Category Archives: Education

A Nation at Risk, Capitalism, CCSS, Democracy, Education, education reform, Franz Kafka, Paulo Freire, Standards

Maxine Greene and the “Frozen Sea Inside of Us”

4 Comments

The image of Franz Kafka that captures most clearly Kafkan for me is the one of Kafka himself coming to consciousness in the morning, numbed from the waist down after sitting in one spot writing all night. He, of course, was lost in his text in a way that is something like dreaming—a hybrid of consciousness and unconsciousness.

The text of Kafka that speaks most directly about Kafka for me is his January 1904 letter to Oskar Pollack:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

And although Kafka is writing here specifically about fiction, I think the core sentiment (“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us”) is the perfect entry point into why Maxine Greene’s works remain more important than ever, her voice the axe against the frozen sea of relentless but misguided education reform.

Greene’s Releasing the Imagination, a collection of essays, is one such book.

Releasing the Imagination: “Breaking with Old Quantitative Models”

Published in 1995, Releasing the Imagination speaks from the middle of the current 30-year cycle of accountability-based education reform driven by standards and high-stakes testing. But the volume also speaks to the resilient nature of the fundamental source for why education reform remains mired in the same failed policy paradigm that is repackaged over and over:

In many ways, school restructure does, indeed, mean breaking with old quantitative models; but countering this break is an anxiety that is driving people into what John Dewey called “the quest for certainty” (1929). Present-day economic uncertainty has much to do with this anxiety as does the current challenge to traditional authorities. In response to school changes, many parents yearn not merely for the predictable but also for the assurances that used to accompany children’s mastery of the basics. (p. 18)

Threads running though Greene’s work are powerfully weaved into this important recognition of the Siren’s song of “certainty” that appears to be captured in quantitative data (think test scores as evidence of student learning and teacher quality): Greene’s existential philosophical lens, her rich progressive commitment, and ability to frame education within larger societal and cultural realities.

Greene continues her examination of breakthroughs by referring to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, and Denise Leverton (again, the style that distinguishes Greene), which she incorporates seamlessly with the framing of Dewey and then Paulo Freire. By example and then explicitly, Greene is making a case for setting aside the veneer of certainty presented by measurement and numbers for the ambiguity and unexpected of art:

In contradicting the established, or the given, art reaches beyond what is established and leads those who are willing to risk transformations to the shaping of social vision.

Of course, this does not happen automatically or even naturally. Dewey, in Art as Experience, talks about how important it is for people to plunge into subject matter in order to steep themselves in it, and this is probably more true of works of art than other subject matters….In our engagements with historical texts, too, with mathematical problems, scientific inquiries, and (not incidentally) the political and social realities we have constructed along with those around us, it is never enough simply to label, categorize, or recognize certain phenomena or events. There has to be a live, aware, reflective transaction if what presents itself to consciousness is to be realized.

Dewey asked for an abandonment of “conformity to norms of conventional admiration” in approaching art; he asked that we try to avoid “confused, even if genuine emotional excitation” (1934, p. 54). The beholder, the percipient, the learner must approach from the vantage point of her or his lived situation, that is, in accord with a distinctive point of view and interest….Imagination may be a new way of decentering ourselves, of breaking out of the confinements of privatism and self-regard into a space where we can come face to face with others and call out, “Here we are.” (pp. 30-31)

From A Nation at Risk and then No Child Left Behind as that morphed into the Common Core movement, education reform has remained focused on the exact measurement (“label, categorize, or recognize”) Greene warns against while that reform has also concurrently erased the arts from the lives and education of children (more often than not, from the lives and education of the most marginalized children).

Along with the allure of quantifying as the pursuit of certainty, of control, bureaucracy is also exposed as a recurring flaw of education reform: “Community cannot be produced simply through rational formulation nor through edict,” Greene recognizes (p. 39), adding:

Community is not a question of which social contracts are the most reasonable for individuals to enter. It is a question of what might contribute to the pursuit of shared goods: what ways of being together, of attaining mutuality, of reaching toward some common world. (p. 39)

The bureaucracy of education reform built on recycling the accountability paradigm also fails because we remain committed as well, not to community and democracy, but competition and market forces (charter schools and dismantling teachers unions and tenure, for examples). Education reform is, in fact, not reform at all; education reform insures that public institutions, such as schools, maintain the status quo of society. As a result, students are being indoctrinated, not educated—as Greene confronts about the trap teachers face:

This brings me back to my argument that we teachers must make an intensified effort to break through the frames of custom and to touch the consciousness of those we teach. It is an argument stemming from a concern about noxious invisible clouds and cover-ups and false consciousness and helplessness. It has to do as well with our need to empower the young to deal with the threat and fear of holocaust, to know and understand enough to make significant choices as they grow. Surely, education today must be conceived as a model of opening the world to critical judgments by the young and their imaginative projections and, in time, to their transformative actions. (p. 56)

Education today, in this time of high-stakes accountability, may at best be preparing students to make choices between buying a Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry (which is no real choice at all), but education today, in this time of high-stakes accountability, is not empowering students to choose not to own or drive a car at all, not empowering them to imagine another world, a better world.

Greene recognized that we are tragically paralyzed by the pursuit of certainty and the need to complete our tasks; as a result, we remain trapped like bugs in the amber of capitalism, never freeing ourselves to pursue democracy:

Dewey found that democracy is an ideal in the sense that it is always reaching toward some end that can finally never be achieved. Like community itself, it has to always be in the making. (p. 66)

And so we stand in 2014, in the wake of Greene’s death, and before us is the frozen sea of education reform. Greene’s Releasing the Imagination is one of the axes waiting for us to take it in hand, to break us free.

These essays now about two decades old serve as foundational explorations of all that is wrong with how we fail to re-imagine our schools in our commitments under the misnomer “reform.” In “Teaching for Openings” (Chapter Nine), Greene presents a tour de force for those of us who embrace the label “teacher,” and it is here that I argue for the enduring importance of finally listening to Greene:

Still, caught in the turmoils of interrogation, in what Buber called the pain, I am likely to feel the pull of my old search for certainty. I find myself now and then yearning after the laws and norms and formulations, even though I know how many of them were constructed in the interests of those in power [emphasis added]. Their appeal to me was not only due to the ways in which they provide barriers against relativism. It was also due to my marginality: I wanted so much to be accepted in the great world of wood-panelled libraries, authoritative intellectuals, sophisticated urban cafes….

That means that what Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has called the elite culture must be transformed. This is the culture white male scholars tend to create, one that has “functioned in relation to women, the lower classes, and some white races analogously to the way in which imperialism functioned for colonized people. At worst, it denied the values of all others and imposed itself as an absolute standard….As a set of techniques, literacy has often silenced persons and disempowered them. Our obligation today is to find ways of enabling the young to find their voices, to open their spaces, to reclaim their histories in all their variety and discontinuity. Attention has to be paid to those on the margins [emphasis added]…. (pp. 114, 120)

•

As I wrote to implore us all to beware the roadbuilders, as I drafted that piece while skimming through Alice Walker’s The Color Purple to find the truth I felt compelled to offer, I stood on Greene’s shoulders, as I often do, trying in my very small way to pay attention to those on the margins because with the axe Greene provided me, I was able to begin breaking the frozen sea of my privilege.

In her death, then, we must return not only to Greene’s words, but to the alternative she points to with those words:

Art offers life; it offers hope; it offers the prospect of discovery; it offers light. Resisting, we may make the teaching of the aesthetic experience our pedagogic creed. (p. 133)

Education, education reform, race

Education in Black and White: Beware the Roadbuilders

4 Comments

Nettie sees the world in a stark black and white once she faces and confronts the missionary zeal being done to the people who are native to Africa. The letters exchanged between Nettie and Celie, which constitute The Color Purple, are literally the lived stories of oppression and the oppressed right there in black and white for readers:

The first thing I should tell you about is the road. The road finally reached the cassava fields about nine months ago and the Olinka, who love nothing better than a celebration, outdid themselves preparing a feast for the roadbuilders who talked and laughed and cut their eyes at the Olinka women the whole day. In the evening many were invited into the village itself and there was merrymaking far into the night. I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them. The Olinka definitely hold this view. And so they naturally thought the road being built was for them [emphasis added]. And, in fact, the roadbuilders talked much of how quickly the Olinka will now be able to get to the coast. With a tarmac road it is only a three-day journey. By bicycle it will be even less. Of course no one in Olinka owns a bicycle, but one of the roadbuilders has one, and all the Olinka men covet it and talk of someday soon purchasing their own.

Well, the morning after the road was “finished” as far as the Olinka were concerned (after all, it had reached their village), what should we discover but that the roadbuilders were back at work. They have instructions to continue the road for another thirty miles! And to continue it on its present course right through the village of Olinka. By the time we were out of bed, the road was already being dug through Catherine’s newly planted yam field. Of course the Olinka were up in arms. But the roadbuilders were literally up in arms. They had guns, Celie, with orders to shoot!

It was pitiful, Celie. The people felt so betrayed! They stood by helplessly—they really don’t know how to fight, and rarely think of it since the old days of tribal wars—as their crops and then their very homes were destroyed. Yes. The roadbuilders didn’t deviate an inch from the plan the headman was following. Every hut that lay in the proposed roadpath was leveled. And, Celie, our church, our school, my hut, all went down in a matter of hours. Fortunately, we were able to save all of our things, but with a tarmac road running straight through the middle of it, the village itself seems gutted.

Immediately after understanding the roadbuilders’ intentions, the chief set off toward the coast, seeking explanations and reparations. Two weeks later he returned with even more disturbing news. The whole territory, including the Olinkas’ village, now belongs to a rubber manufacturer in England. As he neared the coast, he was stunned to see hundreds and hundreds of villagers much like the Olinka clearing the forests on each side of the road, and planting rubber trees. The ancient, giant mahogany trees, all the trees, the game, everything of the forest was being destroyed, and the land was forced to lie flat, he said, and bare as the palm of his hand.

And there is a scene in the problematic film Gandhi (itself both an unmasking of imperialism and the embodiment of paternalism and privilege) when Gandhi expresses his idealism about the potential for non-violent resistance to overcome oppression:

Brigadier: You don’t think we’re just going to walk out of India!

Gandhi: Yes. In the end, you will walk out. Because 100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians, if those Indians refuse to cooperate.

As a work of art (The Color People) and a film recreation (and appropriation) of history (Gandhi), these scenes speak to the current state of education and education reform, especially as those contexts are being viewed through the lens of the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board.

Unlike Gandhi, I am not optimistic that oppressive privilege will simply walk away. Like Nettie, I watch as the roadbuilders court the people they plan to bulldoze.

In New Orleans, the roadbuilders are charter school advocates and Teach For America are the missionaries filled with zeal.

And 60 years after Brown v. Board, New Orleans has replaced its public schools in the wake of firing all of the public school teachers with charter schools—a 21st century separate but equal, as Lyndsey Layton reports:

White students disproportionately attend the best charter schools, while the worst are almost exclusively populated by African American students. Activists in New Orleans joined with others in Detroit and Newark last month to file a federal civil rights complaint, alleging that the city’s best-performing schools have admissions policies that exclude African American children. Those schools are overseen by the separate Orleans Parish School Board, and they don’t participate in OneApp, the city’s centralized school enrollment lottery.

Privilege remains white and inequity remains black.

I invite you, then, to read.

Andre Perry in The education-reform movement is too white to do any good:

But let’s also stipulate that overwhelmingly white movements pursuing change for black and brown communities are inherently paternalistic. The great educator Benjamin E. Mays famously said, “I would rather go to hell by choice than to stumble into heaven.” Reform is being done to communities of color. That’s why saying you’re a black education reformer effectually elicits charges of “acting white” from black communities….

Diversity removes doubt of racial bias, explicit or implicit. So when black and brown people are largely absent from positions of power, the entire reform movement loses credibility and accrues suspicion. Black education reformers struggle to connect with the very communities we’re members of. The overarching sentiment among attendees at the aforementioned meeting was that black leadership is missing from education reform. Consequently, “reform” has become a dirty word in some communities….

We need less “reform” and more social justice.

Tressie McMillan Cottom (and Ta-Nehisi Coates) in No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are:

For some, reparations to African Americans for enslavement and state-sanctioned apartheid (more benignly known as “Jim Crow”) is a shocking case to make. I am a sociologist whose training has been, in part, with economists like Sandy Darity at Duke University and Darrick Hamilton at The New School. For Darity, Hamilton, and many other serious scholars of race, history, and inequality, the matter of reparations is anything but novel or shocking. Neither is it hyperbolic. There are real programs, with feasibility studies and implementation suggestions, and they move far beyond Coates’ call for a spiritual reckoning of the body politic. If you have never heard of them, that is likely by design [emphasis added]. Few powerful persons or institutions have ever been willing to seriously put a reparations program before the American people.

But I wager that you have heard a lot about how education and opportunity can be, through hard work and moral fortitude, the path to greater equality for African Americans. In many ways, when the formerly enslaved asked first for a national program to redress the forced, free labor that made the United States the nation we know it to be, they were given schooling instead of redress; opportunity instead of compensation. It is an attitude that persists in our policy and our cultural lexicon. When the demand is for justice, we are most likely to respond with an appeal, instead, to fairness. And in no institution is that more clearly evident than education. There’s just one problem: It’s not good enough.

Mia McKenzie in The White Teachers I Wish I Never Had:

Black children need teachers who can reflect the history of our people to them in an honest and empowering way. They also need teachers who see them, who don’t think of them as deficient, as problems to solve, or as thugs-in-training, when they are really just children, innocent and eager and as capable of learning as anyone else. They need teachers who can love them. In a world that tells them they are less, having authority figures, from an early age, who believe in their humanity, in their goodness, in their extraordinariness, is everything.

Ms. Reisman was the first terrible white teacher I had, but after her there were others. Mr. Fleischman, my seventh-grade homeroom and math teacher, was one. He disliked me and he showed it. He punished me for things more popular kids got away with daily. He seemed to like only the Black kids who were hip and cool but not smart, and then only if they were also boys. My awkward girl presence bugged him, particularly because I wasn’t silent or invisible. I was still confident, in spite of not being cool, or a boy, and he seemed to loathe it, his misogynoir showing quite clearly. I battled him, too.

Margaret Kimberley in Police Target Black Children:

Americans should take a long look in the mirror before criticizing other nations for human rights abuses. The law enforcement system in the United States ranks among the worst in the world in the cruel treatment meted out to its citizens. Even children in this country are not safe if they are black and unlucky enough to interact with the police. Of all the various ethnic and national groups in the United States, only black people have to worry that their child may be pushed through a glass window by officers of the law.

A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology demonstrated what black people have always known. Black children are dehumanized to such an extent that they aren’t perceived as children at all. They are assumed to be older, less innocent and inherently guilty of some wrong doing. Study co-author Matthew Jackson said, “With the average age overestimation for black boys exceeding four-and-a-half years, in some cases, black children may be viewed as adults when they are just 13 years old.” Two recent cases involving the New York City police department show the truth of these words and the perils black people face even in childhood.

Beware the roadbuilders. They are not here to serve you, they are on their way to bulldoze right over you.

—

See Also

Education Reform in the New Jim Crow Era

Endgame: Disaster Capitalism, New Orleans, and the Charter Scam

From Baldwin to Coates: Denying Racism, Ignoring Evidence

Education, education reform, VAM

Invoking “Oliver Rule (Expanded)” for Education Reform Debate

9 Comments

While it is becoming increasingly common and frustrating that the most perceptive views of political and public claims and policies come from satirical programs and their figure-heads (as I have noted recently), John Oliver’s skit about the current ways the mainstream media present the climate change debate can serve well how we proceed with the education reform debate.

Oliver’s climate change debate skit highlights that by always having one FOR and one AGAINST, popular media debates distort the current state of the field; for example, Oliver notes that 97% of climate scientists support that humans impact climate change, thus he sets up a debate between 97 FOR and 3 AGAINST. The journalistic quest for “fair and balanced” (one FOR and one AGAINST), ironically, creates a distorted view of fields of knowledge.

Guideline 1 for the “Oliver Rule,” then, is that all public debates must accurately represent the current ratio of perspectives within the field.

Embedded in Oliver’s skit, however, is another recognition of the tension between democracy (everyone deserves a voice) and expertise.

Guideline 2 for the “Oliver Rule” must be a slight expansion of Oliver’s initial premise: All who wish to contribute to the debate must be allowed to contribute, but each voice must also establish his/her context for contributing, his/her expertise and experience with the topic, and his/her investment in or potential for benefitting from the stated position.

If we apply, for example, the “Oliver Rule (Expanded)” to the on-going debate about value-added methods (VAM) for evaluating and retaining teachers, the debate would look quite different.

For anyone making a public claim (such as Op-Eds or blogs) or advocating new policy (such as by political leaders or think tanks) endorsing VAM, those advocates should have to establish the following:

  • Formal study and/or experience in education.
  • Investments in research or policy related to VAM.
  • Potential for profiting from VAM policy.
  • Whether or not he/she will be professionally or personally impacted by the policy.

But, more importantly, as with the Oliver skit on climate change, the VAM debate must accurately represent the current knowledge-base on VAM. And that would have to reveal the following:

  • The research base still identifies VAM-based teacher evaluation as experimental—not ready for wide-scale or high-stakes implementation.
  • The research base also recommends when ready for implementation, VAM should be only a small part (often endorsed at only about 10-15%) of a larger range of evidence for evaluating teachers.
  • Commitments to VAM must be revealed as a large investment in a greatly increased testing program that will pre- and post-test every student for every teacher; otherwise, the process can never be equitable. (This huge investment must be framed in the context of “return on investment” for, now, an experimental process.)

If we begin to demand the “Oliver Rule (Expanded)” for the wide range of education reform policies currently being endorsed—VAM, charter schools, Common Core, high-stakes testing, etc.—the debates themselves would look  much different, and as a result, public understanding and support for those policies would likely change dramatically as well.

Just as the overwhelming majority of climate science supports human-made climate change, the overwhelming majority of educational research reveals that charter schools are nearly indistinguishable from public schools (both in student outcomes and in the trend toward re-segregation), that VAM is inconsistent and not ready for high-stakes implementation, that standards reform has not and likely will not address our greatest educational needs, and that high-stakes testing causes more harm than good. But the public and political debate—again as with the climate change debate—greatly misrepresents those bodies of research.

Also, as Oliver detailed brilliantly, climate science has actually been dealt a disservice by Bill Nye because his expertise and relentless commitment to his field (all of which must be commended) have been distorted in the simplistic FOR and AGAINST format in the mainstream media.

In the education reform debate, Diane Ravitch has become our Nye. We need Ravitch to continue, of course, and she has made huge strides in our message.

But we must now make sure that when Ravitch (or any single representative of evidence-based education policy) speaks, the public knows what ratio of the evidence-base she represents.

As Oliver has highlighted, yes, everyone voice counts, but not every voice counts the same.

Education

Maxine Greene, Released to a New Landscape

6 Comments

Throughout my life as a student and career as a teacher, I have always been drawn to the philosophical; thus, my scholarly interests have leaned heavily toward educational philosophers such as Paulo Freire and Maxine Greene.

In Greene, I found not only a philosophical kinship but also an eclectic style of scholarship that appealed to my essential nature as a lover of literature and English teacher. Greene pulls from literature and history as she weaves a view of the world and education that demands something better than what we have achieved so far.

So it is with great sadness to share—Maxine Greene, TC’s Pre-eminent Philosopher Queen, Dies at 96:

Maxine Greene, the philosopher, author and professor emerita who was perhaps the most iconic and influential living figure associated with Teachers College, passed away yesterday at the age of 96. Described byThe New York Times as “one of the most important education philosophers of the past 50 years” and “an idol to thousands of educators,” Greene was regarded by many as the spiritual heir to John Dewey. Her work remains a touchstone for generations of TC faculty, alumni and students, as well as for scholars and artists around the world.

Please read the entire overview above.

As well, I offer my own Of Rocks and Hard Places—The Challenge of Maxine Greene’s Mystification in Teacher Education, included in a special issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy dedicated to Maxine Greene:

Greene (1978) creates an apt literary framework for her discussion of teacher education with an analogy drawn from Moby Dick (Melville, 1851)—acknowledging the broader context of navigation and the narrower flaw of “mystification” in the field. She reminds her reader of Ahab using rewards to manipulate his crew, to mask his true goals in order to increase the cooperation of that crew: “The point is to keep hidden a ‘private purpose’ that takes no account of the crew’s desires and needs” (p. 53). Then, she adds more directly:

“Traditionally, teacher education has been concerned with initiating the ‘forms of life’ R. S. Peters describes, or the public traditions, or the heritage. Even where emphasis has been placed on the importance of critical thinking or experimental intelligence, there has been a tendency to present an unexamined surface reality as ‘natural,’ fundamentally unquestionable. There has been a tendency as well to treat official labelings and legitimations as law-like, to overlook the constructed [emphasis in original] character of social reality.” (p. 54)

Greene writes here of teacher education, but also moves beyond the classroom, arguing for a critical reflection in all people, both a reflection on Self and a reflection on that Self within a community—“not merely as professionals or professionals-to-be, but as human beings participating in a shared reality” (pp. 54-55).

The books by and about Greene that remain prominent on my bookshelf, packed with sticky notes and reached for often include:

Well before No Child Left Behind and the inevitable move toward Common Core, Greene wrote in Chapter Thirteen of Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change:

Academic rigor, high standards, common learning, technical proficiencies, excellence, equity, and self-development—these themes have arisen over and over since the founding of the public schools. Considering them in present moment of hope tinged with anxiety, we teachers find ourselves (at least on occasion) pondering the nature of our democratic society, wondering about the future of our world….For all the optimism of movement for reform, the moment of hope among educators that I just cited, often a hopelessness infects those who administer and those expected to learn….

What I have been calling the common, then, has to be continually brought into being. We may indeed use representative texts and works of art at certain times; we may us paradigm cases in the various domains; we may even use the popular arts. There is always a flux in the things and ideas of this world, and there is always the need to catch that flux in networks of meaning. Whatever the networks, the focus should be on that dislodges fixities, resists one-dimensionality, and allows multiple personal voices to become articulated in a more and more vital dialogue. (pp. 169, 183)

As Greene has been released to a new landscape, let us dislodge fixities, and resist the siren’s song of misguided reform that fails again and again the humanity of each and everyone of us.

Let’s us fight on as you, Maxine Greene, rest in peace.

As a final small token, a flower picked and offered tentatively:

[375]

Emily Dickinson

The Angle of a Landscape—
That every time I wake—
Between my Curtain and the Wall
Upon an ample Crack—

Like a Venetian—waiting—
Accosts my open eye—
Is just a Bough of Apples—
Held slanting, in the Sky—

The Pattern of a Chimney—
The Forehead of a Hill—
Sometimes—a Vane’s Forefinger—
But that’s—Occasional—

The Seasons—shift—my Picture—
Upon my Emerald Bough,
I wake—to find no—Emeralds—
Then—Diamonds—which the Snow

From Polar Caskets—fetched me—
The Chimney—and the Hill—
And just the Steeple’s finger—
These—never stir at all—

—

Please see also:

In Print!: Maxine Says from Nick Sousanis

24/7: 24 Love Letters to Maxine Greene (In no particular order) Followed by 7 Questions from Bill Ayers

Charter schools, Disaster capitalism, Education, education reform

Endgame: Disaster Capitalism, New Orleans, and the Charter Scam

14 Comments

The horror of 9/11 in 2001 and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 captured both the 24/7 media attention and cultural consciousness in the U.S.

In the wake of both, however, the impact of disaster capitalism has remained mostly ignored and unchallenged.

This is the U.S. response to 9/11.

How to monetize and what will the market bear are the guiding ethics of disaster capitalism, which exists seamlessly within the larger ethic of the U.S., capitalism.

Disaster capitalism came to New Orleans in full force in the wake of Katrina, possibly more powerful than a hurricane, in the person of Paul Vallas and his education policy, the Recovery School District.

Career teachers (a significant percentage of the African American middle-class in the city) were fired and public schools were systematically replaced by charter schools and the new pseudo-teacher workforce (mostly young and privileged Teach For America recruits who were transplanted to New Orleans).

Now, less than a decade after Katrina, Lyndsey Layton reports:

With the start of the next school year, the Recovery School District will be the first in the country made up completely of public charter schools, a milestone for New Orleans and a grand experiment in urban education for the nation.

Layton mostly paints this transformation in a positive light, focusing on an idealized view of market forces:

Advocates say the all-charter model empowers parents.

“We’ve reinvented how schools run,” said Neerav Kingsland of New Schools for New Orleans, which promotes and supports charter schools. He is leaving the organization to try to export the model to other cities. “If I am unhappy with service I’m getting in a school, I can pull my kid out and go to another school tomorrow. I don’t have to wait four years for an election cycle so I can vote for one member of a seven-member board that historically has been corrupt.”

By most indicators, school quality and academic progress have improved in Katrina’s aftermath, although it’s difficult to make direct comparisons because the student population changed drastically after the hurricane, with thousands of students not returning.

But this typically rosy but misleading picture of charter schools presents a different kind of evidence than intended, as Mercedes Schneider exposes:

Layton offers no substantial basis for her opinion of “improvement” other than that the schools were “seized” by the state following Katrina.

Certainly school performance scores do not support Layton’s idea of “improvement.” Even with the inflation of the 2013 school performance scores, RSD has no A schools and very few B schools. In fact, almost the entire RSD– which was already approximately 90 percent charters– qualifies as a district of “failing” schools according to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s definition of “failing schools” as C, D, F schools and whose students are eligible for vouchers.

And even in Layton’s own article, we discover the dark truth beneath the polished sheen of charter school advocacy:

White students disproportionately attend the best charter schools, while the worst are almost exclusively populated by African American students. Activists in New Orleans joined with others in Detroit and Newark last month to file a federal civil rights complaint, alleging that the city’s best-performing schools have admissions policies that exclude African American children. Those schools are overseen by the separate Orleans Parish School Board, and they don’t participate in OneApp, the city’s centralized school enrollment lottery.

Yes, you see, a rising tide does lift all boats, but we forget to point out that a rising tide has no impact on who sits in what boats after that tide rises (just as we never note that a rising tide drowns those without boats, even those without boats through no fault of their own, because market forces are amoral).

Once again, behind the curtain of charter school propaganda we find that there is nothing about “charterness” that will reform the most corrosive aspects of inequity in U.S. schools, corrosive aspects that are a reflection of inequity in society.

The relabeling of schools as “charter,” in fact, is yet another euphemistic tactic to avoid the racism and classism that dare not be mentioned, much less addressed.

As Andre Perry uncovers about “community engagement” in New Orleans:

What does community engagement mean? In particular, how does community engagement work for a “takeover district?” It doesn’t really.

Community engagement is a euphemism for “how to deal with black folk.”

I never use certain metaphors. Immediately after Katrina and the breeches in the levees, I added “hurricane” to a list that includes “slavery,” “rape” and sometimes “war.” I’ve also become very alert to people who use euphemisms to conveniently rob words of their history and meaning.

Standards of decency should rise above poetic license.

Nevertheless, education reformers look to post-Katrina New Orleans as a model to increase the percentage of charter schools, remove attendance zones, take over failing schools, close schools, dissolve teachers unions and decentralize bureaucratically thick school districts.

I’m constantly asked, “In lieu of a hurricane, what can be done to radically reform school districts?” Hurricane has become the unspoken metaphor or referent that reform strategists muse upon to build apparatuses that can initiate the aforementioned strategies. The turnaround/takeover/portfolio district has evolved to become the hurricane of reformers’ desire. As a result, community engagement has become euphemism for “how to deal with black folk in the aftermath.”

As well, Deborah Meier challenges the same euphemistic use of “urban”:

Even the “urban” has switched its meaning. When the 1955 film appeared, it was a word for low-income city kids. It’s now a euphemism for the “African American,” “Latino” poor. The book The Power of Their Ideas starts with me asking kids what it meant to refer to as “inner city” in preparation for a visit to a largely white college. They got it when I added that Dalton (a rich white school 20 blocks further “into” the city) was not considered inner city. It was a euphemism for another euphemism—ghetto.

In other words, “charter school,” “Recovery School District,” “community engagement,” and “parental empowerment” are euphemisms designed to mask the consequences of disaster capitalism.

Charter schools as a rebranding of public schools into a free market model driven by competition and choice teach us some ignored but urgent lessons:

  • When parents choose segregation, that choice should not be on the public dime.
  • No impoverished children should have to depend on their parents’ choices in order to have equitable opportunities to learn

However, it seems unlikely these lessons will be heeded because in the U.S., the entire public is a distracted Nero as our Rome burns in the form of souvenirs for sell at the 9/11 museum and the eradication of public schools.

It is no longer enough to call the charter school movement a “scam” because the consequences are much higher than that, as Layton also reports:

John White, the state’s superintendent of education, agreed that access to the best schools is not equal in New Orleans, but he said the state is prevented by law from interfering with the Orleans Parish School Board’s operations.

“The claim that there’s an imbalance is right on the money,” White said. “The idea that it’s associated with privilege and high outcomes is right on the money.”

And here, we have idiom that speaks to the truth euphemisms avoid, possibly with the simple change of a preposition, about the money.

Charter schools, Education, education reform, grade retention, School choice

SC, Choose OK, Not FL: Failing Students with Failed Policy

6 Comments

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

First, across the U.S., they all have a great deal of public and political support.

Second, the research base on all of these policies (among many other popular policies) has shown repeatedly that they do more to fail students than to achieve any of the lofty goals advocates claim.

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

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

This sort of incomplete and distorted advocacy is commonplace in SC, regretfully, but charter schools in SC have reinforced several patterns found across the U.S. but contradictory to the advocacy:

  • Charter schools contribute significantly to the re-segregation of schools, and thus to the exact inequity that plagues schools in high-poverty states such as SC.
  • Students in charter schools have measurable outcomes that are about the same or worse than comparable public schools. I have documented this in SC, but national studies of charter schools have shown that nothing about “charterness” offers advantage to students.
  • Charter schools are the newest version of the school choice movement that depends on emotional appeals to sloganism, “Parents deserve more choices,” and anecdote. Ultimately, however, parental choice has been idealized (many parents can and do make poor choices for children), and school choice remains mostly a neutral to negative influence on educational quality. Charter schools as a mechanism for competition are a distraction from the public good and harm all students, even those who claim they are thriving in selected charter schools. [1]

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

As well, SC is also seeking to follow Florida’s third-grade retention and reading policies—which have been discredited when reviewed. However, a possible pinpoint of light may be at the end of this accountability-based education reform movement tunnel, as John Thompson details:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If equity of opportunity is a public school problem, tracking creates inequity in schools.

In the current public and political environment that rails against failing schools and failing students, the ugly truth is that public and political support for misguided policy is failing students. Again and again.

Education policy must no longer be a popularity contest driven by sloganism and anecdotes.

If we insist on continuing a commitment to choice, we need to choose the sorts of public school policies that will insure that no child and no parent needs to choose the school best for any child.

In SC and across the U.S., we need to choose Oklahoma, not Florida.

—

[1] Now that New Orleans has completely replaced the public school system with charter schools, the full picture of the futility of charter schools is being revealed, as Layton explains about the results of the turnover:

White students disproportionately attend the best charter schools, while the worst are almost exclusively populated by African American students. Activists in New Orleans joined with others in Detroit and Newark last month to file a federal civil rights complaint, alleging that the city’s best-performing schools have admissions policies that exclude African American children. Those schools are overseen by the separate Orleans Parish School Board, and they don’t participate in OneApp, the city’s centralized school enrollment lottery.

John White, the state’s superintendent of education, agreed that access to the best schools is not equal in New Orleans, but he said the state is prevented by law from interfering with the Orleans Parish School Board’s operations.

“The claim that there’s an imbalance is right on the money,” White said. “The idea that it’s associated with privilege and high outcomes is right on the money.”

Education, Paulo Freire

If The Onion Gets It … : “when the mist distorts the outline of the cypress trees”

6 Comments

The power of ideology makes me think of those dewy mornings when the mist distorts the outline of the cypress trees and they become shadows of something we know is there but cannot really define. The shortsightedness that afflicts us makes our perception difficult. More serious still is the way we can so easily accept that what we are seeing and hearing is, in fact, what really is and not a distorted version of what is. This tendency to cloud the truth, to become myopic, to deafen our ears, has made many of us accept without critical questioning the cynical fatalism of neoliberal thought, which proclaims that mass unemployment is an inevitable end-of-the-century calamity. Or that the dream is dead and that it is now the era of the pedagogical pragmatism of the technio-scientific training of the individual and not of his or her total education (which, obviously, includes the former). The capacity to tame, inherent in ideology, makes us at times docilely accept that the globalization of the economy is its own invention, a kind of inevitable destiny, an almost metaphysical entity rather than a moment of economic development, subject to a given political orientation dictated by the interests of those who hold power, as is the whole of capitalist economic production. What we hear is that the globalization of the economy is a necessity from which we cannot escape. (p. 113)

Pedagogy of Freedom, Paulo Freire (2000)

Paulo Freire died in the spring of 1997 while preparing to teach in the fall of that year, resulting in the publication of  Pedagogy of Freedom. Freire’s passage above, then, grew out of the billowing storm called “accountability”—anticipating, ironically, the inevitable expansion of test-based assaults on students, schools, and teachers (at least students, schools, and teachers in the public/state systems throughout the world).

As philosophical text, Freire’s final testament has likely (and probably now) falls on deaf ears, increasing the irony: We (especially in the U.S., and especially teachers) are too practical for all those big words and all that deep thinking.

However, Freire’s essential confrontation of fatalism seems to be obvious enough for The Onion [1] to recognize.

Consider New STEM Education Initiative Inspires Girls To Earn Less Than Men In Scientific Career:

“If America intends to maintain its status as an international research leader, we must do more to encourage young women to enter careers in engineering and technology where they’ll be paid, on average, $4,000 less than their male peers for doing the same work,” said program director Elizabeth Grant, stressing that the strategy would include inspirational K-12 classroom visits by female scientists, televised ad campaigns, and mentorship opportunities targeted at showing young girls that they too could attain a position in which they have fewer opportunities for professional advancement relative to men and are regarded as less competent by their superiors.

And ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens:

“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations.

The same sort of uncomfortable dark satire could be written about school discipline impacting African American and Latino boys and the mass incarceration of African American young men [2]—or the relentless bloodlust for war already catalogued in satire by Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and many others.

It seems to me, then, if The Onion can recognize and confront the fatalism existing in and fostered by capitalism and consumerism in the U.S., then the rest of us should be able to do the same—and then to take action against the paralysis of that fatalism.

Or we could just follow The Onion and Funny or Die on Twitter.

[1] My points here are couched within an important caveat: Please do not ignore that satire in the U.S. is corporate satire. While popular outlets such as The Onion and Funny or Die as well as popular satirists such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are apt to confront well ideas ignored among the so-called serious media, these outlets and entertainers are, nonetheless, part of the corporate (neoliberal, Freire would say) problem also. See my Legend of the Fall series as one example of that concern.

[2] The Onion has already shown they get Teach For America: Teach For America Chews Up, Spits Out Another Ethnic-Studies Major and My Year Volunteering As A Teacher Helped Educate A New Generation Of Underprivileged Kids (with the brilliant by-line “By Megan Richmond, Volunteer Teacher”).

Education, Howard Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut

UPDATED: Memorial Day 2015: A Reader

1 Comment

If we could find a space to honor peace, to honor peace by taking action so that peace was the norm of humanity…

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?, Howard Zinn

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren….

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

The First Decoration Day, David W. Blight

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

21st century “Children’s Crusade”: A curriculum of peace driven by critical literacy, P. L. Thomas

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

“All the King’s Horses,” Kurt Vonnegut

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?, Howard Zinn

At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border, William Stafford

“next to of course god america i, e. e. cummings