Poems, Picture Study and Beginning Again

Cross-posted from "Smart and Good":

I have long thought that the very best gifts are not those that are most expensive or exclusive or even those you most want in advance; the best gifts are those that demonstrate somehow that the giver knows you. I received many lovely Christmas presents this year and all represented, in one way or another, this spirit of "best gifts." But one stands out: Poem a Day, edited by Karen McCosker and Nicholas Albery. It's a collection of 366 poems (including one for February 29th) organized by date, one for each day of the year.

The book cover says, "In times past, Americans with a love of poetry routinely learned by heart dozens of poems ..." and I was driven backward to memories of my Catholic grade school days in Philadelphia, to an occasional subject called "Poems and Picture Study." This was not a "special." We didn't leave our regular classroom (I and my 70 or 80 classmates never left the regular classroom :-). It was simply a weekly exercise in which each of us learned to recognize some famous work of art (Jean Francois Millet's The Gleaners comes immediately to consciousness) or to recite from memory some well-known bit of poetry (for example, "O young Lochivar is come out of the west ..." by Sir Walter Scott). These exercises in memorization and cultural appreciation seem, from my vantage point half a century later, to have been important. We knew then that they were important because there was a final exam at the end of the year in this study, just as there were cumulative exams in all of the subjects we studied.

Ironically, it is examinations (of the NCLB variety) that are partially responsible for chasing this kind of study out of the curriculum. But it is not only the NCLB mentality that impoverishes the studies our children take up. We are impoverished by attitudes that allow the legitimate need for "relevance" to trump the just-as-important need for perspective, for appreciation for the best that has been said and done. E.D. Hirsch was right about the latter, the Progressives were right about the former -- and John Dewey was even "righter" when he insisted that the two were not mutually exclusive.

Some will say that it is silly nostalgia on my part that causes me to bemoan the lack of poems and picture study in the curriculum. Some will say that both are there but in other forms in regular language arts and visual arts classes. Some will argue that we have no time for this nonsense in an age when literacy is lagging. Some will note that the pedagogies of memorization and site recognition are limited. And I will nod and agree. But even if all that is true, I think today's young children would be better off recognizing and reciting at least some of these kinds of expressive and aesthetic achievements. In such works, there is both intelligence and goodness.

As for me, I spent just a few minutes this New Years morning memorizing the selection for January 1st, "New Every Morning" by 19th century poet Susan Coolidge:

Every day is a fresh beginning,

Listen my soul to the glad refrain

And, spite of old sorrows

And older sinning,

Troubles forecasted

And possible pain,

Take heart with the day and begin again.

Strategic Communication and Schools

Peter Levine, a philosopher and researcher on civic engagement (he directs CIRCLE at Tufts), put up an interesting post today discussing the leaked emails from climate scientists. The emails reference statistical "tricks" used to present data to make it more convincing to the public, and refer to climate skeptics as "idiots." These emails have, of course, been fodder for people predisposed to disbelieve in human-caused global warming and to fight political-ecological efforts to slow it down or diminish its effects.

Levine argues that what these scientists were doing was engaging in strategic communication. Using Habermas, he states that climate scientists were trying to effectively communicate a very specific set of messages in order to convince the public of the truth and implications of climate change. Strategic communication simply is better for this purpose, and climate change is a scary proposition for the world's future.

But as Levine states, strategic communication is "unethical" because it uses the listener or reader as the means to an end. It tries to manipulate the reader for what the speaker considers to be justified ends. Manipulation violates trust; Levine writes that

"our views of matters like climate change depend fundamentally on trust. I cannot directly sense changes in the climate, let alone their causes. Neither can scientists--despite their fancy equipment. An account of how and why the climate is changing requires aggregating the research of many scientists and collaborative teams. To use the aggregated information, you must trust all the contributors. Then, to make matters even harder, people like me don't read any of the scientific literature on climate. We read what we regard as high-quality news coverage of the scientific literature, which means that we must trust some reporters, as well as the scientists they cover. And we must trust the reliability of the relationship between them."

Scientists, he says, are not supposed to try and manipulate us; they should "explore the truth in the company of their readers. To the extent that they communicate strategically, they are just interest groups, basically like all the others. They have goals; they may be willing to negotiate; but they cannot persuade on the basis of trust."

All this reminds me of the dilemma that public school leaders find themselves in today. A great many interest groups, pundits, think tanks, and organizations today are explicit in their anti-public-school views and agendas. Groups like the Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation conduct specious studies to forward their agenda. And have plenty of resources to play the media game to their full advantage. They are part of what Bracey called the “schools- are-awful bloc” that use “misinformation, distorted information, deliberate attempts at obfuscation, sloppy thinking” to break public support for government-run schools. I am not saying the public schools are always perfect, by a long shot, but typically the concerns of many of these groups are more based in ideology and politics than in actual balanced views based in evidence-based accounts.

In response, many public schools have tried to become experts at strategic communication. Most districts today have public relations experts on staff, whose job it is to boost the public image and perception of the district. Districts hire marketing experts whose job it is to "re-brand" the label of public education. They attempt to "get the truth out" about public schooling in the face of many unwarranted (and warranted) public attacks today.

This response is understandable, but it only serves to further erode public trust and the legitimacy of public schooling. School officials must have the trust of the citizens who fund, support, and attend their schools, but if they are viewed as strategically communicating with those citizens, trust is diminished. Nobody can sniff out marketing like Americans; we must be the world's experts, given the amount we are bombarded with today. And citizens of public schooling are no different. They can smell "re-branding" a mile off, and it smells like a used car salesman trying to sell a old Buick.

Levine contrasts strategic communication with Habermasian dialogic communication. In such communications, schools leaders and educators convene for dialogue and deliberation around school purposes, aims, and priorities. This doesn't mean that citizens tell teachers how to teach, or superintendents how to balance the budget, anymore than it means that citizens can tell climate scientists how their research should be done. But it would imply that school leaders are not marketers, nor simply managers, but public leaders whose job it is to listen to and speak with those publics to whom they are responsible. Yet the conditions for that kind of communication are exceedingly difficult, posing a challenging dilemma for any school leader who wishes start building public trust rather than simply playing public relations.

School to Prison Pipeline

Cross-posted on the Journal of Educational Controversy Blog

In the excerpt below, ACLU staff attorney Rose Spidell discusses "The School to Prison Pipeline." This term describes a disturbing national trend in which school policies and practices are increasingly pushing students out of the public school and into the juvenile justice system. It refers to the current trend of criminalizing our students rather than educating them and the disproportionate effect it has on different student populations, especially, students of color. Spidell also describes some case studies out of Washington state. The excerpt is taken from the 2009 Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum held at Western Washington University on April 29th. The forum is an annual event sponsored by the Journal of Educational Controversy. Readers can view the entire forum on our journal's website.



View the full video of the forum here: http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/Forums.shtml

To learn more about "The School to Prison Pipeline," visit the ACLU's website here: http://www.aclu.org/racial-justice/school-prison-pipeline-talking-points

"The boa constrictor, in its filthy slime...": G.F. Thayer's Lecture on Classroom Courtesy

From time to time, in my rummagings through the historical detritus of 19th century education, I come across something interesting. A few months ago, while sorting through some material on school hygiene, I found an extraordinary lecture entitled "On Courtesy."

"On Courtesy" is an address was given by G.F. Thayer in August of 1840, at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Instruction. In the lecture, Thayer bemoaned the lack of courtesy that plagued the schools of the day, and offered a list of requisitions and prohibitions that would help to remedy the problem. Some of Thayer's "requisitions" were quite bracing--consider the following comment on order in the classroom:

The first of the four [requisitions] relates to the scholars' taking their
places, on entering the school-room. This is a right step,
and the only safe one. If they wander about, they will
probably fall into temptation, and be led to do something
they ought not to do.

I have seen children, on a person's going into a schoolroom,
quit their seats, gather about the visitor, and stand,
with mouth ajar, drinking in, with the most intense interest,
every word said to or by the stranger, as if the communications
related to the falling of the sky, or some other
equally wonderful phenomenon. What in deportment
can strike a delicate mind with more surprise and disgust
than this ? In some schools, Lancaster's tablets, containing
the suggestion, "A PLACE FOR EVERY THING,
AND EVERY THING IN ITS PLACE,"
occupy a conspicuous situation. It should not be disregarded.

There are a number of other interesting requisitions (keeping the children mud-free, bowing) that Thayer discussed at great length. However, for Thayer, the requisitions are a mere opening act; the real rhetorical flights are saved for the prohibitions. Consider, for example, Thayer's energetic remarks on the problem of graffiti:

Next, marking, cutting, scratching, chalking, on the
school- house, fence, walls, &ic., are forbidden, as connected
with much that is low, corrupting, and injurious to the
property and rights of others. They are the beginnings
in that course of debasing follies and vices, for which the
idle, the ignorant, and profane, are most remarkable ; the
first steps in that course of degradation and impurity, by
which the community is disgraced, and the streams of
social intercourse polluted. You mark the track of its
subjects as you would the trail of a savage marauding
party, by its foul deeds and revolting exploits ; as you
would the path of the boa constrictor, in its filthy slime,
which tells that man's deadly enemy is abroad. And we
are called on, by every consideration of duty, to ourselves,
to our offspring, and to our race, to arm against this tremendous
evil, this spiritual bohon upas, which threatens
so wide-spread a moral death.

Other prohibitions not to be missed include spitting on the floor, the extremely dangerous game of paw-paw, and whittling.

Given the vigor of the pronouncements about the boa constrictor, one might be tempted to conclude that Thayer was an isolated crank. In fact, the opposite is true. Thayer was a popular schoolmaster who founded Chauncy Hall, a Boston private school that is still in existence. He was also, along with Horace Mann, a Vice-President of the American Institute of Instruction. As it happened, Mann, who was present for Thayer's inaugural reading of "On Courtesy", enjoyed the lecture so much that he reprinted it in his journal and had a copy sent to every school in Massachusetts.

In past posts, I've described some of the stark differences between current thinking about education and the ideas that prevailed in the 19th century. Thayer's lecture certainly bears this conclusion out. However, not everyone accepts that these differences exist. Recently, Robert Slavin, while making an argument about education's lack of progress in Educational Researcher, offered up the following assessment: “…if Rip Van Winkle had been a physician, a farmer, or an engineer, he would be unemployable if he awoke today. If he had been a good elementary school teacher in the 19th century, he would probably be a good elementary school teacher today.” Clearly, however, if Mr. Van Winkle had been teaching in Mr. Thayer's school, he might have had some difficulties adjusting to contemporary classroom life.

I highly recommend that you download the full version of "On Courtesy" and read it. Otherwise, you will never find out about Thayer's fascinating comments on bowing, the importance of respecting one's elders, and the dreadful dangers attendant upon "meddling with one's desk."

I just want the opportunity to have a choice

The New York Times reports that increasing numbers of New York City parents are forking over their dollars to companies that prep 3 and 4 year-olds for the city’s gifted and talented assessment test. I read this with considerable dismay but little surprise. Parents waste money on silly ideas, and perhaps in a few years I’ll be laughing at this as hard as I did at the Baby Einstein refund news. What really caught my attention was not the fact that parents are doing this, but the way parents talked about it.

One mother, Melisa Kehlmann, is quoted as saying “I just want the opportunity to have choice”. Her language struck me as perfectly capturing the problem.

The premise of “choice” is that it provides opportunities to parents and children that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Parents with money have always had ample choices and ample opportunities, and school choice is supposed to make comparable opportunities available to families who cannot afford to pay for them. Choice, in short, is supposed to create opportunities. “The opportunity to have a choice”, however, correctly structures the situation: Having a choice presupposes opportunity. The fact that parents are paying to have their children tutored for the gifted and talented assessment is yet one more piece of evidence that school choice only gives some people – those who already have some purchase on opportunity – a choice.

This is deeply problematic in a liberal democracy based on the idea that all people are rational choosers, with an equal right to determine the course of their own lives. Choice is supposed to be a right, and Ms. Kehlmann’s rhetoric captures this too. Her opening words “I just want . . .” imply that this is a plea for minimal basic rights. It is a phrase that one often reads in accounts of people struck by misfortune, famine or natural disaster, for instance, and usually a request for the bare necessities. One usually hears it in sentences like “I just want food for my baby”, or “I just want a roof over my head”. Nothing fancy, not organic baby food or an entire house, just sustenance and shelter. “I just want the opportunity to have a choice” is comic, given the context. “I just want” to pay to give my child a better chance to get into program that is supposed to be merit based strikes me as a plea along the lines of “I just want a Manhattan townhouse and a place in the Hamptons”. And yet, the rhetoric is accurate, inasmuch as choice is, after all, supposed to be a basic right.

What else falls with the Berlin Wall

In November 1987, my AP European History teacher assigned us a famously daunting assignment. She sketched an imaginary line from the Elbe river, down around the Czechoslovak border, and down the Danube to the Adriatic Sea and asked us to figure out what that divide meant.

This is, or was, the divide between Eastern and Western Europe, and we students were being asked to look into the history of that divide, figure out why it had come to be, and why it had achieved what appeared to be permanence, or at least long-term relevance. I cannot remember exactly what I wrote 22 years ago, but I suspect many of our papers included some version of the line that “this is how things have been for a long time and probably how they are going to stay forever”. We were, of course, dead wrong. Two years later, twenty years ago this week, the wall was down, the divide was breached. Five years later, I was in Poland running a civic education program. When I visited friends in Poland and Slovakia this spring, I sailed across borders that even in 1999 required passports and scrutiny but now look antiquated and shabby. (I suppose they probably looked shabby then too, but the presence of border control gave them potency they no longer have.) My Polish friends are traveling the world and moving back and forth across the Elbe and Danube to attend school, visit family, explore job opportunities.

This week, 22 years after writing an essay on the history of a stark divide, I found myself on the other side of the table, grading midterm essays that asked students to explain how teachers, schools, and other institutions in the United States make race matter. My students had seen videos on the history of race in the United States and read contemporary studies that explore race in school, and the midterm asked them to explain the workings of a divide that often seems to have foundations so deep, support from interests so powerful, and psychological ramifications running so far in our souls that it is likely a permanent feature of our world. Over and over, my students told me that race has always been an issue in the United States and that therefore it always will be.

I expect that two years from now, there will still be racial privilege in the United States, but in 1987 I expected the Berlin wall would still be standing. That it was gone two years later speaks to the refusal of large numbers of people to accept such fatalism. Of course it takes more than willpower. In June 1989, Tiananmen Square showed us that. But a fatalistic acceptance of the way things are is not the only alternative. If the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of empire in Eastern Europe teach us anything, it ought to be that refusal to accept present realities as indicating the limits of possibility can sometimes work wonders.

Matthew Shepard and public life

Last night I saw a reading of “The Laramie Project, 10 years later” sponsored by, among others, Miami University’s Department of Theater. All around the country yesterday, staged readings and productions of this play were being brought to the public to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of Matthew Shephard’s death after a brutal slaying motivated by homophobia. This performance intersected with my current research about “the public” – what this space (both actual, virtual and metaphorical) represents and means today.

“The Laramie Project” was a play by the Tectonic Theater Project and later an HBO movie that was based on the interviews done with Laramie residents five weeks after Shepard’s beating. It has supposedly now been seen by more than 30 million viewers. “The Laramie Project, 10 years later” visits the town a decade after the incident to see what has changed. They interviewed many of the same people and tried to see how the community was thinking about the incident, and what has changed for the GLBTQ community in Laramie and in Wyoming. It is a difficult but wonderful presentation. I urge you to see it if you can.

I am fascinated by the way that Shepard’s death has found spaces of expression, action and movement in public life. The Laramie Project represents one artistic vein of that expression, where playwrights, actors, and audiences re-enact and witness the story of Shepherd, his murderer, family, and the people of the town in which he died. The Laramie Project has spawned on-line communities. Shepherd’s death has spawned activism for hate crime legislation, the Shepard Foundation, and a number of other organizations and groups. In Shepard's name, many people in the GLBTQ community and their supporters gather, mourn, commemorate; some of those people take this energy into the political realms of policy-making and legislation on behalf of civil rights for GLBTQ people, as is witnessed by the explosion of activism in support of these causes in recent years.

In the town of Laramie itself, at least as far as how it is represented in “The Laramie Project, 10 years later,” you see the same kinds of discussions and actions around the Shepard’s murder and it’s implications for justice and community in Laramie. But in the performance of “10 years later,” you see how the circulation of meanings around Shepard’s death reflects the divisive and sensationalist world of contemporary political and cultural life. An infamous 20/20 News Hour show in 2004 raised doubts about the motivations of Shepard’s killer despite the clear evidence, including confessions, aired during the trail of his murderers (who are serving multiple life terms). That 20/20 episode asserted that the murder was not related to homophobic hatred but a simple robbery and drug deal gone bad. People interviewed 10 years after Shepard’s death now echo the lies constructed by this 20/20 episode which intersect nicely with our own impulses to ignore and paper over unpleasant truths about ourselves. Matthew’s death wasn’t caused because he was gay, this logic goes. He was killed in a robbery. Murderer’s confessions from the trial, however, reveal he was robbed in the first 10 minutes of the encounter; he was brutally beaten and left for dead well after the robbers had his wallet, which contained all of $30.00.

There are public expressions of this general idea, as well. The conservative right wing of our political culture, through its own media outlets, argue that Shepard’s death was not motivated by hatred at all, and use the 20/20 episode and its half-truths and lies to argue against hate crime legislation. The idea that gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered people do not deserve civil rights creates its own expressions, performances, and activism. It has created a strong set of public ideas and performances since Shepard’s death, passing Defense of Marriage Bills and blocking hate crime legislation in many states.

These public controversies generally are written off now as “the culture wars” in action. But they are not inevitable; they are part of the conditions of our contemporary public life. There are multiple areas of potential agreement between conservative Christians and GLBTQ civil rights activists that might be fruitfully explored and harnessed for political and cultural change that decreases homophobic violence and murder in our society, as one example. “The Laramie Project, 10 years later,” promotes the discovery of these multiple potential sites of agreement when the interview with Shepard’s murderer serves as the climax of the performance. The interviewer is urged, by a Catholic priest who served in Laramie, to get to know the murderer, and try to understand him. The play does not urge an easy excusing of Shepard’s murderer, or a forgiveness of hatred, but a kind of plea to get beyond simplistic characterizations of “us” and “them” while keeping a steady eye on justice. And that is the kind of public performance that, to me, is deserving of the name “public” in aspiration and meaning.

Stuck in Traffic

My daughter started kindergarten last month, and recently she was invited to the birthday party of a pre-school classmate. Naturally, the kids turned to playing and the adults turned to dissecting just what was going on in kindergarten. Our children are at different schools, and people were happy and unhappy about different things, but there was parental consensus that the traffic light discipline phenomenon is occupying too much of our children’s attention and interest.

In case readers aren’t familiar with the phenomenon, it’s a “behavioral management system” used frequently in elementary schools. Students who behave are “on green”. If you get into a little bit of trouble, you’re “on yellow” until you get yourself back to green again. From yellow, if you continue to commit infractions you can go down further to red. Not sure what happens there, since my daughter has been on green since day 1, and according to her the only child to get as far as yellow so far is one boy who tends to talk to the other children at his table.

It sounds fairly sensible as a means of maintaining order, and I am certainly sympathetic to classroom teachers’ need to do so. What’s alarming is that in the minds of so many kindergarteners, one’s primary purpose in school seems to be staying out of trouble.

I’m juxtaposing this with my discovery last week that 75% of the undergraduate students in one of my classes could tell me nothing about Karl Marx. Not even that he was one of the Marx brothers, which I almost would have settled for, as some indication of cultural literacy. It’s hardly news that our schools put a lot of energy into behavioral management and not enough into intellectual content, but it’s worth paying attention to again and again. Programs like KIPP and other successful charter schools have drawn our attention to the importance of teaching pro-school behavior. As Arne Duncan and the Department of Education address the problems of failing schools, they would do well to remember that behavior is only part of what matters.

I suspect kindergarteners may in part be enthralled with the traffic light system because they’ve figured out that it’s the key to what school is all about. She who controls the traffic lights holds the power, and kids are savvy enough to see, by the fourth week of kindergarten, that power, norms, and regulation are as much the point as learning to read. When my daughter and a neighborhood friend played school, they gleefully moved my younger daughter from green to yellow when she played with blocks at “storytime” instead of listening. Traffic lights, and the control of social nuisances they made possible, were (and are) the very heart of the game. In a recent article in Ed Week, Alfie Kohn suggests that alternative educators may be inspired by the traditional classrooms they grow up in – inspired to be different and do better. The insights of kindergarteners (which of course still need to turn into critical analysis, rather than tools for oppressing one’s little sister) are reason to think he might be right.

Think you can't trust the President?? At least trust the kids!

I was greeted early yesterday morning by a local newspaper article noting that some folks (specifically, "conservatives,"  but it's hard to know who that refers to) are angry that President Obama plans to give a speech at a public school urging young people to stay in school and take advantage of the education being offered them. Throughout the day yesterday -- and this morning -- I encountered this "developing story" ... on CNN, in The New York Times, and elsewhere.  

What are we to make of this?

The Obama folks clearly made one mistake in the run-up to the event.   They posted lesson plans that teachers could use in preparation for and after listening to the President's speech (offered live in one school but available for broadcast in any school).   One part of that included a question to be posed to the students:  "What can you do to help the President?"    In context, the question was clearly about supporting the good of the nation, but I can (if I really stretch Peter Elbow's "methodological belief") see why those who do not agree with the "President's ideology" would be concerned.  And it seems the President's folks were listening and focused on making this a non-partisan event. That question in the lesson plan was changed to ask how a student could achieve his or her educational goals.

I am struck by the concern with the "President's ideology," because the complaint incorporates the assumption that ONLY the President has an ideology, that the one complaining is speaking the non-biased truth.   Of course, the President has views on how to deal with the issues of our time, as do we all.    And we don't all agree with each other.   But it seems we have lost even the notion that we share one common goal:  a desire to educate children to be good Americans (even when we are not in agreement about what that means.)  Each of us -- especially the duly elected President of the country -- deserves that benefit of the doubt no matter how hard we fight in the arena of ideas and policies.

We have apparently moved into an era when even the clear election winner, a father of two young daughters, will not be trusted to speak to school children.  Have we so little confidence in our children's ability to listen critically and form and frame their own minds that we fear the influence of Barack Obama?   If that's so, then I fear no education is possible, certainly not the real education that requires openness to people who don't look and think like we do.  

Children who would become democratic citizens need to experience the play of democratic functioning.  I remember well my 6th grade Catholic school playground days during the Nixon/Kennedy elections.   My teachers and most of my classmates were Kennedy supporters (the result of religioius "ideology"? )   My parents -- and I -- were Nixon supporters (the result of my business executive father's socio-economic status?)  I and the few other Nixon supports held our ground when everybody else challenged us;   for the most part, we enjoyed it.  Whether or not we can trust our President in this case (and I obviously think we can),  I am quite certain we can trust our children.   Bring the President into every classroom;  it will do us good.

Where are the Voices from the Grass Roots?

(Cross-posted from the Journal of Educational Controversy blog)

In reading much that is printed in the mainstream media like today's editorial in the New York Times - "Accountability in Public Education," one constantly hears accounts and perspectives from the voices of those who are in power. Where are the voices from the grass roots about their concerns, frustrations, hopes, and challenges to what passes as educational reform in this country. I recently came across a website and a listserv that provides readers with this alternative perspective. For readers interested in educating themselves on other perspectives, check out the following website and join the listserv of the Education for Liberation Network.

Website: http://www.edliberation.org/

To join the listserv: go to www.edliberation.org/join-us

Description and Purpose: The Education for Liberation Network is a national coalition of teachers, community activists, youth, researchers and parents who believe a good education should teach people - particularly low-income youth and youth of color - to understand and challenge the injustices their communities face.

Teachers may also be interested in their recent publication of a new kind of plan book that is called: Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Teachers 2009-2010. You can find it at: http://www.justiceplanbook.com/. I am told that the first printing is already sold out, but more are being printed.