Category Archives: Education

diversity, Education, Media, race, racism

US Media Consumers Trapped in Both-Sides Multiverse [updated]

Jerry: I’m open. There’s just nothing in there.

SEINFELD S9 E3, THE SERENITY NOW

If you want to fully understand mainstream journalism in the U.S., Twitter provided a few excellent examples recently.

The examples often come from the New York Times, a publication either viewed as the paper of record or a liberal rag, but mainstream journalism is consistently equally hollow regardless of outlet.

In a post from December 23, 2021, Twitter exposed the NYT’s use of passive voice, shading the public’s view of police killings by focusing on bullets:

Stray Police Bullet Kills Girl as Officers Fire at Suspect in Los Angeles Store

That’s a magical agent-less bullet [1], much like the raging SUVs killing people as well:

The Washington Post wrote, in a since deleted tweet, Wednesday: 'Here's what we know so far on the sequence of events that led to the Waukesha tragedy caused by a SUV'
Washington Post Deletes Tweet Saying Waukesha Tragedy ‘Caused by a SUV’

Burying the agent, passive construction, is a common practice of mainstream media; for example, not saying aloud a key aspect of a story:

https://twitter.com/JanNWolfe/status/1475145444321812488?s=20

Refusing to acknowledge that the Critical Race Theory attacks are driven by white parents and white politics is distorting the public’s perception of this manufactured crisis in a similar way to the NYT’s coverage of police shootings.

But the primary go-to of the NYT and most mainstream journalism is reducing all coverage to “both sides” false equivalence:

In Enid, both sides in the mask debate believed they were standing up for what was right. Both cared deeply for their city — and their country — and believed that, in their own way, they were working to save it. And it all started as an argument over a simple piece of cloth.

First They Fought About Masks. Then Over the Soul of the City.

Of course, advocating for health and safety based on medical evidence is exactly the same as advocating for endangering people based on nonsense—as long as “both sides” are passionate.

Just like during the Holocaust, we might imagine the NYT’s coverage framing Nazi’s and Jews “believ[ing] they were [both] standing up for what was right.”

While, as I noted above, people tend either to oversell the NYT as having the “best” journalism or to demonize the NYT as absurdly “liberal,” the truth is that the NYT and most mainstream journalism are consistently hollow; “[t]here’s just nothing in there.”

If you pay attention to mainstream journalism, for example, you discover U.S. public schools suck, teachers don’t know what they are doing because teacher educators are clueless (especially when teaching reading), and , of course, poor people are incredibly lazy and horrible with money (notable is the NYT apparently cribbing from The Onion).

Why such baseless and hollow criticism of education and people trapped in poverty? My guess is the mainstream journalism is using deflection to cover for the essential hollowness of mainstream journalism.

And coincidentally, since my fields of experience and expertise include both education and writing (I taught and have written journalism), I believe journalism suffers a similar fate to education, especially elementary education.

Let me emphasize here that I strongly believe journalism and education are robust and credible fields of study, worthy of scholarship and suitable as majors for undergraduate and graduate students. However, when journalism and education are reduced to skills only, the problems noted above occur.

Being well versed in how to conduct journalism or how to teach is important, but not adequate.

Having been a so-called serious writer for about 40 years, I am certain I have the rhetorical skills to write authoritatively about any topic. But those skills would prove to be a mirage, a veneer with quite a few subjects about which I have no expertise.

As I have noted repeatedly about the “science of reading” movement, media coverage of how to teach reading is reductive and worst of all lacking historical context. The SoR problems are examples of Christopher Columbus journalism, a journalist approaching a topic as if they are the first to discover the topic while running roughshod over an existing field.

Being an experienced journalist and having a degree in journalism are of little real value if the journalist doesn’t also have the extensive knowledge of a topic that scholars have.

Ironically, the “both sides” approach, I think, comes in part from admitting a lack of knowledge by the journalist, who then reaches out to people who know the field. The mistake comes when the journalist has no knowledge that would allow them to evaluate who they cite—resulting in far too often journalism that is nothing more than false equivalence.

I was invited once to debate corporal punishment, and the people organizing the debate were perplexed they couldn’t find anyone who was pro-corporal punishment to participate, to which I noted that some topics do not have two sides. The person I was interacting with, a journalist, was completely disoriented by that concept.

People who are anti-racist are not morally or ethically equal to white nationalists or people who oppose anti-racism education; that “both sides” are passionate is a silly equivalence, a hollow equivalence.

Finally, let’s circle back to the Todd/Hannah-Jones exchange. Journalism and education have something else in common—disproportionate whiteness. Journalists are about 70% white (and incredibly under-representative of Black journalists at just over 5%), and educators are about 80% white (also under-representing Black educators at 7%).

Just as mainstream journalism defaults to passive constructions around police shootings, mainstream journalism rarely utters “white” because most journalists cannot see whiteness; whiteness perpetuates itself because it blinds white people to the facts of race.

The manufactured attacks on CRT as a subset of Trumpism are reinforced by mainstream media’s refusal to delineate for readers between credible and false claims. In the early days of Trump, we watched mainstream journalism struggle to call Trump’s lies “lies.”

The simplistic “objective/neutral” pose of journalists is one of the foundational flawed skills of journalism that stands in place of actual expertise.

Mainstream journalism does not suffer from a liberal bias, but mainstream journalism does suffer from a hollowness that is reflected in journalists defaulting to passive constructions and erasing the most essential elements of the topics they are covering.

Unlike Jerry on Seinfeld, journalists have yet to come to the awareness that when you confront their reporting “[t]here’s just nothing in there,” like, as the many Black folk I follow on Twitter noted, the meals white folk prepared at Thanksgiving.

[1] Updated coverage; note the passive voice in the subtitle:

Valentina Orellana-Peralta, who was hiding with her mother inside a dressing room, was killed in the shooting.

Key information from the coverage:

Surveillance video showed the suspect attacking two women, including one who fell to the floor before he dragged her by her feet through the store’s aisles as she tried to crawl away.

Multiple people including store employees called police to report a man striking customers with a bike lock at the store in the North Hollywood area of the San Fernando Valley. One caller told a 911 dispatcher that the man had a gun. No firearm — only the bike lock — was recovered at the scene….

In bodycam video, armed officers entered the store and approached the suspect. The victim was seen on the blood-stained floor and the suspect was on the other side of the aisle. At least one officer opened fire, striking the man.

The 24-year-old suspect, Daniel Elena Lopez, died at the scene. Also killed was Valentina Orellana-Peralta, 14, who was hiding with her mother inside a dressing room….

LAPD officers have shot […] 38 people — 18 of them fatally, including the shooting Sunday of a man with a knife — in 2021, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Those figures mark a dramatic rise in cases where officers shot or killed people in either of the last two years — 27 people were shot and 7 of them killed by LA police in all of 2020. In 2019, officers shot 26 people, killing 12.

Los Angeles Police Video Shows Officer Shooting That Killed 14-Year-Old Girl
Critical Race Theory, Education, NEPC, race, racism

Critical Race Theory: The Facts and Irony (for White People)

1 Comment

[Header Photo by James Eades on Unsplash]

As nearly daily reporting highlights, the manufactured anger over Critical Race Theory (CRT) continues to influence directly and indirectly both public discourse as well as teaching and learning in U.S. schools.

Books are being banned, and state legislation is restricting curriculum and teaching (see here), often in response to outcries against the non-existent influence of CRT on education.

The anti-CRT movement is mostly a political event grounded in misinformation. The essential misinformation includes how CRT is defined and the misunderstanding that CRT is taught in K-12 curriculum.

Let me offer an analogy for understanding what CRT is and why “teaching CRT” is mostly a misrepresentation of the scholarly theory.

For scientists, particularly in the field of medicine, seeking ways to understand disease, an initial challenge was not being able to see microscopic viruses and bacteria. Those scientist had come to the conclusion that the illness being confronted could not be explained by the visible and assumed causes of that disease and its transmission.

In other words, they needed a different way to see the disease. Enter the microscope, a tool for seeing differently in order to understand a complex phenomenon (a disease and its transmission).

CRT is the microscope; in short, CRT is a theoretical lens that scholars use to focus on race and racism as a tool for better understanding a phenomenon that traditional explanations have not adequately explained.

To clarify, then, CRT is a scholarly tool (a set of claims about race and racism) that helps examine phenomena, typically related to institutional dynamics (U.S. legal system, policing, public education). CRT has its origin in legal studies, and at its core, CRT examines phenomenon under the assumption that racial inequities cannot often be understood by simplistic explanations such as individual racism.

As Adrienne Dixon explains for NEPC, CRT does influence some elements of legal and educational scholarship:

CRT is a theoretical framework that originated in legal scholarship in the late 1980s. The founding CRT scholars were dissatisfied with anti-discrimination laws and the legal scholarship that informed it because they felt it didn’t adequately address the role of race and racism and relied too heavily on incremental change. CRT was introduced to education in the 1990s to address similar dissatisfaction with research in education that scholars believed did not fully account for race and racism. Moreover, scholars felt that multicultural education had become co-opted and no longer had the potential to adequately address inequities in education writ large.

Critical Race Theory: What It Is. And What It Is Not. A Q&A With Adrienne Dixson

To clarify about the widespread misinformation about CRT, here are some key facts:

  • CRT is a theoretical lens used by scholars to understand phenomenon impacted by race; CRT is not taught in K-12 education (or undergraduate education), and may or may not have influenced any text or curriculum that addresses systemic racism.
  • CRT centers race in the spectrum of theories that fall under the label “CRT,” and thus, since Marxism centers social class (and often takes a color-blind stance), CRT and Marxist theoretical lenses are in tension. In short, calling CRT “Marxist” is misleading at best, and simply false as worst. [1]
  • Very few students, even graduate students, are assigned readings and lessons that examine what CRT is and how to use it in research. Most students will only ever experience CRT examined formally in graduate courses (law school, graduate education), and even then, CRT remains mostly in elective courses. [2]

Now, let me explore why the attacks on CRT by white conservatives is ironic.

Let’s start with Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose writing is at the center of one of the most dramatic consequences of anti-CRT legislation—a teacher in Tennessee being fired for teaching an essay by Coates.

Coates gained much of his fame as a contemporary writer on race while working at The Atlantic; one of his most powerful pieces examined the Donald Sterling controversy, an NBA owner who lost his ownership because of documented racist behavior.

Sterling represents, according to Coates, oafish racists, individuals who express and act on explicit racism (think David Duke). The oafish racist, the individual racist, as Coates explains, is likely far less common in the U.S., but also far easier to identify and address.

As a CRT scholar would acknowledge, oafish racists pose no problem to scholars; however, racism and racial inequity persist in ways that cannot be linked to individual racist behavior (more below). CRT, then, would be a useful framework for trying to explain what Coates labels as “elegant racism”:

Elegant racism is invisible, supple, and enduring. It disguises itself in the national vocabulary, avoids epithets and didacticism. Grace is the singular marker of elegant racism. One should never underestimate the touch needed to, say, injure the voting rights of black people without ever saying their names. Elegant racism lives at the border of white shame. Elegant racism was the poll tax. Elegant racism is voter-ID laws.

This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Here are a few examples of just exactly how CRT is useful and even necessary for understanding situations exposing racial inequity.

First, consider the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was identified by a police officer as a “‘Black male, maybe 20, black revolver, black handgun by him.'” Rice was shot and killed in just seconds by that officer.

The shooting and killing of Rice fits into a large body of research showing that Black people are shot and killed at much higher rates than other races (for example, Black people shot 2.5 x more often than White people):

Rate of fatal police shootings in the United States from 2015 to November 2021, by ethnicity (per million of the population)

For legal scholars who have concluded that this racial rate inequity cannot be explained by simply identifying individual police officers as racists, CRT provides a process for understanding how and why the police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Rice.

Part of that explanation is systemic racism that influences everyone (regardless of race); Black children are viewed as older than their biological ages:

The social category “children” defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers. We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less “childlike” than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics associated with childhood will be applied less when thinking specifically about Black boys relative to White boys, and (c) that these trends would be exacerbated in contexts where Black males are dehumanized by associating them (implicitly) with apes (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008). We expected, derivative of these 3 principal hypotheses, that individuals would perceive Black boys as being more responsible for their actions and as being more appropriate targets for police violence. We find support for these hypotheses across 4 studies using laboratory, field, and translational (mixed laboratory/field) methods. We find converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children. These data represent the first attitude/behavior matching of its kind in a policing context. Taken together, this research suggests that dehumanization is a uniquely dangerous intergroup attitude, that intergroup perception of children is underexplored, and that both topics should be research priorities.

The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children

So here is our first example of irony: While anti-CRT advocates attack CRT as itself racist and argue CRT labels all White people as racist, CRT actually poses that the killing of Rice is not dependent on a racist police offer, but unexamined and unaddressed systemic biases against Black children.

Again, ironically, training for police officers informed by CRT is the most effective mechanism for helping police officers recognize unconscious bias (viewing Black children as adults) and then change their behavior (resulting in fewer lives taken).

Finally, consider a couple more phenomenon and the need for CRT as a tool to understand and address these inequities.

Consider this report from Brookings that identifies racial inequities between education and income (a racial gap identified in a large body of research):

Perry, Barr, and Romer, then, confront a problem that cannot be explained simply by the impact of individual racists on income:

Our research reveals that the median earnings for Black workers in the manufacturing industry are a staggering $25,629 less than the median for non-Black workers. This racial earnings gap is so large that it is even more pronounced than the earnings gap between workers with degrees versus without. And education does not make up for the racial income gap [emphasis added]; our analysis shows that the median Black worker with a college or trade school degree in the manufacturing industry still makes $875 less than the median white worker with no degree.

Three lessons for boosting postsecondary education and wages in Black-majority cities

Next, consider racial inequity in terms of education, detailed in a report from The Education Trust:

Black students are more likely to attend schools that have high percentages of novice teachers in almost every state across the country. For example:

• In Mississippi, about 25% of Black students attend schools with high percentages of novice teachers, compared to 7% of non-Black students.

• In Maryland, nearly 40% of Black students attend schools with high percentages of novice teachers, compared to about 20% of non-Black students.

• And in eight states (Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas), 30% or more of Black students attend schools with high percentages (greater than 20%) of novice teachers.

Not only do Black students have more novice teachers, but they also have more first-year teachers. On nationwide average, schools serving the highest percentages of Black students have 8% first-year teachers; whereas, schools serving the lowest percentages of Black students have 5% first-year teachers. In 25% of states, schools serving the greatest percentages of Black students have at least twice the percentage of first-year teachers as schools serving the fewest.

• In Louisiana and Mississippi, for example, schools serving the greatest percentages of Black students have almost three times the percentage of first-year teachers as schools serving the fewest.

See Getting Black students Better Access to Non-Novice Teachers

The Education Trust finds a similar disparity for Latino students.

In all three phenomena above—racial inequities in police shootings, income, and access to non-novice teachers—CRT allows a tool for examining and addressing these problems that begins with the claim they are not the result from individual racism, but from systemic (and complicated) dynamics that everyone participates in.

For White people, then, CRT informed research on racial inequity that can unpack and identify the dynamics creating systemic racism can then be translated into policy and practices that eradicate those inequities—all without blaming individuals as racists.

Understanding and incorporating CRT as a tool for research and policy, then, is not a process for condemning all White people as racist, but a pathway to racial harmony.

Being White is not a self-condemning status, then; however, refusing to acknowledge systemic racism and the need to find policies that create equity is a choice, one that perpetuates racism regardless of anyone’s beliefs about race.

The ultimate and ugly irony is that White refusal to understand and embrace CRT is self-defeating, harmful to everyone regardless of race.

[1] See “Claim 2” HERE.

[2] As a critical scholar who identifies with Marxist educational theory, I must emphasize that although I have completed every level of formal education through a doctorate, I have never once been assigned any CRT text or lesson. Further, my understanding and study of Marxism have primarily been on my own, beginning with Marx’s non-economic writings (which I read by choice as an undergraduate after finding the book at a used book sale).

Resources from NEPC

Understanding the Attacks on Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory: What It Is. And What It Is Not. A Q&A With Adrienne Dixson

NEPC Review: How to Regulate Critical Race Theory in Schools: A Primer and Model Legislation (Manhattan Institute, August 2021)

Censorship, Education

Conservative Wet-Paper-Towel Commentary and the So-Called “Liberal” Media

Robert Pondiscio and Frederick Hess, both from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, are about as credible as a paper towel, a wet paper towel.

Not Bounty, of course, but those other paper towels.

Yet, here is an interesting fact.

The so-called “liberal” mainstream media love to provide inordinate space to Pondiscio and Hess, particularly when the topic is even remotely about education.

For example, The New York Times allows them to hold forth on book censorship in Texas. Hess offers a flippant comment that captures the veneer of being reasonable at the core of conservative wet-paper-towel commentary:

“It’s just enormously problematic to rule out particular works,” said Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, who has written favorably of the battles against critical race theory. “I happen to think ‘1619’ is a shoddy work, but so what? Let kids read critiques and wrestle with it.”

In Texas, a Battle Over What Can Be Taught, and What Books Can Be Read

Gosh, that’s mighty kind of Hess to allow “kids” to read some “shoddy” history!

But Pondiscio is granted the last word, and again, he takes the pose of moderation, although like Hess, it is couched in a nasty little swipe: “He sees antiracist education, such as grouping students in racial affinity groups, as lapsing into parody.”

Ah, yes, what a joke antiracist education is!

From Pondiscio to Hess and the entire array of high-profile know-nothing conservative pundits, like David Brooks, mainstream media is awash in wet-paper-towel commentary from conservative (mostly male, mostly white) pundits who benefit from presenting as harmless “experts” who remind us of Ward Clever or Ronald Reagan (actor, not politician).

When Ward Cleaver Caused Social Anxiety - JSTOR Daily
It's Golden Again in America: Ronald Reagan and Hollywood | Film and Digital Media

But don’t let the reasonable pose fool you. These wet paper towels not only don’t hold water very well, but also don’t place a coffee cup on them or you’re going to have a mess on your hands.

Behind the smiles and the hair cuts, however, is something insidious, and the only real way to identify that is to admit conservative commentary is mostly built on lies.

Consider the process in a full Op-Ed by Pondiscio, Drawing the line between censorship and age-appropriateness.

First, note that his commentary is allowed a very reasonable headline, as if the censorship movement across the U.S.—and even calls for book burnings—are merely about misunderstanding a very reasonable issue facing our schools, age appropriateness (glossing over, of course, the implication that teachers and administrators don’t already consider age appropriateness).

Next, as the comments above in the NYT show, Pondiscio proceeds to weave a puppet show of reasonableness that isn’t reasonable at all [1].

Early in his commentary, Pondiscio assures us he is bored with the canon war (apparently itself a bit of a joke like antiracism education!). Where does his concern lie?:

The more challenging front in the censorship wars is over new and comparatively obscure works targeted at readers, from small children to young adults, which cannot claim canonical status. These new works are being published, promoted and defended on grounds of “authenticity and inclusivity.” To question them — to draw a line — is to risk a charge of ignorance, bigotry or worse.

Drawing the line between censorship and age-appropriateness

“Obscure works”? “Targeted at readers”? (Side question: Are there books not targeted at readers? Those readerless books?)

It gets even more fun:

Publishers of young adult novels have been falling over one another in recent years to bring out controversial texts on themes of sexual abuse, racism, domestic violence, gang life, school shootings and other “realistic” subjects, in widely read books such “The Hate U Give,” “Thirteen Reasons Why,” and “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.”

Picture books for little kids are even more discomfiting. I’m old enough to remember the controversies that attended “Heather Has Two Mommies” (1989) “And Tango Makes Three” (2005), which sought to normalize gay and lesbian family structures.

Drawing the line between censorship and age-appropriateness

“Falling over one another”? “Discomforting”? “Normalize gay and lesbian family structures”?

Pondiscio seems to think he is Ward Clever surrounded by his doting and clueless family.

And, boy, things suddenly stopped being a joke, right? To Pondiscio, antiracism education is “parody,” but the real problem (not racism!) is “[t]hat normalizing impulse now goes to lengths that give pause on grounds of age appropriateness even to parents who think of themselves as progressive.”

Jesus, how did the U.S. fall under the spell of “normalizing”? And why are these “progressive”parents confiding in a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute?

You see, Pondiscio is playing a slightly softer version of the conservative Red Herring strategy behind attacks on Critical Race Theory: Make an outlandish and unsubstantiated claim, and then quickly shift to attacking that claim with more outlandish extremism:

Instead, we must reaffirm that you’re not a homophobe if you don’t want your child exposed to an explicit illustration of oral sex as in the graphic novel “Gender Queer.” Neither are you a closet white supremacist if you question the wisdom of exposing young children to the racially charged picture book “Not My Idea. A Book About Whiteness,” which concludes, “Whiteness is a bad deal. It always was.”

Drawing the line between censorship and age-appropriateness

The Big Reveal is that Pondiscio isn’t Ward Clever; he is Eddie Haskell.

Ken Osmond (Eddie Haskell) 1943-2020 – PowerPop… An Eclectic Collection of Pop Culture

Here is the essential problem with both the conservative/Republican attack on books and curriculum, and conservative wet-paper-towel commentary trying to justify erasing free speech and academic freedom.

Including Texas, but all across mostly red states, books are being banned (not checked for age appropriateness), removed from classrooms and libraries so that no one has access to them. These attacks are not about assigning books, but about deciding for parents and students what books can be read.

These attacks are not concerns about age appropriateness (legitimate) or parental rights (debatable). This is fear-mongering around “normalizing” (remember, that thing more dangerous than racism!).

Access to books in children’s homes, classrooms, and schools is one the most important aspects of developing literacy, and limiting access to books in classrooms and schools will disproportionately and negatively impact children living in poverty.

The real parodies—ones so dark they aren’t funny—are Pondiscio, Hess, Brooks, et al., who, like Eddie Haskell, are allowed to offer their veneer of reasonableness in mainstream “liberal” media to promote their wet-paper-towel commentary.

There isn’t enough Bounty in the world to clean up that mess.

[1] As a frame of reference, here is an actual reasonable claim in my own commentary on book censorship (published in The Greenville News, SC):

While there is certainly a place for examinations of age-appropriate texts being taught in public schools, and parents have the right to offer input about the books their own children read, book banning is an act of removing everyone’s opportunity to choose what they read and what they learn.

The current purge happening across the U.S. is not limited to individual student and parent choice, but banning books from school libraries, while targeting the most vulnerable students and authors.

Banning books is “purposeful erasing of history”
Education, Teaching, Writing

On Transitions and Students as Writers

Two decades ago, I left K-12 teaching for higher education. After 18 years as a high school English teacher, I found myself wearing a wrist brace, my right hand overwhelmed by year upon year of hand writing comments on about 4000 student essays a year.

I still hear from my high school students, many on their 30s, 40s, and even 50s. They remain kind and praise my class for helping them become successful student writers, and thinkers.

Although I moved from the field of English (and I always primarily saw myself as a composition teacher who happened to teach literature) to education, I have been fortunate to also teach first-year writing as well as an upper-level writing/research course. Much of my schedule now includes writing-intensive courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, even though I no longer teach literature-based courses.

One confession I must admit is that the transition from K-12 to higher education allowed the physical toll of teaching writing to 100+ students each year to alleviate, but the cumulative almost 40 years of teaching writing is wearing me down psychologically.

I am tired, and I am occasionally exasperated.

But I persist because I still feel the urge to teach, to teach better, and to learn along side my students. Fall 2021 has been another round of important lessons for me because I have been teaching two first-year writing (FYW) seminars in conjunction with a literacy course in our relatively new MAT program.

Both my FYW and graduate students are in transition, and both have overlapping challenges with those transitions.

One of the first activities we do in FYW seminars is to discuss a handout I created just a few semesters ago, Checklist: Making the Transition from Writing in High School to Writing in College [1].

Also relatively new for my FYW students is our final essay assignment; a few semesters ago because of the stress of Covid, I revised Essay 4 by combining it with the reflection I used to require for the final portfolio assignment.

The new assignment is as follows:

Essay 4 Assignment

Submit a showcase essay (approx. 4 pages) reflecting on what you have learned as a writer and what you see as the key weaknesses you need to continue to address. Include direct references to your essays (examples) and any significant connections to Warner or Style (quotes and page numbers are encouraged; include proper citing and references page if needed). Take great care to show in the essay the key elements about writing and essays you have learned in this course.

When this fall’s students submitted Essay 4, I read essay after essay that actively reflected that students have not learned many of the key concepts of writing in college that we emphasized throughout the semester. Something that all teachers of writing will recognize occurred: After students demonstrate “learning” through revision of one essay, they revert and fail to apply that learning in the next essay.

Scholars of grammar, for example, have identified that phenomenon with surface features (see Connie Weaver here and here), but this is also common as students are learning and making significant transitions as students as writers.

My FYW students were struggling with the transition from successful high school students/writers to writing as college students; my MAT students faced moving from being very successful undergraduates to performing as graduate students.

One reflection from a FYW student included a key observation, I think:

Students learned in high school several practices that actively work against their ability to make transitions, their understanding that at each level of education, the expectations change and evolve.

This student’s comment highlights the importance of students in K-12 having rich and authentic experiences with feedback and revision (I recently posted about the problem with students viewing feedback on their writing as “negative”). But the comment also reveals the problem with grades trumping a student’s ability to focus on growth and engaging in an assignment once a grade is assigned.

For both my FYW and MAT students, making the transition to different expectations and different requirements for scholarly writing (specifically moving from MLA to APA) has (too) often resulted in antagonism and paralysis.

I am having some difficulty separating the source of why my students struggled this semester because I am suspicious that some of the challenge lies with the cumulative effect of Covid fatigue.

For example, my FYW students typically submit more than 90% of their writing assignments on time although I do not grade or deduct for late work. This semester, however, only 8 of 22 students submitted all essays fully and on time (although 21 of 22 did complete all work fully ultimately).

None the less, I am certain that a key problem for both my FYW and MAT students has been that their experiences with writing in school and with the writing process (or lack there of) were static (template- and rules-based) instead of developmental and conceptual.

For example, as I have noted before, students in my FYW often acknowledge that they were taught MLA in high school as a monolithic only way to cite that would continue through college. When I note that most of my students will never again use MLA, and will certainly be required to use discipline-specific citation style sheets among their college courses, they are often angry and frustrated.

While teaching my FYW students, I am preparing them for the demands of disciplinary writing and ultimately for writing as scholars in potentially any field once they declare a major; I also anticipate that several of my undergraduates will move to graduate degrees, where scholarly writing includes even greater demands.

I ask my FYW and MAT students to rethink how they integrate sources in their scholarly writing by moving them away from over-quoting (noting that textual analysis requires direct quoting, but many style sheet in several disciplines discourage quoting) and away from walking their reader through one source at a time (many FYW students admit this is how they have written all of their “research papers”) and toward synthesizing source material in sophisticated ways that create an original scholarly essay in their own voice and with own authority.

My writing-intensive courses are demanding, and some of the responses this semester have included very open frustration and even anger as well as some signs that those demands are beyond students’ capacity to engage fully and effectively in the process.

I have a few thoughts on why—beyond the recognition that Covid-fatigue is certainly part of the problem.

Some students expressed concerns that since I am an active, professional writer, I am asking them to perform as “writers” beyond what they can or even want to do. Here, I need to make a better case that we are in a writing-intensive course in college because they will have to perform as writer/scholars throughout undergraduate and graduate education.

The more difficult problem, one we do not acknowledge enough, is that 3-months of writing instruction is unlikely to be long enough for students to demonstrate what they have learned.

Once again, John Warner’s The Writer’s Practice was a hit with FYW students, and as Warner emphasizes, when anyone is learning to write, there is no finish line. As I have noted in previous semesters, students do hear and appreciate Warner’s message that learning to write is about progress, and not perfection. However, putting that to practice is extremely hard for students legitimately concerned about what grade they will receive in a course.

Finally, what I heard my FYW and MAT students say often is that they struggled to see the substance behind some of the concepts my courses stressed; students were trapped inside viewing many of the requirements and lessons as “just formatting”; therefore, I made a list connecting those requirements with the substance—hoping that in the coming semesters, their writing will eventually demonstrate the learning that some of their current work does not:

Key Concepts for Writing in College

1. Openings/introductions should be specific and compelling. Avoid overstatements and huge claims, and be sure to include a clear and specific focus/thesis (can be multiple sentences and/or questions you will answer).

2. Take care with your word choice/diction. Prefer specific and clear language. Make sure the diction/tone of your word choice matches the seriousness of your topic. Concrete and specific word choice is always preferred.

3. Your writing should have purposeful structure and organization. Use subheads to provide that structure and organization. and keep those subheads balanced (more than one paragraph and about equal in length).

4. Make fewer claims and always provides evidence for your claims; develop the evidence and explanations/elaborations. Any time your evidence is from a source, you must fully cite.

5. Focus on purposeful sentence and paragraph formation; length variety shows purpose.

6. Integrate sources into your writing in sophisticated ways, focusing on the content of the sources (write about the patterns found in your sources, and not the sources). Avoid using one source at a time, and recognize that one source is not proof your claim is true.

7. Create a compelling closing that does more than restate your opening. Recognize that the closing is after your reader has read your essay. Give the reader vivid and specific language, and emphasize what the reader should now understand better or do with the new knowledge/understanding. your closing is the last thing in your reader’s mind; make it count.

8. Edit and review your essay submissions for formatting and citation expectations (every discipline has different citation expectations; be sure to refer to a credible style guide). Run spelling/grammar check before submitting and never submit an essay with spelling/grammar alerts active on your document.

On the last class session of my FYW seminars, we discussed this list, and I emphasized that they should review each final version of their four essays within these parameters before submitting their final portfolio/exam.

Today is exam day, and I will soon find out what they can demonstrate.

Just as my students must remain grounded in the understanding that learning to write is a journey, I too must assign their grades recognizing they are on that journey—and for me too, teaching others to write is a journey.

[1] Checklist: Making the Transition from Writing in High School to Writing in College

Writing Process and Drafting

  • Writing a couple quick drafts the night before an essay is due is not drafting, and likely will not be effective in college (even if you received high grades in high school for doing this).
  • Drafting from an approved, direct thesis (common in high school) may be a less effective writing strategy than other drafting approaches, such as the following: (1) “vomit” drafting (free writing as much as you can to create text you can reorganize and revise) or (2) discovery drafting (writing with a general idea of your topic and focus, but allowing yourself to discover and evolve your topic and focus).
  • Planning for several days to draft is necessary, and establishing a routine for revising that commits to one revision focus at a time (diction and tone, paragraphing, etc.) is often effective.
  • Read and use as models published academic and scholarly essays along with public and creative nonfiction essays in order to increase your toolbox as a writer.

Essay Writing

  • A five-paragraph essay with a one-paragraph introduction (and direct thesis), three body paragraphs, and a one-paragraph conclusion that restates the introduction is inadequate in college; the form is simplistic (most topics have more than only 3 points) and guarantees you will under-develop your discussion.
  • Write to a clear audience (not your teacher or professor), recognizing that academic writing often has a well-informed audience and that a public audience can range from being poorly informed or misinformed to being highly experienced and knowledgeable.
  • Avoid overstatements, especially in the first sentences of the essay and in the last few sentences. Overstatements include “since the beginning of time” (or suggesting long periods of time such as “throughout history”), “many/most people argue/debate,” and “[topic x] is important [or unique or a hot topic].”
  • Your word choice (diction) creates the tone of your essay; many scholarly/academic topics are serious so take great care that your diction/tone matches the seriousness of your topic. The relationship between your tone to your topic impacts your credibility as a writer.
  • Always prefer specific, vivid, and concrete over vague or general; “anger” instead of “how he felt,” for example: “John was upset that he couldn’t control his anger” is more effective than “John was upset that he couldn’t control how he felt.”
  • Rethink the essay form and paragraphing not as a set number of sentences but as important and purposeful parts of engaging your reader/audience while establishing your credibility. Your essays should have a multiple-paragraph opening the engages and focuses your reader by being specific and vivid, several body paragraphs with purposeful paragraph lengths (sentence and paragraph length variety are effective), and a multiple-paragraph closing that leaves the reader with specific and vivid language that parallels the opening (framing) but doesn’t simply repeat your initial thoughts.
  • Learn to use the tools available in Word (or other word processors): formatting using menus (and not simply inserting spaces, returns, and tabs), running your essay through the grammar and spell check (be careful not to leave your essay with the colored underlining when submitting an assignment), and saving your text files purposefully (include your last name and assignment type in the file name) and in an organized way on your computer system (making sure you have a back-up process for all files).
  • Most academic essay writing is built from claims, evidence, and elaboration; however, the types of evidence required varies a great deal in writing among the many disciplines of the academy (history, sociology, economics, physics, etc.). For example, direct quotes are often necessary as evidence when writing a text-based analysis (examining a poem or an essay in philosophy), but many disciplines (social sciences and hard sciences) expect evidence that is data or paraphrasing/synthesis of concepts and conclusions from multiple sources at a time (synthesis). When writing a text analysis, quotes are necessary, but your own claims and elaboration should be the majority of the essay, and take great care to integrate quotes with your own words (avoid stand-alone sentences that are quotes only and be careful to limit block quoting).; writing about topics or making arguments should limit quoting.
  • Academic citation (MLA, APA, etc.) is different among the disciplines (you may not use MLA again after entering college, for example), and expectations for high-quality sources also vary among disciplines. Some fields such as literature and history require older sources, yet social (sociology, psychology, education) and hard (physics, biology, chemistry) sciences tend to prefer only peer-reviewed journal articles from within 5-10 years. Across most of academia, however, journal articles and peer-reviewed publications are preferred to books and public writing.
  • File formatting impacts your credibility as a writer; set your font preferences to one standard font and size (Times New Roman, 12 pt.) and maintain that formatting throughout a document (only using bold or italics as appropriate for subheads or emphasis), including headers/footers.
  • Always submit essays with vivid and specific titles and your name where required on the document itself.

When I think about final grades in a writing-intensive course, here are some guiding principles:

  • A work: Participating by choice in multiple drafts and conferences beyond the minimum requirements as well as revising and editing beyond responding only to feedback; essay form and content that is nuanced, sophisticated, and well developed (typically more narrow than broad); a high level demonstrated for selecting and incorporating source material in a wide variety of citation formats; submitting work as assigned and meeting due dates (except for illness, etc.); attending and participating in class-based discussion, lessons, and workshops; completing assigned and choice reading of course texts and mentor texts in ways that contribute to class discussions and original writing.
  • B work: Submitting drafts and attending conferences as detailed by the minimum requirements but attending primarily to feedback without revising/editing independently; essay form and content that is solid and distinct from high school writing (typically more narrow than broad); a basic college level demonstrated for selecting and incorporating source material in a wide variety of citation formats; submitting work as assigned and meeting most due dates; attending and participating in class-based discussion, lessons, and workshops; completing assigned and choice reading of texts and mentor texts in ways that contribute to class discussions and original writing.
book banning, comic books, Education, sexism, Wonder Woman

Just in Time: Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons

[See repost: Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons…arrives just in time]

The oversized format and stunning cover by Phil Jimenez and Romulo Fajardo Jr. suggest something special from DC Black Label, but the black text-only first page signals Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons has arrived just in time:

Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons (2021-) #1 - Comics by comiXology
Interior preview page from WONDER WOMAN HISTORIA THE AMAZONS #1 (OF 3) CVR A PHIL JIMENEZ (MR)

Available December 1, 2021, Historia Book One on its first page speaks into a darkness begun in the waning days of the Trump administration, a ham-fisted attack on the 1619 Project that has escalated into state-level legislation by Republicans across the U.S. banning books and canceling the teaching of history.

The “Some say…” reply of “Some are liars, fabulists” can be read as a critique of the Trump-poisoned Right today. But the most powerful lines speak to the exact source of why conservatives in 2021 are seeking to control what children are taught and how, echoing the essence of Critical Race Theory and vilified historians such as Howard Zinn:

History, young one, is written by the victors. In the bitter battle between the Amazons and the Gods of Men…

The Amazons lost.

There is no objective version. Neither this one, nor that.

But this…this is our story.

Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons (Book One)

The creative team of DeConnick (writer); Jimenez (artist); Hi-Fi, Arif Prianto, and Fajardo (colorists); and Clayton Cowles (letterer) remind me of J.H. Williams III and Kelly Thompson’s run on Black Widow—although in many ways, Historia proves to be dramatically unique.

Occasionally calling a work a feminist read on a topic can seem reductive, or insubstantial—how many feminist reads [1] has there been of Wonder Woman?—but in a world darkened by censorship and the looming threat of overturning women’s reproductive rights nearly 50 years after Roe v. Wade, a feminist manifesto is not just in time, but essential.

“For the Institutions of Men Care Not for the Weal of Women“: Just in Time?

After a beautifully rendered introduction of Goddesses, the narrator admits, “The subjugations and abuses of not-men by men are too numerous to catalog in a library…let alone a book.”

This powerful refrain not only sets the focus of Historia, but carries an eerie weight in a time of book censorship—books ripped from classrooms and libraries, school board members calling for book burnings—as well as the threat of of the State denying women reproductive rights, “the subjugations and abuses of not-men by men” and the women who do men’s bidding.

Next, an admission more sober: “For the institutions of men care not for the weal of women. You don’t have to be the Queen of Gods to recognize injustice.”

Book One moves from introduction to an exchange between Hera and Zeus, where Hera requests the elimination of not humankind but all men.

“The history of men is a chronicle of crimes against women,” Hera proclaims to protestations that history too includes “tales of love and beauty,” followed by:

“Herodotus 1.93. Every daughter of Lydia will work as a prostitute until she has raised sufficient money for a dowry and can secure a husband.”

Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons (Book One)

To which, Aphrodite counters:

The indignity lies not in the commerce of love, goat…

…but in the irony of whoring yourself to many to earn the privilege of whoring yourself to one.

Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons (Book One)

The arguments are an excellent dramatization of concepts such as justice as well as privilege. Hera, indignant, asks, “Do you mean to suggest that women have done something to deserve this station?” Zeus concedes, condescendingly, “You’ve made your point, girls. Women do suffer—historically and undeniably—at the hands of men. But their world is not justice.”

Finally, the main narrative of Book One focuses on childbirth and vividly portrays Hera’s protestations—in short, “Hell is a state of being,” and we can add for women.

An unwanted girl is birthed, an excessively bloody event confirming:

In every birth, there is risk and pain. This is true of creatures, ideas, and tragedies.

Mortal births are particularly gruesome. They enter the world unprotected, screaming, suited for inevitable suffering.

Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons (Book One)

But the birth itself is not the only “pain”; Hippolyta is tasked with discarding the unwanted baby girl.

DC First Look: Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons • AIPT

After leaving the baby in the river—”‘The Gods will decide, as they decide the fates of us all. They will choose wisely. Yes.'”—Hippolyta balks on that faith and runs until collapsing in hopes of saving the child.

This tale of the burden of women and the inescapable fate of women as self-sacrificing builds to her being saved by the Amazons, setting up Book Two in a dramatic final page:

Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons review: Every page of DC's comic is epic - Polygon

Historia is beautiful and compelling as another contribution to the long history of Wonder Woman, but this is a work that speaks to “not-men” and “men” in the U.S. during the final month of 2021. It is a call to confront the “the institutions of men [that] care not for the weal of women.”

Just in time?

[1] Thomas, P.L. (2018). Wonder Woman: Reading and teaching feminism with an Amazonian princess in an era of Jessica Jones. In S. Eckard (ed.), Comic connections: Reflecting on women in popular culture (pp. 21-37). New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield.

#BlackLivesMatter, Adrienne Rich, book banning, Cancel Culture, Censorship, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, Education, George Orwell, Howard Zinn, indoctrination, Martin Luther King Jr., parental choice, politics, race, racism, reading, Teaching, Traditionalism, White Fragility, Whiteness

Freedom and the Politics of Canceling Teachers and Curriculum

By mid-December of 2021, Matthew Hawn, a former teacher in Tennessee, will once again have his appeal heard after being fired for violating the state’s restrictions on curriculum:

The Tennessee General Assembly has banned the teaching of critical race theory, passing a law at the very end of the legislative session to withhold funding from public schools that teach about white privilege.

Republicans in the House made the legislation a last-minute priority, introducing provisions that ban schools from instructing students that one race bears responsibility for the past actions against another, that the United States is fundamentally racist or that a person is inherently privileged or oppressive due to their race.

Tennessee bans public schools from teaching critical race theory amid national debate, Natalie Allison

As Allison reported in May, several states across the U.S. have filed or passed copy-cat legislation aimed at banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory.

By October and November, the consequences of Tennessee’s law have moved from silencing and canceling teachers to attempts to cancel curriculum [1]:

The Tennessee Department of Education recently declined to investigate a complaint filed under a new state law prohibiting the teaching of certain topics regarding race and bias.

The complaint, the first directed to the state under the new law passed this spring, was filed by Robin Steenman, chair of the Moms for Liberty Williamson County chapter, a conservative parent group sweeping the nation. 

The 11-page complaint alleged that the literacy curriculum, Wit and Wisdom, used by Williamson County Schools and at least 30 other districts, has a “heavily biased agenda” that makes children “hate their country, each other and/or themselves.”

Tennessee Department of Education rejects complaint filed under anti-critical race theory law, Meghan Mangrum

Although the complaint was rejected, Mangrum noted, “The group detailed concerns with four specific books on subjects like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, the integration of California schools by advocate Sylvia Mendez and her family, and the autobiography of Ruby Bridges, adapted for younger learners.”

A teacher fired for teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates, parents calling for bans on MLK and teaching about Ruby Bridges—these events are not unique to Tennessee, but they reflect a pattern of efforts to control not only teachers, but what students are allowed to learn and read.

Notable in these examples is that many of the consequences of legislation are canceling Black writers and key aspects of Black history; additionally, legislation and calls for book banning are targeting LGBTQ+ writers and topics.

Teaching and curriculum in the U.S. are being systematically and politically whitewashed.

One aspect not being addressed often is that political dynamic. Parents, political activists, and politicians are impacting who teaches and what is being taught in the context of a historical and current demand that teachers themselves remain apolitical, both in their classrooms and their lives beyond school.

As I have discussed often, teaching is necessarily political, and teaching as well as writing are necessarily types of activism.

For teachers, then, we must recognize that calls for teachers to be objective, neutral, and apolitical are themselves political acts. Currently, laws being passed and parents/activists confronting school boards are exercising their political power at the expense of teachers and schools—both of which are required to remain somehow politically neutral.

From historian/activist Howard Zinn to critical scholars such as Joe Kincheloe and to poet Adrienne Rich, we have ample evidence that taking a neutral stance is a political act that passively endorses the status quo and that silencing words is an act of canceling thought, eradicating ideas.

Zinn’s commitment to transparency as a teacher and activist is hauntingly relevant to the current political attack on teachers and curriculum:

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

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

You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times, Howard Zinn

And Kincheloe confronted not only who is actually indoctrinating students but the imperative that teachers recognize teaching as inherently political:

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

Critical Pedagogy Primer, Joe L. Kincheloe

The great irony is that critical educators (often smeared as “Marxists”) are committed, as Kincheloe asserts, to a foundational concern: “Critical pedagogy wants to know who’s indoctrinating whom.”

The Orwellian named “Moms for LIberty,” then, by calling for canceling curriculum are in fact being “totalitarian and oppressive,” calling for not education, but indoctrination. To ban words and ideas is to ban the possibility of thinking, of learning:

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

Arts of the Possible, Adrienne Rich

A final powerful point is that many of these political acts to silence teachers and cancel curriculum are occurring in right-to-work states controlled by Republicans. Teachers not only are expected to be neutral, objective, and apolitical, but also work with a distinct awareness they have almost no job security.

Hawn fired in Tennessee simply taught a text and now is fighting for his career; the text in most ways just a year ago was considered non-controversial and even celebrated as Coates had attained recognition as one of the country’s leading Black voices.

During this holiday season at the end of 2021, teachers honestly have no decision about whether or not to be political. We are faced with only two political choices: conform to the demand that we take a neutral pose, resulting in endorsing whatever status quo legislators and parents/activist impose on schools; or recognize and embrace the essential political nature of being a teacher by actively opposing efforts to cancel teachers and curriculum.

[1] Twitter thread:

Cancel Culture, Censorship, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, Education, free speech, literacy, literature, race, racism, reading

Reading Matters

[Header Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash]

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?

Hamlet: Between who?

Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

Hamlet: Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards….

Polonius: [Aside] Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

–Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii.

Reading matters.

I imagine you would be hard pressed to find anyone who would disagree with those two simple words. But the reality is that those two words have dramatically different meanings among people advocating for teaching children to read in schools.

“[S]ociety should get behind teaching everybody to read the right way,” explains John McWhorter, linguist turned public intellectual who uses his bully pulpit at the New York Times to join the long list of Black celebrities and notable people invited into the white mainstream of conservative thought cloaking racism and racial stereotyping.

The problem in McWhorter’s words, of course, is that “right way.”

Since early 2018, the U.S. has once again lifted the Reading War into public consciousness with a misleading refrain, “the science of reading” (SoR). The media has maintained a steady beat claiming that teacher education and practicing teachers have failed to embrace the SoR, and as a result, children are failing to learn to read.

The SoR media movement has merged with some aggressive parent advocacy groups, notably related to dyslexia, and the result is copy-cat SoR reading legislation being passed throughout the country. Ironically, and disturbingly, that legislation often codifies policies and practices that are strongly refuted by scientific research—grade retention, universal screening for and oversimplification of dyslexia [1], systematic intensive phonics programs for all students [2], bans on popular reading programs, and efforts to mimic policies implemented in Mississippi [3] (after one round of improved NAEP scores in reading at grade 4).

While I am certain that people advocating for improved reading instruction in our schools all have mostly good intentions (except for a powerful lobby for phonics programs and some media/journalists seeing an opportunity to cash in on SoR), the problem remains with what anyone means by “reading matters.”

We must acknowledge two contexts here.

One context is approaching a common term but a rare case that it may be accurate—crisis.

Since the SoR movement and advocates such as McWhorter are speaking into a conservative and traditional ideology about language, reading, and literature (used broadly to mean any texts students reading), the SoR movement has been swept into a concurrent movement against public education broadly begun under Trump with the purposeful and orchestrated attacks on the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory (McWhorter’s “right way” comment sits inside his joining the anti-woke movement).

What merges the anti-woke education movement and the SoR movement is the focus on parental rights to monitor and control what students learn and how students learn.

The crisis we are approaching, I think, is the ironically disturbing part. The merging of the SoR movement with the anti-woke movement means that so-called advocates for better reading instruction have joined forces with a new rise in censorship that includes book banning, removing books from libraries (lists of 850+ books identified in Texas), proposing bans on terms deemed “woke,” and even calls for burn burnings.

A significant but less powerful group of literacy advocates, teachers, scholars, and writers have noted the problem with emphasizing the need for children to learn to read while simultaneously reducing what they can read, and even what those students are allowed to consider or think.

A second context is the contradiction between the narrow demands of the SoR movement and the likelihood that policies and practices being implemented in the name of SoR are likely to inhibit and even discourage children from reading.

I have detailed several times that I grew up in a racist and deeply conservative community and household. The conditions that saved my life, my mind, and my soul include the coincidence that my very misguided parents happened to respect intellectual freedom; I was allowed to read anything throughout my childhood and teen years.

Once I moved beyond my home and community—college—I was then liberated by reading Black authors assigned and recommended by wonderful professors, again a context that respected intellectual freedom and my mind.

Not an exhaustive list, but for me, someone who has spent almost 40 years as a literacy educator, I want to offer some reasons reading matters for me, highlighting John Dewey, William Ayers, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde:

The allure of SoR for the media, parents, and politicians is grounded in silver-bullet “all students must” thinking that is antithetical to the reasons I believe reading matters.

At the core of the tension in debates about teaching reading and what texts students are assigned or allowed to read is those embracing indoctrination (“teaching everybody to read the right way”) versus those embracing education as liberation (from Dewey to Ayers to hooks and to Lorde).

Indoctrination depends on someone not only controlling what people read, hear, and think, but also erasing what people read, hear, and think.

The SoR movement ultimately fails because it resists being student centered and allows far too often for reading to be reduced to decoding (systematic intensive phonics for all); further, while SoR advocates often demonize popular reading programs (and I am a strong critic of all reading programs), they make the same essential mistake by simply choosing different programs to endorse as rigid expectations for students and teachers (LETRS, DIBLES).

Reading matters, but if we become distracted by raising reading test scores, our practices are likely to produce non-readers (Dewey).

Reading matters, but if we fail to distinguish between indoctrination and education for liberation (hooks), we reduce reading instruction to training (Ayers).

Reading matters, but our commitments must be to how reading matters for the individual, especially for those “who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable” (Lorde).

If we truly believe every person deserves the human dignity of intellectual freedom, as my parents and teachers afforded me, then reading matters only if we refuse silver-bullet scripts, only if we protect all the books and ideas available to free people.

That is the only “right way” worth evoking.

[1] See the following:

An Examination of Dyslexia Research and Instruction, with Policy Implications, Peter Johnston and Donna Scanlon

Research Advisory: Dyslexia (ILA)

[2] See the following:

A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Reading Comprehension Interventions on the Reading Comprehension Outcomes of Struggling Readers in Third Through 12th Grades, Marissa J. Filderman, Christy R. Austin, Alexis N. Boucher, Katherine O’Donnell, Elizabeth A. Swanson

“the simple view of reading does not comprehensively explain all skills that influence reading comprehension, nor does it inform what comprehension instruction requires.”

The Sciences of Reading Instruction, Rachael Gabriel (Educational Leadership)

The Trouble With Binaries: A Perspective on the Science of Reading, David B. Yaden Jr., David Reinking, and Peter Smagorinsky

Reconsidering the Evidence That Systematic Phonics Is More Effective Than Alternative Methods of Reading Instruction, Jeffrey S. Bowers (2020)

[3] UPDATED 23 February 2020: Mississippi Miracle or Mirage?: 2019 NAEP Reading Scores Prompt Questions, Not Answers

See Also

The Problem with Balanced Literacy

Failing Balanced Literacy Is Failing Readers, Katie Kelly and Paul Thomas

book banning, Censorship, Education, literacy, reading

Banning Books Is Un-American

[Update: Published at the Greenville News (SC); see PDF at end of post with hyperlinks]

person holding Ray Bradbury book
Photo by Will Porada on Unsplash

In the fall of 1973, the Drake School Board in North Dakota banned Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

Vonnegut, born November 11, what is now celebrated as Veterans Day, was a World War II veteran who survived the firebombing of Dresden. That horrific event a couple decades later became Vonnegut’s most celebrated novel, the same novel banned after being assigned in Drake High School.

“I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people,” Vonnegut explained in a letter to the school board. There he also defended the value of his novels: “They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are.”

Ultimately, Vonnegut pronounced the banning of his novel “un-American” and concluded, “you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.”

I have been an educator in South Carolina for almost 40 years, about two decades of that time spent teaching high school English. This example of censorship from the 1970s should be nothing more than a regrettable moment in history, but I was reminded of it because on Vonnegut’s birthday in 2021 I read that SC Governor Henry McMaster has joined Republicans across the U.S. who are not only banning books, but actively calling for book burnings.

A popular truism often cited in times like these is “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” attributed to George Santayana. However, what we are experiencing in Greenville, SC and across America is much worse; this is a purposeful erasing of history.

Here is a history lesson we cannot afford to ignore.

“The burning of books under the Nazi regime on May 10, 1933, is perhaps the most famous book burning in history,” detailed at the Holocaust Encyclopedia. The justifications for the book burnings are hauntingly familiar when paired with comments from governors and school board members:

At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged and “unwanted” books onto bonfires with great ceremony, band-playing, and so-called “fire oaths.” In Berlin, some 40,000 persons gathered in the Opernplatz to hear Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: “No to decadence and moral corruption!” Goebbels enjoined the crowd. “Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Gläser, Erich Kästner.”

Holocaust Encyclopedia

While there is certainly a place for examinations of age-appropriate texts being taught in public schools, and parents have the right to offer input about the books their own children read, book banning is an act of removing everyone’s opportunity to choose what they read and what they learn.

The current purge happening across the U.S. is not limited to individual student and parent choice, but banning books from school libraries, while targeting the most vulnerable students and authors.

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the largest organization of ELA teachers in the U.S., supports The Students’ Right to Read, including in part:

One of the foundations of a democratic society is the individual’s right to read, and also the individual’s right to freely choose what they would like to read. This right is based on an assumption that the educated possess judgment and understanding and can be trusted with the determination of their own actions. In effect, the reader is freed from the bonds of chance. The reader is not limited by birth, geographic location, or time, since reading allows meeting people, debating philosophies, and experiencing events far beyond the narrow confines of an individual’s own existence.

The Students’ Right to Read (NCTE, 2018)

While political leaders across both major parties enjoy making grand statements and gestures about individual freedom, the American Way, and the American Dream, there is only one way to describe book banning—un-American.

That governors and school boards are actively banning books across the U.S. at the same time that we as a country were celebrating Veterans Day is repeating the offensive history lived by Vonnegut five decades in our past, a past we refuse to acknowledge, a past we seem eager to repeat.

Greenville News (SC) 5 December 2021
#BlackLivesMatter, Education, George Carlin, Martin Luther King Jr.

“Is everybody okay? Let’s get something to eat”: On George Carlin and the Intellectual Bankruptcy of the Right

In Season 4, episode 3 of Seinfeld, the show becomes a meta-sitcom. George and Jerry pitch a sitcom to NBC, Jerry, and establish what would become the short-hand way to describe the actual show, expressed by George:

George Costanza: I think I can sum up the show for you in one word. Nothing.

Russell Dalrymple: Nothing?

George Costanza: Nothing.

Russell Dalrymple: What does that mean?

George Costanza: The show is about… nothing!

Jerry Seinfeld: Well, it’s not about nothing.

George Costanza: No, it’s about nothing.

Jerry Seinfeld: Well, maybe in philosophy, but even nothing is something.

Seinfeld S4 E3

But, if you dig deeper, ironically, Seinfeld is not just a “show about nothing,” but the characters themselves are, well, let’s allow Jerry to explain (after being challenged by his girlfriend that he never gets mad):

Patty: OK, Jerry, enough. I’m not buying it.

Jerry: You’re damn right you’re not buying it!

Patty: You shouldn’t have to try. It’s just being open.

Jerry: I’m open. There’s just nothing in there.

Seinfeld S9 E3, The Serenity Now

In 2021, Seinfeld the show and Jerry are perfect metaphors for conservatives and Republicans in the U.S.—”there’s just nothing there.”

Consider a hypothetical first.

Imagine liberals and Democrats in the U.S. misrepresenting Ayn Rand or Jerry Falwell and Jerry Falwell Jr. in order to claim that these conservative figures actually are leftists, or Marxists.

Sounds preposterous because that doesn’t happen. At the center of that fact is that the Left has a solid intellectual base on its own. Progressivism has a strong roll call to draw from, reaching back to John Dewey and working through Martin Luther King Jr.

Next, however, we don’t have to imagine.

Republicans and conservatives routinely appropriate by misrepresentation MLK, typically reducing King to a color-blind caricature. Just recently that conservative lie has taken on a new twist, an Op-Ed claiming that MLK would have rejected Critical Race Theory—despite the fact that the founding Black intellectuals who developed CRT identified specifically that the concepts grew from MLK’s ideology, words, and practices. See for example how MLK is anything but a color-blind passive radical:

The moral and racial bankruptcy on the Right is exposed by conservatives’ need to co-opt MLK because with them “there’s just nothing there.”

A newer grasp for liberal thinkers has been a right-wing distortion of George Carlin, who has been trending often on social media. Carlin’s misappropriation is a powerful example of the intellectual bankruptcy on the right because Carlin is complex, easy to misread, and also a perfect example of the difficulty of reducing anyone to a blunt label.

We must imagine how conservatives claiming Carlin ignore his career-long attacks on police (Carlin took great pleasure in announcing “Fuck the police” in his stand-up routines), religion, and anti-abortion activists—just to name a few areas where Carlin is clearly not conservative.

The misunderstanding from the Right, and much of the general public, exposes—as Carlin would argue—that too many people in the U.S. simply do not think critically (Carlin would possibly argue that most people can’t think critically).

Carlin was a stand-up comedian, writer, and actor, but at his core, Carlin was anti-establishment, anti-authority while practicing as an amateur linguist and implementing critical discourse analysis.

Trying to place Carlin on a political spectrum is nearly impossible, more akin to historian Howard Zinn’s own political revelation:

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

You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

To understand Carlin, you must recognize his history, one grounded in fighting censorship.

Yes, Carlin always trashed “the government,” but he was expressing a critique of corporate owned government, and not the ideal of what democratic government could and should do (Carlin often called for better public schools and health care, especially for the elderly).

And Carlin was a product of corporate-government war, the Vietnam War that provided Carlin a career of being an avid anti-war advocate.

Maybe the greatest misunderstanding of Carlin is his (seemingly) libertarian musings about individuals, often sounding like a twentieth century Thoreau. But Carlin was not a rugged individualist as much as he believed in the sanctity of the humanity of every individual and freedom for all people; in fact, Carlin was a champion for racial and gender equity before that was commonplace, and he never shied away from evoking that policing in the U.S. is racist (his voice would fit well into BlackLivesMatter) and that the U.S. was founded by slave holders (a bit ahead of his time on the 1619 Project as well).

And it takes care to listen to Carlin, not just his stand-up, by the way. In interviews, you can hear the clarity in his anger against government as corporate, not government as a democracy:

It says “we the people” in the preamble…. People who hate the government are involved in a form of suicide because government is self-government, and if you hate the government, you hate yourself.

Carlin on Charlie Rose

An even more powerful interview, however, guides us through Carlin’s essentially “left of center” ideology that was paired with his commitment as a non-voter (see W.E.B. Du Bois on not voting as well):

14:24

George Carlin: No, I don’t vote. Voting implies the consent to be governed and I — between you and me, I do not consent to be governed. I prefer to —

…

14:34

George Carlin: Yes, I prefer to be outside of it. It gives me my freedom. But my brother made a good point, because we were pulling for Clinton, being somewhat left of center in general.

…

14:41

Charlie Rose: Right (crosstalk) Clinton/Bush and you said Clinton (inaudible).

14:45

George Carlin: He [his brother] said, you know, he says, I think if there were just one cherry pie and Clinton had it, I think I’d get a piece. And I think if Bush had it, he’d keep the whole pie. And I believe that. And therefore I’m rooting for him.

14:56

Charlie Rose: And what if Perot had it?

14:58

George Carlin: He’d buy 100 more pies and I still wouldn’t have a piece. That was my addendum to what my brother said, but I pull for Clinton because people are going to invest hope in him and I think people — I think the — I think being on this planet, one of the first things people would say — if we were all dumped down here, let us say there were only ten of us.

15:16

Charlie Rose: Right.

15:18

George Carlin: And we dropped into this planet already formed, one of the first things we would say would — after a moment or two would be, Is everybody okay? Let’s get something to eat. And that should be the first thing any society said: Is everybody okay? Let’s get something to eat. And we don’t, because we have this private property thing, property. Property rights over people’s rights. And I just think that competition got the upper hand over cooperation. 

…

15:53

George Carlin: The verge of failure that we’re on is because two wonderful qualities that made us a successful species, cooperation and competition, are way of balance now. Competition is everything. Cooperation happens after a flood. Happens for a few days. Everybody goes back to

…

George Carlin: And we need — we need to get that balance back. If we can get that balance back, there’s hope.

16:11

Charlie Rose: Some sense of community values.

16:13

George Carlin: Communitarian ideas (crosstalk) —

Carlin interview, Charlie Rose 1992

“Communitarian ideas.”

Carlin mentions to Rose that he loves any individual he meets, but he remains leery of organized groups, like churches or political parties.

Unlike the character of Jerry, there is a lot there in Carlin. Not perfect, but a lot.

And the “there” in Carlin is attractive to the hollowness of conservatives, morally and intellectually bankrupt.

Someone trying to appropriate Carlin posted on Twitter that a conservative comedian was today’s Carlin; another person posted that this conservative Trumpster comic is just like Carlin, except he isn’t funny or smart.

The Right, you see, is a movement about nothing, and all they have is grasping at other people’s ideologies in an effort to make them their own.

George Carlin was raised in a Dewey school, a Catholic education.

This too is a message about learning to think for yourself. That Deweyan Catholic upbringing equipped Carlin with the mind and will to reject the Church, religion, and even God.

As he joked throughout the end of his life, Carlin worshipped the sun and prayed to Joe Pesci:

We are a people ruined by private property, Carlin noted, and we would all be much better off spending our brief time on the planet we are destroying simply saying, “Is everybody okay? Let’s get something to eat.”

Official George Carlin

book banning, Education

Censorship and Book Burning: A Reader [Updated]

UPDATE: Efforts to Ban Critical Race Theory Now Restrict Teaching for a Third of America’s Kids (Education Week)

See the report: The Conflict Campaign (UCLA)

Note: See re: why resisting censorship, especially as banning disproportionately impacts diverse authors and texts: What we teach about race and gender: Representation in images and text of children’s books:

The fall of 2021 has seen a surge in book banning and even calls for book burnings. See below for the increased number of cases and why we should all resist:

Resources

[Update]

[Update – Tennessee]

“Moms For Liberty” says book about MLK violates new law banning CRT in Tennessee

Banned in the U.S.A. Redux 2021: “[T]o behave as educated persons would”

Should South Carolina Ban Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project?

“Fahrenheit 451” 60 Years Later: “Why do we need the things in books?”

The 451 App (22 August 2022)