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The worship of change

May 27, 2009 By

Whenever there’s a drive for a particular change in education, reformers talk as though change in general were desirable and good. Those who “resist change” are seen as impediments to reform.

During the curriculum change movement of the 1950s, education reformers applied social engineering methods to curriculum change. Many faculty meetings were devoted to the “change process,” with group activities designed to “re-educate” teachers and bring about consensus. (For a fascinating analysis of this movement, see Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform, pp. 335-343.)

Policymakers continue to use social engineering techniques in order to bring about change in schools. Professional development facilitators use those methods frequently. It is not difficult to find articles, policy papers, and opinion pieces that glorify change and trivialize opposition to change. See, for example, Jana Hunzicker, “The Beliefs-Behavior Connection: Leading Teachers Toward Change” (Principal, November/December 2004, pp. 44-46). According to this article, teachers resist change because of low levels of knowledge, experience, and comfort, as well as poor moral and ego development. Not once does the author consider that the change in question might be a bad idea and that those who resist it might be wise.

Why the assumption that those who resist change are defective? Aren’t some changes much sounder than others? If a school is considering a flawed reading program, for example, some teachers may resist it for excellent reasons. Why ascribe shortcomings to them and not to the proposed change itself?

Demiashkevich offered a dualist conception of education, combining idealism and materialism. In An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, he argued that neither idealism nor materialism is sufficient in itself to explain existence or to address the complexities of education. We must honor both permanence and flux. Change has no inherent goodness. On p. 123 he writes:

The confusion between novelty and desirability, between changing and improving, should, of course, be vigilantly avoided in education as much as in other human matters, or perhaps even more so. On the other hand, suggestions for reform and the invitation to review the existing educational situation, when prompted by a sincere and solid quest for social good, should be welcomed.

Once we break the link between “novelty and desirability,” between “changing and improving,” we can consider individual changes on their own merits. The dissident voices may be among our greatest assets, because they can help us recognize when we are doing something silly.

In his wonderful little book And Madly Teach (1949), Mortimer Smith poses the question:

We have been going along now for some time on the theory that education consists simply of experience and change and “growth,” and this theory has not, as far as I can see, furthered the millennium to any startling degree. Perhaps we need to set up some ends for education; perhaps we need to ask, “Growth towards what?”

Yes, growth towards what? Change of what, and why? And what do we hope to keep?

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Fox is loving the revolution

May 27, 2009 By

Here we have contrasting news perspectives on the “Parent Revolution” in Los Angeles.

Take the Los Angeles Times article that Joanne cited recently.

Then take today’s Fox video, “Parent Revolution Vows to Change Schools.”

One of these views the “Parent Revolution” somewhat skeptically. The other does not.

One is an example of reporting; the other, of puff.

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Carnivals

May 27, 2009 By

The 225th Carnival of Education is up at Siobhan Curious.

The Common Room is hosting the Carnival of Homeschooling.

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Speaking of advertising

May 26, 2009 By

It seems much of education is turning into a PR campaign. The “21st Century Skills” movement seems quite fond of advertising.

Here are some sample projects from the “21st Century Skills Map” for social studies (from the P21 website):

Fourth grade:

Outcome: As a group, work together to reach a decision and to explain the reasons for it.

Example: Working in small groups, encourage and engage other classmates to assist with a group service-learning project. Using digital media, students demonstrate the need to raise the awareness of their classmates on an issue within their community, (e.g., students create a digital poster that persuades classmates to participate in a school fundraising project).

Eighth grade:

Outcome: Students develop entrepreneurial skills by undertaking a business project.

Example: JA World Wide (Junior Achievement) provides a semester project for middle school students, in which business leaders from the community teach a weekly class, and each student group in the class develops and markets a product.

Students are responsible for setting goals, developing and implementing their plans, monitoring their progress in developing and marketing their product, and modifying as needed.

Twelfth grade:

Outcome: Students create an economic venture that requires the application of economic principles such as supply and demand.

Example: Students work together as a class or in groups to execute a simple business task such as selling a certain amount of a popular snack by a certain date. The activity could be structured competitively or in such a way that various groups are attempting to reach group-based specific sales goals. Students use a range of sales techniques that incorporate forms of technology such as video and web-based promotion. Students could also create a new product or packaging of an existing product and make a competitive pitch to fellow students who decide which product or packaging should be awarded with a “venture capital” type of investment. The activity could be incorporated into a co-curricular school-based venture that has access to some start-up funds.

I don’t understand why kids should be selling snacks instead of studying history.

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Why advertise the public schools?

May 26, 2009 By

When I take the subway to school in the mornings, I sometimes puzzle over the ads posted in the cars–ads promoting nothing other than our very own public schools, or rather, someone’s story about how much progress we’re making under the current leadership.

These ads cost $270,000 and are part of a public relations campaign by the Fund for Public Schools. It seems strange that we would need to advertise our own public schools–but the schools are not really the subject of the ads. One of the ads states proudly that 800,000 teachers, parents, and students responded to a survey. Now who would spend thousands of dollars on an ad like that? Not teachers. Not parents. Not students.

Who funds the Fund for Public Schools? We do not know, for the organization has made the most of a loophole that exempts it from disclosing such information.

What are the ads for? Supposedly the Fund for Public Schools exists in order to attract private donors to the school system. But why would those private donors be riding the J train out to East New York early in the morning? East New York is a poor section of Brooklyn. The airport is out a little further, but I imagine that if the potential millionaire donors were going to JFK, they’d take a cab or car.

No, this can’t be for money. I suspect the Fund for Public Schools is doing this for another reason: to get flimsy logic wafting in our minds. If we come to believe that a survey is a sign of progress, then we won’t blink twice over the other ads, like the one that reads, “Because finishing is the start of a better future, New York City public high schools have increased graduation rates by more than 20% since 2002.”

The 20% figure has been roundly disputed–but I would also dispute the reasoning, “Because finishing is the start of a better future.” Is that why graduation rates have supposedly increased? Can platitudes improve our graduation rates?

Don’t think about it. Just “Keep It Going NYC.”

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Teaching-disabled teachers

May 26, 2009 By

Nearly one in five teachers suffers from a teaching disability, reports The Onion, which makes stuff up.

As noted in the report, hundreds of schools have already begun setting up special classrooms in which the teaching- disabled can receive the extra attention they require, teach at their own unique pace, and be paired up with patient students who can help to keep them on track.

. . . “Rather than punishing our teachers or kicking them out, we give them a gold star every time they do something right,” (Wesley Principal Donald) Zicree continued. “If they write the correct answer to a math problem on the board, they get a gold star. If they volunteer to read aloud during English class, they get a gold star. You’d be amazed what a little positive reinforcement can do. Some of our teachers have even stopped drinking in their cars during lunch.”

Sadly, most teaching-disabled teachers don’t get this kind of support.

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Texting may harm thumbs and peace of mind

May 26, 2009 By

According to the New York Times, teenagers sent an average of 80 text messages a day in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Peter W. Johnson, associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, is concerned that “too much texting could lead to temporary or permanent damage to the thumbs.”

But the troubles do not stop at the pollex. Texting may interfere with a young person’s ability to think and act independently. Says psychologist Sherry Turkle, director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at M.I.T.:

“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”

Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”

As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind.

This is no surprise, nor is the loss of quiet new. In 1931 Irwin Edman wrote, “The capacity for absorption has vanished, largely because, especially in America, the contemporary lives, to put it briefly, in cities and among words. He has both too little time for that steady contemplation which is an absorption in the world and in things; he has too many odds and ends of time for brooding, for the internal canvassing of his own doubts and insufficiencies” (The Contemporary and His Soul, p. 43).

But nonstop texting has brought distraction to a new level. There is the appearance of silence (teens text furtively, as the article points out), but blinks and vibrations alert them constantly to new updates, new messages, new replies to their last reply.

Read the whole article here. See also Jonathan Zimmerman’s terrific op-ed, “Really living? Go offline.”

Filed Under: Education

Teachers still have genres in Minnesota

May 25, 2009 By

Schools have decided to adopt Balanced Literacy in District 719, Prior Lake-Savage, Minnesota.

But it’s not all bleak. Teachers will still be able to assign some books. According to the Savage Pacer,

Every reading class – which includes all K-5 classrooms and grade six through eight reading and English classes – will receive a “classroom library” consisting of around 250 age-appropriate fiction and nonfiction books from a variety of genres, said Greene. But despite the new approach to give students an array of reading options, teachers still will be able to assign some texts to entire classes.

“There’s going to be a balance,” the coordinator said. “It’s not going to be always that free-for-all reading. Teachers still have genres and they still have to introduce students to different things.”

What’s wrong with the existing curriculum? It’s “one size fits all,” says Greene.

Well, so is Balanced Literacy, but in a different way. Balanced Literacy focuses on reading strategies. Dan Willingham argues–and I agree–that content knowledge affects reading comprehension more profoundly than reading strategies do. But teachers under BL must focus on strategies nonetheless.

The phrase “one size fits all” is another example of the “witchery of words.” Anything can be called “one size fits all.” We must ask, one size of what? And all of whom?

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Making Connections, Part 3: The Daffodil Project

May 25, 2009 By

This is the last post in the “Making Connections” series. After this, I will turn to other topics: P21 and advertising, the worship of change in education reform, and more.

In my second and third year of teaching, I started reading Diane Ravitch and E. D. Hirsch, Jr. I don’t know how I would have fared without their books. They made sense of the confusion I saw around me and showed me the way to other kindred thinkers. Thanks to Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform by Diane Ravitch–my favorite book on American education—I learned about the brilliant and delightful work of Michael John Demiashkevich (1891-1938) and found my way to his books. Demiashkevich was by no means opposed to progressive ideas, but he railed against excesses such as the obsession with “integrated learning,” an attempt to make all subjects revolve around a given theme. He relates the story of the “daffodil project” (An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, pp. 282-283):

A teacher relates that she organized the entire instruction in one of the grades around the daffodil project. She devoted her time, first, to the anatomy and physiology of the daffodil; next to the poetry about it; and finally, to dancing around the flower bed. The daffodil project was still on at the time we heard about it last. We do not know how much or how little the students have learned through it in terms of information and mental habits; this depends very largely on the ability and culture of the teacher, whom we do not have the pleasure of knowing personally. But we are wondering if the majority of the daffodil project students did not finish by hating the daffodil and waiting as for deliverance for “the clang of the school bell,” which some new educationists would do away with as the sinister symbol of the conventional school which “shatters valuable attitudes.”

[Read more...]

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Liberating languor

May 24, 2009 By

Over breakfast with New York Times reporter Susan Dominus, Chancellor Joel Klein waxed enthusiastic over the recent book of Terry M. Moe and John E. Chubb, Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of Education. According to Klein, this book shows how, “through distance learning and other individualized teaching approaches, we may be able to reduce the need in the future for teachers’ overall numbers and increase their pay.”

One might use online courses to supplement existing curricula. But it’s hard to see how they could replace teachers. What would count as an absence, and what would be done about chronic absences? How many students would drop out of contact and slip through the cracks? What would keep children from “learning” on the sofa with the TV on?

Nor would it be fair to use distance learning for the top students. They, too, need teachers in their daily lives. Intellectual advancement and self-sufficiency are not one and the same. Moreover, young people spend so much time online with their peers that they need a counterbalance: adults they must face, places where they must be.

There is no getting around it. Teachers are needed.

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