All posts by plthomasedd

P. L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English), current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Brill), and author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means (IAP, 2019) and How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, in press). NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning (Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research) volume Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America (Brill, 2018). Follow his work @plthomasEdD and the becoming radical (https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/).
education, Progressivism, reading

Middle-Class Assumptions Fail Literacy Instruction

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My doctoral work was anchored significantly in John Dewey—highlighted, I recall, by discovering that Dewey had claimed we need not teach children to read because reading was something that naturally developed in children (and since he could not recall being taught explicitly to read).

I was struck by such a tremendous failure in a great thinker, one that exposes the dangers of assuming “my” experiences prove a generalization, especially when “my” experiences are ones of privilege.

When I posted Encouraging Students to Read: A Reader, this odd fact about Dewey came back to me when Peter Smagorinsky called me out, appropriately, for failing to acknowledge the middle-class assumptions beneath endorsing holistic approaches to teaching reading, ones that far too often have failed students who struggle to develop literacy due to class, race, gender, and other challenges.

I have noted before that progressivism, whole language, and balanced literacy have been misunderstood by politicians, the media, and the public, but we must also confront that practitioners have misunderstood and then implemented progressive and holistic approaches to literacy instruction in ways that have been extremely harmful to the exact students most in need of formal schooling.

The Dewey Paradox

Two aspects of Dewey’s progressive education philosophy are key in that context: (i) Dewey’s progressivism is steeped in idealism, leaning precariously on the edge of naturalistic views of children and learning (one that may be true if a child lives in privilege), and thus (ii) Dewey’s progressivism has mostly been misinterpreted and implemented in ways that do not reflect Dewey’s foundational commitments or serve many students well.

Not to be an apologist for Dewey, but to help clarify what many of us who stand on Dewey’s shoulders embrace (noting that I am a critical educator, and not a progressive), I recommend Dewey’s Experience and Education as well as Alan Ryan’s biography of Dewey (specifically his Chapter Four: The Pedagogue as Prophet).

For me, Dewey provided the seed for critical pedagogy to grow out of the soil of progressivism:

It is not too much to say that an educational philosophy which professes to be based on the idea of freedom may become as dogmatic as ever was the traditional education which is reacted against. For any theory and set of practices is dogmatic which is not based upon critical examination of its own underlying principles. (Experience and Education, p. 22)

In the reading wars, then, dogmatic commitments to either whole language or isolated phonics instruction instead of addressing the needs of each individual student to become a reader is the great failure Dewey himself would have acknowledged.

Misreading Dewey, however, has a long tradition itself. Lou LaBrant, a fervent Dewey progressive, wrote in 1931 a scathing attack on the project method, which claimed to be in the Dewey tradition:

The cause for my wrath is not new or single. It is of slow growth and has many characteristics. It is known to many as a variation of the project method; to me, as the soap performance. With the project, neatly defined by theorizing educators as “a purposeful activity carried to a successful conclusion,” I know better than to be at war. With what passes for purposeful activity and is unfortunately carried to a conclusion because it will kill time, I have much to complain. To be, for a moment, coherent: I am disturbed by the practice, much more common than our publications would indicate, of using the carving of little toy boats and castles, the dressing of quaint dolls, the pasting of advertising pictures, and the manipulation of clay and soap as the teaching of English literature. (p. 245)

Ryan’s biography achieves a manageable and complex picture of Dewey—one that Dewey failed to express clearly. But in that picture, we see the idealism noted above as well as a level of sophistication (for example, seeking to honor both the individual and community, instead of bowing to either/or thinking) that made Dewey hard for a general public and often inaccessible for practitioners who want the practical and not his pragmatic [1].

However, “Dewey himself argued that it was not enough to repudiate traditional education,” Ryan explains, adding:

It was not enough for progressive teachers to throw out everything the old schools had done, to replace discipline by chaos, a rigid syllabus with no syllabus. And Dewey was inclined to think that many schools had done exactly that and had used his name to justify it. The difficulty was to give an account of the educational experience that would elicit a kind of discipline, an approach to the syllabus and to the authority of the teacher in the classroom that would grow out of experience itself. (p. 282)

And it is here that I can speak directly to the great paradox of progressive and critical commitments in education, especially in terms of teaching literacy, as expressed by Dewey himself:

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur? (Experience and Education, p. 49)

Teaching for over thirty years while attempting to avoid prescription and indoctrination, to foster joy and pleasure in learning, and to provide all students with the content they deserve and need has often lead to paralysis since those commitments are overwhelming in their contradictions. I have never settled for decoding or even comprehension in any student—always demanding we rise to include critical literacy that requires that students have the decoding and comprehension as well.

Despite Dewey’s warning, dogmatism is easier, and as Ryan warned, Dewey’s progressivism demands more of teachers than traditional approaches. And thus, when faced with the most challenging populations of students, we too often take the path of least resistance, mis-serving those students along the way.

Enter Delpit: Middle-Class Assumptions Fail Literacy Instruction

What appears to have happened in formal education throughout the U.S. is that literacy education has increased the gaps among social classes and racial subgroups because too often than not we have failed to honor the balance between fostering a love and joy for language with the necessary skills to read and write—and the students who suffer the most in that failure have been racial minorities and impoverished children.

Affluent students are allowed to relish in the joy of language (reaping the advantages of their privilege, which includes a literacy growth that seems transparent to them, as it did to Dewey) in formal schooling, while struggling students (disproportionately children of color and impoverished) are sentenced to drudgery masquerading as literacy instruction, further disadvantaging them.

Middle-class norms drive a great deal of practice in formal schooling since the wider U.S. society is trapped in those middle-class norms (ones that include not only socioeconomic but also racial [read “white”] expectations) and since the teacher workforce in the U.S. is itself a middle-class profession dominated by white females.

These middle-class blinders can be observed in the misguided embracing of Ruby Payne’s stereotypes about poverty, the nearly universal acceptance of the “word gap,” and the “grit” narrative as a veneer for white privilege.

Just as Dewey’s progressivism needed a critical re-imagining from Paulo Freire and others, Freire’s critical pedagogy needed bell hooks and others to confront Freire’s paternalism.

Then, enter Lisa Delpit, who provides the confrontation of the failures of misunderstood progressivism and holistic approaches to literacy instruction—the failures that often misrepresent whole language but exist under that terminology (see Ryan’s point about Dewey’s complaints above).

Writing in 1996 about Delpit, Debora Viadero explains:

But Delpit is best-known for the bombs she has lobbed at some of contemporary education’s most sacred cows.

A decade ago, Delpit started penning a series of eloquent, plain-spoken essays in the Harvard Educational Review that questioned the validity of some popular teaching strategies for African-American students. The essays were spun off into a book, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, that was published last year by The New Press.

The problem, Delpit says in those writings, is not that whole-language reading instruction techniques or the process-writing approach to teaching writing are inherently bad. They work for some students–possibly most. They just do not work for everybody. And often the people they do not work for are children who, like Delpit herself, were born black and disenfranchised. What is more, these strategies might not work for children of any group that has strong, distinctive cultural roots and that stands on society’s perimeter peering in.

And while some continue to misrepresent Delpit in similar ways to how Dewey was/is misrepresented, Delpit offers to me the best understanding of achieving the balance Dewey sought.

The powerful phrase “other people’s children” comes from the work of Delpit, who confronts the inequity of educational opportunities for minority and impoverished children. Delpit highlights that marginalized students receive disproportionately test-prep and worksheet-driven instruction, unlike their white and affluent peers. While some have claimed her as a champion of traditional practice because her criticisms have included failures by progressives, Delpit counters:

I do not advocate a simplistic “basic skills” approach for children outside of the culture of power. It would be (and has been) tragic to operate as if these children were incapable of critical and higher-order thinking and reasoning. Rather, I suggest that schools must provide these children the content that other families from a different cultural orientation provide at home. This does not mean separating children according to family background [emphasis added], but instead, ensuring that each classroom incorporate strategies appropriate for all the children in its confines.

And I do not advocate that it is the school’s job to attempt to change the homes of poor and nonwhite children to match the homes of those in the culture of power [emphasis added]. That may indeed be a form of cultural genocide. I have frequently heard schools call poor parents “uncaring” when parents respond to the school’s urging, saying, “But that’s the school’s job.” What the school personnel fail to understand is that if the parents were members of the culture of power and lived by its rules and codes, then they would transmit those codes to their children. In fact, they transmit another culture that children must learn at home in order to survive in their communities.

And Monique Redeaux clarifies:

When Delpit began her work on “other people’s children” she predicted that her purpose would be misunderstood. People criticized her for “vindicating” teachers who subjected students of color to isolated, meaningless, sub-skills day after day. However, what she was actually advocating when she referred to “skills-based instruction” was the “useful and usable knowledge that contributes to a student’s ability to communicate effectively in standard, generally acceptable literary forms” and she proposed that this was best learned in meaningful contexts. In other words, Delpit argued that both technical skills and critical thinking are essential: a person of color who has no critical thinking skills becomes the “trainable, low-level functionary of the dominant society, simply the grease that keeps the institutions which orchestrate his or her oppression running smoothly.” At the same time, those who lack the technical skills demanded by colleges, universities, and employers will be denied entry into these institutions. Consequently, they will attain financial and social success only within the “disenfranchised underworld.”

•

Like my progressive muse LaBrant, I remain convinced that reading programs—including prescriptive, systematic phonics programs—are “costume parties” that fail our students—and waste a tremendous amount of funding and instructional time, money and time better spent with authentic texts.

But when I endorse choice, independent reading, and access to books, like Delpit, I am not excusing those who idealize those commitments (through middle-class lenses) and then fail to teach reading (or writing) based on the needs of each student, some of whom will flourish with little guidance and some of whom need intensive and direct instruction.

It is no petty thing to acknowledge that a hungry or abused or frightened child will not find joy in reading when allowed choice, independent reading, and access to books because those do not address the burdens denying them that joy and learning opportunity. It is no petty thing either to note that taking struggling students and simply demanding they ignore their life’s inequities and complete phonics worksheets will not work as well.

As Dewey would stress, either/or thinking and dogmatism serve no one well when we are teaching children to read and write. Too often, that dogmatism has its roots in our middle-class privilege that, as with Dewey, blinds us to what our students need most from our teaching.

[1] As Ryan explains: “Dewey spent a great deal of his adult life explaining that ‘pragmatic’ did not mean ‘practical’ in a merely utilitarian and down-to-earth sense” (p. 225).

reading

Encouraging Students to Read: A Reader

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Valerie Strauss has dedicated two blog posts (here and here) to a new report, Kids & Family Reading Report.

One key finding deserves highlighting (and a caveat):

Additional factors that predict children ages 12–17 will be frequent readers include reading a book of choice independently in school, ereading experiences, a large home library, having been told their reading level and having parents involved in their reading habits.

First, the caveat: Beware concerns about reading levels, which are the flawed domain of the technocrat. (See 21st Century Literacy, co-authored with Renita Schmidt.)

But more important is that (yet again) choice, independent reading, and access to books are all vital to supporting eager and sophisticated readers among children and students.

Note that eager readers are not the result of reading programs, worksheets, intense phonics instruction, or assigning classic reading lists (although all of those have some role to play if not abused, overemphasized).

“It is important that we do not set up in our class-rooms prejudices or snobberies which will make our students less instead of better able to understand, enjoy, and use this language,” argued Lou LaBrant, former NCTE president, in 1943, adding

Too frequently we give children books which have enough value that we call them “good,” forgetting that there are other, perhaps more important values which we are thereby missing. It is actually possible that reading will narrow rather than broaden understanding.Some children’s books, moreover, are directed toward encouraging a naive, simple acceptance of externals which we seem at times to hold as desirable for children….Let us have no more of assignments which emphasize quantity, place form above meaning, or insist on structure which is not the child’s. (p. 95)

See then:

LaBrant, L. (1937, February 17). The content of a free reading program. Educational Research Bulletin, 16(2), 29–34.

LaBrant, L. (1941). English in the American scene. The English Journal, 30(3), 203–209.

LaBrant, L. (1943). Language teaching in a changing world. The Elementary English Review, 20(3), 93–97.

Stephen Krashen: Literacy: Free Voluntary Reading

Setting Free the Books: On Stepping Aside as Teaching

Progressivism and Whole Language: A Reader

Attack on “Balanced Literacy” Is Attack on Professional Teachers, Research

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

Charter schools, education, education reform

Conservative Talking Points Wrong for SC Education

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Political science professor Brent Nelsen argues Conservatives should support public school reform. However, this commentary proves to be not credible commitments for needed education reform in South Carolina but a series of unsubstantiated conservative talking points.

After opening by defining conservatism and establishing that conservatives recognize the need for education reform, Nelsen misrepresents significantly a foundational issue facing SC: “The recent Supreme Court decision highlighting the failure of many public schools puts education at the top of the policy agenda.”

The Supreme Court in SC, in fact, finally ruled on a court case made infamous by the documentary Corridor of Shame [1], true, but the ruling addresses inadequate state support for high-poverty communities and their schools:

SC SC Corridor ruling

As Eva Moore reports:

In a narrow 3-2 decision, the court said South Carolina needs to fix the way it funds education….

“As the court pointed out, it’s a fragmented, inefficient, ineffective method of funding,” Epps says. “Historically the General Assembly has played shell games with the funding. It’s inconsistent and extremely inefficient.”…

The school districts themselves bear some blame, according to the court. They’re administration-heavy and should explore consolidation.

But the bulk of the blame lies with the state of South Carolina.

All parties must work together to create a fairer funding model “within a reasonable amount of time,” the court ruled. In the meantime, the court retains jurisdiction in the case.

A fair but complex representation of SC’s need for education reform, then, must address a historical failure by the conservative political leadership of the state to support adequately both high-poverty communities and the schools that serve those children.

Immediately following this glossing of a major issue facing the state, Nelsen makes a disturbing claim:

But conservatives have allowed liberals to monopolize the public education conversation, promoting private and home school options while leaving the debate over public schools to less conservative voices. Not only does this lead to bad policy, it is also bad politics.

SC’s political and cultural history is solidly conservative, leaning toward a Tea Party conservatism that clings to state’s rights. Even when the South was voting Democrat, SC was conservative, and in the recent years, SC politics is dominated by Republicans.

There are in fact no issues in the state of SC “monopolized” by liberals because progressive and liberal voices are nearly absent from politics, the media, or public debate.

However, Nelsen’s opening shot at “liberals” is solid evidence that this commentary is mostly conservative talking points designed to trigger a targeted political base—the tried-and-true straw men of political discourse in SC linked with the more recent straw men of conservative education reform: liberals and unions along with “bad” teachers, “status quo,” “trap[ped] students in failing schools,” and “throw[ing] tax dollars at problems.”

In SC and across the U.S., these are both common refrains and mostly without merit. For example, the union bashing in SC seems misplaced since we are a right-to-work state. Striking out at liberals and unions in SC is boxing with ghosts.

How about, then, the policy recommendations tagged as “conservative”?

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. (p. 24)

  • Nelsen also endorses increasing support for public charter schools and “expanding the ability of low-income students to attend private schools” (which appears to avoid the how, vouchers, because vouchers are unpopular and discredited). Charter schools are the new school-choice-light for conservatives and market-committed Democrats, but there is a problem with that advocacy, highlighted by SC. Of the 50+ charter schools each year in SC, about 95% of charter schools have student outcomes the same or worse than comparable public schools. As well, in SC and across the U.S., charter schools avoid mandates public schools cannot; charter schools underserve English language learners and special needs students; and charter schools tend to be highly segregated by race and social class. Charter school advocacy is the hollow politics of waving the “parental choice” flag without doing the hard work called for by SC’s Supreme Court—fully funding and supporting the existing public school system that SC has failed.
  • Finally, Nelsen builds to the most troubling conservative option: closing, as Nelsen’s curious word choice identifies, “[p]oor schools” and adopting state take-over practices such as the Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD). Setting aside that Nelsen is associating state government take-over as conservative while opening with a nod toward “small government,” endorsing the ASD is deeply flawed. Nelsen claims inaccurately: “The results in Tennessee are impressive so far. Students have posted double-digit gains in math, science and literacy — outpacing improvements in other public schools”—when actually, 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.

SC education reform doesn’t need conservative talking points, then. Although as I have argued, fiscally conservative principles do support SC changing course in education reform, but that commitment requires acknowledging the accountability movement has not worked and then taking the Supreme Court’s ruling seriously.

SC has an entrenched poverty problem linked to lingering racial and economic inequity that destroys communities and overburdens the schools designed to serve those communities. Partisan conservative political leadership has created and maintained that status quo, and conservative doubling-down would be yet more remedies as part of the disease.

—

See Also

The Sad History of State Takeovers of Schools and School Districts, Jan Resseger

Opinion: New Orleans takeover is a model — of what not to do with Georgia schools, J. Celeste Lay

VAM Remedy Part of Inequity Disease

Review [UPDATED]: “How to Evaluate and Retain Effective Teachers” (League of Women Voters of SC)

‘Race to the Top’ for education a flop, report finds, Nirvi Shah

The Fatal Flaw Of Education Reform, Matthew Di Carlo

Value-Added, For The Record, Matthew Di Carlo

Time to End the ASD Fiasco

South Carolina and Education Reform: A Reader

Sorry, Kirp’s Fix Another Flawed Discourse on Ed Reform

What We Know Now (and How It Doesn’t Matter)

NPR Whitewashes Charter Schools and Disaster Capitalism in New Orleans

Preventing Arson Instead of Putting Out Fires

[1] In the original trial, a lawyer for the underfunded school districts used the “Allegory of the River” to confront the state’s failure to address root causes of failing schools; I recommend that allegory and believe the Op-Ed above calls for policies that continue those failures:

_allegory_of_the_river copy

education

NEW: Beware the Roadbuilders (Garn Press)

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Thomas, P.L. (2015). Beware the roadbuilders: Literature as resistance. New York: Garn Press.

Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance was born out of blogging as an act of social justice. Over a period of about two years, many posts built the case against market-based education reform and for a critical re-imagining of public education. This book presents a coordinated series of essays based on that work, using a wide range of written and visual texts to call for the universal public education we have failed to achieve. The central image and warning of the book—“beware the roadbuilders”—is drawn from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The book presents a compelling argument that billionaires, politicians, and self-professed education reformers are doing more harm than good—despite their public messages. The public and our students are being crushed beneath their reforms. In the wake of Ferguson and the growing list of sacrificed young black men—Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner—the essays in this book gain an even wider resonance, seeking to examine both the larger world of inequity as well as the continued failure of educational inequity. While each chapter stands as a separate reading, the book as a whole produces a cohesive theme and argument about the power of critical literacy to read and re-read the world, and to write and re-write the world (Paulo Freire).

Supporting that larger message are several key ideas and questions:

  • What are the confrontational texts we should be inviting students to read, that anyone should read?
  • Instead of reducing texts to the narrow expectations of New Criticism or “close reading,” how do we expand those texts into how they inform living in a free society and engaging in activism?
  • How do traditional assumptions about what texts matter and what texts reveal support the status quo of power?
  • And how can texts of all types assist in the ongoing pursuit of equity among free people?
Teaching, Writing

What Does “Teaching Writing” Mean?

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Over the past decade, my home university has adopted and implemented a new curriculum that is, in part, built on shifting to a first year seminar (FYS) concept (instead of the traditional first year composition model commonly known as ENG 101 and 102).

In the most recent three years, I have chaired the First Year Seminar Faculty Oversight Committee and been named Faculty Director, First Year Seminars—all of which has led to my role on a newly formed Task Force to consider how to revise (possibly significantly) our commitment to two first years seminars with one being writing intensive (FYW).

While the university is addressing a number of curricular issues related to the FYS program, a central concern involves the teaching of writing in the FYW—specifically issues related to direct writing instruction (including direct instruction on scholarly citation) and the consistency of the writing-intensive element across all FYWs.

Several elements impact these issues and our possible resolutions: (i) the university does not have a formal writing center/institute, (ii) the university doesn’t have an explicit or formal writing program or stated goals/commitments, and (iii) the commitment to the FYS program included the assumption that all faculty across all disciplines are equipped to teach writing.

I have been teaching writing and researching what that means for over thirty years—the first 18 as a high school English teacher and then at the undergraduate and graduate levels over much of those years, including teaching future teachers of English to teach writing. A number of my scholarly articles, chapters, and books also address teaching writing.

And while I learned how to teach writing painstakingly over those wonderful and challenging two decades of teaching high school, I cannot overemphasize what I have learned about the challenges of supporting quality writing instruction in the last three years—highlighted, I think, by coming against the range of insufficient to misguided understanding of what we mean when we call for teaching writing.

What Does “Teaching Writing” Mean?

At the risk of oversimplifying, I can answer this question by how I address students who want to learn to write poetry, a wonderful and impossible task that is a subset of the wonderful and impossible task of teaching writing (to which you should read the glorious and hilarious Teaching the Unteachable by Kurt Vonnegut).

Step one, I explain, is read, read, read poetry—preferably immersing yourself into entire volumes by poets you enjoy and want to emulate.

Step two, I add, is to write, write, write poetry.

And then, step three is to share those drafts with a poet/teacher who can give you substantive feedback—wherein we find ourselves at “teaching writing.”

If those students follow my guidelines, and then send me poems for my feedback, what do I do?

Central to teaching writing, I must stress, is both the authority of the teacher as well as the attitude of that teacher about writing, which I have proposed for the Task Force as follows:

  • Faculty who recognize that all aspects of writing are a process and that undergraduate students continue to struggle with and need guided practice with formal written expression (including the conventions of the disciplines, citation, and grammar/mechanics).

To teach writing, then, you must not be caught in the trap of thinking anyone can be finished learning to write and the concurrent trap of thinking that direct writing instruction is some sort of remediation (since that implies a lockstep sequence of skills that must be acquired).

For example, one challenge we are facing at my university has been brought to my attention by a librarian who works with FYS/W faculty and receives student referrals from the Academic Discipline Committee. She noted that a number of students were being labeled academically dishonest because they lacked the background in proper citation and that faculty were not teaching citation, but simply labeling it incorrect.

This issue with citation, again, is a subset of not understanding that teaching writing is ongoing for all students (and any writers)—not something to master at a set point during formal education.

The teaching of writing includes, as I note above about teaching poetry, creating the conditions within which a student can learn to write and then managing the sort of feedback and opportunities to revise/draft that leads to growth as a writer.

Creating conditions includes reading and examining a wide variety of texts by genre, mode, and media—and that examination must be not only traditional literary analysis but reading like a writer. Reading like a writer entails close consideration of what a text says and how, while navigating the purposeful relationship between the genre and form the writer has chosen for expression and then how the writer has and has not conformed to the conventions of those genres/forms.

Students and the teacher read an Op-Ed from The New York Times in order to confront what Op-Eds and argument tend to do as texts and how in order to determine if the claims in the Op-Ed are sound and how successful the piece ultimately is.

These conditions also include that students always use reading like a writer as a foundation for drafting original writing.

Feedback, then, becomes the element of teaching writing that is both often only what people think of as teaching writing and then the most misunderstood phase.

The primary problematic view of responding to student writing is “correcting,” which overemphasizes and misunderstands the role of conventions in writing (grammar, mechanics, usage).

What many think of as “correcting,” I would argue is editing, and thus, its priority in the teaching of writing is after we have addressed much more important aspects of text, as Lou LaBrant argued:

As a teacher of English, I am not willing to teach the polishing and adornment of irresponsible, unimportant writing….I would place as the first aim of teaching students to write the development of full responsibility for what they say. (p. 123)

And it is at this implication by LaBrant—responsible and important writing—that I think we must focus on what it means to teach writing.

As teachers of writing, we must give substantive feedback that encourages awareness and purpose in our students as well as prompts them in concrete ways to revise. That feedback must address the following:

  • The relationship between the genre/form students have chosen for their writing and then how effective the piece is within (or against) those conventions.
  • Purposefulness of sentence, paragraph, and form/mode creation.
  • Appropriateness and effectiveness of diction (word choice), tone, and readability (in the context of the designated audience).
  • Weight and clarity of claims (notably in the context of disciplinary, genre, and mode conventions). [As a note: novice writers tend to be claim-machines, overwhelming the reader with too many and often overstated claims, and almost no evidence or elaboration.]
  • Credibility and weight of evidence (again, tempered by the conventions of the disciplines and thus the expectations for citation).
  • Effectiveness and weight of elaboration—achieving cohesion through rhetorical and content strategies (such as detailed examples or narrative) that support the reader’s need for clarity, subordination/coordination of ideas, transition, and one or more unifying themes/theses.

Teaching writing, then, is a monumental task, one that may rightly be called impossible (as Vonnegut somewhat tongue-in-cheek claims); however, we who are tasked with teaching writing should understand the first directive above—learning to write is a process that no one can ever finish—and find solace in Henry David Thoreau (excusing the sexism of his language):

A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.

No single writing-intensive class or individual teacher should be expected to accomplish any prescribed outcome for students as writers.

Instead, the teaching of writing must be guided by the basic concepts I outlined above for teaching a student to write poetry—creating the conditions within which writing can be explored, conditions that include reading like a writer, drafting original writing, and receiving substantive feedback from a mentor.

Teaching writing has a long history of being a challenge, one recognized by LaBrant in 1953:

It ought to be unnecessary to say that writing is learned by writing; unfortunately there is need. Again and again teachers or schools are accused of failing to teach students to write decent English, and again and again investigations show that students have been taught about punctuation, the function of a paragraph, parts of speech, selection of “vivid” words, spelling – that students have done everything but the writing of many complete papers. Again and again college freshmen report that never in either high school or grammar school have they been asked to select a topic for writing, and write their own ideas about that subject. Some have been given topics for writing; others have been asked to summarize what someone else has said; numbers have been given work on revising sentences, filling in blanks, punctuating sentences, and analyzing what others have written….Knowing facts about language does not necessarily result in ability to use it. (p. 417)

Any student taking a seat in our classes deserves the patience and time necessary for teaching writing, something extremely difficult to do but possible if we can embrace its complexity and offer students, as LaBrant argues, ample opportunities to practice being writers.

Recommended

Genre awareness for the novice academic student: An ongoing quest, Ann M. Johns

Writing Instruction That Works: Proven Methods for Middle and High School Classrooms, Arthur N. Applebee and Judith A. Langer

What do College Professors Want from Incoming High School Graduates?

Inducing Students to Write (1955), Lou LaBrant

Teaching High-School Students to Write (1946), Lou LaBrant

Writing Is More than Structure (1957), Lou LaBrant

The Individual and His Writing (1950), Lou LaBrant

education

The (Macabre) South: A Reader

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necrophilia [nek-ruh-fil-ee-uh] – noun, Psychiatry.
1. an erotic attraction to corpses.

There is a perverse irony to this I cling to: My homeland, The South, is best represented by William Faulkner’s “A Rose from Emily”—a story that builds to a Town discovering that dear old Emily has been sleeping with the corpse of a lover, who everyone assumed had left her just before marriage.

To this day in 2015, as I post this, Emily remains the fictional personification of The South.

Case in point: Georgia bill would protect Civil War, other monuments despite any local objections:

Proposed Georgia legislation would prohibit the removal of monuments despite any future objections to them.

Rep. Tommy Benton introduced House Bill 50 to avoid changing fashions from sweeping away memories, he said. It was approved by a Georgia House committee on Wednesday.

“I think history is history,” said Benton, R-Jefferson.

Having been born and then lived my entire life in The South, I am deeply skeptical of the first two words of Rep. Benton’s quote—thinking is not something common among the wink-wink-nod-nod populist politics in The South, but pandering is—and that pandering is often to the lowest possible denominator, I fear.

This legislation would once again codify what Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (pp. 22-23) vividly details:

lynching 1

lynchings 2

I imagine that some political leaders in Georgia have heard the rising voices at nearby Clemson University in South Carolina, where students and faculty have called for the renaming of Tillman Hall; see two posts addressing that debate:

Ultimately, The South’s contemporary and historical Selves are almost indistinguishable; we never let go.

Segregation, corporal punishment, self-defeating political allegiances, racism, sexism, inadequate commitments to public institutions (notably education), “right to work” anti-unionism, a contradictory reputation for great literature and “deficient” literacy, a fundamentalist religious fervor—these are The South, and I invite you to read further:

education, education reform

Dear NYT, Better Teachers? How About Better Journalism?

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The New York Times has posed at Room for Debate: How to Ensure and Improve Teacher Quality. As an opinion blog designed to offer debate, and thus differing perspectives, we should expect a spectrum of voices—at least that is the appearance.

So let’s start with a broader perspective: Voices in the media addressing education are inversely proportional to the expertise in the field:

Across MSNBC, CNN, And Fox, Only 9 Percent Of Guests In Education Segments Were Educators. On segments in which there was a substantial discussion of domestic education policy between January 1, 2014, and October 31, 2014, there were 185 guests total on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, only 16 of whom were educators, or 9 percent. Media Matters

Therefore, I think it is fair—and not ad hominem—to clarify the background and experiences of the five debaters selected by the NYT to frame the national debate about teacher quality:

  • Amanda Ripley, journalist, who gained a great deal of national acclaim for her Time cover-story of Michelle Rhee (who eventually left her role in DC under a cloud of suspicion for testing fraud). Ripley has no K-12 classroom experience.
  • Eric Hanushek, economist. Hanushek has no K-12 classroom experience.
  • Mercedes Schneider, 20+-year K-12 classroom teacher who is also an active blogger about education reform.
  • Jal Mehta, Associate Professor in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (with a PhD in sociology). I can find no information on any K-12 teaching experience, but he has written several books on education.
  • Kaya Henderson, Chancellor DCPS with degrees in international relations and leadership (not education). Henderson has K-12 teaching experience.

Any fair person can see this line up is skewed in much the same way that most mainstream journalism distorts the narrative about teacher quality and education.

But let’s add just a couple more details.

Henderson’s background, like Ripley’s, significantly overlaps with Rhee (Henderson served under Rhee at DCPS, although her bio linked above conveniently doesn’t include Rhee’s name) as well as Teach for America and The New Teacher Project, “a spin-off of TFA…originally led by Michelle Rhee.”

And if all this seems to some to be more about the people than the substance of their claims, let’s add a closer look at Hanushek’s first paragraph:

Despite decades of study and enormous effort, we know little about how to train or select high quality teachers. We do know, however, that there are huge differences in the effectiveness of classroom teachers and that these differences can be observed.

Without even a hyperlink or any evidence, Hanushek discounts the entire field of teacher education in the first sentence (which is factually untrue), and then characterizes teacher quality with “huge,” although the research base shows teacher quality’s impact on measurable student outcome is quite small (and note whose work is included in the synthesis of teacher quality research below):

But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics (most are unobserved, but likely pertain to income/poverty). Observable and unobservable schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects [emphasis added]. The rest of the variation (about 20 percent) is unexplained (error). In other words, though precise estimates vary, the preponderance of evidence shows that achievement differences between students are overwhelmingly attributable to factors outside of schools and classrooms (see Hanushek et al. 1998;Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).

At best, Hanushek’s opinion opens with inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and misleading claims.

More of the claims in the five opinions included are factually unsupported than supported, but the focus and the rhetoric maintain a false argument about teacher quality as well as the need for mostly ineffective reform strategies that do not serve the interests of students, communities, teachers, or public education.

Politicians, self-serving organizations (such as TFA), and think tanks promoting bunkum benefit from the inordinate misinformation included, but not genuine education reform aimed at the single greatest problem facing our society and our schools: inequity.

This version of Room for Debate is yet another tired example of an ironic fact: In the debate over teacher quality, there is little room for the truth or the voices of life-long teachers who have served their students and their communities.

education, education reform, race

Avoiding Patricia Arquette Moments in Education Reform

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When Patricia Arquette called for equal pay for women after being awarded the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in late February 2015, Meryl Streep stood, cheering, and Hillary Clinton voiced her support as well.

However, social media began to catalog a much different response, notably by black Haitian writer of Bad Feminist Roxane Gay and Imani Gandy, attorney and political journalist advocating for women’s rights, who explained:

With those words—whether intentional or not (and personally, I believe it was unintentional)—Patricia Arquette gave voice to a system of structural erasure that has been the gold standard in the feminist movement since well before Sojourner Truth stood up and declared “Ain’t I A Woman?”

That erasure assumes that all men are white men and all people of color are men. And that erasure leaves women of color wondering where they fit into all of this.

In a follow up blog, Gandy adds:

My conversation with [Nicole Sandler] got me thinking about the conversations that I have with white women about privilege and why it tends to devolve into shenanigans and feelings of ill-will (as it unfortunately has with Nicole).

Oftentimes when I have these conversations with white women, they’ve never heard the term white privilege before, or if they have, they dismiss it as inapplicable to them.

Arquette represents the dangers of good intentions in the context of unexamined privilege, as Gandy confronts above and then emphasizes:

Here’s the thing about privilege: There are all kinds. There’s privilege based on race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, citizenship status, and on and on. (A great primer on the concept is Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Privilege Knapsack.”)

And you know what? Almost every single person on the planet has privilege in some form or another.

Me? I have class privilege. I make a decent living now and I grew up upper-middle class. I never wanted for anything. And I rarely want for anything now. (Certainly the things that Iwant are luxury items that I really don’t need. I mean, I’ve got my eye on a Michael Kors purse, but do I need it? Hardly.)

Additionally, Arquette as a white woman offers an important moment for the education reform debate, notably since education has its own Arquette in the form of Ruby Payne.

“The current teaching population in the U.S. comprises mostly white, middle-class women,” explain Sato and Lensmire in their analysis of Payne’s claims about poverty and why those discredited stereotypes are nonetheless embraced:

Osei-Kofi (2005) thinks that Payne’s stereotypes provide the well-meaning educator with a certain “guilty voyeuristic pleasure” as they get to affirm their own normalcy against the “comfortably familiar” image of the poor as pathological. Payne plays on our sense of ourselves as normal, the norm, as well as on our sense of the poor as different, other.

Sato and Lensmire then quote Osei-Kofi:

“Based on this depiction of the poor, educators become perfectly situated to take on the role of middle-class, primarily white, saviors of children in poverty by being ‘good’ role models, and teaching these children the so-called hidden rules of middle-class. Through the objectification of the poor, educators are implicitly positioned as the true histor- ical subjects with ability to act in creating social change.” (Osei-Kofi 2005, p. 370; emphasis added)

Bomer, and others, have exposed the same dynamic, including how Payne misrepresents poverty and race in her frameworks:

Racializing the representations of poverty means that Payne is portraying poor people as people of color, rather than acknowledging the fact that most poor people in the US are white (Roberts, 2004). By doing so, Payne is perpetuating negative stereotypes by equating poverty with people of color. Although there is a correlation between race and class, this does not justify her use of racialized “case studies.”

Payne’s audience of teachers is primarily white, female, and middle class, so their probable shared perspective makes it likely that such signals will be understood as racial. Given that the truth claims do not explicitly address the relationships between poverty, race, ethnicity, and gender, we are merely pointing out the absence of such considerations from Payne’s work.

And despite a growing body of research refuting Payne’s claims about class and race, Payne continues to prosper on her self-published books and workshops and has often been defiant—a cycle not unlike Arquette’s defense of her comments and advocacy—as Gorski notes:

For example, in response to a critique of A Framework published by Teachers College Record (Gorski, 2006b), Payne (2006a) writes: “Gorski states that his lens is critical social theory. My theoretical lens is economic pragmatism. The two theoretical frames are almost polar opposites.”

Indeed.

Well-intentioned people, then, unwilling to examine their own privilege and then defiant against the voices of others who speak from marginalized perspectives are as apt to derail the call for equity in education reform as the so-called corporate reformers.

As I have detailed in literacy education, uncritical embracing of the “word gap” reveals the blinders of privilege and then leads directly to policy distorted by racism, classism, and sexism—policy, then, that perpetuates inequity while claiming to be reform.

As Gandy explains above, everyone must be open to examining her/his own privilege, even when she/he feels primarily to be in a marginalized status (such as white women), but that self-examination is often hard since the factors are so close and familiar.

While watching an HBO’s Real Sports episode on Death on Everest recently, I was struck how the relationship between Shirpas and mostly affluent and often white mountain climbers is a stark but real example of the danger and power of privilege: White wealth pays to defer great risk and even death from the climbers to the Shirpas.

A context such as that—also examined in Death and Anger on Everest by Jon Krakauer—may offer the distance needed to understand privilege before turning the mirror on ourselves and those near us.

Nonetheless, as much as the Arquette controversy is important for a national examination of privilege, it is also a key moment for committing to avoiding more Arquette moments within education, where there is no room for privilege or the status quo of racism, classism, and sexism.

Anxiety

The Anxiety Chronicles: Confession 1

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Have you ever felt anxious? Right before giving a talk, or waiting on news that could be bad or good, or minutes before a first date?

Well, you don’t understand then; you don’t and probably can’t understand what suffering from anxiety is like because individual events of anxiousness or worry would be a relief to those of us who suffer the unwanted psychological cocktail of anxiety, depression, OCD, and ADHD (among others).

Colleen Flaherty has recently detailed the stigma of mental illness within the academy:

[Peter] Railton’s topic? His battle with depression, which he says he’s hidden for too long.

“As academics, we live in its midst,” Railton said, according to a draft of the John Dewey Lecture he delivered last week at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association’s Central Division in St. Louis. “We know how it hurts our students, our colleagues, our teachers, our families. Of course, most of us are ‘educated’ about depression — we like to think that we no longer consider it a stain on one’s character. We’ve gotten beyond that. Or have we?”

In the same way that don’t ask, don’t tell policies implied that being gay was something shameful to be kept private, Railton said, the social codes surrounding mental illness prevent many who need help from seeking it. He encouraged those who have struggled with depression and related conditions, such as anxiety, to come out and share their experiences, rather than conceal them for fear of judgment.

October of 1999—my lifelong battle with anxiety (I’ll use that term for the cocktail noted above) became nearly debilitating. For almost 40 years, I had managed it, masked it so powerfully that when I was rendered unable to sleep due to some invisible force that gripped me every time I tried simply to lie down and then relented to visiting my doctor, he was completely unable to diagnose my condition.

A new partner in the medical group noted immediately that I was having panic attacks (although I reject the “attack” part in that it suggests incidences over the pervasive weight of anxiety).

Like Railton, I admit that possibly the greatest challenge with anxiety is that it becomes a vicious cycle of masking to hide the most embarrassing weakness of all: anxiety is completely irrational. In the rational world of academia, few things are worse to admit.

So my life within academia, higher education especially, is a constant but unenjoyable Merry-Go-Round of trying to explain the irrational to the rational.

“I don’t fly,” I explain calmly.

“You don’t fly?” the person always asks, as if this is unfathomable.

“I have flown,” I add, anticipating where the conversation is going. “And in part, that is why I don’t fly.”

“Just take something,” comes the next round.

“It is not the flying,” I continue diligently. “It is the entire concept, and thus, I would have to be medicated from the moment I knew I was going to fly and then until I returned.”

But virtually no one who ventures into this with me understands. Go back to the opening above.

There is nothing rational about a 54-year-old man with a doctorate and successful academic and scholarly career not flying but driving his car every day and cycling 9000-10,000 miles a year (and having been run over by cars twice during that 30-year hobby).

Nothing rational at all.

But if you are interested, I can detail that anxiety: I hate any sort of formal situation (generally they make we want to run to anywhere else), I hate not knowing (and this isn’t about control; it is genuinely about not knowing), and sleep is both the most wonderful thing ever in the human condition (during my collapse in 1999, I was on sleeping meds and cannot explain the joy I discovered at 38) and a constant struggle (I often wake in the night with one or both hands gripping the headboard, white knuckled).

And just as it took decades for me to recognize my anxiety, I have been forced lately to see that my daughter likely shares some of these challenges (although I had been fooled into thinking that she is quite unlike me) and that my granddaughter, fists always clenched and feet crossed and flexed, will soon carry on this unwelcome family tradition.

The Zombie Apocalypse and Other Stories

If I wanted to be a jerk about it, I’d say, “Clench your fist. Now hold that for 54 years and then get back to me.”

While that is entirely fair, it really isn’t helping for those who sincerely wonder what this anxiety is like. So as I mentioned above, my anxiety is a pervasive condition, a fact of life from which I basically never have any relief (except for the cycling, which appeases both my OCD tendencies and creates durations of pain that nearly shut off my mind).

It is a constant (and I mean constant) internal dialogue not of a split mind, but one singular mind that functions simultaneously in the irrational and rational worlds.

Exhausted yet just thinking about it? Sorry, but that is getting you close.

Michael J. Totten, writing about the popularity of zombie narratives, explains:

The fascination with the zombie apocalypse, I believe, is a cultural reflection of the new age of anxiety that opened on 9/11, with its fear of social collapse. As Penn State professor Peter Dendle puts it, the zombie is a “barometer of social anxiety”—and we’re plenty anxious. The Anxiety and Depression Association of America claims that anxiety disorders are now the most common mental illnesses in the country, affecting more than 40 million people.

And for me, The Walking Dead (graphic or TV series) is exactly that—a recreation of living under the weight of anxiety. Rick Grimes and his band are under the relentless fact of zombies, forced into an irrational world of the living dead.

With Season 5 and episode 12, the power of this TV series to portray anxiety is now in full view.

Safely behind the walls of Alexandria and apparently among new friends, the primary characters have a different challenge:

Much of the episode “Remember” deals with the group learning to live in a new place surrounded by strangers. Although everyone can have a new house, the survivors sleep together, play it safe. They have every reason to worry, every reason to find safety in numbers.

Living during the zombie apocalypse is never being allowed to live in the moment, existence dominated by the glaring light of the next moment.

Living during the zombie apocalypse colors everything, as Rick tries to explain:

Rick’s interview with Deanna is the most important. He keeps telling her—and everyone else—not to trust him. Not to trust anybody.

“You should keep your gates closed,” he tells Deanna. “Why?” she asks.

“Because it’s all about survival now, at any cost,” he replies. “People out there are always looking for an angle, looking to play on your weakness. They measure you by what they can take from you, by how they can use you to live.”

“Are you telling me not to bring your people in, or are you already looking after this place?” she asks him, but he doesn’t answer.

And I think this is why so much of the TV series focuses on night, as viewers watch Rick, Michonne, and Daryl sitting awake or suddenly waking in this new safe haven.

Anxiety as a disorder is relentless as the zombie apocalypse; it fosters an irrational response to the world that feels completely rational while you are inside it.

Just a couple days before The Walking Dead episode above aired, I read “Sleep” by Haruki Murkami from his collection The Elephant Vanishes.

“This is my seventeenth straight day without sleep,” the narrator, a wife and mother, begins, adding: “I’m not talking about insomnia.”

Like The Walking Dead, this story can be read as a story of anxiety about a woman who admits, “It was literally true: I was going through life asleep.” Reminding me of Kafka (Samsa lives a bug’s life before the transformation into a bug), Murakami transforms metaphor into the literal.

The power of this story, I think, is the careful and gradual blurring of the narrator as rational and then irrational due to sleep deprivation, all the while maintaining the ability to narrate in a reasonably controlled tone (a narrative mask).

The main character also echoes Meursault from Camus’s The Stranger, who admits one can adjust to anything (prison or not prison is no difference): “Without noticing it, I had become accustomed in this way to a life without books.”

Murakami’s story details a woman who can no longer sleep but believes that condition allows her to live life more fully, although as readers we watch as she becomes more and more isolated from the world, notably her family:

No one noticed that I had changed—that I had given up sleeping entirely, that I was spending all my time reading, that my mind was someplace a hundred years—and hundreds of miles—from reality. No matter how mechanically I worked, no matter how little love or emotion I invested in my handling of reality, my husband and my son and my mother-in-law went on relating to me as they always had. If anything, they seemed more at ease with me than before.

“Sleep,” then, falls into an existential tradition of literature in which the human condition is portrayed as starkly alone: Samsa as bug in a human family, Meusault as heartless murderer and social pariah, and this sleepless woman who loathes the faces of her sleeping husband and son.

“In other words,” she explains, “people live in the prison cells of their own tendencies.”

And as inadequate as words may be, I have to confess that this captures well what anxiety is, the prison cells of our own tendencies.

But prison cells we did not choose, do not deserve, and like the haunting lyrics of the California rock of my teenage years, prison cells where we can check out, but never leave.

James Baldwin, race, Ralph Ellison

Ellison, Baldwin, Coates: #BlackLivesMatter, a Reader

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Published in 1944, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy by Gunnar Myrdal, prompted black novelist Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1913–April 16, 1994) to offer a review, one that is much more than a review, including:

This was a period, the 1870s, wherein scientific method, with its supposed objectivity and neutrality to values, was thought to be the answer to all problems. There is no better example of the confusion and opportunism springing from this false assumption than the relation of American social science to the Negro problem. And let us make no easy distinctions here between Northern and Southern social scientists; both groups used their graphs, charts and other paraphernalia to prove the Negro’s biological, psychological, intellectual and moral inferiority, one group to justify the South’s exploitation of Negroes, and the other to justify the North’s refusal to do anything basic about it. Here was a science whose role, beneath its illusionary non-concern with values, was to reconcile the practical morality of American capitalism with the ideal morality of the American Creed.

And:

The most striking example of this failure is to be seen in the New Deal administration’s perpetuation of a Jim Crow army, and the shamefaced support of it given by the Communists. It would be easy—on the basis of some of the slogans attributed to Negro people by the Communists from time to time, and the New Deal’s frequent retreats on Negro issues—to question the sincerity of these two groups. Or, in the case of the New Deal, to attribute its failure to its desire to hold power in a concrete political situation, while the failure of the Communists could be laid to “Red perfidy.” But this would be silly. Sincerity is not a quality that one expects of political parties, not even revolutionary ones. To question their sincerity makes room for the old idea of paternalism, and the corny notion that these groups have an obligation to “do something for the Negro.”

James Baldwin‘s A Report from Occupied Territory (1966)

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Case for Reparations (2014)

Ta-Nehisi Coates Completely Shuts Down Shelby Steele In Epic Fashion In This Reparations Debate (see video clip)

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow

Black Lives Matter: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males (2015)

“Black Girls Matter”: An Interview With Kimberle Crenshaw and Luke Harris