It’s illegal to disrespect the president, a North Carolina high school teacher told a student in an audiotape that turned up on YouTube. The social studies teacher raised the Washington Post story charging Romney bullied a high school classmate with long hair, reports the Salisbury Post.  A student responded that Obama has admitted bullying a girl in school.  (In Dreams From My Father, Obama writes that he pushed down an unpopular black girl in — I think it was sixth grade — after he was teased about her being his “girlfriend.”)

“Stop, no, because there is no comparison,” (the teacher) says. Romney, she says, is “running for president. Obama is the president.”

When the student says they’re both “just men,” the teacher continues to argue that Romney, as a candidate for president, is not to be afforded the same respect as the president.

The teacher tells the class Obama is “due the respect that every other president is due.”

“Listen, let me tell you something, you will not disrespect the president of the United States in this classroom,” she says.

. . . Later in the conversation, the teacher tells the class it’s criminal to slander a president.

“Do you realize that people were arrested for saying things bad about Bush?” she says of former President Bush. “Do you realize you are not supposed to slander the president?”

The student responds by saying being arrested for talking badly about the president would violate the right to free speech.

“You would have to say some pretty f’d up crap about him to be arrested,” he says. “They cannot take away your right to have your opinion. … They can’t take that away unless you threaten the president.”

The student is correct, of course. The teacher is . . . Sadly misinformed and a bit of a bully.

AMID the  ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments…. But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974, the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.

A generation later, public schools that had been ordered to integrate in the 1960s and 1970s became segregated once again, this time with the blessing of a new generation of justices.

The balance of Professor Kirp’s essay, which laments the fading of court-ordered desegregation orders, can be summed up as follows:

(1) Desegregation/integration produces empirical academic benefits for Black students.

(2) Desegregation/integration produces no empirical injuries or drawbacks for White students.

(3) Therefore Desegregation/integration is a good thing.

(4) The courts should support good things.

(5) Therefore the courts should support Desegregation/integration.

To be fair, this is my summary of his work.  I could be misrepresenting it, though I obviously don’t think I am.

Now I’m willing to grant him (1) and (2); he’s a public policy expert and presumably he’d know better than I would whether the evidence supports these things.  I’ll even grant him (3), so long as we keep it at “a good thing” and not “an unqualifiedly good thing, all-in.”  If something gives relevant benefits, and doesn’t have the most obvious sorts of drawbacks one might suspect, odds are that it’s a good thing.

But I seriously question what I’ve presented as his implicit premise (4).  Kirp seems to lack a certain understanding of how the law works, as demonstrated by the fact that he has linked to Milliken v. Bradley (418 U.S. 717 (1974)), but doesn’t seem to actually understand what the case is about.  That’s a serious charge to level at an academic, so let me explain.  Along the way, I think it will become clear both why I think (4) is wrong, and that Kirp does indeed hold it as a view.

Now it’s clear that Kirp likes desegregation/integration.  His piece is at its best — and by that I mean it’s affirmatively good — when he’s describing why desegregation is a good thing, why it doesn’t have the sorts of drawbacks you might expect, and how it may one of the most potent forces in education.

But Kirps big problem is that despite his command of its effects, he doesn’t really seem to understand what desegregation is.  This may be the most revealing sentence in his article:

Despite its flaws, integration is as successful an educational strategy as we’ve hit upon.

And herein lies the problem: Integration, that is, desegregation, is not really an educational strategy. It’s a court-imposed legal remedy.  It’s  not just something people do because it seems like a good idea, but rather a remedy for a particular sort of harm, in a very particular sort of case: the case of state-sponsored, or supported segregation.

The thinking of a desegregation order goes something like this: if the state (and by “state” I mean district, township, or other governmental body) is using its power to segregate students by race, that’s a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, and a bad thing.  We can justify a race-based response to such bad behavior because it’s the only way to fix the racially motivated problem.

But, like state-sponsored segregation, desegregation orders involve the state making decisions based on race; they are thus are not something to be used lightly.   Before you can issue such an order, you have to have the right conditions to justify it.

Kirp seems to think that Milliken is about the Court’s hostility to integration.  He even describes the case as a “rejection of a metropolitan integration plan,” as if all that mattered was that the Supreme Court said “No” instead of “Yes.”  But law isn’t just a question of outcomes.  Law is, fundamentally, a question of reasons and of process.  The “why” of this rejection of integration is at least as important (and likely more important) than the mere fact of the outcome.

The Milliken case was one in which the desegregation order that had come down as a result of the urban district’s racial segregation, encompassed a number of districts in the greater metropolitan area that hadn’t been found to have engaged in any of that pernicious behavior.  Because discriminating based on race is generally frowned on, and because it wasn’t shown that it was needed to remedy segregation in those districts, the over-ambitious, overreaching desegregation plan was struck down.

This sort of legal reasoning is very different than merely a “thumbs down” on something that, as I conceded above, might very well have some very attractive empirical results.

This sort of reasoning, this attention to the “whys” and the applicability of remedies, is central to the operation of the law, and is the most important lesson of the Milliken case. It is also precisely why the Supreme Court ruled (in another case Kirp cites) that a school district can’t just voluntarily decide to use race as a factor in student assignments to schools.  Racial balancing, busing, and desegregation are remedies for state-caused harm.

Now, for all of its wonderful public policy exposition, there is an inappropriate and decidedly non-academic edge to Kirp’s piece, and it comes in the discussion of that case.  Kirp disingenuously calls this latter decision’s reliance on the principles of Brown v. Board of Education “bad history”:

And five years ago, a splintered court delivered the coup de grâce when it decreed that a school district couldn’t voluntarily opt for the most modest kind of integration — giving parents a choice of which school their children would attend and treating race as a tiebreaker in deciding which children would go to the most popular schools. In the perverse logic of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., this amounted to “discriminating among individual students based on race.” That’s bad history, which, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in an impassioned dissent, “threaten[s] the promise of Brown.”

If you’re going to accuse someone of practicing “bad history”, it’s probably a good idea to explain yourself.   Kirp doesn’t offer such an explanation; he just calls Roberts’ logic “perverse” and leaves that bald assertion hanging out in the ether.  But that’s a strange charge to be making when you don’t seem to have understood the cases that you cite in your own work.  Should we just take his word for it?

Kirp may be a good public policy professor — I don’t really know, but if he’s at Berkeley he’s probably pretty skilled.  And as I said, his explanation for why integration might be good public policy is quite illuminating.  But he’s evidently not much of a legal thinker, and we’re given no reason to think that his history is any better.

He asks, “Integration worked… why have we abandoned it?”  (That’s actually the tag line from the web page title, but it sums up his position nicely.)  But integration wasn’t adopted because “it worked”.  It was adopted on a limited basis to deal with a very specific sort of evil.  If you want to be able to adopt it as a widespread pedagogical practice, then amend the Constitution to allow for racial classification for the purpose of producing educational benefits.

On the face of it, the idea sounds terrific. The ability to ask good questions can enhance both individual lives and common culture. Many people need special instruction in this skill; most of us have room for improvement. I am not convinced, though, that any of this requires the elaborate group processes that Rothstein and Santana describe.

The research started when the authors were working in a dropout prevention program. They heard from parents that they wouldn’t come to meetings at school because they “didn’t even know what to ask.” Rothstein and Santana began by giving them questions but then realized that this was only increasing their dependency—that they needed to know ”how to generate and use their own questions.” Over time, the authors developed a technique for teaching just that. They and others founded the Right Question Project, now known as the Right Question Institute, which teaches the technique to people around the country and abroad.

The book explains the Question Formulation Technique, which consists of six components: (a) a Question Focus; (b) a process for producing questions; (c) an exercise for working on closed and open-ended questions; (d) student selection of priority questions; (e) a plan for the next steps; and (f) a reflection activity. The authors provide numerous case studies to show how these components have played out.

Before starting the process, students are introduced to the four rules: “(1) Ask as many questions as you can; (2) Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of the questions; (3) Write down every question exactly as it was stated; and (4) Change any statements into questions.” Students are supposed to reflect on these rules before proceeding. The authors explain:

The rules ask for a change in behavior, officially discouraging discussion in order to encourage the rapid production of questions. Students thus need to think about how they usually work individually and in groups. They name their usual practices and become aware of how they generally come up with ideas. They then must distinguish their present learning habits from what the rules require of them.

After receiving their Question Focus from the teacher, the students begin producing questions in groups. They are reminded to ask lots of questions and to refrain from judging, answering, or editing them. The teacher is not supposed to give examples of questions, even if the students are having difficulty.

From here, the students work on improving the questions. The teacher explains the difference between closed and open-ended questions and then guides the students as they sort out their questions and change some from one type to another. Through this activity, students learn how a question’s type or wording affects the possible answers. The authors wisely acknowledge that both closed and open-ended questions have a place; they just serve different purposes.

Once this is done, it is time to prioritize the questions (again, in groups). Students are to use the criteria set forth by the teacher: for instance, to choose the three questions that interest them the most or that they consider most important. They must provide a rationale for their choices.

Finally, the teacher and students (and sometimes the school) determine how they will use the questions. The teacher would set the context: for instance, the teacher might draw on the questions in class discussion, or the students might apply them to their homework or to a research project. Thus students come to see how the questions enhance their learning. At the  end, the students reflect on their learning.

The book’s main strength is its underlying premise that students (and people in general) benefit from asking their own questions. This is a good reminder for teachers like myself; I enjoy posing questions and take time to structure them carefully. I assume that students are learning, through my questions, how to ask questions of their own, but this is not always the case. (Sometimes it is.) So, even as a reminder alone, the book has value. Also, it reminds me of the complexity of good question formulation.

As for the drawbacks, there’s far too much emphasis on group work. To ask good questions, one needs time alone with the subject, or time in the classroom listening to the teacher, without obligation to spout anything out. A student who already asks good questions would likely be miserable in this process.

Also, group brainstorming does not necessarily result in the best ideas. In fact, it can degrade them. At the outset, the emphasis is precisely on spewing; there is no control for quality. Quality may be difficult to come by in this setting, anyhow; there’s so much buzz in the room that it’s difficult to form a coherent idea (or question) in the first place. Some students may have trouble getting a word in as others zing forth their latest inspirations. Later, when it comes time to prioritize the questions, group dynamics can get in the way all over again. The group may reject a question just because it doesn’t fit in.

The process as a whole seems to take a great deal of time—time that could be spent discussing the topic itself. As the authors present it, instruction in the Question Formulation Technique is separate from regular instruction in the topic. So, instead of discussing a Shakespeare sonnet and raising questions along the way, students do this group work, generate and select questions, and then come back to the sonnet. Unfortunately, the students may be too removed from the sonnet to know what to ask about it.

The Question Formulation Technique may well have a place in the classroom now and then. It may be a good way to warm students up to asking questions. There are other ways as well. For instance, a teacher could have students read a story for homework and then bring in two questions for class discussion. Students would then pose and consider their questions in class. Or students could learn to identify the hidden questions in an article or story; this would help them see questions where they are not obvious.

In short, this is an interesting and helpful book that oversells its methods just a bit.

How do you meet the students’ diverse needs and make the standards accessible for them? Welcome to Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a “framework” that enables teachers to design curricula for diverse learners in advance, instead of on the fly. On the one hand, it’s difficult to object to something like this. Shouldn’t teachers consider students’ needs when planning curricula? Shouldn’t the curricula reflect the students, at least in part? On the other, it could distract from subject matter. It could send students the message that they need pictures, sounds, activities, strategy instruction, and so forth whenever they don’t understand something.

According to the UDL guidelines, the current curricula are not simply flawed; they are disabled (in terms of who they can teach, what they can teach, and how they can teach. (Why do people find it necessary to disparage the old when presenting the (supposedly) new? Aren’t some curricula better than others?) UDL addresses these “disabilities” by making the curricula more accessible to learners: that is, by providing multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement.

For instance, according to the guidelines, ”an equals sign (=) might help some learners understand that the two sides of the equation need to be balanced, but might cause confusion to a student who does not understand what it means.” Therefore a teacher should provide “alternative representations” (instead of, say, telling the student what the equals sign means).

Or consider this: “While a learner with dyslexia may excel at story-telling in conversation, he may falter when telling that same story in writing.  It is important to provide alternative modalities for expression, both to the level the playing field among learners and to allow the learner to appropriately (or easily) express knowledge, ideas and concepts in the learning environment.” But shouldn’t any student, including a student with dyslexia, learn how to write? Granted, the student should have the opportunity to speak as well. That is nothing new or fancy. It is possible that a student might have difficulty with both speaking and writing. What to do but practice?

Multiple representations and modes of expression are far from the whole of UDL. Teachers are supposed to ”scaffold” the development of the “executive functions” of students’ brains: “The UDL framework typically involves efforts to expand executive capacity in two ways: 1) by scaffolding lower level skills so that they require less executive processing; and 2) by scaffolding higher level executive skills and strategies so that they are more effective and developed.” For instance, when it comes to “higher level executive skills,” teachers should guide students in the formation of their own personal learning goals and help them develop strategies for learning. All of this is fine in moderation, but (a) it can take up a great deal of class time and (b) it can send students the wrong message about their own responsibility and role.

In my experience, students who study at home (that is, who don’t just zip through the homework, but think about it until they understand it) are rarely in need of strategy instruction, multiple representations, and so forth. The strategies come to them as they wrestle with the material. A few tips can help, but they need not be elaborate. In class, these students benefit from challenging instruction. This includes a variety of representations (such as when the geometry teacher says, “Or think of it this way”).  It includes some clarifications, review of basics, hints about how to learn this material, questions pointing to the next step, and exposition of new material. Students then seize this material and work on it. 

By no means am I arguing that a teacher should leave students in the lurches, ignoring them when they stare blankly at the wall or doodle in their textbooks. Of course she should think about what students need and how to draw them in. But take this too far, and you won’t have a lesson that compares the formulas for the hyperbola and ellipse. You won’t have a discussion of Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” You’d end up teaching material that required less intensive study–because you’d have to bring in all your multiple this and that.

If UDL is meant as a collection of suggestions and principles, then much of it makes sense (though I still take issue with the equals sign example). But the word “universal” makes me wary, as does the blanket dismissal of current curricula. Teachers have incorporated UDL-like practices for centuries. It is important to question and refine what we are doing; it is damaging to bring in some sweeping change, some revolutionary lawnmower that tears up the field.

Addressing disabilities in the classroom is a tricky matter; it requires knowledge, skill, and good judgment. But we do students a disservice, overall, when bending too far to accommodate them. One learns by wrestling with things. If students understood this, if at home they pondered and practiced what they were learning in class, we’d see a profound difference in our schools. Teachers, then, would have more room to wrestle with the material at higher levels and plan challenging, well-crafted lessons.

Two schools in the Washington DC area are taking a completely opposite approach to technology in the classroom. One, the Flint Hill School in Oakton, has classrooms filled with latest electronics, and equips all its students with Macbook Air laptops. In the other, the Washington Waldorf School, classrooms look about the same they might have looked at the turn of last century, where pens, notebooks, and a chalk-wielding teacher in front of a blackboard still play the starring roles.

…and it got me to want to blog.  Not about the little article, really, but about the subject of educational technology in general.

My purpose in writing this post isn’t to valorize one model over the other (though I have a marked personal preference for the Washington Waldorf model).  I’m sure that both schools are scrumdidiliumptiously wonderful places for students to learn.  What I want to try to articulate is a series of thoughts about the role of technology in education.  This is something I’ve thought about quite a bit in the last year or so… enough that I feel like taking a stab at setting down some thoughts in writing, anyway.

First, the obvious.  People really like to talk about technology in education.   Just look at the journals:  Technological Horizons in Education.  Journal of Educational Technology and Society, Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, etc. etc..  Educational Technology Review.  Etc. etc. etc.  When’s the next conference on Educational Technology?  EDUCAUSE is going on right now.   ISTE is next month, as is ICEIT.  GaETC is in November.

Technological fluency (or at least passing a class in educational technology, which isn’t the same thing) is a requirement for most teacher certification programs — as if to say that a teacher cannot be competent at his or her job unless he or she knows Glogster from Twitter, a PDF from an e-Book, Voicethread from Prezi, or a BBS from a Blog.

And let us be frank: if education is to prepare a student for living a flourishing life within his or her society, then that education should probably include — inter alia — the development of an understanding of and an appreciation for the technology that helps create and maintain the society’s infrastructure and economic success.

Yet I have heard, on multiple occasions, people offering lavish praise to their best teachers in something of the following form:

“The best class I can imagine is a log with Mr. (insert name) on one end, and me on the other.”

I haven’t just heard this once or twice… I’ve heard it almost verbatim well over half a dozen times from different people about different teachers at different levels of education.  It’s a lovely thought, and one of the things that is most lovely about it is that the focus in such an imagined scenario is exactly where it should be: on the interaction between the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind.

Teachers are not a necessary part of all education; much can be accomplished in isolation (although even reading a book is a sort of conversation with the author).  But teachers are (or can be) valuable, and to the extent that they have a role to play in learning, it’s an inherently interpersonal one.  I’m not saying you have to like your students, or care for them; you don’t.  (I generally do, but one need not.)  Nor am I saying you need to be empathic and give them hugs.  But you do need to acknowledge them as people, and create a conversation of learning if you want to be a successful teacher of anything.

Technology can make this task much easier in a lot of different ways.  A chalkboard allows a teacher to schematize his or her thoughts on the fly, to put an idea up where it persists long after the echo of his or her voice has faded into the classroom carpet.  A video projector allows the teacher to, with a little planning, instantly display complicated graphs, maps, movies, and important points in much the same way.  Grading software frees up teacher time to focus on teaching.  Turnitin allows the policing of academic integrity in a quick, relatively painless way and also gives the teacher insight into some of the writing process.  Clickers can get you instantaneous classroom response that isn’t colored by the social pressure that goes along with shows of hands.

But a classroom without clickers, or without a smartboard, isn’t going to be inherently inferior to one loaded with all the latest gadgets, because it’s not the gadgets that do the teaching: it’s the teacher.  And the teacher should use whatever technology he or she thinks will improve what he or she is up to vis-a-vis the students — no more, and no less.  Whether a piece of technology will be useful and fruitful is primarily a question of how a particular bit of technology relates to that teacher’s methods, personality, and style.

This is the big problem with technology mandates (e.g., “All teachers will use software platform X in their classes…”): not all technology “fits” every teacher’s individual style.  All too often, technology is treated a lot like curriculum is: as a way to standardize teaching and education to such a degree that the teacher becomes just a generic component of some set of committee-approved best practices.

I would love to listen to a lecture by Aristotle, or Avicenna, or Anselm, or even Neitzsche.  But it would be stupid for me to require that they use Powerpoint.

I worry about the razzle-dazzle of technology when it comes to teaching; I worry about it a lot.  I worry that it gets used for the sake of using it, and not to make things better.  I worry that students learn to become dependent on it in ways that undermines their ability to develop the very capacities that  teachers are charged with cultivating.   There is understanding to be had in doing things the old fashioned way, understanding that cannot be obtained if we allow our capacities to atrophy from disuse.

Teenagers are consistently impressed by the fact that, given a minute or so, I can multiply two three-digit numbers together in my head without using pen and paper.  They think it’s a sort of magic.  This is not an impressive skill, but rather a very basic one that one gets after doing enough pen-and-paper-algorithms.  Seeing the structure of the algorithm a thousand times lets you start to understand exactly why it works.  And once you understand why it works, you don’t need to use the algorithm any more.  You can just break it down in your head. But it’s not something you develop if you have used calculators all your life.

I worry that students are allowed to use technological tools to produce elaborate projects that shine and impress, but which have extraordinary little substantive content in them.  Students are often charged with things like creating powerpoint presentations, with huge chunks of the grade depending on the use of pictures, sounds, and video.  (Here’s an example of a rubric that gives 6 our of 27 points for aesthetic design, and here’s one that gives 50%.)

I worry that living in a digital world is, at base, incompatible with living in a world of medium-sized physical objects, and that we’re elevating a pseudo-Cartesian view of the self as a disembodied intellect to a station that far exceeds its warrant.  We might be thinking things, but that’s certainly not all we are.

I saw one of my students writing a paper out by hand once.  Without ever having seen anything she had produced, I knew that her writing would be better than average.   You have to think more about what you’re writing when you’re putting ink on a page than you do when every mistake is just a backspace or an update from oblivion.

I like technology.  I have lots of (hardly original) ideas on how to use it in teaching.  But when I hear education professionals talk about it, more often than not I yearn for what seems to me at times to be the perfect classroom: a handful of students, 6 benches, a stick, and a clear patch of dirt.

Given the sheer amount of time and attention given to Martin Luther King in the typical school year, it might come as no surprise that this second-grader wanted to come as King.

Sean’s mother, Michelle King-Roca, told Denver’s 7News her son was really excited about the project.

“He said, ‘Mom, I want to wear a black suit because that’s what he wore, a black tie, a white shirt, and also I want to do my face black and wear a mustache,’” said King-Roca.

Hilarity ensues.  Well, sort of.

After complaints from a faculty member that took issue with the blackface, the principal asked Sean to remove the face paint or leave the school.

* * * *

A spokeswoman for the principal told KRDO that some students, as well as the faculty member who initially complained, felt the costume was offensive. It’s the principal’s job to make sure the school is a safe environment for students, she said.

Face paint violates the school’s dress code policy, she said.

Sigh.  These people (and by “these people” I mean the morons who perpetuate this sort of stupidity — morons of all races) never get tired of proclaiming perfectly well-intentioned things to be offensive, do they?

I had always thought that there was an obvious (and reasonable) distinction between “Blackface” proper — the gross cariacature of Black people using extremely dark make-up that gave an illusion of giant-sized lips, usually coupled with vulgarly offensive steretyped acting or singing — and simple stage make-up to alter one’s apparent skin tone in an attempt to make one’s costume a better costume.    Was I wrong?

I was once in a production of Fiddler on the Roof once as a Russian Dancer.  It occurred to me, as I was doing make-up on opening night, that there weren’t many Mexican-Americans in turn of the century Russia.  So I thought for a moment, and decided to make myself into something of a Mongol-blooded Cossack — with a slightly darker foundation and some clever eye make-up.  I certainly didn’t think I was being racist.

But maybe I was mistaken.  Maybe really dark foundation isn’t just make-up, to be used when the appropriate need arises… but is really foundation exclusively for use by black people.  I mean, nothing says racial harmony like having a make-up counter with products you can’t buy because of your race, right?

You might be forgiven if you thought that the point of a costume was to, you know, look like the person as whom you are dressing.  If I’m going to dress as Kareem Abdul Jabbar, I’m not just going to need some darker make-up — I’m going to need stilts and a nametag that says “Roger Murdock”.

My friend Bradley (who is quite dark-skinned, as such things go) is going to need some pale make-up and a wheelchair if he wants to be FDR.

But maybe that would be offensive, too.

Could we all agree that, were it possible to buy an MLK silicone or latex mask, that wouldn’t be racist?  But what’s the difference, really?

(Good luck trying to find one, though.  I looked for twenty minutes; maybe it is offensive.)

UPDATE: Minor ambiguity in the second sentence corrected.

Earning credits is a challenge, complains an honors student who hopes to transfer to Berkeley to earn a neuroscience degree. She can’t get into the science classes she needs at her community college.

Some students graduate with too many credits, paying in time and money for poor advising, poorly structured programs and unclear transfer policies.

Let’s consider curriculum. In the United States, a centralized national curriculum would cause far too much political turmoil. Or, rather, if such a thing could be pulled off, it would turn out bland and incoherent, after all the additions and compromises had been made. Well aware of this, policymakers have pushed for the “voluntary” nationalization of standards (not the same as curriculum) instead. Since standards usually focus on skills, they carry less threat than curriculum, at least on the surface. Hence the Common Core State Standards.

Now, it makes no sense to have common standards without common implementation. If people around the country interpret them in their own way, you might as well not have common standards at all. Thus, the standards and accompanying directives veer into curriculum and pedagogy. It’s inevitable, but that’s where the trouble begins. For instance, the standards specify the ratio of literary to informational text for each grade level. A guide for publishers (written by the main authors of the CCSS for English Language Arts) encourages close reading and discourage “pre-reading” activities; in the most recent version, the authors changed the wording to make it less prescriptive (in response to fierce criticism). The assessments based on the Common Core will likely carry even more implicit pedagogical directives and cause still more uproar.

Standards come with unofficial directives as well. District leaders pass on messages to administrators, who pass them on to teachers. Some of these get crass by the time they reach the classroom (e.g., “Only one novel per year“). Some are vague and voluminous; teachers hear that they will be expected to do all sorts of things they haven’t been doing, but it isn’t clear what. All sorts of “stuff” comes along with the standards, a great deal of it insubstantial.

In other words, nationalized standards are difficult to pull off in moderation and with discernment. They start to resemble the Scylla of education: that twelve-footed, six-necked monster that peers over the cliff and fishes for dolphins and bigger creatures.

In response, many argue that curriculum and standards should be left to local communities. This sounds like a great idea, if you live in a community that shares your view of education. Woe (or Charybdis) to you if you don’t.

Why be wary of local control? Oh, because the community’s likes, needs, and preferences might clash with yours. What’s more, they can be limiting. Some communities will try to guard their children from anything that conflicts with their religion. Others will seek curricula with immediate real-life application. Still others will want curricula that focus on their cultural heritage. Still others will focus on job skills and whatever seems to be in vogue. Others still will want anything that gives the children a competitive edge.  Others will insist on the beautiful and classical.

If education is supposed to take you into a larger perspective and larger world, then curricular decentralization, taken too far, works against this goal. Disparities will grow, and they won’t be only economic. Schools will be ingrown entities, confined to what the local communities value and know.

Now, most advocates of common standards and advocates of local curricula avoid the extremes I have described above. They keep some sort of counterbalance in mind. In education discussion, though, people tend to defend the principle they think needs defending, even if it isn’t the sum total of the truth for them. So their views may sound more extreme than they actually are.

Ultimately what makes sense is a  combination of centralized and decentralized curriculum. Getting the combination right is tricky, but it’s worth figuring out. For instance, we could have a few common texts per grade (nationwide), and leave it to districts and schools to shape the rest of their curricula. We could have institutes where teachers and principals immersed themselves in literature and other subjects, thus building a culture together. There are many more possibilities.

We need a common curricular basis of some kind, but it must not stifle initiative, limit variety, or drag down what is good. Finding the right mixture of the common and particular may be one of education’s most difficult challenges. Are we willing to undertake it? Is there a good place to begin?

Sometimes it seems that we are clinging to the fig tree, our legs dangling down, as Odysseus did in order to escape both Scylla and Charybdis. Not being Odysseus, we can’t count on such agility or fortune. Fortunately our Scylla and Charybdis aren’t quite as ferocious as the old ones. Things are bad, and plenty bad, but they aren’t quite that bad.