Charter School Campaign Report: Wall Street Journal tells "A Tale of Two Students"

The Wall Street Journal has published a very touching article -- one might call it the perfect propaganda piece -- in its campaign for school privatization.

The story depicts two similar kids -- two Latino "baddies" -- who were already going off in the wrong direction in middle school. Ivan, the young man, then goes to a charter school and at 18 is attending a flagship university and aiming to be the first Latino Governor of Oklahioma. His former running buddy Laura, a spunky Latina who went to the public High School instead, is now going nowhere.

It's a good conversation starter, and could be valuable in an Introduction to Education course to begin a discussion about charter schools.

The Death of Schools and Society

Dick Morris, a self-serving commentater who has managed to advise both the Clinton and Bush White Houses, is now pushing an apocalyptic vision for public education. The states, he claims in a new book, will shift strongly to the GOP in 2010 and will assert their 10th amendment constitutional rights. Their Attorneys General will take action against all Federal encroachments on State powers in domains left to the states under the reserved powers clause.

As a federalist I also think this is long overdue. Connecticut, my adoptive state, contemplated a 10th amendment suit against NCLB. California has been struggling to assert some control over its natural environment and has been blocked by weak federal environmental protection laws that pre-empt state legislation.

Morris's claim is that once the states successfully get out from under federal educational policy initiatives they will open the spigots on charter schools, vouchers, and homeschools, and will completely tear down the public school system.

This movement to replace the public schools with charter schools is already a trend, as witnessed in New Orleans. If this spreads it will be on a regional basis; some states will lead and others will be very reluctant to follow.

Marc Lilla has a fascinating article in this week's NYRB on the Tea Party and the New Jacobins. He says that the current political climate is the outcome of two successful revolutions: the 1960s revolution of individual self-expression and the 1980s Reagan revolution of privatisation. Combined, these two shifts have left individuals to act as they choose and to free themselves from large institutions, now discredited as corrupt and ineffective, to do all manner of things for themselves that they don't have a clue how to do -- including, educate their children and care for their own health.

I am not as dismissive as Lilla about the capacities of ordinary people, and I am not nearly as enamoured by the institutions whose collapse he fears. maybe I am just an unconscious product of this double revolution myself.

But Lilla has a very important point: once these institutions are de-composed, then given the double revolution it will be difficult to put them -- or successor institutions that we will badly need --back into place.

A few charter schools and homeschools is one thing; a nation state without the means to create society is quite another.

An Update on What ever Happened to the Schools in Post-Katrina New Orleans?

Here is an update on Margaret Crocco's post on "New Orleans and Its Citizens: Three Years Later" that addresses the effects on schooling directly. It is cross-posted from the Journal of Educational Controversy blog.

Editor: In our winter 2008 issue, we published a review of Kenneth Saltman's book, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools. In his post below, Saltman adds to the conversation that was started by Margaret Crocco in her update on "New Orleans and its Citizens: Three Years Later" by sharing his views on what is happening to the public school system in New Orleans since the Katrina tragedy. We invite our readers to read the review, Smashed, by Christopher Robbins and join in the conversation.

A POST BY KENNETH SALTMAN

BEWARE TALES OF PROGRESS THAT ERASE THE FULL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION AND DISPOSSESSION IN THE NEW ORLEANS' SCHOOLS

In my book Capitalizing on Disaster I detailed the vast experiment in neoliberal privatization orchestrated by right-wing think tanks and politicians in the wake of Katrina. I covered the imposition of a massive voucher scheme, no-bid contracting and corporate corruption by those with ties to the Bush administration such as Alvarez & Marsal and Rome Consulting, the dismantling of the public system and union by a for-profit consulting firm, and the replacement of public schools with a charter network. As I argued in the book this has to be understood as a concerted effort to dispossess poor and working class predominantly African American citizens of their communities by the business and political elite of the city and state and to turn them into investment opportunities. I contend that this is part of a much broader movement for privatization and deregulation which is not only about economic redistribution but about the redistribution of political control over public goods and services. As well, I argued these initiatives only make sense in relation to a history of racialized disinvestment in public services and infrastructure that resulted in a city with the least funded urban school system in the country. In short, I argued that the political right capitalized on natural disaster and in the process exacerbated the human made disasters that predated the storm. The consequences were a radical shift in educational governance and material resources away from those most in need of them. It seems to me that honest discussion about the state of the New Orleans schools and communities must take seriously this history and recognize that what is at stake in this is more than a vague notion of educational quality (especially the anti-critical kinds defined narrowly by tests scores) but struggles over material resources and cultural values by competing classes and groups. In other words the role that public schools play for a society theoretically committed to democracy has to be considered. When business and political elites wrest control of schools and communities from the public and then describe it as a gift to the public (the "silver lining in the storm") we are hardly approximating those collective ideals.

What ever Happened to the Schools in Post-Katrina New Orleans

I am cross-posting this message from the Journal of Educational Controversy Blog http://journalofeducationalcontroversy.blogspot.com/ The author only mentions briefly what has happened to the school system in New Orleans after Katrina. I'd like to get responses on the different reactions that I've read on the consequences for schooling that followed efforts to restore the city after the devastating hurricane and thought that readers of this blog would be interested in joining in the conversation. Please cross-post.

Here is the post from the January 1, 2009 Journal of Educational Controversy Blog.

New Orleans and its Citizens: Three years later

Editor: Authors Margaret Smith Crocco and Maureen Grolnick, whose article, Teaching the Levees: an Exercise in Democratic Dialogue, appears in our winter 2008 issue of the journal, give us an update on their groundbreaking curriculum that ties it to the artistic efforts to give voice to Katrina's victims. Margaret Crocco writes that our readers will find this quite different from what they might read in the popular media. We invite readers to respond to her post or to her article from our Volume 3 Number 1 Issue on "Schooling as if Democracy Matters."

A POST FROM MARGARET SMITH CROCCO

NEW ORLEANS AND ITS CITIZENS: THREE YEARS LATER
Margaret Smith Crocco, Teaching The Levees (Teachers College Press, 2008)

Anyone who saw Spike Lee’s masterpiece, When the Levees Broke, will remember its “star” – Phyllis Montana LeBlanc. Straight-shooting, opinionated, and profane, Phyllis and her husband, mother, sister and autistic nephew were stranded in New Orleans on August 28th 2005 as Katrina struck. Like many native New Orleanians, they discounted the warnings of a massive hurricane until it was too late to evacuate. As the water level in their apartment rose in the days after the storm hit , the rescue helicopters flew past, ignoring their cries for help and moving on to those in even more dire circumstances. Phyllis and her family climbed onto refrigerators to float through water infested with alligators and snakes the two blocks necessary to reach higher ground. Phyllis and her husband spent nearly three years in a FEMA trailer while the rest of her family was relocated to Houston so her nephew could get schooling.

Spike Lee’s decision to tell the story of Hurricane Katrina through stories such as Phyllis Montana LeBlanc’s was not just a brilliant directorial decision (witness the scores of cinematic awards the film has garnered) but a shrewd maneuver in addressing what’s been called the “psychic numbing” and “compassion fatigue” that often accompany natural disasters, genocides, and other human tragedies. If Lee’s intention was to provoke empathetic responses for Katrina victims, his strategy was on target, according to decision researcher Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon.

According to psychological research, we are far more likely to be motivated to help out in the face of disaster if we can put a human face on events. Slovic notes that “images seem to be the key to conveying affect and meaning, though some imagery is more powerful than others” (p.8). He goes on to comment that, “When it comes to eliciting compassion, the identified individual victim, with a face and a name, has no peer” (p.8). For a copy of the full article, see: http://journal.sjdm.org/jdm7303a.pdfOf course, Spike Lee offers not just one face and one story but well over a hundred faces and stories in his film, which is effective in conveying the multiple perspectives on these events. Over four hours of such narratives, interspersed with analysis and commentary by experts on poverty, race, science and politics, viewers of When the Levees Broke get a full sense of the human dimension, suffering, and costs of Hurricane Katrina. The film makes an extraordinary effort to use art to address the potential collapse of compassion in the face of so much misery.

In an appearance at Teachers College, Columbia University in September 2007 at the launch of the “Teaching The Levees” project, New Orleans City Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell noted her gratitude for the tremendous outpouring of assistance from citizens—of all ages, races, and regions—to help New Orleans’ residents get on with life and rebuild (http://www.teachingthelevees.org/?page_id=90 ). I do not claim that Spike Lee’s film can be credited as the cause of this generosity. But to the degree that his film got the story out in such a compelling fashion on HBO, it is clear that When the Levees Broke gave a human face—or many human faces--to this epic story.

So, now, three years later, how are Phyllis Montana LeBlanc and New Orleans faring? Have compassion and volunteerism trumped the government indifference and belated investment in rebuilding to provide solace, support, hope, and meaningful recovery for residents of the city? Well, as you can imagine, the answer is a mixed one.

According to the Brookings Institute, which has produced an annual report on conditions in New Orleans since 2005 (http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2007/08neworleansindex.aspx ), positive signs can be found. In a report issued in late August 2008, Brookings indicated that New Orleans’ economy is improving; the population is returning slowly to a growing job sector; the trolley cars on Canal Street are reappearing (http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-0/122768062889950.xml&coll=1 ). Eighty-seven public schools have been opened, including many new charter schools, with many new teachers recruited from around the country.

Affordable housing, however, especially for low income service workers in the city, remains a big problem. One prominent home rebuilding project (http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/081211PittHouses.asp) has been underwritten by Brad Pitt whose “Make it Right Foundation” (http://www.makeitrightnola.org/) has garnered extensive publicity for the architectural distinction of its homes as well as their high-profile celebrity backer.The Brookings report also notes that “nonprofit groups, business leaders and some politicians are working hard to repair the city’s buildings and improve the criminal-justice and health-care systems.” Groups such as Women of the Storm, levees.org, Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans, Catholic Charities, and the Citizens Road Home Action Team, among others, are leading the recovery effort on multiple fronts.

Nevertheless, the progress of recovery has proceeded at what seems a glacial pace to many residents of the city. The Californian hired to help rebuild New Orleans, Ed Blakely, has been the subject of much criticism for the slow pace of the recovery, his absenteeism, and the lack of visibility of Mayor Ray Nagin in the process (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/us/01orleans.html?_r=2&ref=us&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin). Unsurprisingly, many politicians have come in for criticism, at the city, state, and national levels. Many residents are hoping the Obama-Biden administration brings new attention to the city’s plight.

And what about Phyllis Montana LeBlanc? She wrote a book, which appeared in August 2008, while living in the FEMA trailer. Entitled Not Just the Levees Broke: My Story and After Hurricane Katrina, the book was published by Simon and Schuster. LeBlanc did an interview with Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/08/27/phyllis_montana_leblanc/ ) and seems to have used her faith and family to sustain her throughout the ordeal of the last three years. Spike Lee wrote the forward to the book, and it seems that her colorful personality and commentary have made her into something of a celebrity herself.

Despite the positive aspects of this update on New Orleans three years later, it is also clear that the devastation wrought by Katrina and the continuing debate about how best to remedy the damage and prevent further disasters continue. Let me conclude by turning to other works of art, completed and in progress, which can also be seen as efforts to put a human face on tragedy.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Trouble the Water, the “home movie” shot by self-professed “street hustler” Kim Roberts and crafted by professional filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal (http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/08/21/trouble_the_water/), which won an award at the Sundance Film Festival. In the works is The New Orleans Tea Party by Marline Otte and Lazlo Fulop (see a clip on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzA4UR-w8PQ ). This film gets at some of the controversies related to rebuilding—by whom and for whom and to what end, with footage shot in early 2008. It also addresses issues of politics—global and local related to Katrina—and the effects of climate change on the city. Finally, the award-winning filmmakers who created Revolution ’67 (http://www.bongiornoproductions.com/REVOLUTION) about the 1967 race riots in Newark, New Jersey, Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno and Jerome Bongiorno, are working on a “love story” set in Venice and New Orleans—two cities threatened with extinction in the face of global climate change and rising sea levels. If a love story can make the threat of global climate change and a world that is too “hot, flat and crowded” (http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/hot-flat-and-crowded), as Tom Friedman puts it, real to us, then it will offer an interesting twist on Slovic’s theory that putting a human face on disaster is the best way to trigger a response in action.

If there’s any good news in looking back at the tragedy of Katrina, it may lie in enhanced recognition of the need for more democratic dialogue and civic action about the problems we face as a nation. We can thank enlightened filmmakers like those mentioned here for helping motivate us to engage in both talk and action. With a new administration coming to Washington, DC in January 2009, we can hope that they will join the citizens of New Orleans and concerned citizens across the country in taking the steps necessary to prevent other such disasters and help residents of the Gulf Coast to continue to recover from the lingering problems associated with Hurricane Katrina.

See also our post by Kenneth Saltman:

BEWARE TALES OF PROGRESS THAT ERASE THE FULL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION AND DISPOSSESSION IN THE NEW ORLEANS' SCHOOLS


In my book Capitalizing on Disaster I detailed the vast experiment in neoliberal privatization orchestrated by right-wing think tanks and politicians in the wake of Katrina. I covered the imposition of a massive voucher scheme, no-bid contracting and corporate corruption by those with ties to the Bush administration such as Alvarez & Marsal and Rome Consulting, the dismantling of the public system and union by a for-profit consulting firm, and the replacement of public schools with a charter network. As I argued in the book this has to be understood as a concerted effort to dispossess poor and working class predominantly African American citizens of their communities by the business and political elite of the city and state and to turn them into investment opportunities. I contend that this is part of a much broader movement for privatization and deregulation which is not only about economic redistribution but about the redistribution of political control over public goods and services. As well, I argued these initiatives only make sense in relation to a history of racialized disinvestment in public services and infrastructure that resulted in a city with the least funded urban school system in the country. In short, I argued that the political right capitalized on natural disaster and in the process exacerbated the human made disasters that predated the storm. The consequences were a radical shift in educational governance and material resources away from those most in need of them. It seems to me that honest discussion about the state of the New Orleans schools and communities must take seriously this history and recognize that what is at stake in this is more than a vague notion of educational quality (especially the anti-critical kinds defined narrowly by tests scores) but struggles over material resources and cultural values by competing classes and groups. In other words the role that public schools play for a society theoretically committed to democracy has to be considered. When business and political elites wrest control of schools and communities from the public and then describe it as a gift to the public (the "silver lining in the storm") we are hardly approximating those collective ideals.

Duncan a Consensus Choice: Obama Retains Tension between Competing Policy Camps

The Associated Press today reports in an article that Arne Duncan, selected to lead the Education Department in the Obama administration, is a consensus pick whose selection avoids picking sides between the two educational policy reform camps.

Obama managed throughout his campaign to avoid taking sides in the contentious debate between reform advocates and teachers' unions over the direction of education and the fate of President Bush's No Child Left Behind accountability law.

"Duncan's selection may satisfy both factions. Reform advocates wanted a big-city school superintendent who, like Duncan, has sought accountability for schools and teachers. And teachers' unions, an influential segment of the party base, wanted an advocate for their members; they have said they believe Duncan is willing to work with them.

Duncan deliberately straddled the factions earlier this year when he signed competing manifestos from each side of the debate."

Arne Duncan to be named Secretary of Education

According to Lyne Sweet, in a column for the Chicago Sun Times, President-elect Obama will name Arne Duncan, head of Chicago's Public Schools, to be Secretary of Education.

According to the article in Wikipedia, Duncan is the son of Starkey Duncan, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, and Susan Morton, who runs a Children's Center on the city's south side for African American youth.

He attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in sociology in 1987. At Harvard, Duncan was co-captain of the basketball team and named a first team Academic All-American

Duncan played pro basketball for three years after graduation while also devoting himself to children's issues. 1998 he joined the Chicago Public Schools, where he became Deputy Chief of Staff for former Schools CEO Paul Vallas. Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Duncan to his current post on June 26, 2001.

He plays in pick up games with Obama, and is close to several members of Obama's advisors and transition team members.

Duncan, according to various reports, has demonstrated a good deal of savvy in dealing with his various constituencies. His appointment may be viewed as avoiding some of the divisiveness that would have resulted from the selection of Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford or Joel Klein of the New York Schools, though he would appear to be somewhat closer to Klein as both are big city school administrators.

David Brooks on Tough and Tender Educational Reform

In an important column in the New York Times on December 5th David Brooks surveys the educational policy frameworks competing for President Elect Obama's sponsorship.

With the Republicans out of the loop on educational policy, the key issues will be decided by Democratic party in-fighting, so it is essential to follow these internal squabbles.

Brooks says,

On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards.

On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms.

The stakes are huge. For the first time in decades, there is real momentum for reform. It’s not only Rhee and Klein — the celebrities — but also superintendents in cities across America who are getting better teachers into the classrooms and producing measurable results. There is an unprecedented political coalition building, among liberals as well as conservatives, for radical reform.

But the union lobbying efforts are relentless and in the past week prospects for a reforming education secretary are thought to have dimmed. The candidates before Obama apparently include: Joel Klein, the highly successful New York chancellor who has, nonetheless, been blackballed by the unions; Arne Duncan, the reforming Chicago head who is less controversial; Darling-Hammond herself; and some former governor to be named later, with Darling-Hammond as the deputy secretary.

Brooks thinks that Darling-Hammond in the deputy secretary role would be the worst outcome, as she can maneuver against his preferred brand of reform under the radar while a political celebrity secretary of education offers sweet nothings to the press.

What do you think?

RINO Watch #2

Steve Benen reports in the Washington Monthly that the social conservative wing of the Republican party is initiating "Operation Leper" to identify and cast out those so-called Republicans whose loyalty to Governor Sarah Palin in the recent presidential election was not absolute.

Benen reports that Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, has predicted that, after the election, there would be a "bloodbath." Nuzzo explained, "A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?"

Brooks, Frum, and Noonan are all bright people, but to put it bluntly, they are not Einsteins. We attend to people like this not because they have earth shattering insight, but because they sit astride a mountain of power. The Republican party is that mountain.

The question is: where do these influencers and their sponsors go if they are lepers, or "dead people" in the Republican party?

Where will all the RINOs Go?

The Republican party as we have know it for the last third of a century is dead. It was always an untenable coalition of groups with antagonistic views: libertarians who wanted to do away with government to protect individual freedoms, theocrats who wanted to take over government to limit individual freedoms, and free-market corporate liberals who wanted to buy and sell government to feather their own nests. Anyone outside of that triumvarate was a RINO: a Republican In Name Only. Eisenhower, Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller -- all just RINOS.

What happens now? The libertarians fade back into the woodwork as essentially a marginal group of innocuous kooks; the theocrats look to attach themselves to some other, larger political coalition like a parasite or cancer, the free market corporate liberals buy and sell government in more strategic, retail politics.

As for those RINOs, like Colin Powell, Chris Shays, Richard Lugar: many will gravitate, like Jim Webb, into the Democratic party, alongside of Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, and others, to bolster the centrist pragmatist group. These folks will counter-balance the progressives like Russ Feingold and John Conyers. Obama as president will no doubt straddle the centrist -progressive divide. The near term future of American politics will be inside the Democratic party, with Obama holding the internal balance of power.

As a result, the issues on the table for education will be somewhat different. I suspect we will be hearing less about faith-based institutions, anti-science curricula, or voucher plans. For those looking for a key to decipher the future federal policy agenda, I suggest taking the likely proposals of both of these groups within the Democratic party and figuriug out their ideological synthesis.

Charter schools and other choice-within-the-system plans, networked technologies, and provisions to increase the educational attainment levels of minorities are likely to loom large.

For "the next big idea," look for a formula that bring these three themes together.

GOP Education Platform Echoes McCain's Strong Conservative Proposals

The GOP has endorsed an education platform with many of the K-12 proposals of Sen. John McCain, Education Week reports today.

It calls for merit pay for teachers, for recruiting the best educators "without regard to collective bargaining agreements," for expanding charter schools and private school vouchers that can be used at religious schools.

McCain didn't mention NCLB in recent speeches and the GOP platform is just as vague; it doesn't mention the measure by name. But it calls for strong accountability measures.

The platform also supports "English First" instruction as opposed to bilingual education, and the right of students to engage in voluntary prayer in schools. The document also calls for replacing "family planning" programs for teenagers with increased funding for abstinence education.

The Democratic Party Education Platform

The few remarks on education in Joe Biden's acceptance speech last night were lifted directly from pages 18-21 of the democratic election platform.

The education plank is brief and not very informative. The key features are recruiting and retaining teachers by providing merit pay, fixing NCLB by adding a number of additional metrics and providing resources for unsuccessful schools rather than labeling them as failures, supporting more public charter schools, and reforming schools of education. No details are provided in the platform itself. More detailed policy statements are no doubt available, but I haven't yet tracked them down.

Younger Democrats Moving Towards School Choice

At a democratic convention breakfast held by sponsors of school choice initiatives in Denver early this week, Colorado state Senate President Peter C. Groff noted that school choice demographics are changing, according to Ed Week's election campaign coverage.

Groff, 45, who is black, noted that African-American policymakers under the age of 50are no longer following in lock step behind teachers unions or party officials opposing school choice. "This is a generation that doesn't look at race first, but policy first," said Groff, 45, a Democrat. "It's not looking at party first, but the best idea first."

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, the event's main speaker, said charter schools in his New Jersey city are successful, but they don't have enough seats to fill demand.

Many Newark families "break the law, literally," said Booker, a Democrat. "They are faking addresses and sneaking [their children] into schools" in neighboring towns. School officials there investigate students and kick out those who live in Newark, charging their families tuition for the time they were enrolled.

"This is not the America I dream of," Booker said.

Academic Capitalism Watch I: Stanford Restricts Drug Marketing in Medical Education

Stanford University's program in medical continuing education will, according to the New York Times, announce today that it will no longer permit drug companies to pick and choose the continuing education courses they support. Going forward, any drug company wishing to support medical continuing education will contribute to a general pool. It can support the continuing education effort, but can no longer shape it to deliver its own carefully tailored marketing messages.

Dr. Philip A. Pizzo, dean of Stanford’s School of Medicine, said in an interview that the school wanted to take a firm stand on the issue, even if it meant that drug and device companies might no longer contribute to the educational effort if they could not specify which classes they wanted to support.

“I want to make sure we’re not marketing for industry or being influenced by their marketing,” Dr. Pizzo said.

The Times states that doctors have grown accustomed to getting their continuing education classes free and getting a nice lunch thrown in as an added inducement. "Separating commercial influences from doctor education might require doctors to pay their own way," the Times adds, "which some doctors have said they would resist."

You heard that! Feed me or you won't even be able to drag me to continuing education! How is that for entitlement? Corruption breeds corruption.

Dr. Murray Kopelow, chief executive of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, said that Stanford’s new policy was part of a growing push in medical education to further separate crucial medical information from marketing messages.

“It’s a good plan, and it’s a big deal that a place like Stanford has adopted it,” Dr. Kopelow said. “When this is all over, medical education will not be the same as what it’s been.”

Actually, medical education may be taking a small step back to what it was until recently, an honest and professional attempt (not without its own biases, of course) to educate doctors and keep them up to speed.

Educators speak out at Democratic Convention

In the primary season the AFT supported Hillary Clinton and the NEA mostly sat on its hands. Both are now solidly behind Obama, as we would expect. Both groups will be listened to, but given their slow arrival at the campaign, one can ask whether they will be welcomed as insiders going forward.

But to get a clearer sense of where Obama is heading on education we can listen to what Jon Schnur, an education adviser to Barack Obama’s campaign and CEO of the non-profit reform group New Leaders for New Schools, has to say. Schur spoke on the first night of the covention Monday night at one of the three "American town halls".

According to EdWeeks's convention coverage,

Schnur tackled a very broad question from a Philadelphia mom who was piped in on video, who wanted to know how Obama would reform schools. Schnur basically recited Obama’s education platform in lightning speed, but emphasized the Illinois senator’s plan to recruit and retain effective teachers with the goal of getting the best teachers in schools where our students need them the most. Schnur, and his school reform group that trains school administrators, are more open than the teachers' unions are to ideas such as merit pay.

Also on stage on night one were National Education Association President Reg Weaver, and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

Weaver said: "He knows we must hold schools accountable. But that the world is too complex and diverse to judge students by a single, multiple choice, and high stakes test." Weingarten added: “Barack Obama knows teachers must be partners, not pawns, in federal education policy.”

Obama and McCain on Education

A blog at the Chicago Sun Times offers a comparison of the two candidates on educational policy issues.

Neither candidate has made education a central issue in the campaign.Beyond endorsing NCLB McCain has had little to say. Obama promises to "fix" NCLB by providing full funding and reducing the emphasis on standardized testing. He wants struggling schools to receive support rather than chastisement and threats of closure.

McCain supports vouchers while Obama does not; he favors strengthening the public school system by increasing public school choice.

Following Kathleen Kesson's post last week, SI invites comment on the evolving positions of the candidates on educational issues, as well as position statements that might inform the campaigns and the public on educational issues.

Wish List for the New Administration

This is my first blog post; thanks, Leonard for getting this initiative off the ground and for inviting me to participate. I haven’t quite “decompressed” from the spring semester, as I went right into the summer semester, so I’m going to take your invitation literally (you promised “a paragraph”) and try not to be overwhelmed by some of the latest detailed, lengthy and philosophically thoughtful posts. What I’d like to initiate is a blog strand that discusses what the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential candidates have to offer in the way of new and fresh ideas about education. Are we in for more of the same no matter which party attains presidential power? Will the dance to the right, left, and center towards desired constituents neutralize any potentially powerful ideas for change? Each of them - McCain and Obama - have “issues” that they have offered some commentary on: perspectives on national standards, educational choice and competition, character education, merit pay, etc. I’d like to suggest that we take one issue at a time, and try to generate as much “complicated conversation” (thanks to Bill Pinar for that phrase) about it as we can. I would like to see what collective, pragmatic inquiry looks like when we take on issues that have the potential to go beyond traditional right/left ideologies. How might we, as Kathleen Knight-Abowitz suggests in her blog post of July 2, “remain committed to the questions rather than one fixed set of answers,” and maybe, just maybe, influence the course of events? If progressive educators could prioritize our policy wishes, how might that list read? What role would we want a new president to play in the formulation of federal education policy? I suspect we are all very hopeful about opportunities for real change, but where should Dewey-inspired educators put their focus, in terms of influencing policy?

The Delights and Dangers of Cookbook Education

I found a nice simple discussion of cook book teaching today at the Positive Psychogy News Daily blog.

Sherri Fisher writes:

I don’t know about you, but I get bored making, serving and eating the same old-same old. . . .I’d be the first to agree that cookbooks perform a vital function. Especially in an age when it is unlikely that children and grandchildren are in the kitchen soaking up the traditional family recipes, cookbooks allow people the ability to perform in a kitchen with a reasonable amount of self-confidence.

In education there are a number of cookbooks. They may be called “curriculum frameworks” or something similarly sturdy and substantial sounding. Some have actually been around for years despite being touted as the outcomes of education reform. They serve the same purpose as kitchen cookbooks (attempting to guarantee a consistent outcome) and as such are bound by the same limitations. However, in an education system which is under fire from many quarters, cookbook education can sometimes rightly be seen by administrators in charge of “making the numbers” as the most easily defensible program a system can take. A school of educational thought, based on educational theory, develops a highly structured program that is as close to”fool”proof as it can be made. The program is presented to teachers, who are then expected to present it to students. Voilà, education happens. That is supposedly the delight of cookbook education.

Rote cook booking is essential for the novice. One who cooks every day, though, gains the kind of confidence to deviate from the cookbook, to improve the recipe, to adapt the recipe to individual circumstances and ingredients. Ideally, this happens to teachers, too. In fact, the better a teacher is, the more likely it is that the recipe will be improved for the students in her or his classroom, naturally shaping it to the strengths of students by using a teacher’s own strengths.

Good teachers are often acutely aware of the drawbacks and limitations of the educational recipes they are given. When educational systems insist on cookbook education, they may alienate their most creative teachers, their most experienced teachers, their most effective teachers.

One area of promise from positive psychology research in the field of education that addresses this is collective efficacy, the belief of a faculty that as a group they can execute the positive courses of action required to successfully educate students (Goddard, et al., 2004).

Collective efficacy represents a level of confidence in the ability of a group to reach a shared goal. It influences common expectations for action, supports creative problem-solving, and results in resilient goal attainment by influencing the effort and persistence necessary for academic achievement. No cookbook needed!! Perceived collective efficacy facilitates collaboration and the willingness to accept challenges to teaching in the face of difficulty (Goddard, et al., 2004).

Goddard, R.D., LoGerfo, L. & Hoy, W.K. (2004). High school accountability: The role of perceived collective efficacy. Educational Policy, 18(3) 403-425.

Philosophy of Education and the Scholarship of Engagement

Having grown up in Brooklyn, baseball analogies come naturally to me. They can be gender specific, however, excluding half the audience. Can we agree on softball, which is as associated with girls and women as well as boys and men?

O.K. Then let's think of philosophy of education as something like softball. Like all forms of scholarship, it is a team sport. Every player is deeply dependent on others, to provide fodder, supporting arguments, data, responses and counter-arguments. To think of philosophers of education on analogy with weight lifters, competing against one another as individuals, is a deep fallacy.

On the softball field players on the team are assigned positions: infielder, outfielder, catcher, etc. What are the positions in philosophy of education? And how does that help us understand the scholarship of engagement?

Following yesterday's comment about experimental logic and the scholarship of engagement, we can assign many different positions on the philosophy of education team.

Some philosophers of education are sentinels. Their role or position is to stay attuned to developments in other education games, played outside of university scholarship: schooling, teaching, policy making, youth culture to name a few. These sentinels bring the news back to our field in the form of communications attuned to the norms of academic communication and publication. These philosophers may get a lot of their news second hand, from popular writers such as Jonathan Kozol. But some of the sentinels have to get out into the field, into these other games, as participant observers, or the field will inevitably suffer input bias. We can't just take Jonathan's word for everything.

And to be clear, Jonathan Kozol is a superstar in another game but he is not a philosopher of education. He is not a member of our team; he doesn't play in our games, or by our rules; he doesn't speak our language. To get his insights into our game he needs one of us to take them on and shape them as philosophical communications.

Once inside the university as the house of inquiry, the data, insights and ideas from these external practices are subjected to various forms of philosophical study. Some philosophers make analyses of problematic concepts, others make normative arguments, to name two among several typical forms of study. In doing so they both draw upon the works of other members of the philosophy of education team and respond to these others, and depend upon the responses of these others to their own work. We may think of these inside-the-field or intra-field studies, published as the typical articles in Educational Theory or Studies in Philosophy and Education, or the Journal of Philosophy of Education, as the core of philosophy of education, but in doing so we have to remember that the core of the apple is hardly the most important part.

Philosophy of education may be a branch of philosophy, but, as Randy Curren argued in last week's Philosophy of Education Society meeting in Cambridge Massachusetts, philosophy is all branches and no trunk now. If we hope to go to something called "mainstream philosophy" to solidify our work, we will be disappointed to find nothing there. Whether in the American Philosophical Association or elsewhere, there are just folks more or less like ourselves, doing many different things. Solid foundations may be sought by some more than others, but none are on offer.

One important kind of position on the philosophy of education team, then, are the in-fielders, those fielding materials from within professional philosophy. The in-fielders are attentive to and knowledgable about work in other branches of philosophy. Some, like Ken Strike, keep their eye on developments in systematic ethics. Others, like Harvey Siegel, attend to epistemology. Still others, like Michael Peters and Jim Marshall, monitor contemporary continental philosopers.

At the meeting in Cambridge Harvey Siegel argued that the philosophers of education playing these in-fielder roles should, to test or prove themselves, also play in the philosophical games they monitor for us. If you are our ethics man, or post-structuralist feminist woman, Harvey thinks, you should authenticate yourself by moonlighting in ethics or poststructural feminism. If you pass their peer review processes, we'll know that you know what you are talking about so we can take your word for what you say about those fields.

Some in-fielders should no doubt do this, just as some sentinel philosophers of teaching should occasionally teach school classes, and some philosophers of curriculum should get occasionally get involved in curriculum projects. There are, however, many ways of observing and associating with others that don't require full participation as insiders in their games. And philosophers of education have many ways of assessing the input colleagues bring in from other branches of philosophy. We don't have to rely entirely upon their peer-review processes.

Once upon a time philosophy was considered an autonomous, self-contained discipline. I am not sure anyone thinks this today. Philosophical studies often draw on insights from other disciplines and fields, especially the other humanities disciplines like history and literary studies, the social sciences, and educational research. Those who monitor work in these fields and report back to us in philosophical communications we may think of as our inter-fielders.

All philosophers occasionally think about what they are doing, how to go about doing it, and how it fits both on the map of knowledge and the map of practice. These are known as meta-inquiries. We all entertain random meta-thoughts, write them in our journals, exchange them in conversations in the halls at conferences. Some meta-reflections take the form of philosophical communications. The session Randy Curren and Harvey Siegel addressed at PES on the relations between philosophy of education and mainstream philosophy was meta-philosophical. There is even a special journal, Metaphilosophy, for such communications. Some philosophers of education may work mostly at the meta-level, as meta-philosophers .

Just as the field needs sentinels on the input side to maintain a strong connection to the real world outside the university, it also needs its effectors on the output end, digesting and synthesizing philosophical results and re-shaping them as inputs for players in various practical games. Like the sentinels, the effectors will need to have close associations with these audiences. Even more than the sentinels, effectors need to be participants in those other practices. This does not mean they have to be inside players. Maxine Green, to take a well known example, is not a school teacher, but she has an audience among school teachers, because she communicates not only in scholarly journals and books, but directly to teachers, in many ways. Ken Howe and Barry Bull are not public officials who set policy. But they are policy influencers because they communicate directly within the policy process. These, and many others, are our effectors.

Sentinels and effectors are engaged scholars. They do not merely make scholarly communications about the real world. The sentinels make scholarly communications based on a direct, hands-on, engagement with it. The effectors make communications outside the world of scholarship, based on direct, hands-on, intimate knowledge of scholarly processes and results, including of course, their own scholarship. Importantly, the effectors need not be card carrying, university-based, professional scholars. Maxine Green's audiences are attuned to philosophy, and some of her listeners are equipped to make philosophical inputs in the insider games they play in schools and public agencies.

Here is a question about engaged scholars: should the sentinels and the effectors be the same people? Perhaps sometimes, because both will require engagement with these external practitioners and so will be positioned to speak with them. But it is a different talent to shape worldly news in the terms of scholarship and to shape scholarly results in worldly terms. There is no necessary correlation of these talents.

So here is the line-up of the team:

Sentinels, who monitor various educational practices and report to the field in philosophical communications;

In-fielders, who bring inputs from other branches of philosophy into philosophy of education;

Inter-fielders, who bring inputs from other scholarly disciplines into the field;

Intra-fielders, who use inputs from sentinels and other intra-fielders, in-fielders and interfielders, and others, to generate core works of philosophy of education;

Meta-philosophers of education, who reflect on the field and its methods and connections to other fields of knowledge and practice;

and Effectors, who digest and synthesize the processes and results of the field of philosophy of education, in communications from the field to other practices.

The sentinels and effectors are engaged directly in the scholarship of engagement. To engage is to associate, to connect, to share.
The intra-fielders, who write about the practices engaged scholars are engaged in, are not themselves typically engaged.

People without sense organs or arms and legs are severely disabled, regardless of the condition of their brains. The same can be said of most academic fields, no matter how abstract their core works.

Mind the Gap (s)

Philip Kovacs at the Educational Policy Blog has this important post which all readers of Social Issues could keep in mind. Philip has added links to data sources for each of the gaps on the original post.

Reducing the “achievement gap” to what goes on inside of schools has proven to be an effective way for policy makers to ignore all of the other “gaps” outside of America’s classrooms.

While researcher after researcher has shown that outside influences contribute to student performance and achievement, proponents of high-stakes, standardized reforms continue to press for more “rigor,” as if harder work alone will mitigate every outside factor influencing children’s lives.

Rather than focusing exclusively on the “achievement gap,” policy makers and educational reformers might consider policies that help reduce other “gaps” that exist within our country. Gaps that could be narrowed in order to improve the lives and schooling of all students include but are not limited to:

• The incarceration gap, where six times as many African Americans are behind bars compared to their white counterparts;

• The homeowner gap, where 72.7% of white Americans own their homes compared to 48.2% of African Americans;

• The healthcare gap, where 71.4% of white Americans are insured compared to 53.9% of African Americans;

• The earnings gap, where white Americans average over $20,000 more a year than African Americans;

• The poverty rate gap, where 8.7% of white Americans live at or below the poverty line while 24.7% of African Americans do so;

• The unemployment gap, where 5.7% of white Americans are unemployed while 13.2% of African Americans are without work;

• The happiness gap, where 72% of white youths say they are happy with life in general compared to 56% of their African American counterparts;

• The murder gap, where 49% of murder victims in the United States are African Americans, who make up 13% of the population.

Close one of these and I warrant the "achievement gap" shrinks.

Payday for NCLB?

NCLB has entered its fifth year, the year that its draconian sanctions are scheduled to take effect.

But almost all of the schools serving poor children in the nation's largest cities are still failing.

The schools are now scheduled for closure or other drastic remedies. But nothing seems to be happening.

So far, education experts say they are unaware of a single state that has taken over a failing school in response to the law. Instead, most allow school districts to seek other ways to improve.

“When you have a state like California with so many schools up for restructuring,” said Heinrich Mintrop, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “that taxes the capacity of the whole school change industry.”


As a result, the law is branding numerous schools as failing, but not producing radical change — leaving angry parents demanding redress. California citizens’ groups have sued the state and federal government for failing to deliver on the law’s promises.

Read more here: