Tag Archives: education

Social Context Reform

Social Context Reform: A Pedagogy of Equity and Opportunity (Routledge)

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UNDER CONTRACT with Routledge

* If you would like to contribute to this volume as a “late” addition, email paul.thomas@furman.edu ASAP.

Social Context Reform: A Pedagogy of Equity and Opportunity

Editors: P. L. Thomas, Brad Porfilio, Julie Gorlewski, Paul R. Carr

Proposal

The last decade of the nineteenth century laid the groundwork for misguided political and popular commitments to universal public education in the United States: A technocratic and bureaucratic vision of teaching and learning based on a banking concept of curriculum and a test-based reduction of learning. The Committee of Ten identified public school’s failure to provide a challenging curriculum and established a more than century-long focus on curriculum, content, and standards as the locus of authority in public schooling. The educational reforms enacted in the United States have also found significant resonance within the international community, despite there being a skeptical perception regarding how the US has failed or under-performed in many areas of education.

Throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, humanists (re-enforcing the focus on content) and educators won the battle for the American curriculum (Kliebard, 1995); thus entrenching, for all of public education, the pursuit of a fixed and culturally norming curriculum and a narrow version of scientific education built on tests, labeling, ranking, and sorting. By the mid- to late-twentieth century, Freire (1993) and other critical educators such as Kincheloe (2001, 2002) (along with some progressive, constructivist educators) began to challenge the banking model of education but these critical voices—like the progressive influences of Dewey and others throughout the twentieth century—were at the margins, and completely absent from policy debates (Kohn, 2008).

The publication of, and misreporting about, A Nation at Risk (1983) under Ronald Reagan codified further, through state government, the commitment to standards while adding an intensification of testing as central to the supposed accountability paradigm. Within in two decades, the passing of the No Child Left Behind legislation under George W. Bush added federalization to the notion of accountability.

In 2008, Barack Obama’s administration simultaneously spoke against the past thirty years of accountability, and implemented policies that perpetuated and mirrored the policies Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appeared to criticize in their public comments. The notion of accountability is pivotal in the debate on education reform because of how it has been conceptualized. Giroux (2004, 2007, 2009, & 2010), McLaren (2006, 2008, 2009), Carr (2008, 2010), Carr and Porfilio (2009, 2011), Porfilio (2012), Thomas (2012, 2011) & Gorlewski (add references) have all critiqued the thinness and allegiance to a highly functionalist form of accountability in these education reforms, often obfuscating the importance of democracy, citizenship and social justice.

The result is that in 2012 both the status quo of public education and the “No Excuses” Reform (NER) rhetoric and policies are identical. NER offers a popular and compelling narrative based on the meritocracy and rugged individualism myths that are supposed to define American idealism.

This volume will refute the NER ideology by proposing Social Context Reform (SCR), a term coined by Thomas to distinguish evidence-based systemic reform endorsed by educators and scholars from NER endorsed by corporate and political leadership:

Social Context Reformers have concluded that the source of success and failure lies primarily in the social and political forces that govern our lives. By acknowledging social privilege and inequity, Social Context Reformers are calling for education reform within a larger plan to reform social inequity—such as access to health care, food security, higher employment along with better wages and job security. (Thomas, 2011, December 30)

Throughout the accountability era since the early 1980s, policy, public discourse, media coverage, and scholarly works have focused primarily, if not exclusively, on reforming schools themselves. Here, the evidence that school-only reform does not work is combined with a bold argument to expand the discourse and policy surrounding education reform to include how social, school, and classroom reform must work in unison to achieve goals of democracy, equity, and opportunity both in and through public education.

The volume will include a wide variety of essays from leading critical scholars from several fields of study addressing the complex elements of SCR, divided into three sections all of which address the need to re-conceptualize accountability, and, moreover, to seek equity and opportunity in social and education reform.

Final TOC

Foreword: Education and the Epochal Crisis, Peter McLaren

Introduction: Social Context Reform: A Pedagogy of Equity and Opportunity, Brad Porfilio, Julie Gorlewski, Paul R. Carr, and P.L. Thomas, Editors

Section I: Social Reform for Equity and Opportunity

Chapter 1 – “Defying Meritocracy: The Case of the Working-Class College Student,” Allison L. Hurst

Chapter 2 – “Reforming the Schooling of Zombie Desire,” William Reynolds

Chapter 3 – “The Pseudo Accountability of Education Reform: The Denial of Democracy, Citizenship, and Social Justice,” Randy Hoover

Chapter 4 – “Teacher Education and Resistance within the Neoliberal Regime: Making the Necessary Possible,” Barbara Madeloni, Kysa Nygreen

Section II: School-based Reform for Equity and Opportunity

Chapter 5 – “Social Context and School Underperformance in Inuit Schooling,” Paul Berger

Chapter 6 – “An Injury to All? The Haphazard Nature of Academic Freedom in America’s Public Schools,” Robert L. Dahlgren, Nancy C. Patterson & Christopher J. Frey

Chapter 7 – “Educate Youth of Color, Do Not Criminalize Them,” Mary Christianakis and Richard Mora

Section III: Classroom-based Reform for Equity and Opportunity

Chapter 8 – “A Pedagogy of Equity and Opportunity: Literacy, Not Standards,” P. L. Thomas

Chapter 9 – “YouTube University: How an Educational Foundations Professor Uses Critical Media in His Classroom,” Nicholas D. Hartlep

Chapter 10 – “Developing a User-Friendly, Community-Based Higher Education,” Rebecca Collins-Nelsen and Randy Nelsen

Chapter 11- “Transcending the Standard: One Teacher’s Effort to Explore the World Beyond the Curriculum,” Chris Leahy

Conclusion: Learning and Teaching in Scarcity, P. L. Thomas

Author Biographies

Testing

De-Testing and De-Grading Schools (Peter Lang USA)

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De-Testing and De-Grading Schools (Peter Lang USA)

Joe Bower and P. L. Thomas, editors

[Preview and order at amazon]

De-Testing and De-Grading SchoolsBook synopsis

A century of education and education reform along with the last three decades of high-stakes testing and accountability reveals a disturbing paradox: Education has a steadfast commitment to testing and grading despite decades of research, theory, and philosophy that reveal the corrosive consequences of both testing and grading within an education system designed to support human agency and democratic principles.

This edited volume brings together a collection of essays that confronts the failure of testing and grading and then offers practical and detailed examinations of implementing at the macro and micro levels of education teaching and learning free of the weight of testing and grading. The book explores the historical failure of testing and grading; the theoretical and philosophical arguments against testing and grading; the negative influence of testing and grading on social justice, race, class, and gender; and the role of testing and grading in perpetuating a deficit perspective of children, learning, race, and class.

The chapters fall under two broad sections: Part I: «Degrading Learning, Detesting Education: The Failure of High-Stake Accountability in Education» includes essays on the historical, theoretical, and philosophical arguments against testing and grading; Part II: «De-Grading and De-Testing in a Time of High-Stakes Education Reform» presents practical experiments in de-testing and de-grading classrooms for authentic learning experiences.

Contents

Contents: Lisa Guisbond/Monty Neill/Bob Schaeffer: NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress: What Can We Learn from This Policy Failure? – Fernando F. Padró: High-Stakes Testing Assessment: The Deus ex Machina of Quality in Education – Anthony Cody: Technocratic Groupthink Inflates the Testing Bubble – Lawrence Baines/Rhonda Goolsby: Mean Scores in a Mean World – Julie A. Gorlewski/David A. Gorlewski: De-grading Literacy: How New York State Tests Knowledge, Culture, and Critical Thinking – Morna McDermott: The Corporate Model of Schooling: How High Stakes Testing Dehumanizes Education – Richard Mora: Standardized Testing and Boredom at an Urban Middle School – Brian R. Beabout/Andre M. Perry: Reconciling Student Outcomes and Community Self-Reliance in Modern School Reform Contexts – David L. Bolton/John M. Elmore: The Role of Assessment in Empowering/Disempowering Students in the Critical Pedagogy Classroom – Alfie Kohn: The Case Against Grades – Joe Bower: Reduced to Numbers: From Concealing to Revealing Learning – John Hoben: Outside the Wounding Machine: Grading and the Motive for Metaphor – Peter DeWitt: No Testing Week: Focusing on Creativity in the Classroom – Hadley J. Ferguson: Journey into Ungrading – Jim Webber/Maja Wilson: Moving Beyond «Parents Just Want to Know the Grade!» – P. L. Thomas: De-grading Writing Instruction in a Time of High-Stakes Testing: The Power of Feedback in Workshop – Brian Rhode: One Week, Many Thoughts.

About the author(s)/editor(s)

Joe Bower is a teacher in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. He spent 10 years teaching grade eight language arts and science in a middle school, and is now a special education teacher in a childrens psychiatric assessment unit. Follow his work at http://www.joebower.org and @joe_bower.

P. L. Thomas, Associate Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is currently a column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English) and series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Sense Publishers). Follow his work at https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/ and @plthomasEdD.

Series

Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education. Vol. 451
General Editor: Shirley R. Steinberg

Education, education reform

Recommended: Educational Documentaries

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I teach a May Experience course, The Reel World: The Depiction of Schools on Film. A colleague of mine in the education department and I designed the course before Waiting for “Superman,” but the course is intended as a way to examine how political and public discourse shapes perceptions about public schools as well as policy. The course was revised to include Poverty Studies credit so many of the films explore how education intersects class and race.

This May X, I added the choice of reading either Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School, by Kathleen Nolan, or Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children, by Sarah Carr.

The focus of the discussion, however, remains on the eight documentaries below with some annotations about what aspects of education each film highlights. I do recommend all of these films, although each has some limitations as most documentaries do.

Recommended Documentaries on Education:

Corridor of Shame

This documentary focuses on a court case in South Carolina initiated by high-poverty school districts surrounding primarily the I-95 corridor of the state, paralleling the east coast and stretching from the NE to the SE region. The documentary suffers from melodramatic production values (music, slow-motion panning of sad children’s faces), but the essential claim of the film is important for confronting the social inequity that is reflected in educational inequity, particularly in the South. Issues included in the film are school funding, community-based schools, access to high-quality educational opportunities and facilities, teacher assignments related to student characteristics, and state education accountability mechanisms. Some related resources (SC school report cards, poverty indices, related blog posts) to the documentary can be found HERE.

Heart of Stone

Ron Stone stands at the center of this film about an urban high school in New Jersey. The film is solid and interesting—while also creating a good deal of tension and presenting a surprise ending. Many important issues are raised, notably the controversial stance of Stone as principal toward gangs and gang leaders attending the high school. This is an ideal companion to Police in the Hallways and it confronts several important issues about education and education reform—urban schools, high-poverty/majority-minority schools, zero tolerance policies, deficit views of minorities and impoverished children, gang presence and violence, leadership styles, police in schools.

Flock of Dodos

The controversy, teaching evolution in public schools, that will not die—although it has evolved, ironically—is explored by this film that is engagingly personal and often humorous. The Intelligent Design (ID) movement is the approach of the moment for creating debates about if and how evolution should be taught in schools. While the filmmaker is upfront with his allegiances to science, the documentary is fair, almost to a fault as it allows the scientists to show why their expertise is often lost in their arrogance. The film successfully helps viewers navigate the definitions of science, evolution, ID, and creationism; it also confronts the roles of religion, ideology, and politics (specifically the power of school boards) in the “teach the controversy” assertions found among ID advocates. An interesting connection to this documentary is the news coverage of a creationist test given to students in a SC private school.

Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later

These documentaries often soar because of the people allowed to speak for themselves. This excellent HBO film opens with Minnijean Brown Trickey returning to Little Rock Central High, and then it never fails to deliver throughout. I would rate this a must-see among the selections in this course. The film confronts Brown v. Board, separate and unequal, schools within schools, the return of segregation (especially in the South), and the lingering tensions between the ideal and reality of racial harmony. Related pieces on the rise of the segregated South and education reform in the New Jim Crow Era are recommended. Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is also an excellent connection.

Hard Times at Douglass High

When Waiting for “Superman” was released and disproportionately praised in the media, I wrote a piece on this documentary to suggest it is far superior and to ask viewers what these administration and teachers at Douglass High were supposed to do. The focus of this film is No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in the context of a high-poverty, majority minority urban high school. Some of the most significant moments of the documentary are disturbing scenes of violence in the hallways and one female student recounting a fight with an adult male relative. Teachers struggling with the students, including one TFA recruit, are included, and this is also a strength of the film. The film addresses accountability, administrator/faculty relationships, the roles of teachers (especially young teachers), the influence and struggles of parents, the voices of students, the significance of extracurricular activities, and the limitations of school-only reform and accountability under the weight of poverty and racial inequity.

Clearcut

Who controls the money, controls everything—or at least who controls the money wants to control everything. This documentary examines the clash between a family funding scholarships and the science curriculum in a logging community. This is a powerful pairing with Flock of Dodos since both documentaries dramatize the debate over who should determine the curriculum in public schools serving a free society. Clearcut and Flock of Dodos also highlight the culture war that simmers beneath almost all educational controversies. The issues raised in this documentary can be linked to the influence of entrepreneurs in the current reform movement, such as Bill Gates, and the role of school boards is also a central issue, again as in Flock of Dodos.

Prom Night in Mississippi

Morgan Freeman challenges his childhood hometown to integrate the prom, and he’ll foot the bill; this is the focus of an engaging and powerful documentary on the persistence of segregated proms in the twenty-first century. The voices of students, parents, and administrators drive this film, and the intersection of racism and public education takes center stage through those voices. A potential pairing (non-education related) is the documentary The Loving Story about the 1967 Supreme Court case addressing interracial marriage. The 2013 prom integration in Georgia also is a suitable companion to this film.

Grain of Sand

Neoliberalism driving education reform in Mexico is confronted in this documentary, which provides a strong conclusion to the May experience addressing education. Corporations (Walmart, Coca-Cola, Ford), corrupt unions, and President Fox provide a matrix of influential forces shaping and even dismantling public education in Mexico, paralleling the same neoliberal agenda highlighted under George W. Bush and increased under Obama. A combative and disturbing documentary, Grain of Sand forces viewers to consider the value of the Commons and the dangers of privatization. Like Hard Times at Douglass High, this film suggests that accountability reform based on high-stakes testing poses much greater harm than good for schools and students.

—–

A companion video worth pairing with any of the above films is Tupac Shakur at 17 discussing education.

Poverty, race, school to prison pipeline, schools as prison

First Name and then Act

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If we cannot even name the reality we claim we want to change, then we will never change that reality.

—–

There are two points that I make in my scholarship and public writing that are certain to prompt reactions from both friends and foes that suggest I may have just run down someone’s grandmother with a bus:

Let me try once again to clarify both that these claims are true and necessary to name in order to change.

“Poverty is destiny” is a normative [1] fact of the United States. For most children, the social class they are born into predicts the trajectory of their lives, independent of their self-worth, effort, and all sorts of other factors we are more likely to associate with the individual child.

That this is a normative statement includes a concession that outliers exist (some people fall out of and rise above the social class of their births), but outliers do not discredit a normative statement just as we must caution against making an outlier status the rubric for normalized behavior. In other words, that African American men have scaled to the presidency and supreme court stands as outliers against the disproportionate number of AA men incarcerated in our country:

Michelle Alexander has embodied the need to name in order to change by confronting the normative facts of mass incarceration as well as the indisputable fact that mass incarceration is the New Jim Crow, thus racist.

And Sean Reardon has now offered a powerful case that “poverty and affluence are destiny”:

Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion….

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race….

We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families….

The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline….

It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school. There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months….

The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.

Alexander and Reardon are naming normative facts—ones that many all along the ideological spectrum not only refuse to do themselves, but rush to silence others who do name in order to change.

If the patterns of mass incarceration and “no excuses”/”zero tolerance” schools and policies even impacted privileged white males proportionately in the U.S., the outcry would be deafening.

The current and historical racially disproportionate and negative patterns of the U.S. penal and judicial systems and the rise of highly segregated “no excuses” charter schools and “zero tolerance” urban public schools must be named and then we must act t change that which is racist, that which is classist, that which is sexist.

Refusing to name, refusing to act guarantees poverty will remain destiny and the current education reform movement will continue to mirror the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration.

If you are uncertain about the messages our culture sends about race, view the video below:

This Is The Worst Thing I Have Ever Heard A Child Say

[1] “Normative” is being expressed as “typical,” that which can fairly be called “normal” in the sense of mode and/or more than half of a population exists in that condition.

education reform, Gates, NCTQ, Rhee

The Bully Politics of Education Reform

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America is a bully nation.

America is the embodiment of might-makes-right. When another country (USSR) invades Afghanistan, America is filled with righteous indignation, but when America invades Afghanistan, well, all is right with the world.

America has bred the bully tactic of vigilantism in the sanctified Petri dish of law (Stand Your Ground), and the result is the person with the gun is the law while the victim’s innocence is extinguished along with the person’s life.

To mask the bully culture of the U.S., bullying is confronted as a school-based problem among children (note the distraction of the R rating in the documentary on bullying addressed by Nancy Flanagan and Douglas Storm). Yet, the exact ruling class who denounces bullying among children are themselves bullies.

So there is no surprise that the current education reform movement is characterized by bully politics.

NCTQ: Teaching Teachers a Lesson

In the mid-1800s, public education was called a “’dragon. . .devouring the hope of the country as well as religion. [It dispenses] ‘Socialism, Red Republicanism, Universalism, Infidelity, Deism, Atheism, and Pantheism—anything, everything, except religion and patriotism,’” explains Jacoby (2004, pp. 257-258). Bullying public education, then, has long roots, at least stretching back to the threat of universal public schooling detracting from the Catholic church’s control of education in the nineteenth century.

From there, the bullying of public schools continued, judging the quality of our public schools based on drop-out rates (Get adjusted, 1947). We must recognize that the demonizing of public schools and the condemnation of school quality are the way we talk about and view schools in the U. S. as popular discourse and understanding, but this historical badgering of schools has evolved recently into a more direct and personal attack on teachers.

While it appears we cringe when children bully each other, we have no qualms about inexpert, inexperienced, and self-proclaimed education reformers bullying an entire profession.

While the bullying can be witnessed in the discourse coming from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former-chancellor Michelle Rhee, and billionaire-reformer Bill Gates, one of the most corrosive and powerful dynamics embracing bully politics is the rise of self-appointed think-tank entities claiming to evaluate and rank teacher education programs. A key player in bully politics is the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).

NCTQ represents, first, the rise of think tanks and the ability of those think tanks to mask their ideologies while receiving disproportionate and unchallenged support from the media.

Think tanks have adopted the format and pose of scholarship, producing well crafted documents filled with citations and language that frame ideology as “fair and balanced” conclusions drawn from the evidence.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

NCTQ grew out of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Education Leaders Council (ELC), which is associated with the Center for Education Reform, securing in the process unsolicited federal funds (over $9 million under George W. Bush).

In short, NCTQ is not an unbiased and scholarly enterprise to evaluate and reform teacher education. NCTQ is a right-wing, agenda-driven think tank entity determined to marginalize and discredit teacher education in order to promote a wide range of market-based ideologies related specifically to public education.

Further, and powerfully connected to the bully politics of NCTQ, is the association between NCTQ and U.S. News & World Report. In other words, NCTQ lacks educational and scholarly credentials and credibility, but gains its influence and power through direct and indirect endorsements from government, the media, and entrepreneurs (re: Gates foundation and funding).

NCTQ has released one report on student teaching. and a self-proclaimed national review of teacher preparation programs is scheduled for June 2013.

How, then, is this bully politics?

In both reports, NCTQ contacts departments and colleges of education with a simple but blunt request: Cooperate with us or we’ll evaluate you however we can, and publish our report regardless. These requests demand extensive data from the departments and colleges, and then subject these programs to standards and expectations designed by NCTQ completely decontextualized from the departments and colleges being “evaluated” against those standards. In other words, the basis for NCTQ’s evaluations have not been vetted by anyone for being credible. A department or college could very well be rated high or low and that rating mean little since the department or college may or may not consider the criteria of any value.

In fact, the first report by NCTQ has been reviewed (most think tank reports receive tremendous and uncritical coverage without review, and when reviewed, those reviews tend to receive almost no media coverage), confirming that NCTQ produces biased and careless work. Benner’s review concludes, in part:

The NCTQ review of student teaching is based upon the assumption that it is not only possible, but also worthwhile and informative to isolate student teaching from the totality of a teacher preparation program. This notion is in direct conflict with the perspective that effective teacher education programs avoid the isolation of pedagogy and classroom management content, offering such knowledge and skills within a learning environment centered upon a clinical experience.

The sample of programs cannot be characterized as representative based on any statistical standard or recognized sampling technique. The problems include disproportionate samples, artificial restrictions, selection bias toward the weakest programs within universities, lack of clarity regarding sample size, and unsound selection procedures for the sample-within-sample. The problems with data collection include how the ratings were derived, how site visit destinations were selected and how the site visits were used in the data analysis, and how principals were surveyed and/or interviewed.

Limitations in the development and interpretation of the standards, sampling techniques, methodology, and data analysis unfortunately negate any guidance the work could have offered the field and policy makers. However, the fact that this particular review is ill-conceived and poorly executed does not mean that all is well in teacher education. The education of future teachers can be greatly improved by increased selectivity of the students admitted into teacher preparation programs, strengthened clinical experiences woven into the study of teaching and learning, increased demand for teachers to have strong content knowledge and understanding of content-specific instructional strategies, and stricter enforcement of program approval standards.

NCTQ, espcially in its relationship with the media, appears more concerned about creating an appearance of failure within tecaher education than with genuinely addressing in a scholarly way what works, what doesn’t work, and how to reform teacher education.

The bully depends on status—the weight of appointment, designation—and the threat of wielding that power regardless of credibility. The bully depends on repetition and volume of claims over the confirmation of evidence or logic.

The current education reform movement is in the hands of bullies and in the vortex of bully politics. Left unchecked, bullying is incredibly effective for the benefit of the bullies and detrimental to everyone else.

Calling out the bullies, however, is possible and even relatively simple since the bully has nothing genuine to stand on.

In the long run, truth trumps bullying, but truth cannot win in the cloak of silence and inaction.

The States: More Bully Politics of Education Reform

From South Carolina to New Jersey to Wisconsin—and all across the U.S.—universal public education is under assault by the bully politics of education reform.

In my home state of South Carolina, Governor Haley and Superintendent Zais, neither of whom have experience or expertise in education, are seeking to attack unions (although SC is a non-union, right-to-work state), increase education testing through adopting Common Core State Standards (CCSS), deprofessionalize teachers through new accountability and merit-pay schemes, and cripple public schools by endorsing expanded choice initiatives.

Tractenberg details a similar pattern in New Jersey:

Gov. Chris Christie wastes no opportunity to trash Newark’s public schools. His assaults continued recently at a national school choice conference, where he and odd-couple partner Mayor Cory Booker were featured speakers.

Aside from Christie’s well-known penchant for confrontation, there are two big problems with his attacks.

First, he insists on citing “facts” that are either flat-out wrong or cherry-picked to emphasize the worst in Newark’s schools. An education expert recently questioned why those promoting school choice often use the best charter schools to characterize all charter schools and the worst regular public schools to characterize all those schools.

The situation is even more grim in Wisconsin, home of the relentless Governor Walker:

Walker is the archetypical bully. He has plenty of insecurities as a possible suspect in a John Doe case and as a college dropout–which necessitates his attacks on the ‘liberal’ academics. Self-esteem issues explain his need to repeatedly remind us how ‘courageous’ he has been and how he is like Ronald Reagan. Walker, like most bullies, yearns for status—which explains his national speaking tour.  Most blatantly bullying is Walker’s ‘divide and conquer’ management style (openly advertised to one of his billionaire campaign donors).

No group is better skilled at handling bullies, like Walker, than public educators. Teachers have much experience managing bullies in schools. We are trained in anti-bullying tactics. We have intervened in bullying situations and we advise our students on how to counter bullying. It is now time for Wisconsin’s teachers to embrace what we teach our students.

Steve Strieker, then, calls for a response in Wisconsin that every educator should heed: “Public educators must not be bystanders to Walker’s bullying.” Part of the action educators must take is to identify the hypocrisy and lack of credibility coming from the current leaders in the call to reform schools along “no excuses” and corporate ideologies.

Bully Bravado Masks Inexperience, No Expertise, and Hypocrisy

Presidents, Secretaries of Education, Governors, and State Superintendents of Education historically and currently have used their bully pulpits to speak to and directly influence public education in the U.S. and in each state. In the twenty-first century, billionaires, millionaires, athletes, and celebrities have increasingly joined those political leaders by adopting education as their hobby. Among all of these elites, several patterns expose their combined failure to understand the problems facing and solutions needed for education—despite their elitist status that allows them power and prestige in the education debate. Those patterns expose these leaders’ hypocrisy and lack of credibility and include the following:

• Most of these leaders experienced educational advantages unlike the schools they hope to create by dismantling public schools. Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, and Mitt Romney, for example, enjoyed the luxury of low student-teacher ratios, but claim class size doesn’t matter (although class size does matter). The hypocrisy of the “no excuses” reformers reveals that these people living in privilege have a different standard for other people’s children.

• Most of these leaders have never taught a day in their lives, and have no background in education other than their appointments and self-proclamations as educators. Sal Khan—like Duncan, Gates, and the governors across the nation—for example, has been anointed “educator” and “innovator” without having ever taught, without holding any degrees in education.

• Most of these leaders have either a weak or nonexistent grasp on the current knowledge and research-base for teaching and learning. Further, like Christie, when these reformers call on evidence, they either cherry-pick, distort, or misrepresent the data. Recently, Superintendent Zais (SC) discounted paying teachers for years of experience or advanced degrees since, as he claimed, those two characteristic do not correlate positively with higher student test scores. But Zais does endorse merit pay, value-added methods of teacher evaluation, charter schools, and vouchers/tuition tax credits—all of which have the same correlation with higher student test scores as his claim about experience and advanced degrees.

With these patterns in mind, educators must consider directly the situation in Wisconsin, where a recall highlights the power of action, and possibly highlights yet again the negative influence of passive educators.

Wisconsin, along with SC and New Jersey, is not just one state in the union, but a very real crucible of democracy. Educators and citizens across the U.S. must not ignore that an attack on public schools, public school teachers, and public school students is an attack on democracy.

Democracy is not just an ideal, it is an act of the individual fully committed to the community.

References

Get adjusted. (1947, December 15). Time.

Jacoby, S. (2004). Freethinkers: A history of American secularism. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Note

Reposting of two separate blogs from 2012—The Bully Politics of Education Reform and The States: More Bully Politics of Education Reform

education reform, Gates, The Answer Sheet

The (Lingering) Bill Gates Problem in School Reform

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In his Washington Post Op-Ed (28 February 2011), Bill Gates builds to this solution to education reform*:

“What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. (In a 2008 survey funded by the Gates Foundation, 83 percent of teachers said they would be happy to teach more students for more pay.) The rest of the savings could go toward improving teacher support and evaluation systems, to help more teachers become great.”

Gates also includes his own foundation’s survey to give his claims the appearance of evidence-based reform (although he misrepresents even that), but this claim, as well as the continuing free pass Gates and other education hobbyists and celebrities receive from the media and the public (see the softballs tossed to Gates in an interview at Newsweek, for example), proves to reveal several ironic lessons in education reform:

Wealth and celebrity do not equal expertise. The United States is a celebrity culture, and we revere wealth because we aspire to wealth. Why do we listen to Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz? Because Oprah endorsed them—not because they offered the public credible expertise in their fields. The current education reform debate is being driven by wealth, celebrity, and life-long bureaucrats—not by the expertise and experience of millions of teachers, scholars, and researchers who have credible evidence about the problems that face our public education system and the likely solutions that would move us closer to the promise of that system in our democracy.

Calls for accountability tend to come from those outside and above that accountability. As I will discuss later, the role of evidence is interesting and disturbing in the claims made by the new reformers, including Gates. A central part of the push to hold teachers accountable is tying teacher pay to evidence, but when these claims are made, Gates and others are never required to show any evidence themselves about their claims. As well, billionaires, millionaires, celebrities, and politicians all exist in lives in which they are less often held accountable for their actions when compared to the vast majority of Americans.

Teaching and learning are not the simple transmission of a set body of knowledge from an authoritarian teacher and to a passive classroom of students. The smoldering charges that our schools are overburdened by “bad” teachers, and thus we need to improve our teaching core, has distracted us from considering first exactly what the teaching/learning process should look like in universal public education system built to support a free people and a democracy.

The new reformers have framed teaching as both the most important element in educational outcomes (although evidence refutes that simplistic claim) and a simple act of transmitting knowledge to a large group of students to raise test scores linked to national standards.

If we need the best and the brightest and if teachers alone can overcome the weight of poverty, then reducing teaching to a service industry contradicts internally an argument that is also easily disproved since both initial claims are false. Teaching and learning are messy, idiosyncratic, and nearly impossible to measure or trace to single points of causation.

The political and corporate elite as well as the general U.S. public simply do not respect teachers and do not value education. The United States, as the wealthiest and most powerful country in the history of humanity, has and can make anything happen we want. We move forward with wars when we decide we should, we bail out failing banks when we feel we should, we make a whole host of celebrities wealthy when we want (and we never hold them accountable for their egregious lack of respect for anything), and we could eradicate childhood poverty and support fully a vibrant and world-class education system–if we wanted to. But we don’t.

Evidence doesn’t matter, but it should. As the first point above suggests, the public seems content with celebrity and wealth, but skeptical of evidence. I have had dozens of experiences offering public commentary on education, citing extensively why I hold the positions I do, but one of the most common replies I receive is, “Anybody can make research say whatever they want.” While I empathize with the sentiment, this belief is flawed because it oversimplifies the research debate in the same way that the new reformers oversimplify the education reform debate. The truth about research is that one study is interesting, but that one study proves little.

Once research has been peer-reviewed, while no guarantee, that study gains credibility. Then, as research builds to a body of peer-reviewed research with clear patterns, we reach safe ground for public claims and policy (see this about charter schools, for example). Neither cherry-picking studies to advance an agenda nor being cavalier and cynical about research is conducive to advancing humanity through our greatest gifts as human — our minds.

Poverty is the unspoken and ignored weight on education outcomes, and while U.S. public education needs significant reforms, education reform will never succeed without the support of social reforms addressing childhood poverty and income equity.

This final ironic lesson from a billionaire holding forth repeatedly on education reveals its problem by the obvious complexity of the statement itself. The sentence is too much for our sound-bite culture that politicians feel compelled to appease. While we revel in making international comparisons to demonize our schools (falsely), we fail to acknowledge international evidence of how to address school reform.

Let me suggest two international approaches we should be considering, both from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (UK)—a compilation of evidence on the impact of poverty on educational success and adetailed consideration of wide-scale social and education reform.

In 2013, again, U.S. political leaders and the public appear disgusted with a public education system, but this sentiment has been with us since the Committee of Ten declared education inadequate in the 1890s. We must, then, come to terms with two facts: (1) We must drop Utopian claims about education because education is not the sole key to overcoming social failures, but a single element in the larger working of our society, (2) claims of crisis in education are misleading since the problems we are considering (student outcomes and drop-out rates, for example) are patterns that have existed for over a century.

Many are arguing that the new reformers must be valued since they are creating a debate about education and rattling the cage of an entrenched status quo that is failing. I find this argument weak since we have no evidence that inexpert celebrity claims are resulting in a close consideration of what is truly wrong with our schools and what should be pursued to create the world-class schools we claim we want.

In fact, this current round of school bashing and calls for accountability and reform are an intensifying of the exact same failed solutions we have tried for three decades–all the while ignoring the genuine problems and the weight of evidence for what reforms would work

And this leads to a question I have: If Bill Gates had no money, who would listen to him about education reform? No one–the same as who should listen to him now.

* Reposting of original piece from The Answer Sheet (March 2, 2011). See why Gates remains a lingering problem at Jersey Jazzman.

Carter Godwin Woodson, James Baldwin, Poverty, race

Baldwin and Woodson: Lingering Legacy of Failing Education System

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I am currently drafting a chapter on schools as prisons (a product of zero tolerance and “no excuses” ideologies and policies), and along with the words of James Baldwin being relevant today—

The truth is that the country does not know what to do with its black population now that the blacks are no longer a source of wealth, are no longer to be bought and sold and bred, like cattle; and they especially do not know what to do with young black men, who pose as devastating a threat to the economy as they do to the morals of young white cheerleaders. It is not at all accidental that the jails and the army and the needle claim so many, but there are still too many prancing around for the public comfort. Americans, of course, will deny, with horror, that they are dreaming of anything like “the final solution”—those Americans, that is, who are likely to be asked: what goes on in the vast, private hinterland of the American heart can only be guessed at, by observing the way the country goes these days. (Baldwin, 1998, pp. 432-433) [1]

—so are the words of Carter Godwin Woodson:

[T]he educational system as it has developed both in Europe and America [is] an antiquated process which does not hit the mark even in the case of the needs of the white man himself….The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker people….The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worth while, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples. The Negro thus educated is a hopeless liability of the race. (pp. 4-5) [2]

[1] Baldwin, J. (1998). James Baldwin: Collected essays. New York, NY: The Library of America. Originally published in 1972, No Name in the Street.

[2] Woodson, C. G. (1933). The mis-education of the negro. New York, NY: Tribeca Books.

CCSS, Education, education reform

Seeking Common Ground?

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A few years after I joined my university, following 18 years as an English teacher at a rural SC public high school, the faculty ventured into the task of reforming the curriculum and academic calendar. The changes included a revised set of general education requirements, a first year seminar model, and a significant shift in the calendar from three terms and Monday-Friday class sessions to a more traditional fall/spring semester format with an optional May experience and M/W/F or T/Th class sessions.

The university now has experienced several years of the new curriculum and calendar, and is poised to assess how well the changes have been implemented. One concern among faculty and administration rests with the first year seminars. Currently, our students are required to take one first year seminar (FYS) and one first year seminar that is writing intensive (FYW).

Anecdotal and gathered evidence suggests a wide range of how the FYS/W courses are being implemented—some are strong examples of the intended goals of the seminars and how effective they can be, but many miss the goals and appear ineffective. A recent survey also shows that faculty are mixed on the effectiveness of the FYS/W courses for our curriculum and students.

As a writing teacher, I was an early and eager supporter of the move toward first year seminars, especially since that curricular change opened the door for faculty across disciplines to teach FYW classes (I am in the education department, and thus had not been teaching writing for the university since freshman writing had been under the English department). I have taught an FYW each of the academic years of the new curriculum, and have worked as closely as possible with the university to support the effectiveness of writing instruction in those courses.

This current academic year, I have chaired our faculty FYS Oversight Committee, and then was recently asked to take on a small administrative role to guide the assessment and implementation of our first year seminars. One of my first tasks has been to draft and share a common experience document [1] with FYS/W faculty in order to start a conversation about what experiences we believe are essential for FYS/W courses and how to insure all students have these experiences and how to support faculty teaching the courses.

Some of the responses from my colleagues have included strong concerns about attempts to “look over professors’ shoulders” and “dictating” what and how professors teach. When I received those responses, I have been forced to consider a powerful and important tension that now faces me in my roles as an academic at my university and as a public intellectual who spends a great deal of my time engaging in the public sphere about public education policy—a tension that required me to check myself for the very hypocrisy I have claimed about public education reformers.

The question I have asked myself: How can I justify my early and consistent rejecting of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) against my role within my university advocating for common experiences within out FYS/W courses in order to insure all students receive the highest quality education we can offer?

On the surface, the motivation for CCSS in K-12 public schools and common experiences in our FYS/Ws appear to be the same: Identify and implement standard expectations for a commonality of educational experiences by all students.

Setting aside my deep skepticism about the sincerity of those advocating for CCSS, especially at their inception, I can concede only that similarity, and I believe that my experience at the university level with changing and then implementing the curriculum offers the current failed K-12 education reform movement some key lessons about how to reform the reform movement.

Seeking common ground among educational settings must include the following paradigm shifts away from the accountability/corporate model and toward an academic/collegial model:

  • Curriculum change and implementation at the university level are grounded in professor expertise, professor autonomy, and academic freedom. These foundational beliefs provide the central tension necessary for genuine education reform. As Tierney explains, K-12 public school teachers are denied these essentials—and thus current education reform fails:

“In this country, we lurch back and forth between efforts to professionalize and efforts to infantilize public-school teachers, and have been doing so since the beginning of public schools in America. Neither kind of effort accords teachers much respect. Because teachers are chiefly employed by local governments  (unlike doctors or lawyers who are typically employed in private enterprise), there has always been a tendency on the part of some groups of people to try to exert greater central control over teachers, not believing them to be professionals who can be left to do their jobs according to their own judgment. When those skeptics hold sway, the ‘solutions’ they impose favor quantitative/metrics-based ‘accountability,’ top-down management, limitations on teachers’ autonomy, and the substitution of external authority (outside measurers and evaluators) for the expertise of educators themselves.”

  • Thus, curriculum and pedagogical changes as well as on-going evaluation of those changes are prompted and driven by faculty, in collegial (not authoritarian) partnership with administration.
  • Course development and approval are conducted by the faculty. Professors design the courses they teach, propose them to the departments and faculty committees, and then the entire faculty approves those courses.
  • Curriculum change remains “in house,” in that the changes are related to the unique mission of the university and outside political and corporate influences are essentially absent from the process (notably the influence of commercial interests related to textbooks, resources, and testing).
  • Curriculum change and the subsequent evaluation of the implementation are necessarily slow. A great deal of public deliberation (at faculty meetings and committee meetings) went into the initial changes, and that process has continued into the evaluation of the implementation.
  • A constant refrain through the change process has been: Who are our students and how well are we serving them? This is another “in house” element that honors the belief that faculty knows best the students they teach.
  • The pursuit of “common,” “challenging,” “foundational,” and “essential” is not conflated with rote standardization. In other words, faculty are both aware of and honor that a common experience may look different among the faculty teaching the seminars while students still receive high-quality common experiences. For example, our FYWs seek to provide foundational writing instruction for all our students, but the ways in which that can be achieved are varied since each professor must articulate the common experiences for the 12 students in that particular FYW (again “common” is not rote sameness).
  • Absent in the reform and implementation are issues of bureaucratic accountability or concerns about high-stakes testing.

Let me note here, however, that I am not trying to paint the university curriculum change process as some sort of ideal: We now know that despite the deliberateness of the initial process, we likely still moved too quickly, particularly in implementing the first years seminar program, and too often the practical elements of change (for example, having the necessary FYS and FYW courses, all new to the curriculum) overshadowed the issues of insuring faculty were prepared to teach the courses and that courses were being implemented as proposed.

Ultimately, however, I have a great deal of optimism about the curricular change and ongoing efforts to maintain high quality in our courses at my university, but remain deeply skeptical (even cynical) of and nearly hopeless about the failed mechanisms of current K-12 educational changes.

While I am not yet convinced, as Tierney is, that the accountability/corporate reform movement is on its last legs, I am convinced that the model I have noted above is one way that we can and should reform the reform movement.

[1] See a model of common experiences detailed at Cornell University.

Charter schools, Commons

The Ignored Arm of the Commons and the Invisible Hand of the Market

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Education Week has posted a new report on charter school funding, the blog titled “Charter Schools’ Funding Lags, Study Finds”:

Charter school students receive about $4,000 less in per-pupil funding than their regular public school peers according to an analysis of five regions across the U.S., a new report has found.

The report, conducted by the University of Arkansas and funded by the Walton Family Foundation, compared per-pupil funding rates between charter and regular public schools in Denver, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Newark, and the District of Columbia from 2007-2011.

The Walton Family Foundation has been a major backer of school-choice, including charters and private school vouchers. (The Walton Family Foundation also supports coverage of parent empowerment issues at Education Week.)

…Many of the same researchers that conducted the Ball State University study participated in the University of Arkansas research.

What should anyone make about a report coming from the Department of Education Reform Walmart housed at the public University of Arkansas?

First, the charter school movement, good or bad, depends on the existence of public schools—a fact of the Commons often ignored.

The Invisible Hand of the Market sits at the end of the Ignored Arm of the Commons.

Try running your great new business without public streets and highways, public law enforcement, or public schools educating the vast majority of workers and consumers in the U.S.

As Bruce Baker has shown [1], the charter shuffle and its dependence on public schools must never be discounted; note this graphic:

Figure 1. The General Model

—–

As Kelvin Smythe notes:

The education situation is dire, western economies are struggling, with one of its manifestations being the rich and powerful acting to undermine public schools. Charter schools not being about charter schools is emblematic of that dire situation.

Charter schools and charter school reports coming from thinly veiled free market think tanks housed inside public universities are about unfairly discrediting public schools and the wider Commons as well as misrepresenting the power and importance of the free market.

The Invisible Hand of the Market can never conduct its magic without a powerful but Ignored Arm of the Commons to guide it.

[1] See also COMPARING CHARTER SCHOOL AND LOCAL PUBLIC DISTRICT FINANCIAL RESOURCES IN NEW YORK, OHIO, AND TEXAS, Baker & Wiley (2012); and FISCAL DISPARITIES AND PHILANTHROPY AMONG NEW YORK CITY CHARTER SCHOOLS, Baker & Ferris (2011)

McCarthy Era, Merit Pay, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, REM

Where Is Our “Sense of Decency”?

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Before teaching The Crucible in my American literature courses during my two decades as a high school English teacher in rural Upstate South Carolina, I played the students R.E.M.s “Exhuming McCarthy,” which “makes an explicit parallel between the red-baiting of Joe McCarthy‘s time and the strengthening of the sense of American exceptionalism during the Reagan era, especially the Iran-Contra affair” (Wikipedia).

The song includes an audio from the McCarthy hearings, including this soundbite of Joseph Welch confronting Joe McCarthy:  “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator….You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Part of The Crucible unit asked students to examine how societies continue to repeat the basic flaws of abusing power and oppressing powerless groups of people. Despite the lessons of the Witch Trials and the Red Scare/McCarthy Era (with the Japanese Internment in between), Americans seem hell-bent on doubling down on policies and practices that are authoritarian, hypocritical, and simply mean—especially if those policies can be implemented by people with power onto the powerless.

Current education reform needs a McCarthy hearing, and we need to confront those driving those reforms with “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

For example, consider the following:

History is replete with evidence that the ends do not justify the means.

While there remains great political and public support for grade retention, for example, a huge body of evidence shows that retention negatively impacts students retained, taxpayers, and peers not retained—all for mixed results of short-term test scores.

The only justification for grade retention is giving the appearance of being tough (raising a key question about how tough any adult is for lording him/herself over a child).

Americans’ puritanical roots are some of our worst qualities, and especially where children and other marginalized groups are concerned, Americans need to regain our sense of decency.

We would be well advised to begin with how we reform our schools.