Category Archives: Education

Education, Education Week

Rank (adjective) – having a strong, unpleasant smell

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For many years, the College Board would release average SAT scores with the states ranked by those averages. While the media would rush to make claims about those rankings as well as how average SAT scores changed from one year to the next, educational researchers and scholars often fought a losing battle trying to explain the flaws with such rankings and with making many of the claims about relative educational quality the media, politicians, and the public embraced.

More recently, however, even the College Board warns that no one “[should] rank or rate teachers, educational institutions, districts or states solely on the basis of aggregate scores derived from tests that are intended primarily as a measure of individual students.” [1]

Yet, many continue to rank and draw rash conclusions despite that warning because in the U.S. rankings of all kinds are extremely popular—from our sports to our schools and then almost everything else.

The U.S. obsession with ranking seems as much a love/hate relationship as anything; notably how we both seek always a better way to rank sports teams (consider the new playoff format for college football) and constantly argue and complain about those rankings.

What we tend to fail to do is question the act of ranking itself or acknowledge what it is that rankings do reveal—the latter being that any ranking reveals more about who is doing the ranking and why than what the ranking claims to accomplish.

Researcher Gerald Bracey has warned about ranking:

In any ranking, while someone gets to rank first, someone must rank last….In order to properly judge a rank, you need to know something about the context in which it occurs. (p. 59)

A key point here is that ranking imposes a judgment of relative quality on people and situations even though such judgments may be either irrelevant or terribly misleading. To explain this, Bracey refers to Olympic athletic events (placing fourth in an Olympic event is losing, although that athlete may be fourth best in the world at the sport), but with my methods students, while addressing assessment, I discuss identifying the top runners out of a group of students.

Unlike administering selected-response testing, identifying the best (and worst) runners can be accomplished under ideally authentic conditions—running a race. But to return to Bracey’s point about “context,” even though determining the best and worst runners can be authentic doesn’t mean that the process is without bias that impacts directly the resulting rankings.

If we take 30 runners, and ask them to run the 40-yard dash we are likely to get a much different ranking than if we ask them to run a marathon. In other words, who decides and what conditions create the metrics used for ranking render all attempts at ranking deeply biased and relative to a certain setting, and in many ways less useful than they appear.

By changing the parameters of determining “best runner,” we change who ranks where, and we must also acknowledge that a runner who places first in one class (and labeled “best”) may place last if moved to another class.

Concurrent with the newly formed college football national championship playoffs (resulting from decades of using a variety of systems to rank and determine only two teams to play for that championship each year—a deeply unsatisfying process), Education Week released its annual Quality Counts ranking of state educational quality and a edu-scholar public influence ranking first offered in 2010.

At the risk of sounding petty [2], I want to note that although I do not appear on the edu-scholar ranking and since the metrics for that ranking are made public, I would easily rank in the second 100 due to my Klout score, google Scholar metric, book publications, and frequent publishing and citing in international, national, state, and local media.

While I am not lobbying here, my own case highlights that it is likely dozens of other scholars have the same situation, and that despite the intent behind the rankings (to recognize often ignored within the academy public work by academics), the act of reducing people or work to metrics and then ranking is often counter-productive to the intended goals.

Should we increase the value placed on public work by academics and scholars? Yes. But labeling and ranking public work by scholars does more harm than good.

Should we shine a bright light on educational quality of schools and states in order to improve that quality? Yes. But labeling and ranking schools and states does more harm than good.

Just as we need to set aside accountability, standards, and high-stakes testing as our only approach to education reform, we need to stop our incessant race to rank in all educational contexts.

Rankings (labeling in order to sort), I contend, are not only poor ways to accomplish those goals, but the act of ranking itself is likely harmful to those goals—much in the same way SAT data have been misinterpreted for years, not because of the data but because of the urge to use that data to rank.

The urge to rank NCAA college basketball teams and then funnel all that into March Madness may in fact be a vibrant and mostly harmless way to do sport and entertainment.

But as Gerald Bracey (as an active researcher and public scholar) warned over and over, ranking is mostly a harmful and flawed exercise in the world of education. And since much of education in the U.S. is publicly funded and necessarily a part of the political process, many times rankings are more about political agendas than genuinely seeking to recognize accomplishments or prompt reform.

Ranking, as I noted about grades in education, are almost always accomplishing more harm than good, and thus, ranking is the worst possible process to advocate for or achieve laudable goals, especially in the context of education and scholarship.

—

[1] Gerald Bracey often stressed that we must never use an assessment or data set for purposes other than the ones for which they were designed.

[2] To clarify and for full disclosure, I do not need the edu-scholar ranking since I am an associate professor with tenure currently applying for full professor at my university. My university recognition and status are unlikely to be impacted by the ranking, although many of us on the faculty are currently calling for greater acknowledgment of public work by professors. My reason for using myself as an example is because I have the metrics and because a large number of junior faculty not as secure as I am are the ones likely being mis-served by rankings.

Education, education reform

USDOE: When in a Hole, Keep Digging

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The U.S. Department of Education ended 2014 with another (and predictable) reach into education reform, proposing new policy for teacher education.

Reviewing the reform initiative for NEPC, Kevin K. Kumashiro has drawn several disturbing (and predictable) conclusions:

This review considers the evidentiary support for the proposed regulations and identifies seven concerns: (1) an underestimation of what could be a quite high and unnecessary cost and burden; (2) an unfounded attribution of educational inequities to individual teachers rather than to root systemic causes; (3) an improperly narrow definition of teacher classroom readiness; (4) a reliance on scientifically discredited processes of test-based accountability and value-added measures for data analysis; (5) inaccurate causal explanations that will put into place a disincentive for teachers to work in high-needs schools; (6) a restriction on the accessibility of federal student financial aid and thus a limiting of pathways into the teaching profession; and (7) an unwarranted, narrow, and harmful view of the very purposes of education.

While acknowledging the nearly complete failure of this new USDOE proposal to reform teacher education is crucial, that may not be as important as also highlighting the pattern of ineptitude now shaping the Obama education legacy.

The elements of that legacy share several qualities that confirm my call for invoking the Reagan directive to abolish the USDOE:

  • Using federal initiatives and funding to leverage policy and practices in K-12 and higher education: Race to the Top, opting out of NCLB, tuition-free community college.
  • Endorsing, funding, and imposing policies, practices, and organizations that significant bodies of research either refute or reveal to be mostly speculative or no more effective than existing practices or structures: value-added methods of evaluating teachers, schools, or programs; new standards; new high-stakes tests; charter schools (and other choice mechanisms); Teach for America; third-grade retention based on high-stakes tests.
  • Masking social and educational root problems as well as “scientifically discredited” policy commitments behind Orwellian political discourse (utopian claims about teacher impact and educational attainment, parental choice; framing racist and classist structures [charter schools] and ideologies [‘no excuses,” “grit”] as “the civil rights issue of our time”).

Instead of identifying and confronting the social and educational inequity overburdening K-12 public education, schools, teachers, and students—and then promoting research-based policy addressing those inequities—the USDOE is content with maintaining the status quo of keeping the Obama education legacy at the bottom of a very deep hole begun by others and doggedly continuing to dig.

These facts have now existed well beyond a decade, and thus, are not about individual people (elected or appointed) or a political party.

This is a failed approach to government mandated instead of publicly funded universal public education.

The burden now facing the public is about both triggering the democratic process and embracing publicly funded universal public education as central to preserving that democracy.

The rhetoric and policy flowing from the USDOE are in the service of something other than either education in the name of democracy or the public good.

We all must shine light on those facts and demand different.

Democracy, Education, education reform

Publicly Funded, Not Free

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Between two versions of libertarian ideology, I think, many in the U.S. have committed to the wrong one: childish Ayn Rand libertarianism instead of the child-like (idealistic) Henry David Thoreau libertarianism found in the opening of his “Civil Disobedience”:

I heartily accept the motto, — “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient….

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

While I find the rugged individualism and self-defeating as well as heartless selfishness of Rand libertarianism ethically repulsive, the tension offered in Thoreau’s quest for no government strikes me as a practical mechanism for maintaining democracy against the threat of totalitarianism.

And it is at his “better government” call that I think we can look to something such as the roads and highways in the U.S. for a template.

While we may quibble over road conditions near our homes or on our commute to work, I think we must all acknowledge in the U.S. that the publicly funded infrastructure is foundational for market success in the nation. As well, while we have depended on the political system to approve and fund those roads, highways, and bridges, we have not then turned over the design and construction of that system to politicians, but to engineers and construction experts.

That distinct line, however, has not been nearly as sacred in public education, where political leaders and appointees have far too much direct influence not only on the funding but also on the actually policy—the result being that we have far less to be proud of from our public schools than our public highway/road system—the former still much further from achieving the original intent than the latter.

I was reminded of all this once the social media frenzy began about President Barack Obama’s plan to “mak[e] two years of community college free for students,” as reported in Politico. That news prompted #FreeCommunityCollege on Twitter as well.

Against the Obama administration’s abysmal record on public education, this plan certainly sounds encouraging, but the media and public response highlights a serious problem beyond the usual concern about clamoring to score partisan political points: Obama’s plan if approved would create fully publicly funded and no-tuition community college, not free community college.

As well, this plan is a pale version of what Germany has recently re-embraced, as explained by Barbara Kehm:

From this semester, all higher education will be free for both Germans and international students at universities across the country, after Lower Saxony became the final state to abolish tuition fees….

It’s important to be aware of two things when it comes to understanding how German higher education is funded and how the country got to this point. First, Germany is a federal country with 16 autonomous states responsible for education, higher education and cultural affairs. Second, the German higher education system – consisting of 379 higher education institutions with about 2.4m students – is a public system which is publicly funded. There are a number of small private institutions but they enroll less than 5% of the total student body.

This is not a matter of mere semantics, but the German commitment and Obama’s community college proposal are about not charging students (a user fee similar to toll highways in the U.S.), but instead making a social commitment to fully publicly fund all or some of any person’s higher education (an education version of our public highway system).

“Free” is not only factually inaccurate, but the implication detracts from the exact concept that needs our support now more than ever: “publicly funded” is a necessary and rightful commitment by a people that builds the foundation upon which all else exists—life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness as well as the glorified free market in the U.S.

To return to my example above, try building your company yourself without the publicly funded roads and highways, without the publicly funded judicial system, just to start. Yes, our publicly funded institutions in the U.S. have many problems and flaws, but the one aspect about them that isn’t flawed is that they are publicly funded.

While I am deeply skeptical of our partisan political system masquerading as democracy in the U.S., I certainly join those cheering Obama’s plan for no-tuition community college; however, my guarded optimism has strings attached, requiring that this proposal is the first step toward addressing several issues related to education:

  • Two years of no-tuition community college means little in the wake of dismantling K-12 public education, which is the ugly legacy of the Obama administration. The era of accountability-based education reform must end immediately, and then a new era of fully funding and supporting universal public education must begin—one that rejects market forces and political overstep.
  • Two years of no-tuition community college means little in the wake of the massive debt being incurred by college students in the U.S. The existing debt must be addressed (eradicated where possible), and then a system that greatly lessens college-related debt must be established while we work toward a model of universal no-tuition higher education.
  • Two years of no-tuition community college means little in the context of a depressed job market in which recent college graduates do not find full-time, stable work that matches their degrees. A college degree and enormous debt with no prospect of work is a nightmare, but a college degree without debt and no prospect of work isn’t much better. We must recognize that education policy cannot be separated from work policy.
  • Two years of no-tuition community college means little in the context of the harsh reality that educational attainment does not lessen the powerful and corrupting influence of racism and classism in the U.S. The cultural myth that education is the great equalizer is currently a false promise. Blacks with some college have about the same employment prospects as white high school drop-outs, and educational attainment is valuable within ones race, but doesn’t erase inequities among races.

Instead of rushing to promote misleading hastags or to prop up a political candidate along partisan lines, we should see Obama’s proposal for no-tuition community college as an opportunity to “make known what kind of government would command [our] respect,” to emphasize the essential nature of publicly funded institutions that constitute “better government.”

Democracy, Education, education reform, school to prison pipeline, schools as prison

Authoritarian Schools, Authoritarian State in the Service of Privilege

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The fruits of the Reagan Era are proving to be mostly poison apples.

Both begun under Reagan, mass incarceration and high-stakes education reform have escalated the rise of the authoritarian school and the authoritarian state in the service of privilege.

During the past few years, teachers and police are coming under increased scrutiny in the wake of disaster capitalism’s influence how we do school and how we enforce law—significantly at the expense of children living in poverty, black and brown children, and children speaking home languages other than English.

Jose Vilson has offered a bold and critical examination of how political and public calls for greater teacher and police quality and oversight intersect, revealing, I think, that these are not simple black and white issues. Bad teachers and bad police there certainly are, but to play the flawed individual game feeds into the central problem in the U.S.: We refuse to acknowledge systemic causes (racism, sexism, homophobia) for individual situations.

Vilson builds to what I think is the crux of the matter: “To protect and to serve, and that’s something we can never turn our backs to.” Teachers and police are public servants, embodying the will of the people. As public servants, teachers and police fail their charge when they twist their service into authority over the public, instead of from or in service of.

Authoritarian (and thus “bad”) teachers and authoritarian (and thus “bad”) police are consequences of a larger reality: The U.S. is a racist and sexist nation functioning as an authoritarian state, and most of our structures serve that status quo as well as the interests of the privileged.

Democracy and meritocracy along with the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone remain worthy of a people, but those are not what our public institutions serve in the U.S. today.

Sacrificing Democracy and “Other People’s Children” at the Alter of Authority

Well before Bill Ayers was demonized during Barack Obama’s run for president or before Ayers’s radical past was more widely recognized after his memoir in 2001, I was introduced to his wonderful To Teach while in my doctoral program in the mid-1990s.

Ayers offers characterizations of traditional schooling that resonated with me then and do also now:

There are a lot of quiet, passive classrooms where not much learning is taking place, and others where children’s hearts, souls, and minds are being silently destroyed in the name of good management….

In school, a high value is placed on quiet: “Is everything quiet?” the superintendent asks the principal, and the principal asks the teacher, and the teacher asks the child. If everything is quiet, it is assumed all is well. This is why many normal children—considering what kind of intelligence is expected and what will be rewarded here—become passive, quiet, obedient, dull. The environment practically demands it. (pp. 23, 64)

At nearly every level of considering education, we always come back to classroom management and discipline. And it is here I want to ask two genuinely important questions:

  1. Why do we persist at accountability-based education reform driven by standards and high-stakes tests even though that approach has never worked over 100+ years?
  2. Why do we persist with harsh policies such as police in schools, zero-tolerance, “no excuses,” grade retention, and corporal punishment even though they are ineffective and even do more harm? [1]

Because all of these commitments do accomplish one thing that is actually the sacred element in formal schooling—authoritarian environments.

As long as we remain trapped in accountability reform and in-school authoritarian practices, we are admitting that we are not seeking universal public education in the service of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—individual freedom and democracy.

Authoritarian schools feed an authoritarian state (where, for example, police are feared and teachers are disrespected).

Democracy must be fertilized with schools that practice community and collaboration.

So in our necessary and important rush to honor good teachers and good police, let’s be careful about our accusatory gazes because when teachers and police are bad, it may well be that their behavior reflects a failed system, an authoritarian system that serves the status quo and the interests of the privileged.

We need to lift our eyes and look closely at who supports accountability-based education reform and harsh in-school policies—and why.

There is the place to start toward better teachers and police who honor, as Vilson noted, their need to serve and protect as agents of the public good.

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[1] I think in the context of these two questions, we must ask, Why are reformers convinced class size doesn’t matter (despite many enrolling their children in private schools with very low class sizes)? The answer is likely that large class size forces teachers to focus primarily on classroom management/discipline and consequently accomplishes again the main objective: authoritarian classrooms.

NOTE: HT to David Kaib for a series of Tweets recently.

Education, Testing

Grades Fail Student Engagement with Learning

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Possibly my greatest commitment while teaching public school English in a rural SC high school for 18 years was listening to my students, and by that, I do not mean listening to them during class discussions or in conferences (I did that also).

I mean listening to students when they didn’t know an adult was listening.

Some of those moments that have shaped my teaching include the following:

  • Student comment: A student walking into class told a friend that she had just failed a pop quiz in the previous class after studying all night, and from then on, she wasn’t going to waste her time studying. My lesson: Pop quizzes often taught students the exact wrong lessons intended; thus, I very early on never gave pop quizzes (leading eventually to giving no tests, for similar reasons).
  • Student comment: Two students were leaving my class once at the end of the school day. One asked the other if they had any homework in another class; the friend replied, “No, we just have to read.” My lesson: Students did not see reading as homework, and after I asked what the students meant, I discovered that students had learned they did not need to read since teachers told them everything they needed in class the next day. This profoundly impacted how I invited and required student reading in my classes, including offering adequate time in class for them to read, increasing choice in their reading, and adding an artifact of reading (response journals, annotating text, notes to classmates, etc.) to any out-of-school reading expectations.

Some of the listening I did, however, took much more time and required inference on my part. But it is that sort of listening that ultimately shaped my understanding that grades, averaging grades, rubrics, and grading policies contribute significantly to student opportunities to avoid being engaged with learning.

Let me explain.

Over a long period of time, and while carefully listening and even asking questions, I learned that many students gamed their math classes so that they passed math courses while never passing a single math test or exam.

Students had discovered that playing the game of averaging grades and manipulating the impact of non-test assignments (homework, projects, class participation, extra credit) on those averages allowed students to pass the course with a minimum of studying or learning the material for quizzes, tests, and exams. And, yes, the irony here is that students used math to avoid being engaged in actually learning math.

Since students were armed with detailed grading policies, many would keep a running record of their averages, weigh that against the extra credit and non-test grades they could compile, and then maintain cumulative averages just at the passing barrier (often something they learned they could negotiate near the end of the course, as well).

This is just one example of “school-only” practices and “student” behaviors that have guided my own teaching policies that seek ways to end both: I don’t want my class to be “playing school,” and I don’t want the young people in my classes to behave as students.

This came to mind as I exchanged emails with Peter Smagorinsky about a recent post of mine, Email to My Students: “the luxury of being thankful,” lamenting giving grades at the end of the semester.

I want to clarify what I do and why, but also add how I have course policies that delay traditional grading but are driven instead by minimum requirements for course credit that support engagement.

First, some may have assumed that my non-grading practices are somehow related to my teaching at a selective university where that is possible. But I must emphasize that I started de-grading my classes early in my career while teaching in a rural SC public high school, and I did so with all levels of students.

My practices are not about idealized students or settings.

Next, de-grading a class is not about being soft, or easy, or asking less of students. De-grading is about demanding more from students, notably more engagement.

In my courses (then and now), students had/have to participate fully in all activities and assignments [1]. To put this in traditional contexts, students are not allow to “take a zero” on an assignment and then just pass by on the resulting average.

There is no, “I just took zeros on my papers last year and still passed English.” (And, again, many students told me that when I was teaching public school.)

Again, then and now, when students are required to write four original and drafted essays over a grading period or during a course, that means several minimum requirements: initial submission of each drafted original essay (made directly observable during writing workshop in class), required conferences with me after each initial essay submission, and required essay revision meeting minimum expectations of revision (a detailed revision plan we created in each conference).

Don’t fulfill minimum requirements, and you do not receive credit for the grading period or the course (and, yes, I did this during my public school teaching career).

I balance those demands with other important policies: (i) students are allowed to continue revising their work as much as they want and time allows, and (ii) late work is not only accepted, but necessary.

The de-graded classroom is about engagement in the learning process and artifacts of learning. There is nothing soft or easy about any of this, and these are not practices suitable for only some students.

And students are not allowed the manipulation of grades and averages that I have witnessed and continue to witness in traditionally grade-driven courses where students focus on the grades or passing and not engaging with learning.

Minimum observable requirements for student participation trump significantly traditionally graded and averaged testing in terms of creating genuine student engagement in learning.

I want to end by emphasizing , again, that these are not idealistic practices or claims; I also practice concessions to the reality of grades in formal schooling.

The “de-” in de-grading of my classes is best framed as “delayed” because I do invite students to discuss the grades their works-in-progress deserve throughout the process and, of course, I do assign grades at the end of each course.

While delaying grades, however, I am increasing the quality and quantity of feedback my students receive and of student engagement in learning for the sake and advantages of learning.

—

[1] As an example, here is my minimum requirement statement from a first-year writing seminar:

Minimum Requirements for course credit:

  • Submit all essays in MULTIPLE DRAFTS before the last day of the course; initial drafts and subsequent drafts should be submitted with great care, as if each is the final submission, but students are expected to participate in process writing throughout the entire semester as a minimum requirement of this course—including a minimum of ONE conference per major essay.
  • Demonstrate adequate understanding of proper documentation and citation of sources through a single well-cited essay or several well-cited essays. A cited essay MUST be included in your final portfolio.
Education, education reform

A Call for Social Media Solidarity: “This Is Our House”

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Let me start with an image.

Whether you have witnessed this in person or on TV, picture a college football stadium during a special event game when the fans organize a “white out” (or other appropriate color). The effect is impressive with the stadium almost entirely one color, a statement by the fans that “this is our house.”

Now, let me make a case about creating that same sort of solidarity among educators and public education advocates through social media.

Historically and significantly during the last three decades, U.S. public education policy and public discourse have been dominated by politicians, political appointees, billionaire hobbyists, pundits, and self-appointed entrepreneurs—most of whom having no or little experience or expertise in the field of education or education scholarship.

In fact, the “white out” in the media is 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

Next, allow me to chase what may appear to be a brief tangent.

While teaching high school English in rural SC for 18 years, I always enjoyed my U.S. literature unit on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. One of the lines from the play was particularly enjoyable—when Tituba exclaims, “No, no, sir, I don’t truck with no Devil!”

Having grown up in the 1960s and 1970s, my mind always goes to this [1]:

Art and property of Robert Crumb.

But students often found the phrasing odd, despite my affinity for the metaphor and power of Tituba’s language.

To this day, I am apt to adopt Tituba’s stance when expressing my allegiances, and that brings me back to the point of this call for social media solidarity among educators and public education advocates.

Over about two years of blogging at my own site and engaging regularly on Twitter and other social media platforms, I have gradually adopted a stance that I do not truck with those who are disproportionately dominating the field of and public discourse about education.

Yes, I have done my share of calling out, discrediting, and arguing with, but except on rare occasions, I am done with that. Those who have tried to include me in the “@” wars on Twitter may have noticed my silence when the other side is added.

Each time we invoke their names, their flawed ideas, or their policies, we are joining the tables they have set. Once again, look at the chart above.

Also, don’t forget the Oliver Rule in which one-on-one debates imply for the public equal credibility between two people debating. As well, to debate implies that a position is debatable [2], and some issues simply aren’t up for debate.

Therefore, I am now asking that educators, scholars, and public education advocates who are active on social media (blogging, Tweeting, etc.) to make an effort to dedicate a day, a week, a month, or as I have done, a policy to creating our own educators’ “white out” on social media—establishing our place for our voices as a model against the mainstream media dedicated to those with authority (elections, appointments, wealth) but without credibility.

Don’t spend blogs rejecting their public claims and education policy.

Don’t engage them on Twitter, or “@” them into a Twitter exchange.

Symbolic messages matter, and the strongest message we can send about those who shall not be named is exactly that: erase them from the spaces they have dominated without deserving that space.

And in that open arena, let us raise our voices.

Our cases about what is not working and why, our evidence-based proposals for reform, our struggles in the classroom, our successes with students, our recognition of social and educational inequity, our commitment to social justice driven by educational equity—and all on our terms, not theirs.

This is our house.

—

See Also

Claiming the Education Reform Narrative

Whose Reform?: Claiming the Education Reform Narrative, pt. 2

[1] The term “keep on truckin'” likely reaches back to at least early twentieth century Jazz musicians; Robert Crumb popularized this in the late 1960s, however.

[2] Please examine how anti-evolution forces have “won” in the public arena by making teaching an evolution a debate, notably detailed in the documentary Flock of Dodos.

comic books, Education, Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman and a (Surprising) Brief History of U.S. Feminism

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By sheer coincidence, or at the bidding of the book gods [1], I discovered a connection between U.S. poet E.E. Cummings and Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston:

And then, on Thursday, June 24, 1915, an unseasonably cold day, Marston graduated from Harvard. In exercises held at Sanders Theatre, E.E. Cummings, a member of Marston’s class, delivered a speech about modernism called “The New Art.” (Lepore, p. 42)

After reading Susan Cheever’s compact and engaging E.E. Cummings: A Life, I turned to Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman, completely unaware of the connection. Paired, however, these well written and researched books are also powerful histories that reveal the (possibly distorted) influence of Harvard in the U.S. as well as insight into the intersection of early twentieth century intelligentsia, art, and pop culture.

My initial interest in Lepore’s examination of Wonder Woman rested on my comic book background—although I was a Marvel collector in the day and quite not DC. However, Lepore’s volume is much more than about Wonder Woman or even a solid biography of Marston; this is a somewhat shocking story about U.S. feminism and sexual politics, commercialization, pop culture, and the enduring power of myth.

As a lifelong educator who essentially hid my comic book reading/collecting throughout junior and high school, I was initially sympathetic to Marston, who struggled at Harvard:

“I had to take a lot of courses that I hated,” [William Moulton Marston] explained. English A: Rhetoric and Composition was a required course for freshmen. “I wanted to write and English A, at Harvard, wouldn’t let you write,” he complained. “It made you spell and punctuate. If you wrote anything you felt like writing, enjoyed writing, your paper was marked flunk in red pencil.” (p. 6)

Especially in the wake of reading again about how Cummings developed while at Harvard, I recognized in Marston’s life (among his proclivities for living with and fathering children by multiple women) the development of creativity as an act against the norms of one’s time or community.

The short version of Lepore’s work is that Marston stumbled—often badly—through a career as a scholar/academic and inventor of the lie detector test until he created Wonder Woman in the foundational years of superhero comic books, the 1930s-1940s. However, what Lepore details well is that Marston’s creation grew significantly from the U.S. feminism movement in the early twentieth century and his relationships with Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, Margaret Sanger, and Olive Byrne.

While comic books and superheroes in the early decades of the medium from the 1930s and into the 1950s were often discounted and even savagely attacked as corrupting of children, Lepore builds a case not for Marston (who certainly comes off poorly as often a charlatan and essentially a self-centered hypocrite) but for the potential of pop culture as social activism.

Wonder Woman was created and written by Marston (with significant help, it appears, from the many women in his life) as a manifesto for women’s liberation, equality—sexual liberation, reproductive rights, work-place equality.

The farther Wonder Woman drifted from Marston, who wrote most of her comic book adventures from the early to late 1940s, the less that ideal held against the influence of the market, where traditional womanhood sold better than radical feminism (or least, that is what publishers believed).

Superheroes as pop icons have entered the U.S. consciousness through many media—comic books, television (Batman, The Hulk, and Wonder Woman, notably), and film. At any given moment in history, then, the “hot” superhero is often dictated by the medium of prominence. As a result, few people are likely aware that Wonder Woman was among the first big three in superhero comics, along with Superman and Batman.

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Wonder Woman then: Sensation Comics #1 (January 1942) and Wonder Woman #1 (Summer 1942). Art by Harry G. Peter.

And while all three have endured 70-plus years in pop culture—with all three having peaks, valleys, and fairly dramatic reboots—Wonder Woman has certainly not maintained either Marston’s original intent or the same weight as Superman and Batman.

That in itself is a message about how far women have yet to go in the journey to equality so well detailed by Lepore in her portrayals of Holloway, Sanger, Byrnes, and others.

Regretfully, after reading Secret History, I have a parallel concern I raised about a black Captain America: If Wonder Woman reinforces female stereotypes, objectifies women, what good a woman superhero?

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Wonder Woman now: Art by David Finch

Hugh Ryan shares this concern by considering both the new team writing and drawing Wonder Woman, David and Meredith Finch, and how that essentially spits in the face of Wonder Woman as feminist ideal:

That comics are a bastion of sexism is a truism so banal it almost goes without saying. But it is particularly galling to watch the feminist superhero be treated in such a way. The Finches have made no small point of the fact that Meredith is one of only a handful of women to ever write Wonder Woman. “I love the idea that it’s a woman writing a woman,” David said in an interview with USA Today, “because we’re trying to appeal to more female readers now.”

Seeking to be celebrated for simply hiring a woman is tokenizing and offensive. From writer Gail Simone to artist Fiona Staples, there are incredible women already working in the industry. Let’s celebrate them. The Finch’s ideas of feminism, strength, and what appeals to women today seem retrograde, borderline misogynistic, and—to be frank—boring. Wonder Woman deserves better.

Cheever’s biography of Cummings and Lepore’s exploration of Wonder Woman reveal that truly flawed men (in these two cases) are often behind genuinely marvelous creation. And thus, the irony increases: Just as Cummings and Marston created as often flawed reactionaries, in spite of their environments, against the norms, we are now faced with rejecting a popular media failing not just Wonder Woman, but women once again.

—

See Also

In the U.S., Where the Female Nipple Is More Dangerous Than a Gun

[1] Since I am currently re-reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (author’s preferred text), I concede the possibility of the latter.

Education

Responsibilities of Privilege: Bearing Witness, pt. 2

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On my post Bearing Witness: Hypocrisy, Not Ideology, Bill Boyle left a long and thoughtful comment, highlighted by a central question I often receive when I confront privilege: “For instance, does the relative wealth I have accumulated via my privilege make any of my statements on addressing poverty hypocritical?”

In many versions, I have been asked about what right do whites have to hold forth on race, what right do the relatively affluent have to hold forth on poverty, what right do men have to hold forth on gender—if privilege, then, discredits the privileged?

My short answer is that one’s privilege is not the determining factor in a person’s credibility, but what one does with that privilege is.

As an educator for over thirty years, a writer and scholar for most of that time, and then a public commentator during the more recent past, I have often had to negotiate my own privilege (significantly in the dominant statuses in the U.S. that drive much of the inequity, bias, and prejudice in the country) against my social justice commitments as well as my developing commitment to bear witness in the tradition of James Baldwin.

The most difficult example of that journey (one begun in the pages of literature when I was in college, discovering and learning from Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker) has been my own discomfort over bearing witness to the segregating and racist intentions and consequences of the charter school movement (specifically among KIPP charter schools and the many copy-cat “no excuses” charter schools) in the context of evidence that black parents were strongly supporting and rushing to choose those very schools (see Sarah Carr’s Hope Against Hope, which documents that phenomenon).

I was able to rectify that deeply uncomfortable sense that I was being privileged, I was whitesplaining, I was being paternalistic by reading and taking great care to listen carefully to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, in which she identifies and addresses a similar paradox in the mass incarceration debate; as I have explained:

For example, Carr reports that African American parents not only choose “no excuses” charter schools in New Orleans, but also actively cheer and encourage the authoritarian policies voiced by the schools’ administrators. But Alexander states, “Given the dilemma facing poor black communities, it is inaccurate to say that black people ‘support’ mass incarceration or ‘get-tough’ policies” because “if the only choice that is offered blacks is rampant crime or more prisons, the predictable (and understandable) answer will be ‘more prisons'” (p. 210).

New Orleans serves as a stark example of how this dynamic works in education reform: Given the choice between segregated, underfunded and deteriorating public schools and “no excuses” charters – and not the choice of the school environments and offerings found in many elite private schools – the predictable answer is “no excuses” charters.

Here, then, I want to answer Bill Boyle’s concerns a bit more fully—outlining some key responsibilities of those with privilege as a guide for seeking ways to rise above that privilege, to avoid the trap of hypocrisy:

  • Acknowledge privilege. The most telling sign of privilege is the knee-jerk denial (often angry) of that privilege. Self-awareness is key for managing your privilege and seeking a path to empathy.
  • Respond to privilege with humility instead of arrogance. Another powerful signal of the worst aspects of privilege is now a cliche: Being born on third base but thinking you have hit a triple. I call this the Ozymandias Syndrome: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Many of us with privilege have been quite successful, and have even worked very hard, so we are apt to flaunt that success—”Look what I accomplished, and so can you!” Instead, we must recognize that much of our accomplishments have their roots in huge advantages not of our making, and thus, humility.
  • Use privilege in the service of others. Instead of building privilege from privilege or leveraging privilege for personal gain, the advantages of privilege can and should be aimed at dismantling, ironically, the systems that bestowed them. Instead of “Look on my Works,” we must ask, “How do we build a world in which everyone begins as I did?”
  • Understand and avoid appropriation. Privilege breeds a sense of normal among the privileged and thus an otherness onto any unlike the privileged class. One consequence of creating the other is to appropriate those othered in reductive, insensitive, and manipulative ways. The analogy is one of the great faults of privileged good intentions gone wrong: U.S. slavery of blacks, the Holocaust, the Japanese Internment reduced to the analogy game in order to score political points.
  • Shut up and listen. As a white, male, privileged teacher and writer, I am apt to hold forth. I am extremely verbal, and I often struggle against my good intentions and passion coming off as arrogance. As I noted above, my commitment as witness is firmly grounded in reading and listening to those who suffer the burden of bias, prejudice, and oppression. My silence, however, is important since it returns space to the open market of ideas; my intent listening is also essential to my never-ending journey toward compassion that must be central to my role as witness.
  • Understand and avoid paternalism. My warning—beware the roadbuilders—represents well where I am on my journey to use my privilege in the service of others and to eradicate inequity because “roadbuilders” [1] is drawn from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and it rejects directly the cancerous paternalism in bleeding-heart liberalism (confronted by Martin Luther King Jr.). Privilege as paternalism (the roadbuilders) imposes itself on others for their own good, but instead, we must ask, “What do you want, need from me?” [2]
  • Be responsible for your own empathy. Another seemingly good intention among the privileged is requesting that so-called marginalized groups guide one’s path out of arrogant privilege; such requests are simply more burden, more evidence of the weight of privilege heaped on the othered.
  • Step aside. Just as being quiet in order to listen returns space to the common good, an important act among the privileged is to step aside so that others may occupy those spaces automatically denied by the consequences of privilege. Again in my rush to do good, I not only clung to the spaces afforded me because of my privilege, but gobbled up all that I could additionally. In recent years, however, I have begun using my privilege and role as witness to move away from authored scholarly books and toward edited volumes (more voices, and more opportunities for those who otherwise would have been ignored, silenced), edited columns, and other projects in which I can facilitate access to spaces otherwise filled by the privileged. As well—although against the norms of scholarship—my work has been dedicated to preserving the voices of the giants upon whose shoulders I stand by quoting instead of simply paraphrasing and citing.
  • Bear witness to the roadbuilders. The privileged must certainly be willing to call out the arrogance of privilege, and here is likely the most valid way to use privilege in the service of others. Reaching out instead of attacking—but being firm and consistent in bearing witness to the folly and harm done by paternalism, whitesplaining, mansplaining, and the many microaggressions of privilege. This witnessing, I think, is essential for building an empathetic environment in which privilege is no longer allowed to impose itself (Idea X or Comment Y is not valid until Privileged A says so) and in which oversimplification is replaced by nuance (no more monolithic “black culture,” “homosexuality,” “women,” etc., against the privileged norm).

None of this is mine, of course, and none of this is thus justified because I have deemed it so. Therein lies the great paradox of privilege and living in ways that seek to eradicate privilege.

Today this is the best I have to offer because of the many wise and kind people who have lent themselves to my education, to the lifting of the veil of privilege from my eyes. But tomorrow …

Toward the end of his last interview, James Baldwin explains: “Because you can’t be taught anything if you think you know everything already, that something else—greed, materialism, and consuming—is more important to your life.”

And that is something worthy of bearing witness: our humility, and as Baldwin always reminded us, grounded in love.

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[1] “Beware the roadbuilders” as a refrain and analogy creates tension against my warning about appropriation and analogy, but it is that tension I use when making decisions about how to frame my necessarily evolving efforts to bear witness and use privilege in the service of others.

[2] An offer that may reveal, as Baldwin argues, “The only thing that really unites all black men everywhere is, as far as I can tell, the fact that white men are on their necks.”

See Also
Roxane Gay’s “Peculiar Benefits”

Gina Crosley-Corcoran’s “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person…”

Education Reform as the New Misogyny: A Reader

The Funny Thing about Privilege, Imani Gandy

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh