social issues

noreply@blogger.com (Barbara Stengel) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 18:48:00 +0000

This just in from Tennessee (with thanks to Diane Ravitch for the heads up:

New post on Diane Ravitch's blog

Sorry, Great Hearts Academy!
by dianerav

The Tennessee legislature failed to pass the bill to gut local control. Greats Academy will not be able to open in the most affluent section of Nashville. Not this year. ALEC legislation failed. Charters unhappy. Angry moms prevail.

An informed public will not sell or give away public education.

My two cents:

You don’t have to be an opponent of charter schools to recognize this as a sensible refusal to dive deeper into idiocy. What is odd to me is the “big brother” aspect of this — local districts can’t make reasoned decisions about charter schools and therefore have to be overruled by state officials who know better? Charter schools can be — and in a very few instances have been — crucibles of innovation. Turning to them can invigorate public school practice, particularly when they are in the hands of seasoned educators who recognize the limits, misdirections and political constraints of the public school establishment. But pretending that simply being a charter school is a formula for success is silly as a presumption and countered by data. Those closest to the impacts and costs can be trusted to make sensible decisions. And MNPS board and admin made a sensible decision in the case of Great Hearts.

My colleague (at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University) on this turn of events:

"No authorizer. No voucher. No parent trigger. No private charters. All around, a very good session ending"

So now let's turn to encouraging parents to "opt out" of testing for their children wherever the law offers that possibility. If you are a parent in a state where the only "opt out" is for religious reasons, I suggest that you claim a religious belief in human potential (supported I'd say by all the faiths of "the book" -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam at a minimum). Clearly, the current standards and testing regime violates the development of human potential.

The School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Civil Rights and a Civil Liberty Issue

noreply@blogger.com (Lorraine Kasprisin) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 01:28:00 +0000

The School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Civil Rights and a Civil Liberty Issue

An Editorial Preview of the Journal of Educational Controversy Issue on the School-to-Prison Pipeline and the School-to-Deportation Pipeline

http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v007n001/

The School-to-Prison Pipeline stands as a direct contradiction to the vision of the public school as an institution for promoting and sustaining a democratic republic. Each year thousands of students are funneled through the public schools into the juvenile justice system as a result of school policies and practices that increasingly criminalize students rather than educate them. Most are students of color, students with disabilities, and students from impoverished neighborhoods. How and why this is happening is the focus of this issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy.

Research indicates that both the number of school suspensions and expulsions have increased dramatically as well as the kind of behaviors and infractions that result in suspensions and expulsions. Data from the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights indicate that over three million students are suspended and over 100,000 students are expelled each year. 1 This rate has almost doubled in the past thirty years. Research also shows a relationship among expulsions, suspensions and school dropouts and subsequent involvement in the juvenile justice system. According to national figures, “high school dropouts are three and one-half times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested, and more than eight times as likely to be incarcerated.”2

Zero-tolerance policies, the overuse of school discipline and juvenile court referrals, exclusionary discipline policies, excessive policing in schools, the criminalization of disability-related behaviors, and pressures and abuse from the high-stakes testing environment are often cited as contributing factors. Together these policies and practices have resulted in the violation of three of our most basic democratic principles:

1. Right to an Education

2. Right to Non-Discrimination

3. Right to Due Process

The disruptions and denial of education as a result of suspensions, expulsions and exclusionary disciplinary policies have threatened the right to an education, especially when students are given indefinite expulsions without recourse to an alternative education route. The disproportionate impact on different student populations, especially on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems, has resulted in discriminatory treatment. And the process that often funnels students from the public school into the juvenile justice system often violates fundamental due process procedures. Most important, if the philosopher and educator, John Dewey, was correct in his theory that children learn what they experience, what are these school policies and practices teaching our children about the fundamental principles of our democracy?

A reconstructed example illustrates all three violations. A young student of color in an urban school in an impoverished neighborhood is confronted by a police resource officer in the hallway. Suddenly the young student finds himself in handcuffs and arrested for speaking back and for defiant and disrespectful behavior. Infractions that would have been treated as a school disciplinary incident have now become a criminal act. This often results when the concepts of school discipline and criminal acts are not clearly defined in a school policy, and the role of school administrators and police resource officers are not clearly distinguished. The role of police is to ensure safety and stop criminal acts, not to discipline students for breaking school rules. Are these misunderstandings that result in criminal arrest due to a lack in the training of school resource officers in cultural differences and a failure to understand the special needs of adolescent development? How aware is the student of his or her rights to due process at this point. How will this experience lead to school alienation and future dropout? What has this incident taught the student about our democratic principles? The complexity of any specific incident has led many authors in our issue to talk about a “persistent nexus or a web of intertwined, punitive threads” rather than a simple pipeline that our young people get caught up in.3

The purpose of this issue of the journal is to bring awareness and understanding to this complex nexus of events. The issue is going online at a very opportune moment. The United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights held its first ever hearing on the school-to-prison pipeline on December 12, 2012, an event that brought national attention to the problem. In this issue, our authors complement the testimony that was given at the hearing with a deeper, multidimensional analysis.

The following controversy was posed for authors to address:

The School to Prison Pipeline refers to a national trend in which school policies and practices are increasingly resulting in criminalizing students rather than educating them. Statistics indicate that the number of suspensions, expulsions, dropouts or “pushouts,” and juvenile justice confinements is growing. Moreover, there is a disproportionate impact on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems. In this issue, we invite authors to examine the policy implications, the political ramifications, and the causes and possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, what are these policies teaching our children?

There are five different sections.

Section 1 includes authors’ responses to the controversy itself and covers multiple perspectives and dimensions of the problem.

Section 2 looks at other related pipelines like the “School to Deportation” Pipeline.

Section 3, entitled, “From Theory To Activism: Perspectives from Youth Advocacy Groups In Washington State,” brings together a description of the activism and recommendations by groups in the trenches who have been trying to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. The groups include the Center for Children and Youth Justice, Team Child, the League of Education Voters and the Washington State Education Ombudsman, an office that may be the first of its kind in the nation.

Section 4 provides the reader with a video of an interview with one of our authors. Justice Bobbe Bridge, former justice of the Washington State Supreme Court, who started the Center for Children and Youth Justice, discusses a more proactive approach that the courts can use to reach young people who are truant and disengaged from the school before they enter the school-to-prison pipeline. We have also inserted a video from an earlier forum that the journal sponsored in which Rose Spidell, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, talks about the cases that have come to the ACLU and the actions that were taken. In the near future, we will put online other video interviews with our authors. The videos can be accessed by clicking on the “Authors Talk” link on the journal’s menu.

We finally conclude in Section 5 with three book reviews on the subject.

The issue was co-edited with guest editor, Daniel Larner, from the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. Dan has been a longtime member of the ACLU Board of Directors in Washington State. In addition to his courses in theatre arts, Dan also teaches courses in civil liberties at the college. His editorial reflects his own unique perspective on this topic from a lifetime devoted to promoting civil liberties and teaching young people to understand the meanings and significance of these cornerstones of our democracy. Readers can read an earlier article by Dan that was published in the Winter 2010 issue of the journal, entitled, “Educating Politicians as Playwrights: Toward a Sustainable World in Creative Conflict.”

Link to Journal of Educational Controversy issue on the school-to-prison pipeline.

Notes

1Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, Civil Rights Data Collection, available at http://ocrdata.ed.gov/.

2Bridge, B.J., Curtis, L.E., Oakley,N., “No Single Source, No Simple Solution: Why We Should Broaden Our Perspective of the School-to-Prison-Pipeline and Look to the Court in Redirecting Youth from It,” Journal of Educational Controversy, Fall 2012/Winter2013.

3Gebhard, A., “Schools, Prisons and Aboriginal Youth: Making Connections,” Journal of Educational Controversy, Fall 2012/Winter2013

Are YOU ready for Public Education 2.0?

noreply@blogger.com (Christopher Martin) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:05:00 +0000

Kevin Lynch, vice-chair of Canada's BMO financial group, recently contributed an editorial to the Globe and Mail arguing that public education should be ready for "Education 2.0". On the one hand, he should be commended for offering a justification of the value of public education in a context where many are eager to privatize. However, it is worth questioning the extent to which the value of public education can be so easily detached from its content. For example, among his suggestions for public education 2.0 include:

1. Curricula tied to labor market forecasts
2. Outcome based and "managed for quantifiable results"
3. Focused on innovation in industry and in "the knowledge economy"

I don't want to outrightly dismiss all of Lynch's predictions, and we certainly need allies for public education who come from a variety of backgrounds. However, in thinking through what "public education 2.0" would look like, it's worth asking if the conception of education on offer really has public value. Perhaps if by 'public' education, he means education for "global finance capital"?

I am sure that for some, Lynch is a bit of an easy target. His proposed reforms are common within industry and we can marshal all sorts of arguments showing that his (implied?) views on the value of public education are fairly anemic. But it does raise an interesting (or at least, strategic) problem: if in our political economy the kind of people that can offer real clout in terms of protecting public education just are those people who also have "corporatist" views on how public education should be operationalized and managed, and further, their support of public education is conditional on reforms that fall within such views, it puts those that seriously want to protect a robust conception public education from outright privatization in a difficult position. This is increasingly so as austerity measures in liberal democratic states become normalized.

"I'm not villainous or morally deformed; therefore, I cannot be a racist."

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Sayles-Hannon) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 18:07:00 +0000

Jemal Countess/WireImage.com

"I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people."

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his opinion-editorial "The Good, Racist People," examines the present-day reality and pervasiveness of racism in U.S. democratic society. Many of our socially and economically privileged, primarily white students often perceive racism as something that is only performed by evil-doers and, as such, they could not be racist. To be associated with an ideology that modern America, according to Coates, has labeled as that of "trolls, gorgons and orcs" often conflates to our privileged students' complete denial of association. To be implicated in a system, which according to U.S. law, ended with slavery and has only progressively got better with the proceeding desegregation of schools and election of President Barack Obama is "insane."

Reading Coates' editorial may be uncomfortable for many of us, especially those of us who are socially, economically, and historically privileged. The reality of what Coates discusses is not something we want to believe and/or fully except as true. I think, though, this is what makes Coates' article an excellent addition for any classroom that wants to incorporate social justice issues that are occurring within U.S. society. It offers an opportunity for us as teachers to start a conversation with our students about racism in the U.S.--historically, presently, and systematically. The piece also opens the door for group conversations, journal reflections, or both, for privileged, white students about how seemingly "good" intentions potentially prevent one from analyzing their own internal biases. And finally, utilizing publicly-relevant, current news offers an opportunity for us as teachers to engage our students with the everyday and, in turn, open up doors for them to develop their own new and creative ways for working against socially-unjust and systemically-rooted everyday practices.

Making the Grade: Self-Worth, Status, and Mini-Vans

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Sayles-Hannon) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 17:19:00 +0000

What comes to mind when you think of grades or GPA? As someone who only finished the GPA stage of her education journey a couple of years ago, I find myself immensely relieved that I no longer have to spend numerous hours worrying about whether or not I make the grade. I would also be remiss if I did not, at least on some level, acknowledge that I do miss the bursts of motivation, all-nighter writing sessions and so on, that accompanied my desire to make the grade. My ambition, though, for wanting to make the grade may be different than my friends, neighbors, or fellow colleagues. The question follows then, what do grades symbolize? Why do certain students find their entire self-worth/intelligence defined by the letters or numerical averages on a piece of paper? Who cares more about grades/test scores? Is merit distributed equitably for all students with high GPAs?

USA Today's Mary Beth Marklein draws attention to the fact that many U.S. universities and colleges are no longer looking at GPAs for admission. Parents, however, find the GPA to be an important marker of their child's intelligence. GPA/honor-student status is also a designator of elevated social class--bumper stickers for parents' mini-vans/sedans and flair for moms' purses or rear-view mirrors.

Prior to learning the statuses associated with high GPA, I would argue particularly those of class and whiteness, would grades have any meaning to students? The importance of GPA is learned and, for this reason, we should always be cautious of how a constructed concept may influence people/students of different social, economic, and historical locations.

Is merit distributed equitably for all students with high GPAs? Differences in a school's geographical location (i.e., inner-city, rural, or suburb), social location (i.e., public or private), and historical location (i.e., the school's federal report card or accreditation). Schools' variations influence students' merit when they get to the college's admissions board, but what about prior to that? When students from lower-socioeconomic positions achieve higher GPAs, are they granted the same level of merit as students from higher-socioeconomic positions? Even if they are, I would argue that a student from a lower-socioeconomic position might correlate self-worth/intelligence more strongly with GPA than a student from the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Why? Because in addition to the countless images of college success stories in the media, their parents most probably equated academic achievement with elevated social and economic status--that is, a way to make money, to help the family, to do better than "we" did. At least that was how it was for me--a first-generation college student.

What are universities and colleges doing to address how merit is distributed during admissions? According to USA today, one method used is recalculating students' GPAs according to the challenging nature of the courses students have taken. Well, I'd be curious to know how each schools' geographical, social, historical location and possibly the number of mini-vans influence that scale.

Private schools, public money

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:21:00 +0000

This morning, in Metro, the free newspaper that they hand you when you go into the subway station, there was a full page ad for Québec's private schools. These schools, which are currently generously supported with public money, are worried that the new Parti Québecois government may cut their grants, and they are trying to get out in front of this possibility by mobilizing public opinion. Currently, Québec provides over $1 billion per year in funding to private schools, and students in these schools receive approximately 60% of the per-pupil funding given to private schools.

In order to convince Québec taxpayers to continue to fork out more to those who have more, the Federation of Québec Private Schools has offered us five "truths" about the public system.

For those of you who don't read French, let's take a look at each of these "truths" in turn, and offer a bit of commentary on each one:

1. Private schools are non-profit organizations that function in the same way as daycare centers and colleges. The vast majority of these establishments belong to the community.

The first sentence here is true only in a limited technical sense. Yes, private schools are largely non-profit organizations (and thus have a surface similarity to other non-profits like universities), but this doesn't exactly make them open to or accountable to the general public. One could, for example, form a non-profit to promote the sport of polo in Montreal or to lobby for lower taxes for the rich. The bottom line is that the fact that an organization is non-profit does not mean that it works in the public interest.

2. Publicly supported private schools welcome students from a variety of socioeconomic milieux, with the vast majority coming from the middle class. More and more schools are offering financial support to help families access their services.

No evidence is presented for the scale of this "more and more financial support" that is being offered, but, for the sake of argument, let's take it on faith that the private schools are doing this. The fact remains that Québec's current regime of school financing is a massive giveaway to the rich and the middle class. Of course, the "vast majority" of students in Québec private schools come from the middle class--given the fact that almost 20% of Québec secondary school students attend a private school, where else are they going to come from? Notwithstanding this, you can be sure that a significant proportion of the rich parents of this province are availing themselves of Québec's Cadillac-style subsidies for private schooling.

3. The majority of private schools don't select students on an the basis of their grades. For the most part, ability tests are a tool which is used to better understand each student in order to best respond to their individual needs.

While it is true that private schools are not simply for students of high academic ability, this truth masks the fact that the Québec system relegates problem students to the public system. With some exceptions in the case of specialized schools, it is not in the interest of private schools to take students with substantial academic and/or behavioral problems, and their generous regime of subsidies allows them to take the students with the most academic and social capital.

4. The private school is autonomous. It chooses its own staff and takes care of its own buildings. This permits it to adapt to the needs of its clientele rapidly.

The subtext of this truth may be that the private schools are able to fire bad teachers and to build and maintain new buildings outside the confines of Québec public sector corruption. This is a significant advantage for the private system, although it also highlights some problems within the public system that need to be addressed.

5. The private school is linked with parents through a contract to deliver educational services. This model favors a collaboration between the school, the student, and their parents, a guarantee of perseverance and success.

Private schools are indeed accountable to parents (they do not want to lose the tuition dollars, after all), but public schools often do a reasonable job of this as well. Although there are undoubtedly some public schools that are not responsive to parental concerns, the majority of public school teachers and administrators try to do their best for students.

What I Learned in Gym Class

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Shuffelton) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 22:26:00 +0000

The New York Times reports that "Gym Class Isn't Just Fun and Games Anymore." Gym class has been encroached upon by test prep for some years now, with hours and positions cut to accommodate increased time for math and literacy instruction, but this is different. Gym teachers are, by choice or under pressure, or, most plausibly, by pressured choice, now including math and literacy instruction in gym classes. Children, for instance, might be required to review vocabulary words while engaging in a gym activity, or practice math skills.

Why is this a problem? Why not multitask in gym class? After all, I watch the news sometimes while running at the gym, and I think through research while swimming -- and where's the difference? Because the true purpose of gym class is affective. It's all about learning to deal with other people throwing balls at your head -- in fun! -- and to tolerate the humility of being unable to climb a rope. Or, from a different perspective, to revel in your ability to spike that volleyball higher than the smarty-pants who has no trouble in math, and to run faster and farther too. What I really learned from gym class: that there were kids who could do things that I simply couldn't. Also, to be a good sport about this, or at least not to cry when it was time for the annual volleyball unit.

This could be said about the elementary and secondary school curriculum as a whole, I think: that when schools narrow the realms in which students can shine, they stunt children's nascent appreciation of the diversity of human talents. Shining and limitations alike need to be broadly distributed -- because it's important for every child to find some things she's good at, and equally important for children to appreciate others' differing abilities.

And, last but not least, it's important for children to learn to persist in activities that they themselves are not very good at but that are, for good reason, worth doing. When I was in middle school, I decided to join the cross-country team. It was an odd choice, as I'm not especially fast. I suspect I did so out of the realization that if I did not take action, I was destined to spend my whole life as the person who couldn't do a single sit-up, while around me stronger, more adept athletes played games that looked like fun, if only you had sufficient abilities to play. For six years I was not only the worst runner on the team but one of the worst runners in the entire county, but I kept at it and made a lot of friends I wouldn't have had otherwise. If I had been able to show off my vocabulary and my math skills in gym class, I'm not sure I would have bothered.

Of course, I knew I was no star athlete based on recess and pick-up games around the neighborhood, but it means something different when the New York States Board of Regents is counting the number of sit-ups you can (or in my case cannot) do. I am not advocating humiliation as a general teaching tool; the point, rather, is that when schools provide a variety of domains in which children are encouraged to succeed, children come to recognize that people's talents are diverse and that respect, therefore, is to be distributed as broadly as difference.

Gym class, in sum, has never been all fun and games. For some people it wasn't fun. For others, it was too important to count as a game. I'm all in favor of making it more fun, and even for including health information, but keep the test prep out it. (Incidentally, one teacher in the article remarks that she includes health information because "during a 30-minute class, it would be difficult for the children to keep moving constantly." Seriously? During a 30-minute class, it would seem difficult to prevent children from moving constantly.) Glad though I am never to have to play it again, long live volleyball.

Academic Capitalism Meets Volunteer Work: Why I Hate the Co-Curricular Record

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:13:00 +0000

A few years ago, I read Denise Clark Pope's book Doing School, an ethnography of high-achieving high school students in Silicon Valley. One of the more memorable anecdotes concerned one of the high-achieving students, Eve Lin, who was very careful to conceal the fact that she had been volunteering at a hospital from her friends. It was not out of modesty that she did this--her primary concern was that her friends would start to volunteer at the hospital as well, thereby robbing her of any edge that she would have in the college application resumé arms race. After all, if everyone's got "hospital volunteer" on their resumé, the exchange value of this designation would go down significantly.

Although I found Eve's story pretty interesting, I figured that it was at the safely at the margins of student life. One expects to hear about these sorts of things happening in places like Silicon Valley and New York City. However, I was recently surprised to hear that the same sort of thing, which we might call "resumé building charity capitalism," (if I'm in a good mood) is now being given substantial institutional support at several Canadian universities. At Dalhousie University, for example, the student services office now offers a document called the "Co-Curricular Record," which is basically an official transcript of your volunteer service. If you've done hospital volunteering, student services now wants you to "get accredited" so that this activity will appear on an official "co-curricular" transcript issued by the university.

Just check out this handy little video that Dalhousie University (a much longer version of the video can be found here) made in order to justify the existence of this ridiculous document:

Med school wants to know whether people have done volunteer work, and this must surely mean that there is a pressing need for accreditation of this type of work. Otherwise, how shall we separate the real hospital volunteers from the fake ones? In addition, if we don't monitor and accredit all of this goodness and selflessness, how can it possibly be turned into academic capital? I mean, don't the students who pile up the most volunteer hours in the most places deserve to be rewarded in terms of some serious exchange value? That's surely what the spirit of volunteerism is all about. I mean, folks like Jesus and the disciples may not have been very strong in terms of their academic transcripts, but imagine their outstanding performance on their co-curricular records! We'd definitely give them lots of points for an outstanding effort as President and Executive Officers of the Loaves and Fishes Club, but we might have to avoid certifying their leadership roles in the Anti-Usury League. Employers might not like all that moneylenders-out-of-the-temple stuff, after all.

All joking aside, their are two main reasons that I dislike the idea of the co-curricular record.

First, it further credentializes an activity that should remain mostly uncredentialed. Perhaps I am terribly naive in my hope that people should volunteer out of a desire to make a difference and not merely because they want to harvest gains from the approbation they receive, but there it is. And even if people do claim credit, they should not be so concerned about getting this credit that they demand that the entire sphere of student volunteerism be credentialized. I certainly don't care if there are a few fake hospital volunteers floating around out there, and neither should anyone else who sees the intrinsic value in the volunteer work they perform. And in any event, the fake hospital volunteer is, at least, an honest fake, unlike the person who volunteers simply for the credit that it brings them.

The second problem with the co-curricular record is that it will create more administrative bureaucracy in the university. Someone in the student services office will now have to administer these documents, which will not be easy due to the large number of students and volunteer organizations that will have to be dealt with. "They just can't keep up with the paperwork over there!" we will hear. "New Plans to Expand Co-Curricular Record Office," will read the headline in the university bulletin. Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future at some North American university, a Co-Curricular Records Office will be created, along with a position of Assistant Vice Dean for Co-Curricular Affairs. This, surely, is just what the university needs to help out with its core missions conducting research and teaching students. Why hire a new tenure-track professor when you could hire half of an Assistant Vice Dean for Co-Curricular Affairs for the same price?

But perhaps it is useless to rail about these things. I probably couldn't have even put this blog post on my co-curricular record, so I'd better get back to working on something that's got better exchange value than this.

Fascinating snippets from James' Talks to Teachers

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:35:00 +0000

It's a busy time around here in January, so instead of writing a longer post, I'm going to offer you a couple of thought-provoking excerpts from a book that I just finished teaching in our doctoral seminar, William James' Talks to Teachers. I am a huge fan of this book: it's concise, elegantly written, and still incredibly relevant even 120 years after it was conceived.

From the chapter on habit, here's James on the importance of developing productive habits early on:

We all intend when young to be all that may become a man before the destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music...We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled? Surely, in comparatively few, and the laws of habit show us why. Some interest in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age, but if not persistently fed with the appropriate matter, instead of growing into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by the rival interests to which the daily food is given.

We say abstractly: "I mean to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new turns to the thought of my time..." But we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin today. We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of poetry...and an hour or two a week at music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began now and suffered no remission, would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of all we desire. By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.

Or, more pithily, are you going to be an interesting middle-aged person or are you going to be someone whose tastes are frozen in time at age 22?

In the chapter on attention, James also has some helpful comments on what we would, these days, call learning disabilities:

But I wish to make a remark here which I shall have occasion to make again in other connections. It is that no one need deplore unduly the inferiority in himself of any one elementary faculty. This concentrated type of attention is an elementary faculty; it is one of the things that might be ascertained and measured by exercises in the laboratory. But having ascertained it in a number of persons, we could never rank them in a scale of actual and practical mental efficiency based on its degrees. The total mental efficiency of a man is the resultant of the working together of all his faculties; he is too complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed. Concentration, memory, reasoning power, inventiveness, excellence of the senses--all are subsidiary to this. No matter how scatter-brained the type of a man's successive fields of consciousness may be, if he really care for a subject, he will return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and last do more with it, and get more results from it, than another person whose attention may be more continuous during a given interval, but whose passion for the subject is of a more languid and less permanent sort.

There may be rather more exceptions to this line of reasoning than James admits here, but the fact remains that this is a salutary lesson for teachers and students. Genuine interest and passion for a question can sweep away all kinds of roadblocks.

The Behavior I Intend to Change Is

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Shuffelton) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:19:00 +0000

Last February, I blogged here about fatherhood. It's time for an update. In that post, I mentioned the "daddy-daughter dance" at my daughter's school, which caused a young friend, the daughter of two moms, to leave school in tears. I am happy to report that my young friend requested a meeting with the school principal and shared her thoughts. The principal promised that the dance would be structured differently this year, and to a certain extent it is. This year, it has been renamed the "Sweetheart" dance. "Daughters" are invited, along with a parent/care-giver of their choice.

I am not so happy to report that further conversations about the fact that so long as a dance is girls-only it continues to perpetuate gender stereotypes AND THAT IS NOT OK were less welcome. Yesterday I lived out the recurring bad dream of many of us who once attended school: I walked into a school cafeteria filled with peers who did not want me sitting at their table. Having co-signed a letter to the PTO thanking them for their inclusion of diverse families but asking them to reconsider limiting the event to girls, I attended the meeting along with several co-signers in order to continue the conversation. After I talked about Title IX and the harm that comes to boys and girls alike due to the perpetuation of gender stereotypes, even fewer of them wanted me at their table. Although I have more self-confidence now than I did in high school, at that point part of me really wanted to grab some friends and go out for a pizza bagel. In fairness, although several of the mothers present shook their heads at me in irritated disbelief, others suggested that we work together to address the matter. The Assistant Principal said that change has to come slowly, which I thought was kind of silly since the dance has only been held for two years.

What struck me about the meeting was how quickly the PTO attendees and administration alike were willing to stop excluding diverse families and how reluctant many of them were to address gender stereotyping. It led me to the sad realization that Americans of my generation are willing to welcome single-sex marriage because in itself it poses no significant challenge to long-standing gender norms. If you open the dance to girls with two moms, you can continue to celebrate girls as princesses who are to be valued as sweethearts. You can also switch the "mother-son Cubs game" to a caregiver/son outing without questioning boys' commitment to professionalized sports and ritualized aggression. But if you encourage boys to value the arts as much as professionalized sports. . . . well, I don't really know what will happen (although I suspect it would involve a significant reorganization of values and commitments), and neither does the PTO (who are smart enough to have the same suspicions).

Did I mention that everyone at the meeting, with the exception of the male Assistant Principal, was a mother? As my post a year ago suggested, the demands we make of fathers qua fathers are pretty low. They certainly do not include unrewarding tasks such as baking hundreds of cupcakes, decorating the gym, and spending Wednesday mornings listening to the viewpoints of working women who have not volunteered this year because they are too busy earning salaries, traveling to conferences in foreign cities, and enjoying the esteem of peers in venues beyond the school cafeteria. When I apologized for needing to leave the meeting early to get to work, one mother wistfully commented "it would be nice to be going to work." Let it not be ignored that the flourishing of our children depends also on the work, the real work, done by her and others who dedicate themselves to the raising of children and the maintenance of institutions in which that flourishing can happen. As the Illinois Fatherhood Initiative essay contest reminds us once a year, there's a lot of behavior that needs to change.

Dignity and Education?

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Sayles-Hannon) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:20:00 +0000

42nd ANNUAL MEETING OF THE NEW YORK STATE FOUNDATIONS OF
EDUCATION ASSOCIATION
Colgate University, Hamilton, NY
April 5 – 6, 2013

THEME: “Dignity and Education”

Potential topics include:
• Implementation of the Dignity for All Students Act (NYS)
• Surveillance of students-GPS tracking
• Surveillance of teachers-APPR
• Dignity and education: Civil liberties
• Affirmative action issues
• Cheating among tutoring companies
• High-stakes testing
• Bullying in schools

Proposals due January 15, 2013

The New York State Foundations of Education Association invites
participation in the Annual Meeting from all those interested in the
foundations of education as scholarship and lived experience.
Especially welcome are proposals that develop “crossover discourses”
between and among sustainability activism, socially critical
curriculum, progressive politics/pursuit of global social justice,
comedy, theater, and visual arts/media literacy used in real
classrooms and/or civic and informal networks. You don’t need to be
from NY State. Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students, and K-12
teachers welcome! Alternative formats welcome!

Our conference is intimate, activist oriented, has no concurrent
sessions, and provides a great space for dialogue and feedback.

Keynote Speaker: Barrie Gewanter

Barrie Gewanter is the Director of the Central New York Chapter of the
New York Civil Liberties Union. Her path to working with the ACLU has
been unusual. After receiving a BFA in Stage Management, she worked as
a stage manager and technician in the professional theatre. She then
earned a Masters in Sociology and taught college courses in Sociology
and Women’s Studies. (She also tutored the SU Football Team.) As
Executive Director of the CNY Council on Occupational Safety and
Health, she worked with businesses and unions to promote worker safety
and health. She has been an advocate for women’s rights, gay and
lesbian rights, voting rights, economic justice and civil rights.
Gewanter played key roles in the implementation of Domestic Partner
Benefits at Syracuse University, in the passage of a Living Wage Law
in Syracuse, enactment of Bill of Rights Defense Campaign Resolutions
in Syracuse and Elmira. In 2011 she served on an Advisory Committee
that drafted revisions to legislation guiding effective civilian
review of police complaints in Syracuse. This legislation was enacted
into law in late December of that year. She has worked on class action
lawsuits challenging inequities in resources for public education in
NY State and deficiencies in its Indigent Defense System. Gewanter has
received awards from the Syracuse/Onondaga County Human Rights
Commission and Peace Action of Central New York. In 2008 she was
honored with a Community Service Award from the Syracuse/Onondaga
County NAACP. She is now in her 16th year representing the ACLU and
NYCLU in the Central NY Region.

Proposal Guidelines:

All proposals are due by January 15, 2013. To submit your proposal,
please visit http://conference.nysfea.org/ or
http://bit.ly/NYSFEA2013. Please register for a user account at the
site if you do not have one already, so you can log in to start the
submission process. Only those proposals submitted through NYSFEA’s
online submission site will be accepted for consideration.

For further information please contact Dr. Shawgi Tell at Nazareth
College at stell5@naz.edu.

New DEEL seeks proposals

noreply@blogger.com (Kathleen Knight-Abowitz) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 15:54:00 +0000

New DEEL is an small educational leadership organization which shares many ideals of educators and scholars in the Deweyan tradition. I thought, in the spirit of cross-fertilization and collaboration, I would spread the word about their recent Call for Papers for their May 2013 conference. The proposals are due on Jan 7, 2013 (see details below).

According to Ning of the New DEEL organization,

"The mission of the New DEEL is to create an action-oriented partnership, dedicated to inquiry into the nature and practice of democratic, ethical educational leadership through sustained processes of open dialogue, right to voice, community inclusion, and responsible participation toward the common good. We strive to create an environment to facilitate democratic ethical decision-making in educational theory and practice which acts in the best interest of all students."

Currently, New DEEL is calling for proposals for their May 2013 conferenced which will be held at Temple University in Philadelphia. The theme of the conference is Creating and Sustaining Democratic Ethical Leadership: The Impact of the Political and Global Financial Crisis on Education.

Proposals for the 2013 conference are due Jan. 7, 2013. For more info and to see the 2013 Call for Proposals, visit this website

The DEFCON project

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:49:00 +0000

Here's a super-geeky video of me talking about our DEFCON video game project at Congress 2012. It was produced by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, which provided infrastructure support for the project. DEFCON is a violent nuclear war simulation, and (somewhat counterintuitively, perhaps), we're trying to see if it might have a positive educational impact. The video explains it all.

The DEFCON research has been conducted in partnership with two other Concordia faculty members--Ann-Louise Davidson and Vivek Venkatesh. We've got some good initial results, and we're hopeful that we'll be sending off a journal article sometime soon.

A massive lobbyist-driven smartboard purchase gets erased

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 18:10:00 +0000

In a surprise victory for the technoskeptics of the world, the Québec government announced today that it is scrapping the previous government's plans to buy 40,000 smartboards for Québec public schools. Speaking to La Presse, Education Minister Marie Malavoy commented, "It was a comprehensive program that, after examining the evidence, didn't seem to be the best option." Malavoy further noted that school boards didn't actually want the smartboards--"The problem was that the smartboards didn't really line up with the needs of the school boards and the schools. They didn't ask for them. It wasn't a choice they made."

Interestingly, this development comes a few months after La Presse revealed that the company that makes smartboards (Smart Technologies) had, in 2011, hired Martin Daraiche, a lobbyist who had previously worked as an advisor to both former Liberal Premier Jean Charest and former Deputy Premier Nathalie Normandeau. The mandate that M. Daraiche was given was to ensure that "a directive was established following the [government] budget which would confirm the mandate to furnish every classroom with an interactive blackboard in order to improve student success." Evidently, given the level of success that smartboards had under the Liberals, M. Daraiche's lobbying efforts met with some measure of success.

In Science in Action (1987), Bruno Latour talks about a popular (but, in his view, false) conception of technological progress that he calls the "diffusion model." In this model, worthy ideas and technologies seem to spread and multiply under their own steam, without human intervention. Latour comments at some length:

...it seems that as people so easily agree to transmit the object, it is the object itself that forces them to assent. It then seems that the behavior of people is caused by the diffusion of facts and machines. It is forgotten that the obedient behaviour of people is what turns the claims into facts and machines; the careful strategies that give the object the contours that will provide assent are also forgotten...the model of diffusion invents a technical determinism, paralleled by a scientific determinism. Diesel's engine leaps with its own strength at the consumer's throat, irresistibly forcing itself into trucks and submarines, and as to the Curies' polonium, it freely pollinates the open minds of the academic world. (p. 33)

As Latour explains, people work very hard on behalf of both ideas and technologies to construct strategies that will make them "just catch on." If these strategies work well, no one will ever notice them--the machine will simply have been "built right" and will have "really caught on." Smart Technologies tried hard to do this in Québec classrooms and failed. But it is instructive to realize that it is the failures that we notice and not the successes, which are all around us. Cellphones are a great example of a technology where we have bought into the diffusion model wholeheartedly; we have forgotten all of the strategies that were pursued in order to make cellphones appear necessary.

Are some of you out there reading this teachers and professors that are struggling with technologies that are trying to inevitably diffuse their way into your classroom? Is a smartboard or clicker system that will revolutionize student success just around the corner for your little nook of the educational realm. Tell us about it in the comments.

Killer Robots Bite Back (with a helpful educational website)

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 23:42:00 +0000

Some years ago, back in grad school, I asked one of my fellow students what he was working on. "I'm working on building robots," he told me, "Robots that fly around and can bite people." At the time, I was a bit taken aback by this, and I took some consolation from the fact that educational theory, my own subject, had somewhat less direct destructive potential.

As it turned out, however, my colleague had picked an excellent dissertation topic--as of 2012, the robots that bite (and that do rather more than bite) have been proliferating. One might say, in fact, that we are well into the era of the killer robot. Naturally, not everyone is overjoyed about this. What with this business of unmanned aircraft wiping people out left and right, people are starting to see these 21st century engineering marvels as harbingers of the surveillance society. As a result, drones have a bit of a PR problem.

Thankfully, the good folks who manufacture these devices have taken notice, and this month, for all fans, young and old, of killer robot technology, there's a new hope on the horizon: a brand new "public education website" dedicated to showing "how the unmanned systems and robotics industry literally increases human potential by working for the human in dull, dirty, dangerous and difficult tasks." Over at increasinghumanpotential.org, a site sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), you can find out about all the wonderful ways in which drones are transforming our lives for the better. They're saving endangered species, they are "fostering education and learning," and they are, surprise surprise, "enhancing public safety." This isn't just any old increase in human potential--it's a literal increase in human potential. Like, literally.

And as the AUVSI duly informs us, there's even a new drone caucus in Congress now. The Senate Unmanned Aerial Systems Caucus is a bipartisan collaboration between climate-change denier Sen. James Inhofe (Oklahoma) and coal industry advocate Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia). Senator Inhofe tells us more:

The caucus will help educate senators and staff on the importance of all unmanned systems, including air, land and sea-based platforms.This caucus will help develop and direct responsible policy to best serve the interests of U.S. national defense and emergency response, and work to address any concerns from senators, staff and their constituents. I hope that all of our colleagues in the Senate will join and participate in this bipartisan caucus.

What a happy day for America! What a victory for bipartisanship! Who says it's a do-nothing congress when we're managing to create institutions like this?

The industry also just can't wait to talk to privacy advocates:

We also steadfastly support Americans’ right to privacy. And just like other new technologies such as cell phones, GPS and even social networking websites like “Facebook,” a reasonable conversation about the implications of a new technology is entirely appropriate. That is why AUVSI has fostered a dialogue with privacy advocates and civil liberties organizations to discuss how we can ensure Americans’ rights are protected as the use of this technology advances.

Drones are just like cellphones and Facebook! Once we've figured out how to get the government's spies out of my Facebook messages, then we'll tackle the nettlesome problem of those drones (What drones? I don't see any drones.).

When you've finished surfing increasinghumanpotential.org and learning about all of the wonderful things that killer robots do when they are not busy killing people, you should try out Unmanned, a video game by Molleindustria, a radical game collective. Here's a Youtube preview:

Conscientious objectors to the testing regime

noreply@blogger.com (Barbara Stengel) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 23:59:00 +0000

This post comes from guest blogger, Carolyn Browder, a masters degree candidate at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University:

I recently read an article in The New York Time which profiles a movement of Brooklyn parents who are boycotting the standardized testing at their children's schools. Their complaint is not with the content or style of the tests--they concede that the tests may be worth while for measuring content knowledge as their children progress through school. They are instructing their children to sit out the tests out of fear that standardized tests are being overvalued in teacher evaluation. Many school districts are evaluating teacher performance based primarily on student test scores, and these parents fear that this will produce unhappy, unsuccessful teachers. First, placing such a tremendous value on the tests strips teaching of any artfulness or creativity. Second, teachers who believe they are successful because they train their students to perform well on a multiple-choice test might have an inaccurate perception of what successful teaching really looks like. For both of these reasons, Brooklyn parents and other around the country are showing concern that not only are standardized tests potentially disenfranchising students but they may also be causing harm to good teachers and reinforcing undesirable attitudes in bad teachers.

The parents say they are not staging the boycott for a specific political purpose or targeting any administrators. Rather, they are trying to advocate for parent involvement in the local schools. Many of the parents participating in the Brooklyn boycott are considered low-income, and advocates say this is an excellent way for low-income parents to be more active decision makers in their children's education. Parents are observing the negative effect the testing environment can often have on a child, and they are seizing the opportunity to not only improve conditions for their children but for teachers as well.

Here's the problem: many school districts cannot send children into the next grade without standardized testing evidence supporting the child's academic proficiency at grade level. One parent quoted in the article recalls that when her son abstained from standardized testing, his teacher gave her endorsement to have the child moved into the next grade, but it was not until they received approval from the superintendent that the child was allowed to proceed in his education without test scores in his portfolio. It takes a brave parent to create these hurdles for their child in a system that is perpetually too bogged down to individually approve every student at the superintendent's level. What if, however, testing abstinence becomes a trend? If enough parents swamp the system with appeals for grade progression will the teacher's consent to allow the child to more forward become substantial approval?

I struggle to imagine myself placing my child in a situation where he or she could be disadvantaged on the day to day as a result of my own ideological pursuits, but it seems as though real change cannot be made until someone throws a wrench in the system. If these parents are correct in their assumption that more low-income parents in these areas combating standardized testing will take on greater responsibility as advocates against the system, perhaps adjustments will be made and students and teacher evaluation reform will result. Now advocates for evaluation reform must cross their fingers and hope more parents will be willing to take the risk.

Obama’s Re-election: What Can We Anticipate for Education?

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Stitzlein) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:20:00 +0000

On the day after the election, many of us in education may be wondering what might have been and what will be when it comes to the presidential impact on schooling. Mr. Romney’s election may likely have ushered in increases in school choice programs (especially vouchers and for-profit charter schools) and decreases in school spending (at least if Mr. Ryan’s budget would have held out). With those changes on the loosing end of the ballot, should we anticipate more of the same from a second four years of President Obama? In some ways, yes, I believe we will see more of the same—for better or worse.

Given Mr. Obama’s emphasis on the need to keep America competitive in an increasingly technological and knowledge-based global economy, we will likely see more focus on recruiting and (hopefully) preparing math and science teachers, which will be backed with government funds. We will likely see continued efforts to alleviating bullying and the achievement gap in schools, but we will likely see less federal funding to aid in doing so, especially as the last of the stimulus money dries up, putting Obama’s major first-term project, Race to the Top, at risk. And while Race to the Top funding may cover some of the performance pay plans that the president desires, others will go unfunded by struggling local districts.

Money may be sought from other sources, however, as I believe President Obama will continue to celebrate philanthropists and foundations that sponsor educational innovations. Relatedly, I think President Obama will continue to applaud the efforts of organizations leading the charter school movement. If his pattern from the first term holds, he will likely do so without enough careful scrutiny of the practices of those schools, especially in terms of how they use public dollars or meet the needs of poor and minority children with pedagogical styles that sometimes jeopardize other educational opportunities, like the development of good citizenship.

I suspect we will also continue to see Secretary Duncan offering NCLB waivers, despite the fact that these have angered many political opponents who see them as circumventing the good intentions of the original law, which had Democratic roots, bipartisan support at the time of signing, and a Republican legacy. Hopefully this situation might provoke positive changes and a reauthorization of the overdue ESEA law during Obama’s second term. Additionally, I anticipate that Republicans at the state level will continue to push school voucher and tax credit legislation despite Mr. Obama’s position against it, as demonstrated by his stance on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Finally, the next four years will begin to show us the usefulness and effectiveness of the new Common Core State Standards, an endeavor that Obama’s administration has supported, sometimes dangling funds in front of leery states in order to get them on board.

This is what I anticipate. I welcome hearing from you regarding what you suspect we will see in the next four years.

Photo credit: Romeo Area Tea Party

noreply@blogger.com (Barbara Stengel) — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 15:45:00 +0000

Just came across Ushahidi and am wondering how this "crowdsourcing" tool might support the kind of communication and community-building (read education) that Dewey -- and Jane Addams and others -- locate at the heart of democracy. Remember, the cure for democracy is more democracy! Anybody have ideas on how this came be used educationally?

The Signal and the Noise in Ed Reform

noreply@blogger.com (Barbara Stengel) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 14:19:00 +0000

Saw this in Leonard Mlodinow's review of Nate Silver's new book The Signal and the Noise (New York Times on-line this morning):

Healthily peppered throughout the book are answers to its subtitle, “Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t”: we are fooled into thinking that random patterns are meaningful; we build models that are far more sensitive to our initial assumptions than we realize; we make approximations that are cruder than we realize; we focus on what is easiest to measure rather than on what is important; we are overconfident; we build models that rely too heavily on statistics, without enough theoretical understanding; and we unconsciously let biases based on expectation or self-interest affect our analysis.

It struck me that this is a pretty good description of the "science" of education (and teacher) evaluation espoused by contemporary "reformers" (those who Debbie Meier calls "deformers"): models sensitive to assumptions, crude approximations, measuring what can be measured rather than what is important, basing models on self-interest. Silver's point is that it is very, very difficult to distinguish the signal from the noise. A little humility is in order ...

Parents Know Best—But Does That Mean Their Curriculum Conscience or Their School Choice is Better?

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Stitzlein) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:38:00 +0000

Over the past year (1/14/12, 2/11/12, and 9/9/12), I’ve offered several posts about the role of parents, their rights, and their desire for school choice. Even though these topics were not something that interested me in the past, my developing interest should come as no surprise given the dramatic increases we’ve seen in discussions of school choice and parental rights, especially in the context of the election and in light of a slew of school choice related bills being introduced in states throughout the country.

In one of my earlier posts, I discussed a bill recently passed in NH (HB 542) that allows parents to remove their child from any teaching or curriculum they find objectionable to their conscience and to demand an alternative course of study. Related bills or practices are in place in other states like Missouri and Kentucky. I want to share with you here an intriguing analysis that stems from the work of law professor Robert Vischer that shows how calls to protect parents’ rights of conscience—while seemingly aligned with the rise in calls for wider school choice—may actually pose an interesting predicament for the two parental desires.

Many parents may support wider and publicly-financed forms of school choice in hopes that it will allow them to enact their conscience by selecting a school whose views are already more aligned with that of the parent. Interestingly, professor of law Robert Vischer remarks on the implications of parental conscience in relation to school choice: “As school choice bolsters the ability of a school to create its own identity, the ability to maintain and defend that identity presupposes a reduced authority for the individual consciences of the school’s prospective constituents” because “to the extent that the implementation of a school’s mission creates tension with a dissenting student’s conscience, the student’s exit option gives the school a stronger claim to maintain its mission” (2010, p 207). In other words, while school choice may enable parents to more thoroughly enact their conscience by selecting a school more closely aligned with their views, those parents lose the ability to flex their conscience by demanding curricular changes within the chosen school because parents have the ability to remove their child from that school at any point. In a setting of substantial school choice, the child is not a captive audience to a curriculum to which the parent objects and the parent has less grounds on which to dictate it.

I’ll be curious to see how parents reconcile their claims for school choice with the right to parental conscience in control over what is taught to their children.

Photo credit: http://www.dpfc.net/ResourcesforKindergarteners.aspx

University of Phoenix 3-year Default Rate: 26.4%

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:56:00 +0000

The U.S. Department of Education has started publishing student loan default rates, and the University of Phoenix is, as usual, at the back of the pack. 26.4% of University of Phoenix students default on their student loans within 3 years.

Americans, that's a lot of your tax money down the drain (and lining the pockets of the giant corporations that run these schools). You can go here to browse the figures on some of the other proprietary schools (e.g. Ashford, Kaplan), many of which aren't doing a whole lot better. Should you wish to search conventional public and private universities, go here.

Naturally, the for-profit schools aren't going to take this default rate problem lying down! As Salon's Andrew Leonard explains in a great article, the colleges are now providing counseling to students to help them avoid default:

Lauren Asher, president of the higher education research and advocacy think tank the Institute for College Access and Success, questioned whether Corinthian’s sharp drop in default rates actually served the interests of students. She pointed to a May 3 conference call Corinthian held with investors, in which company executives acknowledged that much of the improvement resulted from “deferment and forbearance. “In other words, Corinthian students were being counseled on how to delay paying back their student loans, in order to avoid defaulting during the three-year window tracked by state and federal governments."

Of course, this regime of counseling isn't simply out of the goodness of the proprietary schools' hearts--the threat of federal and state sanctions is motivating them to bring default rates down. Interestingly, as Leonard points out, this counseling may actually be harmful for some students who would default anyway, since delaying default simply adds to the balance of the loan.

Social Issues has lots more coverage on University of Phoenix and its brethren--here, here, and here.

Looking for a Job? You Could Become the Canadian "Oil Sands" Professor of Early Mathematics Education

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:28:00 +0000

The University of Calgary's Faculty of Education is looking to fill a new job. Here's the description:

The Faculty of Education, invites applications for the position of Director, Early Mathematics Initiative. This is a 5-year Contingent Term academic position at the rank of Assistant Professor, requiring professional practice and research expertise in the area of Early Mathematics Education. The position involves teaching in the graduate and undergraduate programs in the area of Mathematics and particular responsibilities for coordination of activities associated with the Canadian Oil Sands - Early Mathematics Initiative (COS-EMI) initiative, located in the Faculty.

The usual verbiage follows.

If the individual who eventually accepts this job is looking to be an ethical person, I'd advise them to focus their research on the development of addition and multiplication skills. That way, future generations of Albertans will be better able to calculate the additional greenhouse gases that the Tar Sands produce.

All joking aside, as academics working in education, I think it's time to start asking some hard questions about who we're really working for.

Are we prepared to accept money from anyone who is willing to donate? Or would restrictions on donations be a violation of academic freedom?

Charter schools? It's about politics ...

noreply@blogger.com (Barbara Stengel) — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 03:16:00 +0000

In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, Bill Keller notes that the 1989 fatwa against author Salmon Rushdie was never about religion, but about political advantage. Similarly, argues Keller, the present upheaval in the Middle East over a “cheesy anti-Muslim video” is neither spontaneous nor religiously-motivated, but political organized.

I have been thinking the same thing about the apparently bipartisan effort to “reform” the schools that seems to have begun with No Child Left Behind but that probably must be traced back to A Nation at Risk and even to Sputnik and the National Defense Education Act in the late 1950s. It’s not about the schools; it’s about politics. It’s not about lack of student achievement or about the need for choice; it’s about securing political dominance for a peculiar version of a conservative political position.

I thought this long before Rachel Maddow went on the air to highlight campaign finance and the role that teachers unions play in getting candidates of an apparently liberal or moderate stripe elected. Nonetheless, her data make it easier to make sense of the politics of school reform.

One wonders how self-proclaimed liberals (Barack Obama, for one example; Democrats for Educational Reform, for another) got tangled up in this and why they don’t see what they are supporting and how they are being used. I suspect they are blinded by their abiding belief in their own goodness and efficacy (a defining trait of those who participate in Teach for America, for example). They really do believe that if THEY create schools that are similar in every way to public schools (curriculum, one teacher-one classroom, test score mania – I’m really having a hard time figuring out what the “re-form” is), those schools will be better just because THEY are the ones running them.

So here I sit in Tennessee where the unions are so eviscerated that a teacher being sexually harassed by a colleague can’t even file a grievance against a principal who won’t follow his own SOP and report the incident. And I’m watching the aftermath of the Chicago Teacher Strike and the upcoming election in Idaho that will determine the efficacy of the teachers union.

Teacher unions are like every other social, political and economic institution. Some have great leaders, leaders that are smart and good; others have not-so-good leaders -- smart but not good, good but not smart, neither smart nor good. This doesn’t make unions bad or even unnecessary. But unions, with or without good leaders, are perceived as a “problem” for those who view them as organized political opposition. And so there is money, lots of it, to support those who bring to school “reform” enormous energy in the service of the same old strategy repackaged into charter schools, but no real ideas about how to reconstruct the way we educate.

The sad thing is that charter schools could be incubators of experimentation (and a few are!) Charter schools could be the places where we test the usefulness of a whole wave of intriguing educational research. But they won’t be as long as their most substantial support comes from those motivated by a desire to eviscerate democratic dialogue.

Congratulations, Alberta teachers! You've won an all-expenses-paid trip to...Fort McMurray!

noreply@blogger.com (David I. Waddington) — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 00:09:00 +0000

During the recent Québec election, sovereigntist Amir Khadir was asked what his party offered to federalist voters. He replied, "For Anglophones we will offer them a choice. They can either go to Fort McMurray or to Guantanamo, with a lovely view of the beach!"

As it turns out, as long as you don't have to stay at the prison, Cuba's Guantanamo province is definitely the better choice (great beaches and music). Fort McMurray, on the other hand, is a tough industrial city in Northern Alberta. And "Fort Mac," as they call it out Alberta way, is where all of the Tar Sands oil extraction activity is happening.

Now, unless you have been living under a rock, you will probably have heard something about the environmentally destructive aspects of the Tar Sands (or, as the oil companies prefer, the "Oil Sands") project. Not only does it produce five times the greenhouse gases per barrel of conventional oil, it also requires ripping up the land. The photo that you see below is the outcome of tar sands mining activity.

As one might expect, the fact that Fort McMurray has now replaced Sudbury as Canada's man-made moonscape capital has not exactly made it a top tourist destination. But there is one demographic that can't wait to sign up for trips out to Fort Mac: Alberta teachers. That's because Inside Education, an oil-company sponsored educational outfit, has been offering them all-expenses-paid "professional development" Tar Sands tours.

Let's let the cheerful lady from Shaw TV Edmonton tell you all about the WONDERFUL TOUR that a bunch of Alberta teachers recently went on...

Notably, nowhere in this report does one see any indication that Inside Education is a group that appears to be sponsored almost entirely by resource extraction companies of one kind or another. Let us take a look at a screenshot of Inside Education's "sustaining partners" for an illustration of this point:

Recognize any of those logos? I think you do!

Nevertheless, Steve MacIsaac, the Executive Director of Inside Education, is keen to deny that these corporations have any influence whatsoever on the organization's educational programming. Responding to a critique of the Tar Sands tours by Andrew Hodgkins, a graduate student at the University of Alberta, MacIsaac offered the following comment:

At no time do our partners have 'veto' power over what topics and issues we address. They've never asked for it in 27 years, nor do they want it -- no matter who the partner. Our industry partners are further aware that during our teacher professional development programs we will be inviting in members of the environmental community who will likely have some uncomplimentary things to say about their business.

So....to review...not only do our industry/government/not-for-profit supporters NOT have program veto power, their support enables informed debate about the work that they do.

The last point is really the most important point to me. And it's here that as an educator I profoundly disagree with Mr. Hodgkins and those saying industry has the most to gain from programs like our summer Canadian Oil Sands Education Program. In fact, society has the most to gain from a citizenry of informed and critical thinkers

Thus, for Mr. MacIsaac, the oil companies are simply sponsoring these trips out of the goodness of their corporate hearts. They just want people to get the facts and to be good critical citizens! And Inside Education's tours, despite being funded mostly by oil companies, are totally unbiased.

Naturally, this is not the case. As we like to say back in rural Nova Scotia, "You've got to dance with the ones that brung ya," and in a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives paper, "Petrol's Paid Pipers," Andrew Hodgkins has documented serious difficulties with Inside Education's lessons at some length. Yet the fact remains that one does not have to look especially hard to uncover problematic material. Let's take the following extract from a "Stewardship Kit" that is meant to be suitable for Alberta junior high school classes. The following extract is from the teacher's guide for a lesson entitled "Does it Matter if the Climate Changes?" The teacher is meant to lead this discussion for the students after they have completed an activity on climate change:

Discuss:

• Did everyone come to the same conclusions?
• Did group members agree on whether the
effects were negative or positive? Why or why not?
• Did any impacts have both potentially positive
and negative effects?
• Did any impacts have only positive or negative
effects? Why?

By the end of the activity, students should understand that when considering issues related to a changing climate there are no absolute answers. Climate change is a complex problem. After completing this activity, students should also recognize that people will have differing perceptions on how climate change will affect them, Canada, and Earth.

The desired outcome here is clearly to give the students a "balanced impression" of climate change. Yes, some damage may happen as a result of climate change, but there will be some positive outcomes as well! At the end of the day, climate change is kind of a mixed bag!

I would argue that this seemingly "balanced" message may be the most dangerous propaganda of all. It's difficult for students to recognize it as propaganda, since it makes a show of examining both sides of the issue. As a student, one comes away with the impression that the "mixed bag" conclusion is the only fair one.

Evidently, Inside Education uses the same technique on its oil sands junkets. They duly bring in a couple of environmental experts to speak to the teachers, which helps create the impression that their only agenda is to inform. Some teachers, apparently, are convinced by this. In a video that you can view in its entirety here, teacher Karen Knull talks about what she learned on her all-expenses-paid tour:

We got to hear from the Mayor of Fort Mac...We got to hear from oil and gas industry people. We got to tour the mines and actually see the impact of truck and shovel operations. Then, we also got to hear from government and policy and from an environmental group who would tell us about how they feel about all the issues going on. We got to see a reclaimed bit of land. Really, we heard a completely balanced perspective...I was able to take back to my communities an accurate picture of what is going on. I can't thank Inside Education enough. I've been on several programs, and every single time I've connected with people who are genuinely interested in helping me find resources for my students.

Clearly, Inside Education's message is finding some takers.

As an environmentally concerned Alberta teacher, the best thing that you can do to fight this propaganda may be to actually go on one of Inside Education's many available junkets and attempt to subvert it. For more information on the program, read the FAQ here--there will be plenty of "chances to sit back and relax with fellow teachers," and they'll even pay the district to hire you a substitute! And if you are an education student, there's a special free PD opportunity for you as well! Just be sure to pretend that you are really naive in your application for the program, and you'll be sure to get in.

An uncommon sense about education

noreply@blogger.com (Barbara Stengel) — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:09:00 +0000

My 6 am taxi ride to the Nashville airport included an early morning educational eye opener, delivered by a self-proclaimed Virginia mountain man (complete with just the right bearing and beard), named Josh. As he drove, Josh sequed from a notably sophisticated treatise on the hypocrisy of some people's attitudes toward medical care (and euthanasia) for animals vs. humans to a trenchant historical critique of Andrew Jackson (the treatment of native Americans was the connector here) to a concise listing of the keys to education. I thought I'd share the latter with you here.

There are just three keys, says Josh. First, teach your kids to read at a young age. Second, teach them to enjoy reading. (He seemed concerned that we didn't model reading for pleasure and personal growth and also that adults might over-correct a child reading and kill the inclination to pick up some text.) Third, teach them what's worth reading. (He sounded a bit like the Bill Bennett of The Book of Virtues days, suggesting that the Bible or Aesop's Fables or Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac might offer both interest and character development, but then he opened up the universe of reading suggesting that the what to read question had an infinite number of answers.)

Josh is willing to leave the teaching of reading in the hands of school teachers, though he seemed to think that even teaching the mechanics of reading was a team sport. He clearly believes that teaching kids to enjoy reading and teaching them what is worth reading is the responsibility of all of a child's "teachers" (including parents and others, older and wiser).

I was struck by the uncommon sense of Josh's formulation and wondered to myself how the "underperforming" school I was in yesterday might be transformed if we concentrated on Josh's keys.

I hasten to add that Josh completed his dissertation on reading before he knew that I was a professor of education at Vanderbilt University. When I disclosed that information and asked whether I might share his views with others on this blog, he replied quickly in the affirmative. As we parted at the terminal door, I told him that my goal as an educator of teachers was to replicate his spirit among those who were and would be teachers. Josh is himself an educated mountain of a man.