race

Recalling 1947 in 2014

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I had never felt more than a passing interest in 42: The Jackie Robinson Story because I expected a film biography of Robinson to pale too much against his life. As someone who admires the life and career of Muhammad Ali, I felt the same reservations about Ali.

It seems likely that some people, some lives are simply too big, too grand on their own for recreation.

But the universe can be a funny thing. 42 was on cable the other night so I gave the film a chance. There is much power in the story, and despite the film slipping as many film biographies and movies about sports do, I was glad to have watched since it prompted me to look closer at Robinson’s life.

More importantly, though, I watched this film on Robinson in the context of two other situations—just weeks after the Richard Sherman controversy and just hours before Marcus Smart, an Oklahoma State basketball player, stumbled into the crowd at a game resulting in his pushing a fan who taunted Smart.

As the title of the Robinson film highlights, in sports, numbers mean a great deal.

While exploring how the media and public responded to Sherman, I noted that while Sherman is not Ali, the life and responses to Ali certainly should inform how we recognize racist threads running through calling Sherman a “thug” and attempts to justify Sherman through his academic achievements, such as his GPA. Even as we tried to embrace Sherman, we erased his blackness by honoring codes of his whiteness, codes that blind.

Marcus Smart is no Jackie Robinson; nor will he have that opportunity because Robinson lived in a time of monumental shifts that cannot be recreated.

But the incidents surrounding Sherman and Smart—both talented young African American men—are important moments for America to look in the mirror, and it may be equally important that we make sure pictures of Robinson and Ali hang on the wall behind us so their faces remain in that mirror frame while we pause, look, and reflect.

•

In 1947, Jackie Robinson was closer to Sherman’s age than Smart’s. Robinson had attended college and served in the military by the time he played baseball in the Negro League before being invited to play minor and then major league baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

But what could prepare a man for standing at the plate to play a baseball game while the manager for the opposing team stood outside the dugout yelling racial slurs?

As I watched the film recreation of Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman shouting at Robinson, I was enraged. I was enraged, hundreds of levels removed from Robinson by my privilege, my race, my spot in history, my safe couch.

And then I saw Smart stumble into the stands after hustling down the court on defense. I saw him push a fan. I read Smart’s lips as his teammates pushed him away. And I knew Smart had lost in a way that Robinson had been warned about thousands of times.

It is a different type of anger, but I was immediately angry about that fact. I knew Smart would apologize (I was surprised the fan made his admission, though). I expected Smart to be suspended (and he was). I knew Smart would be compelled to express remorse for how he portrayed himself as a potential NBA prospect, as a member of the Oklahoma State team, as a young man.

I suspect there now will be some discussion of just what the fan shouted—as if “piece of crap” somehow lessens the incident.

We can’t have a fan shouting a racial slur but we can have a fan shouting “piece of crap” because we are not going to examine why that fan felt justified in the taunt?

Right, as with the Sherman controversy, it can’t be about race. And if anyone suggests otherwise, the usual “Why does everything have to be about race?” will be trotted out as a defense.

Mostly by white people. Mostly by white males in power who live outside a racist gaze, who are insulated from living every moment on the razor-thin threat of collapse brought about not by the content of one’s character but by the simple fact of one’s skin color.

It is 2014 and there is no longer a race barrier stopping African American males from excelling in professional athletics.

But, if the film 42 is accurate at all, young African American males must live on the same egg shells Robinson did when they are challenged, literally, by a white male.

Smart lost the minute he asserted himself in defense of his own dignity as a human—just a Robinson would have lost if he hadn’t remained at the plate while Chapman harassed him.

You see, civil society wants African American males with numbers on their chests to assert a certain kind of manhood on the court, the field, or the diamond, but those same African American males must not assert their manhood when it is about human dignity. Decades removed from Robinson’s life, codes of knowing one’s place remain.

The public and media gaze for the Smart incident will remain on Smart. He will carry the brunt of responsibility for the entire incident even though he was simply playing the game, even though he stumbled into the crowd, and even though the fan felt justified in shouting at the young man for no other reason than the jersey and number on his chest.

Marcus Smart should never have been placed in that situation, however, and then Smart would not have been the one holding a press conference and apologizing.

And as far as gazes go, let’s not forget that Robinson broke a barrier other people created.

It is 2014, and we need fewer press conferences and more time looking in the mirror.

—

Please read:

10 Points About College Hoops All-American Marcus Smart’s Pushing a ‘Fan’ by Dave Zirin

Critical Pedagogy, education

“What Is Wrong with Aiming for Basic”?

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English educator and Deweyan progressive Lou LaBrant taught from 1906 until 1971; LaBrant lived to be 102.

She led a long and rich life as an educator, and when she wrote her memoir for the Education Museum at the University of South Carolina, in that reflection, she confronted the back-to-basics movement under Ronald Reagan’s administration that spurred the current accountability reform era.

LaBrant noted that she had lived and worked under a recurring cycle of back-to-basics movements—sparking in me a not-so-funny version of real-life Groundhog Day.

Calls for basics, essentials, and core knowledge are nothing new; in fact, these calls are ideological and simply will not die, regardless of the evidence of their ineffectiveness.

And thus, we have Annie Murphy Paul blogging about a Robert Pondiscio blog titled Be Excellent at Simple, both endorsing 5 basic commitments for education proposed by Pondiscio:

1. Every child must have a safe, warm, disruption-free classroom as a  non-negotiable, fundamental right.

2. All children should be taught to read using phonics-based instruction.

3. All children must master basic computational skills with automaticity before moving on to higher mathematics.

4. Every child must be given a well-rounded education that includes science, civics, history, geography, music, the arts, and physical education.

5. Accountability is an important safeguard of public funds, but must not drive or dominate a child’s education. Class time must not be used for standardized test preparation.”

A series of comments on Paul’s blog—mine and Chris Thinnes—prompted comments from Paul, and some of the key points she raised and questions she asked are my focus here:

But on the other hand, what is wrong with aiming for basic–if we’re not even achieving basic now?

When I say “research-based” I am referring to his five prescriptions, which are the focus of what I presented here. And his five prescriptions have solid research behind them. Cognitive science research demonstrates that children should be taught to read with phonics-based instruction. Cognitive science research demonstrates that children should master math facts to automaticity. Cognitive science research demonstrates that children need a broad base of content knowledge (Robert’s “science, civics, history, geography, music, the arts”) in order to comprehend what they read and in order to think in a sophisticated way about the world. THAT’S what I meant by “research-based.”

What can we learn from this long-running see-saw between Romanticism and back-to-basics? Does the answer lie in finding a happy medium between the two, or breaking out of this dichotomy entirely?

First, what’s wrong with a basics approach to education is highlighted by #2 above, a Hooked on Phonics reduction of how to teach reading.

Next, in Paul’s comments—notably “cognitive science research demonstrates”—we have the seeds of why the call for basics remains flawed.

Finally, her two concluding questions offer a way out.

Identifying direct and isolated phonics as a model for basic education exposes how this argument is self-fulling and ultimately outside the current research base on literacy.

As with direct, isolated, and intense grammar instruction, phonics instruction appears effective only within a narrow research paradigm built on a narrow testing context. The National Reading Panel (NRP) and its role in No Child Left Behind calling for “scientifically based research” is a powerful example of how this dynamic is bureaucratically effective but pedagogically blind.

Traditional parameters for quantitative research are grounded in aspects of control—controlling for noise that can distort findings. Experimental and quasi-experimental research models remain the gold standard for such research, and those narrow definitions of research were the driving ideologies behind the NRP.

I invite anyone interested in how narrow and traditional paradigms for research distort what we know about language development to read Joanne Yatvin’s expose of the NRP. But let me offer a brief explanation.

In order to test and conduct research on reading (a messy and holistic, although artificial, human behavior), we must first examine how reading is defined. To make reading efficiently measurable in selected response testing formats, researchers often break reading into discrete and isolated skills—decoding, phonemic awareness, comprehension, etc.

Then researchers tend to create testing  formats divided into enough test items on each isolated skill to constitute the sort of data that researchers deem adequate for issues related to validity and reliability; for standardized testing, how well those test items create score spread is also a factor in designing the tests.

This process (although simplified for this discussion) exposes how meeting the needs of narrow research paradigms and standardized testing can produce credible data within those paradigms while also severely distorting what we need to know about teaching real children to read.

The phonics problem is this: Once researchers allow “decoding” and/or “phonemic awareness” to count as “reading,” and then they test those skills in isolation on tests labeled as a “reading” test, intense, isolated, and direct phonics instruction is revealed as an effective way to raise scores on those tests.

The literacy problem is this: The field of literacy has known for decades and proven often that even when short-term evidence such as that described above may look effective, it doesn’t last and doesn’t correlate well with a richer holistic definition of reading.

Again similar to acquiring grammar and usage conventions, acquiring phonemic awareness requires that students receive the minimum amount of direct instruction that facilitates students becoming eager and frequent readers; once students are engaged as readers, they acquire greater and greater decoding and phonics “skills.” Ample evidence shows that intense phonics instruction fails in many ways—wasting time better spent by students actually reading as well as creating reading problems in students who are past the stage of needing direct instruction (see this brief outline of Ken Goodman on phonics and how NCLB, NRP, and Reading First created DIBELS and thus failed the teaching of reading again).

As pedagogy, skill-and-drill is effective for raising test scores on tests that look like that skill-and-drill.

If acquiring phonics rules is our instructional goal, intensive phonics lessons are appropriate.

But, to answer Paul’s initial question above, the problem with seeking such basics is that these should not be our goals.

Narrow paradigms of research and testing are the problem; they distort our view of the real world and in effect distort how we should be teaching students who inhabit that real world.

Reading and learning to read are messy, complex, and much more than a discrete set of skills that can be taught and measured in isolation in any ways that reflect accurately the whole act of reading.

Literacy experts have known this for decades: All students need the least amount of direct phonics instruction necessary for them to engage with whole texts; no literacy experts have ever said “don’t teach phonics.” But the field of literacy also knows that intensive phonics programs that treat phonics as a goal in itself is not teaching reading; it is teaching phonics.

Now to Paul’s final questions.

Public school instruction has been primarily traditional (grounded in the exact essentialism Paul and Pondiscio endorse, an essentialism that falls into the trap of misguided certainty) and the Romanticism Paul notes as also failing has never had any serious place in the public school classroom (I suspect she is targeting progressivism, which has the odd history of almost never being implemented but being blamed for the failures of public schools; this is the same dynamic experienced by whole language, which was also demonized as a failure although it has been documented as never having been implemented by teachers who closed their doors and practiced traditional strategies despite mandates to do whole language).

I am, however, not being a progressive apologist—although when essentialists use the false progressives-as-failures narrative, I feel we are slipping off the rail to reaching the conclusion we should.

And that brings me to Paul’s final and important question noted above: “Does the answer lie in finding a happy medium between the two, or breaking out of this dichotomy entirely?”

To which I answer: The dichotomy is a false narrative itself (and thus a distraction), and I don’t see either option as the way to the sort of education a free people should embrace for their children.

I opt for breaking out, embracing a critical pedagogy that doesn’t ignore knowledge, doesn’t normalize knowledge, but challenges knowledge so that it becomes a tool for each learner and a force for all of society. For knowledge to be liberatory, it must be confronted.

I opt for breaking out, embracing a critical pedagogy that doesn’t ignore the humanity of each child, doesn’t romanticize the child, but sees teaching and learning as a partnership between teachers and students who have roles as teacher-student and student-teacher. For education to be liberatory, it must be an act of a community.

Pondiscio’s simple list is nothing new and is an ideological argument (not an objective argument) grounded in essentialism (the purview of E.D. Hirsch and other proponents of Core Knowledge). Paul appears to be firmly grounded in a narrow (although highly regarded) context for research.

They certainly have every right to their ideological commitments, but I urge that they confront how those commitments are the status quo of the educational system most essentialists declare a failure. LaBrant’s work over seven decades exposed how essentialists refuse to see how their views are the dominant practices in public education; again, even as they lament how that system has failed.

We need to break out of narrow definitions and narrow tests for those things we value most in the education of children, and certainly, the numeracy and literacy of our children deserve more than we are offering. A critical approach is that option.

Back to basics tends to be reduced to seeing children as empty vessels to be filled (especially true with the populations of students who need education most—the impoverished and minorities), and almost always asks too little of students.

So what’s wrong with aiming for basic? It is trying the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.

James Baldwin

C-SPAN: James Baldwin January 15, 1979

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C-SPAN: James Baldwin January 15, 1979

In this 1979 speech Mr. Baldwin talked about being a black writer, about the civil rights movement, and other topics.

“They know they would not like to be black here. If they know that, they know everything they need to know. And whatever else they say is a lie….The American idea of progress, when Americans talk about progress, they mean how fast I become white. And it’s a trick bag because they know perfectly well I can never become white….

“There is a reason, there is a reason, that no one wants our children unto this day educated.”

—January 15, 1979, James Baldwin Speech

education reform, Gates, Poverty, Rhee

Teflon, Fatalism, and Accountability

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One legacy of Ronald Reagan’s presidency is his being tagged the Teflon president, as Patricia Schroeder explained:

As a young congresswoman, I got the idea of calling President Reagan the “Teflon president” while fixing eggs for my kids. He had a Teflon coat like the pan.

Why was Reagan so blame-free? The answer can be found in the label that did stick to him — “The Great Communicator.”

Reagan’s ability to connect with Americans was coveted by every politician. He could deliver a speech with such sincerity. And his staff was brilliant in playing up his strengths. They made sure the setting for any speech perfectly captured, re-emphasized and embraced the theme of that speech. And, let’s be honest, Reagan told people what they wanted to hear.

Teflon is, I believe, an apt metaphor for the protective veneer of privilege and power. As Mullainathan  and Shafir detail, individual behavior tends to reflect powerful contexts such as abundance and slack or scarcity, and thus, those living in abundance and experiencing slack live much as Reagan lead since nothing sticks to the Teflon of privilege and power.

Let me offer a brief example.

Since I hold a salaried position as a tenure professor (all of which have been attained from effort built on statuses of privilege), if I drive down the highway to work one morning and hit something in the road, resulting in a ruined tire, I simply call in, cancel class, buy a new tire with my credit card, and then go on with my day. As well, my next paycheck will not reflect that morning in any way.

If I were an hourly employee driving a car on its last leg and having no credit card (or more likely, one that is maxed out with little hope of paying more than the minimum next month), that same morning would be quite different, and once I missed work, my paycheck would be reduced as well—as my ability to get to work for days may be in jeopardy if I cannot somehow acquire a new tire.

The slack that comes with privilege and power (whether or not the person earns or deserves either) is a Teflon coating that allows many conditions that constitute the burdens of poverty to slip right off the privileged and powerful.

I want to transpose the Teflon metaphor onto another context, as well, related to the key figures leading the education reform movement built on an accountability/standards/testing model.

Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, and a wide assortment of political leaders (notably governors and superintendents of education) have some important characteristics in common: most have no background in education, many grew up and were educated in privileged lives and settings (such as private schools with conditions unlike the reforms they promote), many with children send those children to schools unlike the reforms they promote, and few, if any, suffer any real consequences for their misguided claims or policies. This crop of education reformers are Teflon reformers.

When Gates poured money and his influence into small school projects and then pulled the plug (a project that proves more about misunderstanding research than education reform), all the schools and stakeholders were left holding the bag, but Gates just shifted into “blame the teachers” mode and is investing his money and influence with the same gusto as before [1]. Education is his hobby, and nothing sticks to Gates while he is playing the game because of the Teflon coating provided by his enormous wealth (built on his privileged background).

The narratives around Duncan and Rhee are little different; they thrive on serial political appointments (often irrespective of the quality of their performance at any position [2]) and that their “leadership” skills (which they argue trumps experience and expertise in the filed that are leading [3]) are transportable from venture to new venture. But neither suffers any real career consequences as Teflon reformers.

Who does suffer the consequences of narratives, claims, and policies coming from Teflon reformers?

Students and teachers—who also represent two levels of relative powerlessness, sharing, however, a state of scarcity created by the high-stakes elements of the reform movement built on accountability.

Students and teachers also share a similar response to that scarcity combined with their powerlessness, fatalism [4].

For teachers, the self-defeating characteristics of that fatalism are captured in the current implementation of Common Core, which, as with all the preceding waves of new standards and tests, are imposed on teachers, not called for, designed by, or directed by teachers.

SC represents how caustic Teflon reform and teacher fatalism are for effective implementation of policy and practices. As is typical across the U.S., administrators, teachers, professional organizations, and unions nearly universally and without criticism accepted CC as a matter of course (an example of professional fatalism).

The standard line was that no one in any of those groups could stop or change CC from happening, thus they all felt compelled to implement CC as best as possible—including professional organizations explicitly saying they could not challenge CC as they had a duty to help teachers implement CC, again because no one could stop the implementation.

Now that many teachers have been given a great deal of training and a tremendous amount of CC-related materials have been purchased, SC is taking a predictable Tea Party turn against CC. Governor Nikki Haley has identified dumping CC as part of her re-election campaign and Tea Party motivated parents have begun to challenge directly schools for implementing CC.

While some states are also seeking to drop CC, others are simply renaming the standards. But in SC, the consequences of this churn created by Teflon reform policies and partisan backlashes against CC impact primarily teachers—trapped within demands for them to implement CC—and students who are bridging the years between their being taught and tested under one set of standards and soon to be taught (although some may have to mask that the lessons are CC-based) and tested under yet another.

For teachers, their own fatalism against the power of Teflon reform has resulted in low morale and scattered CC implementation (directly contradicting a central call for CC as a way to standardize what is taught across the U.S.).

Both Teflon reform and teacher fatalism doom any reform efforts in our schools. Teflon reformers continue to prosper despite the credibility of their claims or the outcomes of their policies.

And at the bottom of this power chain are students, themselves fatalistic.

Rick VanDeWeghe, expanding on the work of Rick Wormeli, in 2007 confronted how the flawed accountability paradigm remains uncontested, but at the center of Teflon reform’s greatest failure:

This research is based on a basic and controversial assumption about accountability. Quoting from Wikipedia, Wormeli states that accountability “implies a concern for the welfare of those with whom one works” (“Accountability” 16 [5]). This definition carries the message that “I’m here to help you along, to help you grow.” It implies that teachers are learner advocates and have a responsibility to help students grow as learners, just as students have a responsibility to demonstrate their growth as learners: It’s mutual accountability. This form of mutual accountability focuses on achievement—that is, we practice accountability when we focus on actual achievement and not on nonacademic factors, and we teach accountability when we demand that students show their real learning and growth. It sounds simple, but it gets complicated.

In contrast to mutual accountability, Wormeli notes, an alternative and more familiar definition of accountability values threat over concern (i.e., advocacy) for others….This is the ‘caughtya’ and ‘gotcha’ mentality,” and grading “is one of the default tools teachers use to play the ‘gotcha’ game.” When we play the gotcha game, according to Wormeli, “There is no growth in accountability within the student that will carry over to the next situation” (“Accountability” 16). Students learn to do whatever it takes to get the grade. (pp. 74-75)

Teflon reform along with with teacher and student fatalism have combined to create the exact failed accountability exposed by VanDeWeghe and Wormeli.

The current accountability paradigm embraced and perpetuated by Teflon reformers ignores the importance of mutual accountability as well as investment by all stakeholders in both the policies and the consequences of those policies.

When Teflon reformers are neither mutually accountable nor personally invested, their policies create fatalistic, and thus, ineffective teachers—in the same way that students become fatalistic (and learn less or simply check out of the learning opportunities) when teachers are above the accountability and thus not mutually invested in learning with students.

For education reform to work, we need to reject Teflon reformers for the sort of leadership accountability highlighted by Wormeli:

There is an old story about ancient Roman engineers and accountability. It says that whenever they were constructing an arch, the engineer who designed it stood directly underneath the center of the arch as the capstone was hoisted into position. He had worked hard, took responsibility, and knew his competence was true. It was the ultimate accountability if his design failed. (p. 25)

And thus, Wormeli concludes:

Accountability by its nature requires the interaction of others in our work. Individually, we are not, but together we are, accountable. (p. 26)

Together must include those leaders who rise above the Teflon veneer of authority and stand beside us, investing and risking in collaboration.

—

[1] For those unfamiliar with the history of Gates’s small schools focus and then shift to teacher quality (and if you jump to the assumption that my comments above are mere ad hominem), I offer the following reader (and suggest this exact pattern will occur again after teacher quality and Common Core fall as flat as small schools appeared to do to Gates):

[2] Rhee has suffered little if any career fail-out from “eraser-gate,” and Duncan attained in part his appointment as Secretary of Education on a mirage, the Chicago “miracle” (replicating the same misleading rise of Rod Paige to Secretary based on the debunked Texas “miracle”).

[3] This is the inherent problem with Teach for America, which is primarily a leadership organization, not an education organization.

[4] See Freire.

[5] See Rick Wormeli’s Accountability: Teaching through Assessment and Feedback, Not Grading

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