Charter schools? It's about politics ...

In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, Bill Keller notes that the 1989 fatwa against author Salmon Rushdie was never about religion, but about political advantage.   Similarly, argues Keller, the present upheaval in the Middle East over a “cheesy anti-Muslim video” is neither spontaneous nor religiously-motivated, but political organized.

I have been thinking the same thing about the apparently bipartisan effort to “reform” the schools that seems to have begun with No Child Left Behind but that probably must be traced back to A Nation at Risk and even to Sputnik and the National Defense Education Act in the late 1950s.  It’s not about the schools; it’s about politics.   It’s not about lack of student achievement or about the need for choice; it’s about securing political dominance for a peculiar version of a conservative political position.

Congratulations, Alberta teachers! You've won an all-expenses-paid trip to...Fort McMurray!

During the recent Québec election, sovereigntist Amir Khadir was asked what his party offered to federalist voters. He replied, "For Anglophones we will offer them a choice. They can either go to Fort McMurray or to Guantanamo, with a lovely view of the beach!"

As it turns out, as long as you don't have to stay at the prison, Cuba's Guantanamo province is definitely the better choice (great beaches and music). Fort McMurray, on the other hand, is a tough industrial city in Northern Alberta. And "Fort Mac," as they call it out Alberta way, is where all of the Tar Sands oil extraction activity is happening.

Now, unless you have been living under a rock, you will probably have heard something about the environmentally destructive aspects of the Tar Sands (or, as the oil companies prefer, the "Oil Sands") project. Not only does it produce five times the greenhouse gases per barrel of conventional oil, it also requires ripping up the land. The photo that you see below is the outcome of tar sands mining activity.

As one might expect, the fact that Fort McMurray has now replaced Sudbury as Canada's man-made moonscape capital has not exactly made it a top tourist destination. But there is one demographic that can't wait to sign up for trips out to Fort Mac: Alberta teachers. That's because Inside Education, an oil-company sponsored educational outfit, has been offering them all-expenses-paid "professional development" Tar Sands tours.

An uncommon sense about education

My 6 am taxi ride to the Nashville airport included an early morning educational eye opener, delivered by a self-proclaimed Virginia mountain man (complete with just the right bearing and beard), named Josh.   As he drove, Josh sequed from a notably sophisticated treatise on the hypocrisy of some people's attitudes toward medical care (and euthanasia) for animals vs. humans to a trenchant historical critique of Andrew Jackson (the treatment of native Americans was the connector here) to a concise listing of the keys to education.  I thought I'd share the latter with you here.

There are just three keys, says Josh.   First, teach your kids to read at a young age.   Second,  teach them to enjoy reading.   (He seemed concerned that we didn't model reading for pleasure and personal growth and also that adults might over-correct a child reading and kill the inclination to pick up some text.) Third,  teach them what's worth reading.   (He sounded a bit like the Bill Bennett of The Book of Virtues days, suggesting that the Bible or Aesop's Fables or Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac might offer both interest and character development, but then he opened up the universe of reading suggesting that the what to read question had an infinite number of answers.)

Josh  is willing to leave the teaching of reading in the hands of school teachers, though he seemed to think that even teaching the mechanics of reading was a team sport.   He clearly believes that teaching kids to enjoy reading and teaching them  what is worth reading is the responsibility of all of a child's "teachers"  (including parents and others, older and wiser).

I was struck by the uncommon sense of Josh's formulation and wondered to myself how the "underperforming" school I was in yesterday might be transformed if we concentrated on Josh's keys.  

I hasten to add that Josh completed his dissertation on reading before  he knew that I was a professor of education at Vanderbilt University.   When I disclosed that information and asked whether I might share his views with others on this blog, he replied quickly in the affirmative.  As we parted at the terminal door,  I told him that my goal as an educator of teachers was to replicate his spirit among those who were and would be teachers.  Josh is himself an educated mountain of a man.

The Québec Student Movement Has Won

Today, in the aftermath of Québec's dramatic recent election, Premier Pauline Marois announced that she was cancelling the Liberal government's planned tuition hike. As you may recall from earlier posts, this tuition hike had touched off half-million strong street protests on the part of students across the province.

Law 78, which had been enacted by the Liberal government in response to the strike and which had severely restricted the right to public protest, was cancelled as well.

Needless to say, Marois' action constitutes a stunning, historic victory for the Québec student movement and should be cause for reflection on the part of students across North America. Although the political context outside Québec is substantially different, the students' battle nonetheless shows that mass solidarity and activism can make a major difference.

You can read more details here and here.


I'd love to mix it up in the comments with readers of this blog who may also be reflecting on the end of the Québec student strike. I'm also happy to answer any questions you might have about the strike. Have at it.

Rick Santorum, Democracy and Education

This post comes from guest blogger Zach Fox, a masters degree candidate at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University.

In a season of disheartening and sometimes alarming political rhetoric, Rick Santorum’s recent speech to the conservative Values Voters Summit may be a new low for social studies educators following this fall’s presidential election race. Santorum’s speech included a number of ahistorical assertions. He also clearly dismissed attempts by economic conservatives to distance themselves from social conservatives, but these are not new positions from the former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania.

More troubling is Santorum’s jarring claim that, “[social conservatives] will never have the elite smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do.” One wonders just who he means by “the elite smart people.” After all, Santorum has three post-secondary degrees, including an M.B.A. and a J.D. He served two terms as a U.S. Senator, and he emerged as former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s chief rival in the Republican presidential primary contests. He apparently means elite, smart, socially liberal people, but conveniently omits that last qualifier.

Santorum's statements position socially conservative Americans, and the founts of their values (the church and the family), as opponents of anti-democratic forces, here vaguely labeled "elite smart people...[who] believe they should have the power to tell you what to do." These forces are closely tied to higher education, continues Santorum: “So our colleges and universities, they’re not going to be on our side.”

Commerce, Choice and Poverty (and the Chicago Teacher's Strike!)

This post comes from guest blogger Luke Freeman, a masters candidate at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College.

Last week, I heard a presentation at a conference in which the speaker pointed out that at the heart of the school choice movement lies a basic redefinition of the relationship between schools and students. As part of a much larger argument, the speaker, Michael Gunzenhauser, said that the relationship between schools and students is now more like commerce than it is like education. Of course, most parents, students, and teachers do not experience school in a commercial way, nor do they conceive of it as such. However, the point stands: funding is tied to enrollment, and charter schools draw students from schools city-wide. Thus, even traditional schools are now notionally bound to their students in a commercial role.

Note to my Alderman about the Chicago Teachers Union Strike

Even though I’m one of the many working parents inconvenienced by childcare this week, I spent most mornings out on the picket lines supporting the teachers strike. Yesterday I called my alderman’s office to voice my opinion, and when I mentioned that the job I’m trying to attend to this week is professor of education, the staff on the other end of the line had some questions. “Air conditioners?” she asked. “It seems like this strike is over air conditioners, but surely it can’t be that . . . ?” After we talked over the issues, she asked me to put them in an email for the Alderman. Here's what I wrote:

Beneath all the particular items on the negotiation table – the pay, class size, evaluation mechanisms – is a struggle over the deprofessionalization of teaching. In Chicago, teachers are standing up for their profession as a genuine profession worthy of respect. If our school system is to attract and retain good teachers (which is harder than the “lay the bums off!” crowd realizes), teaching needs to appeal to smart young people as a profession worthy of their ambitions. Whatever the reforms’ short-term impact, in the long term such reforms contribute to the growing problem of attracting and retaining qualified workers in an increasingly demonized profession.

Over the past twenty years, and most intensely since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2003, there has been a move to hold teachers accountable for problems in the public school system, without providing the money that would make this high expectation achievable. Neoliberal reformers like Rahm Emanuel argue that the path to improving schools is better teachers and that the way to improve teaching is to weed out the bad teachers. Good teachers are essential, but this does not mean that bad teachers are the real problem, nor is teacher accountability (including the new evaluation system) likely to improve the teaching force.

Hard Facts about the Chicago Teachers Union dispute

This piece from the Chicago Sun Times provides a clear, level-headed account of the issues dividing Rahm Emmanuel and the Chicago Teachers Union.

Is narrow vocationalism back? A Deweyan op/ed in the New York Times

In the New York Times, Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University, argues that the narrow vocationalism which Dewey fought against is back in a new form.

Conflicting goals, caring parents

This post comes from guest blogger Shara Bellamy, a masters degree candidate at Vanderbilt University

"I've given up on her. I'm just waiting for her to be arrested so jail can straighten her up." It was my second year of working in an urban school and despite having had many conversations with parents, this was something I had never expected to hear a parent say. I had hoped her mother could give me some insight or guidance, but instead I was speaking with a mother who I thought didn't care at all. More than once, she claimed that jail would be the thing to correct her daughter’s behavior.

I had heard people stereotype poor minorities before, saying many of them didn't care about their kids’ futures. It was easy for those I grew up around, in the comfort of an upper-middle class suburb that was well over 90% white, to make such generalizations. I found that for many of them, the only minorities with whom they had actually conversed were my dad, my sister, and/or me. When people with so little experience and knowledge of the lives of others make such statements, they are easy to ignore, but what about when I am faced with the truth myself? I had met people who thought school was unimportant before, in fact, I am related to quite a few people who believe that, but I had never seen this kind of. . . apathy?