(Posted 2 7 12)
(Posted 1 2 12)
“Yes, but . . .” isn’t negative: it’s an affirmation
I felt good about attending the 20th Golden Apple Awards last week here in Seattle’s Intiman Theater. Sponsored by KCTS Channel 9, Pemco, the Gates Foundation, and School Employees Credit Union, the Golden Apple Awards went to eight individual teachers or principals and four schools or school programs.
I felt especially good for one of the recipients, my friend and colleague, Dr. Jennifer Wiley, Principal of Franklin High School in Seattle. It was good to see recognized the hard work of Wiley and the Franklin HS staff. It was also good to hear about other outstanding educators from around the state.
Nicely done videos–as one would expect from KCTS–showed some of the outstanding work of each of the recipients, along with lots of positive comments from students, parents, other teachers. As it happens, KCTS has archived all of the twenty award ceremonies on their website, so you can, if you want, easily tap into a good world of outstanding teaching. See:
So. A welcome and fun evening. A warm, appreciative audience, with lots of good feelings, lots of admiration for a dedicated, energetic, outstanding group of educators.
A nice counterpoint to the daily onslaught of naysayers who seem to be everywhere, as always, complaining about how lousy our schools are, how lazy the teachers are, especially when compared to schools and teachers in, well, Finland. Or perhaps next week, Bulgaria. What with the incessant din coming from national levels and right here at home, it’s easy to conclude that we might as well give up, hand the keys to the kingdom over to those other nations whose schools produce genius scholars (or at least docile workers) at one-tenth of the cost of the money we throw away here on the worst public schooling system known to humankind.
Another Golden Apple ceremony won’t convince those who already know that schools are intractably bad, those who resonate with what one of Gregory Bateson’s patients in a psychiatric said: “If it’s wrong, I’ll prove it.”
But can we not hope that such ceremonies might move those in the disgruntled and somewhat suspicious middle to be more thoughtful about schooling? Those who created the Golden Apple Awards (and those creating similar programs in other parts of the country) did so in part to give heartfelt recognition of excellent educators. But surely these creators also have in view a persuasive function, an effort to convince some of those in the middle that many in many schools are doing good work with students.
There’s nothing wrong in principle with trying to tell folks that there are lots of good things going on out there. But it’s a tricky business. Schools aren’t all bad, of course. But neither are they all good Golden Apple schools. We need to talk about the problem of how to talk about the good while acknowledging problems.
Several Golden Apple recipients, in their acceptance speeches, acknowledged with thanks the recognition, but then went on to talk about the need for another kind of recognition–the recognition that many students are not doing all that well, that many students continue to be overlooked, ignored, or treated poorly, that schools aren’t getting the kind of support they need in order to meet the needs of all students. My sense is that many folks watching the television broadcast of the awards ceremony were likely to hear the first part of the speech but weren’t all that willing to give a serious ear to that part about not doing well.
It’s not good to always focus on the bad. We need to recognize progress and good work when we see it, in schools, everywhere. Very few people can continue to do good work in bad circumstances year after year without some praise, some recognition. But surely no good will come of selective vision, looking only at the positive, and not wanting to be “negative.”
Like it or not, we’re on “yes-but” rhetorical ground. We have to know how to speak from that rhetorical ground, giving a strong “yes” to excellence and hard work and commitment, followed by an equally strong “but” to remind ourselves and our many partners in the education endeavor that the work is not over, it is never over.
I think that’s what some of the Golden Apple Award recipients were getting at in their acceptance speeches, and that’s what was, for me, perhaps the most important part of the whole evening. The “but” doesn’t negate the “yes.” In fact, the “but” gives the “yes” deeper resonance as we reflect on the importance and complexity of the work we are engaged in.
(Posted 1 2 12)
And the beat goes on . . . more testing and cramming, this time in Japan
A couple of weeks ago I commented in this space on mass testing in South Korea. Now testing and related issues are back on the radar, this time in Japan. A recent article in The Economist
http://www.economist.com/node/21542222
talks of juku, the after-school cram schools. We have here no expose of dismal Dickensian school workhouses, but a consideration of positive benefits. There are surprising merits of juku, beyond helping students get into good universities. That’s one payoff, of course: according to the article, “school and university test-scores rise in direct proportion to spending on juku..”
But there are other positive benefits apparently to be had. The service of the juku is said to be “more personalised, and many encourage individual inquisitiveness, when the public system treats everyone alike.”
Moreover, another report says that “The juku are succeeding in ways that the schools are not.”
A 2008 government survey found that two-thirds of Japan’s parents “attributed the growing role of juku to shortcomings in public education.
I would suggest that The Economist welcomes such a findings, given its long-time opposition to publicly supported schooling.
“Japan’s education ministry refuses to recognize juku, dismissing them as mere service businesses. The powerful teachers’ union resists them on the grounds of undermining equality.” Of course. Teachers’ unions everywhere are, by The Economist’s lights, always powerful, always recalcitrant, and a major reason why students everywhere aren’t learning something.
“Meanwhile the juku concept is being exported. Japanese operators are expanding to China and elsewhere in Asia. There, too, they may prove a response to broken state systems.” Indeed. We can suppose that if juku spreads to Singapore – a nation whose schooling system is touted by some as one of the best in the world – this will mean that Singapore’s state schooling system has somehow become as broken and feeble as, well, state schooling in America, China, Japan, and everywhere else except, perhaps, Finland.
Perhaps we have here the same argument against public schooling that is put forth by voucher and charter and libertarian advocates. Competition is a good thing, the state has little business being in the business of schooling, private corporations can do it a lot better.
Perhaps in some way that argument holds. One can imagine what kind of computers we would have without all that good competition for profits and market share. But, still, computers aren’t quite the same as an educated populace, a populace thoughtfully aware of its responsibilities in a free democratic republic. (And here I am not saying anything that hasn’t been said with equal or greater force by Dick Clark, other contributors to this blog, and any others elsewhere.)
What The Economist, in its barely concealed delight in reporting yet another razzle-dazzle answer to “broken state systems,” fails to consider is whether there is indeed a critical relationship between a public schooling system and the kind of thoughtful public we need to be and sustain. Surely we need to be thoughtful before we dismiss public schooling out of hand in favor of whatever superficially and immediately appears to be doing a better job.
Consider other public services that are seen as doing a lousy job. Some people think public law enforcement can’t do a good job. These people move to a gated community with a private police force. That’s their business, of course, but is it this a healthy response to a perceived problem? Another response to poor public law enforcement is support for the Mafia. Here let me direct the reader’s attention to Diego Gambetta’s very fine study, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Note, if you will, the subtitle.
So if public law enforcement is ineffective, either run away or call on Don Corleone and see what service he can provide in exchange for some small favor. Either way, nothing gets done about law enforcement.
In like manner, public schooling. Keep running away, or keep looking for magic solutions of which for some juku is only the latest, but don’t dare to raise the fundamental question of the relationship between public schooling and a thoughtful populace.
The Economist should be asking us to consider that fundamental question. Sadly, though, this often well-edited and thoughtful publication goes off the rails whenever it deals with schooling matters, clanking out tired old cliches about teachers’ unions, broken state schooling systems, and the need to abandon these in favor of, well, whatever private alternative that happens to look good today.
If you want to destroy public schooling, you can. Just keep cutting back resources while supporting ways for those who have personal resources to run away. In the end, you’ll have a broken system and The Economist and others of its ilk can say, “See? Told you so. It’s broken.”
Is that what we want?
(Posted 12 19 11)
Guaranteed results of our fixation on test scores
Roger Soder
Where do we end up given our narrow focus on test scores as the determinant of what children are and will be? We don’t need a crystal ball to see the future because where we’ll end up is where South Korea already is.
“The One-shot Society: Examsin South Korea,” (December 17 2011 The Economist paints the bleak picture:
The goal for everyone, it appears, is entrance to one of South Korea’s top universities. From those universities, it’s supposed to be on to good jobs in the government or in one of the big conglomerates. How is it decided who gets to go to what university? A single set of fill-in-the-bubble exams. You either make it or you don’t: the exam score is everything.
That goal and that very high-stakes exam process dictates what goes on in the schools. The focus in schools is on rote learning, memorization, cramming.
We’re told of a typical high school student, Kim Min-sung. “All the joy seemed to have been squeezed out of him, to make room for facts. His classes lasted from 7am until 4pm, after which he headed straight for the library until midnight. He studied seven days a week. ‘You gets used to it,’ he mumbled.”
Many parents send their children to after-school exam cram schools. There are close to 100,000 cram schools throughout the country. What with the competition to get into the better cram schools, and a relatively free market based on demand, tuition keeps going up. In the last couple of years, local governments have been allowed to try to limit private school hours and fees.
The after-school cram schools are expensive. It’s hard enough on many families to send just one child to a cram school. Multiple children in a family can make for serious hardship. The system of a one-shot exam and the consequent perceived need for expensive cram schools has serious long-term consequences. Given the educational costs, women are having fewer children. The fertility rate in South Korea has dropped from six children per woman in 1960 to a current 1.2-1.3 children per woman. That’s far below the replacement rate of 2.0 children per woman. At the current level of fertility rates, South Korea will all but disappear not too many generations down the line.
Another indicator of costs: suicide rates. “15 per 100,000 15-24-year-olds, compared with ten Americans, seven Chinese, and five Britons.”
In the meantime, there are lots of young people in universities (some 63 percent of South Koreans aged 25-34 are college graduates). To get a job, get a good education, as the old saying goes. But an August survey found that four months after graduating, some 40 percent of the graduates had not found work. As with everywhere else in the world, there are only so many of those high-level high-paying jobs and all the benefits that come with them.
Some big firms are starting to change hiring practices by establishing vocational training for high school graduates. “But the managers who run big Korea companies are mostly from the generation in which academic background was everything, so they may be reluctant to change.”
A shrinking work-force, a shrinking population, lots of unhappy children, lots of people denied life chances. Is that what appeals to you?
(Posted 9/30/11)
Some comments on the character of “character”
It’s good to see attention in this blog to Paul Tough’s NYT Magazine article on character. One way or another, schools do and should play some part in character development. We all need have on-going conversations about what character is, and what roles schools should play.
I’d like to share my concerns about three aspects of character and schools.
First, I share Dick Clark’s concerns about likely tendencies to focus on quantification of character traits. Litmus tests of character and little psychometric checklists can only shift us away from what is really important. Maybe there’s something to be said for the often-maligned “I know it when I see it” or common sense approach.
I think most of us have a common sense approach when we consider traits such as being honorable, decent, kind, trustworthy, dependable and that approach works pretty well. My father admonished my sister and me starting at a very early age: “have respect for time, place, and property.” My understanding of what he asked of us deepened over time, not because of psychometrics, but with experience and reflection.
Second, I share the concern raised in the article about having too much of a good thing. “Can’t a trait backfire at you?” asked an astute student. Yes, is the reply. Excellent question. The student could well have asked it of Aristotle. For example, in The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle considers the character trait, “ambition.” There is such a thing as being overly ambitious, or, at the other extreme, not being ambitious enough. What we need, Aristotle said, is to reside in some middle ground.
It’s not an easy matter to know the boundaries of that middle ground. Once again, character traits to check off , using some sort of psychometric list, to see whether one “has” the trait or not, won’t get us very far. We’ve all heard people say of someone, “she’s really ambitious,” and we see that as a good thing: she’s set goals, she’s comfortable with deferred gratification, she’s not distracted, has her eye on the prize, will do well in her undergrad work as well as in law school and beyond. And we’ve all heard people say of someone else, during a staff meeting break or around the water cooler, “she’s really ambitious,” and we see this as a bad thing: she’s focused on herself as she climbs the ladder, mistreating others, doing whatever she thinks it takes to get to the top. “Ambitious” is one of the most ambivalent words around.
Third, I’m concerned about the distinction often made between character education programs that focus on “moral character” and those that focus on “performance character.” There are indeed differences, but what is problematic for me are programs focus strongly on one and weakly or not at all on the other.
The “moral character” emphasis is clearly important. We want people to be fair, considerate, generous, thoughtful. But if that’s the only side of character that we emphasize, we run into problems. If we don’t know how to get on in the world, how to assert ourselves, how to push, persevere, insist, and more, then we run a good chance of getting run over. But if we focus solely on performance and ignore moral character, what have we gained?
It would seem that Jesus recognized the need for both moral and performance character. Consider his admonition to the disciples about to go out into the world: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye therefore as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.” It’s inconceivable to me that Jesus was advising some sort of amoral “nice guys finish last” approach. But neither was he under the illusion that simply being of good moral character would suffice.
Using slightly different terms, Samuel Johnson puts it this way: “Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.” The point is we have to have both moral and performance character. And any good character education program in a school must deal with both.
Schools have something to do with character. And well they should. I think we can, through reasonably civilized conversations, find broad consensus about behaviors and traits we would like to see developed, in part in schools. But in the end, it’s not schools that will matter. It’s us. I’m with Marcus Aurelius on this one: “We have to stand upright ourselves, not be set up.”
(posted 8/25/11)
How Should the Argument Be Made?
Fall is here and that means televised college football in all its glory and wealth. And, as always, the half-time ads for the two competing schools. These are the ad stuck in amongst the sales pitches for beer and sex. You know the ones. Shots of red brick buildings and elm trees, an immaculate campus, an impeccably diverse bunch of students. Then the main voiceover argument, accompanied by shots of research labs, atom-smashers, operating rooms. Our university is great, on the cutting edge, because our people have discovered the cure for the common cold plus ways to triple the soybean yield plus ways to stop crime cold. I’ve never heard an argument that the greatness of our university resides in part in having an astonishingly good Italian language department or outstanding professors of ancient Greek drama.
Look at these ads and you’ll see what universities (or, if you will, their administrators and mouthpieces and pr departments) think will impress the political and financial world out there.
Viewed from the administrator perspective, the problem, if there is one, is one of marketing: figuring out what kind of sales pitch will bring in the most cash.
But there’s another perspective, and with it another problem. Many faculty folk don’t want to argue this way, don’t want to use these kinds of sales pitches. They want elegant, principled arguments based on learning for its own sake, or some such. And some faculty don’t want to have to argue at all. They simply want to be. Or be left alone.
A useful summary of these conflicting views and thus the problem can be found in a book review by Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield that appeared in the Fall 1990 Public Interest. Mansfield, a tight writer (and good translator (Machiavelli’s The Prince; co-translator of Machiavelli’s Discourses and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America), is reviewing Henry Rosovsky’s The University: An Owner’s Manual. Rosovsky has much to say, particularly given his decade-plus experience as dean of Arts and Sciences at Harvard.
Here’s what Mansfield has to say, and I’m citing at length because the tight writing is difficult to summarize.
[Faculty members'] "standing in the academic community, Rosovsky notes, depends on their individual reputations as scholars, not on their capacity for teamwork. If certain critics attack American higher education as a whole, professors are not likely to think that this reflect on them personally. Their main concern is whether the critics’ arguments are consistent with what they themselves believe and have published. The conclusion that higher education is unsound means much less to professors than the principles by which it is declared unsound. To be a professor is to be able to live by one’s principles painlessly and, as it were, to be heroic as a matter of course.
“Such an attitude can be somewhat irresponsible. It takes no account of the mutual respect and cooperation, however minimal, that sustain a way of life mainly devoted to staking out one’s own point of view. Not to mention the money also required to support universities, from sources who like to believe, wrongly, that money talks.
“Thus professorial argument is incapable of securing the conditions of its own existence. In relation to other professors, and to forces outside the university, the best and most original arguments do not automatically prevail. While truth always comes out on top in your own books, it does not succeed so well with other professors, who will be envious of your discoveries (envy being the besetting sin of academia, as Rosovsky sagely remarks). Those outside the universities, who do not live like professors and who are not so absorbed in their own projects and constructions, tend to be suspicious of and resistant toward the academic community. Securing the nonacademic conditions of academic life–comity and money–therefore becomes a job for deans and presidents. They are called to the task of defending the universities, and to do it in political terms that will gain the most support–as opposed to flaming statements of principle that are coherent but divisive. Deans and presidents cannot afford to show how well they argue, not because they are incapable–perish the thought!–but because they cannot afford to annoy those whom they might excel.”
If we accept Mansfield’s analysis, it seems that university administrators are in a double bind. If they argue with the public and politicians on the basis of what will gain support, they will lose the support of the faculty. If administrators allow themselves to be guided by faculty perspectives, they will construct elegant but unpersuasive arguments
It is a serious question, this matter of how to argue, this matter of how far an administrator can play it both ways, Janus-faced, pleasing both politicians and professors.
But it is a question not limited to higher education folks. K-12 educators have to deal with the same question, whether they want to or not, or whether they even want to acknowledge the dilemma. K-12 administrators and school board members have to go to their communities and to the state legislature for support. They have to have reasons, they have to have an argument. It’s tempting for them to do some quick market research and conclude that the good old “test scores are going up” or “we’ve got value-added on top of value-added,” will bring in the most support.
At the same time, they have to deal with (should they so choose) teachers and others in the community who believe there is more to schools and education that test scores and value-added formulas. We should argue, these folks will say, on the basis of what schools ought to be doing to help students become intelligent and inquiring citizens, human beings who won’t just follow orders, who want to think about things, and learn to appreciate things.
But K-12 administrators and board members can very well say, “those ideals are nice, but they’re not going to sway state legislators. The folks with the money want test score results, not idealism, and, by golly, that’s what we’re going to give them.”
So K-12 administrators and board members, just like administrators in higher education, have to figure out how to play it both ways, Janus-faced.
The question for me is whether, given that everybody knows what kinds of arguments are being made, one can be Janus-faced, and still remain an effective leader for both sides. Or, a larger question, is there another way of getting out of this muddle?
(posted 8/9/11)
Response to Villages Do Raise a Child
Dick Clark’s latest piece on schools, villages, and communities didn’t exactly awake me out of my dogmatic slumbers, but he did push me–as he has many times over what’s getting close to four decades–to look yet another time at some serious dilemmas.
One dilemma: how in fact to wrestle with dilemmas. We don’t want to dismiss a dilemma out of hand just because there’s no ready solution to hand. (If there were an acceptable solution, there wouldn’t be much of a dilemma in the first place.) But, yet, if we’re going to wrestle with a dilemma, we will need to consider implications, figure out what dealing with the dilemma would actually mean in the world.
One difficulty I think we need to wrestle with: question of what common values, the question of what schools are for. I’ve no problem with the values outlined in the first paragraph of Dick’s piece, but I think there’s at least one more to add into the mix, one that Dick alludes to in comments about parents “beating the system.” Schools have always been seen by many people as connected to social mobility. Doing outstanding work in good elementary schools lead to payoffs in good high schools and high SATs and . . . well, you can take it from there, all the way to the J.D. or the M.B.A., good jobs, and all the rest.
So we’re right back to the inherent tension between freedom and equality. The more freedom people have to build on their necessarily unequal situations, the less equality there will be. The more we plump for equality via any sort of restraints or unleveling the playing field (in the name of leveling it?) the less freedom there will be.
So as long as schools are seen as the venue and the means for getting ahead, and not just as benign places for all kids to self-actualize, there’s going to be a scramble, and healthy communities/schools questions won’t even be raised.
Another puzzle for me in puzzling this out. I’m hardly a fan of the fed coming in and telling people what to do. One hardly has to be a Tea Party adherent to understand the limitations here. As for the state level, we’re not much better off, as we can see with all the rules and regs, the SLOs, the WASL, and all the rest over the years. Private philanthropy might seem to hold out some hope, some way of providing support for school/community development, but there are difficulties here, too.
The Seattle Times (Sunday, August 7) has an article about the Gates Foundation and its efforts to improve schooling. It can be found at:
As noted in the article, the reaction of many to the Gates efforts is similar to reactions to top-down “reforms” from the feds and the state.
Note, too, the comments appended to the article. The last time I checked, there was one lone comment to the effect that we need to find common ground and engage in some thoughtful discussion. The other comments were either of the “why don’t you people appreciate what Bill Gates in his goodness is trying to do for you?” (a minority) or “why doesn’t Bill quit telling us how to run our schools and our lives?” (a decided majority).
So. What might seem like an opportunity (Gates money, support for needed efforts, ways to bring community and schools together) seems in fact to end up no further than we were when we started.
I’ve no way out of here, and I’m not arguing against any of the claims Dick is making. But I’m surely in a muddle as to how to proceed. And I can’t help but think of dear old Tocqueville. This is from one of the closing chapters of the second part of Democracy in America:
“ . . . I cannot prevent myself from fearing that men will arrive at the point of looking on every new theory as a peril, every innovation as a distressing trouble, every social progress as a first step toward a revolution, and that they will altogether refuse to move for fear that they will be carried away. I tremble, I confess, that they will finally allow themselves to be so much possessed by a relaxed love of present enjoyments that interest their own future and that of their descendants will disappear, and they will rather follow the course of their destiny weakly than make a sudden and energetic effort when needed to redress it.”
I’m surely willing to engage with others in thinking about what that sudden and energetic effort would entail.
(posted 7/29/11)In this posting, Nick Michelli of CUNY reacts to Soder comments and shares his own views on China and the UAE.
A year or so ago I wrote an essay on this blog describing my experiences as a visiting professor in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and my visit to universities in Beijing. I very much enjoyed reading Roger Soder’s reporting of his experiences in China and Allan Wood’s comments. I’d like to add a few of my own, some of which will repeat what I said in my earlier essay. I make no claim to being an expert on China and so these are in the category of informed observations, and I only will make a few.
I found extraordinary interest among the faculty and students I worked with in the United States and a hope to understand it better. I was surprised by the openness and friendliness of the people, the beauty of the country, and fascinated by the traditions and history, which meant much more up close than in the abstract. My surprise, I think, came from the gray and unappy picture painted of China during the cold war. The China I found was neither. It was colorful, friendly, and largely happy. I gather that Roger found largely the same. This year I have been working in the United Arab Emirates, primarily with Zayed University in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. I will try to draw some contrasts between this experience and my experience in China.
As to openness and the view of democracy, the fact that East China Normal University published the book I did with David Keiser, Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice in Chinese and are using it widely speaks to openness and a desire to understand both democracy and the United States. The economic revolution in the last 20 years in China has brought the Chinese version of capitalism to the forefront. It isn’t surprising that it has led to a greater spread in wealth between classes. I believe that the economic revolution has led to the conflicts among the upper echelon of the government regarding openness. Decisions, as Allan suggests, still are behind closed doors. Some folks I know believe that big and controversial decisions are better off made behind closed doors, even here. Witness the debate over the debt ceiling between the President and Congress, both with an eye on the 2012 elections. I sometimes think the problem would have been settled easily if the public didn’t know the different positions, or who voted how! I’m not saying this would be good, and certainly is not in keeping with democracy as we define it, but we would not be in the current quandary if the election were out of the picture. It seems to me that most of the people I met in China were happy not knowing all the inner workings of government, so long as their lives improved. I explored this a bit in my last China essay, in that when I asked about Tiananmen Square on the 20th anniversary of the uprising, everyone I talked to thought they had “won.” Why?? The democracy they sought was perceived to have been delivered in the form of economic change and better quality life, at least for many. They didn’t use the words, but I bet they viewed their own posterity as social justice. This seems to be consistent with Roger’s observations.
Openness was hardly in evidence in the United Arab Emirates. There was even more strict Internet control than Roger and I found in China. When there was a report that Indian expats could not find enough seats in Indian schools for their children, the government scrambled to fix the problem. When I asked future teachers what they thought about the conditions of the expat workers, including Indians, Pakistani and East Africans, they said, “We don’t talk about that.” And they wouldn’t. Of course they were part of the 20% of the society who are citizens—Emirati—and who have access to free public education. The system works well for them.
Regarding the amazing industrial and urban development in China, I certainly wouldn’t want to pay the electric bills! Standing on the banks of the Huangpu River, the tributary of the Yangtze running through Shanghai, and looking across to Pudong one can hardly take in the huge buildings, all brightly lit and many with animated signs of a scale that exceeds Las Vegas. Twenty years ago Pudong was a rice field. Extraordinary, and the same kind of development and bright lights was true of Hong Kong, which is still not quite China (one needs a visa to pass from Hong Kong to China). This kind of glittering development creates a problem for China which might be called the “revolution of rising expectations.” Those now educated, and having discovered cities, have no interest in doing anything in the rural areas, and there aren’t enough jobs in the urban settings for them, but they expect continued economic comfort. It is like seeing Oz!! How does China attract those with skills to help improve life in rural China? I expect a good deal of coercion is in the offing and I expect it will be one of the great problems of the next decade.
In the UAE almost everyone lives in cities! Less than 40 years ago there was no UAE and the population wandered the desert with camels, drinking camel milk and hunting. Now the extraordinary cities dominate, with the expatriate workers in the oilfields or working in the tourist industry. But Emirati do not, by and large, live in rural areas. They live in cities that feature malls with ski slopes and ice rinks, as anyone watching National Geographic television knows. This is in 40 years, not thousands.
Roger and Allan both mentioned education and the struggle to educate and accommodate the educated in China. The system is, of course, regimented and controlled, but there is evidence of concern for change. One of my colleagues has been approached to work with 200 schools in the far western provinces of China to make schools more hospitable and emotionally supportive for the children of migrant workers. This is a very interesting change, and I wonder what the roots are.
In the UAE only the Emirati have free public education. Expats may pay for it and attend private schools, but the costs are high. However most expats can’t afford to bring their families, so the issue is largely moot. I did see schools that were surprising to me in a theocracy. Children were surrounded by signs that said, among other things, “Question everything.” Not what I expected. They were working in in their classrooms in groups to foster collaboration and they were engaged in the study of the arts and performing plays. I didn’t see many schools in China, so I’m not sure if there are any parallels. The one thing I do know is that in both China and the UAE children study English beginning in the early grades.
Another thing I found impressive in China was the reverence for the aesthetic. The museums I visited were well constructed learning experiences that highlighted the history of China as told through art. I don’t know, but I expect Roger or Allan might, how aesthetic education is carried out in the schools in China. I didn’t see many children in the museums
The UAE, by the way, is buying its place in the world as a center for art. A branch of the Louvre will open soon. This is quite controversial in Paris, but the Louvre has been handsomely compensated for the right to use the brand. There is also a branch of the Guggenheim scheduled to open. However, there is an interesting controversy underway. What art would they put in these museums. Western art? That seems not to be the plan. But what local art might be presented? Remember, 40 years ago there was no UAE and the Bedouin culture was hardly uniform. So now they have the space, but not a decision about where the art will come from.
These experiences for me, and I know for Roger and Jane, were extraordinarily stretching. I have never learned as much in such a short time as I did in China. I appreciate Roger’s sharing of his experience with us and Allan’s comments, and I hope all of you have the opportunity to visit some far away culture and try to make
(posted 7/26/11)
My two previous chunks of comments on China dealt with a few matters of teaching, learning, and leadership. This concluding chunk focuses on several topics: impressions of the scale of China, impressions of some of the apparent wide range of wealth distribution, and impressions of the ruling party’s struggles to deal with scale and wide range of wealth.
Scale. Despite looking at internet photos of, say, Shanghai and the new Pudong district before our travels, we were unprepared for what we saw. We were in big cities: Shanghai (23 million), Chongqing (14 million), Kunming (7 million), as well as many other cities in southern and southwestern China, many with one million or more residents. Seemingly everywhere: tower cranes, new buildings, new industrial plants, new roads, new power plants.
Typical impressions. Driving in from the very large, very new, very clean Kunming airport, we saw miles of new office buildings, new apartments and condos, most of them in the 30-40 story range. Look just past a cluster of 40-story condos, and you’ll see five more clusters being built, all the same design. It’s difficult to get a sense of a downtown core in the sense, say, of Seattle’s downtown core. What with all these miles of tall buildings, you could put Seattle’s downtown somewhere in Kunming, or take it away, and nobody would notice the difference. Not everyone lives in the new buildings, of course. Too expensive. There are hundreds of blocks of old apartments, mostly in the 3-10 story range.
We saw plenty of countryside away from the cities, plenty of mountains and forests and rice paddies in southwestern China. But big new urban developments pop up just around the curve of the country road. There are the mountains, the meandering river, a peaceful bucolic scene, and then, right before you, is an entirely new town, hundreds of thousands of people living in newly constructed high-rise apartment buildings and working just a few miles (walk, bike, motorbike) at a newly constructed industrial park, putting together laptops or mobile phones or whatever else is in demand in a country of 1.3 billion plus the rest of the world.
We didn’t see the manifest contrast of rich and poor that you see, say, in India, Mexico, Vietnam, Pakistan. But in the cities, the wide range is there, nevertheless, with most people getting and newly emerging upper class people buying all they can get. In the countryside, the usual rural/urban contrast. Rice paddies being plowed in the old way, one beast, one plow, one man.
You can get by on relatively little in the country . But, as is well known, there’s a huge shift from rural to urban involving millions of people. That shift can be costly when you go from being part of an integrated cohesive network in a farm village to isolation in a big city, where you’re looking for work and not finding any, and not finding a lot of social and psychic support.
There are immense challenges for the country and its ruling party, what with the scale, with economic development, with increasing disparities in wealth distribution, with population shifts. From what I have read, and from what we gathered from talking with people here and there, the ruling party’s main response to the challenges is to hunker down and try to maintain stability and control. Sometimes one maintains control by being a bit flexible. For example, extent of enforcement of the one-child policy seems to vary from region to region. (See, for example, the article in the current Economist:
But, despite flexibility in some areas, the ruling party seems to want to clamp down on any sort of communication between people that might lead to people talking with each other about political matters and eventually questioning the party line.
Try, for example, to use the internet in China without encountering the Great Firewall. Some of our hotel rooms had nice new computers, with access to the Net. I could check my email with no problem. I could get the basic news pages of, say, the Washington Post or the NY Times. But consider what I couldn’t get, what nobody can get. You can’t get Facebook. You can’t get YouTube. You can’t get the blog pages of the Washington Post or the NY Times, or any other blog. Facebook, YouTube, blogs–these all involve people talking with each other without Party control, and that the Party cannot abide. Try to access any of these, and all you get, in Chinese, is some version of “don’t even think about it.”
A healthy free democratic society depends on people being able to talk with each other about things that matter. It seems very clear that the ruling Party is aware of this notion. People do try to get around the Great Firewall, they do try to talk with each other. They blog. I saw something recently, a distinction made between blogging and actually doing things, as if blogging and doing were somehow different things. In a non-free society, at any rate, blogging is an extremely important political act, it is doing something of extreme importance (and danger).
And thus, I found myself in China working and thinking about schools and community and freedom. And I thought of Dick Clark’s blog page, and its title, Education and Community. I tried to access his blog page. No luck. And now, back home, I think of my friends in China who cannot read what I’m writing here, at least not on Dick’s page. It’s a blog, after all, and we can’t have that, can we?
(posted 7/20/11)
Leadership development in China: implications for us
Dick Clark asked me whether there was any particular surprise we encountered, anything particularly unexpected, during our recent trip to China. I’d have to say that I was surprised by (and respectful) of China’s purposeful leadership development efforts. In this second clutch of comments about our recent trip to China, I’d like to discuss some of those leadership efforts with a focus on the leadership academy I worked with - the China Executive Leadership Academy-Pudong (CELA-Pudong). Again, the caveat: what’s here are impressions based on a short visit to a complex institution in a complex country.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created four leadership academies, each with a particular focus. Leadership Academies at Jinggangshan and Yan’an center almost exclusively on Party matters, theories, orthodoxy. Focus follows location: Jinggangshan was the original home of the Red Army; Yan’an for years the home of the revolutionary CCP. A third academy, the Dalian Business Executive Academy in Dalian (northern industrial China) focuses on programs for senior managers of state-owned enterprises.
The fourth Leadership Academy, the one I worked with, is the China Executive Leadership Academy-Pudong (CELA-Pudong). Again, location and program approach are related. Shanghai’s Pudong economic development area has dozens and dozens of blocks of modern and very tall office buildings and some of the most expensive condos in the region. Not surprisingly, the CELA-Pudong has a clear sense of openness, a sense of outreach, think-outside-the-Marxist-CCP box, a willingness to engage the world. Many have said that Shanghai is the most international of Chinese cities; the CELA-Pudong has been characterized as the most international of the four leadership academies.
Perhaps the easiest way to get a sense of the CELA-Pudong operation, its purpose, scope, and procedures, is to go to its web page. There is a lot of descriptive information here, and the short video link on the home page will give a sense of the scale and scope.
And it might be helpful to glance at the Journal of the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong, found on the web.
At any give time, there are upwards of 850 or so senior- and mid-level Chinese government officials on campus, taking part specially designed development programs of varying lengths, or working toward the MBA or MPA.
In addition, the CELA-Pudong maintains all sorts of international connections, sending its faculty members to institutions in other countries, and welcoming foreign academics to Pudong to conduct lectures and classes. International corporations such as Proctor & Gamble (now P&G, but I still think of it by its former name) have working arrangements with the Academy. The CELA-Pudong also conducts specially designed leadership development programs for leaders and potential leaders who come from other countries. If you’re going to cut deals with, say, a country in Africa, providing infrastructure development in exchange for mineral rights, why not provide leadership training for that country at the same time? Why not make it easier to continue mutually beneficial business and political relationships in the decades to come through leadership development programs?
The CELA-Pudong is an impressive operation. There are lots of modern buildings (the place was opened just six years ago), including eight well-appointed hotel-style residence halls. Residence rooms have new TVs plus new computers. The food services are excellent. Classrooms have all the latest technology. The ubiquitous support staff is efficient, friendly, and helpful. I had good conversations with thoughtful and engaging faculty members about all sorts of political and non-political matters.
For all the modern and efficient and friendly engagement, one still has to wonder about how much the direct authority of the CCP affects curriculum and instruction at the CELA-Pudong. The head of the CELA-Pudong is the head of the Operations Department of the CCP. There’s some heft here, hardly a token leadership position. The CCP created the CELA-Pudong and continues to fund it. So there are, it would seem, constraints on academic freedom.
On the other hand, I think it’s fair to say that every academic/bureaucratic organization has some sort of orthodoxy. Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal once said that “Generally speaking, we can observe that the scientists in any particular institutional and political setting move as a flock, reserving their controversies and particular originalities for matters that do not call into question the fundamental system of the biases.”
So if the leadership academy at Pudong has biases and orthodoxies, it’s hardly alone. Nonetheless, there would seem to be some tensions between wanting to be cutting-edge in the international business and political world involving all sorts of creative thinking and free exchange of information and at the same time demanding political orthodoxy in a relatively closed system with information exchange highly restricted.
We are dealing, after all, with a regime that has at least one faction that probably recognizes the need for authentic openness and at least one other faction that is concerned about keeping the lid on and maintaining order/stability/control. This is a regime that is still struggling to figure out how to talk about the not-too distant past. We might consult, for example, a recent article in the New York Times on the newly published official history of the Communist Party from 1949-1978.
Mao and the CCP caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, but not a word about this in the official history of the Communist Party. As such, we’re talking about whole herds of elephants in the room, and not much space in that room for free and open inquiry, free exchange of information, and critical perspectives that go counter to the Party line. There are indeed tensions that, it would seem, will sooner or later have to be worked out.
Those tensions will have to be worked out by the people in China themselves, not by outsiders.
Nonetheless, the purposeful leadership development programs in China provoke us to think about our own ways of developing a leadership corps.
In the U.S., we have our service academies, founded to provide a competent corps of military officers. But we have no purposeful way of preparing a non-military leadership corps. Perhaps the way we recruit and prepare leaders – a haphazard combination of free enterprise and social class – works well for us, perhaps there is no other way to do things. But what China is doing in the way of preparing and supporting leaders (domestic and foreign) provides a model that might not in the end be worthy of emulation, but is surely worth careful examination.
(posted 7/12/11)
Soder in China -- Part One
My wife Jane and I visited China during most of May and a part of June. I had been invited to speak at two institutions in Shanghai - East China Normal University and the Shanghai Leadership Academy - as well as Southwest University in Chongqing. These engagements took about a week; for the remainder of our time we traveled with driver and guide in the countryside in southwestern and southern China.
Faculty and administrators and East China Normal and Southwest U had specifically requested that I speak about the moral dimensions of teaching (the title of a book John Goodlad, Ken Sirotnik, and I had edited some twenty-one years ago) as well as issues of teacher education.
Not surprisingly, then, many of the questions from faculty, administrators, and students focused on the moral dimensions. People didn’t express much interest in how the moral dimensions were dealt with in American schools or teacher education programs. They were very interested, however, in ways to frame basic concepts.
Whence comes this interest?
In one way or another, the basic concepts of moral dimensions of teaching have long been a part of Chinese culture. At both institutions, we talked about a basic Chinese phrase, “jiaoshu yuren,” meaning, as I came to understand it, “to teach book [and] educate people.” The distinction is critical. It is not enough simply to teach what’s in the textbook (jiaoshu). One must also be concerned with educating people, that is, teaching people how to live, how to conduct themselves as individuals and as members of a group (yuren).
Moreover, from what I was told, the Chinese word for “teacher” (laoshi) means something much more than someone helping you “learn book.” It is a term of reverence and respect for teachers at all levels, preschool through university.
In addition to long-term tradition, there are recent developments. We know that in America some have argued that teachers are not merely technicians “teaching book, “if you will, in order to get the test scores up. Similar arguments appear to be emerging in China. There has been a huge emphasis, especially in the last thirty years, in economic development and providing schooling (and thus providing teachers) to support that economic development. But now there are those who want to put more emphasis on the “yuren” part of education.
How well did we communicate about these difficult matters? I don’t know. It’s difficult enough here in the U.S., after all, with everyone speaking English, and my asking students to paraphrase what I or someone else in class was saying. But at East China Normal and Southwest U, I was speaking for a few minutes, then what I said was translated into Chinese, with everyone taking notes. For a good many reasons, I wasn’t about to ask someone to paraphrase for the audience what I had just said. Between language/translation difficulties and the larger issues of cross-cultural differences, who knows how all these matters of moral dimensions were interpreted and thought about?
All I know, at base, is that these matters in one way or another are of particular importance to some educators in China.
A second question often asked, relates to the first. To speak of moral dimensions is, I would surely argue, to speak of political dimensions, because moral dimensions involves other people and relations among people always takes place in one sort of political regime or another. If I argue that a teacher is morally obligated to help students learn how to think critically, I am speaking as much in a political sense as I am in a moral sense.
So many of the questions, both after the lectures and in many other meetings with individuals and small groups, focused on basic political matters. When Jane and I talked about politics in America, what was going on with President Obama, Congress, and the like, there would be puzzled looks, and then, in one way or another, the basic question would emerge:
“You have two major political parties, Democrats and Republicans, and lots of others, and many many differences about what should be done about just about everything. So who decides what should be done?”
Well, we would say, that’s the basic question, isn’t it.
I don’t think that anyone’s mind was changed as a result of the conversations that followed. The cultural/political differences run deep. But I was once again struck, as I am here at home, by the closeness of questions about moral dimensions of teaching and matters political, and how quickly we go from one to the other.
(posted 5 7 11)
It’s easy to alter history, but do you really want to pay the price?
Once Joseph Stalin figured you had become his enemy, you vanished-- killed in the basement of Moscow’s Lubianka Prison with a bullet in the back of the head, or shipped to the Siberian Gulag.
You also vanished in another sense. All documentary evidence of your existence was obliterated.
There’s an extensive collection of photographs showing how Stalin’s enemies became non-persons in David King’s The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia. It’s frightening to see an original photo showing Stalin with five close comrades. And then, one by one, there is a series of photos showing the progressive airbrushing of the five enemies out of existence. This was in the 20s, the 30s, 40s, long before Photoshop. Imagine what Stalin’s minions could do now.
Altering of history is a central theme of Orwell’s 1984. The Party officials simply get rid of unpleasant political contradictions by putting things down the Memory Hole. The Party slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” And, as Orwell says, “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened–that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture or death.”
It never happened. The altering of history to avoid political embarrassment is still going strong. Take, for example, the recent behavior of the distinguished Senator from Arizona, John Kyl.
As has been widely reported, on the floor of the Senate on April 8, Senator Kyl stated that “If you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does;” pretty much straightforward, and pretty much inaccurate. Planned Parenthood and many others pointed out the inaccuracy.
A few days later, the senator’s staff, apparently intent on damage control, issued a statement to the effect that the Senator’s claim about Planned Parenthood was “not intended to be a factual statement.”
And some days later, the Senator took advantage of the rule allowing changes to be made in remarks before insertion in the Congressional Record. Now, for all time, what it appears that the good Senator actually said on April 8 was, “If you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood and that is what Planned Parenthood does.” The “well over 90 percent” part of the statement simply went down vanished down Orwell’s Memory Hole. From now on, unless you have recourse to C-Span tapes, the “truth” of what Senator Kyl said is what he says the Congressional Record says it is.
Senator Kyl is not the only politician concerned about historic cleansing. Lots of folks are worried. The new media-- especially audio/video recording, the internet, and tweeting–make it easy for any statement to go viral in seconds and to stay around forever. That’s a bad combination for any politician who tends to make offhand and often stupid comments to a just-us-folks crowd.
And thus another cottage industry is coming on strong. Embarrassed by something stupid you said, something that is stuck there on the web for all to see and hear? There are lots of eager service companies out there who, for a price, will cleanse the web of your embarrassments and make your web presence as saintly as you want it to be.
(For a recent piece on web cleansing services, see:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54302.html)
A new saintly presence, at a price; the price is higher than one might at first think. What we are buying is a new version of how to respond to human error. The old adage is altered: To err is human, to erase is divine. But with that erasing, there is no longer an opportunity for growth, for forgiveness. If you can’t alter history, can’t alter what you said, then you might be embarrassed, but you have the opportunity to say “This is what I said, this is what I regret saying, this is what I might have said, and this is how I hope I have grown.” But when everything embarrassing can be erased – it never happened – then there’s no chance for acknowledgment, no chance for growth, no chance for forgiveness. If it never happened, there’s nothing to forgive.
So Senator Kyl and the rest of us who alter history so it never happened are paying–and asking us to pay–a terrible price.
What does all this have to do with an education and community blog? We continue, I hope, to think about what schools might be for. I hope that young people will emerge from the K-12 experience with the ability and willingness to carry on a thoughtful and generous conversation about it never happened.
(posted 4 15 11)
The temptations and tyranny of the US News & World Report rankings
Roger Soder
April is the cruelest month, said T. S. Eliot. But March has to be the maddest.
There’s NCAA basketball. Also another form of March Madness, with high school seniors hoping against hope for that letter of acceptance from the selective university of their dreams. High anxiety levels here, about the same as waiting for your SAT scores.
And there’s an even worse March Madness, one that makes the high school senior anxiety attacks seem like the repose of Zen meditation. For March brings the good or bad news of the rankings of higher education by US News & World Report. All sorts of undergraduate and graduate and professional programs are ranked in higher education’s version of American Idol. And all sorts of higher ed administrators and faculty await the annual US News issue (or advance teasers on the internet) with hope and fear.
How much hope and fear depends on how your institution’s programs have fared in previous contests.
When the rankings have you in the Top Ten or even, seductively, in the Top Twenty, it’s very tempting to believe the rankings are right on the money. (“We always knew we were good and now US News says we are, too!”) For Top Ten winners, the news means you have something to tell the Provost so the Provost can tell the PR people who can brag to the lobbyists and the legislators and anybody else who might be useful.
And why not? There is precious little good news about Education schools. The wolf is always at the door, even more so in these times of severe budget cuts in most states. There are people in state governments, even people in your own institution, who have elimination of the Ed School high on their list of things to do. In such parlous times, it would take the courage of a saint or a fool to disparage or ignore a Top Ten ranking.
If you’re further down the list, the temptation fades. If your institution is ranked 87th out of 200, there’s not a lot of hurry to get the news out to your constituents. Even if you’ve “improved,” gone from 91st to 87, to talk of that improvement merely emphasizes your low position. If anybody asks, you’re more like to say “the rankings really don’t mean all that much.”
But for players, those in the top ranks, the rankings mean all that much. The danger, moreover, is the addiction. Once you buy these rankings as actually having meaning, there’s no turning back. Rather than focus on your program and what it actually means, you focus on the rankings. But there is no way to wing this game. In his memoirs, Malcolm Muggeridge makes a shrewd observation about two publishing magnates – millionaires, they were, but they “continued, till the day of their deaths, to be tormented by unrealised hopes and unaccountable fears.” There’s always something more, somebody richer. Or somebody with a higher ranking.
When you make the rankings mean so much, with the stakes so high, there is a temptation to game the system. We know that some “good” students have early on figured out that the way to succeed is to figure out exactly what the teachers want and then, by golly, you give it to them. So, too, with the US News ranking system. If last year you were 18th and now you’re 13th, you’ve got a double challenge. You have to make sure that next year’s ranking is even better and certainly not worse. (Imagine the disaster if you slip from 13 back to say, 16. The people you bragged to about your 13 rank might raise an eyebrow. (What’s going on over there in the Ed School, they’ll ask. A little slippage? Do you think it’s time for new leadership? ) To meet the challenge, you figure out what they want – what they want, not what might be best for your program – and, by golly, you give it to them.
Once you buy into the rankings game, it can be very difficult to remain clear about what you’re doing. We’re close here to the observation made some decades ago by Austrian journalist Karl Kraus: “How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.’”
What higher education leaders need to do is shake clear of the temptations of their American Idol contest. They need to gain control over the definition of the meaning of their work. In The Politics Presidents Make, political scientist Stephen Skowronek suggests that Franklin Pierce was a failure "not that he lacked the power or inclination to do great things but that he completely lost control over the meaning of what he did. . . . As a rule, power has been less a problem for presidents than authority; getting things done less of a problem than sustaining warrants for actions taken and for accomplishments realized . . . successful leaders do not necessarily do more than other leaders; successful leaders control the political definition of their actions."
Gain control over the meaning of what you do, and let the March Madness drift right on by.
(posted 1 22 11)
Finding the One Clue to Raising Perfect Kids
Roger Soder
When my daughter was not quite one year old, I picked up a copy of a parenting guidebook. Not Dr. Spock - that one was already on the shelf. This one was How to Give Your Child a Superior Mind. Not just a good mind, or thoughtful mind. We were going all the way, the top, with superior.
I don’t know how much good the book did. Kids seem to do what they seem to do, despite what we say. (Out of curiosity, I checked to see if the book is still available. Indeed it is, in its tenth edition. That’s what one calls legs in the book world.) But I do recall thinking, way back then, that it was important to do all we could to help our daughter self-actualize (or whatever Carl Rogers was saying) and if the book would help, then buy the book, read the instructions, and get on with it.
So it’s no surprise to me to learn that hundreds of thousands of people are buying Amy Chua’s recent memoir about raising (by supposedly hair-raising means) her two daughters. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is hanging around sixth on the Amazon site. A best seller for two reasons, one I dislike, and one I can understand.
First, the reason I dislike. With the knowledge and support of the author and her publisher, excerpts were published in the Wall Street Journal, little tidbits here and there detailing outrageous (for most people) parenting strategies: putting your child out in the freezing cold, refusing to let them use the toilet until they played a piece of music without error, tearing up child-made birthday cards and demanding better ones, calling a child “garbage,” and so on.
Right quick, the Journal piece generated some 7,000 comments. If the book excerpts were outrageous, most of the commentators were outraged. Subsequently, Ms. Chua explained to all and sundry that she had been misread: the book, if anybody cared to read it, detailed what didn’t work, and, anyway, she was being satirical, and, beyond that, perhaps some of what she wrote was, well, read the book. (I won’t put in any cites here: just a click or two on the internet, and you’ll have all you want and probably more.)
My own sense of the book is that it is a short, self-indulgent, and, in the end, sad lament. Had the book been marketed in terms of what I think it actually is, that Amazon ranking would be a lot lower. That said, there is one good part of the book: a description (from both mother and daughter) of how a marvelous piano teacher brings Prokofiev and the daughter together - masterly teaching in action, a joy to read about, and it would have been wonderful to hear more.
The reason I can understand the flurry to be the first on your block to get this one, is that, as I said, I’ve been there. The book is seen by many, however mistakenly, as providing clues to giving your child a superior mind and, by extension, a straight path to Carnegie Hall, Harvard Law School, a Rhodes Scholarship, whatever you think your child needs and deserves.
Many of us are always on the lookout, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But sometimes it seems we’re looking for some bit of magic, the one Clue, instead of reflecting on how hard all this is, bringing up kids. Just a day or two after the Chua flap took off, I saw a NY Times story on a research study showing links between weightlifting and academic achievement (or IQ or something similar that we all want). I wouldn’t be all that surprised to see a spike in health club memberships, getting our kids to pump iron to pump up SAT scores. We keep looking for that one magic Clue that will unlock everything for our kids.
All of these efforts are have downsides, not only for many of our kids (who aren’t going to get 800s on the SATs no matter how much weight they can bench press), but for how we engage with our schools.
What we are, at heart, talking about is how we want to raise our kids to what ends. That’s a kind of private right. But we also all send our kids along to schools (either because we want to or because that’s what the law says). So now what we’re talking about is how we want the schools to support how we want to raise our kids to what ends. Difficult enough for educators to sort through the many varying versions of how to raise one’s child. And much much more difficult to have any sort of reasonable private and community conversations when so many people are tempted to think that all you have to do, and all those schools have to do–if only they would wake up and start cooperating–is find that One Clue.
(Posted 1 10 11)
“Seamless” coordination of education: How can something that sounds so good also sound so forboding?
Washington Governor Christine Gregoire is proposing a major reorganization of K-20 schooling in the state, creating a new Department of Education, with just about everybody in the business reporting to her. It’s supposed to be “seamless” and “student-centered,” a “one-stop education shop” (I like the rhyming here). I don’t know if the Governor is well-intentioned. It’s quite clear, though, that she’s intentioned. The Policy Brief coming out of the Governor’s office explaining all this includes two org charts, one showing what we have now, the other showing her dream.
That dream: the usual - in the name of accountability and efficiency and everything else sacred, add more levels of bureaucracy, with a Dept. of Ed. secretary appointed by the Gov., add a Statewide P-20 Education Council appointed, surprise, by the Gov., and much more. But if we look just for a moment at the current and proposed org charts, rather like the “what’s changed in the pictures” game children can plan, we see one major difference. The current chart includes, reasonably enough, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. (The Superintendency is an elective office.) The new chart? The Superintendency and the Office have disappeared, not to be found.
I’m reminded of David King’s fascinating and depressing book, The Commissar Vanished: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, with page after page of before-and-after photos and paintings. A before photo showing Stalin and a colleague arm-in arm would have to be retouched after the colleague fell out of favor (and, most likely, shot): the now-evil colleague just disappeared. The cover of the book shows four photos: the first showing Stalin with three aides, the next with two aides, the next with one aide, and the last with, well, Stalin by himself.
At the same time of the Governor’s seamless move, I’ve been thinking of the struggles between public health advocates and the mainline AMA medical profession starting in the early years of 20th century America.
When the New York City Health Department made major advancements in providing large quantities of serum for tetanus and other diseases, their activities were denounced as “municipal socialism” by mainline medical folks. When the NYC Health Department made mandatory the reporting of results of tb lab tests by private practitioners, those practitioners immediately shot back, saying that the health department was “usurping the duties, rights and privileges of the medical profession.”
School health services were beginning by the mid- to late-1800s, with the intent of controlling communicable disease, and subsequently doing testing for eye problems and other physical impairments. But, again, the medical profession resisted what was seen as intrusion, and thus, as Paul Starr relates in The Social Transformation of American Medicine, “year after year, inspectors and nurses would examine children, find poor hearing or dental problems, and give the children notes to their parents saying they should see a doctor ro a dentist. When they were examined the next year, the health problems would still be there. ‘If only we could take some of the money we use for examining and reexamining children and pay to have the most important kinds of work done, we would be able actually to accomplish something,’ a school health administrator told a public health convention. But there would be no integration of school health programs with health services, just as there was no integration of other public health activities. Private interests created a barrier to any unified organization.”
As with health services in schools, so with the “health center” movement in the 1920s, with health centers seen as providing and coordinating medical services and related social services. What might seem like a reasonable idea with some potential was denounced by physicians’ organizations: “too much power is given to the laity and too little to the medical profession,” said one opposition report. So languished another attempt to think about prevention and cure and medicine and environment and social conditions.
Even among social reformers themselves, the question of who should do what to whom was always on the table. In 1907, as part of the effort to extend health services for children, New York schools superintendent William Maxwell proposed providing free eyeglasses for students too poor to afford them. Reformer Jacob Riis was opposed to what he apparently saw as infringement on his turf, asking why Maxwell didn’t go further and provide all students with watches.
There are some interesting parallels between health and education. The ideals of the public health movement, the notion of health centers, and the coordination of prevention, treatment, and cure, all faded with opposition by other medical interest groups. Although the AMA and other groups might have had some good points to make in opposition, it seems too bad that opportunities were missed.
So, too, with schools, as we try to think through making schools more than just 9-3 Monday-Friday places with a sole focus on doing well on the usual tests, we run across turf protection and bureaucratic battles over span of control.
And thus my puzzlement. It seems reasonable enough to want to have centers (health, education, social) with efficient and reasonable coordination among many kinds of practitioners and clients. But at the same time I’m always concerned when I hear of governors and other leaders coming out with yet one more reorg, all in the name of seamless, efficient coordination. I don’t know why what I think we want ends up sounding like just another power grab on the make.
(Posted 1 2 11)
Trying to Change How I Think About Change
Roger Soder
It‘s a new year; and for me, a resolution to try to be open to the many proposals and predictions about radically changing the way we conduct schools and schooling.
I can’t begin to keep up with what’s out there, let alone try to sort out what actually makes sense. A few items come to find. A November 2010 Phi Delta Kappan article by Paul Hill and Mike Johnston outlines what are seen as “radical” changes to schooling coming down the pike: everything from hybrid schools that “mix full-time teachers, contractors, and technology-driven instruction” to “virtual schools,” with students out there somewhere doing “technology-based courses.”
I’m thinking, too, of the School of the Future, the technology-based urban high school in Philadelphia built several years ago by the district with Microsoft providing all the tech stuff.
And, one more example of the many to be had about technology, private sector, and new forms of schooling: Joel Klein leaves New York schools to work for Rupert Murdoch as executive VP for marketing ed tech stuff to the schools, and, presumably, for in various forms promoting the very kind of hybrid school Hill and Johnston see coming.
So to my resolution to be open. But I’m hesitant. In his classic Diffusion of Innovations, now in its fifth edition in fifty years, Everett Rogers outlines five types of adapters of innovations: innovators, early adapters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. According to Rogers, the later you are, the lower your social status, not much opinion leadership, not a lot of money to risk. I don’t like to be seen as a laggard. (Who does, except if we’re being asked to do something morally wrong?) But when it comes to embracing radical change in schooling, I’m down there near the bottom.
Perhaps what I’m feeling is something close to the quote opening Robert Ruark’s novel,
Something of Value: "If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them."
We all know schooling needs to be improved. But in thinking about improvement, I want to continue to start with some basics, to remind ourselves of the fundamental purposes of schooling, especially schooling in a free society. I presume we want active, alert, knowledgeable citizens in a free society, a liberal constitutional democratic republic.
What I see with the tech stuff and the hybrid forms and all is a focus on “isn’t this stuff really neat” and not much, if any, focus on fundamental purpose.
Paul Hill does acknowledge that the virtual school he sees coming has no guarantee of producing good citizens. He does cite David Campbell’s very useful Why We Vote: How Schools and Communities Shape Our Civic Life as suggesting that Catholic and private and charter schools do as well as regular public schools in producing effective citizens-- although I find nothing in the source that deals with charter schools per se.
In Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy, Stephen Macedo critiques a voucher plan advocate, Clifford Cobb, in part because Cobb “fails to acknowledge that public schools stand for any public values at all: they are, he says, ‘a neutral, value-free zone.’” Schools, of course, aren’t neutral, aren’t value free. Macedo notes that “a disturbing civic forgetfulness characterizes many arguments for school reform” and concludes that we should “formulate a plan to help ensure that the new educational regime serves public purposes more effectively than the one we currently have.” Indeed.
So I’m somewhere between late majority and laggard. There are the usual difficulties in implementing any vision, and the product rarely gets to the level of the promise. And thus the difficulties of the Philadelphia School of the Future, as outlined by Meris Stanbury in School News.
But innovation difficulties aside, we’re still left with the question of fundamental purpose. That’s what we need to start with, and that’s what we need to keep before us when listening to the constant and sometimes tempting proposals for change and prophecies about technology and schooling.
(posted 10 1 10)
Teacher Evaluation ,Technology, and Easy Answers
Roger Soder
Part I
I was making modest progress outlining reactions to Dick Clark’s very useful discussion of “value-added” teacher evaluation when I was distracted by last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine with its many articles on education and technology. Lots of new stuff, as you can see .NY Times Link
Neat stuff. A “smart” pen, that records lectures while you take notes. But more than that. Let’s say you’re in a statistic class. You make notes about “t-test” applications. Later on, if you’re still confused about t-tests, all you have to do is touch your pen to your note, “t-test”, and up comes the recording of that part of the lecture dealing with t-tests. Marvelous, I suppose.
Lots of good stuff here. And, as usual, some fatuous claims. Somebody is quoted as saying that the new high-tech stuff means we don’t need to teach spelling. Well. I get emails from bright university students with such barbarisms as “I would defiantly [sic] like to meet with you.” They’ve spelled it “definately,” then some spellcheck program suggests “defiantly,” and I defy ed tech people to justify this sort of thing.)
But after a bit, my distraction with tech stuff changed to something else. I realized that the ed tech folks (and those who write about their claims with such adoration) and the high tech valued-added teacher evaluation advocates are in the same camp (or computer chip). For both, there’s a problem and, by golly, there’s a technical, non-messy “solution” just waiting to be applied. Both promise a lot, both have sure-fire answers. And both need to be approached and used with great care. Both have limits.
Thus, one of the ed tech articles quotes someone as being all excited about computer programs that teach kids how to do social interaction on the web. I guess I’d rather see some programs that teach kids how to talk to each other in person.
Part 2
“Value-added” teacher evaluation surely has its limits, as suggested by Dick Clark (and by the many good folks he cites, plus some useful letters to the editor in the very NY Times Magazine I’m talking about here).
My own sense is to leave alone the subtleties of the psychometrics and return to what for me is the most important point Dick makes. That point is in Part One (“Deciding Which Results to Evaluate”) and in the September 10 summary. Teachers do a whole lot more than teach those subjects that seem at least partially amenable to measurement. One of the most important things they do is help prepare the young to be active and intelligent and ethical citizens in a free society. I don’t know how we are to talk about “valued added” here. Nor, as with Dick, do I know how to balance citizenship preparation and, say, helping students learn to desire to read for the sake of reading, or how to be kind, or how to listen.
The value-added approach promises a lot. It’s seductive, just like those games of “skill” at the fair: knock over the milk bottles and get the teddy bear, easy to do folks, step right up. But valued added has a premise that is demanding and very very limited: the only things that matter, the only things that can matter for value added are things that can be (presumably) measured. You can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter.
That’s a hard premise. If you want to go with it, in the name of “science” or “objectivity,” well and good, but you’ll be cutting out most of the world. There are lots of things that matter that really can’t be measured.
Part 3
You can get a idea of some of these things that matter but can’t be measured. That idea involves judgment, common sense, wisdom.
A modest example of what matters that can’t be measured. My kid starts playing on a neighborhood league soccer team. After a while, I’m wanting to find out how things are going. I talk to my kid, that gives me a certain perspective. Maybe I’d like more. So I go to the soccer coach. Coach says that the team is having a winning season. Well, that’s okay information, but hardly sufficient. I’m not so much interested in the w/l record. I’m interested in lots of other things. I want to know if the kids are learning how to win. And how to lose. How to conduct themselves. How to learn to do better without having to humiliate others. And I want to know how the kids are being treated by the coach. Is he a martinet? Tough guy, rub their noses in it, make “men” out of them? How does he motivate the kids? What’s his basic approach? How does he deal with the kids who are, at least now, perhaps less skilled?
Your value added approach might give you a bit (a very small bit) of data about the w/l record as related to who was the coach at any given time. But all these other matters, the matters that matter to me? Value added is silent.
So. What’s the value-added of valued-added teacher evaluation? About as much as note-taking pens that record lectures, or teaching kids how to use facebook rather than deal face-to-face.
We need understanding of what’s going on in schools, of how schooling bears on the rest of what we do and want in our society and in the world. Certainly we, along with education professionals and school board members, need to get a sense of schools, what teachers are doing, what’s happening with kids. How do we get this sense? By getting together and talking and listening. And I don’t mean on Facebook. And maybe we can leave our magic pens at home in the drawer.
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(Posted 9 8 10)
Some optimism (!) in the midst of the usual miasma of education rhetoric
Roger Soder
I don’t know whether it’s a long term trend, but I’m encouraged by some of the recent commentaries and reports about education and schooling in America.
Dick Clark’s on-going discussion of teacher evaluation issues on the Education and Community blog makes me feel that there are some embers of thoughtfulness still to be found. Dick makes many good points. He also points us another thoughtful discussion: the recent Economic Policy Institute briefing paper on problems associated with using student test scores to evaluate teachers.
The Education and Community blog has a link to another useful page - Arts and Letters Daily. I regularly check some of the “brainstorm” blogs embedded in this page. Worth a look is Marc Bousquet’s recent piece on the 2010 Gallup/Phi Delta Kappa poll of American opinions regarding public schools. Bousquet’s piece is entitled “Public Rejects Obama Education Secretary.” That might be pushing it a bit, but poll results clearly indicate that folks out there aren’t happy with the role the Federal government has taken on. Link to Poll
For myself, I’m delighted to see Bousquet’s dissection of the cynical approach of the Race to the Top people. They dangle a bit of money out there, tempt a lot of cash-starved agencies to promise “breaktaking” (as Duncan would put it) reforms. A cheap (and ultimately ineffective) way to do business. Breathtaking reforms aside, what I see is a heavy move toward ever more federal control along with more than a smidge of immediate political gain in time for the elections.
It’s also interesting to note that public school parents continue to like their local schools. According to the Gallup/PDK poll, “Seventy-seven percent of America’s parents gave the school their oldest child attends either an “A” or B. These are the highest grades parents have assigned to their oldest child’s school since the pool began [in 1985].” At the same time, only 18 percent of the respondents give an “A” or “B” to public schools nationally.
Some will argue that the “my school/schools nationally” discrepancy makes sense in that we know our own schools and know that they’re not as bad as the national media keep trumpeting. Others will argue another way. In the September Kappan article, Jon Schnur claims that local people don’t know what they’re talking about and if only they knew how bad their schools really were, they’d give lower grades, just like they did with schools nationally. But there’s a bit of a contradiction here. If people don’t know what’s what on the local scene, then how is it at all possible for them to be on the mark when considering schools nationally and abstractly?
Lastly, I’m encouraged by Robert Samuelson's piece in the September 6, Washington Post, “School Reform’s Meager Results.” [ed. note-- similar article appears in the Newsweek for Sept. 13, 2010]
Samuelson argues that claims for reform made by Arne Duncan and others do no more than “really show that few subjects inspire more intellectual dishonesty and political puffery” than school reform. After dismissing some of the standard explanations for why we don’t see all those vaunted reforms, Samuelson argues that causes for failure are two: first, we really haven’t discovered “transformative changes” that can scaled up, and second - the larger cause - “shrunken student motivation.” There are lots of variables bearing on how we frame school reform, certain more than the two Samuelson offers. But I believe he’s on the mark and his comments are worth much reflection.
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(Posted 8 16 10)
Everybody needs a BA, or all have won and all shall have prizes.
Roger Soder
President Obama has framed his views of K-12 education reform in terms of “race to the top.” The metaphor continues. Now, he tells us, we have a college graduation race: we have to Be Number One in percentage of college graduates. Following faithfully along, on August 9 Education Secretary Arne Duncan gives us the bad news: we’re now number twelve in world rankings. Eleven other countries have higher percentages of college grads. see link here
It’s difficult to sort through the claims beyond the desire to Be Number One. It seems, as per Duncan, that “we have to educate our way to a better economy.” Perhaps. But Duncan can’t seem to get clear about what he wants, other than to say that we “are losing.” In his interview with King, Duncan talks about the importance of graduating from college. But in the same interview, he says that “basically there are no good jobs out there if you just have a high school diploma.” So, he says, “four-year universities, two-year community colleges, trade, technical, vocational training, some form of higher education has to be the goal for every single student who graduates from high school.” Well, we have to wonder, which is it: some sort of higher ed training, or a BA degree? It’s difficult to tell with Duncan, although a fair reading of the entire interview surely suggests it’s the latter. But the lack of clarity is startling. After all, if you really mean a BA for all, then that points to one kind of policy frames. “Some form of higher education,” quite another.
Seattle Times columnist Lynn Varner wasted no time in lamenting our poor standing in the race. Click on link here telling us we should be embarrassed to be behind South Korea, Canada, and, even Russia. Although she touches on all sorts of topics, her basic point is the same as Duncan’s: a BA degree for all.
As a thoughtful counterpoint to the clamor, let me suggest Charles Murray’s Real Education (2008). The book includes a provocative (as always, with Murray) chapter, “Too Many People are Going to College.” Murray stakes out five claims:
- no more than 20 percent of students have the academic ability to deal with “genuine college-level material,”
- liberal arts education should be provided by K-12 schools,
- four years of residential college is not the best way to acquire knowledge that’s needed,
- college doesn’t really deliver on claims of higher income, job satisfaction, and maturation, and
- “by making a college degree something that everyone is supposed to want, we are punishing the majority of young people who do not get one.”
There are perhaps ways of countering Murray, but his essay at least does us the favor of engaging the issues beyond sloganeering.
Just last week I visited a government agency to work out some retirement issues. The person who helped me was bright, personable, helpful. She told me she had just got her BA. I congratulated her. She was engaged in her job, doing a good job at her job. But I couldn’t see any connection between job demand/performance and having a BA. Some careful on-the-job training combined with reasonable alertness and brightness (attributes that have been around thousands of years before institutions of higher education) was all that was needed here. Perhaps the BA contributed something to her enjoyment of life, and surely I know that education is an end in itself. But it was hard for me to see how the BA was connected to her job.
So rather than chanting mantras about being number one, we need to think about the various ways of allocating scarce resources. The question that we don’t seem to want to face square on is this: on what basis should some people get “good” jobs while most other people do not?
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(Posted 7/15/10)
On the on-going need for moderating second thoughts
“It’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right,” says Joe Keohane in a recent essay on how difficult it is for people to admit new facts and insights that challenge our political misperceptions. Check out his comments here.
Note to readers: I picked this one up from Arts and Letters Daily, a wonderful compendium; it’s included on the home page in Dick Clark’s list of blog pages.
Moreover, Keohane notes that “If you harbor the notion--popular on both sides of the aisle--that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types . . . Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are the ‘very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.’”
As it happens, this very theme of the need for challenging our perceptions and misperceptions is addressed by Ralph Lerner in his latest book, Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times. Lerner begins with two beautifully crafted sentences:
“In a world of strident certainties, individuals offering moderating second thoughts have had no easy time. Their call for us to think and think again is hard to hear, let alone heed.”
Lerner suggests that some thoughtful writers (he considers here Benjamin Franklin, Edward Gibbon, and Francis Bacon, among others) have practiced subtlety and indirection, moving on tiptoe, using irony and other devices “to breach impervious ignorance.” It is a dangerous business: “while power (monarchic or democratic) may invite truth to speak out, it quickly grows restive and resentful of what is said.”
We need to be reminded of uncertainties, of the need to reconsider, to think again. At the same time, Lerner points out, “we want decisiveness in our private and public affairs.”
Decisiveness/uncertainty and the need to look again. Nowhere is this dilemma more before us than among public school educators and of these, school board members. We expect public officials such as school board members to be decisive–after all, there are scarce resources, very little time, and the education of children is at stake. At the same time, though, we need to expect school board members to take the lead in helping us have “moderating second thoughts,” to help all of us realize that some of our strongest beliefs about education and schools need revisiting.
What are some of those beliefs? In his July 11 blog entry, Dick Clark provides a list of twelve that surely bear multiple revisits. Merit pay. Standards. Charters. Union busting. Federal control. And these and more need careful and ongoing consideration and reconsideration.
How are board members to take the lead here? They are likely not in a position to engage in the kinds of subtleties engaged in by Bacon, Franklin, Gibbon, and other writers Ralph Lerner asks us to consider. Board members usually feel that they have to play it straight, not engaging in irony, subtlety, and indirection. What they can do, first of all, is to develop and sustain a sound understanding of the difference between creating and playing to a persuaded audience and creating and working with a more thoughtful public.
A critical distinction here. If board members feel that all they have to do is persuade a majority of an audience, they will leave little room for moderating second thoughts: all that matters is that the audience succumbs to the din of persuasion. But being thoughtful about creating a thoughtful public, a public willing to begin to entertain moderating second thoughts, allows for talk, for weighing and considering, reconsidering, and reconsidering again, all within a framework of moving ahead.
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(posted July 5, 2010)
Greater expectations of our schools-30-
Much of my recent commentary has centered on the relationship between schools and freedom and stability. Important as that relationship always is, there other aspects of what schools do or should do. Whether these are deeper aspects or just different aspects, I don’t know. I think, though, that we can say they are important.
I say “I don’t know” and “I think.” Most of the time in these pages I’m trying to put some notions on the table to help myself get a little clearer, and hope that others in raising an eyebrow here and there will help us all get a little clearer.
Other aspects of schooling, then, or, if you will, greater expectations.
One greater expectation was suggested by poet and essayist John Erskine in 1927. He allowed that “If the school really told the truth about them [students] it would say,
'Madam, your pretty daughter here almost became a poet, but the danger is past.
'My dear sir, your boy has for a while disturbed himself over the failures of justice in human society, but from now on he is resolved not to worry.
'We give you back your children, immune, we believe, to that disturbing love which moves even the sun and the stars, and we bestow upon them this diploma certifying that they have quiet minds and happy dispositions.'"
Granted that it is difficult to devise the appropriate psychometrics to measure “that disturbing love,” Erskine has his finger on something important, something schools should encourage and not squelch.
French philosopher Simone Weil has something to say about the dangers of squelching the soul, something close to Erskine: "The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no bread. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry."
We should, as part of our greater expectations for schools, hope that schools will not persuade its children that they are not hungry.
In Great Expectations–written late in life and possibly autobiographical -- Charles Dickens reminds us of something else schools need to attend to. He speaks of the “dread of not being understood” “hidden in the breast . . . of young children” as they try to respond to the questions of others.
And, in the same novel, Dickens also reminds us of injustices as seen from a child’s perspective:
“In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as an injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big boned Irish hunter.”
Our greater expectations of schools must attend to the child’s perspective of not being understood and injustice.
Another greater expectation: schools need to encourage acceptance of ambiguity and lack of certainty. One of my two favorite essayists, Joseph Epstein, speaks of his close friend, sociologist Edward Shils in this way: “I shall never forget Edward telling me one evening how much he admired Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and others of the free-market economists who were his colleagues at the University of Chicago. 'They are highly intelligent,' he said, 'and they are subtle and penetrating and have intellectual courage. Yet with all that, Joseph, I fear that they are insufficiently impressed with the mysteries of life.’”
I’m not backing away from strongly held assertions about schools and their role in the good political regime, their role in helping the young learn to earn a living. But there’s more, much more, to talk to each other about in our greater expectations of schools.
(Posted June 29, 2010)
Schools and freedom that is not license and order that is not oppression
In a May 28 commentary, I juxtaposed education for liberation to schooling for stability. I was trying to make a point, suggesting that for a disturbing number of observers, it’s okay to have education for liberation for some of us select folk, whilst maintaining for the multitude a schooling for stability.
But I don’t want to suggest a juxtaposition, an either/or that really isn’t there. It’s not that we should get freedom and others should get stability. For all of us, as human beings in whatever kind of society, we need to have both freedom and stability.
If pushed very much at all, I admit I shift quickly to liberation, to freedom, and away from stability. I’ve never agreed, though, with Janis Joplin: “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Well, no, that’s not what freedom is. Freedom is the ability to design and carry out purposes. It’s quite the opposite of what Italian novelist Curzio Malaparte said about a totalitarian state, “everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.”
But surely the exercise of freedom involves stability. Conditions for freedom are similar to conditions for invention, inventiveness. Necessity is the mother of invention, it has been said. But others counter: leisure is the mother of invention. You have to have time to mess around. Beyond leisure time, I would add that you have to have some measure of stability. Even if you aren’t spending all of your time foraging for food, those downtime hours aren’t going to be conducive to invention if you’re worried all the time about saber-tooth tiger attacks. Likewise, the exercise of freedom.
What’s required for the exercise of freedom gets us into a kind of circle.
Freedom requires power to rise above domination and control (in itself a kind of power). You have to have the power to exercise freedom. But power soon morphs into some sort of system of administration, bureaucracy, stability, routine: there must be some stability and order in order to exercise freedom. And the struggle for freedom requires power to . . . . And so the cycle continues.
Once again, then, I come back to the notion that schools have to teach students to be thoughtful about freedom and stability, about what political philosopher Leo Strauss said of the tension between freedom that is not license and order that is not oppression. Moreover, schools don’t merely “teach” about these matters: they embody the freedom/stability tension. It is the freedom/order tension that we must keep at the forefront when we think of what schools “do” and envision what we want them to do.
So both freedom and order, and no way out of the necessary tension. At the same time, though, I do go back from time to time to one of Sandor Petofi’s poems, written in Pest, Hungary, 1847:
The Song of the Dogs
The thunderstorm is raging
with low heavy cloud;
winter’s twin sons, rain
and snow are lashing down.
What’s it to us: a corner
of the kitchen’s safely ours,
our good and gracious master
gives us a place of ease
Food is no problem for us.
Our master leaves a table
rich in scraps, and we
can eat all we are able.
Oh yes, there is a whip,
and sometimes it will nip,
and when it nips it hurts,
but then: dogs’ bones soon knit.
And once he’s spent his anger,
our master takes his seat
and calls us, and we’re glad
to lick his gracious feet!
The Song of the Wolves
The thunderstorm is raging
with low heavy cloud;
winter’s twin sons, rain
and snow are lashing down.
It is a wilderness
without life where we live;
shelter of any kind
there’s not a bush to give.
Cold and hunger seize us
outside, inside, joined
in torment to attack us
without pity or end;
and now a third appears:
the guns, ready and aimed.
Our red blood drips,
the white snow is stained.
We shiver and we starve
through every misery,
the bullets riddle us . . .
But always we are free!
Petofi died in 1849, fighting in the Hungarian Revolution against the Hapsburg empire. Revered in Hungary as a freedom fighter. About one hundred years later, another Hungarian Revolution. Budapest, 1956. The Red Army tanks, the Molotov cocktails, the killings. And on it goes. Freedom, stability, tension, and working with all these, the schools.
(Posted June 21 2010)
The Almost-Forgotten Role of the University in a Free Society
Roger Soder
In Alexander Murray’s Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, we’re told that in the very early days of Oxford and Cambridge, everybody that matriculated had to swear “to defend the privileges of the university.” Moreover, everybody had to come to the defense of the university, not only during their time of attendance, but from then on out, from that day forward, “whatever rank he shall attain to.” What this latter clause did was “to create, in effect, a huge sworn society . . . bound together for protection and discipline,” reaching “far beyond school walls, into the furthest recesses of church and state.”
In our own time, it’s easy to imagine that many within our universities might wish to revive a version of those oaths of allegiance and protection, given the pressures being put on their institutions. Budget cuts, especially for public institutions (and surely there is a strong relationship between budget and curriculum), calls for assessment (e.g., exit exams) of undergraduate student learning, combined with pressures from accrediting and certification agencies, combined with calls for making the university more “relevant” in time of economic downturn and loss of job opportunities–all of these pressures and more can put the university in a position where it feels necessary to redefine its role, or at least expand its role to where there are so many roles that it becomes difficult to say clearly just what the university is.
We can argue that not all the pressures on the university are negative. The pressure to open the university to those traditionally denied or underserved is surely welcome. The pressure to involve the university in partnerships with other community institutions and agencies (e.g., school-university partnerships) is surely welcome. There are always issues and problems that could benefit from a connection with a less-than-ivory-tower university.
So a university needs to respond to pressure, and, as appropriate, to change. As with Edmund Burke, in another context, the university without the means to change is without the means of its preservation. It’s important to change, to adjust to new circumstances, new opportunities, and all of that means returning to role definition.
Role definition is a tricky business, though, and in its efforts to define new roles, or at least find new ways of justifying old roles, the university risks putting itself at risk.
Former Harvard President Nathan Pusey put what I’m trying to get at here much more elegantly in a 1958 speech commemorating the retirement of Henry Wriston as President of Brown University. The final paragraph of the speech is worth quoting in its entirety:
"The present chief danger for a college or university is that, from a preoccupation with business life, or from fatigue, or from a lack of grasp of what the spirit means for life, it will yield to the pressures that are always working to make it conform itself to the world–not at the world’s novel, creative best, but at its less thoughtful, almost meaningless ordinary. Thus it is possible for a university without being aware of it to slip into a servile relationship with the culture in which it finds itself and so betray its real reason for being. This danger as it now presents itself to us in a new form is apt to grow as colleges and universities look increasingly to government and business for the sustenance they must have to keep alive. Limited dependence of this kind need not necessarily be harmful, but it cannot fail to be dangerous if there is not a clear, prior, recognition of the way universities deeply and truly serve society. For if the university does not stand in some sense as a critic of society and a force always calling for fresh endeavor, it cannot be the university.”
Let me stress the year of the speech. 1958. Just a few years from the excesses of McCarthyism. And just ten years from the Washington State Legislature Canwell Committee, one of the first state-level “un-American activities” committees. The Canwell folks targeted the University of Washington, resulting in pressure to fire three tenured professors for their political beliefs. The university review committee recommended firing one of the three. UW President Raymond Allen thought that wasn’t enough: he wanted all three fired, and that’s what the Board of Regents did. The UW has the ignoble distinction of being one of the very first universities in the U.S. to fire professors for their political beliefs. We set a standard there, did our very own UW in 1948, and other universities, equally unmindful of their true role, did their level best to meet and exceed that standard. A useful book here is Ellen Schreker’s 1986 No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities.
President Pusey was, then, speaking out in a time of fear and repression and keeping one’s head down, and we need to thank him for that.
And we need to always remember that the university does indeed have a peculiar and distinct role in a free society. It provides a critical vocabulary and a critical place to stand, a perspective offered by no other societal agency or institution. The university has a schooling function, and beyond that, an educative function, one of speaking truth to power–and speaking truth to the rest of us.
A complicated matter, then, asking (or telling, or demanding, as the case may be) the university to do something. We have to have a good sense that the university is the most appropriate agency for what it is we say we want. But more important, we have to ask ourselves whether the university, as a result of responding to our demands, can still be the university in the deeper sense we’re talking about here. Even more complicated, when the university in question is in funded even in some small part by public monies.
These issues can’t be “solved” but they can and need to be talked about in thoughtful ways.
(Posted June 14, 2010)
In a recent Seattle Times column Danny Westneat describes a low-key effort by the Everett (Washington)School District to increase high school graduate rates. It seems that over the past seven years, the graduation rate has climbed from 53 percent to nearly 84 percent. How did they do it? The main strategy was hiring seven “success coordinators” who look after students deemed “at risk.” Nothing unusual here, just keeping after students, nudging them along, letting them know you care.
Westneat notes that there were no big deal initiatives involved here, no charters or vouchers or “think-tank studies” or “federal programs reinventing anything,” or any of the other usual nostrums.
So one part of the story is the welcome news about graduation rates. An equally interesting part is the slow, low-key strategy the district used.
It’s often tempting to adopt big new programs (or big old programs decked out in new colors). But big deal strategies have downsides.
In a letter to one Mrs. Henry Whitman, June 7, 1899, Williams James gives his views on the kinds of strategies that will work or not work:
“As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top.”
Along similar lines, William Blake, in his epic poem, “Jerusalem,” tells us that “He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, the hypocrite & flatterer.”
Shakespeare has Othello saying,: “Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars that make ambition virtue.” The big deal program carries with it the potential to distort reality.
Despite these cautions, we tend to lead ourselves into temptation, go with the big deal. The usual pattern is to start with a big announcement. We are launching (always in launch mode, it seems) a great new program designed (even, some might say, guaranteed) to take care of X problem, a problem heretofore intractable.
It’s a bit of a double bind. You know that you’re trying to deal with a complex problem that nobody has been able to crack and you know that you might make modest inroads at most. But you also know that you won’t get the support or resources from legislators or the public without promising huge payoffs. So you make the promise, get the resources (usually far less, even, than you asked for), and what happens a few years down the line is what you already knew would happen: some small gains, some modest inroads. But the standard you asked to be judged by, those promises of huge payoffs, will be applied with the inevitable finding: your didn’t make very much progress, your program is, in fact, a failure.
This was the pattern by which Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was launched. Lots of promises about eradication of poverty–only way to get the money was to make huge claims–some (not much) money finally allocated by Congress, and a few years later people were saying the program was a failure because the poor were still with us. (A useful analysis of this melancholy pattern can be found in David Zarefsky’s President Johnson’s War on Poverty: Rhetoric and History (1986).
Starting small, starting modestly without fanfare seems to be a good strategy. And there’s another advantage to this approach: increased flexibility. When you go slow, you can make small changes, minor adjustments, to keep things moving along. We know that going slowly works in other areas of behavior. For example, going slowly works for efficient traffic patterns: go to Vietnam, a city like Hanoi or Saigon (in person or via youtube - search “Hanoi traffic”) and see thousands of people on motorbikes, in cars and trucks and buses, and on foot, all getting to where they need to go without incident. It’s indeed possible to cross twenty to thirty lanes of traffic without too much problem, because everybody is moving relatively slowly and adjustments are easy to make.
So the folks in Everett School District appear to be on to something. Start slow, don’t make any big pronouncements, do some things in a low-key way, keep making minor system adjustments, and let other people, should they so desire, recognize what you’ve done.
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(Posted June 7, 2010)
The Common Core standards are good – in context
In a June 3 post, Dick Clark commented positively on the Common Core State Standards for English speaking and listening, grades 9-12. In a short response, I also welcomed the effort, with the modest proviso that backing up the standards would have to be appropriate resources as well as commitment to assuring that all students learn at a high level.
At the risk of making things even more muddled, I’d like to add a bit more here about another matter related to standards.
I say more muddled, because as always many variables are in play, are related. And thus a dilemma. It’s reasonable to focus on a given variable (e.g., standards). If we try to single out any one variable, there are those who will say “yes, but you haven’t considered this or that variable” (e.g., resources, commitment, or what have you). True, but if we try to consider all the variables at the same time, before very long we have such a complicated picture to consider that many of us conclude that it’s too overwhelming, no way we can take on such a huge task. Many people will refuse to give serious consideration to a problem that appears to have no solution. The “yes but” response can be useful in helping us to see that variables are related, that if you’re going to mess with X, you’re also going to have to deal with Y and Z and all the rest. At the same time, the “yes but” response is all too often a strategy used by those who oppose what’s being suggested but don’t want to be seen as opposing. The strategy here changes from “yes, but” (too oppositional) to “yes, and as we continue to think about X, we also need to consider Y and Z and A and B.” Anybody with modest experience can show you how to think a proposed policy change to death.
So, a dilemma. Let me venture forth a bit more nonetheless, with a comment on a variable critically related to standards.
As these things work, while looking for something else, I happened across my copy of Carl Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson back in 1989. Most of the book consists of transcripts of conversations between Rogers and various luminaries–Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, B. F. Skinner, Michael Polanyi, and Gregory Bateson. Quite a collection of folks, I should say. What stood out for me was the Rogers-Bateson conversation. Bateson was talking about significant learning, “significant learning that goes along with whatever it is that is being taught.” What is critical here, Bateson says, is context and pedagogy. Bateson says “I can teach the comparative anatomy of beetles in a way which will make little Hitlers of you all, or I can tech the comparative anatomy of beetles in a way which will make you all into, what shall we say, dancers or artists . . . even, perhaps, democratic citizens. There is . . . a whole order of learning, quite different from the subjects taught, inevitably always carrying implications for character, about what sort of world you think you’re living in, about what sort of a world you think the relationship between you and the teacher springs out of, and these are going to be related, of course.”
And later in the conversation, Bateson has this: “If you look at the words in the human language describing human character, you will find that they are all of them words for contexts of learning, words for the significant learning that occurs and goes along with the more specific learning in a context. It’s quite a good exercise to take adjectives about people: honest, deceitful, courageous, cowardly, bully-coward, passive-aggressive, et cetera, all the adjectives around, and plan what sort of context of learning you would put the person through in order that he might acquire, become the suitable recipient, of this adjective. And that’s what these words mean, and how to define them. Now that means that the whole of education–and I think that I’m talking about the same thing that Carl really is – is an enormously technical business of the anatomy of contexts and how they interact, how they combine. Are they beautiful, ugly, destructive? And they may be totally murderous, they may be the most elegant things in the world.”
So when I consider the standards, whether the currently proposed Common Core standards or standards in general, I keep coming back to Bateson and character and context. I applaud the Common Core and, at the same time, with a “yes, but. ” We need to always connect the standards to how we teach, how we present ourselves, how we are in relation to students–in effect, “all that goes along with whatever it is that is being taught.”
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(Posted May 28, 2010)Education for liberation or schooling for stability?
We all agree there should be some schooling common to all. There is less agreement about how much schooling should be common in terms of curriculum and the duration of that common experience. Hardly a new issue. In his 1922 Selective Character of American Secondary Education, George Counts argued for universal secondary education. He didn’t like the notion of differentiation on the basis of class, asking “why should we provide at public expense these advanced educational opportunities for X because his father is a banker and practically deny them to Y because his father cleans the streets of the city?” But Counts argued that there is a point beyond common education that differentiation is necessary: the question – unanswered by him – is the basis for differentiation.
In a larger sense, the issue of who should get what kind of schooling at what level (and for what reasons) has always been on the table. The issue seems to have been of particular importance in Europe beginning in the mid-eighteenth century with Enlightenment thinkers confronting schooling as a public matter related to interests of the state. What these thinkers had to say then has some bearing on our own time.
In The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture, Tim Blanning gives us a good sense of the emergence of the schooling-state interest-market culture nexus:
“Once it was realized that literacy made communication with–and thus control of–the subjects on the receiving end that much easier, a corresponding impetus for popular education was created. In the interests of centralization and the maximization of the state’s resources, regional particularism had to make way for standardization–and that could only be achieved by uniform education. . . . All over Europe, indeed, the middle decades of the eighteenth century were marked by a burst of reforms with three objectives in common: the assumption of public responsibility for education; the formation of a new secular cadre of teachers; and the modernization of the curriculum to serve the practical objectives of the state. . . . Gradually it came to be realized that it was not just a question of educating bureaucrats or even merchants and manufacturers but also of modernizing the attitudes of the labour force. If productivity were to be raised, the pre-industrial work ethic, with its disregard for set time-patterns and liking for high days and holidays, had to be replaced by a market culture. Both Prussian and Austrian officials believed that schools had a vital role to play in instilling the discipline required by the factory” (pp. 117-118)
The question for many, however, was just how much education was enough: they saw dangers in ignorance; at the same time, they saw dangers in too much education.
Schooling was surely necessary for social stability in addition to a strong economy. Thus in 1774
Johann Felbiger, an Augustinian and pedagogue, submitted to Empress Maria Theresa a draft ordinance on schools in which he claimed the main purpose of schools was to help make children “honest Christians.” Felbiger also argued that schools had two other objectives – “to create ‘good citizens, that is, faithful and obedient subjects of the authorities,’ and ‘useful people for the community’” (James Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria, p. 212).
There were concerns about education leading to dissatisfaction and unrest. Typical is the 1774 observation of Ferdinant Kindermann, a Bohemian educator: “The welfare of society requires that the education of the common man reach no higher than his occupation. Otherwise he will no longer wish to fulfill his duties” (Melton, Absolutism, p. 217).
Not all Enlightenment writers saw education as a means to keep order amongst the lower classes. In his 1791 Report on the General Organization of Public Instruction, Condorcet suggests that
“Each Sunday, the village schoolmaster will deliver a lecture for citizens of all ages. . . . the principles and rules of ethics will be further expounded, as well as those of the laws of the Nation which every citizen must know, or else he would not know his rights and would, therefore, be unable to exercise them. . . . Neither the French Constitution nor the Declaration of the Rights of Man will be presented to any class of citizens as tables handed down from heaven that must be worshiped and believed . . . As long as there are men who will not obey reason alone, who will receive their opinions from others, in vain will all chains have been broken. Even though these borrowed opinions be true, the human race would remain no less divided into two classes: those who think and those who believe; that is to say, masters and slaves . . . By thus continuing to learn throughout life, it will be possible to prevent knowledge acquired in school from being quickly forgotten, a helpful mental activity will be maintained . . . It will even be possible to teach them to learn for themselves.” (Fontainerie, French Liberalism and Education in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 328-329).
Harvey Chisick gives us a useful summary of the two positions:
“There is, I think, a meaningful distinction to be drawn between enlightenment and education. To ‘enlighten’” implies developing a critical, secular and analytic habit of mind, allowing the mind to encounter all known facts and letting the argument lead to where it may. Ultimately, perhaps, enlightenment implies liberation. Education, on the other hand, may be regarded as the teaching of skills or beliefs, whether true, false, or merely expedient. It is in this rather narrow sense that most members of the enlightened community understood education, at least for the lower classes. To the question, ‘Should the people be enlightened?” virtually all spokesmen of the Enlightenment answered with an emphatic “No.” To the question, “Should the people be educated?” they responded with a reserved “Yes.” The education that members of the enlightened community proposed for the lower classes was intended to improve their health, teach skills suited to their etat, and to enlist their minds and hearts for religion and for the patrie. Such an education was intended not to liberate the people, but to increase their efficiency and to control them” (Harvey Chisick, The Limits of Reform in the Enlightenment: Attitudes Toward the Education of the Lower Classes in Eighteenth-Century France, p. 274).
And so in our time. What does it mean to be a good citizen and what is the role of common schools in producing good citizens? Felbiger would have it that good citizens are “faithful and obedient subjects of authorities.” That’s quite far from Condorcet and citizens needing to know their rights because if they didn’t know their rights, “they would be unable to exercise them.” (Exactly, Felbiger would say: that inability goes hand in hand with being obedient.) More largely, how do we want to talk about sorting out distinctions between enlightenment and education, between education for liberation and schooling for stability?
(Posted May 13, 2010) Understanding the Reasons and Emotions Underlying Regularities of Schooling
I’m continuing to reflect on Dick Clark’s discussion of the regularities of schooling and I’m continuing to reflect on the need to get to the root of the persistence of those regularities.
It’s surely reasonable to decry the regularities of schooling--at least those regularities that we think get in the way of the good schools we want to see.
For example, one of those regularities is the fairly common confusion of education with schooling. People often use one term when it seems they mean the other and our talk consequently is often in a muddle. But decrying the confusion takes us only so far. Why is it so difficult to get people to separate education from schooling? We need to ask ourselves what we need to know about people’s perceptions here if we want to construct ways of persuading people of the difference. We need to have a sense of the kinds of mental models people have.
Age-graded schooling is another regularity, one we might not like. But while it might not make sense to us, age-grading has been around a long time. We can construct the most logical arguments countering age-grading, but if those arguments don’t address the mental models and the needs and concerns of people, then it will be by chance alone if our arguments are even partially persuasive.
We need to understand that an argument we find persuasive might not persuade others. For example, a school board will try to persuade a good superintendent to stay on by offering higher salary. But what if the superintendent doesn’t care about the salary but has other priorities, other things in mind? However carefully presented the money argument is, or how much it might “work” for the board, it will be ineffective. How persuasive can a money argument be to someone who doesn’t care about money?
So, we need to understand the regularities of schooling. But beyond that, we need to understand the reasons behind those regularities. This is a matter for historians, to be sure. But it’s also a matter for those who wish to not only introduce what might be more useful ways to view schools, pedagogy, and all the rest, but introduce those ways in manners likely to persuade people to relinquish old mental models and replace them with something that makes more sense to them.
What I’m suggesting here is not all that different from what any good teacher does. If a teacher wants a student to think about, say, a painting they’re both looking at, the teacher might best start off with “tell me what you see. Describe the painting to me.” A good math teacher will want to know what’s going on with the student’s view of the math problem at hand: where is it that the student is making an incorrect assumption?
Put another way, we are talking about diagnosis. In medicine, the first order of business is the diagnosis. Incorrect diagnosis, very likely incorrect treatment.
It’s easy to descry, to lament that others are stuck, unwilling to adopt whatever we seem to have in mind. In education, and in many others matters. I’m thinking of a Maureen Dowd column appearing last July in the New York Times. A devastating attack on Sarah Palin, easy prey for Dowd, and, depending on your point of view, perhaps entertaining to read.
The usual Dowd fare. But what struck me was one of the comments, one highlighted by the Times editors. The respondent said, in part,
“Maureen, I would be so grateful if you would use your extraordinary talent and insight to actually interview some of the many women who are fans of Sarah Palin. . . . I fear that we are only deepening the divide by mocking her... all the while failing to address the issues faced by the people who actually find meaning in Sarah Palin. . . . The more we trash Palin instead of respectfully engaging and communicating with her fan base, the more power we give her.”
That comment made much sense to me.
Michael Ignatieff gives us similar insight, albeit at a much more profound level. In Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, Ignatieff considers the need for reconciliation between enemies and underscores the importance of understanding the reasons for the desire for revenge. “Revenge–morally considered–is a desire to keep faith with the dead, to honor their memory by taking up their cause where they left off. Revenge keeps faith between generations; the violence it engenders is a ritual form of respect for the community’s dead–therein lies its legitimacy. . . .The mourning of the dead is where the desire for peace must vanquish the longing for revenge. Reconciliation has no chance against vengeance unless it respects the emotions that sustain vengeance. . . .”
Our struggles over some of the regularities of schooling might not have the same import as centuries-old enmities resulting in on-going death and destruction, but the same principle obtains. Understanding (and respect for) the reasons-- and emotions--behind deeply held views is a prerequisite for thoughtful discussion, and thoughtful discussion is the only reasonable alternative to either top-down imposition or you-have-your-opinion-I-have-mine deadlock.
Real Change in Reward Structure and Norms of the Faculty Career in Higher Education: What Will It Take? (Posted May 7 2010)
In an earlier response to Dick Clark’s call for discussion of regularities in schooling, I mentioned, among other regularities, the reward structure and norms of the faculty career in higher education. There’s far too much to deal with on this complicated subject than can be done in one blog commentary, but I’d like to make a start.
My own concern about reward structure and norms stems from work since 1985 with colleagues in the Center for Educational Renewal, the Institute for Educational Inquiry, and the National Network for Educational Renewal. Much of the grounding of that work centers on simultaneous renewal of schools and the education of educators, and new ways of construing roles of both K-12 and higher education people. In terms of higher education, it is clear that for new kinds of involvement and relationships to be long-term and effective, faculty must view the new work as a legitimate part of who they are as academics. (For more discussion of these issues, see John Goodlad’s Teachers for Our Nation’s Schools, especially in Chapter 5.)
Consideration of what should be appropriate rewards and norms in higher education is hardly new. For example, when Oxford dons were clergymen or clergymen-to-be (as was the case hundreds of years), teaching was the sole focus and faculty role not much open to question. But with the secularization of the faculty in the 1850s and the emergence of the role of professional academic, major conflict emerged. Some dons argued that research and scholarship and publication were necessary to show how the new role differed from the old; others argued for the primacy of teaching. The debate was on. (A debate discussed with verve and scholarship by A.J. Engel in From Clergyman to Don: the Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford.)
The teaching-research tension has always been found in American higher education. Always in play in appropriate rewards/norms has been the kind of institution one is working in. Traditional “research” universities, of course, applaud research. Former normal schools, morphing into teachers’ colleges, then colleges, then universities, have changed rewards/norms accordingly (from mostly teaching and a modicum of scholarship to an imitation of the traditional universities). Community colleges tend to place much more emphasis on teaching than on research.
The tension has always existed, and has always been of concern to many inside and out of higher education. In 1990, Ernest Boyer, then with Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, published Scholarship Reconsidered, a major effort to consider the tension and, more largely, to consider the nature of scholarship itself and the norms of the career. For quite a long time, requests for the Boyer report far outpaced requests for all of the other Carnegie publications. The report’s findings were discussed by faculty and administration in many institutions and, in some instances, those findings formed the basis for new norms for tenure and promotion.
The influence of the 1990 report is still to be felt. An example. Some two years ago, the folks at Western Carolina University used Scholarship Reconsidered in developing a new tenure policy.
[Link: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/02/wcu ]
What impact will the new policy have? The article has this to say:
“Lee S. Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (through which Boyer did much of his work), said Western Carolina's shift was significant. While colleges have rushed to put Boyer's ideas into their mission statements, and many individual departments have used the ideas in tenure reviews, putting this philosophy in specific institutional tenure and promotion procedures is rare, he said. "It's very encouraging to see this beginning to really break through," he said. What's been missing is "systematic implementation" of the sort Western Carolina is now enacting, he said. What could really have an impact, Shulman said, is if a few years from now, Western Carolina can point to a cohort of newly tenured professors who won their promotions using the Boyer model.”
And therein lies the difficulty. It’s easy to have develop mission statements and institutional web pages proclaiming the importance of teaching and service and community involvement and varieties of “scholarship,” but what really matters is what faculty and administration really believe and act on when it comes to rewards and norms. Moreover, authentic and acted-upon changes in one institution must be mirrored by changes in many other institutions at the same time. It’s all well and good to propose changes in reward structure in a given institution, but faculty–especially mobile or potentially mobile faculty–will be hesitant to support: they want to know what is going to be accepted as proper scholarship and behavior at the institution they’re aiming for as well as the one they’re currently at. You might reward my work with schools here, but what are they going to think of me three years from now when I’m a finalist there?
A tall order, to change all at once. As Benjamin Franklin said of the struggles of the colonies to come together, it’s difficult to get thirteen clocks to strike at the same time.
Tight money and decreasing state support for higher education make it even more difficult to create authentic changes in reward structures and norms. Institutions and their faculty have to rely more and more on extramural funding. But more people are chasing the money (and less money these days: consider the decline in foundation endowment values). Competitors must calculate what foundations are willing to fund. How much money is out there for traditional research and scholarship, and how much is out there, in the case of the concerns of many of us, for teaching, for teacher education, for partnerships with schools and community groups?
Competitors will calculate the odds in the same way young pianists in international competitions do. Piano competition organizers have for some decades suggested that pianists try new works, or lesser-played. But year after year, winners ride home on one of the big four - Rachmaninoff Third, Prokofiev Third, Grieg, and Tchaikowsky piano concerti. You’re a young pianist trying to figure out what to play. You want to win. Probably the best strategy is to play it safe.
We are concerned about the regularities of schooling. We want to see changes in schooling at all institutional levels. We surely realize that we’re not going to see those changes without accompanying changes in the reward structures and norms. There can be no long-term sustained work without rewards and sanctions and self- and peer-legitimation of that work. But making changes here is always going to be difficult.
In Camford Observed, a lively and insightful look at the world of Oxford and Cambridge, authors Jasper Rose and John Ziman talk of the unwillingness of the dons to change. “They like things as they are. They will not vote for change, unless it is the only hope of survival; they will vote solidly against it if it seems in any way to threaten anything of substance that they value.”
We’re close here to historian William McNeill’s observation about adopting changes: “When a group of men encounter a commodity, technique, or idea that seems superior to what they previously had known, they will try to acquire and make it their own whatever they perceive to be superior, but only as this does not seem to endanger other values they hold dear.”
Can we change the reward structure and norms beyond the superficial? Perhaps, but only when the participants themselves conclude that the change is of value, and only when that conclusion is reaching in a tipping point way across the board.
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The regularities of the September-June school year (posted 4/29/10)
Roger Soder
Roger Soder Dick Clark has initiated a welcome discussion of some of the regularities of schooling, both K-12 and post-secondary. For me, this discussion comes at a good time: as it happens, I’ve been thinking a bit about regularities through engaging with a fascinating volume: William Fischel’s Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts, published last year by the U. of Chicago Press. The subtitle doesn’t quite suggest the range of topics covered: American land policies and the one-room school, the school district consolidation movement, the emergence of age graded schools, the emergence of the standardized school calendar, economic geography of school districts, and education reforms and social capital in school districts. Fischel, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, covers his ground with scholarly grace, showing that academic writing doesn’t have to be dull.
Of the many regularities, I’m particularly interested in the standard September-June school calendar, why it emerged, why it’s still here. Perhaps like many of us, I had figured the school calendar regularity as a holdover from the 19th century, agricultural America needing the kids on the farm during the summer. In a wonderful chapter (revised slightly from his “Will I See You In September?” article in Journal of Urban Economics vol. 5, 2006), Fischel argues that the “needed on the farm” argument doesn’t hold: opportunity costs were highest during spring planting and late summer harvest, and thus in many parts of the rural America schools had two relatively terms, winter and summer. These terms were collapsed into one, and during the late 1800s to early 1900s the September-June year was standardized everywhere. Why? Fischel posits some interrelated factors, and he does so much more persuasively than I can do here in this brief outline.
One factor is mobility. During the late 19th century, mobility was high, with one in five families changing residence every year. (Although many decry our current high mobility and speak of the dangers of “rootlessness,” mobility rates have actually declined steadily over the past half century.) Some people were moving from one county to another, others across country. The shift from rural to urban was underway: by 1815, about one-third of urban residents were native-born, coming from rural areas. Families–and teachers–were on the move. When people move, they want convenience. “September was the most likely preferred time to start the school year because transportation of people and household goods was least likely to be disrupted by inclement weather in June, July, and August.” A standard calendar, with school starting in September, enabled both children and teachers to finish in the old place and begin the next school year with a minimum of upheaval. It’s good for everybody to be in school when everybody else is in school – for learning, for sports, for other activities.
Mobility is related to property values–and to the calendar. Residents in a given school district had a strong interest in keeping property values high, and values would remain high, in part, by having a standardized school year so potential buyers would know they could move in with the assurance that their children would be able to fit right in. Those suggesting a different school year configuration would always have a tough sell.
Another related factor: the decline of the one-room school and the emergence of age-graded schooling. With age-grading, all students in the same cohort are (more or less) on the same page: again, standardization. One can’t have effective age-graded schooling without a standardized school year (and vice versa). For a host of reasons, we moved to age-graded schooling in the late 19th century, abandoning the one-room school (with its considerable pedagogical flexibility), and locking into the school calendar.
All told, Fischel argues, we have September-June, and efforts to change the calendar will continue to be fruitless. What is to be done, then, if anything? Instead of cramming more into the school year or making the school day or the school term longer, Fischel suggests we consider focusing on the edges: what goes on prior to K-12, and what might go on after. He suggests that “delaying a serious commitment to the workforce to ages twenty-five or thirty is not much if a disability if one can work productively past age seventy.” We might “look at our extended lifetimes and try to facilitate learning over a longer period of time.”
Can We Talk? Or Why Can’t We Talk? (posted 4/20/10)
Roger Soder
People don’t seem to be able to talk very well with each other about controversial issues. I don’t think we knew how when we were young. As youngsters, a lot of “is so” rebutted by “is not.” We don’t tend to get better with age. As adults, we engage in a lot of “You’re entitled to your opinion, I’m entitled to mine” and the rest is, as Hamlet says, silence. The web, sometimes seen as a way for all to engage in discussion, seems to be a venue for anonymous vitriol: the comments sections in newspaper sites, even moderated sites, are pretty nasty.
We know that in some sense that thoughtful discussion is an important part of being a thoughtful public. In Revolutions Revisited, political philosopher Ralph Lerner speaks of Jefferson’s concern that people “develop skills of listening and speaking, of thinking and judging–in short, of behaving like a people who deserved a free society and would be capable of sustaining it.”
But engaged and authentic discussion about controversial issues doesn’t seem to come naturally. We have to learn, as with Jefferson, to develop skills. But where are these skills to be developed?
In my own experiences as student and teacher, starting with junior high school, I can think of times when we touched a bit on those skills.
Junior high. English classes, sometimes Social Studies. One by one, we would get up in front of the class, clutching index cards, give a three minute book report or report on a current event, sit down, glad that’s over. Next. This activity was useful in helping learn how to talk to a group. An early and necessary version of undergraduate Public Speaking. I don’t know if current middle school classes include this activity or not.
High school. Not much in English classes. Discussions of texts, yes: What role does religion plan in Hamlet? There was lots of speaking in Debate-- my favorite class. But the speaking was, as one would expect, formalized, either Lincoln-Douglas or extemp or impromptu. Wonderful as all that was, it didn’t (nor was it intended to) get at the matter of people, possibly strangers to each other, engaging in thoughtful talk about controversial issues.
Undergraduate higher education. One can usually find a class in Public Speaking. Important material here, and useful experiences, but what I’ve seen is mostly one-way, with a focus on how to develop and deliver speeches. There might be some discussion, but it tends to be Q&A after the speech, or comments on what went well, what was less persuasive.
Other undergraduate classes? Even in classes that are discussion-based (I’m speaking of my own, now) we tend to get little further than my opinion, your opinion. Or silence. I’m willing to take responsibility here for not creating a setting to encourage thoughtful discussion, and I keep looking for new protocols to try. If there’s much of any talk, somebody is certain to come up after class saying “wow, we really got into it, didn’t we?” and mostly I nod, saying that well, we did establish a bit of a beachhead. Sometimes students come up after class to tell me what they really think about the issue we were trying to talk about. “Why didn’t you say that in class?” “Well, I just didn’t want to.” A bit discouraging for me, all of this, given that in all of my classes the fundamental objective is to learn how to talk better with each other in here (classroom) and out there (the world).
Graduate school? Hardly. At least my own experience in conducting grad seminars suggests that we tiptoe around controversial issues. Many of the students have had a fair amount of experience in work situations, bureaucracies, and behave prudently, cautiously, wanting to avoid conflict. Again, I’m willing to take responsibility. But I can recall - going back some many decades now-being a student in grad seminars and observing the same kind of caution. A few people did most of the talking, most others hung back, some because they didn’t know what was going on, others because they did and didn’t particularly care.
So. An important skill, one that needs to be learned, developed, honed. But where? The K-12 setting seems to be a reasonable venue. But there continues to be a lot of frontal teaching in K-12 settings, affording little opportunity to develop discussion skills. Moreover, the pressure for test score performance continues, and discussion skills aren’t part of mass paper-and-pencil tests. So it’s difficult to envision serious work on discussion skills in K-12.
I’m even less sanguine about higher ed as a reasonable venue. In a democracy, everyone needs to know how to talk thoughtfully about controversial issues. But only some have access to higher ed.
I’ve looked at some books. Mortimer Adler’s How to Speak, How to Listen approaches the subject, with some useful suggestions for running effective discussion groups and Socratic seminars. At a more philosophical level, there’s Danielle Allen’s Talking to Strangers. The difficulty here is that books by themselves don’t allow much interaction with other people (unless in a book discussion setting).
My friend and colleague, Walter Parker (University of Washington College of Education), has for years conducted workshops involving K-12 and community folks, all with the focus on “Can We Talk?” – an instructive title – aimed developing discussion skills, and by all accounts the workshops are useful for those who attend. Perhaps there are possibilities here, although there is, as always, the matter of scale.
Perhaps there are other ways to approach this, perhaps my framing of the “problem” is too limiting. But for the nonce, a very long nonce, I’m stuck, and the most I can do is say, as with Walter Parker, “can we talk?”
Links for above:
Revolutions Revisited
http://www.amazon.com/Revolutions-Revisited-Faces-Politics-Enlightenment/dp/0807857424/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271445748&sr=8-2
How to Speak, How to Listen
http://www.amazon.com/How-Speak-Listen-Mortimer-Adler/dp/0684846470/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271445834&sr=1-1
Talking to Strangers
http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Strangers-Anxieties-Citizenship-Education/dp/0226014673/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271445883&sr=1-1
When did reading for pleasure become something we just don’t do? (posted 4/6/10)
Just last week, a longtime friend and colleague mentioned that few people seem to be concerned about students learning to read for pleasure. Reading for performance on the commonly administered statewide “academic achievement” tests, yes. Reading to solve “story problems” in math, yes. But reading for pleasure? That doesn’t seem to make it onto the agenda.
The Race to the Top folks aren’t asking whether those ambitious state proposals include concerns about reading for pleasure. "I'm pretty sure reading for pleasure has never been a part of NCLB.
One hundred years ago the same struggle was going on. All the economic efficiency and social efficiency folks were arguing for, well, economic and social efficiency, and that didn’t leave much room for reading for pleasure. There were a few voices trying to be heard above the din. In his very fine book, The Shaping of the American High School, 1880-1920, Edward Krug calls attention to one of those trying to be heard--James McConaughy, professor of education at Bowdoin College. In a 1914 article, McConaughy “argued for the academic subjects on the grounds of enjoyment. ‘Should not high school boys and girls,’ he asked, ‘go into life trained to use the wonderful pleasure giving opportunities which literature, art and history afford? How many of the pupils trained in the new vocational subjects know how to read with pleasure–and what bigger gift can education bring us?’”
I don’t know if our reluctance to embrace the joys of reading stems from a kind of Puritanism, that kind of worry, as has been said, that somewhere, somehow, people are enjoying themselves. That might be part of it. More likely, our reluctance is based on the fear that everybody else in the world, especially those in the emerging powers that threaten our place in the world, is reading for purposes of economic and political power gain.
As with my longtime friend and colleague, I feel sad that reading for pleasure doesn’t seem to be something most people think we should do, and certainly not something we should try to inculcate in the K–12 schools. (I leave aside for the moment higher education because I’m tired of hearing the archetypal line, “I never had a chance to read anything for pleasure when I was in college, and then I had to go to work and now I have even less time.”) When school districts are cutting out recess in order to spend more time in test prep, it’s difficult to be sanguine about schools doing anything much to encourage reading for pleasure.
I wonder, too, whether the schools are neutral or, worse, whether they might not actually actively discourage such reading, never holding it out as a possibility.
If an advocacy group were to retain me to develop an advertising/pr/lobbying effort to convince state legislators of the joys of reading for pleasure, I think I’d have to return the money. I might be able to convince skeptical legislators that reading Hamlet was a Good Thing, as long as I could somehow prove there was a payoff in higher test scores or graduation rates or lifetime earnings. Maybe. But reading Hamlet for the pure enjoyment of reading Hamlet?
I’m setting my sights not lower but elsewhere. Taking grandchildren and great nieces and nephews and children and grandchildren of friends and anybody else within range and letting them in on the secret.
National standards (and national learning objectives and national skill sets and national testing): This time, the NY Times assures us, it’s going to really work (Posted 3/31/10)
Of the many regularities, I’m particularly interested in the standard September-June school calendar, why it emerged, why it’s still here. Perhaps like many of us, I had figured the school calendar regularity as a holdover from the 19th century, agricultural America needing the kids on the farm during the summer. In a wonderful chapter (revised slightly from his “Will I See You In September?” article in Journal of Urban Economics vol. 5, 2006), Fischel argues that the “needed on the farm” argument doesn’t hold: opportunity costs were highest during spring planting and late summer harvest, and thus in many parts of the rural America schools had two relatively terms, winter and summer. These terms were collapsed into one, and during the late 1800s to early 1900s the September-June year was standardized everywhere. Why? Fischel posits some interrelated factors, and he does so much more persuasively than I can do here in this brief outline.
One factor is mobility. During the late 19th century, mobility was high, with one in five families changing residence every year. (Although many decry our current high mobility and speak of the dangers of “rootlessness,” mobility rates have actually declined steadily over the past half century.) Some people were moving from one county to another, others across country. The shift from rural to urban was underway: by 1815, about one-third of urban residents were native-born, coming from rural areas. Families–and teachers–were on the move. When people move, they want convenience. “September was the most likely preferred time to start the school year because transportation of people and household goods was least likely to be disrupted by inclement weather in June, July, and August.” A standard calendar, with school starting in September, enabled both children and teachers to finish in the old place and begin the next school year with a minimum of upheaval. It’s good for everybody to be in school when everybody else is in school – for learning, for sports, for other activities.
Mobility is related to property values–and to the calendar. Residents in a given school district had a strong interest in keeping property values high, and values would remain high, in part, by having a standardized school year so potential buyers would know they could move in with the assurance that their children would be able to fit right in. Those suggesting a different school year configuration would always have a tough sell.
Another related factor: the decline of the one-room school and the emergence of age-graded schooling. With age-grading, all students in the same cohort are (more or less) on the same page: again, standardization. One can’t have effective age-graded schooling without a standardized school year (and vice versa). For a host of reasons, we moved to age-graded schooling in the late 19th century, abandoning the one-room school (with its considerable pedagogical flexibility), and locking into the school calendar.
All told, Fischel argues, we have September-June, and efforts to change the calendar will continue to be fruitless. What is to be done, then, if anything? Instead of cramming more into the school year or making the school day or the school term longer, Fischel suggests we consider focusing on the edges: what goes on prior to K-12, and what might go on after. He suggests that “delaying a serious commitment to the workforce to ages twenty-five or thirty is not much if a disability if one can work productively past age seventy.” We might “look at our extended lifetimes and try to facilitate learning over a longer period of time.”
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Can We Talk? Or Why Can’t We Talk? (posted 4/20/10)
Roger Soder
People don’t seem to be able to talk very well with each other about controversial issues. I don’t think we knew how when we were young. As youngsters, a lot of “is so” rebutted by “is not.” We don’t tend to get better with age. As adults, we engage in a lot of “You’re entitled to your opinion, I’m entitled to mine” and the rest is, as Hamlet says, silence. The web, sometimes seen as a way for all to engage in discussion, seems to be a venue for anonymous vitriol: the comments sections in newspaper sites, even moderated sites, are pretty nasty.
We know that in some sense that thoughtful discussion is an important part of being a thoughtful public. In Revolutions Revisited, political philosopher Ralph Lerner speaks of Jefferson’s concern that people “develop skills of listening and speaking, of thinking and judging–in short, of behaving like a people who deserved a free society and would be capable of sustaining it.”
But engaged and authentic discussion about controversial issues doesn’t seem to come naturally. We have to learn, as with Jefferson, to develop skills. But where are these skills to be developed?
In my own experiences as student and teacher, starting with junior high school, I can think of times when we touched a bit on those skills.
Junior high. English classes, sometimes Social Studies. One by one, we would get up in front of the class, clutching index cards, give a three minute book report or report on a current event, sit down, glad that’s over. Next. This activity was useful in helping learn how to talk to a group. An early and necessary version of undergraduate Public Speaking. I don’t know if current middle school classes include this activity or not.
High school. Not much in English classes. Discussions of texts, yes: What role does religion plan in Hamlet? There was lots of speaking in Debate-- my favorite class. But the speaking was, as one would expect, formalized, either Lincoln-Douglas or extemp or impromptu. Wonderful as all that was, it didn’t (nor was it intended to) get at the matter of people, possibly strangers to each other, engaging in thoughtful talk about controversial issues.
Undergraduate higher education. One can usually find a class in Public Speaking. Important material here, and useful experiences, but what I’ve seen is mostly one-way, with a focus on how to develop and deliver speeches. There might be some discussion, but it tends to be Q&A after the speech, or comments on what went well, what was less persuasive.
Other undergraduate classes? Even in classes that are discussion-based (I’m speaking of my own, now) we tend to get little further than my opinion, your opinion. Or silence. I’m willing to take responsibility here for not creating a setting to encourage thoughtful discussion, and I keep looking for new protocols to try. If there’s much of any talk, somebody is certain to come up after class saying “wow, we really got into it, didn’t we?” and mostly I nod, saying that well, we did establish a bit of a beachhead. Sometimes students come up after class to tell me what they really think about the issue we were trying to talk about. “Why didn’t you say that in class?” “Well, I just didn’t want to.” A bit discouraging for me, all of this, given that in all of my classes the fundamental objective is to learn how to talk better with each other in here (classroom) and out there (the world).
Graduate school? Hardly. At least my own experience in conducting grad seminars suggests that we tiptoe around controversial issues. Many of the students have had a fair amount of experience in work situations, bureaucracies, and behave prudently, cautiously, wanting to avoid conflict. Again, I’m willing to take responsibility. But I can recall - going back some many decades now-being a student in grad seminars and observing the same kind of caution. A few people did most of the talking, most others hung back, some because they didn’t know what was going on, others because they did and didn’t particularly care.
So. An important skill, one that needs to be learned, developed, honed. But where? The K-12 setting seems to be a reasonable venue. But there continues to be a lot of frontal teaching in K-12 settings, affording little opportunity to develop discussion skills. Moreover, the pressure for test score performance continues, and discussion skills aren’t part of mass paper-and-pencil tests. So it’s difficult to envision serious work on discussion skills in K-12.
I’m even less sanguine about higher ed as a reasonable venue. In a democracy, everyone needs to know how to talk thoughtfully about controversial issues. But only some have access to higher ed.
I’ve looked at some books. Mortimer Adler’s How to Speak, How to Listen approaches the subject, with some useful suggestions for running effective discussion groups and Socratic seminars. At a more philosophical level, there’s Danielle Allen’s Talking to Strangers. The difficulty here is that books by themselves don’t allow much interaction with other people (unless in a book discussion setting).
My friend and colleague, Walter Parker (University of Washington College of Education), has for years conducted workshops involving K-12 and community folks, all with the focus on “Can We Talk?” – an instructive title – aimed developing discussion skills, and by all accounts the workshops are useful for those who attend. Perhaps there are possibilities here, although there is, as always, the matter of scale.
Perhaps there are other ways to approach this, perhaps my framing of the “problem” is too limiting. But for the nonce, a very long nonce, I’m stuck, and the most I can do is say, as with Walter Parker, “can we talk?”
Links for above:
Revolutions Revisited
http://www.amazon.com/Revolutions-Revisited-Faces-Politics-Enlightenment/dp/0807857424/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271445748&sr=8-2
How to Speak, How to Listen
http://www.amazon.com/How-Speak-Listen-Mortimer-Adler/dp/0684846470/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271445834&sr=1-1
Talking to Strangers
http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Strangers-Anxieties-Citizenship-Education/dp/0226014673/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271445883&sr=1-1
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When did reading for pleasure become something we just don’t do? (posted 4/6/10)
Just last week, a longtime friend and colleague mentioned that few people seem to be concerned about students learning to read for pleasure. Reading for performance on the commonly administered statewide “academic achievement” tests, yes. Reading to solve “story problems” in math, yes. But reading for pleasure? That doesn’t seem to make it onto the agenda.
The Race to the Top folks aren’t asking whether those ambitious state proposals include concerns about reading for pleasure. "I'm pretty sure reading for pleasure has never been a part of NCLB.
One hundred years ago the same struggle was going on. All the economic efficiency and social efficiency folks were arguing for, well, economic and social efficiency, and that didn’t leave much room for reading for pleasure. There were a few voices trying to be heard above the din. In his very fine book, The Shaping of the American High School, 1880-1920, Edward Krug calls attention to one of those trying to be heard--James McConaughy, professor of education at Bowdoin College. In a 1914 article, McConaughy “argued for the academic subjects on the grounds of enjoyment. ‘Should not high school boys and girls,’ he asked, ‘go into life trained to use the wonderful pleasure giving opportunities which literature, art and history afford? How many of the pupils trained in the new vocational subjects know how to read with pleasure–and what bigger gift can education bring us?’”
I don’t know if our reluctance to embrace the joys of reading stems from a kind of Puritanism, that kind of worry, as has been said, that somewhere, somehow, people are enjoying themselves. That might be part of it. More likely, our reluctance is based on the fear that everybody else in the world, especially those in the emerging powers that threaten our place in the world, is reading for purposes of economic and political power gain.
As with my longtime friend and colleague, I feel sad that reading for pleasure doesn’t seem to be something most people think we should do, and certainly not something we should try to inculcate in the K–12 schools. (I leave aside for the moment higher education because I’m tired of hearing the archetypal line, “I never had a chance to read anything for pleasure when I was in college, and then I had to go to work and now I have even less time.”) When school districts are cutting out recess in order to spend more time in test prep, it’s difficult to be sanguine about schools doing anything much to encourage reading for pleasure.
I wonder, too, whether the schools are neutral or, worse, whether they might not actually actively discourage such reading, never holding it out as a possibility.
If an advocacy group were to retain me to develop an advertising/pr/lobbying effort to convince state legislators of the joys of reading for pleasure, I think I’d have to return the money. I might be able to convince skeptical legislators that reading Hamlet was a Good Thing, as long as I could somehow prove there was a payoff in higher test scores or graduation rates or lifetime earnings. Maybe. But reading Hamlet for the pure enjoyment of reading Hamlet?
I’m setting my sights not lower but elsewhere. Taking grandchildren and great nieces and nephews and children and grandchildren of friends and anybody else within range and letting them in on the secret.
National standards (and national learning objectives and national skill sets and national testing): This time, the NY Times assures us, it’s going to really work (Posted 3/31/10)
“National School Standards, at Last,” trumpets the New York Times in an editorial on March 13. Rather than what we have now – “a generally mediocre patchwork of standards that vary, not just from state to state, but often from district to district,” the new standards will bring us into a new world. These standards tell us “what students must know to succeed at college and to find good jobs in the 21st century. The standards “set out the skills that children should learn from kindergarten through high school.” “Clear, ambitious goals for what children should learn from year to year.”
“Internationally benchmarked,” yet, “which means they emulate the expectations of high-performing school systems broad.” Indeed, all those countries that are ahead of us in math and science education “have one thing in common: They offer the same high education standards– often the same curriculum–from one end of the nation to the other.” Yes, indeed. Trying to impose standards and goals and itemized sets of knowledge and skills is easily done. France. United Kingdom. Never mind that the country of France is smaller by a good measure than Texas; the United Kingdom is smaller than Wyoming.
Once we have those standards, nobody is going to mess with us, by golly, except, perhaps, those in control of the renminbi.
And, as expected, the Times tells us that “sophisticated tests must be created so we can measure results.” Apparently nothing we have after all these years of testing and accountability can measure up in terms of sophistication.
All told, it’s quite a package, these “standards.” Goals. K through 12 skills. All of what students need to know for college and those, uh, “good” jobs. All “vertically aligned.” And sophisticated tests.
At the same time–and here is where I am getting particularly confused–the Times insists that this comprehensive package “is not a call for a national curriculum.” I guess that makes it all okay, this reassurance that educators in those 15,000 school districts out there can develop any kind of curriculum they want. More or less. Rather like the young Henry Ford saying you could have any color Ford you wanted–as long as it was black.
The hedging of the Times here is common and hardly new. We’ve always wanted it both ways: national learning standards, the whole package and at the same time, local control. National standards were first invoked as part of what was necessary to create good citizens for the new republic. Later commissions and study groups and politicians and educators pushed standards for making us Number One in the world, or keeping us that way, or getting back to what we were. Local control is exemplified by Abraham Lincoln’s statement of his intent to run for state legislature, published in the local New Salem newspaper on March 9, 1832. The young Lincoln tells the folks, “Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.” We all know that schools are important, but he’s not about to tell the good people of Sangamo county how to run their schools.
So a dilemma here. We need to talk about the dilemma and how to resolve it (if, indeed it can be resolved). But we’re never going to get to the root of the dilemma, this national/local tension, as long we engage in the wishy-washy cant given us by the Times in its national standards editorial. The Times, and others, would do us a bit of a service by using straightforward language outlining a straightforward position. You want national control of the whole thing, say so. But don’t give us the usual cake-and-nibble-at-it-too.
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Unwisdom about Getting Better Teachers (Posted 3/22/10)
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/opinion/19jacoby.html , Susan Jacoby opines that it will be “difficult to cure what ails the nation’s schools.” Nobody can disagree. But Jacoby tells us that a major reason for the “mediocre to poor performance of American students” is our inability to “attract smart young people” to teaching. You can mightily improve the schools, she repeats later on in this piece, by “attracting the brightest young people to teaching.”
And here I must disagree. It’s a creaky old argument (Jacoby is hardly the first to pitch it) goes like this. We’ve always had lousy public schools because we’ve always had dumb teachers. Teaching is a fallback occupation for those not smart enough to do something productive like dealing soybean or junk bonds or derivatives. A correlate is, as the thinking goes, if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich? Teachers surely aren’t rich, therefore they aren’t smart. You get smart people into teaching, and you can say good bye to those mediocre test scores.
Buried within all this conventional unwisdom are all sorts of unexamined claims.
First, there is the claim that teachers are indeed the least “smart” or “bright.” (Jacoby apparent thinks these two terms have equivalent meaning, although she doesn’t trouble herself or us with definitions.) But in my own experience in reviewing applications to a teacher education program over the years (limited to one institution, I will grant you), I’ve found that on GRE-verbal most of the applicants were at least one standard deviation above the mean, with many close to two standard deviations above the mean. Further, during our Study of the Education of Educators (reported in many places, first and most throughly in John Goodlad’s Teachers for Our Nation’s Schools), we found that applications to teacher education programs were increasing in the institutions we visited, not as a result of fallbacks from not getting into other graduate programs but as affirmative desire to get into increasingly competitive programs.
Second, there is the assumption that “smart” or “bright” (and young, too, according to Jacoby) people will make better teachers than all those vacuous Ichabod Cranes running around ruining our schools. But it has long been apparent that having intellectual smarts doesn’t correlate very well with good teaching. I don’t want to generalize too much here, or reflect in negative ways on my many friends and colleagues in higher education who are both bright and effective teachers, but take a look around in higher education and ask yourself what having a doctorate (presumably a requirement for teaching) has to do with good teaching.
Third, there is the assumption that we can significantly change the nature of the teacher education applicant pool. Jacoby assumes that more rigorous teacher ed programs will attract all those double 800 students who are currently going into, what, astrophysics? MBA? Law? She’s giving us a variant argument here. Most others assume we can change the pool by paying new teachers more money. Neither argument has much weight. Can we really believe that someone intent on Harvard Law is going to say “wow, look at this much more rigorous teacher ed program at X university: I thought teacher ed was Mickey Mouse, but look at all these difficult courses at X–I think I’ll go into teaching.”
As for the money, well, yes, it would be nice to pay beginning teachers more than, say, the $30,000 or so they get, for example, in Washington State. But two difficulties. First, a modest matter of funds. Let’s say we want to pay all teachers $10,000 more a year in order to make the profession more attractive to those young and bright and smart people Jacoby thinks will save public education. We have some three million K-12 practicing teachers in the country. Quite a multiple there, resulting in an additional bill of $30 billion a year. Where are we supposed to find that kind of money.
The second difficulty is even more difficult to overcome. People who are attracted to teaching are attracted to teaching. They are attracted to teaching despite the poor pay. They might be somewhat more likely to stay in teaching if they had higher pay (or, perhaps more important, if working conditions were changed so they weren’t regarded as technicians or robots assigned to teach a totally predetermined set of lesson plans or teach to the test). But overall, that extra $10,000 isn’t going to change the nature of the applicant pool.
So, in a relatively free country, with reasonable chances for occupational choice, we have who we have–and what we have is actually quite good. We should welcome the applicant pool we have, not try to effect marginal changes in the pool. Our focus should be on selecting into teacher ed programs those who are dedicated to children, to helping students act on expanding opportunities as individuals, as community members in a free and just society. Our focus should be on teacher ed programs that extend far into the teachers’ practice as teachers. And, as I said above, our focus should be on changing the working conditions of teachers, providing them support, providing them meaningful feedback on their teaching so they can get better at it, providing them opportunities for new professional and personal challenges. (I’ll have a bit more to say about these matters further down the road.)
Focusing on these matters will be much more likely to make schools better places for students and teachers. Much more likely than buying into the wrong and damaging notion that Jacoby pushes. That the “best and the brightest” (or smartest, and young – don’t forget young) make the best teachers is wrong. It’s damaging because to buy into it diverts us from understanding what really does need to happen in teacher preparation and in the schools.
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Why Aren't Our Schools As Good As Theirs?
We seem to be in a China-is-overtaking-us decade. You’ve seen the claims in books and other media: their economy is soon to be number one; ours is sinking. Typical is Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. The claims are often linked to schools. China is where it is and where it will be because China’s schools outpace America’s schools in academics–especially science and math.
The claimed connection between the rising threat of outside powers and the superiority of their schools is familiar. Some of us may recall the American reaction to the first Russian sputnik launched in October 1957. The space race was underway, followed immediately by claims of Soviet superiority not only in space but in schools. Russian schools focused on science and math, not life adjustment courses on how to have a good self image–or so claimed Life Magazine in “Crisis in Education,” a series of articles appearing just five months after Sputnik. Hyman Rickover comes out with his devastating critique of American schools, Education and Freedom, in 1959. I still have my 1959 paperback edition of The Growth of Physical Science, by James Jeans. A stylized post-it on the book cover reads: “Any Russian schoolboy could understand this book. Can you?”
It was difficult for many people other than the party faithful to visit the Soviet Union to see just what the schools were doing. But for many it was clear: we were being beaten by a regime that had better schools. If we wanted to be like them, we had better have schools like theirs.
That was in the late 1950s. Thirty years later, things have changed a bit in the world. In 1989, the Soviet Union is gone. “We will bury you,” Khrushchev had threatened. In the end, the Soviet Union buried itself. And by 1989, Japan had emerged as the emerging power, buying up much of the world (or so some claimed), including Rockefeller Center and who knows that else. Again, much media attention to the emergence of Japan and the concomitant decline of America. Typical was Michael Crichton’s didactic and doom-laden novel, Rising Sun. And again, the implied causality. Japan was strong and getting much stronger because of its schools. Everybody is in school day and night, studying math and science with the utmost discipline . And again, educational pilgrims made the journey to Japan to see the educational/economic miracle first-hand.
Not all were caught up in the argument that Japan is strong because its schools are strong. In his thoughtful book, The Next Century, David Halberstam recounts his conversations with Naohiro Amaya, a “historian disguised as a bureaucrat . . . who seemed to understand the outline of my book somewhat better than I did.” According to Halberstam, “Amaya had become embroiled in a major attempt to reform the Japanese educational system, to have less teaching by rote and a greater emphasis on the liberal arts . . . He believed a mistake of historical proportion may have been made as Japan prepared to deal with its future. The nation, he suggested, was producing workers rather than full citizens, and he once told me . . . that it was a great deal easier to produce a good car than it was to produce a good human being.”
Then, beginning in the early 1990s, Japan’s economy takes a tumble. It’s still in the doldrums. We don’t see much in the media predicting Japan’s overwhelming hegemony.
But what we also don’t see is any conscious willingness to retract, to reconsider, to think about the argument that many had made or accepted during Japan’s bubble period in the 1980s. If Japan was great because of its schools, then what should we say about its schools now that Japan is in an economic muddle? Have the schools significantly declined in quality? Probably not, we would say, because in reality, schools weren’t the cause of the rise and thus aren’t the cause of the fall.
But somehow it’s difficult to shake the rising-economy/good schools way of thinking.
And, as I said, now it’s China we’re watching, and just as surely, China’s schools are touted by some as worthy of emulation if we are going to keep our nation strong. Are we going to fall into the same illogical thinking yet another time? If not China, then how about India? India is clearly an emerging economic power. They must have good schools. And if we don’t make our schools like theirs, we are bound to lose, no?
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