education

Resisting Fatalism in Post-Truth Trumplandia: Charter Schools and the End of Accountability

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Bill asks Mike Campbell how Mike goes bankrupt, and Mike answers: “‘Two ways….Gradually and then suddenly.'”

This conversation in Ernest Hemingway’s sparse dramatization of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises, also serves as a chilling characterization of how the U.S. finds itself in post-truth Trumplandia.

The paradoxes multiply for those of us in education because we can not only see but also live the reality that our post-truth U.S. is both a consequence of a country’s negligence of universal public education and the cause of that negligence—notably the uber-corrosive accountability era of the past three decades.

It seems like a distant memory, but just months ago, there appeared to be light at the end of the tunnel, a crumbling of support for charter schools on the heels of rising resistance to standards and high-stakes testing.

And then the election of Donald Trump.

And then Trump’s apparent selection of a Secretary of Education with zero experience in public education and a harsh school choice agenda.

This feels not like passing dark clouds, but a potential permanent eclipse of the sun.

However, we must resist the alluring fatalism of Trumplandia upon us even though truth and evidence have been declared defunct.

In a time of post-truth, truth becomes Kryptonite.

The Crack in Charter School Support Must Be a Harbinger of the End of the Accountability Era

“What exactly is the position of charter school supporters?” ask educators and activists Adrienne Dixson and Andre Perry, writing at The Hechinger Report. For some, the time to question charter school advocates and commitments to charter schools is well past due because the evidence is substantial that charter advocacy fails against miraculous claims and erodes community public schools.

Nearly three decades ago, charter schools began as educational experiments designed to benefit, not compete with, all public schools, but during the Obama administration, charter schools have increasingly turned into an alternative to traditional public schools, especially for black and brown students.

As a softer but misleading and more publicly palpable form of school choice, charter schools represent a microcosm of the larger accountability era of education reform. In many ways, charter schools have been defined by embracing Teach For America (TFA) and rejecting tenure and unionized staffs, focusing on standards and high-stakes testing, promising to close achievement gaps among vulnerable populations of students (black, brown, and poor), and identifying strongly with “no excuses” ideologies and policies such as teaching “grit” and growth mindset, as well as enforcing zero tolerance disciplinary agendas.

The transition from educational experimentation to educational alternative can likely be traced back to 2009, when David Brooks proclaimed the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) the “Harlem Miracle” and introduced Paul Tough and Geoffrey Canada to the education reform landscape.

Tough established himself as a powerful proponent of “grit,” and “miracle” charter schools, while Canada was soon crowned “Superman” in a controversial and biased documentary that promoted TFA and charters while demonizing unionized teachers.

Grounded in both Barack and Michelle Obama’s championing Canada’s HCZ, the education agenda of the last eight years has never really questioned charter schools or their advocates. However, at the end of Obama’s second term and despite this administration’s doubling down on George W. Bush-style accountability education reform, questions about charter school began in some notable places, including by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan penning The Myth of the “Miracle School.”

Ironically, charter schools have now returned to delivering on their original goal: they’re an experiment that has quite possibly produced what education reformers could not have anticipated—evidence that the accountability era has failed. Questioning charter schools prompts, then, another question: Can calls for a moratorium on expanding charter schools sustain a broader end to accountability era education reform?

From “Miracle” to Mirage

Over Obama’s two terms, charter schools went from “miracle” status to the focus of a searing satire by HBO’s John Oliver, prompting, as Valerie Strauss reports at The Answer Sheet: “the Washington-based Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit pro-charter organization, [to offer] $100,000 to the school that creates the best rebuttal video to Oliver’s rant.”

But the challenges and rebuttals to charter schools have also been extremely serious. Both the NAACP and the Black Lives Matter movement issued calls for a moratorium and an end to charter schools serving highly segregated impoverished and black/brown students.

The shift from “miracle” to mirage grew out of the utopian promises linked to charter schools, such as closing the achievement gap, paired with the crisis discourse (failing schools and “bad” teachers) around traditional public schools.

Advocates for charter schools blamed low academic outcomes for impoverished and minority students on “bad” teachers and the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” but claimed that charter schools would close the achievement gap, primarily by implementing the major elements of the accountability education reform movement.

The promises of charter schools gradually began to be central to major reform efforts across the U.S.

Notably, one of the most powerful examples of eradicating traditional public schools and replacing them with charter schools—as well as firing the entire teacher workforce and replacing them with mostly TFA recruits—has been New Orleans post-Katrina, documented by education journalist Sarah Carr. Yet, since New Orleans became an all-charter school district, test scores have remained low and schools have continued to be plagued by segregation—the exact problems charters were supposed to eradicate.

Parental choice, which lies at the heart of support for charters, has failed, as Julian Vasquez Heilig, professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at California State University, has detailed. Broadly, Helig explains:

Despite the trendy popularity of charter schools in some circles, their wholesale replacement of traditional public schools is unnecessary. Not only do decades of data and research show this, but in each city there are plenty of successful public schools on the other side of the tracks or highway or river. The wealthy in the United States, regardless of locality, continue to have access to quality public education.

As an experiment, then, “decades of data” have produced results that charter proponents would like to ignore: on balance, charter schools are mostly indistinguishable in quality from traditional public schools, with both having some strong results while sharing lingering problems related to social class and race.

Since charter schools have become the primary face for the accountability machine of education reform, embracing many of the primary policies and practices of the standards and high-stakes testing era, challenging charter schools must continue as a lever for overturning the entire accountability era.

The Beginning of the End?: Maintaining Hope

As the tide has turned against charter schools, many parents have also begun to reject high-stakes testing and embrace the opt-out movement, and the entire country has witnessed a jumbled but significant challenge to national standards, the Common Core.

In other words, many of the key aspects of major polices designed to reform public education have suffered eroding support from the public in general and parents specifically—even while the larger political environment has embraced an ugly form of right-wing ideology. Questioning charter schools must continue and must also fit into helping create a much different structure for education reform.

Therefore, recent challenges to charter schools and the reform agenda cannot be allowed to be swept away in the post-truth mayhem of Trumplandia.

Even Tough, who made much of his fame by supporting “no excuses” charter schools and “grit” has begun to backpedal, as seen in his latest book and recent public messages. And zero tolerance policies, so prevalent in charter schools, have been challenged by parents, the public, and even the Office of Civil Rights.

Once popular among educators and the media, both “grit” and growth mindset have lost favor as well, particularly as useful approaches to addressing vulnerable populations of students. As Paul Gorski, Associate Professor of Integrative Studies in New Century College at George Mason University and founder of EdChange, warns: “No set of curricular or pedagogical strategies can turn a classroom led by a teacher with a deficit view of families experiencing poverty into an equitable learning space for those families.”

And TFA, strongly linked with charter schools, has experienced multiple years of decline in applications, as well as cities and states dropping partnerships. Since TFA was touted as the quick and easy fix to a failed teacher workforce buoyed by teachers’ unions, this decline signals yet more cracks in both education reforms promises as well as suggests a potential end to the era of accountability.

Challenges to charter schools by national organizations are simply catching up with, for example,  Matthew Di Carlo‘s 2011 warning: “there is nothing about ‘charterness’ that leads to strong results.”

Today, with powerful messages from the NAACP and BLM, activists supporting public schools must remain resolved to emphasize the overwhelming evidence that simply creating charter schools and implementing the same ineffective policies—new standards, new high-stakes tests, “grit,” growth mindset, zero tolerance, TFA—has not and cannot create the sort of reform needed that addresses inequity of opportunities for the students who need public schools the most.

As well, activists supporting public schools must be vigilant about the utter failure of school choice, which is a form of zombie politics paralleling the accountability buffet of the past thirty years that has proven to be universally hollow as well.

The remaining hurdles, of course, include a well informed and vocal public as well as political leaders in office (consider Duncan’s turn of attitude came after he left office) willing to question and then change their standard reform practices.

This now seems a Herculean task in post-truth Trumplandia—but hope has to overcome fatalism here. However, the rise of Trumplandia was both gradual and sudden.

As Emily Deruy writes in The Atlantic regarding Black Lives Matter’s K-12 education agenda:

 “The education system in this country has never worked for poor people and people of color,” said Rivera. “We’re not calling for the status quo. We don’t want things to continue as they’ve always done.”

Ultimately, questions about charter schools and their advocates must continue and resonate in a way that recognizes an extremely complicated message about historical and current failures of public education—primarily the inequity of opportunity in the lives and schooling of black, brown, and poor students—that has not been and cannot be addressed by high-stakes accountability or through a form of schooling, charter schools, that simply houses failed policies.

Along with questioning charter support, Dixson and Perry call for reformers to change course in a way that serves communities—especially black and brown poor communities—instead of using those children and their education as political theater.

In post-truth Trumplandia, this imperative is even more urgent.

Charter schools like the entirety of the accountability era must be named for what they are: political theater.

Trumplandia as the ultimate and most hollow political theater cannot be allowed to win.

Along with U.S. politics, public education and education reform need a new script, and continuing resolved to stop charter schools and the accountability era can be an important moment in making that happen.

education, Kurt Vonnegut, Ralph Ellison

A Literary Reader as 2016 Fades

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Emily Dickinson’s Singular Scrap Poetry, Dan Chiasson

The way that Dickinson’s poems made it out of that house, eventually reshaping American literature, is a story that is still unfolding. Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime, all anonymously; publication was, as she put it, as “foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.” Not that she intended her poems to go unread—she often sent them in letters to friends, sometimes with other enclosures: dried flowers, a three-cent stamp, a dead cricket. She also tried a form of self-publishing: from around 1858 until roughly 1864, she gathered her poems into forty homemade books, known as “fascicles,” by folding single sheets of blank paper in half to form four consecutive pages, which she then wrote on and, later, bound, one folded sheet on another, with red-and-white thread strung through crudely punched holes. These books were found in Dickinson’s room after her death, in 1886, by her sister, Lavinia, along with hundreds more poems in various states of composition, plus, intriguingly, the “scraps,” a cache of lines that Dickinson wrote on scavenged paper: the flap of a manila envelope, the backs of letters, chocolate wrappers, bits of newspaper.

Lessons from Literature: Cat’s Cradle, Louisa Christen

One has to create lies or create truths or essentially just create some reality that allows one to live day to day. This is the purpose of science and religion according to Vonnegut; they provide the destructive truths of the physical world that lead to the atom bomb and the inflated lies of the spiritual world that hide mass indoctrination and ignorance behind the façade of peace and faith. It is this need to create a reality which one can understand that leads to the creation of Bokononism, a universally practiced religion banned on the island of San Lorenzo, based on the ideology of “living by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” as a Parable of Our Time, Clint Smith

The day after Donald Trump was elected, one of my former students, from that same class, sent me a text message. We had not spoken in some time. She wrote, “I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m a little scared. Unsure of what’s going to happen.” She continued, “I know I wasn’t born here, but this has become my country. I’ve been here for so long, with a lot of shame, I don’t even know my own country’s history, but I know plenty of this one.” In his interview with “60 Minutes,” Trump reiterated that he would move immediately to deport or incarcerate two to three million undocumented immigrants. As for the rest, he said, “after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination.” After I listened to the interview, I began looking over the essays from a writing assignment I had given a different group of students, years ago. The students were asked to write their own short memoirs, and many of them used the exercise as an opportunity to write about what it meant to be an undocumented person in the United States. Their stories narrated the weeks-long journeys they had taken as young children to escape violence and poverty in their home countries, crossing the border in the back of pickup trucks, walking across deserts, and wading through rivers in the middle of the night. Others discussed how they did not know that they were undocumented until they attempted to get a driver’s license or to apply to college, only to be told by their parents that they did not have Social Security numbers.

Now Is the Time to Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Now is the time to resist the slightest extension in the boundaries of what is right and just. Now is the time to speak up and to wear as a badge of honor the opprobrium of bigots. Now is the time to confront the weak core at the heart of America’s addiction to optimism; it allows too little room for resilience, and too much for fragility. Hazy visions of “healing” and “not becoming the hate we hate” sound dangerously like appeasement. The responsibility to forge unity belongs not to the denigrated but to the denigrators. The premise for empathy has to be equal humanity; it is an injustice to demand that the maligned identify with those who question their humanity.

deficit thinking, education, education reform, Standards, Teaching

Not What, But Who: Remaining Grounded as a Teacher of Students

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Because she’s older and the teacher, she’s right and I’m not.

Sandra Cisneros, “Eleven”

The field experience students complete as part of my foundations of education course has this semester blended well with their reading Chris Emdin’s For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too.

As we have discussed both during class sessions, students have been drawn to witnessing and reading as well as thinking about how teachers view and respond to their students.

Although these students have virtually no background in formal education, they have been very perceptive about the inordinate, and distracting, pressures on teachers to cover the curriculum (standards) and prepare students for testing—notably while observing and tutoring at a local majority-minority elementary school.

High student/teacher ratios have also been identified as making good classroom practice nearly impossible.

Running through our discussions has been a concern about how teachers treat students (often more harshly than my students anticipated or endorsed) and about the pervasive deficit perspective throughout the school.

Observing and tutoring in special needs classes and among Latinx students needing to acquire English have intensified how my students have responded to their field placement and their recognition of the myriad factors that impact negatively formal education.

Often unspoken, but what teachers and students share in far too many schools is a “no excuses” imperative that demands teachers perform well (even miraculously) despite being placed in circumstances that work against their efforts and that demands students somehow leave the pressures and inequities of their lives in order to excel at academics being imposed on them.

Teresa Watanabe’s Can a child who starts kindergarten with few reading or math skills catch up? is a snapshot of what my students have witnessed and what Emdin’s work challenges.

Responding to that article, Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California, has identified the problem that my students have observed:

But there is no evidence that tougher standards lead to more learning, and no evidence showing that the Common Core standards are better at preparing children for college and career than other standards or than no standards….

Forcing young children to study flashcards in the car and spell words during family outings in order to “master” 100 words is turning kindergarten into kindergrind.  Children who develop a love of reading will master thousands of words, without suffering.

Although political leaders and the public often view the authoritarian classroom where teachers are charged with keeping order and demanding that students learn standards and content about which they have no choice or input as the solution, it is now far past time to recognize that this is the problem with formal schooling.

Of course, what we teach is important at every level of education, and that what is becoming even more important for our democracy as we are confronted with a new post-truth media and politics.

That what needs to be the sort of truth that empowers a free people.

That what also needs to include a clear focus on the civility of learning and wrestling with ideas since our post-truth media and politics are increasing and justifying the demanding and nasty tone that is already a problem in many schools.

However, the what must remain secondary to the who—who we teach is what makes teaching an essential calling grounded in the dignity of both teachers and their students.

And the what can never be well taught or learned unless we attend to the conditions of teaching/learning and living among our teachers and students.

The authoritarian classroom, deficit thinking, “no excuses” ideologies and practices—these are corrosive elements for teaching, learning, and democracy as well as liberty.

The very long era of standardized testing and the more recent and relatively shorter era of accountability and standards have inflicted immeasurable harm on teachers and students.

And even as educator autonomy and professionalism become daily further eroded, we are morally obligated to call for and remain grounded in our role as teachers of students.

The who of teaching and learning must always come before the what.

Media, politics, Poverty, race, racism

Adichie’s “danger of a single story” and the Rise of Post-Truth Trumplandia

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In an effort to understand post-truth Trumplandia, this is one explanation:

However, this fails to confront that the rise of Trumplandia is but an extreme and logical extension of a mainstream media and political elite existing almost entirely on false narratives—the denial of basic reality.

The bootstrap and rising boat narratives, black-on-black crime, the pervasive threat of terrorism, the lazy poor, the welfare queen, and the relentless “kids today” mantra—these are all powerful as well as enduring claims but also provably false.

With Trump’s election, the post-truth reality now focuses on lamenting the plight of the white working class (also provably false) and masking racism and white supremacy as “alt-right.”

The media simply report that Source X makes Claim A—but never venture into the harder story that Source X is making a false Claim A—especially when false Claim A rings true within the Great American Myths that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie powerfully warns about:

I’m a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call “the danger of the single story.”…

I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.

Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.

Adichie artfully shares more examples in her talk, but her message from 2009 rings much more horrifying today in post-truth Trumplandia, where the elected leader of the free world can say damn near anything one minute, deny it the next, and remain safely cloaked in the lies that endure as the “one story” many in the U.S. believe despite ample evidence to the contrary.

The one story of black men as criminals that allows police to disproportionately execute those black men in the streets.

The one story of the lazy poor that allows political leaders to avoid their moral obligations to provide social services, including health care even for children.

The one story of objectified women that allows rape culture and the democratically elected leader of the free world to boast about his own cavalier behavior as a sexual predator.

And so: “Stories matter. Many stories matter,” Adichie concludes:

Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

For Adichie, “now is the time” to confront post-truth Trumplandia, and the media are on notice:

Yet a day after the election, people spoke of the vitriol between Barack Obama and Donald Trump. No, the vitriol was Trump’s. Now is the time to burn false equivalencies forever. Pretending that both sides of an issue are equal when they are not is not “balanced” journalism; it is a fairy tale—and, unlike most fairy tales, a disingenuous one.

Post-truth Trumplandia is creeping toward yet another of the very ugliest stories of a people claiming to embrace life and liberty but denying basic reality instead.

The question before us is whether or not we have the capacity for changing that arc of history toward, as Adichie expresses, the possibility to “regain a kind of paradise.”

See Also

Now Is the Time to Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Capitalism, communism, Critical Pedagogy, education, socialism

I, Too, Am a Dangerous Professor if You Covet Ignorance, Hatred

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We Marxists are rightfully criticized for being idealistic, but we are unfairly demonized by those across the U.S. who wrongly associate Marxism, socialism, and communism with totalitarian governments and human oppression.

You see, Marxism as a scholarly stance is a moral stance—unlike the amoral pose of capitalism.

We Marxist academics and scholars are all about the good, the right, and the equitable—including creating intellectually challenging classrooms in which every student feels physically and psychologically safe.

But this is 2016 Trumplandia, a sort of Bizarro World in which reality TV has become a real-life nightmare, including a professor watch list promoted by an Orwellian right-wing organization that claims to be protecting free speech and academic freedom by identifying dangerous professors.

George Yancy, professor of philosophy at Emory University, has responded with the powerful I Am a Dangerous Professor, and my home state of South Carolina has had three professors included on the list.

The responses to the list have run a range from fear (because professors have received very serious threats) to bemusement to anger about not being included.

I am a white male full professor with tenure, but I teach in the South—where before I joined a university faculty, I was an intellectually closeted public school teacher for 18 stressful years.

As a leftist and atheist, I was constantly vigilant to mask who I was, what I believe and live, because I was fearful of losing my job and career (SC is an Orwellian-named “right to work” state) that I dearly love.

When I interviewed for my current position, I was about as naive and idealistic as a person could be about the golden fields of higher education.

During my model lesson for my day-long interview, I explained to the class I was a critical pedagogue, and thus offering a Marxist perspective on literacy and power.

Later in the day, at the debriefing and in hushed tones, I was told I may want to not share the whole Marxist thing if hired at the university.

I was hired—although my being a critical educator, scholar, and public intellectual have all been problematic throughout my second career as a professor.

And I have bull-headedly remained true to my ethics as both a professor/teacher and a critical pedagogue, best expressed by my dear friend and mentor Joe Kincheloe:

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. (p. 2)

Recognition of these educational politics suggests that teachers take a position and make it understandable to their students. They do not, however, have the right to impose these positions on their students [emphasis in original]….

In this context it is not the advocates of critical pedagogy who are most often guilty of impositional teaching but many of the mainstream critics themselves. When mainstream opponents of critical pedagogy promote the notion that all language and political behavior that oppose the dominant ideology are forms of indoctrination, they forget how experience is shaped by unequal forms of power. To refuse to name the forces that produce human suffering and exploitation is to take a position that supports oppression and powers that perpetuate it. The argument that any position opposing the actions of dominant power wielders is problematic. It is tantamount to saying that one who admits her oppositional political sentiments and makes them known to students is guilty of indoctrination, while one who hides her consent to dominant power and the status quo it has produced from her students is operating in an objective and neutral manner. Critical pedagogy wants to know who’s indoctrinating whom. (p. 11)

In fact, yesterday in my foundations of education course, I reiterated to the class that as a Marxist I often seem obnoxious, even dogmatic because I teach and speak with a moral imperative, an impassioned moral imperative—seeking that which is right, good, and equitable.

About this watch list, then, I am torn, struggling between embracing Yancy’s brilliant rebuttal and my own belief that I am in fact not the dangerous one because the dangerous thing about this world is to remain both ignorant and without a moral grounding.

As a Marxist educator and scholar/public intellectual, as a critical pedagogue, I am not the person hiding who I am or what I am seeking.

The dishonest are those who claim to be objective when in fact they are endorsing uncritically an inequitable status quo.

The dishonest are those claiming a non-political pose that is itself a political pose.

The dishonest are waving flags and chanting the entirely dishonest “Make America Great Again.”

That is dangerous stuff—endangering the faint promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that I, in fact, hold sacred.

So I am left with this paradox: I, too, am a dangerous professor if you covet ignorance, hatred.

If you are seeking the Truth, however, as well as the right, the good, and the equitable, please call me comrade because I am no danger to you at all.

Critical Pedagogy, education, education reform, Education Week, literacy, Media, Sense

Call for Chapter Proposals: Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America

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Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America

Co-editors P.L. Thomas and Christian Z. Goering

Critical Media Literacies and Youth series, Sense Publishers

Series Editor, William Reynolds

Rationale

In the fall of 2016, just after the U.S. elected Donald Trump president, a black female first-year student submitted an essay on the prospects for Trump’s presidency. The course is a first-year writing seminar focusing on James Baldwin in the context of #BlackLivesMatter; therefore, throughout the course, students have been asked to critically investigate race, racism, gender, sexism, and all types of bias related to the U.S.—through the writing of Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxane Gay, Teju Cole, and Arundhati Roy, among others.

The student’s discussion of Trump’s policies, however, were hyperlinked to Trump’s campaign website. Discussing the draft with the student revealed that the current post-truth America is a significant issue among youth who seem unable to distinguish between facts and so-called fake news.

To blame youth for this lack of critical media literacy seems misguided since the mainstream media itself plays a significant role in misinforming the public. For example, as a subset of the wider media, edujournalism represents a default lack of critical perspective among journalists.

Claims by mainstream media are impressive:

Education Week is the best independent, unbiased source for news and information on pre-K-12 education. With an average of 42 stories posted each weekday on edweek.org, there is always a news, multimedia, or opinion piece to keep you up-to-date on post-election changes in policy, and to help you become a better practitioner and subject matter expert.

The reality is much different. When journalists at Education Week were challenged about their lack of critical coverage of NCTQ, Juana Summers Tweeted, “I’m not sure it’s my place to say whether the study is credible.”

In other words, mainstream media are dedicated to press-release journalism and maintaining a “both sides” stance that avoids making informed decisions about any claims from their sources—including the campaign of Trump.

This volume, then, seeks contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following in the context of teaching and reaching youth in the U.S. about critical media literacy:

  • Unpacking the lack of critical perspectives in mainstream media.
  • Examining “post-truth” America.
  • Confronting issues of race, racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia as related to the media.
  • Exploring the promises of the New Media as a haven for truth.

Contributions should seek ways to couch chapters in practical aspects of teaching and reaching youth in the U.S., but can reach beyond the traditional classroom into youth culture as that intersects with critical media literacy.

Send a tentative title, author information, and 100-word abstract of the proposed chapter as a Word file (use your name to label the file, please). Make sure your abstract clearly shows how the proposed chapter addresses the focus of the volume—critical media literacy, fake news, and post-truth U.S. as related to youth.

Contact: paul.thomas[at]furman.edu

Timeline, etc., TBD

Critical Media Literacies and Youth series, Sense Publishers

Series Editor, William Reynolds

cmls-3

education, NCTE, Public Intellectual

#NCTE2017: Call for Roundtable

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After a very inspiring roundtable at #NCTE2016, many of us are energized to propose a related by more hands-on roundtable for #NCTE2017.

Below is a draft proposal for NCTE 2017. Please email me ASAP (paul.thomas@furman.edu) if you are interested in offering a roundtable that is a workshop related to educators developing their public voices in a wide variety of media and purposes. The current roundtables below reflect the focus of the session, but different media and perspectives are strongly encouraged to join.

2017 NCTE Annual Convention

Teaching Our Students Today, Tomorrow, Forever: Recapturing Our Voices, Our Agency, Our Mission

St. Louis, MO
November 16-19, 2017

Proposal: Roundtable

Co-Chairs: Chris Goering, University of Arkansas, and P. L. Thomas, Furman University

From Advocacy to Agency: Workshopping Our Public Voices

This roundtable session will offer participants concrete and hands-on opportunities to investigate the “how to” of writing and speaking in a public voice that reflects our professional agency. Tables will address writing Op-Eds and letters to the editor, starting and maintaining a professional blog, participating in social media (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) as a professional educator, and creating and producing podcasts/radio programming. Additionally, participants will be given guidelines for blending scholarly and public work as well as how to integrate our professional advocacy-as-agency with our demanding work as classroom practitioners.

Tables:

Exploring the Op-Ed: Two Public Essayists Share Their Process for Writing in the Op-Ed Genre

Christina Berchini and Peter Smagorinsky

This table will discuss their process for identifying topics, locating a suitable publication outlet, and understanding and writing within the op-ed/blog genre. Participants will also be alerted to the risks and rewards of writing in the public forum.

Adventures in Edublogging: Finding and Developing a Public Voice

P.L. Thomas and Angela Dye

Blogging remains a misunderstood form of communication along with many types of social media. This table will discuss and workshop how to create a professional blog and social media presence while helping participants with the “how” and “why” of creating that professional voice for the public.

Guinness Stew in the Ozarks: The How and Why of Professional Writing Retreats for Teachers

Christian Z. Goering and Nikki Holland

This roundtable offers a rationale and practical advice for gathering teachers in a retreat setting to write for professional audiences. One way that teachers can develop agency in the larger conversations swirling around the punch bowl of education is by writing for professional audiences—broadly defined. The act of doing so is complicated, something that takes time, nourishment, and courage. But aren’t retreats expensive and elitist? The low cost, low maintenance model shared in this roundtable can be adapted and adopted by a wide range of teacher groups or even offered as professional development by a school district.

Blogging Advocacy in the New Latinx South

Bobbi Siefert

Blogging Advocacy in the New Latino South – In this roundtable session, presenters will discuss beginning and maintaining a TESOL Blog in the context of the New South. Discussion will center on initial steps to beginning a blog, responses to challenges, focus and direction, and sustaining momentum in an increasingly xenophobic regional and national environment. We argue that blogging is a virtual platform for our professional advocacy for Latino Transnationals K-12.

Writing Radio Commentaries for Local Stations

 Rebekah Buchanan

Local NPR affiliates can be an effective way of reaching the public about education issues in our communities. Based on my experience recording monthly radio commentaries, this roundtable will present ways to start writing for the radio, coming up with topics, and presenting commentary ideas to local stations.

What Will Attract and Persuade Blog Readers?

Patricia A. Dunn

Academics are used to writing for a particular audience with discipline specific expectations about academic evidence, research, and citation—the very elements that potential blog readers may avoid. How can we attract readers to our public writing, get them to rethink an issue in our blog, and get them to share it? We’ll look at some topics, titles, and formats of several blogs that have been shared widely. We’ll talk about selecting links for providing evidence, keeping the blog lively (and short), and using effective analogies.

Who wants to be the Village Explainer? Opening Conversations, Not Closing Them

Patricia Waters, Daneell Moore, and R. Buchanan

In rural areas the English teacher is often in the invidious position of being The Village Explainer: how can the professional communicate with non-professional audiences by meeting people where they are? How do we not lose sight of urgency but also not alienate where we need allies most?

Crafting Arguments for Change: Expanding Spheres of Influence

Trevor Thomas Stewart and George L. Boggs

This table will discuss the cultural resources employed by teachers who are speaking out in order to consider how teachers can position themselves as experts whose voices ought to count in education reform discussions. By discussing the rhetorical tools being employed by teachers who are currently speaking out online, our table will provide participants with an opportunity to develop practical strategies for engaging in civic action online while managing the risks associated with public dissent.

Telling the Positive Stories of Public Education

Steve Zemelman

To counter the ongoing propaganda attacking public schools, it’s essential not only to advocate for better education policies, but also to let the public know about the work of high quality teachers in their schools, and the meaningful learning their students experience. At this table, we’ll look at examples of published op-ed pieces by teachers, deduce some of their characteristics, get started on some writing ourselves, and brainstorm how to get through to news editors to get our stories published.

Know Thy Enemy

Jonathan Pelto

In his epic, The Art of War, Sun Tzu explains: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” This table will serve has a training session for understanding and tracking the charter school industry and their corporate education reform allies through the use of opposition research techniques and tools.  Particular training will be provided on how to utilize federal and state campaign finance reports, IRS 990 forms reports submitted by non-profit corporations and for-profit filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission.   Participants will come away with a better understanding about how to learn more about the individuals and organizations seeking to undermine students, parents, teachers and public education.

Finding Our Public Voices: Building a Community of Writers around Writing for the Public

Ann D. David and Megan Janak

This roundtable will discuss how classroom teachers, preservice teachers, and a university professor developed their individual, public voices and began publishing for the public.  We will share both our process for forming and sustaining our writing community, and our individual experiences with writing for the public across a range of channels.

Blogging from the Inside Out: Mining Personal Stories for Larger Truths

Russ Walsh and Peter Anderson

As educators our days and nights are filled with stories of personal success and personal struggle as well as student success and student struggle. Stories, informative, humorous and tragic, are part of the life-blood of the veteran teacher. As bloggers, we can mine these stories to draw the reader into our world and then reach for the larger truths that these stories illuminate. In this round-table, we will share examples of how this has been done by education bloggers, analyze how it is done, and share techniques for developing engaging blogs based on personal, school-based experience.

Ed Philosophy Book Clubs: Creating Safe Spaces for Dialogue and Debate

Nicole Amato

Teachers are increasingly bound to curricular mandates or policies that directly conflict with what research argues is best for our students, teachers, and school communities.  This roundtable will look at the development and progression of an ed philosophy book club at a high school in Chicago, Illinois. The book club was designed with two goals in mind: to create a safe space for discussing campus polices and to arm teachers with high quality,timely, peer-reviewed research.

Podcast On Your Plan – Using Podcasting as Professional Development

Josh Flores and Lara Searcy

This roundtable will demonstrate how educators can use the podcast format to expand their voice, agency, and professional growth. Attendees will participate in a live podcast during the session in order to explore the hands-on application of “how to” podcast and become familiar with a currently active program, “Podcast On Your Plan.” “Podcast On Your Plan” episodes actively advocate for teachers’ voices by promoting teachers as a resource for professional learning communities and educator’s professional growth. Each podcast episode focuses on deconstructing the expertise of a classroom teacher and their pedagogy. Listeners are encouraged to discuss the practices and strategies presented in each episode with colleagues and reflect on their own pedagogical approaches to literacy.

Barbara Kingsolver, education, politics

Barbara Kingsolver: “everything we do becomes political: speaking up or not speaking up”

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“So many of us have stood up for the marginalized,” explains writer Barbara Kingsolver in the wake of Trumplandia, “but never expected to be here ourselves,” adding:

It happened to us overnight, not for anything we did wrong but for what we know is right. Our first task is to stop shaming ourselves and claim our agenda. It may feel rude, unprofessional and risky to break the habit of respecting our government; we never wanted to be enemies of the state. But when that animosity mounts against us, everything we do becomes political: speaking up or not speaking up. Either one will have difficult consequences. That’s the choice we get.

She then calls for those of us with a social justice conscience to wear our hearts on our sleeves, including teachers:

If we’re teachers we explicitly help children of all kinds feel safe in our classrooms under a bullying season that’s already opened in my town and probably yours. Language used by a president may enter this conversation. We say wrong is wrong.

I have been using the writing of Kingsolver in both my high school English classes and a variety of college courses since the 1990s, and my first book-length examination of teaching a writer focused on Kingsolver.

The most enduring writing from Kingsolver for me as a teacher has been her essay writing. And while Kingsolver’s politics drives her fiction—such as Flight Behavior—and her poetry, there is a artistry to her essays that allows her politics to meander instead of immediately provoking.

For example, her collection Small Wonder grew out of 9/11, and the essays speak powerfully with a progressive voice that is unlike the American character and that challenges the flag-waving patriotism/nationalism the terrorism spurred across the U.S.

And while Kingsolver actually lives her convictions, her newest confrontation of what Trump means for the U.S. reads as an intensified Kingsolver-as-activist.

“We refuse to disappear,” she announces.

The American character has long misread and misrepresented the label “political,” and the rise of Trump may have, as Kingsolver argues, brought about inadvertently the change promised by Obama: “everything we do becomes political: speaking up or not speaking up. Either one will have difficult consequences.”

But only one—speaking up in the name of the good and the equitable—has the potential for the sort of consequences a free people should be seeking.

politics, REM

“Out of Time” in Post-Truth Trumplandia

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We’ve been through fake-a-breakdown
Self-hurt, plastics, collections
Self-help, self-pain
EST, psychics, fuck all

“Country Feedback,” R.E.M.

Maybe this is the stuff of Legend, or false memory—or that the Russians can hack even that—but it seems R.E.M. kept a running list of possible album titles as they recorded, a practice often including daring titles left to linger with the specter of a very unlike-R.E.M. outcome.

For the now 25-year-old Out of Time, that title, I recall, came from a final statement on that board—the band was out of time for submitting the recordings and title.

That the album most associated with R.E.M. and their delayed rise to pop culture fame, fueled as well by their becoming MTV darlings, has turned 25 in the year of electing Trump seems cruelly painful, and whether or not my recollection about how the album was named is factual has become irrelevant in post-truth Trumplandia.

Throughout the 1980s, R.E.M. was immediately loved by Rolling Stone and the so-called college radio crowd, and they were a touring alternative rock success—a reality that had much to do with fans and music critics recognizing that within the realm of popular music, R.E.M. took their craft seriously and were uniquely adept at that craft.

By the time the band angered those 1980s alternative fans by signing a huge record contract with Warner Brothers, and then (gasp) achieved fame with “Losing My Religion,” R.E.M. had become known as both a highly ethical band (making money but not selling out their artistic autonomy) and a political band; neither seemed to hurt the band in ways that other performers could not avoid (think many years later the fate of the Dixie Chicks).

Still now after the band has called it a day, after their fame dwindled into petty sniping at the albums produced after Bill Berry retired (Up, Reveal and Around the Sun unfairly slighted by critics and fans), after the inevitable rush to reconsider the enduring excellence once R.E.M. no longer was a practicing band—it is the politics of R.E.M. that fascinates me, from the more overtly political “Orange Crush” and “Ignoreland” to the ambiguously political “Fall on Me” or intimacy politics of “Tongue.”

Yes, Out of Time soared into the wider national and international consciousness with “Losing My Religion” as the least likely of hits (dare we say radio hit in the context of the album’s first song and the fact that this world is now a distant memory?) and an iconic tour-de-force in music videos.

But appreciating an album also requires taking the album as a whole:

Out of Time
01. Radio Song
02. Losing My Religion
03. Low
04. Near Wild Heaven
05. Endgame
06. Shiny Happy People
07. Belong
08. Half A World Away
09. Texarkana
10. Country Feedback
11. Me In Honey

The paradox of R.E.M., for me, is that the popularity of the band includes “Losing My Religion” and the odd controversy over the so-called too-poppy “Shiny Happy People”—and maybe that the album has guest vocals from KRS-One and Kate Pierson of the B-52s—but that many among those wider, late-to-the-party fans don’t understand: “I’m not sure all these people understand,” Stipe sings in the haunting and magnificent “Nightswimming.”

Maybe, just maybe, R.E.M. is about the politics of understanding, a call to the politics of intimacy.

Theirs is the art of the politics of the beautiful, of raising voices and instruments against all the unnecessary shit.

I fall in love hard with musical performers/groups and writers. And then I consume everything they create.

There is a direct line from my love affair with R.E.M. to The National, and especially with R.E.M. disbanding, my time and energy have been disproportionately committed to The National and CAKE.

So I have recently revisited Out of Time, and it has been lovely and tearful.

R.E.M. as the politics of the beautiful.

But the beautiful of Out of Time for me is “Low,” “Belong,” “Half a World Away,” and “Country Feedback.”

“I’ve had too much to drink/ I didn’t think, I didn’t think of you,” echoes into my bones—and then:

Oh, this lonely world is wasted
Pathetic eyes, high-alive
Blind eye that turns to see
The storm it came up strong
It shook the trees and blew away our fear

The politics of the beautiful, the politics of understanding, the politics of intimacy.

“That’s me in the corner,” I suppose, “Like a hurt lost and blinded fool, fool.”

And I miss R.E.M.

Charter schools, education, education reform, School choice

The Zombie Politics of School Choice: A Reader

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The original zombie narrative has been re-created and distorted in contemporary U.S. pop culture, as Victoria Anderson explains:

So what were zombies, originally? The answer lies in the Caribbean. They weren’t endlessly-reproducing, flesh-eating ghouls. Instead, the zombie was the somewhat tragic figure of a human being maintained in a catatonic state – a soulless body – and forced to labour for whoever cast the spell over him or her. In other words, the zombie is – or was – a slave. I always find it troubling that, somewhere along the line, we forgot or refused to acknowledge this and have replaced the suffering slave with the figure of a mindless carnivore – one that reproduces, virus-like, with a bite.

While there is some nuance and variety among the many ways in which U.S. pop culture have manipulated the zombie narrative, central to almost all of those is the zombie as relentless consumer who has risen from the dead and resists being killed permanently.

In that context, school choice is zombie politics because the ideology will not die and its many versions (vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools) are destructive.

A few decades ago, school choice advocacy depended on the appeal of the ideology itself since choice is idealized and fetishized in the U.S.

Once school choice policy began to be implemented, and then over the past 2-3 decades as evidence from how choice has not achieved the promises made, school choice advocacy has depended on constantly shifting the type of choice and the promises.

At the center of the school choice debate is a failure in the U.S. to appreciate the importance of the Commons, how publicly funded institutions are necessary for the free market to work (both economically and ethically).

For example, publicly funded roads and highways are powerful and essential for commerce in the U.S. Many resist toll roads in the U.S., and certainly, the entire economy and way of life in the U.S. would be destroyed if we left roads and highways to the whims of the Invisible Hand.

Two facts remain important now as the election of Donald Trump and the apparent choice for Secretary of Education suggest that the zombie politics of school choice has been rejuvenated:

  • The overwhelming evidence for all aspects of school choice show little differences when compared to traditional public schools; some aspects can certainly be categorized as harmful, and any so-called positives are erased when those gains are explained—attrition, comparing apples and oranges, selectivity, inability to scale, etc.
  • Idealizing parental choice fails to step back to the bedrock promise of publicly funded institutions: insuring that choice isn’t necessary.

Just as a blow to the head and brain can kill permanently the zombie, evidence and truth should eradicate the zombie politics of school choice. However, Trumplandia is a post-truth country.

None the less, the truth is our only real option so below is a reader to combat the zombie politics of school choice:

Betsy DeVos’ big education idea doesn’t work, Sarah Carr

Idealizing, Misreading Impoverished and Minority Parental Choice 

Parental Choice, Magical Thinking, and the Paralysis of Indirect Solutions

School choice lessons for Charleston – Post and Courier

Public School, Charter Choice: More Segregation by Design

Don’t Buy School Choice Week

Parental Choice?: A Critical Reconsideration of Choice and the Debate about Choice

Work by Christopher Lubienski

The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski 

Research-Based Options for Education Policymaking – 2016 Collection, William J. Mathis (NEPC)

Julian Vasquez Heilig on vouchers

Julian Vasquez Heilig on charter schools

School Finance 101, Bruce Baker

School Vouchers Are Not a Cure For Segregation: Part I , Jersey Jazzman

Here are links to all five parts of the series:

On negative effects of vouchers, Mark Dynarski

Recent research on statewide voucher programs in Louisiana and Indiana has found that public school students that received vouchers to attend private schools subsequently scored lower on reading and math tests compared to similar students that remained in public schools. The magnitudes of the negative impacts were large. These studies used rigorous research designs that allow for strong causal conclusions. And they showed that the results were not explained by the particular tests that were used or the possibility that students receiving vouchers transferred out of above-average public schools.

Another explanation is that our historical understanding of the superior performance of private schools is no longer accurate. Since the nineties, public schools have been under heavy pressure to improve test scores. Private schools were exempt from these accountability requirements. A recent study showed that public schools closed the score gap with private schools. That study did not look specifically at Louisiana and Indiana, but trends in scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress for public school students in those states are similar to national trends.

In education as in medicine, ‘first, do no harm’ is a powerful guiding principle. A case to use taxpayer funds to send children of low-income parents to private schools is based on an expectation that the outcome will be positive. These recent findings point in the other direction. More needs to be known about long-term outcomes from these recently implemented voucher programs to make the case that they are a good investment of public funds. As well, we need to know if private schools would up their game in a scenario in which their performance with voucher students is reported publicly and subject to both regulatory and market accountability.

Failing The Test Series

Regardless of motives, the charter initiatives in Oakland and Los Angeles together signal a significant watershed in the growth of a statewide movement that was birthed by California’s Charter Schools Act of 1992 to create classroom laboratories that might develop the dynamic new curricula and teaching methods needed to reinvigorate schools that were failing the state’s most underserved and disadvantaged children.

How that modest experiment in fixing neighborhood public schools could morph in less than 25 years into the replacement of public schools with an unproven parallel system of privately run, taxpayer-funded academies is only half the story of California’s education wars that will be examined in this series, much of which is based on conversations with both sides of the charter school debate. Over the next few days Capital & Main will also look at:

  • The influence wielded by libertarian philanthropists who bankroll the 50-50 takeovers.
  • How charter schools spend less time and money on students with learning disabilities.
  • The lack of charter school transparency and accountability.
  • How charter expansion is pushing Oakland’s public school district toward a fateful tipping point.
  • The success of less radical yet more effective reforms that get scant media coverage.
  • Nine solution takeaways for struggling schools.

(from Failing the Test: A New Series Examines Charter Schools, Bill Raden)

Charters and Access: Here is Evidence, Julian Vasquez Helig

No, Eva, You Can’t Do Whatever You Want, Jersey Jazzman

Don’t Trust Invested Advocates in Edureform Wars

from Engel, M. (2000). The struggle for control of public education: Market ideology vs. democratic values. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

[I]t is nothing short of disastrous that more than ever before, one antidemocratic system of ideas—market ideology—almost exclusively defines the terms of educational politics and charts the path of education reform.

…[I]deology is important in understanding educational change….Ideology is nonetheless often overlooked or at best misapplied by mainstream social scientists as a factor in politics. This is due in part to the dominance of quantitative methodologies in political science, which leads to the trivialization of the concept into conveniently measurable but irrelevant labels….Market ideology has triumphed over democratic values not because of its superiority as a theory of society but in part because in a capitalist system it has an inherent advantage. (pp. 3, 8-9)

from Callahan, R. E. (1962). Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the social forces that have shaped the administration of the public schools. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

For while schools everywhere reflect to some extent the culture of which they are a part and respond to forces within that culture, the American public schools, because of the nature of their pattern of organization, support, and control, were especially vulnerable and responded quickly to the strongest social forces. . . .The business influence was exerted upon education in several ways: through newspapers, journals, and books; through speeches at educational meetings; and, more directly, through actions of school boards. It was exerted by laymen, by professional journalists, by businessmen or industrialists either individually or in groups. . ., and finally by educators themselves. Whatever its source, the influence was exerted in the form of suggestions or demands that the schools be organized and operated in a more businesslike way and that more emphasis by placed upon a practical and immediately useful education….

The tragedy itself was fourfold: that educational questions were subordinated to business considerations; that administrators were produced who were not, in any true sense, educators; that a scientific label was put on some very unscientific and dubious methods and practices; and that an anti-intellectual climate, already prevalent, was strengthened. (pp. 1, 5-6, 246)

Posts about school choice

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educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free