Québec's Minister of Education resigns

I said I would keep things updated, but I didn't think I'd have to add an update to my earlier post so quickly.

This afternoon, in a surprise announcement, Line Beauchamp, Québec's Minister of Education, tearfully resigned both her post as minister and her seat in the legislature. She commented, "As Minister of Education, I didn't succeed in getting [the student leaders] to compromise. I am making the only compromise that I can make: I'm giving up my position." She added, "I'm hoping to provoke something, to provoke a change."

Beauchamp, along with the Premier Jean Charest, has been a top target of student ire, but she has also recently been tarred by scandal due to having held a small fundraising lunch that was attended by Domenico Arcuri, a suspected mafia figure. Donato Tomassi, a (disgraced) former Liberal organizer commented in Le Devoir, "Frankly, it's not possible that she didn't know who was at her lunch. When you invite 20-25 people in, and it brings in more than $60,000, you know who's at the table."

Meanwhile, Premier Charest indicated, cryptically, that "things are going to change" with respect to the student strike.

We'll see what happens.

A dispatch from Montreal: student protests continue

Some scenes from my life over the past month:

On an unseasonably spring afternoon in March, De Maisonneuve St., a four-lane artery, has several couches sitting in the middle of it. Students are lounging around on them, chatting with each other and sipping some drinks. I enjoy the warm day as I walk past.

Outside my house one night in April, a helicopter is buzzing overhead. Our cat runs toward the back of the house and hides behind the couch as thousands of people, all dressed in red, walk past my door, chanting. Phalanxes of police cars cruise down the street, flashing their lights.

Last Thursday morning, I arrive at an academic conference in downtown Montreal somewhat bedraggled (as usual). I'm on my bike and it has been raining, so I'm wearing big yellow rubber-lined rain pants. "Are you here for the conference?" the security guard asks me in French. I explain that I am, and I show him my driver's license as well as where I am listed on the program. But without my accreditation, he won't let me into the conference center. It turns out that the subway has been paralyzed by smoke bombs all morning and the security guards are worried about disruptions to the conference. I guess that with my yellow pants and generalized dishevelment, I not only look ridiculous but potentially threatening as well. Once I finally get into the conference by another entrance, I show up at the session and no one is there--traffic jams and the smoke bombs mean that the sessions are temporarily on hold.

This is Montreal in the Spring of 2012. The student strike is still ongoing.

Glocal schools? An interesting struggle over global and local school influences in New Hampshire

Recently New Hampshire (the state where I currently reside) has been inundated with proposed education legislation—from a statewide voucher program to the required offering of Bible classes in schools to a school’s obligation to offer an alternative curriculum if a parent disagrees with the current one. One of the most interesting bills is HB 1403, which takes issue with the International Baccalaureate program, a decades-old program housed in Switzerland and run by a UNESCO NGO. The program offers a rigorous curriculum and is currently used by two schools in New Hampshire.





While I am not intimately familiar with the IB program, I was intrigued to hear that the majority of NH Representatives felt that the program should be banned from New Hampshire because it is designed by foreigners and because, rather than upholding US or state laws as the highest guidelines and championing US sovereignty at all costs, it draws upon globally-oriented documents and philosophies such as those endorsed by the United Nations. Some feared that the IB program was a form of international indoctrination that taught un-American values, rather than concentrating on instilling facts. (A selection of quotes about concerns with the IB program have been collected here.) While some state residents echoed similar concerns at hearings at the state capitol and in newspaper editorials, participants in the program, including high school students, spoke passionately on its behalf and, partially as a result of the student efforts, the bill was just recently voted Inexpedient to Legislate by the Senate Education Committee (despite its overwhelming support in the House).

The existence of such proposed legislation and the discussion it provoked certainly raises concerns about the local control of schools, including the teaching of both facts and values that are upheld within one’s own community. But it’s also noteworthy when a local community participates in a school’s decision to intentionally select a foreign-based curriculum, thereby invoking local control to make a non-local choice and privilege global perspectives. It’s also noteworthy that even as cultivating citizens who are globally competent, or at the very least workers prepared for an increasingly global economy, becomes a more widely held purpose of schooling, the desire to maintain state and federal control over how global living is defined is still quite strong.

Lift the rock that is ALEC and watch the insects scatter ....

Every educator (and parent) needs to look under the rock that is ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), an apparently innocuous legislative advising group that is systematically writing and spreading legislation intended to undercut public school in order to open up corporate profit opportunities.   A piece in NEA's recent Education Votes not only takes you under the rock but offers some suggestions about how to respond.    Take a look! 

Let's Push Back

In School and Society, John Dewey described the school as a social microcosm that the young should find consonant with a humane and functional society. He assumed that the social ethos the young experienced, day in, day out, would reinforce the influence of a well socialized school.

Were Dewey writing now, the resulting book would be Society against the School. The school struggles as the social ethos constantly carps that the schools and the teachers are failing the nation, putting it at risk. Critics sound as if all the other elites were doing an exemplary job in their domains, upholding the interests of the nation through selfless wisdom, while the schools alone subvert the nation's prospects. This carping damages educational effort, but it is a symptom, and not a cause, of how society has turned against the school.

Let's go, GMOs! Some recent lowlights from science textbooks

Today's edition of La Presse has an article on an elementary school science textbook that contains the follow rather unbalanced content on GMOs (genetically modified organisms):

In the future, we will see more and more genetically modified fruits and vegetables that are capable of defending themselves against disease and insects. We will therefore have less need to use polluting pesticides. Nutritious and hardy, these fruits and vegetables will, we think, be even tastier than before. Apples won't have any more seeds, strawberries will be sweeter and juicier, and pears will keep for longer. It is also foreseeable that medicines and vaccines will be integrated in foods... (my translation from French)

This extract reminds me of some of the gems that I uncovered while researching Québec junior high school science textbooks.

When the Pineapple Races the Hare . . .

Note: if you haven't been following the story of the New York State test that offered the Pineapple and the Hare story, followed by questions, this won't make sense.  (Actually it will, but not as much sense.) The gist of it is that the test borrowed a story from Daniel Pinkwater, changed a few details, and then asked questions about it that baffled eighth graders taking the test.  New York announced that the questions related to that passage wouldn't count towards students' scores.  Critics say this shows the flaws in standardized testing.  I say it makes perfect sense, and here's why:

 Once there was a huge capitalist democracy that included a lot of children, some of them well-off, some of them poor, and most of them somewhere in the middle.

 "Hey," said the parents with a lot of resources, "how about our kids have a race?" Now, the children of the parents with a lot of resources, as you know, came to school with pretty good early literacy skills, numeracy skills, books at home, health care, financial stability and more. Or, as the sociologists like to say, capital: financial, human, social and cultural. The poor children, as you also know, had less of all these things.

Most of the American public bet on the poor children because America is a land of equal opportunity, in which any child can rise to the highest peaks of achievement simply through will-power and dedication. (The best-off parents bet on their own kids -- sending them to private schools, skillfully manoevering them into top-notch public schools, paying for summer camp, etc. etc, but when it comes time to answer the questions, remember that this is extraneous to the story.)

The race started and there was a lot of cheering.  "We're number 1!" the spectators shouted. "Just look at what happened to those European Socialist democracies -- stagnation! Deficits! Vacation time and welfare and wine and cheese and, um, um, well, look at the stagnation and deficits!" "USA! USA!"

 The well-off children streaked out of sight. The poor children looked out the window. They played with their friends on the playground. They squinted at the blackboard. They doodled and said "I don't know".

Everybody knew that in some surprising way this had nothing to do with the political choices that shaped their circumstances and that still, somehow, America was the land of equal opportunity and they would end up winning the race. Nothing of the sort happened. Eventually, the well-off children took the winners share of the spoils, while the poor children lost all around.

The capitalist democracy ate the poor children and said it was all their fault anyway.

Moral: The Pineapple and the Hare story is no more absurd than the notion that standardized testing leads to equitable outcomes for America's children. 

(Credit goes to Daniel Pinkwater for the original story of the Eggplant and the Rabbit.)

Take responsibility not tests!

Lots happening in teaching today and I'll comment on three:

1) Bill Gates and Charlotte Danielson agree with teachers that bubble tests are not the answer to whatever the educational question happens to be. Nonetheless, nobody suggests getting rid of them altogether; just use them sanely (don't, e.g. release teachers' scores to the public) AND keep trying to construct assessments that are both authentic and do-able. Check out http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2012/03/20/gates.html?tkn=YYOFvJReWV7OELHkPh1bCubdpGAVRhUGbVE%2F&cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1.

So if the big money (Gates) and the big expertise (Danielson) on the side of angels, why aren't those angels pushing back big time and mounting resistance to the continued foregrounding of standardized tests in educational policy decisions. Barack and Arne, get a grip!

2) Kids in blended schools (on-line plus face to face) like the individualization and autonomy BUT criticize the blended format because they have to take more responsibility for their own learning. YES! I am laughing myself silly and I think Dewey might be chuckling too. Apparently in at least some places blended settings are getting it right and developing kids who are both smart and good (even if they are a little resistant to it at first). But I have to say that I doubt it's "blended learning" per se that is making the difference but an educational approach using digital tools combined with that focus on autonomy and responsibility. And that's been happening in some kinds of alternative schools for a long time. (I'll haul out my oft-used example of Central Park East High School in the early 90s -- but we could go back much further than that).

3) Emily Douglas who was talked out of being a teacher by her teachers who told her they weren't paid enough and they were not respected found her way back to education with Batelle for Kids after a career in human resources. But she's paying attention to the buzz of teachers now and is worried that we are heading for a teacher shortage. And a recent Met Life survey supports that buzz, suggesting that good folks are getting fed up, losing their heart for this critical work, becoming literally "de-moralized" as my friend Doris Santoro points out.

The second story looks to me to be very good news, that in some places at least, technology is being used in just the educational ways we want and need. But the first and third stories are looking like potential opportunities missed unless educators -- and parents -- everywhere stand up and speak differently. Current policy that leads with weak and indefensible forms of standardized testing resulting in high stakes decisions is driving teachers away and we know it doesn't represent the goals that anybody has for any real kids. Forget parent-trigger laws (another of today's stories) and advocate for and help to create educational spaces where the only thing kids can complain about is that they have to take responsibility for their own learning! I love it ....

John Dewey Society annual meeting information

The John Dewey Society will be having its annual meeting in Vancouver, BC, in conjunction with AERA. A full program of Dewey Society events is available by clicking here. The inaugural School and Society Forum is of particular interest; the theme is "Teachers' Unions Build Trust in Teachers" and panel topics include professional autonomy, advocacy for teachers, and parent and community support.

Minecraft in education?

I recently saw this video of a multi-day collaborative building project in Minecraft, which is a sort of game/online sandbox environment. All of the little whirling dervishes are avatars of users who are working together to assemble the building blocks that will eventually form the train station.

My intuition is that the educational possibilities of a sandbox environments like this could be interesting, but I can't yet work out what sorts of tasks classroom teachers could get kids to do in Minecraft. Any thoughts?