Simon Fraser Dean Paul Shaker Supports Teacher's Refusal to Give Standardized Test

Paul Shaker, an active member of the Dewey Society and Dean of education at Simon Fraser University, has supported teacher Kathryn Sihota, who refused to administer a standardized exam to a child who appeared overly stressed by the prospect of taking it.

The teacher's refusal to administer the test has made national and even international news. Now Shaker's support for her is at the center of the storm.

Shaker stated at a college collquium that:

Teachers, having exercised due process, like other professional persons, have an obligation to act on the basis of their professional ethics, even when such behaviour requires non-violent civil disobedience and personal sacrifice by the teacher. The safety and nurturance of students is a sacred trust that assumes the highest priority.

We know that when an individual exercises the right to resist written law in response to a higher sense of morality that they assume a serious responsibility. In my understanding of the principles of our democratic social contract and moral tradition, however, I follow the convention that this option is available to us. Our democracy is an amalgamation of many individuals, making choices that matter for good or ill. Professional persons carry such responsibility to a greater extent than others due to their role in society. In and outside professions, we have seen that great issues of peace, human rights, and the environment have been advanced by courageous individuals standing up in this way, often at great cost to themselves

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Google's Knol

As noted in Business Week on December 14, 2007, Google has invited a select group of 'authorities' to write authoritative articles, to be called knols, on a wide variety of topics. Google's driving idea is to create an on-line reference source that competes with wikipedia as a first go-to source for reference knowledge. Instead of a 'neutral' wiki, which can be endlessly modified by a community of readers, knols will have a single authorial slant, much like an entry in a standard encylcopedia.

Rumors are floating around that there will be opportunities to comment and initiate dialogues about knols. So maybe the knol will evolve as a genuinely new form of reference material that takes advantage of the best features of traditional published reference (authorial credibility) and the web, including next-to-no-cost space and storage, and community interaction.

Here is Google's post on knols, from VP of engineering Udi Manber, from December 13, 2007:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. ...

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

The worry, as many commentators have already noted, is that Google the search engine may slide into ranking knols above other reference sources such as wikipedia, essentially driving web trafiic to itself!

The Dewey Society and Social Issues

Yesterday I blogged on Next Things about Google's Knol as an important new reference source. You will find this post cross-posted above because I see Knol as a useful channel for progressive scholarship on today's pressing educational and social issues: from NCLB, to Darwin and evolution in science education, IQ testing and intelligence, charter schools and public-private partnerships, school resegregation, to anti-racist education and many others.

Because Google will be inviting authoritative articles for Knol this appears to be an excellent vehicle for progressive scholars to claim and achieve credibility. Some members can probably position themselves with Google in such a way as to get invited to contribute.

I also recently blogged about the 'manifestos' published by Change This Newsletter as a kind of model for a publication series on pressing issues.

Now I want to share a vision about Dewey Society members, these issues, and this blog and other on-line publications.

Most active members of the society claim serious expertise in one of the listed issues or others. By joining the author team for this blog, Social Issues, a member can lay claim to a particular issue -- can be, in short, our main man (or woman) on IQ or NCLB or Resegregation.

In that way, when other members seek guidance on these issues, for teaching or social action (for example, when preparing letters to editors or Op Ed articles) they can find a valuable archive of informed progressive comment whether on the blog or in something like an on-line version of the Insight books published regularly by PES-GB. Further, by commenting on the blog posts of our main authors, our members can help over time to shape a clear progressive consensus where one is there to be shaped, or to establish a band width of progressive positions.

Then, by linking actively to other blogs and websites, the views of Dewey Society members can enter into a larger progressive discourse.

We will have a workshop at the Dewey Society meeting held in conjunction with AERA in the Spring of 2008. The goal will be further to develop the Society's capabilities in addressing pressing issues through this Blog, its other publications, and its meetings.

I invite comment by all members of the Society.

Letters to the Times on Genes and IQ

This is one post in an on-going series on writing letters to editors.

The New York Times today (December 16, 07) publishes a series of letters in response to Richard E. Nisbett's Op Ed article " All Brains are the Same" from December 9th. The original article and the letters focus on the relations between genetic endowment, intelligence, and IQ.

These letters are exemplary (with the exception of one which is flat out stupid, accusing Nisbett of political correctness). They are worth studying because they demonstrate how informed comment can cut to the heart of issues discussed in the public arena and really make a profound contribution.

Stephen Murdoch, a historian of IQ, writes:

I.Q. tests were created in the early 1900s before scientists had sufficient understanding of the brain or genetics. They were cobbled together with no real intelligence theory — and they have changed very little over time.

If we want intelligence tests, we need to devise new ones based on actual scientific theory rather than Victorian and Progressive Era puffery.

Paul Coleman, a senior Alzheimer's researcher, writes:

It is not the genetic DNA in a cell that determines what a cell is and how it performs; it is, rather, which genes are turned on and when. Turning a gene on or off can be controlled by a wide variety of factors in life: toxins, learning, disease, hormones, drugs, diet — the list is numberless.

We now know enough about the fine structure of the brain, the proteins involved and the roles they play in learning, cognition, memory and other components of intelligence to understand that the DNA of genes are, generally, many steps removed from determining these capacities.

Change This Newsletter

The Website Change This newsletter has a nice idea about how to use a publication platform to spread ideas about social change.

The site publishes Manifestos in copyright-free form, and encourages their distribution. The manifestos are well written and beautifully formatted, and are limited in length, so that they are suitable reading for policy makers and influencers.

A good sample manifesto is Change the Way to Change the World


Readers are invited (no, make that strongly encouraged) to copy them, e-mail them to everybody, put them on their web sites, print up their own editions to pass out on the street. The costs to Change This and their authors are contained: no costs for paper, ink, postage, etc.

The manifesto authors include many of the 'coolest' people: Tom Peters, Seth Goodin and their ilk. They include educational ideologues like Michael Strong and Chester Finn. However, the pages of Change This are open to many others: there is a proposal process similar to what one might encounter from a print publisher.

The Editors state their goal as follows:

ChangeThis is creating a new kind of media. A form of media that uses existing tools (like PDFs, blogs and the web) to challenge the way ideas are created and spread.

We're on a mission to spread important ideas and change minds.

This idea has a very direct relevance to the Dewey Society's mandate. Here's why:

Some years ago the Philosophy of Education Society UK initiated a publication series called Insights. The various volumes, all authored by card carrying philosophers of education, have been devoted to specific 'hot' policy issues in British education. They have been widely distributed to policy makers, legislative staff personnel, educational administrators, and the press. They have served to maintain the visibility and credibility of philosophy of education there.

Since I read the first Insight volumes I have longed for an American version. Given the mandate of the John Dewey Society, I have considered the Society to be the natural publisher of such a series. Budget limitations, however, have crimped the Society's ability to move ahead with this form of publication.

Change This offers an alternative model. Building from the Change This template, the society could move forward with web-based Insight-like publications on a limited budget.

What would this involve?

The creation of an editorial board by the Board of the JD Society or alterrnatively, byu the members of the commission on Social Issues;

An RFP (similar to that of Change This that could be distributed through the publications of the Society;

The distribution via e-mail alerts to members of the Society + a list of policy makers and staff, influencers, thought leaders, administrative personnel, and the press.

Please take a moment to look at Change This and Change the Way to Change the World then comment on this idea.

National Coalition Against Censorship

An organization that all members of the Dewey Society should know about is the National Coalition Against Censorship. Founded in 1974, NCAC is an alliance of 50 national non-profit organizations, including literary, artistic, religious, educational, professional, labor, and civil liberties groups. United by a conviction that freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression must be defended, we work to educate our own members and the public at large about the dangers of censorship and how to oppose them.

NCAC's Purpose

• To promote and defend First Amendment values of freedom of thought, inquiry and expression.
• To oppose restraints on open communication and to support access to information.
• To encourage, support and coordinate activities of national organizations in opposition to censorship.
• To encourage understanding that restrictions on the free interchange of ideas threaten religious, moral, political, artistic and intellectual freedom.

NCAC has been active in the struggle for first amendment rights of teachers and students as well as artists, writers, scientists and political activists.

Of great interest and value to educators is the NCAC toolkit on censorship in schools, providing step by step responses including boilerplate letters to administrators, and other valuable tools.

Report Cards or Lab Schools?

The New York Times today features James Liebman, the architect of the New York City Schools Report Card.

“We’re not measuring kids, we’re measuring schools. This isn’t about a child’s bad day, this is about a school’s bad year,” he said, sitting in a sub-ground-level conference room at the Tweed Courthouse.

He said he devised “from scratch” the system that yielded the citywide school report cards: the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System is based not only on test results, but also on surveys of 600,000 students, teachers and parents.

He insists no school is being asked to produce results its peers have not already achieved, and he doesn’t rule out that the reports may eventually represent a death sentence for some of the 50 schools stigmatized by a grade of F. Ninety-nine floundering schools received D’s. Around 60 percent rated A’s or B’s

He says he isn’t innovating anything John Dewey didn’t figure out in the 1890s.

“The purpose of grading these schools and making those grades public is not because we want to give them a whack on the knuckles, it’s to generate pressure to get them moving forward, to improve,” he said. “We’re looking for innovators and problem-solvers among our educators, but there has to be accountability.”

It may be useful for Mr. Liebman to consider that John Dewey argued, in The Ethics, The Public and its Problems, and elsewhere that public institutions could not reform themselves, and that innovators would have to do their pioneering work beyond it. Public schools, he felt, would eventually adjust to new societal requirements by emulating and adapting that work. Significantly, he did not develop any report cards for the public schools of his day; he developed a model alternative outside the system.

(Note: The Lab School of the University of Chicago is pictured above.)

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.

NCLB Leading to Rising Applications at Alternative Schools

According to the New York Times, Alternative schools such as the Village School in Great Neck New York, are experiencing a rapid rise in applications as parents and students seek to escape from the madness of high stake test preap regimes.

The Village School accepts a maximum of 50 students, about one half in need of special education services, but is getting three times the number of inquiries it received just a few years ago.

Sample Letters on Report Cards for Schools

From time to time Social Issues will select passages from letters that can be used as models in writing to editors

Sample Letters to the Editor in the New York Times on Report Cards for Schools

November 10, 2007
A School Is More Than an A, B or C

1. To the Editor:

Re “50 City Schools Get Failing Grade in a New System” (front page, Nov. 6):

Grading schools is as absurd as grading students. The criteria for both are equally detrimental to achieving the goals of a truly useful education: self-awareness, an engaged citizenry and the skills necessary to generate meaningful, dignified work.

Until we address the core societal conditions that now make such goals unattainable for the vast majority, there is little hope that obfuscating parlor tricks like high-stakes testing, free cellphones for every child and schoolwide report cards will serve as successful incentives.

Roland Legiardi-Laura
New York, Nov. 6, 2007

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2. To the Editor:

Why use an A-to-F format to grade an entire school, when educators are moving away from that kind of a report card for our children because it is insufficient? Why use more high-pressure tests that don’t really gauge the students’ ability or the quality of the school?

Our public schools are full of highly motivated, creative teachers. They are often beaten down by large class sizes, lack of support, and more and more testing.

I urge all parents to ignore these report cards.

Ray Franks
New York, Nov. 6, 2007

•

3. To the Editor:

Report card grades are based mainly on test scores. This means progress is measured by a single score on a single test on a single day.

Parents want more. We want to know if our children are reading more books; if their understanding is deeper; if they ask intelligent questions; if they are curious and creative; and if they can work cooperatively. No test score will give us this information. Learning is complex, and assessments should be, too.

Jane Hirschmann
New York, Nov. 5, 2007