Tough questions: new teachers and free speech

In life, most of us (save those, perhaps, that adopt an unabashed go-with-your-gut philosophy) experience the occasional moment of internal conflict and indecision. Usually, these happen to me at the store, when I'm trying to choose between Oat Flakes and Oat Clusters. Difficult waters to navigate--ingredient lists that extend far beyond oats, stunning illustrations of the magic of food chemistry, and so on. This is why it sometimes takes me a while to emerge from the supermarket.

But, once in a while, conflicted moments happen in the professional context. Last week, I was invited to appear on a panel at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI). The topic of the panel was dealing controversial issues in the classroom, and I had been invited because the students had read my article on the Morin case.

Longer, Faster in Chicago

Since I became a Chicago Public Schools parent two years ago, I have been rolling my eyes at our district's notoriously short school day and short school year. School dismissed at 2:45? 3 weeks straight of 3-day weeks in November? No school for Pulaski Day? Come on, I would think, as I scrambled to find useful ways to engage my daughter's out-of-school time, is this district for real? CPS students spend fewer hours in the classroom and fewer days in school than most other large urban school districts, and when Jean-Claude Brizard was appointed CEO, he was charged with changing that.

In the past few weeks, his attempts to do so have been making headlines. After cancelling the 2% raise originally offered CPS teachers, Brizard offered individual schools who were willing to waive their contract and add an extra 90 minutes to schooldays $150,000 for the year, or $75,000 if they make the change in January. So far, 7 schools have elected to do so (on a majority vote by teachers). In the 2012-13 school year, Brizard has announced, all schools will have a longer day.

It comes as something of a surprise, then, to find myself horrified by this possibility. Here's why.

Did a Québec Blogger Cause a Car Dealership to Burn?

Early this morning, a KIA dealership burned down in Montreal. The fire department suspects that the fire was a result of criminal activity because some cars in the lot were found with their tires slashed.

Normally, this wouldn't be big news. Things burn down regularly in irregular ways in Montreal, and for the most part no one pays much attention. It's usually a matter of someone not paying their protection money to one of the many organized crime syndicates that ply their trade around here.

This time, though, it may be different. Early this week, the dealership was targeted by a Québec blogger, Gab Roy, who claimed that it had ripped off his friend Genevieve, an attractive former reality TV contestant. Apparently, Genevieve had placed a $500 deposit on a car at KIA Pointe-aux-Trembles, but she eventually bought another car at a different dealership. When Genevieve returned to get her deposit back, KIA Pointe-aux-Trembles refused to return it.

Call for Proposals--John Dewey Society meeting in Vancouver (April 13-17, 2012)

Dear Members and Friends of the John Dewey Society,

Founded in 1935, the John Dewey Society exists to keep alive John Dewey's commitment to the use of critical and reflective intelligence in the search for solutions to crucial problems in education and culture. We subscribe to no doctrine dogmatically, but in the spirit of Dewey, we welcome controversy, respect dissent, and encourage responsible discussions of issues of special concern to educators. We also promote open-minded, critical reconsiderations of Dewey's influential ideas about democracy, education, and philosophy.

At this upcoming conference, we welcome contributions that either relate specifically and directly to Dewey's life and work OR that represent the "spirit" of John Dewey. They may be in the form of papers, panels, or other formats described by the author. Please submit an abstract of no more than 750 words. You do not need to be a member of the John Dewey Society to submit a proposal, although you will be asked to join should your paper be accepted. The deadline for proposals is September 5, 2011. They should be sent to Kyle Greenwalt, Secretary of the John Dewey Society, at greenwlt@msu.edu.

Sincerely yours,

Deron Boyles
President, John Dewey Society

Click N for “No”: An Educational Technology Returns from the Dead

As a graduate student at the Stanford School of Education, I often attended lectures in a large lecture hall at CERAS, the Center for Educational Research. The distinguishing feature of the otherwise ordinary lecture hall was that it was equipped with large cash register-like keypads that were embedded in the tables in front of each seat. When we asked what the keypads were for, we were informed that they were part of a “state-of-the-art” student feedback system that had been installed during the 1960s. During the course of a lecture, students would press Y or N on the keypad to indicate whether they understood a lecturer’s point, or they might key in a specific number to respond to a mathematical question. When they were installed in the late 1960s, these keypads were hailed as a revolutionary educational technology. No longer would lecturers have to wonder whether students understood a particular point; instead, students could anonymously key in Y or N. A breakthrough in student learning was surely just around the corner.

As it happened, even in their 1960s and 70s heyday, the keypads were seldom used. The machines turned out to be unreliable, and, more importantly, the professors at the School of Education turned out to be largely uninterested in the supposed transformative power of the keypads. By the time I arrived at Stanford in 2001, the technology had been dead for twenty years. I was still free to press Y or N to indicate my low level of comprehension or my secret disagreement with the lecturer, but, alas, no one was monitoring the response.

Imagine my surprise, then, upon discovering that Stanford’s white elephant is making a 21st century comeback. This time, however, the keypads have gone wireless. In the contemporary version of the “student response system,” students are issued small credit-card sized “clickers” upon which they can press Y or N or a numerical response. As was the case with the Stanford system, the results are made available to the lecturer, and with our 21st century technology, the fruits of this “instant polling” can now be instantly displayed in a nifty Powerpoint slide.

Civility: It’s All the Rage

Only a few short months ago in Wisconsin, protesters engaged in what the Christian Science Monitor called, a “week of rage” through protests over the governor’s budgetary cuts that would weaken collective bargaining power of public employees. Their rage was compared to that expressed by tea party activists over the past two years and even activists leading the protest that caused Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to resign.

In late February the University of Arizona announced the establishment of a National Institute for Civil Discourse, naming former presidents Clinton and Bush (Sr.) as chairs. Acting in the wake of the violent rampage in Arizona that took the lives of 6 people and maimed 19 others, including Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona Board of Regents member Fred DuVal charged the Institute with the task of defining “best practices and corrosive practices” in debate. He asked, “How do we nurture robustness on one hand and not in any way chill speech, and keep it in bounds that are not destructive to democracy? Will it change the nature of dialogue? That will be a tall order.”

Cheers to the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action

Over the weekend, thousands of teachers simultaneously braved temperatures over 100 degrees and a chilling political climate that has worked to silence many educators to speak out at the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action in Washington D.C. This grassroots, teacher-led organization (spearheaded by teachers Anthony Cody and Nancy Flanagan) brought together teachers from around the country in support of four principles: equitable funding for all public schools, an end to overreliance on high stakes tests for punitive ends, teacher and family leadership in forming education policies, and curriculum development within local communities. Hundreds gathered beforehand at a two-day conference at the end of the week, while thousands appeared Saturday for speeches and a march from the Ellipse to the White House. The march was kicked off by speeches by higher education leaders Jonathan Kozol, Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Pedro Noguera, as well as passionate talks and songs by teachers, preservice teachers, and administrators. Finally, some Hollywood sparkle lent support to the teachers’ movement via a heartfelt speech by Matt Damon and a brief comical piece by Jon Stewart. As Ravitch noted in her speech, this event was the first of its kind in a long history of teacher frustrations with educational policy, especially in the past decade. Here’s to hoping that it’s the first of a sustained and effective movement to truly champion educators’ voices in school reform.

Summer Camp

If it's July, there will be articles about summer camp. This summer, two in the New York Times have caught my eye. "When s'mores aren't enough" looks into the business side of camp and reports that traditional summer camps -- the kind where kids hang around in the woods engaged in fun activities, friendship, and marshmallow roasting -- are having a hard time staying competitive with camps that promise more bang for the buck by honing tennis, college readiness, and other skills that promise to bring a financial return someday. An article on parents' increasing use of private jets to transport their children to rustic camps touches on some of the same economic issues: the cost of camp, the lack of time. Rather Marie Antoinette playing farmer at Versailles, but camps that serve wealthy children have always been that, if less dramatically so when reached by car or train.

Although chartering a private plan to get a child to camp might seem more outrageous than dedicating a child's summer to useful activities like soccer and marine biology, the decline of s'mores worries me more than the rise of private jets, perhaps because absurd disparities in wealth is such a familiar story by now that it takes a bigger story (like impending default on US debt) to raise my ire. Why worry about the end of s'mores? Because more than they need tennis skills and college admissions, children need time to ramble around in the woods, negotiate friendships outside the scrutiny of adults, and daydream.

The other big summer camp story, of course, is the shootings in Norway. A far more horrible invasion of summer camp (and that he shot kids at summer camp is what makes it so especially horrible!) than the incursions of self-improvement on American childhood, but analogous all the same.

I could cite research supporting the importance of unstructured time and free play for children, but since it's summer, I'll leave readers to ponder at leisure the question of whether, and why, free time ought to be children's birthright and a blank sheet of paper we provide for them to color in as they please.

Zero Tolerance and the Failure to Educate

The older I get and the more exposure I have to schooling and educational policy in the United States, the more I wonder if we like children.

I was recently reminded of this when I saw yet another example of a very young child given an absurd penalty because of an over-literal interpretation of a “zero tolerance” policy in a local school (http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2011/01/21/First-grader-punished-for-finger-pointing/UPI-42171295600400/). The details of this case—first grade boy suspended because he pointed his finger as though it was a gun—are the sort that get people either laughing at the disconnect between the action and the severity of the response or outraged for the same reason. After all, a child’s finger, on even the most liberal interpretations of zero tolerance, is not a gun. But that response misses a deeper point: zero tolerance policies renege on the promise that schools are in the business of education for democratic life.

Mindless forms of “classroom management” have triumphed over efforts to help children become better people. And we know there are more positive and more effective – more educational – ways to respond to bad behavior in schools (see, for example Deborah Meier’s The Power of Their Ideas or Vivian Paley’s You Can’t Say, You Can’t Play). Perhaps it is because of the increasing focus on maximizing time on task in order to increase test scores, but I am not sure that is the reason: the policy of treating children like animals predates the regime of testing so often supposed to be its cause. Behavioral control has been the approach of “classroom management” for all of my professional life, and I started teaching high school in 1968.

One district where I was employed adopted Lee Canter’s “Assertive Discipline” program in the 1970’s; the catch-phrase of this program was “deal with the behavior, not the child.” I heard this from many teachers, always expressed with pride. The idea always puzzled me, however, because I has become a teacher because I wanted to deal with children, and in line with that commitment, I have always believed that a child’s behavior is a part of who the child is, and to treat those two things as separable is to fail to understand our role in democracy as much as it is to violate the integrity of the person the child is.

There are two reasons we should reject the emphasis on behavioral strategies for controlling behavior and “classroom management”: they are demeaning to both the children against whom they are used and to the teachers forced to use them, and they diminish the likelihood that our public schools will form democratic citizens. When they work, even when they are applied rationally, zero tolerance policies shape behavior by fear, not by consideration of what sort of people they should be, or what sort of choices they should make. Further, such policies send the message that the school and the adults in it do not think the child who breaks a rule counts for very much. They make clear to all children that the adults in the school consider the children to be disposable.

Zero tolerance policies explicitly state for all to see that we consider our rules more important than our children, and our children see this. Even the children who obey the rules understand where they stand in a regime of zero-tolerance. This will certainly increase the alienation children and young adults feel toward schools.

Children will sometimes behave badly. They will break rules, even really serious, important rules. Such events can be seen as opportunities to banish the miscreants, or as an opportunity to educate. Only the last honors our claim to be educators trying to prepare children to be citizens in a democratic society.

One of my former colleagues wisely suggested that the way to be more effective in classrooms is to “be the child,” to try to understand what need the child is meeting my misbehavior and then to help the child meet that need in more positive ways. This is not at all to suggest that classrooms should be places of permissiveness or places where there are no rules that matter. It is to suggest that our job is to help children understand and internalize the norms of democratic life the rules are meant to enact, and that they best learn democracy by living it. However, when we replace citizen formation with zero tolerance policies we do not prepare them for democratic life, but for what some now refer to as the school-to-prison-pipeline (http://justicepolicycenter.org/Articles%20and%20Research/Research/testprisons/SCHOOL_TO_%20PRISON_%20PIPELINE2003.pdf).

I do not understand why so many educators think the proper response to children who are alienated from the school’s social contract (I am making a large assumption here, I know) is to exacerbate and formalize that alienation with the official proclamation that they really do not belong. I do not understand how a culture that valued its young could make zero tolerance a policy.

One final irony: this incident took place in Oklahoma where—I could not make this up—there is a serious on-going effort in the state legislature to make actual guns on school, college, and university campuses legal.

Local deliberation on the federal role in public education

As a scholar interested in the meanings that public still might have for education and schools, I’ve been intrigued with the potential of deliberative forums to help develop individual understanding, dialogue across diversity, and shared decision-making. As a member of the League of Women Voters here in Oxford, Ohio, I have access to a good organizational structure for fostering political deliberations. Our local League will deliberate this fall on the prickly questions surrounding the proper role for the federal government in K-12 education.

The national League of Women Voters (LWV) this year announced a new national study on the role of the federal government in k-12 education. A local, state, or national League group can call for a study of any political or policy issue that is relevant to its members, and a study commits a League to undertaking a careful deliberative process that educates members and encourages them to come to consensus on the issue under study. While not every study ends in a consensus among members, the aim of these studies at the national level is to help national LWV advocate and lobby on behalf of policy positions that reflect the views of its membership. This Education Study is designed to help local League organizations give feedback to the national League so that it might take up a good position with regards to the upcoming re-authorization of No Child Left Behind and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

For those readers unfamiliar with U.S. schooling history and policy, the involvement of the federal government in public education is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before 1950 the federal government played almost no role at all in the administration, curriculum, funding, or assessment of public education. The launch of Sputnik compelled some national activity towards enriching science and math education to fuel the “space race.” Civil rights and equity movements led to the development of greater federal regulation, mandates, and funding for particular populations in the 1960s-1980s (for example, students who are poor or who have disabilities). And in the last decades, a push for a more national standards/assessment system has gained much ground, due in part to the U.S.’s waning eminence as an economic and educational super-power, and in part to help pressure schools to erase the pervasive achievement gaps between white and non-white populations (which, schools by themselves cannot possibly do). No Child Left Behind is obviously the prime example of this effort. At this point, education is still mainly the responsibility of state governments and federal money usually does not represent more than 10% or so of any district’s budget. It is politically unlikely that the federal government will play a larger role in funding schools in the future. Still, there is much discussion that our school systems are too entrenched in their parochial, localized history, and that our country’s educational achievements are bogged down by this decentralized structure, and in the “bureaucracy” of federal regulations in the realm of equity.

The U.S. League of Women Voters wants regular citizens to be more involved in these important debates. That’s why they are encouraging local Leagues like mine to host deliberations around these questions.

According to the national LWV, our local study should help our members take positions on two broad areas: common core standards and assessments, and federal funding for equity issues. With regards to common core standards, our League members will become educated on the history of decentralized schooling in the U.S., the recent movements towards national standards, and the degree to which common standards should become those which are federally mandated or incentivized, as well as monitored through a set of national assessment measures. With regards to equity, our League study participants will look at the history and forms of federal involvement for equity goals.

There are many ways to deliberate, and consensus among members may not always be the goal of a deliberation. But whatever the goal and format of deliberation, such programs help to both educate voters and begin discussions among diverse voters on complex issues that are often reductively treated in the media. And there are increasingly more organizations like LWV that can be conduits for deliberation activity in communities. I like LWV because it provides a non-partisan space for people to learn and think through political issues, and become involved for particular policies or stances.

Deliberation is important, but it is also important to remember that it is one among many kinds of political tools in a democracy. Deliberation isn’t activism, lobbying, or policy-making. There are many different kinds of political activities, and it is important to understand what each sort of activity does and does not accomplish. Deliberation can help citizens understand and take positions on complicated issues like the federal role in K-12 education. It cannot, however, substitute for advocacy and activism on behalf of positions. The strength of the deliberations in Oxford, Ohio will be funneled to the national League, who will hopefully articulate a strong and persuasive position as law-makers engage in the sausage-making working of revising NCLB/ESEA in the coming year.