Interesting study on who is and is not PC in the academic world. In education he apparently looked only at elementary education folks.
Elementary Education Professors:
PC--24.4%
Kinda PC--40%
Anti-PC--24.4%
Couldn't give a crap--6.7%
Of course, the higher up you go, the more PC people get.
Other interesting stuff.
Source: Aaron Schutz
Picking up a meme from progressivehistorians.com:
What one book on education do you think Obama should read?
Kozol’s Savage Inequalities is an easy out, but probably doesn’t get at what I’d really like him to know that he doesn’t already know.
Consider readability, clarity of the argument made, etc. He’s not a scholar, he’s a busy candidate (or, likely, president). Please explain why you arrived at this choice. Entries will be judged by the coherence of their justifications 
.
I have to think about this myself.
Source: Aaron Schutz
This is cross-posted from Bridging Differences with the explicit permission of Deborah Meier. That is a site worth monitoring. And I thought this might be of interest. – tk
Dear Diane,
A lot of questions. I’d love to know more about your answers, too. But part of the problem is that there are lots of different things called charters—even the charter laws differ dramatically in different states and the schools even more so. Not all are small, and many are no more, and sometimes maybe less, self-governing than the average regular public school. Vouchers are, of course, a straightforward proposal to get out of the public school business—except maybe for the left-overs.
The Edison schools (now moving into online learning) have been as large as any public school. In fact, most charter school students in Massachusetts attend large schools, although the average charter is modest in size. Many of the “chains” are even more “standardized” than KIPP. You sent me a piece, recently Diane, about IKEA schools—in of all places, Sweden!—whose leader boasts: “We do not mind being compared to McDonald’s. If we’re religious about anything, it’s standardization. We tell our teachers it is more important to do things the same way than to do them well.” A colleague and pro-KIPP’er friend acknowledged that their kids sometimes have difficulty in high schools that expect kids to be more independent, speak up, write well, and be intellectual explorers. He hoped they’d learn from this. But deciding to go into the high school business may just be postponing the bad news. (See Mike Rose’s brilliant “Lives On the Boundary” about just this subject.)
A side note on test scores: dramatic system-wide improvements in test scores, like New York state’s and D.C.’s, would have sent up a red flag in the days of psychometric standards when such results were a sign of poor tests or cheating. One of the odd qualities of the current mania for testing is that we have no standards for standardized tests.
But back to small schools. The purpose of smallness—that kids and faculty and families are better known to each other—is generally irrelevant in many of the new “small learning communities” and in most of the chains that profess smallness. Irrelevant, that is, for the purposes we had in mind. The reason for the large “dinner table” conversation that small schools (and smaller classes) allow for is precisely in order to make difficult decisions together, to weigh trade-offs, to look across age spans at unexpected side effects (or no effects at all, e.g. “successfully teaching fractions” starting at scratch year after year). Kids have always created their own form of smallness (cliques, gangs, groupings), so have adults! What we wanted was smallness on behalf of educational decision-making close to the ground.
Knowing kids better is not simply to help kids “feel good” (which is definitely a positive), but so that we can over time better understand their interests, styles, passions, “ways of thinking”—and our own. It matters only if we—school and family—are in control of how we can respond to what we learn. It’s a laboratory, in effect, for democracy. It’s not intended to turn teachers into social workers (although hopefully there are social workers that the kids can see) but into wiser intellectual leaders. Fewer and fewer kids take for granted any more that they live within something they can call “a community”—a living culture held together by common bonds as well as common norms for dealing with differences. Democracy is one kind of community, and a very complex kind. When our lives depend on democracy many of its citizens have only the faintest notion about how to think, much less operate, within it. Often enough, they abandon it at precisely such moments as a frill we cannot afford.
When we tease local school boards, or local decision-making in general, for stupidity, we are acknowledging that we have created a society in which very few people “think like” democrats, seeing the importance of connecting their knowledge to their arguments, taking the opinions of others into account, and on and on and on. Once every four years we deride “elitism” but in between we operate with elitist assumptions about the way “ordinary people” think. That’s the most telling indictment of our schools, not their scores on tests.
Yes, representative democracy is essential when the numbers prevent direct democracy, so we must learn equally how to operate within such a system. But each school needs to develop its own set of trade-offs between the two, which was a central argument of the NYC Network project. I think the Boston pilots come close to representing a helpful model that has captured the strengths of charters, but has remained true to our commitment to public’ness. I’m hoping the L.A. model follows in that path.
But, remember, what you and I have hoped for in public schooling has always been aspirational. As you have noted in your books, it has had a rocky and uneven history. Many were excluded. Nor have we ever depended on them as much as we do today given all the other publics kids were once exposed to in their growing years. Today, the young experience the adult world, if at all, through a variety of media, via pre-programmed, often solo games. They require very little negotiation amongst peers, and the ends are pure amusement—to induce the state of wanting “more, more”. (I’m sure there are some skills that are honed, some knowledge taken in—I’m an acknowledged novice at kids’ electronic games.)
Small schools are an attempt to re-create, intentionally, the best of the family dinner table, the town meeting, the public square, the legislative process, the team, and the academy of thinkers—with as much of the diversity of the larger community as we can corral all in one manageable place.
You asked many other questions; particularly about the reason so many hedge fund managers (etc.) want to start schools. Money and the pleasure of control is my short answer. The longer answer is that they really are “believers”. Note the rest of that piece, where IKEA’s spokesman broadens his McDonald’s analogy. What works for hotels and airlines, he says, is what’s best for schools.
But this is more than enough for starters.
Deb
Source: teacherken
An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education explores how key scholars from a range of fields have been essentially written out of their history:
How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past.
Can people think of examples of this in education? It’s a more complicated issue, since education is an interdisciplinary “field,” if it counts as a field at all in the same way as these others.
I would point to an entire group of educators that I’m calling the “personalists” from the 1920s and the 1960s with a vision of psychoanalytically and aesthetically based efforts to release the unique creativity of individuals in communal settings. Essentially the “romantics” of education, like Margaret Naumburg, Caroline Pratt, Paul Goodman, A.S. Neill, and the like. But they certainly aren’t on the same level as a Hegel. (Philosophers have forgotten Hegel? Bizarre!)
Others?
Source: Aaron Schutz
I haven’t posted in ages, but thought I would see if I could get a debate going on the merits of the small school movement. I recently visited a small school in Brooklyn that really impressed me. All of the seniors in a school that almost exclusively serves low-income Black and Latino/as applied to college and the majority were accepted (in some cases to great schools like Brandeis and UNC Chapel Hill). Most passed the New York Regeants tests in math and English and an increasing number in the harder science subjects. The teachers all appeared dedicated to the mission of ensuring that their students were well-disciplined, passed the regeants and went to college. They worked collectively to improve pedagogy and share information on individual students, including an impressive accountability system that tracked students throughout the year and culled those who needed additional help. The students all seemed to know each other and had a strong relationship with the teachers and principle. There was an air of comfort, structure and shared commitment to learning in a nurturing, caring environment. The school was originally a large, urban high school, but split into three schools that are isolated from one another.
I do know the critiques that have been levied against small schools, including 1) fewer class offerings 2) less diversity of students (and thus less interaction across cultures) and 3) a proclivity to be co-opted and thus to mirror negative trends in larger comprehensive high schools. But there appear to be huge benefits that cannot be easily overlooked: 1) small class size, which is generally shown to increase student achievement no matter what the right likes to saw 2) more attention to individual students and their differentiated needs 3) more opportunities for collaboration across the staff 4) the ability to build a small community that can work collectively toward common goals. It is the last two aspects that I saw first hand and that I believe could be extremely effective in closing the achievement gap and addressing the specific needs of minority and poor children who are failing in our large urban high schools at alarming rates. I really believe high expectations and a structured, caring environment can go a long way to compensate for the many disadvantages these children bring into schools. This is not to discount all of the other problems facing urban youth today, but to suggest an alternative that might be very effective at mitigating some of these disadvantages and offering these students the opportunity for academic success and a brighter future.
Thoughts?
Richard Van Heertum
Visiting Assistant Professor of Education
CUNY/College of Staten Island
Source: Richard
[NY Daily News] Students at a South Bronx middle school have pulled off a stunning boycott against standardized testing.
More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx – virtually the entire eighth grade – refused to take last Wednesday’s three-hour practice exam for next month’s statewide social studies test.
Instead, the students handed in blank exams.
Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education.
“We’ve had a whole bunch of these diagnostic tests all year,” Tatiana Nelson, 13, one of the protest leaders, said Tuesday outside the school. “They don’t even count toward our grades. The school system’s just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams.”
According to the petition, they are sick and tired of the “constant, excessive and stressful testing” that causes them to “lose valuable instructional time with our teachers.”
School administrators blamed the boycott on a 30-year-old probationary social studies teacher, Douglas Avella.
The afternoon of the protest, the principal ordered Avella out of the classroom, reassigned him to an empty room in the school and ordered him to have no further contact with students.
A few days later, in a reprimand letter, Lopez accused Avella of initiating the boycott and taking “actions [that] caused a riot at the school.”
The students say their protest was entirely peaceful. In only one class, they say, was there some loud clapping after one exam proctor reacted angrily to their boycott.
This week, Lopez notified Avella in writing that he was to attend a meeting today for “your end of the year rating and my possible recommendation for the discontinuance of your probationary service.”
“They’re saying Mr. Avella made us do this,” said Johnny Cruz, 15, another boycott leader. “They don’t think we have brains of our own, like we’re robots. We students wanted to make this statement. The school is oppressing us too much with all these tests.”
Two days after the boycott, the students say, the principal held a meeting with all the students to find out how their protest was organized.
Avella on Tuesday denied that he urged the students to boycott tests.
Yes, he holds liberal views and is critical of the school system’s increased emphasis on standardized tests, Avella said, but the students decided to organize the protest after weeks of complaining about all the diagnostic tests the school was making them take.
“My students know they are welcome in my class to have open discussions,” Avella said. “I teach them critical thinking.”
“Some teachers implied our graduation ceremony would be in danger, that we didn’t have the right to protest against the test,” said Tia Rivera, 14. “Well, we did it.”
Lopez did not return calls for comment.
“This guy was far over the line in a lot of the ways he was running his classroom,” said Department of Education spokesman David Cantor. “He was pulled because he was inappropriate with the kids. He was giving them messages that were inappropriate.”
Several students defended Avella. They say he had made social studies an exciting subject for them.
“Now they’ve taken away the teacher we love only a few weeks before our real state exam for social studies,” Tatiana Nelson said. “How does that help us?”
Source: Nick Burbules
This is a slightly modified version of a “book review” I did at Daily Kos. IT is an essay largely about one book, and while it is LONG, I think it relevant to also post it here
Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way
Please bear with me. I have to explain. Partially as a result of my visibility ad Daily Kos, I often get asked to write about books, particularly on education. Sometimes they show up at home or at school without notice. Even if they are good books, often it is not relevant to write about them here.
Also, people who try to turn the material from doctoral dissertations into books often find it exceedingly hard going, as my dearly beloved has discovered over the past few years.
And personal narratives can also be frustrating, because regardless of the success portrayed in the book, one immediately wonders if that success is transferable beyond the individual personalities, the specific context in which it occurred.
I have recently finished a book that is a personal narrative, derived from a doctoral dissertation. And I am going to suggest that even for a general audience such as this, it is not only worthy my writing about it, but also encouraging you to read it. It is entitled Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way: Lessons from an Urban Classroom and was written by Brian Schultz.
One of the most important tasks facing this nation is how we educate our young people, particularly those who come from inner cities and rural poor districts. While aspects of our educational policy at least label the problem, such as No Child Left Behind, in reality our approach to many of these students tends not to respect what they bring with them to the classroom, the worlds in which they live, the skills which they already have developed. Instead we are too prone to take an approach of insisting on their learning certain academic skills in a decontextualized fashion, using materials that often have little relevance to their experience and their lives. And then we wonder why our attempts at improving their lot by education do not seem to accomplish the goals we have set out.
What if we could learn from the examples of others that when we respect the students and trust them, within limits, when we take into account the issues of social justice – or rather, for many of our students, the social injustice with which they already are far too familiar – it becomes possible not only to develop the necessary academic skills but to see rapid development of the application of those skills in the lives of the students with whom we work?
Yes, that is a very prolix expression. But it is necessary for me to set the framework in which I wish to approach this book.
And it is also necessary to introduce you to We the People: Project Citizen (a program of the Center for Civic Education) about which I quote from the introduction at the website:
We the People: Project Citizen is a curricular program for middle, secondary, and post-secondary students, youth organizations, and adult groups that promotes competent and responsible participation in local and state government. The program helps participants learn how to monitor and influence public policy. In the process, they develop support for democratic values and principles, tolerance, and feelings of political efficacy.Entire classes of students or members of youth or adult organizations work cooperatively to identify a public policy problem in their community. They then research the problem, evaluate alternative solutions, develop their own solution in the form of a public policy, and create a political action plan to enlist local or state authorities to adopt their proposed policy. Participants develop a portfolio of their work and present their project in a public hearing showcase before a panel of civic-minded community members.
This is project based learning, and can serve as a means of simultaneously developing skills such as organization, data analysis, computer skills, public speaking, cooperation, etc.
That introduction is necessary because it is the framework used by Brian Schultz in the experience he describes. It is his experience as a 5th grade teacher in Room 405 of the Richard E. Byrd Community Academy (pseudonymously named in the book as the William D. Carr Community Academy) in Chicago, adjacent to the notorious Cabrini-Green Housing project. To quote from Schultz’s preface and acknowledgments:
The book is organized as a reconstruction of my thought processes and my interpretation of a year-long classroom experience with fifth graders from Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood. When the elementary students in Room 405 were challenged to name problems in their school and community, the unanimously focused on replacing their dilapidated school building. Rather than this being a simple activity, addressing this complicated issue became our curriculum for the remainder of the schoolyear. The narrative storytelling central to the book portrays the fifth graders’ attempts at solving this complex problem through a curriculum that we developed together.
through a curriculum we developed together That is a key to what you will encounter when you read through the book. Schultz recognized that in order to engage his students in their own learning, he also needed to find ways to empower them, and thus the process of exploring how to address the situation in their schools required him to be less of an instructor and more of a coach, less didactic and more encouraging. That required surrendering some of the authority inherent within the classroom while still maintaining overall responsibility for what happened.
The book is published by Teachers College Press, which does not take lightly its responsibility as a major publisher of tomes on education. That should give you one sense of why I was willing to take the book seriously, which I began reading in an uncorrected advanced proof before I finally obtained a copy of the final product. Schultz, who now teaches at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and who won awards for his teaching both while at Chicago Public Schools and in his current position, was a doctoral student at University of Illinois Chicago Center while he did the teaching covered in the book. One of the members of his doctoral committee was William Ayers, and I feel it important to address this, even though Ayers was not Schultz’ doctoral adviser. During the current political season the past of Ayers and his wife (Bernadine Dorhn) has become a matter of some interest because of their activities during the 1960s as part of the Weather Underground and because of a piece from Ayers published around the time of 9-11. For several decades now both have been serving the larger community as academics, Dorhn teaching juvenile justice as Northwestern and Ayers as one of the most important voices addressing the matter of social justice in our schools. Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago in particular has praised the work Ayers has done. If Ayers’ backgound is a stumbling block for you, then you are likely to resist what Schultz can teach you in this book, because the book is permeated with the same kind of thinking about social justice and education that has been a major part of the work not only of Ayers, but of figures such as Paolo Freire and Jonathan Kozol. Its roots can clearly be traced back to the too often neglected work of John Dewey, and in its concern for democratic participation is clearly visible in the current work of people like George Wood and Deborah Meier today.
To fully appreciate what one’s students can do, one must approach them with the attitude that there is no limit, to not close the door before they even have a chance. Sometimes this is hard. I want to quote a passage from well into the book. The setting is that a reporter from the Chicago Tribune had come and spent time with the students, listening to them. Schultz had brought copies of the published article in for them to read. Remember as you read the material I quote that this are 5th graders from an inner city school. Also, the reference to video is because Schultz had arranged cooperation with what is known as the Collaboratory, an initiative at Northwestern
that provides project consulting, training, technical advice, and Web-based resources and services to K-12 teachers and their students who are interested in using Internet technologies to advance education.
That is sufficient context. Now read what Schultz writes on pp 79-80:
When the first student found the article on the front page of the second section, he shouted, “Found it! March 23, 2004, ‘Pupils welcome All to See Their Dreary Reality.’ Go to section B at the top to read ’bout us!” I watched each child find the article and begin reading. Some read silently, while others stumbled over some words as they read aloud line by line. There was definite excitement as they went through the sentence looking to get the meaning fo the article as they searched for their own quotes.
I remember enthusiastically watching these fifth graders enjoying reading. Individually each student took the initiative to get through the entire article, each had a stake in what it said. They all wanted to read what that guy wrote about them and see their efforts headlined in the newspaper.
Tavon and his video documentary team had arranged for Karen Percak from the Collaboratory, along with a videographer, to be present for the interview of activist Therese Quinn later in the morning. It was a bonus to get footage of the first deconstruction of an article about them in newspaper.
As we went through the text, we were able to talk about personification, albeit in a manner unconventional when compared to a traditional language arts curriculum. The article contained a real-life example of the literary device” Cresswell Academy of the Arts, a recently built $15 million facility that sits in mocking splendor just across a ball field from Carr.” Definitions had to be found for the great new vocabulary found in the article. The key to reading and making sense of the article was that these students – students who were labeled as incapable, not meeting standards, at risk, and struggling – were readily able to make sense of what they read. They were able to decipher the meanings from context, just by looking around the room as Zorn did the previous day. They may have stumbled over some words, but they understood, made sense of, and connected with the text. They consulted the dictionary when a word surpassed their vocabularies because they truly wanted to know the meaning. The text was alive; it was about them.
Most of the students were engaged in the reading lesson, and my initial reservations about having the videographer present and not wanting to be caught on tape being a bad teacher subsided. Classroom management, luckily, was not difficult because the students were genuinely interested in the material and remained focused.
Let me note several things from this passage. These were students who were labeled as incapable, not meeting standards, at risk, and struggling. They they truly wanted to know the meaning because the text was alive because it was about them. And as a result, there were no classroom management problems.
I don’t want to give away the story. Some may know it, particularly those in Chicago, or who have been involved with Project Citizen. You may have encountered them through the writings of Ralph Nader. It is an interesting story to follow, and it has a rhythm of its own. You can, if you choose, explore much of what was accomplished that year, with all the artifacts from the students, by visiting the website they built (with some assistance) to document their experience. It is called simply the Room 405 website.
I realize this is not a traditional book review. Such a review would do justice neither to the book nor to the story it has to tell us. For that you will need to read the book. What I hope I can do is demonstrate some key ideas for you. I have already illustrated the connection supposedly limited students were able to make with higher level text (the Chicago Tribune is not regular reading for most elementary school students) and have hopefully demonstrated that project-based learning such as Project Citizen can be an effective way of students learning important skills because they are applying those skills in a context of value to them.
People are often shocked by examples such as this. There is a paragraph on p. 105 where Schultz directly addresses this:
People were shocked the fifth-graders from the inner city were willing and able to do something good for themselves by taking on a project with such dedication. Some of these reactions were belittling and offensive, but it was an opportunity to change their viewpoints by spreading awareness of the smart young citizens’ capability, regardless of their neighborhood.
This book is more than just a recounting of a very interesting year in the classroom. Schultz also provides the reader an important chapter on Justice-Oriented teaching. This is a chapter that is going to challenge the thinking of many. I want to quote the first and third paragraphs of the chapter, as they appear on pages 126 and 127 respectively, and then digress with some commentary of my own.
Should teachers have agendas? Whose agenda should it be? When teachers challenge the dominant culture of measurement, standards, and curriculum mandated by federal, state, and local government as well as school boards to enhance student learning, they may be alienated or pejoratively labeled “maverick” or even “radical.” Where can teachers seeking to engage their classrooms in democratic practice get support? Should they be able to follow their visions, even if they are in conflict with current school reform efforts? How teachers are viewed in their respective schools and communities raises questions about the idea of whether a teacher should be an activist, someone who takes direct action to achieve a social or political goal, or advocate, one who speaks or writes in support or defense of a group or cause.
Then, after telling us in the second paragraph that “Teaching is not an ideologically neutral practice” and “it is imperative that the teacher be political, especially in the current state of affairs, in which one-size-fits-all testing is prescribed as the only way to improve education” we read the key third paragraph:
Teachers teaching for social justice maintain a curricular stance rooted in and relevant to the lives of students. With a focus on critical, multicultural, antiracist, and antioppressive perspectives, teachers focus on meaningful hands-on, experiential, and participatory activities that seek to help students (and themselves) to critically think about social, political, and economic problems. Teachers and students learn alongside one another in culturally sensitive and culturally relevant spaces. Academic rigor is paramount because curriculum delivered within a social justice context has a tendency to move beyond the school structure
This is a very different approach than that we see in most schools in this country, which may make it seem alien to you. But before you dismiss it, recognize this: it was by using this approach that Schultz was able to reach a group of inner city 5th graders that most would have thought should be given extensive remedial work in order to “improve” their skills in order so that they could perhaps “pass” the high stakes tests which we impose so broadly, and incorrectly.
I want momentarily to digress to another book I am reading now. By Daniel Koretz of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, it is entitled Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. I want to quote three relatively brief passages that I think are relevant to bear in mind as you consider what Schultz has to offer. The first is a quote Koretz repeats from a friend who at the time ran a large testing program, and who got impatient when he tried to explain the subtleties and limitations of testing to a woman who wanted to know what was the best school in which to place her child, and who kept returning to test scores. Finally he told her
“If all you want is high average test scores, tell your realtor that you want to buy into the highest-income neighborhood you can manage. That will buy you the highest average score you can afford”
The second quote is when Koretz is describing the limitations listed in the manual for the widely used Iowa Test of Basic Skills, which
advises school administrators explicitly to treat test scores as specialized information that is a supplement to, not a replacement for, other information about students’ performance. And for the same reason, it warns that is inappropriate to use a score from a single test, without additional information, to assign students to special education, to hold students back, to screen students for first-time enrollment, to evaluate the effectiveness of an entire educational system, or to identify the “best” teachers or schools.
Please note, Koretz is saying this in a book that attempts to explain to those of us who are not psychometricians both the benefits and the limitations of testing – he is NOT anti-test per se. Isn’t it interesting how many things against which the makers of ITBS warn are precisely what we are doing with our current misuse – or should I say, abuse – of testing?
And finally, and very relevant, we need to remember why we have schools, and it should not be merely to prepare them to test well:
We don’t put students in school simply to do well while they are there. We put them in school because we think it benefits both them and society as a whole – to make them mores successful in advanced study, more successful in the world of work, and better citizens, and to enable them to manifest their own potential and lead fuller lives.
better citizens, and to enable them to manifest their own potential and lead fuller lives The first is clearly one key goal of Project Citizen, and both of these are key parts of the approach of teaching for social justice, of taking into account the lives of the students as Schultz has done and as he and many others advocate.
Schultz’s students were eventually invited to present their project the next year at the national conference of the Center for Civic Education. The students gave a presentation, and then, instead of simply waiting for questions, one student, Malik, took a different approach. Remember, this is an inner city sixth grader speaking to a national conference of adults. The moderator had explained that before taking questions, the students had some to ask. The audience cheered and clapped, and Malik interrupted to say “It is fine and good that y’all think we did good work, ’cause I agree, we did. Thank you. But how ya gonna help us?” As the audience grew silent, Malik continued as follows:
You know it costs a lot of money to get a new school, and kids can’t go to schools like our bootleg, old one. I am not saying we want your money now, but when leave out of here, I bet there are schools just like Carr in y’all cities. What are you going to do to make a difference for them kids and them schools? You can’t just think we did good, clap a lot – which I like, by the way – and then not do something in your communities. Think about it.
Schultz offers a commentary immediately after recounting this episode, and I hope he will not mind my also quoting that paragraph in its entirety:
Malik’s exemplary series of questions were a perfect manifestation of what we as a class had striven to create the entire previous school year – a problem-posing curriculum that centered around questions that were most important to the students and their lives. Well aware that there were going to be many questions from the audience, Malik also understood that he could think critically for himself. Malik’s story illustrates the emergent themes that came out of Carr’s room 405 and the many possibilities for the future of the students and their curriculum.
I don’t want to spoil the book by telling you more of the details. The students Schultz taught learned how to learn, by learning how to pose questions. They learned because that is also how he taught them. And I will give an example of how he uses that technique to teach, or should I say, challenge us (really, is there a difference?):
Could a skill-rich curriculum adhere to democratic principles and progressive educational ideals and vice versa? Isn’t one purpose of education to provide students with the opportunity to explore with what they already have: curiosity, intelligence, and the drive not only to achieve but also to make a difference in their own lives? Teachers should embrace the moral obligation to provide them with the skills necessary to matriculate, while also allowing them to explore their world and become conscious, active citizens in the process.
This kind of teaching is inherently risky. Believe me, even approaching it can raise all kinds of anxiety among parents, administrators, other teachers. And the teacher has to be very careful NOT to impose her own values or politics over those of the students. The real value in taking something of a Socratic approach is this, and again I quote Schultz: “Teachers can best understand the needs of their students by asking them questions and allowing the children, in turn, to pose questions back.” Questions, not mere lectures of fact. There is a time and a place for lecture, for practice and drill, but it is far less necessary than its current prevalence in our schools would warrant. And unfortunately, too often that increasingly that is the school experience of many students in inner city schools, precisely the ones we say we do not want to leave behind.
I commend you for having read this far, those of you who persisted. I hope I have at least raised your curiosity about what this book from Schultz has to offer you, to offer us all, as we consider how to make the educational experience we offer our children truly productive, a productivity that surely can be demonstrated by means like the project based learning experience of the students in Room 405.
Read the book, then ponder it.
Peace.
Source: teacherken
This has been cross-posted at Smart and Good.
The most recent issue of Education Week included a piece highlighting Bill Damon’s new book, The Path to Purpose: Helping our Children Find Their Calling in Life. Damon is a Stanford psychologist and long-time moral development researcher whose earlier work, The Moral Child, sets out a worthwhile vision of what makes a child good.
Damon’s work is a hermeneutically-enriched form of survey research. He is asking large numbers of young people aged 12 through 26, through paper and pencil surveys and selected in-depth interviews, about their lack of direction in life. The work, still in progress, has a comparative dimension in that Damon and his colleagues are trying to determine whether the youth of today differ from past generations in their ability to frame meaning and purpose in their lives.
Damon’s preliminary answer is that more than a quarter of young people are “disengaged” and about a fifth have actually found something meaningful to which they wanted to dedicate their lives. The vast numbers in between have not given up on meaningfulness but haven’t found a way to make sense of their lives either. Damon calls on schools and communities to address this “malaise.”
Damon’s on target here in my estimation, and this may be one of the premier ways that “moral education” can – and must – be integrated with academic purposes in schooling. When a young person (in high school or college) learns biology, the purpose is not that he will know the difference between mitosis and meiosis. One purpose is that he will understand himself in the world as a form of life, as a walking miraculous process, as a complex system, as an atomic unit in a much larger complex system, and so forth. Another purpose is that she will possess the resources (knowledge, analytic skills, skills of appreciation/communication) to respond in a fitting way to the day’s practical issues re health, innovation, nourishment, etc. And if he finds himself fascinated with either the mechanisms of biology or the issues that biological understanding illuminates, he may find a pursuit (of employment or leisure) to which he can commit large amounts of time and energy. Each of these purposes is about life meaning, about one’s way of being in the world, and about the actions that turn meaning into meaningfulness. This is moral education (as Damon’s background and life purpose would portend) – without the direct weight of moralizing or evangelization or indoctrination.
These are unquestionably educational issues though perhaps not narrowly academic ones. Are our school structures, schedules and curricula designed to make it likely that this work is being done? Are teachers willing and/or able to take up these issues even when time – and administrative fiat — “permits”? I’d answer no.
Source: Barbara Stengel
This is also posted at Daily Kos
As the Federal government has delayed reauthorization of the basic law affecting public schools, the Elementary And Secondary Education Act, the most recent version of which is (unfortunately and inaccurately) as No Child Left Behind, perhaps now might be a good time to explore alternative approaches to public education. Since public education is primarily the responsibility of the states, and since the Federal government provides less than 8% of the cost of public education, perhaps rather than Federally imposed mandates we can explore what states have done to address some of the needs of public education. And if we are willing to go down that path (as I certainly am), perhaps the first state at which we would look would be Minnesota.
Had I any doubts of the wisdom of such an examination, they would have been removed after reading a May 4 column in the Providence Journal by Julia Steiny entitled Columnist Julia Steiny looks at Minnesota’s plan to save money and improve schools. Let me begin by discussing what in that column caught my attention.
Steiny begins her column with an argument about reducing the number of school divisions in Rhode Island from its current 36. That holds little interest for me, but in the process of looking for different examples, she had a discussion with Joe Nathan, the director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute, about whom she notes that
Nathan had a hand in writing several of the Minnesota school-choice bills, including the nation’s first charter school legislation. He was also an author of the 1991 Open Enrollment legislation that offered public-school choice to all families.
While I have never met nor spoken with Nathan, we have overlapped on various educational lists for more than a decade and I have been well aware of his work. He was gracious enough to help me in obtaining information I needed in order to write about the Minnesota approach.
Let me return to Steiny’s column, in which she wrote of MN that
Its technique was to pass a series of laws allowing all children, K-12, to attend whatever school the family chooses, provided there is room. The money followed the students. The parents were thrilled, and the bureaucracies had no choice but to adjust.Unappealing or incompetent districts lost students, so rather than run astronomically expensive programs for the remaining students, they merged with stronger districts. Good schools filled to capacity, which is the most cost-efficient way to run them. Bad ones closed, which also saves money. Kids generally got better, more efficient schools.
And there wasn’t so much to fight about. Consolidations took place. Tax money flowed more directly to good schools and away from bureaucratic waste.
Steiny quotes Nathan as saying that because the power was placed in the hands of parents, districts might have consolidated, but also might have found ways to cooperate to increase the options offered to parents for their children, options that might attract those parents. According to 2005 survey run by the Center, 80% of respondents said that parents should have some voice in selecting the schools their children attend. And while Nathan properly warned that no single approach is a panacea to solve the problems faced by our schools, he also noted that the approach in MN allowed teachers greater voice in designing the alternatives of schooling offered to parents. This has resulted in a great variety of options from which parents can choose.
Before I explore those options in more detail, allow me to quote what Nathan said about himself:
“I entered this issue in the 1970s for social justice reasons. All kids need options. Not crummy options, good options. Some kids flourish in core knowledge, Montessori, or two-way bilingual. Others need a multiple-intelligence school, international baccalaureate, or one that teaches how to repair computers. Every kid should have transportation and no admissions test. Families have options for daycare, nursery school, college, so why not public school?”
Minnesota may not yet have fully implement the sweep of this kind of vision, but as a state it has probably gone further than any other, and certainly it has done enough to warrant anyone interested in public education policy taking a closer look.
An examination of the website of the state’s Department of Education will take you to this page, which lists all the options of school choice (of which I will only examine those relating to public school choice). Allow me to quote the text with which the page begins:
Minnesota is a place where all parents have meaningful public school choices for their children. Minnesota is, after all, the state that brought the nation the charter school movement. It is also a state where students may “open enroll” into schools that are part of school districts where the families do not reside. It’s a place where Minneapolis students encounter a wealth of choices not only within their district, but also in nearby suburbs, with transportation provided free. And it’s a state where the borders of a classroom can be as broad as the global connections of the worldwide web. With this wide range of learning options, Minnesota families are often able to find a school that meets their child’s individual needs.
The website provides information on five different aspects of public school choice. These are
Charter schools, which have existed in MN since 1992, and of which there are currently 158 in operation. The Department notes of charter schools that they
employ licensed teachers, offer services to special needs students and require students to take state and national tests to assure academic accountability. They do not charge tuition, and there are no admission requirements to enroll students in charter schools. New charter schools with exciting programs open their doors to students every year in Minnesota. Parents may contact charter schools directly to find out about the type of programs and enrollment options.
Alternative Education provides more than 150 programs at over 600 sites for students under 21 at risk of not graduating who meet ANY of the following criteria:
(1) are performing substantially below grade level; (2) at least one year behind in credits for graduation; (3) are pregnant or parents; (4) have experienced physical or sexual abuse; (5) are chemically dependent; (6) have mental health problems; (7) have been homeless recently; (8) have withdrawn from school or been chronically truant; or (9) speak English as a second language or have limited English proficiency.
Online Learning gives students the ability to take such courses either as supplementals in place of a regular class during the school day, or as the sole means of obtaining a public education. The state maintains a clearinghouse of approved programs, and all those certified by the state
are taught by Minnesota licensed teachers, meet or exceed state academic standards, transfer to other public school districts and apply to high school graduation. The documents linked below contain information about online learning programs, student enrollment and certification of public providers.
The Choice is Yours is a special program for families receiving free or reduced lunch benefits in the city of Minneapolis, giving them priority in placement in the schools they choose, whether for magnet programs in the city or schools in the suburbs. For those going to suburban schools the state provides the cost of transportation. The city is split into Northern and Southern sections, with the choice of suburban districts being limited by proximity.
Finally, there is Open Enrollment which
allows all Minnesota’s public school students the opportunity to apply to attend school outside of the school district where they live. More than 30,000 Minnesota students did just that last year.
While in this program parents do not have to pay tuition, they are responsible for providing the transportation for their children.
I contacted Joe Nathan to ask some specific questions, and he was kind enough to respond in detail, and to reach out to people in the State Department of Education to verify the figures. Let me note that his Center for School Change offers a great deal of information at their website, and for those interested in knowing more I encourage you to explore there as well as at the State website.
Let me offer some of Joe’s concluding words from one of our earlier exchanges, because I believe this provides some appropriate context (and PSEO = Post Secondary Enrollment Options, which enables secondary students to take college courses on a part- or full-time basis while still enrolled in HS):
The broad coalition that supports the public school choice programs above (plus inclusion of private college and universities in PSEO) has NOT supported vouchers. Moreover, statewide polls show Minnesotans do not support vouchers unless private and parochial schools are open to all, with no admissions tests. Many private and parochial schools in Mn want the power to decide who is admitted. that has helped mean vouchers went no-where.Public school choice has received strong bi-partisan support here. PSEO,
open enrollment and the charter movement all were first proposed by
Democrats who saw it as expansion of opportunity.
In other words, even though there are SOME aspects of the MN approach that do allow some limited enrollment in non-public schooling situations, the program has been implemented in a fashion that does not move in the direction of privatization of public schooling. As to vouchers, I will reiterate something I have noted on multiple previous occasions: in every case were vouchers have been placed on the ballot for the voters they have been defeated. Those voucher programs which exist have been imposed by legislative bodies without the direct voice of the voters included. MN clearly demonstrates that it is possible to offer a wide variety of options of public school education without resorting to vouchers.
In my examination, I became interested in seeing how widespread participation in the various programs of choice were in Minnesota. Joe Nathan was kind enough to contact a variety of people in the State, and he and I went back and forth several times with the data we were able to obtain. In fairness, since he understands the meaning of the numbers better than I do, I am going to present the numbers by quoting his suggested presentation:
* In 2007-2008 About 145,000 of Minnesota’s 836,672 public school students used Minnesota’s cross district, public school choice laws
(includes open enrollment, 2nd chance laws, charter law and Post-Secondary Enrollment Options) That’s about 17%.* In addition, Mpls and St. Paul (two different districts) do not assign students to a particular school, k-12. They have dozens of magnets, schools within schools, and other options. Those kids and families are actively selecting from within district options. So if you add the 38,000 from St .Paul and 34,000 from Mpls you are up to more than 210,000 kids. (Again, there is some double counting because of Post-Secondary Options – but that is only 7400 kids. Mpls and ST Paul also have a few thousand kids attending contract alternative schools so that is why I did not add 72,000 and 145,000 call it 217,000). 210/836 is 25%.
* Many other districts including Rochester and Duluth offer schools within schools, magnets and other options. At this point is not possible to figure out exactly how many kids involved.
Beyond the numbers, I raised several other issues about the program in order to understand it better. Joe was kind enough to offer detailed responses to these questions.
I live in Arlington VA which spends more than 19,000 per student. There are other districts nearby which spend substantially less. The district in which I teach, Prince George’s County MD, spends significantly less than does the neighboring district of Montgomery County. The differentials come from local taxes. Joe’s response on this was
In Minnesota, the state provides more than 2/3 of the funding for the students. So the issue you describe for Maryland and Virginia is less of an issue here. To be fair, in states such as yours, my sense is that all or a portion of local property taxes should follow students.
That is one thing that could represent a stumbling block to expanding the MN approach to other states.
I asked about the chartering of schools, and how that affected their enrollment, given the state’s open enrollment approach. Joe responded that
The original charter idea was that the state legislature would give at least one other group the power to authorize, or “charter” groups of educators, parents and others to create new public schools, open to all. Thus, a law such as you have in Virginia that limits this power only to local districts is not really a charter law. In Minnesota, the following groups are allowed to authorize a new chartered school: Local districts, regional groups of districts, higher education institutions, social service agencies or foundations that are registered with the Mn Attorney General and have a bank account of at least $2 million.Students attending Mn charter schools may move across district lines, just
like students attending district public schools. However, charters may NOT
have any form of admissions tests for their students.
I also asked if receiving schools or districts had any ability to limit the number of students coming in by open enrollment. Joe responded as follows:
The legislation gives receiving districts the ability to limit cross district enrollment, but no specific % is included in the
legislation. So a receiving district has complete flexibility in terms of
numbers of students it can accept, and has complete flexibility at each
grade, and if it has more than one school, at each school. The receiving
district may NOT limit incoming enrollment to just students of one race,
and may not use an admissions test for the school (unless it already uses
an admission test for students in its own district).
I have often written that I believe the entire structure of American public schooling is flawed, and were it up to me I would blow it up and redesign it from the bottom up. Unfortunately that does not seem a viable option. Because of our ongoing responsibility to those currently enrolled in our schools, we have to see what salutary improvements are possible within the reality in which we currently find ourselves. Merely attempting to drive performance by analyzing test scores and graduation rates has not as yet demonstrated that its effects are positive, and in fact may be proving the contrary case.
Further, we know that not all children learn alike, and that parents have different aspirations for how they want their children instructed. Because we know that the education of any child is improved when the parents are involved and committed to that education, involving the parents in the process of selecting the environment in which their children are instructed seems to warrant giving those parents some say in how their children are educated. It is often difficult for one school or even one district to provide the full range of options that parents might seek or students might need. Allowing a wide range of options within a public school framework seems a reasonable method of attempting to meet such aspirations.
I encourage those with interest in educational policy to take the time to explore more completely than I can within this posting the approach that Minnesota is taking. It may not be completely transferable to other states, but there is much than can be learned from their experience, which now extends more than a decade and a half since their implementation of the nation’s first charter school program.
I will be interested in your responses to what I have presented. So will Joe Nathan and those people in the Minnesota Department of Education who were kind enough to help me with information: Glory Kibbel, Bondo Nyembwe, Cindy Jackson, and Marceline Dubose. They are rightly proud of what they have accomplished in MN, even as they seek to find better ways to serve the people of their state.
Peace.
Source: teacherken
Norman Lamont is frustrated again. This time, in Re-use Revisted, he wonders whether the idea that learning objects can be reusable is just a myth – sounds good on paper, doesn’t work that way in practice. He asks whether anyone else out there ever finds they can re-use their learning objects. Good question.
The idea behind the concept of learning objects is an elegant one. At the time when the idea was first mooted, ten years ago or so, object orientation had already proved to be a great success in the world of programming, allowing small objects of code to be easily re-used in multiple applications, considerably reducing wasted effort. Somebody obviously saw parallels in the world of world of learning content development, by that time almost exclusively a digital activity but still tackled in the way you might approach the writing of a book – as one, large, hard-wired entity.
The intention behind object orientation in content development was to make it easier for content to be reapplied in multiple settings, within different subject areas and for different student groups. Learning objects could be aggregated to form complete courses of study, whether intelligently, by learning content management systems, by teachers or by learners themselves. To make this possible, learning objects had to be self-contained and as context-free as possible.
Reality is somewhat different. I’m doubtful if anyone really got themselves organised enough to have their LCMS configure content automatically to meet the needs of individual students. If they did, then well done to them. And re-using content on a systematic basis across subjects and in different contexts also requires a great deal of organisation, most probably on a centralised basis. As we know, this is not typically how learning and development works.
And of course, it is difficult to create good content that is free of context, certainly not content that anyone would want to use. The cases, examples and stories are what brings the subject alive and makes it memorable. You can introduce context into an object-orientated approach without breaking the rules, but only by carefully concentrating the context-specific material in a limited number of objects that can then be swapped out for different audiences.
But, looking back over my own use of learning objects in the past ten years, I can see many more pluses than minuses:
And believe it or not, I’ve also been able to re-use many of the learning objects that I’ve created, sometimes I’ll admit with a few tweaks, but often in their original form. And even if you aren’t lucky enough to experience much re-use, thinking in an object-orientated way can’t do you any harm and will certainly help you avoid some of the excesses of the past.
Source: Clive Shepherd