Chanda Jefferson, 2015 S.C. biology teacher of the year, advocates for Achievement Schools Districts (ASD) in the state.

The commentary leads readers to SCAchievementSchoolDistrict.org (SCASD).

Jefferson has also blogged at StudentsFirstSC, the state affiliate of StudentsFirst founded by Michelle Rhee.

Please connect the dots.

And Jefferson’s claims of ASD success echoes this initial claim at SCASD:

An Achievement School District has a proven track record in other states of catapulting the bottom 5% of schools into high quality, high performing, neighborhood, public schools.

However, what is that track record in reality (not the edureformer spin-zone)?

Like charter schools in general, the ASD has not performed much different than public schools, according to a 2014 analysis:

My analysis suggests that ASD schools aren’t doing significantly better in terms of student growth than they were before state takeover. In fact, in many cases the schools’ pre-takeover growth outperformed the ASD. These findings have significant implications for the future of the ASD, how we should move forward with continued takeovers, and for future turn-around efforts in general.

From Tennessee to New Orleans to Los Angeles, claims of successful take-over strategies have been discredited, but those take-overs have resulted mostly in disenfranchised children and communities while providing political capital for advocates.

Once you connect the dots of ASD advocacy, the only conclusion you can reach is don’t buy it.

Humans have tremendous capacity for good and evil.

The good is so simple, I think, that we too often fail to make it real.

“All we are saying is give peace a chance.”

“Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too.”

“‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

The great paradox is that human evil is almost never that simply, yet we respond over and over to evil as if it is.

Addressing recent acts of terror in Beirut and Paris, Sunny Hundal writes that terrorists “want us to brush away humanity and compassion with suspicion and division,” adding: “By following that script we do exactly what Isis want us to do.”

Who we are must not be defined by those who choose evil, by that which is done to us.

Who we are must be defined by what we choose to do in the aftermath of evil.

Who we are must be defined by what we choose to recognize as terror and evil, as well. Our selective and narrow gaze of outrage is another kind of evil—one that renders some inhuman by our indifference—that lies at our feet even as we condemn large-scale brazen evil.

We must not allow the din of sword rattling to drown out the voices of the past that may, again, seem to be too simple:

“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” [1]

Let us move now from the practical how to the theoretical why: Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. (Martin Luther King Jr., Loving Your Enemies) [2]

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[1] Attributed to Gandhi, but never confirmed as an accurate attribution.

[2] See how even accurate attributions can be manipulated here.

The pronoun/antecedent debate about “they” has continued at the NCTE Connected Community’s Teaching and Learning forum—mostly by advocates of prescriptive grammar.

That many English teachers continue to beat the drum for prescriptive rules is troubling—as I noted earlier when calling for descriptive grammar and conventional awareness. Troubling on one level since prescriptive grammar is solidly refuted by linguistics and the history of the English language [1]; troubling on another level since one staunch defense of the rules posted at the forum by an English teacher included a dangling modifier—highlighting that prescriptive grammarians often by necessity are themselves picking and choosing which “rules” to emphasize (an ironic type of descriptive grammar).

Another post called for ELA teachers to “hold the line with pronoun – antecedent agreement” because “[w]hile I think that grammar is a reflection of society, this is really about singular vs. plural.  It is not a political platform.”

And that last claim, I think, is an important place to consider further why a rules-based approach to language is failing both the language and our students.

First, critical pedagogy and critical literacy begin with the recognition that all human interaction, including language and teaching, is political. As Joe Kincheloe explains about teaching:

[P]roponents 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. (p. 2)

And thus, making the claim that students must conform to prescriptive rules of language usage because those rules are not political is both a political act itself and a false claim that language can somehow be politically neutral. Endorsing prescriptive grammar instruction cannot be divorced from the historical fact that standard grammar has been used to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism

As well, the literature we teachers of ELA often assign—from George Orwell’s 1984 and essays to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—illustrates that who controls language controls people; these works also highlight how that imbalance of power is unfair.

As linguists show, all identifiable types of language usage (standard English, AAVE, etc.) are simply somewhat cohesive versions, none any superior to the other except that some group in power creates that status of standard or “correct.”

Therefore, again, all language usage and the teaching of language are inevitably about power, always political.

With that context, then, the teaching of ELA should prefer an authoritative stance instead of an authoritarian one (see the writings of Paulo Freire).

Authoritative teaching of language generates teacher authority based on that teacher’s knowledge and experience with language (in terms of grammar, I would argue that includes essentially linguistics and the history of the English language). Authoritative teaching seeks to foster the student’s authority through that students’ understanding conventional usages as well as the biases associated with those usages.

Authoritarian teaching of language is the rules approach, in which teacher authority is grounded in the status of being the teacher, and the authoritarian stance necessarily asserts the authority’s (teacher’s) politics and mutes the politics of the subservient (student). Authoritarian teaching simply demands compliance—applying rules because they are rules.

As teachers of ELA, we are serving our students and the language well if we see language usage as something to be investigated and interrogated—not as a mechanism for imposing our authority on the student.

Those students can and should be guided in investigating and interrogating why we have standard English—who it benefits and why so that their own awareness about the power of language serves them and not those who use it to deny other people their political voices.

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[1] Both in the false notion that some language use is inherently superior to others (as opposed to the arbitrary nature of standard forms based on who has political power), and against the reality that all language usage evolves, changes (and thus, trying to stop that change is misunderstanding the basic nature of language).

See Also

Revisiting James Baldwin’s “Black English”

A Tale of Two Teachers: The Politics of Personal Teaching, Nat Hentoff