charter school debate and research, the influence of those media accounts can be disproportional to the quality.

For example, The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC) has taken a strong position for charter schools in SC: “But there is one area where the state has taken bold steps to improve education: charter schools.” However, an analysis of charter schools in SC that compares state report card data between those charter schools and  TPS using the state metric of “Schools with Students Like Ours” revealed in 2012:

Charter schools in SC have produced outcomes below and occasionally typical of outcomes of public schools; thus, claims of exceptional outcomes for charter schools in SC are unsupported by the data (3/53 ABOVE Typical, 17/53 Typical, and 33/53 BELOW Typical).

Since the pattern of advocacy and implementation of charter schools includes a significant amount of support from political leaders, business leaders, the media, and advocates (such as charter-based organizations and think tanks), most stakeholders need a clear and accurate primer addressing what we currently know about charter school effectiveness, and that must be guided by this caution from Matthew Di Carlo:

There’s a constant barrage of data, reports and papers flying around, and sifting through it with a quality filter, as well as synthesizing large bodies of usually mixed evidence into policy conclusions, are massive challenges. Moreover, we all bring our pre-existing beliefs, as well as other differences, to the table. There are no easy solutions here.

But, one useful first step, at least in education, would be to stop pointing fingers and acknowledge two things. First, neither ‘side’ has anything resembling a monopoly on the misuse of evidence. And, second, such misuse has zero power if enough people can identify it as such.

One overarching point needs to be made about the charter school debate first. Charter advocacy and criticism both too often fail in their use of data, as Di Carlo warns, but both also make another mistake, ignoring the evidence base entirely.

What, then, is the current state of evidence on charter school effectiveness? [1] And, how do charter schools address, or not, clearly identified problems and goals of TPS—including what questions and concerns remain in the context of what the evidence suggests about charter school effectiveness?

• Research has repeatedly shown that measurable outcomes (test scores, graduation rates, college admissions rates, etc.) from charter schools produce about the same range of quality as TPS (and private schools) and that the type of school structure (charter v. TPS) appears not to be a determining factor in the outcomes with the demographics of the students and the community remaining powerful correlations with those outcomes.

• Claims of “miracle” schools fail to stand up under close scrutiny, but even if outliers exist in charter schools, outliers exist in TPS and private schools as well, and thus, outliers may prove to be ineffective models for scaling any success.

• Charter schools do not appear to address and often seem to mirror or increase key problems with TPS: (a) teacher assignment (high-needs students assigned to inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers), (b) class and racial segregation, (c) selectivity and attrition of students, (d) teacher turnover and retention [“churn”], (e) concerns about excluding the most difficult sub-categories of high-needs students [English language learners, special needs students, highest-poverty students, students from home that cannot or will not pursue choices].

• Charter school student outcomes are often complicated by issues of selectivity, attrition, and scalability.

• Some charter school ideologies—notably “no excuses” policies—trigger concerns about classism and racism that are rarely weighed against data.

• Charter schools (along with school choice and home schooling) introduce problems concerning athletic participation as well as a wide range of extracurricular participation in TPS.

• Charter schools also complicate already stressed and controversial TPS funding policies and agendas.

The charter school debate seems to warrant a similar caution that many other reforms now deserve, including VAM-style teacher evaluation. As Di Carlo explains:

As discussed in a previous post, there is a fairly well-developed body of evidence showing that charter and regular public schools vary widely in their impacts on achievement growth. This research finds that, on the whole, there is usually not much of a difference between them, and when there are differences, they tend to be very modest. In other words, there is nothing about “charterness” that leads to strong results.

With commitments to charter schools, many policy makers are moving too quickly and failing to examine the evidence so far along with weighing that evidence against clearly defined problems with TPS and specifically identified goals for the reforms.

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[1] A number of studies inform the list above. Readers are invited to examine a wide array of research and reports listed below, but also urged to search for new evidence:

Charter Schools Not the Answer, Especially if We Fail to Identify the Question, P. L. Thomas

Comparing Teacher Turnover In Charter And Regular Public Schools, Matthew Di Carlo

Charter Schools posts at The Shanker Blog

Search “charter schools” at NEPC

Charter Schools posts at School Finance 101 (Bruce Baker)

Charter Schools research at NCSPE

Search “charter schools” at EPAA