Monthly Archives: August 2014

Adrienne Rich, Capitalism, CCSS, Childhood, Critical Pedagogy, Democracy, Education, education reform, Equity, Howard Zinn, indoctrination, Media, Poverty, Public Intellectual, race, social justice, socialism, Standards, Testing, Workers

Howard Zinn: “education cannot be neutral on the critical issues of our time”

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[Header Photo by Ankush Minda on Unsplash]

24 August 1922—Howard Zinn was born. His life and career spanned the twentieth century and into the first decade of the twenty-first. It is his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times, for me, that speaks to the enduring power of Zinn’s metaphor, particularly for teachers.

Historically and currently, teacher remain under the demand that their teaching—and even their lives—remain neutral, not political. University professors—such as Zinn—also face disciplinary and public expectations of objectivity, dispassion—their work as public intellectuals either shunned or unrecognized.

In that context, K-12 education and university education suffer the same ultimate failure found in journalism, a flawed pursuit of objectivity, the faux-neutral pose of representing both sides.

So on the day of Zinn’s birth, it continues to be important not only to read and listen to Zinn, but also to act on Zinn, for it is action, after all, that Zinn lived and called for.

“When I became a teacher,” Zinn explains in You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, “I could not possibly keep out of the classroom my own experiences”:

I have often wondered how so many teachers manage to spend a year with a group of students and never reveal who they are, what kind of lives they have led, where their ideas come from, what they believe in, or what they want for themselves, for their students, and for the world.

Does not the very fact of that concealment teach something terrible—that you can separate the study of literature, history, philosophy, politics, the arts, from your own life, your deepest convictions about right and wrong?

Concealment is a political act, and in the face of the tragedy surrounding the police shooting of Michael Brown, the educational response has been exactly that, concealment. But as poet Adrienne Rich has confronted:

The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable.

Instead of striking the masked political poses of neutrality, objectivity, and dispassion, Zinn called for transparency:

In my teaching I never concealed my political views: my detestation of war and militarism, my anger at racial inequality, my belief in democratic socialism, in a rational and just distribution of the world’s wealth. I made clear my abhorrence of any kind of bullying, whether by powerful nations over weaker ones, governments over their citizens, employers over employees, or by anyone, on the Right or the Left, who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth.

Having taught in rural Southern public schools for 18 years and then 13 more years in higher education, I can attest that Zinn’s argument is challenged only because of the positions he holds and not because he took positions. You see, in K-12 classrooms, especially in history classes, textbooks, curriculum, and teachers always represented positions by framing as neutral the mainstream perspectives found among them all: a blind allegiance to capitalism, representing the U.S. as a righteous military victor, whitewashing every struggle in the country’s history, celebrating the wealthy and powerful while turning a blind eye to their many sins.

It has never been that our classrooms are neutral, as Zinn confronts, but that our classrooms have been passive passengers on the moving train of social and cultural indoctrination, the sort of indoctrination that benefits the few who have wealth and power built on their privilege at the expense of the many—workers, racial minorities, women, children, and the impoverished.

As Zinn recognized:

This mixing of activism and teaching, this insistence that education cannot be neutral on the critical issues of our time, this movement back and forth from the classroom to the struggles outside by teachers who hope their students will do the same, has always frightened the guardians of traditional education. They prefer that education simply prepare the new generation to take its proper place in the old order, not to question that order.

And although written well before the current education reform movement built on accountability, standards, and high-stakes testing, Zinn’s memoir has identified the Orwellian reality of that movement: Those decrying the status quo are those in service of the status quo. Education reform is the pursuit of maintaining, not reforming.

This call for teaching as activism was join by Zinn’s disciplinary challenge as well:

History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history—while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance—might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.

Here, Zinn recognizes both the power of disciplinary knowledge and the concurrent danger of codified disciplinary knowledge (prescriptive standards, curriculum). Zinn’s confrontation, then, speaks to the foundational principles expressed by critical scholar Kincheloe:

Thus, proponents of critical pedagogy understand that every dimension of schooling and every form of educational practice are politically contested spaces. Shaped by history and challenged by a wide range of interest groups, educational practice is a fuzzy concept as it takes place in numerous settings, is shaped by a plethora of often-invisible forces, and can operate even in the name of democracy and justice to be totalitarian and oppressive.

These critical principles replace the dissembling of neutrality in the classroom, as Kincheloe explains:

Recognition of these educational politics suggests that teachers take a position and make it understandable to their students. They do not, however, have the right to impose these positions on their students [emphasis in original]….

In this context it is not the advocates of critical pedagogy who are most often guilty of impositional teaching but many of the mainstream critics themselves. When mainstream opponents of critical pedagogy promote the notion that all language and political behavior that oppose the dominant ideology are forms of indoctrination, they forget how experience is shaped by unequal forms of power. To refuse to name the forces that produce human suffering and exploitation is to take a position that supports oppression and powers that perpetuate it. The argument that any position opposing the actions of dominant power wielders is problematic. It is tantamount to saying that one who admits her oppositional political sentiments and makes them known to students is guilty of indoctrination, while one who hides her consent to dominant power and the status quo it has produced from her students is operating in an objective and neutral manner.

“Critical pedagogy wants to know who’s indoctrinating whom,” Kincheloe concludes. Teaching and history as activism, for Zinn, were moral imperatives, and thus:

From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.

Zinn, activist, radical, speaks to us now, the “us” of any classroom, the “us” charged with the learning and lives of any child:

From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than “objectivity”; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.

Today on the date of Zinn’s birth, I argue, it is a recipe we must follow.

Education, education reform, Poverty, race

Complicit: On Facing the Mirror Before Casting Stones

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“Let me begin,” admits George J. Sefa Dei in “‘We Cannot Be Color-Blind’: Race, Antiracism, and the Subversion of Dominant Thinking,” “by making clear that I see myself as fully complicit in the discussion that I undertake in this chapter” (p. 25).

As we face large and powerful social forces such as poverty and racism—along with more narrow issues of education—I believe we all must address that first concern of who is complicit.

Let me begin with something that echoes in my mind almost continually, from Oscar Wilde: “But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting.”

Consider taking that frame and using it many contexts: “But to recommend _____ to  _____ is both grotesque and insulting.”

Also consider who makes such recommendations. For the poor, the affluent and powerful—who do not live up to the same standards they impose—are the who.

Today—at this exact moment—we watch as a white authority structure recommends to a dominantly black community that which is “grotesque and insulting.” And then on a narrower scale, those with power and money recommend to educators that which is “grotesque and insulting.”

So whether we are confronting poverty and racism or education, we all must begin with who is complicit.

People in poverty and African Americans in the U.S. share one disturbing but distinct quality: disproportionately the impoverished and African Americans are excluded from the power structure.

Who, then, is complicit in the existence and tolerance of poverty and racism? It cannot be those without the power; therefore, it must be those with the power.

Inaction is being complicit. Silence is being complicit. There is no political option for being neutral as long as poverty and racism exist. None.

White high school drop-outs and African Americans with some college have the same economic opportunities.

Whites and African Americans use recreational drugs at the same rates, but African Americans are targeted, charged, and incarcerated at much higher rates.

Those born wealthy and not attending college have greater economic power than those born in poverty and completing college.

To be white, to be wealthy—in the U.S. is to be complicit.

Inaction is being complicit. Silence is being complicit. There is no political option for being neutral as long as poverty and racism exist. None.

While I think my field of education is of a magnitude smaller than issues of poverty and race, I must end there because the picture is hard to confront.

And because education is and always will be inextricable from the fight to end poverty and racism; as George J. Sefa Dei concludes, “Antiracism is about changing current processes of schooling and education delivery” (p. 39). We may say the same about poverty.

I have taught high school English for 18 years in rural South Carolina and then been in teacher education for another 13 years. Teachers and teacher educators persistently complain about the bureaucracy of education; it is a relentless refrain among educators.

Recently, I received an email about how to anticipate what may be demanded of us when political regimes, once again, change; the email included: “No other profession has to deal with such crap.”

My response: “No other discipline would put up with that crap.”

Educators are complicit in the crap that is education reform. Inaction is being complicit. Silence is being complicit.

All those scrambling to have a seat at the Common Core table, a table inextricable from the entire reform agenda—unions, administrators, teachers—all are complicit.

It is time to face the mirror, to examine who is complicit.

Education

English Journal: Speaking Truth to Power: Invisible Young Men: African American Males, Academics, and Athletics P. L. Thomas

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English Journal, Vol. 104, No. 1, September 2014

Speaking Truth to Power

Invisible Young Men: African American Males, Academics, and Athletics, P. L. Thomas

Excerpt

As a pre–Civil Rights era novel dramatizing Ralph Ellison’s perspective on being African American in the United States at mid-20th century, Invisible Man opens with the unnamed narrator explaining:

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. . . . When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imaginations—indeed, everything and anything except me. . . . That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact . . . [Y]ou often doubt if you really exist. . . . It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful. (3–4)

Readers learn that the narrator’s response to his invisibility, ultimately, is hibernation, a withdrawal from a society, a world that refuses to see him.

A 2012 report from the Office of Civil Rights offers a disturbing picture of how US public schools see African American (AA) males in the first decade of the 21st century: AA males are disproportionately targeted in disciplinary actions in schools, referred to law enforcement, and suspended from schools. The academic picture for AA males is just as disturbing since they have less access to advanced courses but are overrepresented in retention data. AA males also tend to sit in classrooms taught by inexperienced and under-/un-certified teachers who are under-compensated (“Revealing New Truths”).

When AA males are seen in school, then, many must recognize that they are mostly viewed as misbehaving, as potential, if not already, criminals. AA males have become both the embodiment and stereotype of the school-to-prison pipeline as well as the school-as-prison phenomenon associated with urban schools across the United States (Nolan). Like Ellison’s invisible narrator, then, AA males often make decisions paralleling the narrator’s hibernation—one of which is seeking the support and potential achievement found in athletics, both as an oasis of possibility and as a ticket to college or a profession (despite that ticket often being an illusion). …

Common Core, then, will be yet more failure if it becomes another aspect of the traditional commitments of schooling and if it is a distraction from the sorts of reform that should address race, class, and gender inequities in discipline, retention, academic access, and the emphasis on athletics to the detriment of the athletes. In our ELA classrooms, committing to close reading of text may once again shift our eyes in the wrong direction—the decontextualized text—if we fail to see the students in our care. It is well past time not only to see AA males, but also to listen to them.

Bicycling, Education

Lessons from Cycling—for Cyclists and Educators

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My formal expertise and experience are in the field of education, but I have developed as well what I consider equal expertise and experience in two other areas, although the paths have been primarily by self-education: writing and cycling.

I have been serious, purposeful, and committed to teaching, writing, and cycling all for about thirty years each; however, as a writer and cyclist, I have basically no formal preparation. Cycling provides a great deal of pleasure (and pain) for me personally and socially; as well, I recognize more and more every day that cycling offers really important lessons—many of which inform teaching and learning in formal settings.

Lessons from Cycling—for Cyclists and Educators

One of the most compelling aspects of recreational cycling is the it is incredibly complex and challenging, especially as a group sport. As a complex human activity in a group dynamic, then, I think becoming and being a cyclist offers powerful lessons for becoming and being a teacher.

First, cycling has a significant learning curve for beginners to integrate with group rides. To be a group cyclist, you need fitness, a wide assortment of cycling-specific skills, and a knowledge base about group cycling (coming to understand the culture of group cycling).

Fitness requires time and commitment—not unlike learning anything. But embedded in that is the motivation to commit that time. Since cycling can be extremely painful, it offers a perfect example of how learning comes best through the choice of the individual. I cycle about 10,000 miles a years—many of those rides are exhausting, nearly unbearable. There is little likelihood I would either participate or improve in cycling if this were not my choice.

Related to this need for time and commitment to fitness is the necessity for cycling-specific skills. Cycling, teaching, and writing, for me, are parallel human behaviors that are best cultivated by actually doing the behavior, but also by doing the behavior with purposeful attention to the discrete skills that make up the activity.

A fit cyclist (often runners transitioning to cycling) without bike handling skills or group riding knowledge is extremely dangerous to her/himself and other cyclists. In fact, group cycling is so complicated that it baffles me that anyone succeeds in integrating into group riding (in the same way that staying committed to writing or education is very challenging).

Cycling well requires cycling-specific cardiovascular fitness, bike handling skills (maintaining a straight and stable line), proper bicycle fit (bike positioning is crucial, but somewhat technical), and maneuvering awareness and knowledge. In brief, cycling in a fast-paced group (peloton) is extremely complicated—like writing, like teaching: hundreds of concurrent automatic behaviors blended with dozens of split-second decisions.

For cyclists, this means simultaneously exerting often maximum physical efforts that tax your breathing and stress lower body muscle groups, maintaining upper body relaxation so that bicycle control remains your primary concern, and maintaining awareness and control of yourself as well as the surrounding cyclists.

Since each of these elements of group cycling impacts and depends on all the others, how does a cyclist gain the level of expertise needed to participate well and safely?

I think this is the greatest lesson of cycling as it informs teaching. Cycling at a high level in group events is best learned by cycling often—and participating with and observing closely elite and experienced cyclists.

Beginning cyclists perform at first in unskilled ways that require them to consciously focus on gradual and purposeful improvement. It takes baby steps. But it also requires that the cyclist is committed to learning through observation and has the self-awareness to recognize the nuanced differences among her/his novice behaviors and the more polished behaviors of experienced cyclists.

In cycling, beginners are best served (as is the group) if they participate at first in minimal ways—not taking pulls for example, focusing on riding at a high pace while insuring she/he learns group dynamics (not making drastic changes in pace or direction, bike handling). An aggressive paceline (an organized double-line of cyclists in which riders rotate so that one cyclist at a time is pushing the pace [1]) is the ultimate test of cycling expertise; a cyclist needs high fitness, strong bike handling skills, and a honed sense of the entire group and how each cyclist impacts that group’s pace and safety.

Pulling through in a paceline tests a cyclist sense of pace and space—because rotating through from the front into the receding line is a delicate balance of speed and smooth bike handling. Adding to this complex blend of skills and fitness is that cyclists drink and eat while participating in their events! Yet another range of skills that must be learned while doing.

Here is an ideal representation in cycling of the beauty found in balancing the needs of the individual with the good of the community. To be an elite or skilled group cyclist, each cyclist needs the group; thus, each cyclist benefits from conforming to the group norms and contributes to the group good—not because of arbitrary or blind allegiance but because those norms address that balance between individual and group.

At their highest levels, teaching, writing, and cycling are individual endeavors grounded in communities; all represent John Dewey’s complex (and often misunderstood) calls for honoring the individual and the community simultaneously—not as competing interests but as synergetic interests.

Each cyclist in a group ride can perform better than cycling alone by contributing to and competing with the other cyclists, but if any individual cyclist disrupts the essential dynamics of that group (poor bike handling, careless attention to the safety of the group) that cyclist and the entire group suffer, performing less well.

Self-interests and group-interests, then, are inseparable in cycling. I would argue the same about teaching and writing.

Serious recreational cycling offers dynamic lessons for cyclists and educators about the power of engaging by choice and over time with complex human behaviors that require a balance between individual and group needs, about the value of committing to those behaviors as a novice eager to observe and learn from elite and experienced experts/mentors, and about the reality that few human pursuits are ever finished, but always in a state of becoming.

There is a zen elements here—the giving up of the self to find the self. And as with cycling, teaching, and writing, you will not understand it until you do it—by allowing the becoming.

—

[1] See for example below:

Education, education reform

CALL: DEMOCRACY AND DECENCY: WHAT DOES EDUCATION HAVE TO DO WITH IT?

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CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

DEMOCRACY AND DECENCY: WHAT DOES EDUCATION HAVE TO DO WITH IT?

EDITORS:

PAUL R. CARR, P. L. THOMAS, BRAD PORFILIO & JUIE GORLEWSKI

PUBLISHER:

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING

Democracy can mean a range of concepts, including freedoms, rights, elections, governments, processes, philosophies and a panoply of abstract and concrete notions that can be mediated by power, positionality, culture, time and space. Democracy can also be translated into brute force, hegemony, docility, compliance and conformity, as in wars will be decided on the basis of the needs of elites, or major decisions about spending finite resources will be the domain of the few over the masses, or people will be divided along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, religion, etc. because it is advantageous for maintaining exploitative political systems in place to do so. Often, these frameworks are developed and reified based on the notion that elections give the right to societies, or segment of societies, to install regimes, institutions and operating systems that are then supposedly legitimated and rendered infinitely just simply because formal power resides in the hands of those dominating forces.

The book is interested in advancing a critical analysis of the hegemonic paradigm described above, one that seeks higher levels of political literacy and consciousness, and one that makes the connection with education. What does education have to do with democracy? How does education shape, influence, impinge on, impact, negate, facilitate and/or change the context, contours and realities of democracy? How can we teach for and about democracy to alter and transform the essence of what democracy is, and, importantly, what it should be?

We are particularly interested in the notion of decency in relation to democracy, and underpinned by forms of meaningful, critically-engaged education. Is it enough to be kind, nice, generous and hopeful when we can also see signs of rampant, entrenched and debilitating racism, sexism, poverty, violence, injustice, war and other social inequalities? If democracy is intended to be a legitimating force for good, how does education inform democracy? What types of knowledge, experience, analysis and being are helpful to bring about newer, more meaningful and socially just forms of democracy?

Some of the themes to be explored might include:

  • peace, peace education and democracy
  • media, media literacy and democracy
  • pedagogy and education for democracy
  • curriculum and education for democracy
  • race, anti-racist education and democracy
  • poverty, class and education for democracy
  • environment and ecology within the context of democracy and education
  • the meaning of kindness in relation to democracy and education
  • what is decency within the context of democracy and education?

If you are interested in submitting a chapter, please submit the following to paul.thomas@furman.edu by September 30, 2014:

1)    a 400-word summary of your proposal, including:

  1. title
  2. focus and research questions
  3. the connection to the subject of the book
  4. the theoretical and/or conceptualframework
  5. the major themes to beexplored
  6. other pertinent information

2)    8 keywords for the chapter

3)    a 100-word biography for each author

Process:

1)    Call for Proposals (August 25, 2014)

2)    Receive Proposals (September 30, 2014)

3)    Communicate with contributors regarding decision on proposals (October 15, 2014)

4)    First complete draft of 5,000 words due (January 15, 2015)

5)    Comments from editors regarding first draft to contributors (Februrary 15, 2015)

6)    Final complete draft due to editors (April 1, 2015)

7)    Review by editors, and follow-up with contributors (May 1, 2015)

8)    Liaison with publisher for final editing and proofing (May 15, 2015)

9)    Publication (Summer 2015)

For all other inquiries about this book, please contact Paul R. Carr at prcarr@gmail.com

Education, education reform

Revisiting Content and Direct Instruction

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It is the 1890s, and educators are concerned that students are not receiving the quality education they deserve—especially if those students plan to attend college. What became known as The Report of the Committee of Ten has now been replicated at varying intervals in the U.S. for 120 years: Competing interests declaring what students learn (and how students learn) as inadequate, and then setting out themselves to identify what students learn (and how students learn) to (i) save the children, (ii) save the country, (iii) save the economy.

This pattern of education reform is best captured, I think, in Herb Kliebard’s The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 because his guiding motif, “struggle,” reveals what is really going on when politicians, educators, researchers, and the public debate (often badly and in conflated ways) content, curriculum, standards, and then instruction.

Although content, curriculum, and standards as terms are different, in the real world, they tend to represent the same urge: Identify the what (knowledge) students should (or must) learn.

Before diving into the content and direct instruction debates, I want to address what is really going on. You don’t have to read George Orwell or Ray Bradbury to know this (although you should*), but the powerful in any society recognize that those who control knowledge (and language is knowledge) ultimately control everything. Thus, to codify what is known, what counts as knowledge, and what facts mean is to establish power.

Howard Zinn has popularized how perspective impacts so-called objective facts in his people’s history of the U.S.; many narratives of history told from the perspectives of losers, workers, and marginalized people become suddenly unrecognizable to those who were raised on traditional textbook renditions committed to celebrating the American Way.

Since the U.S. is mired in a misguided and often distorted debate about national curriculum, I want to return here to what is wrong with the content and direct instruction debates, historically and currently.

Revisiting Content and Direct Instruction

Ron Barnett in The Greenville News announces, “The high school of the future is here”:

George Jetson won’t be dropping his daughter Judy off in a flying bubble capsule, but the New Tech high school programs starting up this month in Greenville County promise to rocket the old educational model straight into the 21st century.

And what does that entail?: “The concept of teachers imparting knowledge on students who passively soak up information from their desks is on its way out at Carolina and J.L. Mann high schools.”

Two schools in Greenville (SC) county have adopted project-based learning, but Barnett offers this qualification: “Actually, project learning isn’t entirely new in the district.”

Actually, project learning isn’t even new to this century because, as Kliebard details, project-based learning grew out of John Dewey’s laboratory schools at the turn of the twentieth century and then the concept was bastardized and popularized throughout the first half of the 1900s, notably by William H. Kilpatrick.

And just for the historical record, project-based learning and an assortment of garbled practices mislabeled “progressive” [1] worked so swimmingly that all hell broke loose in the 1950s and 1960s: Rudolf Flesch fretted over Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955) [2] and Hyman G. Rickover (1962) warned about how the Swiss were kicking the U.S. to the curb because of failing schools.

So let’s start with the central problem driving the never-ending content and direct instruction debates that sound about exactly the same today as they did over 100 years ago: The real issue with content and direct instruction is not if but how, when, and why.

At the core of how these debates both flourish and fail is the straw man, personified by attacks on John Dewey (progressivism) and Paulo Freire (critical pedagogy). Neither Dewey (progressivism) nor Freire (critical pedagogy) reject content or direct instruction, but both demanded that teachers and students re-imagine content (notably that content is not ideologically or politically neutral) and direct instruction.

Content is problematic as a term because many stakeholders in education use it differently. I want to clarify that content in this discussion has two distinctions: disciplinary knowledge (the facts of the disciplines) and disciplinary moves (how the disciplines view artifacts/facts, how the disciplines gather and interpret data, how the disciplines present their examinations of coming to know the world).

For progressive and critical educators, that formal schooling tends toward transferring static disciplinary knowledge to the exclusion of examining and fostering disciplinary moves (especially for marginalized groups of students) is the crux of the debate, compounded by the traditional stance that disciplinary knowledge can be objective. As critical scholars have argued, simply choosing what counts as knowledge is itself a political act.

As well, Dewey argued that since we could never really predict what static disciplinary knowledge students would need in the future, we should be sure to focus much of our energy on fostering disciplinary moves in students; this argument has been reduced to a somewhat silly and simplistic urge to teach “critical thinking,” which is in practice, as it turns out, anything except being critical.

Freire added to Dewey’s quest for instilling disciplinary moves by challenging the simplistic “banking” concept that views content (disciplinary knowledge) as static and non-political—but that challenge did not reject content, but called for ways in which to honor that content.

Both disciplinary knowledge and disciplinary moves, then, are battlegrounds over power—influenced by race, class, gender, and sexuality (among other contexts). As Lisa Delpit has argued, children of color and impoverished children are often fed reduced disciplinary knowledge and excluded from disciplinary moves; thus, our debates about content and direct instruction (as a subset of all instruction) must move toward insuring that all students have equal access to disciplinary knowledge and disciplinary moves, and that all students receive the same quality of instruction (including direct instruction).

No one that I know is calling for no content or no direct instruction. The debate rests with when, how, and why—and those debates are important, and likely inexhaustible.

For me, content (as disciplinary knowledge) and direct instruction are secondary: disciplinary knowledge as a means to the greater ends of disciplinary moves; direct instruction coming after students have engaged in relatively naive and emerging authentic productions of artifacts of learning.

When I teach writing, for example, my students must engage with something worth writing about (disciplinary knowledge), and then after they present early drafts, I must offer direct instruction. My critical teaching of composition, then, is not without content and not without direct instruction.

Ultimately, then, the why is central: So that every student comes to discover for her/himself the disciplinary moves most valuable for reading and then re-reading the world, for writing and re-writing the world (Freire) in order for her/him to act on the world instead of having the world happen to her/him.

Finally, as a critical educator, I practice these beliefs each day with deep and diligent skepticism because, in the end, I could be wrong. And that is what disciplinary moves are all about—the purposeful engaging with the world to better understand it for the self and the larger community.

—

* Wink, wink, nod, nod …

[1] For a genuinely progressive take-down of the folly found in misguided uses of the project method, please read: 

LaBrant, L. (1931, March). Masquerading. The English Journal, 20(3), 244-246. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/803664

That the making of concrete models will keep interested many pupils who would otherwise find much of the English course dull may be granted. The remedy would seem to be in changing the reading material rather than in turning the literature course into a class in handcraft. (p. 246)

[2] And by 2011, ta-da!, “Why Johnny STILL Can’t Read.” [HINT: It’s those damn progressives.]

Education, education reform, Standards, Testing, VAM

VAM Remedy Part of Inequity Disease

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But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it.
Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism”

In Reliability and validity of inferences about teachers based on student test scores (ETS, 2013), Edward H. Haertel draws an important conclusion about value-added methods of evaluating teachers built on standardized tests: “Tests aligned to grade-level standards cannot fully register the academic progress of students far above grade level or far below grade level,” and thus create a “bias against those teachers working with the lowest performing or the highest performing classes,” adding:

High-stakes uses of teacher VAM scores could easily have additional negative consequences for children’s education. These include increased pressure to teach to the test, more competition and less cooperation among the teachers within a school, and resentment or avoidance of students who do not score well. In the most successful schools, teachers work together effectively (Atteberry & Bryk, 2010). If teachers are placed in competition with one another for bonuses or even future employment, their collaborative arrangements for the benefit of individual students as well as the supportive peer and mentoring relationships that help beginning teachers learn to teach better may suffer. (pp. 8, 24)

All of these consequences of high-stakes testing and VAM, then, are likely to impact negatively high-poverty and minority students, who disproportionately score low on such tests.

Matthew Di Carlo’s new examination of VAM in DC reinforces Haertel’s concern:

Specifically, you’ll notice that almost 30 percent of teachers in low-poverty schools receive the highest rating (“highly effective”), compared with just 7-10 percent in the other categories. In addition, just over seven percent of teachers in low-poverty schools receive one of the two lowest ratings (“minimally effective” or “ineffective,” both of which may result in dismissal), versus 18-21 percent in the medium- and high-poverty schools.

So, the relationship between school poverty and IMPACT ratings may not be linear, as the distributions for medium- and high-poverty schools are quite similar. Nevertheless, it seems very clear that IMPACT results are generally better among teachers in schools serving lower proportions of poor students (i.e., students eligible for subsidized lunch), and that the discrepancies are quite large.

High-poverty schools already share some disturbing characteristics, including that they often reflect and perpetuate the inequities found in the homes and communities of the children they serve (see HERE and HERE). But high-poverty schools also struggle to attract and retain experienced and certified/qualified teachers.

And while virtually no one advocates for using VAM in high-stakes policies, mounting evidence shows that VAM is likely to further deter teachers from the schools and students most needing high-quality dedicated teachers.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and then Common Core have been sold to the public as policy intended to close the so-called achievement gap (a misnomer for the equity gap; see HERE and HERE)—just as advocates of VAM have attributed school failure to “bad” teachers and VAM as a way to rid schools of those “bad” teachers, again to address the achievement gap.

However, the evidence refutes the rhetoric because accountability built on standards and high-stakes testing, Common Core, and VAM have not and will not address equity, but are likely to increase the exact problems advocates claim they will solve (see Mathis, 2012; Hout & Elliot, 2011; Haertel, 2013; Di Carlo, 2014).

If left unchecked, VAM as a education reform remedy will prove to be yet another part of the inequity disease.

James Baldwin, race

Blacked Out: “you must consider what happens to a life which finds no mirror”

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First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out

“Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich

This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.

James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory”

Recently, I have been trying to navigate my own journey toward calling for the next phase in the education reform debate—the primary tension being between my evolving position as it rubs against my sisters and brothers in arms who remain (justifiably) passionate about confronting the misinformed celebrity of the moment or the misguided journalist of the moment.

And then Jose Vilson posted on Twitter:

This moment of concise clarity from Vilson was followed the next morning by a post on R.E.M.’s Facebook page, Troopers release video showing forceful stop of musician Shamarr Allen:

As he continued defending his troopers’ actions, the Louisiana State Police chief released a dashcam video Tuesday of the forceful stop of a musician in the Lower 9th Ward.

Shamarr Allen, a trumpeter known for his band,Shamarr Allen and the Underdawgs, has claimed in TV interviews that he felt in danger and that he was treated unfairly because of his race.

“It’s just wrong,” Allen told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune on Tuesday after watching the video. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t do none of that. I don’t live wrong at all. It’s just, this is the life of a black man in the Lower 9th Ward.”

Occurring with cruel relevance at the nexus of disaster capitalism and education reform, New Orleans, Allen’s “life of a black man” rests in the wake of Michael Brown’s death as a black young man:

An 18-year-old Missouri man was shot dead by a cop Saturday, triggering outrage among residents who gathered at the scene shouting “kill the police.”

Michael Brown was on his way to his grandmother’s house in the city of Ferguson when he was gunned down at about 2:15 p.m., police and relatives said.

What prompted the Ferguson officer to open fire wasn’t immediately clear.

Multiple witnesses told KMOV that Brown was unarmed and had his hands up in the air when he was cut down.

The officer “shot again and once my friend felt that shot, he turned around and put his hands in the air,” said witness Dorian Johnson. “He started to get down and the officer still approached with his weapon drawn and fired several more shots.”

This feeling has come to me before, a sense that outrage remains mostly token outrage, misguided outrage. Outrage over Whoopi Goldberg, Campbell Brown, and Tony Stewart filled social media, blacking out Brown and Allen as well as dozens and dozens of black men who will never be named.

50 Years Later: “you must consider what happens to a life which finds no mirror”

August of 2014 marked the month James Baldwin would have turned 90. 18 December 2014 will be 50 years since Baldwin spoke at The Non-Violent Action Committee (N-VAC) (speech archive):

There Baldwin built a passionate message, challenging his audience with “you must consider what happens to a life which finds no mirror.” Baldwin inspired author Walter Dean Myers, who echoed a similar message early in 2014 just before his own death:

But by then I was beginning the quest for my own identity. To an extent I found who I was in the books I read….

But there was something missing. I needed more than the characters in the Bible to identify with, or even the characters in Arthur Miller’s plays or my beloved Balzac. As I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. I didn’t want to become the “black” representative, or some shining example of diversity. What I wanted, needed really, was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me….

Then I read a story by James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues.” I didn’t love the story, but I was lifted by it, for it took place in Harlem, and it was a story concerned with black people like those I knew. By humanizing the people who were like me, Baldwin’s story also humanized me. The story gave me a permission that I didn’t know I needed, the permission to write about my own landscape, my own map.

There is a beauty, a symmetry to the lineage from Baldwin to Myers—and then to the countless young people for whom Myers paid it forward.

But I must pose a counter-point about Baldwin’s speeches and essays: Why must Baldwin remain relevant 50 years later?

Baldwin’s words in 1964—”it is late in the day for this country to pretend I am not a part of it”—fit just as well in Allen’s mouth, pulled over in New Orleans because he committed the crime of approaching his car and then reversing himself while black.

And then Baldwin in 1966, A Report from Occupied Territory:

Here is the boy, Daniel Hamm, speaking—speaking of his country, which has sworn to bung peace and freedom to so many millions. “They don’t want us here. They don’t want us—period! All they want us to do is work on these penny-ante jobs for them—and that’s it. And beat our heads in whenever they feel like it. They don’t want us on the street ’cause the World’s Fair is coming. And they figure that all black people are hoodlums anyway, or bums, with no character of our own. So they put us off the streets, so their friends from Europe, Paris or Vietnam—wherever they come from—can come and see this supposed-to-be great city.”

There is a very bitter prescience in what this boy—this “bad nigger”—is saying, and he was not born knowing it. We taught it to him in seventeen years. He is draft age now, and if he were not in jail, would very probably be on his way to Southeast Asia. Many of his contemporaries are there, and the American Government and the American press are extremely proud of them. They are dying there like flies; they are dying in the streets of all our Harlems far more hideously than flies.

Or Baldwin in 1963 asking, Who is the nigger?:

It is 2014 and the list of blacked out names grows—Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Michael Brown—with the unnamed list even longer, although mostly ignored, invisible.

When Baldwin’s 90th birthday approached, many expressed how Baldwin as a writer and powerful public voice has himself become mostly unseen, unheard, unread, but each day suggests that in the U.S. we prove Baldwin’s words to be disturbingly relevant.

At the end of his 1964 speech, Baldwin asserts: “[I]t is not we the American negro who is to be saved here; it is you the American republic, and you ain’t got much time.”

“I came to explore the wreck,” explains Rich’s speaker, the “wreck” a metaphor for the U.S.:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun…

a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

The narrative of the U.S. remains a redacted myth, names and lives blacked out. Yes, as Baldwin noted, “it is late in the day for this country to pretend I am not a part of it.”

Let us hope it isn’t too late.

—

“Harlem”

by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?
      Does it dry up
      like a raisin in the sun?
      Or fester like a sore—
      And then run?
      Does it stink like rotten meat?
      Or crust and sugar over—
      like a syrupy sweet?
      Maybe it just sags
      like a heavy load.
      Or does it explode?

See Also

Reading Out of Context: “But there was something missing,” Walter Dean Myers

War Against Whites? I Think Not, Charles Blow

New Study: White People Support Harsher Criminal Penalties When Told More Black People Are Incarcerated

Michael Brown: Yet another reminder that police see even unarmed black people as thugs, Andre Perry

Richard Sherman’s GPA and “Thug” Label: The Codes that Blind

Education, education reform

Preventing Arson Instead of Putting Out Fires

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What do the allegory of the river, the science fiction film In Time, and a mainstream examination of living in poverty by an economist and a psychologist reveal for those of us seeking the next phase in our resistance of the education reform agenda in the U.S.?

We need to pull back from a thousand individual examples of how political, media, and public claims about education are failing children and public education. In other words, we need to increase our calls for ending arson and reduce our efforts to put out fires.

The allegory of the river emphasizes the need to address causes for our problems, instead of only tackling over and over the consequences:

The woman replied, “Someone or something is causing these children to fall into the river.  We could be here for years pulling broken bodies from the water.  I am going to walk upstream until I find out what is causing these children to fall in and see if I can do something to stop it!”

Babies tossed in the river, arsonists setting fires—or as Oscar Wilde confronted, “But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.”

So step one in the next phase is shifting our energy to causes.

Step two includes a recognition that spending a disproportionate amount of our time and energy putting out the fires the education reformers are setting insures the reformers win—just as the majority of people are shackled to their frantic lives artificially by ruling forces in the film In Time.

Teachers and students are now experiencing paralyzing frantic lives—conditions (remedies) labeled “reform” that in fact “deform” (part of the disease).

Focus on causes, reduce our frantic responses, and then the third step, revealed in Scarcity: Committing ourselves to disciplinary evidence addressing large-scale social forces (instead of accusatory stares focused on individuals).

Let’s consider, then, how to move forward, shifting our messages away from putting out fires and toward calling out grand scale failures because politician X or celebrity Y or journalist Z is not a unique or especially flawed example on his or her own.

Politicians, celebrities and journalists are failing the public discourse often, and we cannot express enough that those failures are grounded primarily in their lack of experience and expertise in teaching and education. So we certainly need to continue reminding everyone of those facts: I don’t know politician X or celebrity Y or journalist Z, and I have no way genuinely to examine any of their intentions or essential nature as people (although I have credible suspicions, I think), but I do know they have little to no credibility, and that their claims and policies are misguided.

Today, for example, reveals both our need to continue the resistance (although with a new resolve) and how dangerous our duty remains:

  • The New York Times reports on very disturbing details about a sports-celebrity’s charter school. The lesson here is not specifically the celebrity-athlete or the political figures who allowed the charter to form, but the larger failure: Political, media, and public commitments that ignore expertise and evidence represented by the unwarranted charter school movement.
  • NPR reports on a journalist’s book about teaching, teachers, and teacher effectiveness. The media coverage of that book has also promoted Tom Loveless to refute many of the claims made by the journalist. None of this is an isolated or unique problem because we daily are bombarded by the media and journalists examining education as if educators and researchers have never considered their own field. The result is the public is misguided once again. NPR and the NYT represent journalists covering journalists writing about the disciplines as if the experts in the disciplines simply do not exist; and therein lies the problem.
  • At The Washington Post‘s The Answer Sheet, we learn that grading policies at Princeton are mis-serving students. Education Week adds that at-risk students are also mis-served. These seemingly separate reform fires can be traced to the same arsonist: Our urge to label students and our blind allegiance to grading.

I could go on, and tomorrow will be the same, I suspect: Fires, fires, everywhere fires—ones set by the exact reformers who claim to be here to help us (possibly suggesting another key work of science fiction literature).

We cannot ignore the fires, of course, but we must not allow them to keep us mostly focused on the frantic task of fighting those fires to the exclusion of unmasking the arsons, an unmasking designed to prevent those fires.

Charter schools, Education, education reform, grade retention

GreenvilleOnline: SC should choose Oklahoma, not Florida

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SC should choose Oklahoma, not Florida [1]

What do third-grade retention policies based on reading tests and charter schools have in common?

First, they have a great deal of public and political support.

But, second, the research base on these policies has shown repeatedly that they do more to fail students than to achieve any of the lofty goals advocates claim.

South Carolina is a typical example of how education policy not grounded in evidence continues to fail students. For example, charter schools advocacy remains robust but deeply misleading:

We know that choice in education changes lives. We must work together to develop a culture in South Carolina that values education — from our families to funding at the State House. All students deserve access to a high-quality education regardless of their ZIP code, and excellent public charter schools are part of the solution in transforming South Carolina’s future.

This sort of incomplete advocacy [2] is commonplace despite charter schools in SC reinforcing discrediting patterns found across the U.S.:

Charter schools—like grade retention—are politically compelling, but neither effective nor appropriate for the essential problems facing public education.

Nonetheless, SC also models reform on Florida’s third-grade retention and reading policies discredited when reviewed. However, as John Thompson details:

Oklahoma’s Republican Legislature overrode the veto of Republican Governor Mary Fallin, and overwhelmingly rejected another cornerstone of Jeb Bush’s corporate reform agenda. The overall vote was 124 to 21….

Oklahoma’s victory over the test and punish approach to 3rd grade reading is a win-win team effort of national importance. The override was due to an unexpected, grassroots uprising started by parents, joined by superintendents and teachers, organized on social media, and assisted by anti- corporate reform educators and our opposite, Stand for Children, as well as Tea Party supporters, and social service providers who are increasingly coming to the rescue of the state’s grossly underfunded schools.

The rise of grade-retention policy and  charter schools shares the flawed combination of popularity and a solid research base discrediting those policies. Deborah Stipek and Michael Lombardo pose some key points about the need to reject grade-retention policy, points that should guide needed movements against charter schools and other misguided policy:

  • Before policy is implemented, the problem needs to be clearly defined with the research base on the appropriate policies for that problem identified by experts in the field (not political leaders or policy advocates). If, for example, reading achievement is an identified problem in a state, what do we know about grade retention as a policy solution? According to Stipek and Lombardo:

A majority of peer-reviewed studies over the past 30 years have demonstrated that holding students back yields little or no long-term academic benefits and can actually be harmful to students. When improvements in achievement are linked to retention, they are not usually sustained beyond a few years, and there is some evidence for negative effects on self-esteem and emotional well-being.

Moreover, there is compelling evidence that retention can reduce the probability of high school graduation. According to a 2005 review of decades of studies by Nailing Xia and Elizabeth Glennie: “Research has consistently found that retained students are at a higher risk of leaving school earlier, even after controlling for academic performance and other factors such as race and ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, family background, etc.”

  • Once we establish the problem and the evidence base on the reform, what concept should guide adopting new policy? Again, about retention, Stipek and Lombardo explain: “Instead of giving children the same treatment that failed them the first time, alternative strategies provide different kinds of learning opportunities.” In other words, policies that reinforce or replicate the identified problems must be ended, and then something different needs to be implemented.

If reading achievement is a problem, grade retention guarantees to cause more harm than good.

If public school segregation and student achievement are problems, charter schools actually fuel segregation and offer about the same student achievement (and even worse) as public schools.

Currently, the public and political leaders rail against failing schools and failing students, but the truth is that public and political support for misguided policy is failing students.

SC needs to choose the sorts of public school policies that will insure that no child and no parent needs to choose the school best for any child. In SC and across the U.S., we need to choose Oklahoma, not Florida.

—

[1] Op-Ed originally published at The Greenville News, and included here to add hyperlinks for support.

[2] See Review of The Productivity of Public Charter Schools