Two provocative articles for my students

 Waselenchuk’s judgment of the court’s geometry would make even Euclid wonder.

I'm giving my Philosophy of Ed students two provocative articles from the New York Times to consider. They have just finished reading John Dewey's Experience and Education and the articles exemplify the fundamental connection between experience and learning.

The first is, "A Field Trip to a Strange New Place: Second Grade Visits the Parking Garage" by Michael Winerip.

Experiences that are routine in middle-class homes are not for P.S. 142 children. When Dao Krings, a second-grade teacher, asked her students recently how many had never been inside a car, several, including Tyler Rodriguez, raised their hands. “I’ve been inside a bus,” Tyler said. “Does that count?”

When a new shipment of books arrives, Rhonda Levy, the principal, frets. Reading with comprehension assumes a shared prior knowledge, and cars are not the only gap at P.S. 142. Many of the children have never been to a zoo or to New Jersey. Some think the emergency room of New York Downtown Hospital is the doctor’s office.

 The second, "Self-Taught Racquetball Player Is in a Class by Himself" by John Otis.

 To understand how Kane Waselenchuk became the dominant player in the history of racquetball, one must embrace the teachings of the Bulgarian psychotherapist Georgi Lozanov... “He developed a way of teaching called Suggestopedia,” Jim Winterton, the coach, said about Lozanov. “In layman’s terms, it says that everybody has the capacity to be a genius, but the traditional education system screws us up. Children play using all their senses and learn all they know before school, and once they get there, it slows dramatically.”

The Econometrics of Rwandan Pear Blossoms at Duke University

I rarely post anything of this length. But this piece by my friend and Duke Univ. prof Tim Tyson, was much too compelling and beautifully written to pass up. Had to post it in full. Enjoy.

******

The Econometrics of Rwandan Pear Blossoms at Duke University
Timothy B. Tyson
Senior Research Scholar
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture

Genius glinted off every sentence she wrote. A sophomore in my first class at Duke University in the spring of 1991, she sat in my office three hours each week, both wrists wrapped in bandages; we rarely spoke of that. She read to me from her stories; I read to her from Zora Neale Hurston. A natural-born English major, she majored in Econ, for which she cared not a fig. Her tyrannical father refused to pay tuition for any major but Econ. Hospital gauze hid the wounds of her war with him.

I thought about her as I read the study by Peter Arcidiacono and Kenneth Spenner, who insist that African American students at Duke remain less well-prepared than their white counterparts. Evidence that black students catch up quickly is mistaken, they say; the mirage of their progress reflects that African Americans select “less demanding” majors at far higher rates than whites.

African American undergrads here are fodder for this attack on affirmative action and liberal arts. “What Happens After Enrollment” is a political tract disguised as scholarly inquiry. Arcidiacono speculates disingenuously that all the attention might be “because others are using the study in a lawsuit against racial preferences in admissions.” How can “others” use his unpublished work without him? How can a Duke prof be “very surprised” that the newspapers follow a racially-loaded U.S. Supreme Court? History, anyone? Who appointed him to weigh the merits of black folks being allowed into the room?

No one disputes the academic freedom of these professors to engage in politics around their own points of view; Duke’s treasure, the late Dr. John Hope Franklin, whose legacy Arcidiacono treads upon, provided research for Thurgood Marshall in Brown. But there is no constitutional right to r-e-s-p-e-c-t, as Aretha might put it. BSA members who question “the research’s intent, methodology, analysis and conclusion, in addition to its validity,” display a generosity and deliberation far exceeding those of this study.

Arcidiacono and Spenner dress their Little Lord Frankenstein in academic robes, an unconvincing costume. In their bizarre econometrics, our African American students, failing to choose the “more challenging” majors, bear the blame for the lack of minority “representation” in economics, engineering and the natural sciences. Other explanations abound; possibly the company. But the authors’ pretense of caring is undercut by their crusade to reduce the numbers of black students at the elite institutions where research careers begin. Stingy polemics, yes; good scholarship, not so much.

Their pamphlet expounds on "racial difference” without contemplating what “race” might be. Nor do the authors consider the very nature of these decisions. Their inquiry into the deeply personal choices of black students fails to ask even one black student, not that we should take anyone’s words at face value. Apparently white males at Duke once devoted to Econ and Engineering in high school mostly cling to their calculators, despite this claim that “the average student finds Engineering the most challenging field, followed by Economics.” Less-average students might diagnose lack of curiosity or fear of the unfamiliar. But to explain would require individual inquiry; we would have to check our assumptions, not just boxes on a questionnaire. Neither God in Her Divine Wisdom nor our destiny as a species would make us all engineers or economists; to major in econ when poetry holds your heart defines failure, not success. Is it possible that African American students, each one unique, on the whole come from cultural and intellectual traditions different than—not less than--most white students at Duke?

Econ majors in my seminars complain of the staggering amounts of reading. And the paucity of “right answers” in history, literature and theology intimidates many, though they catch up quickly. Once they stop inhaling the economist’s elixir--the hokum that crazy humanity is a profit-maximizing choice-machine--people often blossom in sunlight.

I have watched fire seize the minds of erstwhile econ majors, causing bad grades—in economics. They just can’t “value-maximize” anymore, not drunk on James Baldwin and James Brown. If you want a “more challenging” major, get entangled in Ellison’s “blues impulse” and trace the dust tracks from Bethlehem to Rwanda; “finger the jagged grain” of humanity, sharp with our “myriad subtleties.” Sit on the steps of Atlanta University with Du Bois, shotgun cradled on his lap, and wait for the mob; let Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” behold Armstrong’s genius of jazz; wander with Hughes among “the people of the night,” who “will give even a snake / a break.” How then to stumble home to mute econometric formulas? Sometimes these renegades light out for territory unseen. If only we built higher walls around Duke, we might bar such fools that learn and lose their way; resolute youth could scale the heights of Economics without leaving their own intellectual cul-de-sac, unimpaired by poetics—or by education.

Not long ago, I saw her walking her dog near East Campus. No more bandages; her little family and her part-time teaching job leave a light on her face never seen on that sophomore. Inspired by Hurston’s heroine, Janie, she told her father to go to hell. He groused about it, but she’d finally majored in English—double-majored in Econ to shut him up. She couldn’t remember much Econ, she said, but she still reads Their Eyes Were Watching God every spring when the pear trees blossom.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

University of California, Davis Police Lt. John Pike uses pepper spray to move Occupy UC Davis protesters while blocking their exit from the school's quad Friday

Charles J. Kelly

A former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department's use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a "compliance tool" that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters "When you start picking up human bodies you risk hurting them... What I'm looking at is fairly standard police procedure..." -- Daily Kos

Newt Gingrich tells jobless at OWS

'Go get a job right after you take a bath,'" continued Gingrich, to loud applause from the audience. -- At Family Forum in Iowa

Best Practices aren't...

"There is no such thing as best practices... One of the most common reasons for pursuing best practices in a given area is to avoid having to 'reinvent the wheel.' Think about it like this – if nobody ever reinvented the wheel, we’d still be riding around on wooden rims." -- Mike Myatt at Forbes

UFW co-founder, Delores Huerta 

“Yes we have got to occupy Wall Street. We’ve go to do that, but we’ve also got to occupy the school board, right? And we’ve got to occupy the city council, right? And we’ve got occupy the Congress, right? Because this is where the decisions are made; where our money is going to go... Sí se puede — we can do it.” -- Democracy Now!

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Science Teacher

"Getting through another year of AYP successfully is like passing a ridiculously large and hard stool. You do it because you have to, there's a modicum of relief when it's done, and you pray you haven't done too much damage when passing it." -- The Logic of Arne

Kate Spade in Afghanistan???

 As part of his efforts, Brinkley brings in corporate executives on trips to Afghanistan to try to get them to invest. An array of executives, including from Citibank, IBM and even Kate Spade, have accompanied Brinkley on these types of trips. When he's making his pitch, he wants to make it clear this is not a charity opportunity. It's strictly business. "I want them to come in and see that they can make actually make money, that there's a market," Brinkley says, "that there's talent that can be brought to bare for their particular business interests." -- Paul Brinkley, head of a Pentagon group called the Task Force for Business Stability Operations 

Duncan attacks Diane Ravitch

"Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day." -- Jonathan Alter at Bloomberg

L.A. teacher responds

"Teachers at schools like mine are concerned that education reform policies are not helping our students, because threats of turnarounds, takeovers, and poor evaluations can’t make us work any harder or make our students any less poor.  Dr. Ravitch understands this reality, and recognizes that the true insult in this debate is the allegation that teachers like me are not working hard enough, or don’t believe enough in the potential of our students, because if we did, our schools would have miracles too."-- Martha Infante at InterAct

 Dr. Cornel West

"There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie." -- Truthout

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."

Taking back school reform

Ravitch & Rose via email

Mike Rose and Diane Ravitch connected in L.A. during her book tour and continued their discussion of school reform issues via email.

Rose: I think a good place to start is with NCLB. That law was driven by a masterful rhetoric that casted dissent from its agenda as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” There can be “no excuses” for the low performance of poor, immigrant, and racial and ethnic minority kids, as measured by the tests NCLB supported. Currently, some other school reform advocates, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have taken up this point of view: Poverty doesn’t matter. 

Ravitch:  The press barons, the mighty foundations, and most think tanks today share a common narrative. They want privatization, the more the better; they have contempt for ordinary teachers, whom they hold responsible for low test scores; and they applaud any superintendent who promises to fire principals, fire teachers, and privatize more public schools. I don’t know who will frame the counter-narrative, and I don’t know who will lead the opposition to these destructive trends. 

 Read the entire Teacher Magazine dialogue here.

Speaking truth to power

Diane Ravitch is an educational traditionalist. That hasn't changed. She still doesn't fancy herself as a progressive educator. Nor is she a fan of small schools. So why do I like her so much? With the very survival of public education hanging in the balance, Ravitch has emerged as a powerful voice on the most important issues of the day. She's become a loud, clear active force against the ownership society policies of Duncan and Bloomberg. She's speaking truth to power about testing, mass teacher firings, and school closings. Plus, she's pro-teacher and for their rights to bargain collectively. Progressive or traditionalist, how can you not like that?

In today's NYT, Richard Bernstein writes:

Ms. Ravitch’s basic idea is that the education bureaucrats, the politicians, and the heads of a group of fabulously wealthy foundations have cleaved to the latest fads and theories, most of which can be subsumed under the business model of public education. (Letters from America)

As for small schools:

Ms. Ravitch found that they have produced little in the way of measurable results. Often, as in the case of the Gates Foundation’s creation of small high schools to replace large, big-city high schools, they have brought about the opposite of what they intended. 

I'll even give her another amen on that last point.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Maybe they mean this Dewey...

Newbie instructors too often emerge from ed school stuffed with the ideas of everyone from Thomas Dewey to Brazillian Marxist theorist  Paulo Freire (author of "Pedagogy of the Oppressed") - but clueless about how to help kids learn. (N.Y. Daily News editorial bashing schools of education)

Mass. testing madness

MCAS has a decidedly negative effect on the humanities and the arts. With the excessive preoccupation on testing in English and math (and now science), there is no room or energy for becoming human. (Anthony J. Palmer, visiting scholar at the School of Music at Boston University)

When they start talking "innovation," DUCK!

"Even if the reform bill does bring stringent regulation to derivatives — a big if — that won’t rectify capitalism’s worst “innovation” in our own Gilded Age: the advent of exotic, speculative “investments” that have no redeeming social value and are instead concocted to facilitate gambling for its own sake." (Frank Rich)

D.C. Superior Court judge questions legality of Rhee teacher firings

"The issue is now whether it was reasonable for the chancellor to believe last fall that there was a budget shortfall to justify" the layoffs. (WaPo)

REMAPPING PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

The First Symposium of the Deborah Meier Institute

Featuring
Michelle Fine CUNY
Pedro Noguera NYU
John Ryan PRESIDENT EMERITUS INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Deborah Meier COALITION ESSENTIAL SCHOOLS

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Sponsored by the following schools and organizations (list in progress)

AmPark*Art of Teaching Program of Sarah Lawrence College*Boston Arts Academy*Brooklyn Collaborative*Brooklyn International *Brooklyn New School*Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies*Bronx New School*Center for Urban Education at LIU*Central Park East 1*Central Park East 2*City as School*Community School for Social Justice*Earth School*East Side Community*El Puente*Elementary Teachers Network*Ella Baker*Essex Street*Facing History*Fannie Lou Hamer*Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School*Fenway*Freedom High School*Global Learning Community*Gotham Arts Academy*Humanities Prep*Institute of Collaborative Education*James Baldwin*Landmark*Lehman Alternative Community School*Lyons Community*Manhattan International*Middle College*Mission Hill*Muscota New School*Neighborhood School*PerDevPerceptual Development*Public Science Project at the Graduate Center, CUNY*School of the Future*School Without Walls*United Federation of Teachers (UFT)*Urban Academy*Vanguard*Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation

• Hear nationally known educators speak about creating and sustaining progressive schools.
• Participate in workshops facilitated by educators and students addressing topics relevant to progressive educators.
• Participate in workshops to redirect the local and national education agenda.
• Connect with colleagues of similar perspectives and varied experience.
• Be entertained by the All-City High School Chorus.

The Julia Richman Education Complex
317 East 67th Street (between 1st &2nd Avenues)

Saturday, April 17, 2010
8:30 am-3:30 pm

Registration details will follow

Email MeierSymposium@gmail.com with any questions

The Meier Institute Symposium is presented in collaboration with
Harmony Education Center and Indiana University

QUOTABLES

Mike Rose, author of Why School?, is interviewed at Pulse

I’m all for having structural alternatives in big district bureaucracies, and there are a lot of good charter schools out there. But as report after report has now demonstrated, there are also a lot of average charters, and there are some that aren’t very good at all. This is the kind of variability you’d expect if you didn’t see the charter school as a cure-all.

Deb Meier at Bridging Differences

Between now and next week, all readers must go out and buy Diane's book (The Death and Life of the Great American School System). It's an important book and lays out the basis for Diane and my agreements and, on occasion, our disagreements. It would be fun to explore it with an audience who has at least dipped into it, or has it at hand to refer to.

Just got my copy. Still waiting for my review copies of Hargreaves & Shirley's The Fourth Way and Bryk, etal.'s, Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago

Problems of philosophy(ers)

While I'm sure that most of my Philosophy of Education Society colleagues will refuse to cross the picket line at San Francisco's Hyatt Fisherman's Warf, the Society's leadership is having a hard time trying to decide whether or not to support the union boycott. On the one hand...

Although the Board is sympathetic to the union, we also feel keenly our responsibility to the Philosophy of Education Society. Among the concerns raised were sustaining the financial health of the organization in order to maintain a forum for philosophers of education in the long term, recognizing that the funds that have been raised on behalf of the organization over the years were meant to be used for this purpose, and honoring the collective will of the membership with regard to hotel labor disputes (we will provide a process for this at the 2010 meetings).

QUOTABLES

A plan to fail our kids

Closing N.Y. City schools is a plan for failure, write NAACP leaders Benjamin Todd Jealous and Hazel Dukes in a DaillyNews commentary. The NAACP has filed suit to stop the closings.

We are suing because, in the New York City case, democracy was overlooked and citizens' voices - the concerns of those most affected - were left out. In our view, the city blatantly disregarded the state-mandated analysis of how the closings would affect the more than 13,000 students who attend the schools, particularly special education and other special needs students, and how the closings would impact the often overcrowded schools they are sent to.

Gutting Local School Councils

A new bill is being pushed by State Sen. James Meeks that would strip Chicago's LSCs of their power to hire principals and to control discretionary spending. Don Moore, executive director of Designs for Change, says he does not understand Meeks’ motives.

“It seems ironic that an elected official from the South Side would propose a bill that would basically gut the powers of LSC’s, which have a majority of African American members,” Moore says. (Catalyst Notebook)

Sisyphus

Inspired by a blogger looking to become a teacher because "teaching...sounds...interesting...," Mei Flower came up with the quick, sure-fire method for getting ready to become a teacher. Think myth of Sisyphus but with people criticizing you. (Teacher Magazine, Blogboard)

GOOD READS

Against the Odds

Small schools educators, activists and researchers will want to read Against the Odds: Insights from One District's Small School Reform. The district is Mapleton, Colorado and Larry Cuban and his team have put together a good, readable, qualitative study. I even have a back-cover blurb which reads, "It's all there--struggle, resistance, leadership issues, the muscle foundations, parents, and community engagement. Against the Odds is a great resource for the small schools movement.”

The Strive of It

One of my favorite writers (people), Kathleen Cushman, has a great piece in the current Educational Leadership, "The Strive of It." It's all about practice, practice, practice--maybe not Alan Iverson's favorite topic, but the road to expertise for young learners. The Practice Project opens up real possibilities for teachers who are struggling to engage young students, capture their interests, and building expertise based on the habits of experts.

We discovered a great deal about why young people engage deeply in work that challenges them. And as we analyzed their experiences, the kids and I also began to think differently about what goes on in schools. Could what these young people already understood about practice also apply to their academic learning? Could teachers build on kids' strengths and affinities, coaching them in the habits of experts?

Teacher miseducation at ASU

Is McCain the new dean?

ASU is "reforming" its teacher education program by putting less emphasis on pedagogy and more on subject matter. Is John McCain the new dean of ASU's College of Ed, or what?

A new curriculum will be tougher and will consist of more content courses, especially in mathematics. Education students must specialize in a content area, even if they are teaching in elementary school. "We're talking about having a course in probability and statistics that elementary teachers will have to have because that's what they use in elementary school," [the real dean, Mari] Koerner said. "So you can't be a teacher if you're math-phobic." (Arizona Republic).

More elementary teachers with a background in statistics and little knowledge about child development and learning theory. Isn't that special?

Another indication of ASU going with the conservative flow in teacher ed is their $18 million contract to study and model Teach for America's approach. Sounds like a win-win for both.

I actually like the ideas of teachers having a specialty and of placing students in classrooms while they are doing course work. But are these something new at ASU? How sad.

Tweets Ken Libby: "I bet David Berliner has some choice words for these upcoming changes to ASU's teacher program." ASU Regents Professor of Education, Berliner is co-author of The Manufactured Crisis and one of the biggest critics of the neo-conservative/privatization trends in public ed reform.

California dist. bans Webster's Dictionary

It's too dirty

After a parent complained about an elementary school student stumbling across "oral sex" in a classroom dictionary, Menifee Union School District officials decided to pull Merriam Webster's 10th edition from all school shelves earlier this week. School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the "sexually graphic" entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus. (Press Enterprise)

The problem for the book-banning officials is, they have to be able to read through the dictionary themselves in order to find more sex-related words.

"It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," Cadmus said. She explained that other dictionary entries defining human anatomy would probably not be cause for alarm.

To help Betti and the other officials build their case against the dictionary, I'm asking readers to comb through their copies of Webster's and send in any words, via the comments section, that might be considered inappropriate for school age children to read. Then I will forward them on to the good people at Meniffee.

Nell Noddings makes sense of national standards

"Differentiate, don't standardize"

Educator and ed philosopher Nell Noddings says that national standards have been tried many times before, under different and have never worked to improve teaching/learning.

We do not need to standardize. We need to differentiate—to offer a greater variety of courses—and we should work on the quality of these courses. They should not be shabby, dead-end courses for those thought to be incapable of the long-favored academic courses. Rather, they should represent a genuine democratic respect for all the interests and talents required in the contemporary work world. (Edweek)

Guest blogger Bill Schubert

Bill Schubert, 2007 winner of the Mary Anne Raywid Award, is SmallTalk's guest blogger.

Remembering Mary Anne Raywid and Her Contributions

Mary Anne Raywid was a major influence in education – history and philosophy of education, social foundations of education, democratic education, educational choice, small schools, teacher education, and more. She was a pioneer – one of the few women who worked at high levels in realms of educational philosophy, history, and other foundational disciplines.

When I entered the field of curriculum and educational foundations, Mary Anne was a dynamic presence. She nurtured and led many. I first saw her when I was a doctoral student attending the 1974 at the annual conference of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), a large organization that also served as an umbrella group to bring together a network of philosophically oriented associations: The John Dewey Society for Education and Culture, The American Educational Studies Association, and The Society of Professors of Education.

Over the years, Mary Anne was a leader in all of these. She also took an interest in those beginning the professoriate, and encouraged us to understand that a responsibility that lies deep within our privilege to have a lifetime of study is to advocate. In an editorial position with the Journal of Teacher Education, sponsored by AACTE in 1980 she accepted an article I wrote called Professors Should Advocate. I was thrilled to be published, and continue thirty years later to argue that professors should advocate and take action to overcome injustices and enact more humane possibilities. This has been the spirit of Mary Anne’s work.

One of her early books was called The Ax-Grinders (Raywid, 1963) wherein she showed her ability to grapple with critics of public schools. An advocate of quality and choice in public schools as a basis for democracy, she and colleagues from AESA (with Don Warren and Charlie Tesconi, 1984) wrote Pride and Promise: Schools of Excellence for All People. This book was a brilliant antidote to A Nation at Risk, the 1983 the National Commission of Excellence in Education report. Over the years, themes of advocacy, activism, and democracy continued to permeate her work. Relative to the accountability craze, she has asked us to ponder deeply about what is worth measuring. She has highlighted our attention to progressive reforms from the renowned Eight Year Study (1933-1941) through the counter culture movement of the 1960s, the open and alternative schools of the 1970s and early 1980s, through small schools and charter schools of the past two decades, working closely with the Small Schools Workshop and many other reform ventures.

In 1996, The Society of Professors of Education inaugurated the Mary Anne Raywid Award, which was given to Maxine Greene. Subsequent recipients include Gloria Ladson-Billings (1997), Larry Cuban (1998), William Hare (1999), Herbert Kliebard (2000), Douglas Simpson (2001), Faustine Jones-Wilson (2002), O. L. Davis, Jr. (2003), William Pinar (2004), Wayne Urban (2005), Geneva Gay (2006), William Schubert (2007), Daniel Tanner (2008), and Joel Spring (2009). I was deeply honored to be one of the recipients of an award in Mary Anne’s name. The last time I met her was at the meeting when this award was given in 2007 in Chicago. We had a great conversation – remembering educational scholars and events in the field, and moving quickly as Mary Anne was wont to do into a discussion of matters of mind and heart – concerns for life’s mysteries – bases of what education should address.

Mary Anne was an exemplar for progressive democracy, critical awareness, and practice on the ground. She lived her study and her advocacy. Her legacy is substantial and continues in the lived experience of many she influenced.

Bill Schubert University of Illinois at Chicago

Rethinking education as the practice of freedom

Henry Giroux on Paulo Freire

Freire understood quite keenly that democracy was threatened by a powerful military-industrial complex and the increased power of the warfare state, but he also recognized the pedagogical force of a corporate and militarized culture that eroded the moral and civic capacities of citizens to think beyond the common sense of official power and its legitimating ideologies... At a time when education has become one of the official sites of conformity, disempowerment and uncompromising modes of punishment, the legacy of Paulo Freire's work is more important than ever before. (Truthout)

QUOTABLES

'It's about relationships...'

Jay Steele, Nashville's high school superintendent, believes that smaller learning communities are the key to high school reform.

It's about relationships. Being a band teacher, you form relationships with kids that go beyond the classroom. You form relationships with the community — you're working with large groups of kids and parents, and you're providing experiences that will last a lifetime for a group of kids. It's the same concept in redesigning high schools. High school redesign is about creating positive experiences for kids that enrich their lives and establish relationships with nurturing adults. Once you have that in place, attendance increases; discipline problems decrease. The kids see relevance in why they're going to school. Then it's easy to raise the rigor of what's being taught. (Tennessean.com)

The Zero-Tolerance gap

The causes of over-disciplining reside at the intersection of family poverty, under-funded schools, inadequate teacher training and deeply-rooted cultural biases in the way administrators and students of color respond to each other. It explains why some students get a slap on the wrist for fighting while others get a ride to the police station (David Thigpen, "Rethinking School Discipline" at Huffington).

View from right field

Conservative Mike Petrilli has some valid points to make in his critique of "anti-intellectualism" embedded in Arne Duncan's Race To The Top reforms and a curriculum that focuses almost exclusively on easily testable reading and math. Of course all this didn't begin with the Obama regime and Petrilli's alternative seems just as bad to me--E.D. Hirsch's list of what every smart person should know. When you've run through the list, voila! You're smart.

Democratic reformers had better be careful. An obsessive focus on nothing but basic skills in reading and math, which can be chopped into little bits of data with which we can make all manner of decisions, will result in a generation of students who will make Palin sound like Socrates. (The Gadfly)

What would Paulo Freire do?

In the current issue of Rethinking Schools, Bob Peterson raises the question: "Big City Superintendents: Dictatorship or Democracy?"and draws on the experience and wisdom of social-justice educator and former school supt. himself, Paulo Freire for answers.

Popular participation in the creation of culture and education breaks with the tradition that only the elite is competent and knows what the needs and interests of the society are. The school should also be a center for the [illumination] of popular culture, at the service of the community, not to consume it but to create it.

Holiday quotables

The language of schooling

We seem trapped in a language of schooling that stresses economics, accountability and compliance. (Mike Rose, Why School?)

Harlem Children's Zone in Chicago?

"We've been programmed out, and we still have the same problems. We need a communitywide effort that includes the schools, the police, the hospitals, the politicians, the universities all working together."Bishop Arthur Brazier, longtime head of The Woodlawn Organization, is working with University of Chicago officials to craft a plan for the neighborhood. The city's education and crime woes call for a bold, comprehensive strategy, he said. (Chicago Tribune feature on Harlem Children's Zone)

More HCZ

President Barack Obama is so impressed with the early successes of the Harlem program that he's set aside $10 million for 20 communities to replicate it. Cities will compete next year for seed money to launch similar "Promise Neighborhoods" in low-income and crime-plagued areas. (Trib)

Me: $10 million? For the entire coutry? That's impressed? HCZ's budget alone in $48 million.

The "reconstitution" of L.A. Fremont High

L.A. Unified did so little to improve Fremont High School that eight years ago, the state took on decision-making authority over the school and nine others in L.A. Unified. Students were reading primary-grade picture books; dropout rates were legendary. The state was supposed to provide an improvement plan that would show results within 18 months; if that failed, it would take over the school entirely or impose other sanctions. But no sanctions were imposed, and here's where Fremont is now: 12% or so of students are proficient in reading and writing. About 2,000 students start out as freshmen; by senior year, there are proficient less than 600. (L.A. Times editorial)