WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Republican frontrunner Santorum said the idea of public school was “anachronistic.”

Rick Santorum

“It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology,” he said. “But no less a theology.” -- N.Y. Times

Valerie Strauss

Jon Stewart tried to engage Education Secretary Arne Duncan on “The Daily Show” Thursday night, but the effort was an exercise in the futility of conversing with someone who won’t deviate from his talking points. -- The Answer Sheet

Atlanta Supt. Davis 

“Education is the only industry in this country where failure is blamed on the workers, not the leadership.” -- N.Y. Times

Stephen Krashen

“Our average scores are less than spectacular because the U.S. has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries.” -- Dallas Morning News

Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang

An internally motivated approach to building self-control plays to traditional American strengths. Being self-motivated may lead to other positive long-term consequences as well, like independence of thought and willingness to speak out.  -- N.Y. Times

I like this riff on Foucault

Michel Foucault

Twenty-five years ago you couldn't cocoa your cappuccino without someone accusing you of floating a signifier, much less close down the, ahem, discourse with a simple "I prefer my coffee that way". Who is this mythic "I", the theorists wanted to know, and how could he presume to know what he prefers? Has he forgotten he's as fictional as Oliver Twist or Mrs Dalloway? Doesn't he know that his likes and dislikes are as ideologically determined as the medium-term financial strategy? -- Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960 by Gary Gutting – review

Think I'll give it to my Philosophy of Ed students to unpack.

Horne vs. Dyson

Good thing I'm not teaching in Arizona. State Supt. Horne wants to ban Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I just assigned chap. 2,  "The banking concept of education."  Horne ought to read it. It's really not about "smash the gringos."

IN MY MAILBOX

From Bill Ayers

The New Yorker failed to print this.

February 7, 2010

Carlo Rotella’s flattering portrait of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (“Class Warrior,” February 1, 2010) claims that in today’s school reform battles “there are, roughly speaking, two major camps.” The first he calls “the free-market reformers,” the second, “the liberal traditionalists.” This unfortunate caricature leaves out a huge range of approaches and actors, including people Rotella himself interviewed for this story (Diane Ravitch, Tim Knowles, Kenneth Saltman). Most notably it omits those who argue, as John Dewey did, that in a democracy, whatever the wisest and most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what the community wants for all of its children.

Rotella notes that Duncan as well as the Obama children attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons), where they had small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits. Oh, and a respected and unionized teacher corps as well. Good enough for the Obamas and Duncans, good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere.

Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of Dewey, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

Sincerely, William Ayers
Distinguished Professor of Education University of Illinois at Chicago

Reform metaphors

On vacation this week but still blogging occasionally

Lying on a beach somewhere, thinking of course about metaphors for school reform. Doesn't everyone?

Bush used the best one, No Child Left Behind, coopting the Children's Defense Fund slogan of Leave No Child Behind, and turning it into its opposite with a near decade of punitive testing madness. Now Arne Duncan comes along with a far worse Race to the Top metaphor--the very opposite of leaving no child behind. A race metaphor, after all, clearly envisions (necessitates) educational winners and losers.

It's like Duncan's people met one day and said, let's continue NCLB only without all that nonsense about not leaving kids behind. Here's Diane Ravitch at her best, dropping the hammer on what she calls the Race to Nowhere:

Public hearings are pro forma; no decision is ever reversed. Parents and teachers may protest 'til the cows come home, and they can't change a thing. Their school will be closed, the low-performing students will be dispersed, and either new small schools or charter schools will take over their building. Some of the schools that will close are, funnily enough, small schools that were opened by Bloomberg and Klein only a few years ago. Does anyone believe that this sorry game of musical chairs will improve education? Does anyone in Washington or at central headquarters grasp the pointlessness of the disruption needlessly inflicted on students, families, teachers, principals, and communities in the name of "reform"? Do these people have no shame?