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.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
The Purpose of Small Schools
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
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
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Games and social foundations classes?
I've been pondering how to engage students in an asynchronous class this fall, and I'm going to take a turn trying a game (that I've audaciously named Strata because, well, it starts out with a straightforward stratification focus). I may well fall flat on my face, but there's a deeper question: what are the possibilities for using games or simulations in social foundations classes? My interest here is in generating discussion about the game (and the meta-gameplay I'll plan for partway through the semester), but there are other purposes that could be served by such activities. We create a simulated case for our multi-section undergrad social foundations class, and both my colleagues and I have run one- or two-class simulations.
But those are in my limited experience. If you've taught social foundations, have you used simulations or games, and in what structures?
But those are in my limited experience. If you've taught social foundations, have you used simulations or games, and in what structures?
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Key Thinkers Lost to Education?
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:
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?
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?
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Small School Movement
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
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
Friday, July 11, 2008
THE RESEARCH TRIANGLE. SORT OF.
As a student of education policy, my foremost personal goal is to keep my teacher sensibility and credibility from permanently draining away. Reading research reports, with their inevitable earnest calls for still more research, authoritative policy claims and suggestions, one understands that the base of the research-policy-practice triangle is practice, the apex being the conjunction of research and policy. Practice is a kind of collection pan (or audition stage) for ideas generated by scholarly investigation and clever policy-making.
Teachers serve as both subjects and objects of reform, but�with the exception of classroom-based action research, a phrase that causes your average doctoral student�s lip to curl�seldom go out looking to gather data or propose policy on a wider scale. They wait for the next finding, prescription or mandate to come down the pike, then either wrap the new guidelines around their old practice or attempt to ignore scholarship and policy altogether.
Some see this as evidence of a regrettable autonomy still present�despite the best efforts of education publishers�in the act of teaching. Others (people who work in schools, mainly) see these habits as a defense mechanism. No matter how many studies are conducted, no matter how large the data sets and innovative the statistical modeling, no matter how muscular the policy lever�kids keep coming to school, and teachers have no choice but to keep their heads down and teach them, somehow.
There�s been a little dustup over another one of Jay Greene�s papers, just released by the Manhattan Institute: Building on the Basics: The Impact of High-Stakes Testing on Student Proficiency in Low- Stakes Subjects. Greene�s shabby scholarship was roundly criticized about six months ago, when he and colleague Catherine Shock counted course titles in university catalogues, and developed a math-to-multiculturalism ratio, proving that Ed schools and teachers didn�t give a rip about mathematics achievement. Greene took some heat for that, eventually re-characterizing the data as �an amusement.�
This time, Greene and co-authors Marcus Winters and Julie Trivitt investigate the question of whether narrowing curriculum to put greater emphasis on two tested subjects (math and reading) in
Eduwonkette and other bloggers have raised lots of questions about technical aspects of the study�s research design, and the fact that the report was embargoed, not subject to traditional peer review, before hitting cyberspace; these are the kinds of inquiries that won�t be satisfied until long after the titular core message (�building on the basics� is a good and justifiable thing) has become conventional wisdom. Sherman Dorn cranked out an engaging essay on �the reworking of intellectual credibility in the internet age (which) will involve judgments of status as well as intellectual merit.� And an �Anonymous Peer Review� poster on the Ed Week blog set up, point by point, technical issues of concern in the piece, including some that are obvious even to research lightweights. For example, the study uses two years of math and reading achievement data and one year of test scores in science. That�s right�one year. I�m no statistician�but isn�t it hard to do growth comparisons with only one set of numbers?
Some tidbits from the report:
We find that students attending schools designated as failing in the prior year made greater gains on the state�s science exam than they would have done if their school had not received the F sanction.
There are two important reasons that we might expect schools deemed to be failing to respond positively. Those that have received an F grade for the first time may be shamed into improving their performance. Those that have received at least one failing grade may decide to raise their performance because they fear attrition of their student body.
Though there is some disagreement about which aspect of the accountability policy was effective (the threat of vouchers or the shame of an F grade), each of these analyses found that the policy improved the math and reading proficiency of students in public schools designated as failing.
While the hard-core researchers duke it out, let me step aside here and think like a teacher. Greene and his colleagues, through the Manhattan Institute (�turning intellect into influence�) have released a study strongly suggesting several things, some of which will be appealing to
� Don�t worry too much about schools cutting back on science or other academic subjects to meet math and literacy targets, because it doesn�t really matter, in the long run. Science scores are likely to go up, statistically, if math and reading scores go up�and that�s good enough for us.
� Schools can �decide� to raise their performance after being shamed and threatened.
� The policy of giving schools failing grades improves their reading and math proficiency. And now we have evidence that it improves all subjects, whether we spend time teaching them or not. Failure, therefore, is a great motivator.
� Sanctions work, and are much less expensive than investing in improved instruction, engaging curriculum or retaining effective teachers.
Teachers from advantaged schools and states with financial incentives were more likely to participate in the certification process. Board-certified teachers are more likely to remain in the field than other teachers, and are more likely to move to assignments in high-performing schools with lower rates of poverty.
When policy and research �decide� that perhaps a robust science program really isn�t a necessity in a failing school, where are the Board-certified teachers going to migrate? Where might an accomplished science teacher seek refuge from the trickle-down effects of policy and research, along the bottom of the triangle?
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Do You Have an Opening for a Social Studies Teacher in Your School?
[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?"
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?"
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