social issues

Arizona’s Ban on Ethnic Studies: The Latest Battleground over Ideology, Power, and Voice

noreply@blogger.com (Lorraine Kasprisin) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:31:00 +0000

The recent dismantling of the Mexican American Studies Program in Tucson, Arizona has less to do with facts over a highly successful thirteen year old curriculum taught in the Tucson Unified School District and more to do with ideological dominance and power over whose voices will be heard in a democracy.

In response to the long historical failure of the public schools to raise academic achievement and reduce the dropout rates of students of color, the Tucson Unified School District created a Mexican American studies program that would be more culturally responsive and socially relevant to the needs of the large population of Latino students in the district. By all accounts, the program has been highly successful. Readers can go to the Save Ethnic Studies website for details about audits on the program’s effectiveness. In 2010, in a highly charged political environment, the Arizona State Legislature passed HB 2281 banning any program that “prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that: promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” (Arizona Revised Statute § 15-112, 2010)

Despite the state’s own commissioned study that showed the Mexican American Studies Program fully complied with the law and had produced significant results in student achievement, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal , nevertheless, continued his pressure to suspend the program. In January of this year, faced with a multimillion dollar reduction in state aid as a penalty, the Tucson School Board voted 4-1 to dismantle the program. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is now considering a suit that was brought by students and teachers. The court found, however, that the teachers do not have standing but that the suit by students could continue. Teachers have set up a website, Save Ethnic Studies, where readers can follow the progress of the case, donate to the cause, and sign a petition.

The struggle in Arizona goes to the heart of democracy. As U.S. Rep. Raul M. Grijalva says, “This legislation against diversity might be focused on Tucson, but it has significant ramifications across the country.” (Biggers, 2011) It raises questions about who will have a voice and how that voice will be exercised. It asks whose history should be taught and how it should be portrayed. Ultimately, it raises questions about truth. Do we betray our students by presenting only a sanitized account of our history; do we pretend that this nation has never failed to live up to its ideals; do we continue to suppress voices that have been historically silenced, or more often, co-opted and appropriated by the dominant discourse. Or do we allow and encourage alternative narratives in a more inclusive democratic conversation. Public education is at the heart of these questions.

As teachers were ordered to box the censored books for storage in the Textbook Depository, one cannot help but wonder what messages were being sent by a political authority that was supposedly concerned about not promoting ethnic resentment. For young people whose encounter with these books led to self discovery, positive images of Latino identity, and transformative knowledge and action, the State’s actions must surely have been traumatizing and a lesson in the very oppression and hegemony that often defined the social conditions of their communities.

References

Biggers, J. (2011). Arizona's Ethnic Studies Ban Has National Ramifications, Warns U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, HuffPost, Posted: 5/11/11 11:00 PM ET. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/arizonas-ethnic-studies-b_b_860860.html on January 21, 2012.

Prohibited Courses and Classes; Enforcement. AZ Rev. Stat. §15-112 (2010) Retrieved from azleg.gov.

For more insights into this issue, I invite readers to visit the upcoming issue of our electronic journal, the Journal of Educational Controversy (Volume 6 Number 1) and read “The Hypocrisy of Racism: Arizona's Movement towards State-Sanctioned Apartheid” by Augustine F. Romero, Director of Student Equity and Co-Founder of the Social Justice Project, Tucson Unified School District, Arizona.

Going Beyond Textbooks to Paint a Fuller Picture of Dr. Martin Luther King for Students

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Stitzlein) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:17:00 +0000

From a national holiday in his honor to a firm position in the state standards guiding the prescribed curriculum of nearly all schools, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the most widely celebrated civil rights leaders and dissenting activists in America. Examining the treatment of this exemplar as portrayed in widely adopted social studies textbooks reveals important and worrisome insight into the prescribed treatment of leaders who engage in social and political dissent, if they are mentioned at all. While the content of what is taught about an historical figure certainly encompasses more than just the adopted textbooks of the school, textbooks offer a starting point for examining the account of a figure that has been, at minimum, tacitly endorsed by the school board through their adoption of the text, even if teachers may chose to supplement or ignore its contents.

My graduate research assistant and I examined the treatment of King in nine major textbooks selected based on large state adoptions as chronicled by the American Textbook Council, representing 80% of the textbook market in social studies. In most textbooks, King is celebrated as a hero who preached love and unity as he tried to bring together Americans divided by racism. A typical portrayal of King is demonstrated in the eighth grade social studies textbook, Creating America: “Dr. King became the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. Fresh out of school, he had been in Montgomery about a year. But his courage and eloquence made him a perfect person to lead the movement. King learned about nonviolence by studying religious writers and thinkers. He came to believe that only love could convert people to the side of justice. He described the power of non-violent resisters: ‘We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And in winning our freedom…we will win you in the process’” (p. 585). While there certainly are many aspects of this image that are true, these textbooks tend to ignore the complexities of King’s life as a political dissenter and social activist. The radical aspects of his work, especially those that became clearer later in his life as he fought poverty and the Vietnam War, are rarely mentioned, if at all.

One of the few mentions is the rather innocuous statement in The American Nation: “He became increasingly upset that funding for social programs was being diverted to the war in Vietnam” (p. 938). With the exception of the more nuanced portrait offered by Joy Hakim in A History of Us, the overall textbook impression offered of King is as a gentle uniter—one who is accepted and appreciated by all—and one who worked hard to calmly win over white people. He is shown in contrast to some of his Civil Rights colleagues who chose to focus on empowering Black peers instead and especially in contrast to Malcolm X whose radical tactics many textbooks imply should not be emulated. Failing to demonstrate for students the ways in which King passionately and even, at times, angrily engaged dissent to reveal problems, break unjust laws, rally the public, and demand alternative ways of living, prevents students from seeing the success and necessity of dissent and activism in democracy. Painting such a limited and seemingly rosy image of King suggests that the work of other dissenters who are less well-known or respected may be even more problematic or inaccurate, possibly depriving students of a rich account of the complexities and sustained efforts of those who practice dissent well. In order to paint a fuller and more accurate picture of King and his contributions, schools need to go beyond the image offered in popular textbooks.

Parents Outweigh Curriculum in New Hampshire

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Stitzlein) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 02:30:00 +0000

The House and Senate of New Hampshire kicked off the new year by overturning a veto by democratic Governor John Lynch on HB 542. This bill allows parents to object to classroom curricula (and in some cases also the way material is taught) and requires schools to offer an alternative that is satisfactory to parents. Most obviously, the implementation of such a bill is a nightmare for teachers who, though unlikely, could face dozens of objections and alternative requirements for their students at any one time. But perhaps more importantly, this bill favors the views of parents potentially to the detriment of the public good, the dissolution of democratically selected curriculum, and the full development of the child as an autonomous liberal chooser which requires exposure to multiple and conflicting worldviews and life choices.

Cases such as Wisconsin vs Yoder, Pierce vs Society of Sisters, and Mozert vs Hawkins County Board of Education have struggled to balance parents’ rights, children’s autonomous development, freedom of religious practice, and the needs of the state. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has also weighed in on the issue, suggesting that children should receive a certain type of education that prepares them for peaceful global citizenship, while also allowing that parents should have choice over the type of education that children receive.

While the scales seem to have been tipped toward the parents in NH last week, I am reminded of a counter call from a fellow philosopher of education, Sigal Ben Porath: “"When parents oppose teaching their children a democratic, civic curricula (as in Mozert), they ‘do not have a general right to override otherwise legitimate democratic decisions concerning the schooling of their children.’ It is therefore the school’s commitment to democracy that takes precedence over any demand made by specific parents or groups regarding the civic education of children. This claim, widely accepted by political, educational, and legal commentators in the context of Mozert, should be extended to include situations in which the social majority rejects the educational commitment to substantive democracy. The democratic argument for committing the public education system to the principles of democracy, not to majority rule or parental authority, should be maintained in better and worse times." I can see how parents should have some outlets for expressing objections and putting forward alternatives when the content taught in schools is legitimately wrong or sufficiently unjust (I’m thinking here of some of the worrisome social studies content favored in Texas and the limited version of history endorsed by the state in Arizona and Florida). But overall, I generally favor tipping the scales toward democracy, including curriculum that is democratically constructed and geared toward the public good.

I'm (not) a little teapot? A Muslim family's accommodation request causes consternation in Québec

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:18:00 +0000

The scene: a kindergarten. Little children are singing a simple song together. As usual, some follow the words easily and know the tune, while others hang back, more hesitant. At first glance, it seems like a familiar tableau.

Yet in this Québec classroom, something is different. One child is not participating--while the other children sing and chant, she sits quietly, wearing noise cancelling headphones. Her parents are conservative Muslims, and they have decided to forbid her from participating in the school's musical activities.

The Montreal tabloid Le Journal de Montréal reports that this scene is a regular occurrence at one kindergarten class in Montreal's Saint-Michel neighborhood. The decision has been backed by both the school authorities and the Ministry of Education.

Given the fact that reasonable accommodation of difference is an especially touchy subject in Québec, it isn't surprising that this story quickly roused the ire of both right-wingers and supporters of French-style strict secularism. The Journal de Montréal's conservative columnist Richard Martineau assessed the headphones as, "...the perfect symbol of the stagnation in which Québec is wallowing" and suggested that, by neglecting to rectify the situation, "the government has literally sacrificed a 5 year-old girl on the altar of state policy." Martineau doesn't pull any punches, but he also demonstrates that he has a weak grasp on the meaning of the word "literal."

Over in Le Devoir, a newspaper typically more left wing than Journal de Montreal, Antoine Baby, a retired education professor from Laval University in Québec City, offers a lengthier analysis of the situation. His polemic begins as follows:

This isn't an isolated event; it's a question of an event that is part of a worrisome and troubling trend in Quebec. It is thus necessary to come back to it and create a debate about it. It isn't sufficient to be indignant [s'indigner] about this incident; one should really be up in arms [s'insurger]. By giving in to the opportunistic and irresponsible demand of this little girl's parents, the school officials have demonstrated a serious lack of judgment and discernment.

He reserves some serious alliterative rhetorical thunder for the Ministry of Education:

[Le Devoir] has already pointed out the illogical nature of the Ministerial position which claims that the decision of the school in question doesn't go against the curriculum. This is incredible, inconceivable, unimaginable, and irresponsible!...In kindergarten, music, songs, and stories are part of the curriculum and they are a powerful tool for learning and socialization. Anyone who pretends otherwise is evidently not worthy of being Minister of Education.

And he offers a pessimistic conclusion:

Anyone who claims that by isolating a kindergarten child in this way and by approving this decision, that we've agreed on a "reasonable accommodation" is a person who has understood neither the challenges involved in constructing a modern Québec identity nor the challenges associated with integrating new immigrants.

As Professor Baby's response indicates, the headphone case has some Quebeckers riled up. It isn't difficult to see why; there is something disturbing about a child being forbidden to participate in an apparently benign activity that she would probably enjoy. Our ideals of how childhood should be are offended by the practice of depriving a child of music.

Yet at the same time, it's important to figure out whether there's any real harm to the child or his/her classroom that's going on here. The Journal de Montreal reports that the little girl is happy in her classroom and gets along well with her classmates, despite this seemingly disruptive accommodation. If this is indeed correct, then it doesn't seem as though any significant harm is being done to this child through this accommodation. Granted, she may be missing out on an educationally useful activity, but not a particularly critical one.

It is also important to keep in mind that in the event that the accommodation is not granted, the parents could withdraw this child from public school and either (a) send her to a religious private school or (b) home school her. From the standpoint of social integration, each of these alternatives would, arguably, be significantly worse. In a public school in a neighborhood like Saint-Michel, this child has the opportunity to meet other children whose home cultures are significantly different from her own. This is far less likely to be true in a religious private school setting.

In addition, neither Professor Baby nor Mr. Martineau acknowledge that there is already a quasi-official policy in place for judging whether a cultural/religious accommodation should be granted in an educational setting. The 2008 Bouchard-Taylor Report on Accommodation Practices laid out the following three criteria for adjudicating these kinds of of situations:

A request must not:
1. violate the student’s other rights or the rights of other students;
2. run counter to the rigorously restrictive requirements of the Education Act, program organization or other statutes;
3. impose undue hardships on the school with regard to its operations and budget.

There's certainly some debate that's possible about point two, but even here, it doesn't seem as though this accommodation violates any "rigorously restrictive requirement." As far as points one and three are concerned, despite Martineau's rhetoric of "literal sacrifice," there seems to be very little sacrificing actually going on. The people who are angriest about this event are those that are speculating from the sidelines. The school staff, the girl, and her parents all seem to be managing reasonably well.

We are all tempted to stick our proverbial oars in when we see accommodation of a cultural practice that we dislike. And there are certainly times when it is legitimate to protest--there have to be limits to accommodation practices, and the Bouchard-Taylor report does an excellent job of pointing out when the limits may apply. We should keep this in mind the next time the media stirs the reasonable accommodation pot.

Samasource: ethical outsourcing or 21st century deskilling?

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:28:00 +0000

For the last couple of weeks, I've been away on a trip in New Zealand. It's a spectacular place, and I've been "tramping" (this is the New Zealand word for walking) along all kinds of magical trails. As such, I haven't had much time for blogging. However, on a drive between tramps, I did manage to take in a fascinating BBC radio documentary on Samasource, a new San Francisco non-profit that does ethical outsourcing. This story annoyed me to such an extent that I felt compelled to write a post about it when I returned.

Samasource is a non-profit organization that claims to "bring dignified, computer-based work to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty." The work that Samasource farms out includes typing out business cards and receipts, checking scanned text for errors, and verifying business listings. Samasource then pays women and refugees a living wage to do this work.

What could possibly be wrong with this?

The difficulty is that Samasource's foundational premise is an old and familiar one: it outsources unpleasant, repetitive tasks to the poor. Take, for example, transcription, which is one of the services advertised by Samasource. Any former research assistant can testify that transcription is a painfully boring and unredeeming task. You listen to the words on the recording and type them out. There's very little thought involved. In order to complete the job, you do need to be able to type and spell, but it isn't the type of job in which you'll learn much of anything. Verifying business listings and checking scanned text, Samasource's other offerings, fall into exactly the same category.

Not surprisingly, though, the women and refugees who are hired to do these tasks are happy to have jobs. Checking scans certainly beats being unemployed and hungry, after all. There is little doubt that Samasource is improving the lives of the people that it employs in terms of their material well being.

Still, Samasource's work raises a number of questions. First, what about the North American workers who are going to lose their jobs thanks to Samasource?

I'll use an example from my own work to illustrate this problem: right now, it costs me at least $17/hr. to have my research assistants transcribe interviews. The going rate on Samasource, by contrast, is a bit more than $1/hr. What a savings! I could hire at least 10 Samasource employees for the price of one North American research assistant.

Of course, research assistants aren't really the example that we should be worried about. Big companies like Facebook and LinkedIn have been contracting with Samasource in order to get their repetitive tasks done. For companies like these, Samasource offers a tempting twofer: it allows them to make more money by outsourcing their work for next to nothing and, simultaneously, lets them portray themselves as upstanding corporate citizens. Samasource, after all, is a charitable organization that is dedicated to doing good.

A second problem concerns the nature of the work that is being outsourced. In order to get a hint of what this problem might be, let's examine some of the comments that Samasource's founder, Leila Janah, made in the BBC documentary:

I liken what we do [at Samasource] to what Ford did, back in the early 1900s...Ford figured out how to break down the making of what was considered a very complicated machine, the automobile, that previously had only been made in craftsman's studios by people who were highly specialized and spent years making one machine--he figured out a way to divide up the work into small tasks, and teach people to do one of those tasks, and together, they could make a car. But each person didn't know how to make a car individually.

In these comments, Ms. Janah makes the bold move of presenting Fordist deskilling as a positive development for workers. Of course, from her perspective, it is positive, since it is deskilling that makes Samasource possible. Break the tasks into simple, repetitive increments, and anyone can do it! That's Henry Ford's democratic promise!

Despite Ms. Janah's sentiments to the contrary, there is a possibility that this kind of repetitive labor might not be good for people. A classic study of autoworkers from the 1950s, The Man on the Assembly Line, is especially illuminating. Here's how one autoworker in the study felt about his work:

The assembly line is no place to work, I can tell you. There is nothing more discouraging than having a barrel beside you with 10,000 bolts in it and using them all up. Then you get a barrel with another 10,000 bolts, and you know every one of those 10,000 bolts has to be picked up and put in exactly the same place as the last 10,000 bolts.

One can imagine workers feeling the same way about one of Samasource's tasks: digitizing business cards by typing them into a database. In fact, screwing in the bolts might actually be preferable--at least in the case of the bolts, the autoworker was building something with a clear use.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Janah clearly sees the Samasource workers as empowered rather than alienated, as the following comment from the BBC documentary shows:

These are people who have been told that they don't belong in the global economy and that their place is in the fields, doing manual labor...the idea that they could be valued for their brains is so empowering, and I think that's really what Samasource does beyond the income...it makes people feel like they're included, like they're on a level playing field with the rest of the world.

Thus, instead of doing manual labor in the fields, the Samasource workers have been set free to be "valued for their brains" on the digital assembly line. Granted, earning a relatively large salary doing repetitive computer tasks is probably preferable to working in the fields, but no one should be under any illusion that these workers are being "valued for their brains" more in one setting than in the other. If anything, working on a digital assembly line probably requires less brainpower than working in the fields.

In passing, it's worth noting that neither of these two obvious criticisms were addressed in the BBC documentary. This really bothered me. I would have thought that critical thinking was alive and well in the UK (and especially at the BBC), but it certainly wasn't in evidence in this documentary, which offered a fawningly uncritical portrait of Samasource.

The bottom line is that working for Samasource makes marginalized people less marginalized than they were before. This is something. Yet there is something rather disquieting about a charity that puts people to work on deskilled, repetitive tasks for the benefit of large corporations. We should think twice before we praise ventures like Samasource from the rooftops.

Danger: Thin Understanding!

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Shuffelton) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:29:00 +0000

Over a year after it came out, I finally sat down to watch Waiting for Superman. A conversation between the filmmaker and an African American grandmother from Washington DC, who has custody of her grandson Anthony, hit the issues square on the head, I thought. "Choice?", the grandmother exclaims. Taking in Anthony after his father died was no choice, she continues. He had no one else, so of course she raised him.

The rest of the movie was bunk. A case can be made for charter schools, but this film's shallow understanding of education puts its level of argument somewhere below that of a pre-service teacher at the end of one good semester of ed school. Those teachers, in other words, have a better understanding of education than Guggenheim does. When the cartoon showed a teacher pouring knowledge into the head of a child (with a comment to the effect of "it should be easy, right; knowledge goes from the teacher to the child"), I had to turn the movie off for a minute. I had to again after the movie claimed that of course KIPP schools can be scaled up -- after all there are around 80 already! -- as if this were any kind of evidence. (Even KIPP's founders deny that KIPP can be scaled up to include all schoolchildren who would benefit from such a program.) And while those were the most egregious errors, there were plenty more.

As I watched, I kept wondering if Guggenheim was aware of the irony of including that grandmother's quote. Choice? There is no choice. If there are children who need to be cared for, those who care about them take them in. That has never been a factual description of the United States, but it is certainly our ideal, our national myth. If all of us thought about schools and schoolchildren the way that grandmother thought about her grandson -- as vulnerable yet invaluable people who need care and commitment, not a menu of choices -- we'd end up with . . . well, public schooling.

This is but one of the deep and important truths that public schoolteachers understand. I'd call them the real Supermen, except, of course, most of them are not men. They're women. So, given that most schoolteachers are women, why not "Waiting for Wonderwoman"? Because there is an ugly gendered undercurrent to the criticisms of public school teachers at large in our national discourse -- and in this ugly movie. One of those other simple lessons that Guggenheim seems to have missed is that anytime you're inclined to scapegoat a group of relatively disempowered people for a national problems, you should think again.

I waited a year to see this movie, and might as well have kept on waiting. The filmmaker, I'm sorry to say, seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel.

Karl Rove's latest attack ad: Watch out, Elizabeth Warren's got THEORIES!

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:41:00 +0000

Another week, another attack ad aimed at Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. This one, apparently, is courtesy of Karl Rove and his American Crossroads organization.

This ad, completely ridiculous though it may be, is substantially more effective than the last one. Let's go through it frame by frame:

First up in the good ol' anti-intellectual playbook, we've got to highlight the fact that Elizabeth Warren is a professor. But Rove hits the anti-intellectual/red-baiting twofer by putting the big red socialist banner in the background! He's off to a promising start, here.

Next up, it's time for a quick segue to some Occupy Wall Street footage. First up, we've got a sign waving hippie girl, a sight which is, no doubt, guaranteed to warm the hearts of the elderly inhabitants of the Bay State.

The narrator intones that the protesters "attack police", and we've got a ominous looking shot of someone (perhaps a police officer) on the ground. Sirens wail in the background. Watch out, old rich people--next stop, armed revolt!

These Wall Street protesters "do drugs, and trash public parks." Those dirty, dirty hippies! Who knows what else they're up to down there?

Next up, we hear a bit about "radical redistribution of wealth" and "violence." I bet that this hat-wearing skater dude with the upside-down American flag is probably not meant to represent the sanctity of property rights...

Now we're back to Elizabeth Warren, and she looks mad! Uh oh...she's one of these professor ladies with ideas who thinks she knows better than you with her so-called "intellectual foundations." She's the kind of lady that might want to TAKE AWAY OUR PRECIOUS FREEDOMS!

After this, we've got some more jumping hippie protesters (they're old hat now), but we've also got this image, which flits by:

"Throw me a bone, pay my tuition," says the sign. And here we have another classic trope: the student bum, who sits around and wants the working stiffs to pay her tuition, while she studies art history or educational philosophy or some bullshit like that. Great move, Karl!

And now, at the end of the spot, Rove returns to the core theme of anti-intellectualism. "We need jobs, not more intellectual theories and protests."

Actually, some "intellectual theories" (as opposed to non-intellectual theories?) might be exactly what we need. Surely we need some sort of understanding of the problem in order to figure out how to generate jobs. One would hope that this obvious fallacy would be apparent to the viewing audience, but I guess we'll see.

Occupy our Classrooms!

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Stitzlein) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:44:00 +0000

Two recent newspaper stories caught my attention. In both, teachers sought to connect the content they were teaching to the Occupy protestors in public parks near their schools. In one case, the teacher engaged her students in asking the protestors about the rationales for their actions, the understandings of democracy that prompted their actions, and the like. Given that much of our current prescribed, tested, and hidden curriculum works to silence student protest and divorce teaching of democracy from that actual practice of democracy occurring outside school doors, I found these stories to be worth celebrating.

Educating students for citizenship should not be confined to school walls or school personnel. It’s important that children experience organic efforts at trying out citizenship and dissent by studying and at appropriate times even working alongside real people engaged in struggle, doing what Giroux calls making “the political more pedagogical.” Efforts to bring children out to politically and civically active groups and to bring those groups into schools helps to unite the prescribed and external curriculum. Skilled teachers can bring those external experiences back into the classroom as fodder for discussion, such as critique of the way the group operates, including how it uses language and media to engage dissent, how it builds coalitions, and whether or not its intentions are good, thereby helping students better understand how successful dissenting groups work and how they keep democracy healthy. Moreover, such an experience allows children to see how real life people engaged in protest experience suffering, struggle, and triumph, humanizing the learning of dissenting citizenship for children.

So I say let us use the Occupy protests as learning opportunities to help our students make sense of the political events occurring around them and, moreover, to learn to appreciate (and even practice) dissent as central to a flourishing democracy.

"For now I see what is the matter with you, John Dewey": Dispatches from the Scudder Klyce files

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:30:00 +0000

One of the little known facts about Dewey is that he had an intense, frequent correspondence with a very strange ex-Navy man, Scudder Klyce (the image above is a postcard sent by Klyce in 1907, when he was on a naval posting in Nicaragua).

Outside of the world of Dewey scholarship, Klyce is perhaps best known his book, Universe, to which Dewey wrote a forward. The opening lines of the book describe Klyce's ambitious project clearly:

1. a. This book is a brief description, and rigorous proof of the truth of the description, of the universe and all that appertains to it, both "spiritual" and "material." Hence, the book is religion, science, and philosophy.

Since Universe is (as one would expect) rather heavy going, I will make no judgment here as to whether Klyce succeeded in this difficult task.

At any rate, Klyce was a bright man, but he was also an odd duck, as virtually all of his (extremely lengthy) letters to Dewey make clear.

Consider, for example, Klyce's comments in a letter to Dewey, dated July 31, 1927. Klyce has recently found out that Dewey's wife had died, and he takes the time to send the following sympathetic missive:

I am very sorry that your wife has died. And I thank you for telling me the circumstances. For now I can see what is and has been the matter with you. I am sorry that I have been bothering you when your mind was thus preoccupied. This letter of yours which I have just received (yesterday afternoon) is so confused and contradictory as to be substantially incoherent. And I state that simple fact without implying any sort of adverse criticism—I am rather inclined to consider it a positive merit on your part that you should have written such intellectuallly defective stuff.

And the letter does not stop here!
Klyce continues:

Possibly even under the circumstances you will still require the specific citation of fact, to indicate that you are actually confused. So I shall briefly give it.

Brief, in Klyce's terms, implies a 2200 word discourse, which then follows. But don't think that Klyce is finished his letter just yet! He has been talking to some of his friends, who have had a lot to say about Dewey's value as an intellectual:

Now, while I am about it, I think I had better give you another hard blow—and I assure you that I regret the necessity, and am deeply sure that it is for your own final advantage. Some time ago I managed to get a young professor who is informed on such matters, to tell me in confidence how your professional work is regarded by probably the majority of young professors. He was quite positive that the consensus of opinion is that you are remarkably good in many details; that your intentions were certainly fine and inspiring, as was your personality to those who had had the advantage of your personal teaching; but that almost unuanimously the younger men who hadn't come into personal contact with you considered that your books were so excruciatingly hard to read that they weren't often read in whole; and that it was impossible to determine what you meant to be your general or fundamental teaching or doctrine, and that many questioned whether you had any real knowledge yourself of what real idea you intended or wanted to teach.

Even after this letter, the Dewey/Klyce correspondence continues for almost another year, right up until Klyce decided to publish all of the private letters that Dewey had written to him as Dewey's Suppressed Psychology. Such was Dewey's reward for his dedicated, decade-long correspondence with this difficult individual.

Fixing schools because we can't fix the real problems

noreply@blogger.com (Barbara Stengel) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:40:00 +0000

Did you catch Charles Blow's piece in the weekend NY Times featuring this chart? The chart is aptly titled "Bottom of the Heap" and makes clear that when it comes to the concept of the "just society," the United States does not make the grade. The US ranks 27th among 31 developed nations in measures of intergenerational justice (poverty prevention, child poverty, senior citizen poverty, income inequality, pre-primary education and health rating). Our senior citizens are not at the bottom of the barrel (thank you, Medicare and Social Security), our health rating is higher than Mexico and the former Eastern Bloc countries (something to brag about?), and we spend nearly as much as Finland on pre-primary education (not as good as it sounds since we're still in the next to the last quintile), but the other ratings are truly terrible.

As I was studying this chart I was reminded that inequality is not born and nurtured in our schools; it is deeply woven into American society. It is created by adults and sustained by adults -- and it should be up to adults to talk openly and respectfully about what kind of social fabric we want to weave and wear. Instead we talk about equity vs. excellence (a false dichotomy if there ever was one) and ask that we fix what ails society through high quality schooling.

I am all for high quality schooling for all our children -- and we need to mobilize every person and every resource in that effort not because it solves inequality but because education is good -- for students, for communities, for economic interests. But I can't help but think that those who consider themselves "new reformers" of public schools are fixing schools because they just don't know how to fix any of our real societal problems.

Mental and Moral Science

noreply@blogger.com (Barbara Stengel) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:01:00 +0000

I just finished reading an obituary for the Jungian psychologist James Hillman who -- with Robert Bly and Michael Meade -- was a key figure in the "men's movement" of the 1990s. Two interesting points worth pondering today:

1) Hillman took seriously our "demons," urging that thoughts of death and suicide be thought of not as symptoms of mental "illness" to be cured, but as philosophical longings to be explored and understood. Parents who were trying to "manage" a mentally troubled son would be well-advised to to begin by NOT trying to change him. Counterintuitive? Surely but oh so sensible. This brought to mind thoughts of R.D. Laing's thesis in The Politics of Experience that insanity was just a sane response to an insane world. Why is THAT rolling around my psyche right about now?

2) Hillman graduated from Trinity College in Dublin with a degree in "mental and moral science," a phrase and a concept Dewey might have a good time with. Where could one study such things today?

Wisdom from Experience and Nature

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:35:00 +0000

A lovely remark in Experience and Nature caught my eye recently:

The "matter" of materialists and the "spirit" of idealists is a creature similar to the constitution of the United States in the minds of unimaginative persons. Obviously the real constitution is certain basic relationships among the activities of the citizens of the country; it is a property of phase of these processes, so connected with them as to influence their rate and and direction of change. But by literalists it is often conceived of as something external to them; in itself fixed, a rigid framework to which all changes must accommodate themselves. Similarly what we call matter is that character of natural events which is so tied up with changes that are sufficiently rapid...It is no cause or source of events or processes; no absolute monarch; no principle of explanation..." (p. 73)

It's meant to be a call to think about reality in terms of experience rather than in terms of underlying substance. However, there's lots of political food for thought here as well, particularly given the times in which we find ourselves, in which constitutional literalism is, rather surprisingly, stronger even than in Dewey's time.

Anti-intellectualism: it's back!

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 03:03:00 +0000

Remember 2008, when conservatives mocked Obama for being an "arugula-eating pointy-headed professor type"? With all of the hooting and hollering about Obama's alleged "intellectual elite" status, I had thought that 2008 might have been a high-water mark for anti-intellectualism, which Richard Hofstadter defined as "a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it."
Of course, there was nothing unprecedented about this hostility--America has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism. Thomas Jefferson, one of the less boring founding fathers, was derided during the campaign of 1800 for his "shewy talents" and his dangerously French "theoretic learning."

So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that in 2011, with the Republican primaries in full swing, anti-intellectualism is back, baby!

Let's start with a look at Herman Cain's campaign. Despite being a raving anti-Muslim lunatic (at least by Canadian standards), Cain is actually doing very well in the Republican primaries at the moment. Kent Short, who appears in the following testimonial for Cain, is a hard-core Herman fan. And Kent may also have some anti-intellectual tendencies, as it turns out:

Kent is a butcher, who, as the video points out, "turns steers into steaks." He isn't the kind of guy who's going to believe in the bullshit that they churn out at Columbia and Harvard, where they're busy readin' newspapers (?) and term papers. Thankfully, Herman Cain isn't a term-paper-reading kind of dude. He knows how to run a business--in fact, as the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, he might well know how to turn pigs into pepperoni. In the anti-intellectual view of things, this is exactly the kind of knowledge that's required to run the business of government.

Exhibit B is Scott Brown's campaign against Elizabeth Warren in the senate race in Massachusetts. Brown is a real-estate lawyer who was a former winner of an America's Sexiest Man contest. Warren, by contrast, is a Harvard Professor. As you might have guessed, this combo means that it's time for an anti-intellectualism RED ALERT!

Elizabeth Warren has done three things in her life: taught school (strike one!), done research (oh dear!) and "thrown rocks at people I thought were in the wrong" (cue ominous drums and shaky camera). The phrase "Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren" are on screen for a solid ten seconds. Clearly, Sexy Scott is a real man of the people, whereas Elizabeth is a resentful, bitchy, brainy elitist who doesn't know anything about the real world, wants to take away your precious freedoms, and is even going to throw metaphorical rocks at you.

Will we see more anti-intellectualism as Campaign 2012 shapes up? Despite his tendency to take protean policy positions, if Mitt Romney is nominated, he is going to have a hard time explaining away his Harvard MBA. If Rick Perry or Herman Cain are nominated, though, I suspect that anti-intellectualism's best days may yet be ahead of it.

Do you have some interesting examples of anti-intellectualism from Campaign 2011/2012? Post them in the comments.

Education Connection: worst ad in America or worst company in America?

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:05:00 +0000

The Consumerist, a consumer rights blog, is running their annual "Worst Ad in America" contest. Beyond the usual mix of unfunny jokes, horrible theme songs, or hackneyed corporate spokesthings, one ad caught my eye. It's a spot for Education Connection, a company which claims to help match students with colleges. If you click on the video, you will discover why Education Connection has been nominated for Worst Jingle:

But it's not the quality of the jingle that interests me here. Our pitchwoman sings, "It matched me with the right college for me for free." As Neil Young says, "Tell me more, tell me more." Who are these altruists who want to inform America's youth about their exciting college options?

In order to find out, I decided to sign up for Education Connection as a prospective student. I gave one of my old California addresses, selected Education doctoral programs as my main interest, and waited to see what popped up. Might it be Stanford? The University of California network? The affordable Cal State system perhaps?

You can imagine my surprise when the University of Phoenix and Ashford University (two for-profit, online institutions) popped up in the recommendation box.

This, of course, is what I had suspected all along. Knowing that America's for-profit universities have been having trouble ~~luring new victims~~ recruiting new students these days, I suspected that they would be eager to embrace alternative recruiting channels. This is particularly true due to the settlement of a recent class-action lawsuit, in which two whistleblowers alleged that University of Phoenix had made incentive payments to its own recruiters based on the number of students recruited, an illegal practice. U of P paid $78.5 million to settle this lawsuit, admitting no wrongdoing. But although it may be illegal to pay your own recruiters this way, there's no problem with paying Education Connection to generate leads for you.

It's not particularly difficult to connect the dots between Education Connection and for-profit institutions. If we take a look at Education Dynamics (their slogan: "Find, enroll, retain."), the parent company of Education Connection, we see a very close relationship to the for-profit sector. Let's take a look at a line in CEO Tom Anderson's bio:

As CEO, Tom leads EducationDynamics into a new phase of growth by expanding on the Company's commitment to being the most trusted partner for higher education institutions and the students they seek to serve, particularly as students receive less government support and the industry faces increased regulatory oversight.

Hmmmmmm. And let's have a look at the bio of Richard Capezzali, the founder of Education Connection:

...Richard’s career in proprietary education spans forty years...

Richard, evidently, is a veteran of the for-profit university game. We can be sure that he knows how to find, enroll, and retain.

In addition to outsourcing your recruitment, the other advantages of relying on Education Connection are obvious. The for-profits can let this middleman make the lowbrow, Slap-Chop style pitch to the poor suckers who'd like to go to school the EZ way, and then fork over some dough once some of them sign on the line. The core brand remains untarnished, which fits nicely with the glossy, high-minded "I am a Phoenix" ads at the airport.

It would be lovely if Education Connection were only a joke. Sadly, people actually sign up for this stuff. In fact, Education Connection seems to be doing very well--they've even managed to recruit a celebrity spokeswoman. Former 90210 actress Shannen Doherty has signed up to be the pitchwoman for Education Connection, and she's quite enthusiastic about her new job:

"Education Connection helped me find a way to go back to school. The site made it easy for me to choose the right program and earn my degree while maintaining my busy lifestyle," said Doherty. "I made the decision to do something smart for my future and I want to inspire others to do the same."

Needless to say, it isn't a smart decision. As we've documented here on the blog before, students who join up with for-profit institutions are frequently signing on for crippling debt and slim prospects of graduation.

Of course, all of these programs do have the killer advantage of allowing you to go to college in your PJs. That counts for a lot in the whole college-choice equation, evidently. See below...

Tough questions: new teachers and free speech

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 19:05:00 +0000

In life, most of us (save those, perhaps, that adopt an unabashed go-with-your-gut philosophy) experience the occasional moment of internal conflict and indecision. Usually, these happen to me at the store, when I'm trying to choose between Oat Flakes and Oat Clusters. Difficult waters to navigate--ingredient lists that extend far beyond oats, stunning illustrations of the magic of food chemistry, and so on. This is why it sometimes takes me a while to emerge from the supermarket.

But, once in a while, conflicted moments happen in the professional context. Last week, I was invited to appear on a panel at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI). The topic of the panel was dealing controversial issues in the classroom, and I had been invited because the students had read my article on the Morin case.

Some quick background on the case--Richard Morin was a grade 9 teacher in Charlottetown, PEI. As part of a unit on "What religion means to different people," Morin decided to show his students a BBC documentary that was critical of Christian fundamentalism. Following parent complaints about the film and a dispute between Morin and the school administration, he was suspended, and was subsequently not rehired. After he lost his job, he launched what became a 20 year court battle, in which he argued that his free expression rights had been violated. In the end, he was vindicated, although fighting the case (he acted as his own lawyer) exacted a tremendous toll on his life.

In the panel discussion, I shared the stage (via Skype) with a school principal, a former teacher, and a school superintendent. The other three panelists, who went first, all urged a measure of caution when bringing up controversial topics in the classroom. They urged the students to consult with administrators and to discuss their plans with colleagues. They pointed out that it was important to know the curriculum very well, and to stick fairly closely to it. They also urged teachers to be cautious when students introduced controversial subjects into class discussion.

When it was my turn to say my piece on the panel, I echoed all of this advice. I felt sick at heart about the possibility that my article or my suggestions as a panelist could inspire a new teacher to embark on a course of action that would be disastrous for them personally. As a professor, I have tremendous autonomy to say what I wish to say in my classroom. As a new, probationary teacher, one's autonomy is obviously much more constrained and fragile. Surely, the story of Morin is in some sense a cautionary tale--after all, the man showed a slightly controversial film and lost his job. His only reward for exercising his free speech was an extraordinarily long court battle and a paltry court costs award. This is certainly not a fate that I would wish on anyone.

At the same time, though, I felt conflicted about my cautionary advice. I didn't write the article on the Morin case in order to make teachers more cautious! I wrote about it because it was an inspirational victory for teacher free speech. I wrote about it because it was an extraordinary case of a man who had fought to the end for an important principle. I felt, and I still feel, that the Morin case clears an important space for teacher free expression in Canada.

The whole question reminded me of something I'd read on this blog a few months ago. In Feburary, Amy Shuffelton wrote about how she had dealt with a sensitive issue that arose in her university classroom. As Wisconsinites, her students had wanted to talk about the protests in Madison. Amy recounted...

My immediate reaction was to tell them that I am not allowed to discuss politics in the classroom. A memorandum from the chancellor reminding us of that came around as soon as the controversy started. Not so easily put off, one of my students said Ok, but Professor Shuffelton, you can teach us about what’s going on. You can educate us.

But I have no expertise on budgets or unions, I stammered. I only know what I’ve read in the newspapers. Well, one of them pointed out, you know more than we do.

I came to the next class a bit more prepared and asked them whether they wanted to spend classtime discussing the assigned reading or what was going on in Madison. Madison, they unanimously agreed. No more dodges.

Later in the post, she described her experience teaching the class that resulted from her decision:

If the class was difficult, it also reinforced my belief that when there are pressing ethical and/or political questions at hand, it is always worth discussing them. My students were bursting to speak. They spoke well. They shared the information they had, and more than usual they spoke with genuine authority.

This is the sort of discussion that I would like new teachers to be able to hold in their classrooms. This is one way in which the space of freedom that is opened up by the Morin case could potentially be used.

The fact remains, however, that these kinds of discussions are dangerous for new teachers, and people have often been keen to remind me about this when I have discussed the Morin case publicly. A year or so ago, when I presented the case at a conference in Montreal, some teacher educators got quite annoyed with me during the Q&A. Some of them were very insistent in pointing out that Morin shouldn't have taught the lesson he taught. It was a bad idea to teach it. It was poorly planned. It was risky. It was indefensible.

From a prudential standpoint, I conceded, they were right. Morin, already an unpopular teacher when he taught this lesson, inflicted great damage on himself by showing the film. I then argued that it was the principle of teacher free speech that was important, and that it was vital not to get to get too wrapped up in the details of the case.

But perhaps the critical teacher educators were more right than I initially thought. Perhaps what one has to be concerned with in teacher education is the future of the people that are in one's class--the prospective teachers--rather than abstract principles like teacher free speech.

At the end of the PEI panel, we were all given a few minutes to say some last thoughts. I tried to split the difference between caution and courage, and I gave them generic but (I hope) worthwhile advice: "Be courageous, but be judicious." I believe that it is possible for new, probationary teachers to deal with controversial issues in the classroom without suffering Morin's fate. It will require attention to the curriculum, careful planning, and discussions with colleagues and possibly consultation with one's administration. It may also, in some case, require neutrality on the part of the teacher. If we are to follow Dewey's precept that the school is to be at least somewhat continuous with "real life," then it cannot be a zone that is swept clear of controversy and debate. Good citizenship involves dealing with controversial issues, and students might as well have some preparation for this task at school.

Longer, Faster in Chicago

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Shuffelton) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:46:00 +0000

Since I became a Chicago Public Schools parent two years ago, I have been rolling my eyes at our district's notoriously short school day and short school year. School dismissed at 2:45? 3 weeks straight of 3-day weeks in November? No school for Pulaski Day? Come on, I would think, as I scrambled to find useful ways to engage my daughter's out-of-school time, is this district for real? CPS students spend fewer hours in the classroom and fewer days in school than most other large urban school districts, and when Jean-Claude Brizard was appointed CEO, he was charged with changing that.

In the past few weeks, his attempts to do so have been making headlines. After cancelling the 2% raise originally offered CPS teachers, Brizard offered individual schools who were willing to waive their contract and add an extra 90 minutes to schooldays $150,000 for the year, or $75,000 if they make the change in January. So far, 7 schools have elected to do so (on a majority vote by teachers). In the 2012-13 school year, Brizard has announced, all schools will have a longer day.

It comes as something of a surprise, then, to find myself horrified by this possibility. Here's why.

1. I am not in favor of a longer schoolday if that is rolled up with union-busting, as this plan appears to be. Far worse than not spending enough time in school would be spending more time in school with an underqualified teacher. From the teachers I know in Wisconsin (where they've had 7 months now to think about the implications of executive authority undermining years of collective bargaining) and in Chicago, I am hearing increasing frustration and despair about the long-term viability of teaching as a career. This is anecdotal evidence, but there is harder evidence as well that strong teachers unions correlate with better educational systems. As teaching is turned into a more, faster, harder, profession, it becomes less appealing as a career to intelligent young people with options, and reducing the power of professionals to shape their field cannot, in the long run, strengthen the profession. I fear that these reforms will, over the long run, be one more factor in deprofessionalizing teaching, leaving our classrooms run by less qualified, less inspired teachers.

According to Arne Duncan, giving teachers the option of waiving their contract is "empowering teachers, since teachers are taking the vote," but his words reveal a shallow understanding of empowerment. Real empowerment involves collective action and the opportunity to shape one's options, not simply a momentary chance to vote.

2. As the CTU has pointed out, quantity does not equal quality. Last year, the advocacy group Raise Your Hand publicized an option few parents had known about: if schools choose, they can extend the day 45 minutes by moving lunch and recess back to the middle of the day. Yes, lunch and recess had been moved to the end of the schoolday, leaving kids with 10 minutes to eat and 10 to run around (if they were in the lucky minority even offered this much!), meaning that students and teachers spent 45 minutes less in school each day. Giving children recess IS an effective use of time, given what we know about childhood obesity, the importance of children's free play, and changes such as the decline of free outdoor play in neighborhoods, which means that recess may be the only chance children have to play with their friends on an average day. This is not, however, what Brizard appears to envision, as he calls for more instructional time.

Other good uses of time might include more art, more music, more social studies . . . but again, only with good, really good, teachers. If more art requires deprofessionalizing the teaching force, I do not want it.

3. Finally, why this blanket policy? There are neighborhood schools in Chicago whose children desperately need access to music, art, safe play spaces, social studies and science -- all of which school could provide. Poorer parents, by and large, cannot afford excellent after-school activities, and if school can provide those, so much the better. (Again, though, teachers ought to be paid, and paid respectably, for providing this!) Middle class parents, on the other hand, have a wide array of options, many of them probably better than what the school would offer. Top-notch dance classes. Gymnastics. Art studios. So why spend limited resources providing more school for them, when they are likely better off without it? I say this last with regret, since surely it would be better if our schools offered art and music classes as good as those one can obtain elsewhere, but although this is sometimes the case, it is not always so. The inequities in what is available to children outside school calls for spending resources to provide schools in poor neighborhoods with excellent additions to their school day, not for spreading things around equally and ending up with mediocrity everywhere.

I oppose this policy rather sadly. As a professor of education, as a parent, and as a citizen, I really wish I could believe that children were so well served by our schools that more of it would be better for them. At present, I doubt it. Until school days are better, I do not want them longer.

Did a Québec Blogger Cause a Car Dealership to Burn?

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:15:00 +0000

Early this morning, a KIA dealership burned down in Montreal. The fire department suspects that the fire was a result of criminal activity because some cars in the lot were found with their tires slashed.

Normally, this wouldn't be big news. Things burn down regularly in irregular ways in Montreal, and for the most part no one pays much attention. It's usually a matter of someone not paying their protection money to one of the many organized crime syndicates that ply their trade around here.

This time, though, it may be different. Early this week, the dealership was targeted by a Québec blogger, Gab Roy, who claimed that it had ripped off his friend Genevieve, an attractive former reality TV contestant. Apparently, Genevieve had placed a $500 deposit on a car at KIA Pointe-aux-Trembles, but she eventually bought another car at a different dealership. When Genevieve returned to get her deposit back, KIA Pointe-aux-Trembles refused to return it.

Gab Roy then rode to the rescue. Accompanied by Genevieve, Roy visited the dealership and got into a shouting match (viewable on Youtube) with the sales director who, according to Roy, pushed him into a wall. Eventually, after a long argument in which Roy alluded to his thousands of followers, the dealership refunded the deposit. On August 29th, Roy posted the recording of the shouting match to his blog, along with instructions to his "army of trolls" to attack KIA's webpage and to harrass them via telephone. A large caption in the video says, "Troll Army: KIA Pointe-aux-Trembles is underestimating you."

The trolls swiftly moved into action with e-mails, Facebook pages and telephone calls. Yesterday, Roy added a KIA Troll Awards post to his blog in which he named the top three trollers (see below).

This morning, the KIA dealership was, to borrow an idiom from French, "the prey of flames." Was this the work of Roy's troll army? Did the internet cause a dispute over a $500 deposit to escalate to arson? It is difficult to say--it's always possible that someone else could have had a score to settle with the dealership. Yet, interviewed this morning on the radio, Roy was backtracking furiously. He remarked, "I told my readers to write to the dealer...but my God...I never asked anyone to set fire to anything." He added, "OK...it could be that I was the match...but many people were unhappy with the dealership."

Most mainstream journalists realize that it is unsafe to mobilize people to target a particular individual. But on the internet, mobilizing hate and rage is still viewed by many as being acceptable. What obligations to bloggers have to protect the targets of their ire? Public discourse, especially in the United States, has grown increasingly heated, and there is a clearly a risk that this rhetoric will occasionally spill over into violence.

As Sarah Stitzlein has recently pointed out in this blog, recent dramatic manifestations of public rage (e.g. the Gifford shooting in Arizona) have prompted a demand for increased civility--the University of Arizona is establishing a National Institute for Civil Discourse. Stitzlein notes, however, that civility is not an unalloyed good. Forced politeness and cordiality can potentially help keep oppressed people oppressed.

Still, as the ashes of the KIA dealership would seem to indicate, there is plenty of room for caution.

For those who read French, Clique du Plateau has a full account of the story. The La Presse story documenting the fire is here.

Call for Proposals--John Dewey Society meeting in Vancouver (April 13-17, 2012)

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:04:00 +0000

Dear Members and Friends of the John Dewey Society,

Founded in 1935, the John Dewey Society exists to keep alive John Dewey's commitment to the use of critical and reflective intelligence in the search for solutions to crucial problems in education and culture. We subscribe to no doctrine dogmatically, but in the spirit of Dewey, we welcome controversy, respect dissent, and encourage responsible discussions of issues of special concern to educators. We also promote open-minded, critical reconsiderations of Dewey's influential ideas about democracy, education, and philosophy.

At this upcoming conference, we welcome contributions that either relate specifically and directly to Dewey's life and work OR that represent the "spirit" of John Dewey. They may be in the form of papers, panels, or other formats described by the author. Please submit an abstract of no more than 750 words. You do not need to be a member of the John Dewey Society to submit a proposal, although you will be asked to join should your paper be accepted. The deadline for proposals is September 5, 2011. They should be sent to Kyle Greenwalt, Secretary of the John Dewey Society, at greenwlt@msu.edu.

Sincerely yours,

Deron Boyles
President, John Dewey Society

Click N for “No”: An Educational Technology Returns from the Dead

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:22:00 +0000

As a graduate student at the Stanford School of Education, I often attended lectures in a large lecture hall at CERAS, the Center for Educational Research. The distinguishing feature of the otherwise ordinary lecture hall was that it was equipped with large cash register-like keypads that were embedded in the tables in front of each seat. When we asked what the keypads were for, we were informed that they were part of a “state-of-the-art” student feedback system that had been installed during the 1960s. During the course of a lecture, students would press Y or N on the keypad to indicate whether they understood a lecturer’s point, or they might key in a specific number to respond to a mathematical question. When they were installed in the late 1960s, these keypads were hailed as a revolutionary educational technology. No longer would lecturers have to wonder whether students understood a particular point; instead, students could anonymously key in Y or N. A breakthrough in student learning was surely just around the corner.

As it happened, even in their 1960s and 70s heyday, the keypads were seldom used. The machines turned out to be unreliable, and, more importantly, the professors at the School of Education turned out to be largely uninterested in the supposed transformative power of the keypads. By the time I arrived at Stanford in 2001, the technology had been dead for twenty years. I was still free to press Y or N to indicate my low level of comprehension or my secret disagreement with the lecturer, but, alas, no one was monitoring the response.

Imagine my surprise, then, upon discovering that Stanford’s white elephant is making a 21st century comeback. This time, however, the keypads have gone wireless. In the contemporary version of the “student response system,” students are issued small credit-card sized “clickers” upon which they can press Y or N or a numerical response. As was the case with the Stanford system, the results are made available to the lecturer, and with our 21st century technology, the fruits of this “instant polling” can now be instantly displayed in a nifty Powerpoint slide.

Obviously, this technology has some degree of possible usefulness. Professors can receive instant feedback on the lecture from students and can run quizzes in class. Some research indicates that where the technology is employed, students maintain that they like it, and that their level of engagement in the class increases. The companies selling clickers (only $40!) tout the benefits aggressively.

Yet despite the promised benefits, I am not particularly enthusiastic about the return of this particular technology. There are several reasons for this: first, it is associated with a transmissive model of teaching; second, much more innovative and interesting technologies are available for use; third, it validates certain tendencies within the university system that I find problematic. I will briefly explain each of these reasons.

Turning to the first reason, clickers will allow me, the professor, to check whether the student has “got it.” To reprise what Karl Popper liked to call the “bucket theory of the human mind,” I will be able to verify whether I have successfully transmitted the particular concept I was discussing to the student’s brain bucket (Or, more accurately, the student’s perception of his/her bucket). Now, as I pointed out above, this has a certain appeal, since I do wish to transmit concepts to students sometimes. Yet much of what I do does not line up well with this particular conception of learning. For the most part, I’m not primarily interested in transmitting knowledge. I am, rather, concerned with awakening students’ interest in particular kinds of questions--I want to get them fired up about investigating philosophical and historical questions in education. It’s not at all clear to me that clickers line up well with a more inquiry-based approach like this.

Clickers do, however, line up very well with the good ol’ [my knowledge→your brain bucket] approach that has served us long (and perhaps not exactly well) in education. Therefore, contrary to the way in which they are billed, clickers aren’t really much of a “student-centered” teaching tool at all. They are, rather, a tool that palliates the worst aspects of transmissive teaching by getting students to click Y for Yes on occasion. Instead of enabling and promoting student-centered learning, clickers perpetuate the teacher-centered classroom.

Second, I fail to see why, as an instructor, I should spend my time on clickers when I have much more exciting tools at my disposal. In my class, I can use blogs (with embedded video and all the other bells and whistles) to interact with my students, which allow the students to marshal the powers of the internet to express a full opinion. A clicker allows students to choose between an array of canned responses, whereas a blog opens the way for students to construct their own response, drawing from a variety of sources and media types. Granted, students constructing their own response might not always be preferable, but one would hope that it often would be. This is particularly true at the university level, where students should be learning to formulate ideas on their own.

Third, clickers perpetuate (to reprise one of my favorite Bushisms), the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in the university classroom. If students don’t understand an aspect of a lesson, is it really so much to ask to expect them to ask a question about it during class or to speak to their teaching assistant/professor later on? Furthermore, if students have an opinion on a particular question, should they not also be capable of articulating that opinion rather than just clicking (a), (b), (c), or (d)? There’s a lot of hand-wringing right now about whether “the youth” are losing their ability to express themselves due to their use of the “corrupted language” of text messaging. At least text messaging (in contrast to clickers) requires people to construct an actual message!

To conclude, I think it would be for the best if this particular zombie educational technology returned to the obscurity from which it emerged. Zombie technologies are tough, though, and I expect that clickers may be lurching towards your university classroom at this very moment. In order to prepare yourself, keep in mind the following tip: to knock out a zombie educational technology, you’ve got to aim for its vulnerable core principles.

Civility: It’s All the Rage

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Stitzlein) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:41:00 +0000

Only a few short months ago in Wisconsin, protesters engaged in what the Christian Science Monitor called, a “week of rage” through protests over the governor’s budgetary cuts that would weaken collective bargaining power of public employees. Their rage was compared to that expressed by tea party activists over the past two years and even activists leading the protest that caused Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to resign.

In late February the University of Arizona announced the establishment of a National Institute for Civil Discourse, naming former presidents Clinton and Bush (Sr.) as chairs. Acting in the wake of the violent rampage in Arizona that took the lives of 6 people and maimed 19 others, including Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona Board of Regents member Fred DuVal charged the Institute with the task of defining “best practices and corrosive practices” in debate. He asked, “How do we nurture robustness on one hand and not in any way chill speech, and keep it in bounds that are not destructive to democracy? Will it change the nature of dialogue? That will be a tall order.”

We are left wondering, when policies or actions are deeply worrisome or especially egregious, is “civil” discourse the best approach? We are reminded of noted Duke University historian William Chafe’s assessment of Civil Rights Era efforts: “From a black point of view, of course, the ground rules, or ‘civilities,’ were often just a way of delaying action.” Citizens, especially those who actively protest, need to find ways to say what they think without targeting and vilifying those with whom they disagree. But who decides what is “egregious” enough to warrant civil unrest that stops governments from working, that closes businesses and schools, and that draws comparisons between Madison, Wisconsin and Cairo, Egypt? Are we going to justify the mode of political participation by the outcome such that perhaps only protest could have forced Mubarak to resign, whereas civil deliberation might be more effective in Wisconsin?

Many colleges across the country, especially those rocked by budget, tuition, and collective-bargaining protests in recent months, increasingly feel pressured to maintain or restore civility by calling for respectful, tolerant, and considerate action that avoids ad hominem attacks, and especially outright violence, against others. Admittedly, civility is generally beneficial at universities and throughout public life because it brings courtesy and consideration to discussions that may touch on difficult or even anger-inducing subjects, discussions that might otherwise get out of hand or devolve into malicious accusations or hurtful statements. Civility works to establish stable environments where points of difference can be explored.

But aligned with an important distinction recently made by Peter Levine, director of Tufts University Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, we don’t think that colleges and universities should teach students to be civil and respectful. We believe colleges and universities should teach students about civility and respect. For as Levine explains, “Civility is not a self-evident or transcendent good. It can promote fair, responsible, participatory democracy, but it can also trade off against other democratic values. Civility is welcome by, and likely to benefit, some citizens more than others, and is likely to help in some situations more than in others …The ethical question is how to think about civility if promoting it would have asymmetrical effects? (p. 13).”

While there is much to value in campuses and classrooms that uphold civility, we fear that blanket imposition or straightforward teaching of civility may restrict the important work of democracy undertaken by many of today’s protestors. Strict expectations of cordial behavior may stifle dissent, for dissenters sometimes need a space for impassioned outcry. They may need to be able to express frustration and articulate ideas that overtly challenge mainstream or dominant beliefs and may do so in ways that don’t conform to traditionally accepted ways of civilly communicating. In the case of marginalized people, like those Chafe chronicles in his work, they may need to use forms of expression that dominant participants may see as outside the accepted approaches of civil conversation. In college classrooms norms of civility can prevent young dissenters from speaking out, even when they are justified in doing so, because they fear (or fear punishment for) disrupting the classroom community, leading the class away from central subject material, expressing uncivil emotions, being ostracized, or hurting other people’s feelings. Pressures to be polite can lead participants to temper or censure their passionate feelings and thereby curtail their move toward action. Norms of civility can also prevent some participants from listening or responding to the worthwhile contributions of others when those contributions are seen as biased, hysterical, angry, or otherwise uncivil. Alternatively, some participants can hide behind a mask of civility, thereby burying problematic emotions like fear or resentment and biases against certain peoples by maintaining a calm façade.

We are not suggesting that classroom or general public civility be abolished; rather, we want educators to be more critical of how civility might silence certain voices, might empower some participants to write off the contributions of others, and might actually stifle real political change, which requires acts and speeches that disrupt the peaceful status quo—an element all too often wrapped up with the stable environments that civility seeks to preserve. Civility must be balanced with appropriate and justified moments of incivility in order for dissenters to raise problems, especially those of injustice, that need to be ameliorated in order for democracy to proceed or flourish.

We hope that campuses are seizing these teachable moments in history. Colleges and universities should be teaching students to think critically about whether civility is a value, how it can conflict with other values, and how, at times, it can be employed or disregarded by good people doing their best under challenging circumstances.

Sarah Stitzlein and guest contributor Nancy Thomas of the Democracy Imperative

Cheers to the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Stitzlein) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:28:00 +0000

Over the weekend, thousands of teachers simultaneously braved temperatures over 100 degrees and a chilling political climate that has worked to silence many educators to speak out at the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action in Washington D.C. This grassroots, teacher-led organization (spearheaded by teachers Anthony Cody and Nancy Flanagan) brought together teachers from around the country in support of four principles: equitable funding for all public schools, an end to overreliance on high stakes tests for punitive ends, teacher and family leadership in forming education policies, and curriculum development within local communities. Hundreds gathered beforehand at a two-day conference at the end of the week, while thousands appeared Saturday for speeches and a march from the Ellipse to the White House. The march was kicked off by speeches by higher education leaders Jonathan Kozol, Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Pedro Noguera, as well as passionate talks and songs by teachers, preservice teachers, and administrators. Finally, some Hollywood sparkle lent support to the teachers’ movement via a heartfelt speech by Matt Damon and a brief comical piece by Jon Stewart. As Ravitch noted in her speech, this event was the first of its kind in a long history of teacher frustrations with educational policy, especially in the past decade. Here’s to hoping that it’s the first of a sustained and effective movement to truly champion educators’ voices in school reform.

Summer Camp

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Shuffelton) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:42:00 +0000

If it's July, there will be articles about summer camp. This summer, two in the New York Times have caught my eye. "When s'mores aren't enough" looks into the business side of camp and reports that traditional summer camps -- the kind where kids hang around in the woods engaged in fun activities, friendship, and marshmallow roasting -- are having a hard time staying competitive with camps that promise more bang for the buck by honing tennis, college readiness, and other skills that promise to bring a financial return someday. An article on parents' increasing use of private jets to transport their children to rustic camps touches on some of the same economic issues: the cost of camp, the lack of time. Rather Marie Antoinette playing farmer at Versailles, but camps that serve wealthy children have always been that, if less dramatically so when reached by car or train.

Although chartering a private plan to get a child to camp might seem more outrageous than dedicating a child's summer to useful activities like soccer and marine biology, the decline of s'mores worries me more than the rise of private jets, perhaps because absurd disparities in wealth is such a familiar story by now that it takes a bigger story (like impending default on US debt) to raise my ire. Why worry about the end of s'mores? Because more than they need tennis skills and college admissions, children need time to ramble around in the woods, negotiate friendships outside the scrutiny of adults, and daydream.

The other big summer camp story, of course, is the shootings in Norway. A far more horrible invasion of summer camp (and that he shot kids at summer camp is what makes it so especially horrible!) than the incursions of self-improvement on American childhood, but analogous all the same.

I could cite research supporting the importance of unstructured time and free play for children, but since it's summer, I'll leave readers to ponder at leisure the question of whether, and why, free time ought to be children's birthright and a blank sheet of paper we provide for them to color in as they please.

Zero Tolerance and the Failure to Educate

noreply@blogger.com (John Covaleskie) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:52:00 +0000

The older I get and the more exposure I have to schooling and educational policy in the United States, the more I wonder if we like children.

I was recently reminded of this when I saw yet another example of a very young child given an absurd penalty because of an over-literal interpretation of a “zero tolerance” policy in a local school (http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2011/01/21/First-grader-punished-for-finger-pointing/UPI-42171295600400/). The details of this case—first grade boy suspended because he pointed his finger as though it was a gun—are the sort that get people either laughing at the disconnect between the action and the severity of the response or outraged for the same reason. After all, a child’s finger, on even the most liberal interpretations of zero tolerance, is not a gun. But that response misses a deeper point: zero tolerance policies renege on the promise that schools are in the business of education for democratic life.

Mindless forms of “classroom management” have triumphed over efforts to help children become better people. And we know there are more positive and more effective – more educational – ways to respond to bad behavior in schools (see, for example Deborah Meier’s The Power of Their Ideas or Vivian Paley’s You Can’t Say, You Can’t Play). Perhaps it is because of the increasing focus on maximizing time on task in order to increase test scores, but I am not sure that is the reason: the policy of treating children like animals predates the regime of testing so often supposed to be its cause. Behavioral control has been the approach of “classroom management” for all of my professional life, and I started teaching high school in 1968.

One district where I was employed adopted Lee Canter’s “Assertive Discipline” program in the 1970’s; the catch-phrase of this program was “deal with the behavior, not the child.” I heard this from many teachers, always expressed with pride. The idea always puzzled me, however, because I has become a teacher because I wanted to deal with children, and in line with that commitment, I have always believed that a child’s behavior is a part of who the child is, and to treat those two things as separable is to fail to understand our role in democracy as much as it is to violate the integrity of the person the child is.

There are two reasons we should reject the emphasis on behavioral strategies for controlling behavior and “classroom management”: they are demeaning to both the children against whom they are used and to the teachers forced to use them, and they diminish the likelihood that our public schools will form democratic citizens. When they work, even when they are applied rationally, zero tolerance policies shape behavior by fear, not by consideration of what sort of people they should be, or what sort of choices they should make. Further, such policies send the message that the school and the adults in it do not think the child who breaks a rule counts for very much. They make clear to all children that the adults in the school consider the children to be disposable.

Zero tolerance policies explicitly state for all to see that we consider our rules more important than our children, and our children see this. Even the children who obey the rules understand where they stand in a regime of zero-tolerance. This will certainly increase the alienation children and young adults feel toward schools.

Children will sometimes behave badly. They will break rules, even really serious, important rules. Such events can be seen as opportunities to banish the miscreants, or as an opportunity to educate. Only the last honors our claim to be educators trying to prepare children to be citizens in a democratic society.

One of my former colleagues wisely suggested that the way to be more effective in classrooms is to “be the child,” to try to understand what need the child is meeting my misbehavior and then to help the child meet that need in more positive ways. This is not at all to suggest that classrooms should be places of permissiveness or places where there are no rules that matter. It is to suggest that our job is to help children understand and internalize the norms of democratic life the rules are meant to enact, and that they best learn democracy by living it. However, when we replace citizen formation with zero tolerance policies we do not prepare them for democratic life, but for what some now refer to as the school-to-prison-pipeline (http://justicepolicycenter.org/Articles%20and%20Research/Research/testprisons/SCHOOL_TO_%20PRISON_%20PIPELINE2003.pdf).

I do not understand why so many educators think the proper response to children who are alienated from the school’s social contract (I am making a large assumption here, I know) is to exacerbate and formalize that alienation with the official proclamation that they really do not belong. I do not understand how a culture that valued its young could make zero tolerance a policy.

One final irony: this incident took place in Oklahoma where—I could not make this up—there is a serious on-going effort in the state legislature to make actual guns on school, college, and university campuses legal.

Local deliberation on the federal role in public education

noreply@blogger.com (Kathleen Knight-Abowitz) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:22:00 +0000

As a scholar interested in the meanings that public still might have for education and schools, I’ve been intrigued with the potential of deliberative forums to help develop individual understanding, dialogue across diversity, and shared decision-making. As a member of the League of Women Voters here in Oxford, Ohio, I have access to a good organizational structure for fostering political deliberations. Our local League will deliberate this fall on the prickly questions surrounding the proper role for the federal government in K-12 education.

The national League of Women Voters (LWV) this year announced a new national study on the role of the federal government in k-12 education. A local, state, or national League group can call for a study of any political or policy issue that is relevant to its members, and a study commits a League to undertaking a careful deliberative process that educates members and encourages them to come to consensus on the issue under study. While not every study ends in a consensus among members, the aim of these studies at the national level is to help national LWV advocate and lobby on behalf of policy positions that reflect the views of its membership. This Education Study is designed to help local League organizations give feedback to the national League so that it might take up a good position with regards to the upcoming re-authorization of No Child Left Behind and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

For those readers unfamiliar with U.S. schooling history and policy, the involvement of the federal government in public education is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before 1950 the federal government played almost no role at all in the administration, curriculum, funding, or assessment of public education. The launch of Sputnik compelled some national activity towards enriching science and math education to fuel the “space race.” Civil rights and equity movements led to the development of greater federal regulation, mandates, and funding for particular populations in the 1960s-1980s (for example, students who are poor or who have disabilities). And in the last decades, a push for a more national standards/assessment system has gained much ground, due in part to the U.S.’s waning eminence as an economic and educational super-power, and in part to help pressure schools to erase the pervasive achievement gaps between white and non-white populations (which, schools by themselves cannot possibly do). No Child Left Behind is obviously the prime example of this effort. At this point, education is still mainly the responsibility of state governments and federal money usually does not represent more than 10% or so of any district’s budget. It is politically unlikely that the federal government will play a larger role in funding schools in the future. Still, there is much discussion that our school systems are too entrenched in their parochial, localized history, and that our country’s educational achievements are bogged down by this decentralized structure, and in the “bureaucracy” of federal regulations in the realm of equity.

The U.S. League of Women Voters wants regular citizens to be more involved in these important debates. That’s why they are encouraging local Leagues like mine to host deliberations around these questions.

According to the national LWV, our local study should help our members take positions on two broad areas: common core standards and assessments, and federal funding for equity issues. With regards to common core standards, our League members will become educated on the history of decentralized schooling in the U.S., the recent movements towards national standards, and the degree to which common standards should become those which are federally mandated or incentivized, as well as monitored through a set of national assessment measures. With regards to equity, our League study participants will look at the history and forms of federal involvement for equity goals.

There are many ways to deliberate, and consensus among members may not always be the goal of a deliberation. But whatever the goal and format of deliberation, such programs help to both educate voters and begin discussions among diverse voters on complex issues that are often reductively treated in the media. And there are increasingly more organizations like LWV that can be conduits for deliberation activity in communities. I like LWV because it provides a non-partisan space for people to learn and think through political issues, and become involved for particular policies or stances.

Deliberation is important, but it is also important to remember that it is one among many kinds of political tools in a democracy. Deliberation isn’t activism, lobbying, or policy-making. There are many different kinds of political activities, and it is important to understand what each sort of activity does and does not accomplish. Deliberation can help citizens understand and take positions on complicated issues like the federal role in K-12 education. It cannot, however, substitute for advocacy and activism on behalf of positions. The strength of the deliberations in Oxford, Ohio will be funneled to the national League, who will hopefully articulate a strong and persuasive position as law-makers engage in the sausage-making working of revising NCLB/ESEA in the coming year.

Join our Conversation on a Declaration of Education Rights

noreply@blogger.com (Lorraine Kasprisin) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 03:55:00 +0000

I just put up a post on my journal’s blog that I thought readers of this blog might find interesting. In the post, Jim Strickland, the Regional Coordinator for the Western Region of John Goodlad’s National League of Democratic Schools, suggests that we are desperately in need of “a moral compass by which we can guide our practice, develop our programs and policies, and evaluate our results….a mutual commitment to values that will inspire us and keep us from drifting off course.” As Jim warns us, “In education, as in all areas of life, if we do not decide where we are going, someone will be happy to decide for us.”

In the interest of full disclosure, our journal and its governing institute participate in the League so we were particularly interested in Jim’s reflections. In the post, Jim proposes a Declaration of Education Rights as a “common standard of achievement for the continuous growth and self-realization of all people in the context of democratic community.” In the context of the paucity of good ideas in today’s national dialogue on education, we think Jim’s proposal is a good starting point for a deeper, more meaningful discussion on the public purposes of education.

The post is long with thirteen articles and comments but we invite readers to join the conversation.

Journal of Educational Controversy Blog: http://journalofeducationalcontroversy.blogspot.com/2011/07/declaration-of-education-rights.html