Education for Liberation Network Launches New Online Community Forum

In an effort to keep readers of the Journal of Educational Controversy informed on the widening conversation about education across the nation and the globe, we will be using this blog occasionally to update you on other movements. Tara Mack has just announced a new online community forum established by the Education for Liberation Network that I mentioned in an earlier post. Check it out at http://edliberation.ning.com


From Tara Mack:

Dear Educator,

I am excited to announce that the Education for Liberation Network is now launching an online community that includes discussion forums, member profiles, online chats, groups, an events calendar etc. Please check out this exciting new tool for bringing our community together and register today (http://edliberation.ning.com).

This new forum also offers the network an opportunity to share the latest news from the fight for a more just education. You'll find recent headlines on the Community Home page in the Just Ed and More Just Ed Headlines section. I will be gathering news items and updating that section once per week. But I need your help to make that site a rich source of information.

Over the coming weeks and months please send me timely articles, blog posts, videos etc. related to liberatory education, both in the classroom and in the wider community. More specifically the items should be education, education organizing and youth organizing related news that prioritize the perspectives, needs and concerns of marginalized communities. This site could be great resource for our community, but only if lots of people contribute. I will publish as many of them as I can.

I hope you will become a member of this online community!

Paideusis Recognizes Editorial Board Member William Hare with Special Issue

The current issue of Paideusis. an International Journal in Philosophy of Education, published by the Canadian Philosophy of Education Society, has just published a special issue with papers from their last year's conference in celebration of the retirement of Professor William Hare from Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Professor Hare is a member of our editorial board and published the article, "Ideological Indoctrination and Teacher Education," for our summer 2007 issue.

Check out the articles in Paideusis.

Alfie Kohn to Speak in Bellingham

Author Alfie Kohn will speak on the topic, "Schools Our Children Deserve," on Friday, October 9th at 7pm at the Syre Auditorium, Whatcom Community College. The event is sponsored by the Whatcom Day Academy and the Explorations Academy in conjunction with the Journal of Educational Controversy.

The journal will be publishing a special issue on this theme in the future that will be dedicated to Alfie Kohn, who has agreed to write the prologue. Kohn's concerns and progressive ideas for schooling are exemplified in our partner school, the Whatcom Day Academy. The Academy partners with the journal and the Woodring Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal that houses the journal in an effort to highlight a vision of the kind of school all children deserve and to engage the public in a national dialogue on this topic.

Stay tune for videos and articles as we create this vision.

Alfie Kohn's website.

Reflections from a Freedom Writer Teacher

The next issue of our journal will be on the theme of "Art, Social Imagination and Democratic Education" and will appear soon. We have interpreted art in that issue very generically to include visual art, music, performing art, and theatre as well as literature and poetry. Kirsten Jensen, an English teacher at the Nooksack Valley High School here in Washington state, has joined a very interesting movement started by Erin Gruwell called the Freedom Writers. Some of you may be aware of Gruwell's foundation and her earlier book, The Freedom Writers Diary. A graduate from our own MIT program here at the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University, Kirsten wrote of her experience teaching reading and writing workshops in Gruwell's latest book, Teaching Hope: Stories from the Freedom Writer Teachers." In the Bellingham Herald recently, she described her goals, "Often (teachers) try to control what students do, and I think it's hard to step away from that...The whole Freedom Writers experience ... has been one of the most impactful professional development activities for me." Kirsten joined other freedom writer teachers along with some of her own students at Village Books, our town's independent bookstore, to share her experiences with teachers and others in our community recently. In her post below, Kirsten describes her use of "memoir" writing as a way of helping her students find their own voice. We thank Kirsten for sharing with our readers another innovative way to create a democratic classroom.



The Power of Memoir Writing, Relevant Literature and Diversity Education in a Fight for Educational Equity; A Freedom Writer Teacher’s Experience


by Kirsten Jensen
Teacher, Nooksack Valley High School


Every year a new stream of students enters through our classroom doors, each with his or her own story that either supports their educational success, or makes it all the more difficult for them to make it a priority in their lives. Over time, some of these students have experienced moment after moment of disappointment and failure and are beginning to give up on the possibility of achieving a passing grade or even graduating from high school. I have these students in each of my classes in a Washington State rural, low-income school.

I remember the first time I began teaching Memoir writing. One day I asked students to leave their composition books for me to read. That night as I flipped through the pages of each notebook, I found myself shocked and saddened by the obstacles many of them faced. That same week a fellow teacher left the book The Freedom Writers Diary in my box in the teacher’s lounge. That night I read through entries written by Erin Gruwell’s 150 students from Long Beach, California. Students who were dealing with homelessness, drug addicted parents, avoiding deportation, teenage pregnancy, and abuse at home, I couldn’t help to see some similarities between these students and my own. I contacted the Foundation to find they were starting a teacher-training program to train 150 teachers in the methods that helped Gruwell’s students achieve educational success. The vision of the Freedom Writers Foundation is to publicly and systematically promote an educational philosophy that honors diversity and gives all students the opportunity to reach their full potential. The Foundation empowers students and teachers through curriculum, outreach and scholarships to help break the cycle of inequity that still continues in our educational systems. This was the reason I entered the teaching profession.

As I got off the plane in Long Beach I was greeted by teachers from around the country and Canada, all with a similar visions and passions for teaching. We learned ways to engage students in meaningful and relevant curriculum, teach students to write, read and listen to each others stories and experiences, teach Holocaust education and diversity awareness, and most of all, form relationships that allow all voices to be heard in a safe classroom community.


When I returned to my students, I witnessed some that seemed to have become "failure-acceptors" experience moments of success and begin to see that with motivation and work they could feel a sense of accomplishment. By getting the right book in the right student’s hand at the right time, a student was able to actually read a book for the first time, read more books, and perhaps become a life long reader. By getting students to develop some sense of empathy through diversity awareness teachings, the safety in my classroom increased and more students felt comfortable and willing to share their personal writing and experiences with others.

Every student has the potential to contribute something positive to our community and world. By finding ways to reach students that often fall through the cracks and help them experience success, more students will graduate high school with the skills they need to become contributing citizens to our world. These citizens may one day have their own children that they will be able to support and help to experience this same success. Education has the power to help affect the social inequities that exist in this country. Helping all students find voice and relevancy in their education may be the first step.

The Freedom Writers Foundation is still accepting teachers into its training program in Long Beach. For more information visit http://www.freedomwritersfoundation.org/

New Blog on Poverty and Education

For our readers who would like to continue their understanding of issues on poverty and education that was the focus of our Winter 2009 issue of the journal, "The Hidden Dimensions of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty and Education," I came across a new blog this morning that might be very helpful. It is called, Living and Learning in Poverty." According to the blog, the blogger, Paul Thomas, is an associate Professor of Education at Furman University, who has taught high school ELA in North Carolina for eighteen years at a rural school with "significant poverty issues."

This is his description of the blog's purpose and goal.

"This site is dedicated to storing and exploring all available research and resources related to poverty as it impacts the lives of children and the learning of children....Our society and our schools are failing our children, but not in ways often popularized in our wider discourse about schools. Our free society is still plagued by social inequities related to gender, race, and affluence—all of which are accidents of birth placed upon children. Our schools remain reflections of our social inequities, but in order for those schools to help children attain the empowerment that is also their birthright, society must lay a more solid and level foundation for children before school and during their education.This site is dedicated to housing the best possible data available for all stakeholders in the lives of children—including the children themselves—in order to overcome the plague of poverty in the lives and learning of children."

Where are the Voices from the Grass Roots?

One of the purposes of this blog is to promote serious discussion between educational professionals and the general public. In reading much that is printed in the mainstream media like today's editorial in the New York Times - "Accountability in Public Schools," one constantly hears accounts and perspectives from the voices of those who are in power. Where are the voices from the grass roots about their concerns, frustrations, hopes, and challenges to what passes as educational reform in this country. I recently came across a website and a listserv that provides our readers with this alternative perspective. For readers interested in educating themselves on other perspectives, check out the following website and join the listserv of the Education for Liberation Network.

Website: http://www.edliberation.org/

To join the listserv: go to www.edliberation.org/join-us

Description and Purpose: The Education for Liberation Network is a national coalition of teachers, community activists, youth, researchers and parents who believe a good education should teach people - particularly low-income youth and youth of color - to understand and challenge the injustices their communities face.

Teachers may also be interested in their recent publication of a new kind of plan book that is called: Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Teachers 2009-2010. You can find it at: http://www.justiceplanbook.com/. I am told that the first printing is already sold out, but more are being printed.

(Cross-posted on Social Issues)

Obama’s School Choice: Shouldn’t the education that Malia and Sasha receive be available to all?

Our colleague David Marshak has just published this provocative piece for the August 3rd issue of Education Week and has permitted us to reproduce it on our blog. David is professor emeritus at Seattle University and our colleague here at Western Washington University. In his article, he describes the Sidwell Friends School that President Obama's children attend and asks why all children don't have this kind of education available to them. In asking this question, David exposes the wrongheaded direction that the public school is taking today. All children may not be able to attend this kind of elite private school, but all children ought to attend a public school system that is guided by the enlightened philosophy that shapes this school's vision. In reading David's description of the school, I saw many similarities with our partner school, the Whatcom Day Academy, that I talk about in a post below where we describe the creation of the new Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal that houses the Journal of Educational Controversy. To read about the philosophy of our partner school, the reader can go to the link on our Institute's website. Also check out our YouTube video below and hear teacher, Vale Hartley, describe her classroom at the 2008 Educational Law and Social Justice Forum.


ESSAY BY DAVID MARSHAK


Education Week
Published Online: August 3, 2009
COMMENTARY

Obama’s School Choice

Shouldn’t the education that Malia and Sasha receive be available to all?

By David Marshak

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wants to intensify the industrial, modernist character of American public schools. He wants a longer school day, a longer school week, and a longer school year. He wants national subject standards, which will inevitably lead to one national test. And he wants to institute merit pay, which is a euphemism for paying teachers to produce higher test scores. And this sort of merit pay, combined with national academic standards and one national test, will inevitably result in even more public schools becoming test-prep factories. Thus, more and more of the same.

Every one of these putative remedies grows from a belief that intensification of the command-and-control, modernist, factory model of production is what schools need to improve their performance.

Arne Duncan seems to have no understanding that the most effective organizations in our society, both for-profit corporations and nonprofits, have evolved beyond command-and-control cultures. The author and business professor Peter M. Senge describes these new entities as “learning organizations,” which are built on the foundation of systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning.Senge explains why Duncan’s desire to intensify the factory model of schooling is destined for failure. “Today’s problems come from yesterday’s ‘solutions,’ ” he says. Factory-model schools, though always flawed by racism and classism, worked reasonably well when America was primarily an industrial society. But given our evolution into a more postindustrial culture, the industrial elements of schooling—mass production, rigid time and curricular structures, simplistic age-grading, and depersonalization and alienation—have become the problem, not the solution.

A postindustrial society requires postindustrial, post-modern schools. We could find a good example of this kind of education by following President Barack Obama’s two daughters to school one morning. Since their move to Washington, Malia and Sasha Obama have attended the Sidwell Friends School. It is both private and expensive, but these are not its essential characteristics. Sidwell Friends is more profoundly defined both by the values that it rejects—and by those that it embodies.

Sidwell rejects the modernist, industrial paradigm of schooling that makes school like an assembly line engaged in mass production, that claims all children should learn the same stuff at the same time. It also rejects the modernist claim that children’s individuality and inner knowing are irrelevant to education.

Sidwell embraces a post-modernist paradigm of schooling defined by the following elements:

• Sidwell is a prekindergarten through 12th grade school, with 1,097 students. This is about 84 children in each grade, a small enough number so that no child is lost in the crowd. If Sidwell had a free-standing high school, it would have all of 336 students.

• Sidwell offers “a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement, and independent thinking in a world increasingly without borders.” It does not limit its curriculum to the antiquated 19th-century subjects, as does every set of state curriculum standards—or the new national standards that Arne Duncan is pitching.

• Sidwell encourages its students “to give expression to their artistic abilities.” It does not cut the arts out of the curriculum to focus only on math and reading, as so many schools have done in our testing-obsessed era, but understands that the arts need to be an integral element in every child’s education.

• Sidwell Friends School is a community that values “the power of individual and collective reflection.” It values not only knowledge that is outside the child or teenager, but also what children and adolescents know within themselves. Sidwell encourages reflection and inner knowing, neither of which are acknowledged in any state’s academic standards.

• Sidwell promotes “an understanding of how diversity enriches us,” recruits a diverse student body (39 percent of its students are persons of color), and offers a global and multicultural curriculum.

• In its curriculum and communal life, Sidwell emphasizes “stewardship of the natural world” and engages its students both in learning the science of ecology and in developing the ethics that are at the core of the concept of stewardship: that every individual has a personal responsibility for ecological health and sustainability.

• Sidwell also promotes service, and its curriculum and communal life engage its students in understanding “why service to others enhances life.”

• Sidwell explicitly acknowledges multiple forms of accessing knowledge and truth: “through scientific investigation, through creative expression, through conversation, … through service within the school community and beyond.” All state standards are far more simple-minded.

• Sidwell recognizes that schooling is about both individual learning and learning how to work together well with others. “Work on individual skills and knowledge is balanced with group learning, in which each person’s unique insights contribute to a collective understanding.”

• Sidwell is a school that focuses on personalization of learning and on educating the whole person. “Above all,” its literature declares, “we seek to be a school that nurtures a genuine love of learning and teaches students ‘to let their lives speak.’ ” Sidwell’s central ambition is “to recognize and nurture each person’s unique gifts.”

Yes, Sidwell Friends is an expensive private school; the tuition is about $29,000 a year. And it has one teacher on staff for every seven students—plus small classes and expensive facilities.

But Sidwell’s commitment to implementing a post-modern paradigm of schooling based on the personalization of learning, a global and multicultural curriculum, an emphasis on ecology and environmental stewardship, service to others, multiple forms of knowledge, and personal responsibility and excellence has little to do with money. It’s driven primarily by the value of educating the whole person, and any school in America could enact a program founded on that same value.

If Barack and Michelle Obama have abandoned industrial-paradigm, modernist schooling and have chosen to send Malia and Sasha to a post-modern school focused on the personalization of learning in the context of a caring, responsible school community, isn’t it time for every family in the nation to have the same opportunity?

And if President Obama sends his own kids to such a school, why are he and Arne Duncan advocating policies that would intensify the most defective features of industrial schooling, rather than trying to transform schools to make them more like Sidwell Friends?

David Marshak is a lecturer in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University, in Bellingham, Wash., and is a professor emeritus at Seattle University.


First published in Education Week on August 3, 2009.

Are Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall Too Radical for Our Students?

Having just posted (below) Nino's song honoring the death of Agustin Gudinon, the farmworker who died of a heat stroke in the fields, we happened to notice this petition on the website of the United Farm Workers. In their petition, they alert the public to a debate taking place over the adoption of new social studies curriculum standards before the Texas State Board of Education. Why are figures like Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall even being challenged?

To read the concerns of the United Farm Workers in their own words, go to their website and see their petition: "Tell Texas not to remove Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall from school books." You can also find news clips on the subject at their website also.

Nina's Song: Honoring a Farmworker who Died

Editor: Nandini Gunewardena, author of "Pathologizing Poverty: Structural Forces versus Personal Deficit Theories in the Feminization of Poverty" that appears in our winter, 2009 issue on "The Hidden Dimensions of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty and Education," sent in this e-mail. Dr. Gunewardena gave us permission to reproduce it on our blog. The author can be reached at: nandini@ucla.edu Nina’s song, in commemoration of the life and death of farmworker, Agustin Gudino, gives a human dimension to our articles.

POST FROM AUTHOR, NANDINI GUNEWARDENA

This is to share the poignant song composed and sung by twenty-year old Nina Marie Fernando, my niece (Ramani's daughter), a junior at Redlands University, in memory of a farm worker Augustin who died in the Grape fields due to heat stroke on July 21st, 2005 in Kern County.

She sung this at a prayer vigil last week in downtown L.A. for all farm workers who have died in the fields, including the pregnant teen who died recently - part of her work as an intern at CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice), Los Angeles.

The words are below. Click on this link youtube.com to listen to Nina's haunting voice, and enter "Nina Fernando" in the search field to get to the song. [Or go directly to:

Nina Performs "Agustin's Song" ]

Agustín’s Song

by: Nina Marie Fernando

Escuchanos en los campos
Nuestro dolor y nuestro sueño
Queremos ver los colores
De justicia y unidad

Remember us at your table
How each fruit was plucked with a dream
How we thirst to be acknowledged
How we hunger to be seen

I became a sacrifice
To the sun that gives us life
We are lost, apathetic, in darkness
Shine a path toward what is right
I came here with nothing in my hand

But I had strength in my heart
My voice was silenced, my strength exploited
Now hear my plea
As I stand, take my hand

Call for Reviewers

The Journal of Educational Controversy is in the process of building a pool of reviewers to assist in evaluating future manuscripts. If you would like to be considered as a reviewer, please e-mail a vita indicating your discipline and areas of interest to: CEP-eJournal@wwu.edu Please include "Potential Reviewer" on the subject line.

Supreme Court Decides Student Strip Search Case

The U.S. Supreme Court decision on the student strip search case was announced today. The ACLU , who represented April Redding, the mother of the Arizona student, Savana Redding, calls it the first victory for student rights in the last twenty years. The High Court ruled that the search that took place when honors student Savana was 13 years old was an unconstitutional violation of her rights. The search was done by school officials on the basis of an uncollaborated accusation by another student that Savanna had ibuprofen in her prosession. Now nineteen years old, Savanna wrote about her experience and her court victory on the ACLU blog today.

Read Savana's own words about her court victory from the ACLU blog:


Civics 101
by Savana Redding

"People of all ages expect to have the right to privacy in their homes, belongings, and most importantly, their persons. But for far too long, students have been losing these rights the moment they step foot onto public school property -- a lesson I learned firsthand when I was strip-searched by school officials just because another student who was in trouble pointed the finger at me. I do not believe that school officials should be allowed to strip-search kids in school, ever. And though the U.S. Supreme Court did not go quite so far, it did rule that my constitutional rights were violated when I was strip-searched based on nothing more than a classmate's uncorroborated accusation that I had given her ibuprofen. I'm happy for the decision and hope it helps make sure that no other kids will have to experience what I went through.

"Strip searches are a traumatic intrusion of privacy. Forcing children to remove their clothes for bodily inspection is not a tool that school officials should have at their disposal. Yet, until today, the law was apparently unclear, potentially allowing for the most invasive of searches based on the least of suspicions. Every day, parents caution their children about the importance of not talking to strangers, looking both ways before crossing the street, and following directions at school. But I imagine they never think to warn them that a school official, acting on a hunch, may force them to take their clothes off in the name of safety. And now, thankfully, they won't have to.

"Our fundamental rights are only as strong as the next generation believes them to be, and I am humbled to have had a part in preserving and promoting the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights."

Readers can read the U.S. Supreme Court decision here.

Editor: The journal recently published some articles on another student rights case, Morse v. Frederick, decided by the U.S Supreme Court in 2007. Readers can read two articles on the case in our Winter 2008 issue on "Schooling as if Democracy Matters."

Visions of Public Education In Morse v. Frederick by Aaron H. Caplan

"Bong Hits 4 Jesus”: Have students’ First Amendment rights to free speech been changed after Morse v. Frederick? by Nathan M. Roberts

(Cross-posted on the Social Issues Blog)

Announcing the new Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal

Talk is one thing; action is another. We hope to engage in both. We believe that action without reflective talk is mindless and talk without action is an opportunity missed. Talk is not empty, however, as proponents of the practical and critics of theoretical knowledge sometimes charge. It is merely an opportunity awaiting reflective action. It provides the interpretive frameworks for new ways of understanding, new paradigms for restructuring our experiences, new challenges to older ways of thinking. Sometimes it adds to the growing body of knowledge that has been provided by those who went before us and on whose shoulders we stand. Other times, it confronts the entrenched orthodoxies that blind us and make parts of our experience of the world invisible to us. That is perhaps why John Dewey believed that there was nothing more practical than a good theory.

The journal is a place for talk, a place to look deeply at the tensions, perplexities and controversies of our time. But we also have an activist, progressive arm. In 2004, the Woodring College of Education and the Whatcom Day Academy entered a partnership to explore the role of schooling in promoting and sustaining a democratic society. Our work is affiliated with the League of Democratic Schools, a project initiated by John Goodlad. Our newly formed Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal incorporates our work in developing the journal and our work with the League. In a special section of our website, we share ideas and innovative practices for democratic schooling. Readers can also view our YouTube clip below of Whatcom Day Academy educator Vale Hartley as she discusses democratic practices in her classroom at the 2008 Educational Law and Social Justice Forum that was sponsored by the journal. Vale wrote the article, "The Elementary Classroom: A Key Dimension of a Child's Democratic World," for the winter 2008 issue of our journal.

On our institute's website, we write that "Our goal is to provide an alternative voice for research and scholarship on the educational controversies and initiatives that arise in teaching and learning in pluralistic, democratic societies." One might ask: an alternative to what? We believe that the language of education today has lost its bearings and its moorings. As I mentioned in my posting of March 27th below, silent assumptions underlying our language have controlled the national debate for decades. The language of the market place has become the language of education. Students are talked about as the human capital that keeps the national economy competitive. Although we give lip service to the democratic purposes of education, the language of the market place prevails and all other discourses are on the edge. In a public school system that serves both democracy and capitalism, the public deserves a deeper conversation of the tensions that exist between these two forces. And educational professionals need more public space to create a learning environment that takes seriously the democratic purposes of our schools.

The Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal at the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University is an attempt to achieve both the goal of talk and the goal of action. It is the home of both the journal and our work in creating a laboratory for democratic practices. The Institute is in its early stages and we will be sharing our progress with our readers of this blog in the future. In the meantime, we would appreciate thoughts and ideas from our readers on what they would like to see from such an Institute. How would it be beneficial to you. Please add your comments to this posting and let us hear from you. Also, does anyone have ideas of Foundations and other organizations that would be interested in joining our efforts and working collaboratively with us?

New YouTube clips online!

We have four new YouTube shorts from our April 30, 2008 Educational Law and Social Justice Forum, "Schooling as if Democracy Matters."

Clip 1: ACLU Staff Attorney Aaron Caplan discusses the history of legal decisions leading up to the Supreme Court's 2007 decision in Morse v. Frederick, also known as the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case.



Go to the video on YouTube.

Caplan's original article, "Visions of Public Education in Morse v. Frederick," first appeared in our Winter 2008 issue, "Schooling as if Democracy Matters."

Clip 2: Whatcom Day Academy educator Vale Hartley discusses democratic practices in her classroom as part of the academy's participation in the League of Democratic Schools.



Go to the video on YouTube

Hartley's original article, "The Elementary Classroom: A Key Dimension of a Child's Democratic World" first appeared in our Winter 2008 issue, "Schooling as if Democracy Matters."

Clip 3: Western Washington University Professor Bill Lyne discusses his article "Beautiful Losers."



Go to the video on YouTube

Lyne's original article, "Beautiful Losers" first appeared in our Winter 2008 issue, "Schooling as if Democracy Matters."

Clip 4: Our panelists respond to audience questions in a brief Q & A session.



Go to the video on YouTube

View the full forum here.

Come back in a few weeks for clips from our 2009 forum, and the latest installment in our "Talking with the Authors" series!

Call for Submissions deadline approaching

Now that we're already over a week into the month of May we thought it would be nice time to remind everyone that the deadline for our most recent call for submissions is rapidly approaching.

THEME: What is the Role of Professionals in the Public Square

CONTROVERSY ADDRESSED:
Professionals in all fields -- education, business, law, medicine, journalism, social work, engineering, etc.-- bring a special expertise to the discussion of ideas in the public square of a democracy. At times, democratic decisions or views widely held by the public conflict with sound professional knowledge and other imperatives faced by the professional, and challenge the integrity of the choices that a professional must make in a particular case. Under those circumstances, the professional is left with a decision about the ethical path to follow. This issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy invites authors to compose a dilemma that pits a democratic decision or widely held view against the expertise of professional standards or other imperatives faced by a professional, examine the choices that would have to be weighed, and consider the most ethical position that should be taken. This issue of the journal invites authors from all professions to look at the dilemma from within the context of their own professions.

DEADLINE FOR MANUSCRIPTS: MAY 31, 2009
PUBLICATION DATE: WINTER 2010

Please direct your submissions to:
cep-ejournal@wwu.edu

What was the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case all about?

We have posted our second teaser interview from our "Talking With the Authors" series on YouTube.

In it, ACLU staff attorney Aaron Caplan discusses the Morse v Frederick case, in which a student in Alaska held up a banner titled "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" during the 2002 Olympic Torch Relay, and was subsequently suspended for 10 days.

Frederick, who argued that his right to free speech had been violated, took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against him in 2007.


Go to the video on YouTube.

Caplan's original article, "Visions of Public Education in Morse v. Frederick," first appeared in our Winter 2008 issue, "Schooling as if Democracy Matters."

To view Caplan's full interview, visit: http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/AuthorsTalk.shtml

The Journal is now on YouTube

In the interests of getting these educational issues to the largest audience possible, we have begun posting excerpts from our "Talking With the Authors" series. First up is former Ballard High School principal David Engle.

In the fall of 2000, David Engle became the principal of Ballard High School in Seattle. At the time, the Seattle School was implementing an integration plan that allowed families to choose which high school they would like to attend. In the event of high enrollment at a particular school, the district had made provisions for a "racial tiebreaker" to be used, giving minority groups priority over the substantial population of white students in the area. When, after the protests of many of the white neighborhoods in the Seattle area, the 9th Circuit Court ruled against use of the "racial tiebreaker," Engle resigned his position in protest.

Stay tuned for excerpts from our interview with Aaron Caplan, and our forthcoming interview with Bill Lyne.


Go to the video on YouTube.

David Engle's article, "As Our Students Watched," first appeared in our Winter 2007 issue "Jonathan Kozol's Nation of Shame Forty Years Later."

Click here to watch our full interview with Engle.

"American Indians in Children's Literature" Comments on a Recent Article in our Journal

This morning, I came across what looks like an interesting and informative blog called: "American Indians in Children's Literature." On the April 5th posting on the blog, Debbie Reese, a member of the Nambe Pueblo in northern New Mexico and a former school teacher who currently teaches in UIUC's American Indian Studies program, talks about an article that the Journal of Educational Controversy just published in its current issue. Our article was entitled, "Examining Images of Family in Commercial Reading Programs," and it was written by Judith Dunkerly and Frank Serafini. While generally favorable to the article, Debbie Reese raises some interesting questions about the author's account of Native American students in their study. We reproduce the post from her website below, so our readers can consider the concerns expressed and respond with their own thoughts.

Update: Our authors have notified us of an error in their article. The figure for Native American representation should be .9% and not 9%. We will make the correction in the article.

From the American Indians in Children's Literature Website:

Basal Readers
by Debbie Reese

Earlier today I read an article about a research study of basal readers (textbooks used to teach children how to read).

The researchers wanted to see how families are presented in the readers. Here's the citation. Click on the title to go right to the complete article.

Examining Images of Family in Commercial Reading Programs
Judith Dunkerly, M.Ed., Doctoral Student, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Dr. Frank Serafini, Ph.D., Arizona State University
Journal of Education Controversy, Volume 4, Number 1, Winter 2009

The study is definitely worth reading. Texts they studied are:

• Harcourt Trophies
• MacMillan-MacGraw Hill Readers
• Scott Foresman Reading

What stands out for me is the content related to American Indians. In the Findings section of the article, this is under "Ethnicity."

"Ethnic diversity within the basal anthologies more closely mirrored the face of American society statistically. Nineteen (40 percent) of the basal anthology selections depicted Caucasians. Characters of Hispanic and African American descent were portrayed in eleven selections (24 percent) and nine selections (20 percent), respectively. There were seven stories featuring Asian or Pacific Islanders, which made up the other 16 percent. Comparatively, the student population of the school district under study is 9 percent American Indian, 6.6 percent Asian, 28.8 percent Hispanic, 13.8 percent African American, and 49.9 percent Caucasian, figures that are closely aligned with state and national statistics (Population Reference Bureau, 2000).

"While the percentages of race representations in the basal anthologies do favor Caucasians, they are at least comparable to the statistical composition of both national and local populations. However, it is worth noting that while overall portrayals of different ethnicities are fairly representative, 45 percent of children under the age of five are minorities. Coupled with data showing that Hispanics continue to be the largest and fastest growing minority group at 42.7 million people followed closely by African Americans at 39.7 million (U.S. Population, 2006), the comparatively representative portrayal of minorities in basal anthologies will not be so in the near future, if both publishing and population trends continue along the current pattern."


I read that first paragraph several times. None of the stories portray American Indians.

The researchers say the diversity in the readers "more closely mirrored" national statistics. And, they say, the local school district (unnamed) is "9 percent American Indian."

Again, none of the selections in the readers reflect American Indian families.

American Indians are absent from the readers, but, American Indians are absent, too, from the researcher's discussion. They give us that statistic (9 percent) but don't comment on it. To be fair, Dunkerly and Serafini were not looking at Native representation. Perhaps they've written about that elsewhere, and for the purpose of this particular article, it seemed to them unnecessary to note the lack of Native people. I hope, in fact, that they've written about it somewhere, because Serafini teaches in Arizona.

Many stories in readers like the ones Dunkerly and Serafini used for their study are drawn from children's literature. In their discussion of socio-economic status, for example, the researchers refer to Cynthia Rylant's story, The Relatives Came. There's a lot of books like The Relatives Came that publishers can use to portray Native families. One terrific example is Cynthia Leitich Smith's Jingle Dancer. I should head over to UIUC's school collection to see what the basal readers we've got available look like.

Author Bill Lyne Responds To Teachers on "Beautiful Losers"

Bill Lyne, author of the controversial (naturally) article "Beautiful Losers" in our 2008 issue on "Schooling as if Democracy Matters," met with teachers, both university and secondary, and students at Bellingham High School on February 17th, 2009, to talk about the article.

The article is one of the most thought-and-argument-provoking, that we've ever published. I disagree with some of it, and I help to edit the journal. Yet I can't help but see the wisdom of his argument. Lyne's urge to "give up hope to give up despair" created quite a stir with this group of teachers and potential teachers here at BHS. Read on to see what they said.

Bill Lyne, Bellingham High School, 2/17/09

BL: I’d like to start by saying, with some sense of humility, that I hope to learn as much from you all as you might learn from me or more. I don’t know much about teaching high school. I did it for a year and I was fired. (laughter)

This article was written in response to an article by a man named Henry Giroux, in the same issue of the JEC, and it also was in response to the topic “Schooling as if Democracy Matters.” Part of my article began with this question: is there is actually democracy to be had? The other part of the article was in response to Giroux’s notion that now is the time for us to take back our schools from what he saw as mind-numbing corporate influences. I tried to pose this question: we understand that we want to take this back to something democratic, but what are we taking it from? From Dick Cheney? What is it that he imagines us taking it to?

He poses some sort of utopian path where democratic schools are the place where liberation takes place. It seems to me that American history calls that into question. I wanted to at least complicate the idea that schools have ever been that kind of place.

In the line of work that I’m in a lot of people peg me as a professional pessimist. I go around saying “everything is bad bad bad and if you think it’s good this is really bad." So often I get this question: “What do we do?”

It seems to me there are two ways to answer that. One verges toward this kind of romantic utopian thing, you know: “we must feed the children, we must live our lives honorably.” The other answer is “really, I don’t know.” And that is the more honest answer. If you look at the history of the United States, especially under a capitalist arrangement, and if you choose to work in a place like this, or the place where I work, or any public school in this country, you must recognize that these are institutions of the state. Especially in the earlier grades, the job of institutions of the state is more about indoctrination than opening minds. It’s about teaching kids the Pledge of Alliance, Columbus discovered America, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and we used to have a race problem but we don’t anymore.

You deliver some sort of usable and marketable skills, reading and writing and arithmetic, but generally speaking, what institutions of the state, a state that is designed to create a class society, are going to do is continue to reinforce the inequalities of a class society.

Working at any public school, we have to recognize that the possibilities of genuinely or fundamentally changing the society through teaching are really pretty low.

What we’re doing is bound by those restrictions and we probably get into more trouble when we deny that than admit it. Paraphrasing James Baldwin, “We can’t possibly solve all the problems that we face, but we aren’t going to solve any of them if we don’t face them.

Now, the frustration that comes with being unable to have those answers shouldn’t be turned into, “well, those answers aren’t really there.” The first shot is to articulate. That was the problem with Henry Giroux’s article: he was imagining a history of past schools that just didn’t exist.

He gave a lot of exhortation to take back our schools, but had very little practical advice about how to do that, and very little recognition of the kinds of punishments and restrictions that would actually greet anyone who might try that.

Q: There’s a lot of research hush-hush that says that the NCLB and Title 1 and basically what we’re doing isn’t really changing the gap, but is more like obscuring the world and keeping people in misery. I’d like to think that what I do here is good for the world. And now, with this article, I’m feeling rather dejected, and that’s what’s bothering me the most.

BL: Yeah, I get that a lot.

Q: Because I do believe I’m doing good. I do believe I’m making a difference.

BL: And certainly I think that’s probably true. I think that by and large, most people who choose to take jobs where you don’t get paid very much and teach people in public schools are doing really good.

I think that absolutely everybody here in any kind of school is doing good work. The point is to recognize where that work is. We might inspire individual students. We might create opportunities for individual students. But the work that we do is not going to fundamentally rearrange the gap that you’re talking about, not in terms of the gap in access to rewards in society that are created along race lines and class lines.

Which is not to put down the goodness of the work we all do, but also not to over-imagine or over-dramatize about it.

Q: That’s discouraging, but I don’t disagree with the truth of it.

BL: You know, I like to think of myself as an upbeat and cheery guy, yet everywhere I go, people say, “wow, you’re a drag.” (laughter) I think that part of what’s been beat into us is that if we can’t, as teachers, imagine that we’re changing the world, we should feel like failures. Admitting to ourselves that “look, this is a job, it’s got certain rewards and does things for me personally and I feel like I’m helping some people,” but in terms of revolutionizing the world no, I’m not doing that,” well, that can be a liberating realization. We don’t need to feel guilty about telling that truth.

If a truly revolutionary method of teaching becomes too successful it often gets crushed. When the Black Panthers were slaughtered by the state in the 1960s, it was in response not to their guns but their schools. They were incredibly successful with a lot of their programs, many of which were later adopted by the state of California, but in terms of educating the children of black inner-city America, and educating them outside of the curriculum sanctioned by the state—well that became incredibly threatening to the state, and they had a storm of fire raining down on them.

Historically, we see the problem in changing education as an “inside-outside” thing. The metaphor for that is the voting for Ralph Nader. “I’m going to vote for Ralph Nader.” You know, it just made me the nut that my friends suspected I was.

And yet, if you can’t break the status quo and put someone like Nader in office, you must start asking what the point is of voting at all.

Well, the big difference there was that we got George Bush.

This dynamic of inside and outside is one that people in our position struggle with all the time. When I taught high school—for a year in South Central LA, the students 98% black and 2 % Hispanic, with exactly one white kid—I showed up there a freshly scrubbed white boy from the suburbs there to tell them about the history of oppression.

Well, my students knew more about that stuff from the time they were four years old than I ever could. They were actually very patient with me, you know, they said: “That’s very interesting, but right now we have to get paid. You need to teach us how to read or how to do this other job skill. It’s a white man’s world, and you have to show us how to behave in a white world so that we can survive.”

That seems to be a genuine demand to be making. “I need you to deliver to me the kind of skills that were delivered to you as a matter of your birthright that will allow me to make progress within society as it’s arranged. I do not need you to be here talking to me all day about how badly society is arranged. I’ve lived that.”

Speaking again on that whole inside-outside thing, there was one brief exciting moment where I was chair of my department at my university. For years I walked around my department saying, “When I’m chair, I’m going to do this or do that,” and within days I found myself being compromised.

That’s the world of being chair. There was a very carefully circumscribed area. And if you stepped outside of that, your ability to be effective for your department became diminished. If I started screaming about what was wrong, that just made the dean and the the other chairs stop paying attention to me and my department suffered. So I had to be there making deals within the rules.

More to come from Bill's presentation.

For a Progressive President, a Very Nonprogressive Educational Policy

(Cross-posted on the Social Issues blog)


The progressive language implicit in many of President Obama's programs was no where to be found in the educational policy that he unveiled recently in his speech on education. Rather than an imaginative vision on what we need for public schools in a complex 21st century democracy, President Obama fell back on the language of neoconservatives for things like rewarding teachers and more school choice at least through more charter schools. Essentially, his proposal for new mechanisms for making changes in the educational system lacked any discussion on what these changes were meant to accomplish. For example, a recommendation for more charter schools is a rather neutral suggestion. The real question is: for what purpose and to what end? That requires a much deeper conversation about the public purposes of education for a democracy that is constantly reinventing itself. For some, it is an opportunity to introduce new ideas and innovative approaches. For others, it provides an avenue for choices within our public school system that can meet the diverse needs, aspirations and talents of our children. For still others, charter schools have been seen as a path to privatization and the dismantling of the public schools and teacher unions.



But more importantly, lurking behind President Obama's educational policy are the silent assumptions that have controlled the national debate for decades. A genuine national discussion on educational reform requires that we start to discuss that which has been undiscussable, namely, that the language of the market place has become the language of education. Students are talked about as the human capital that keeps the national economy competitive. But, as educational critic, John Goodlad, has constantly pointed out from surveys taken to determine parents' desires for their children, parents' visions are not limited to seeing their children as human capital or workers for a competitive market force. They consistently say that they want their children treated as whole human beings, nurtured in their growth, inspired in their dreams, and empowered in their civic voice. Of course, the usual retort here is that such goals are not inconsistent with the goal of producing a working force for the labor market. That is true. And so is the response by parents whose children have been marginalized in the schools. They very rightly are demanding that their children succeed in a competitive labor market at the same level that the children of the more privileged have succeeded. Both of these responses are legitimate. But the force of the arguments is to silence the national conversation that we should be having. In a public school system that serves both democracy and capitalism, the language of the market place prevails and all other discourses are on the edge. It is that conversation that the public needs to have. Nations are guided by the stories they tell about themselves. What story are we telling ourselves about the public purposes of our schools?


Readers who are interested in looking at the issues associated with "Schooling as if Democracy Matters," may want to read our Volume 3 Number 1 issue of the journal.

A Scholar and a 14-Year-Old Take on the Issue of Poverty

With our winter 2009 issue on "The Hidden Dimensions of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty and Education" now being read and discussed by our readers, we thought we might add two more sources that we recently found on the web. One is by a scholar, the other by a 14-year-old on YouTube. We invite your thoughts.

David Berliner's report, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success

14-Year-Old Student, John Wittle, looks at his school's invitation to Ruby Payne on YouTube, Ruby Payne Does Not Understand Poverty

Check them both out.

The Obama Effect?

At the Journal, we have long been concerned with the effects of race and poverty on NCLB test scores. Our current issue addresses this theme in depth, while Jonathon Kozol, subject of our second issue, has famously criticized NCLB and its relation to economically and racially disadvantaged areas--and criticized leadership that ignores those findings. See his book The Shame of the Nation (267)

Famous Harvard and Princeton studies on race and performance backed up Kozol's criticism with an even more surprising finding that “it is the targets of a stereotype whose behavior is most powerfully affected by it. A stereotype that pervades the culture, like "ditzy blondes" and "forgetful seniors" can make people painfully aware of how society views them--so painfully aware, in fact, that knowledge of the stereotype can affect how well they do on intellectual and other tasks.”

The effects of these findings, when regarding African-Americans, may see a drastic change from President Obama’s election.

In this article, researchers at the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management administered a standardized test to a mixed group of blacks and whites four times during the process of Obama’s run. The further the president got, the better the minority subjects of the study did. They were told that the exam was “created by the Massachusetts Aptitude Assessment Center, and is used as a diagnostic tool to assess verbal problem-solving ability”—a ruse meant to activate the stereotype that blacks don’t do as well as whites on aptitude tests.

After Obama’s election, among students who watched the speech, the achievement gap was roughly equal.

The possible consequences of this study, though it will require follow-up studies to confirm the hypothesis, are incredible. Obama’s example as a black man in power might serve as a psychological reinforcement to the black children of America who disproportionately attend underfunded, poverty-ridden schools that underperform on standardized tests. A picture of a black President might be worth a thousand motivational words. In the spirit of the Obama campaign, we will hope.

Creative Lessons by Woodring College of Education Students

In our winter 2008 issue on Schooling as if Democracy Matters, we published an article on the curriculum developed at Teachers College, Columbia University around the Hurricane Katrina tragedy. Using the HBO documentary by Spike Lee, Margaret Crocco and Maureen Grolnick developed a curriculum called Teaching the Levees: a Curriculum for Democratic Dialogue and Civic Engagement. The goal was to use a contemporary social issue in order to help students engage in a democratic dialogue that the event raised.

Students at the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University have created lessons that bring content from their own discipline (English, social studies, science, art, music, math, physical education) to the democratic discussion that they are trying to generate. We have created this public space for students and teachers to share their ideas. We also invite teachers and students from other parts of the nation and around the world to enter into our conversation. We will keep adding to this post over the years as more and more people share their comments.

Here's a more fundamental question to reflect upon as well: Can we imagine a high school experience that integrates the disciplines around major social issues and engages students in democratic dialogue and civic action? Our very fragmented approach to the study of high school subjects is deeply entrenched in our system. Does this approach prepare all students adequately to participate in a 21st century democracy that is constantly reinventing itself? Can our schools create a public that is capable of sustaining this republic in an increasingly complex and global world? Add your thoughts.

A New Issue of the Journal is Now Online!

The Journal of Educational Controversy is proud to announce that our Winter 2009 issue, "The Hidden Dimensions of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty and Education," is now online.

This timely edition explores poverty from a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives, and features contributions from:

-Muhammad Yunus (2006 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize)
-C.A. Bowers
-Kay Ann Taylor
-Nandini Gunewardena
-Rachel Jackson
-Jennifer C. Ng, & John L. Rury
-Venus Evans-Winters & Bevin Cowie
-John Korsmo
-Judith Dunkerly & Frank Serafini

Be sure to check our blog for supplementary material in the next few weeks, and, as always, if an article so moves you we encourage you to submit your thoughts for possible inclusion in our Rejoinders Section.

Where are Teachers' Voices in the National Education Debate?

From the Bellingham Herald http://www.bellinghamherald.com/291/story/786150.html
Print version - Sunday, February 8, 2009

Feb, 7, 2009

(Cross-posted on the Social Issues blog)

Where are teachers' voices in national education debate?
LORRAINE KASPRISIN / THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

Discussions surrounding the problems public schools face have become dichotomized in the national debate with teachers increasingly demonized and their professional expertise belittled and often ignored. The recent disagreements over the choice of a new Secretary of Education in the Obama administration along with the petitions that were circulated reveal the immense animosity and polarization of that debate.

Rather than a rational conversation on a direction for alleviating the problems that face the public schools, the problem has been presented as a great showdown between the forces of "good and evil." Even the mainstream media were not immune to this seduction. Newspapers and magazines like the New York Times and the New Republic have presented the decision over a new Secretary of Education as a battle between the "new reformers" and the "old establishment."

Who are the new reformers? Apparently from these publications, they are the outsiders who wish to see the schools privatized and turned into a commodity on the free market. They cry out for high-stakes testing, accountability measures, merit pay for teachers, vouchers, and the expansion of charter school experiments. Who is the "old establishment?" They are the teachers and their unions, the education schools who educate them, and the local school districts that represent the public. They are seen as advocates for things like more equitable funding and smaller class size.

Nowhere in this debate do we really hear the voice of teachers whose relationship with children, their parents and the community are carried out everyday on the grassroots level. Ultimately, it is their actions in the classroom with children, and the understanding they bring from their professional knowledge and experiences that will really make a difference in the achievement of children.

How do we reconstruct the public debate that brings in their voice? With this in mind, I would like to raise six questions for readers to consider if we are to redirect the public debate.

-- Why are individual teachers often acknowledged while teachers collectively often demonized?
The teachers union has been projected as a huge monolithic power structure that resists any reform on behalf of children. Unions, of course, are the mechanism that workers in our society have for a chance at equal participation in the power structure. Why are teachers as workers seen as such a threat to a schooling system of a capitalist society?

-- Why are professional expertise and training seen as a threat to reform?
Why can't we talk about the nature of the professional knowledge that is required to teach effectively in a multi-cultural, multi-racial democratic society that is constantly reinventing itself? How can the institutional structures that are politically set, and out of the control of teachers, be made to be more conducive with what teachers know about the developmental learning stages of their students? Without a serious conversation at this level, the charges and counter-charges are useless and banal.

-- Why does so much of the discussion on teacher incentives rely on a business or corporate model?
The assumption that if teachers receive merit pay, they will perform better has been repeated as an unexamined mantra throughout these debates. Of course, teachers should get more pay. But all teachers deserve a decent wage for what they do. Are teachers going to be more motivated because they earn more than the teachers down the hall? Perhaps, what inspires teachers' work is the support they receive, the respect they have earned, the opportunities to learn more from each other as part of their daily work, the collegiality with their colleagues in purposeful dialogue and goal setting, and the voice of the profession in decision-making over meaningful changes that will bring about real achievements for children.
John Goodlad, the longtime critic of American schools, has called this process "educational renewal" as opposed to "educational reform."

-- Why are experiments like new charter schools articulated in the public debate as the prerogative of one side only? In reality, many teachers across the nation participate in these initiatives and are part of these experiments.

-- Why is the high-stakes accountability movement allowed to appropriate and dominate the language of accountability?
In today's climate, to argue against high-stakes testing and its effects is seen as an argument against accountability itself and used as an example of the status-quo. Why can't we take a serious look at what accountability can and should entail as a moral responsibility to assure equal chances for all our students rather than success on a high-stakes test?

-- Why can't we openly and honestly discuss the class disparities in this country and the legitimate concerns of parents and communities over the achievement gaps in student populations without using it for exploitation and a pretext for privatization and corporate gains?

-- Why can't we openly and honestly debate the public purposes of schooling in America? If advocates for the privatization of schooling really want to take public education in this direction, then let's debate what that means for the future of this nation's public school experiment.

At the beginning of President Obama's new administration that harbingers change and collaboration, a new national conversation is needed that brings all voices to the table. The dichotomization, polarization, simplification, and demonization must give way to a new, more inclusive public conversation that includes the voice of teachers and their communities on a grassroots level.

Lorraine Kasprisin is a professor in the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University. She is also president of the Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal and editor of "Journal of Educational Controversy."

What Does it take to Eliminate the Achievement Gap for African American Students?

In our winter 2007 issue, the Journal of Educational Controversy had a special section on Washington state politics. Among other articles, we published the position papers prepared by the Multi-Ethnic Think Tank (METT) in Washington State. The Multi-Ethnic Think Tank is an umbrella group that comprises individual think tanks - African American, Asian and Pacific Islander American, Hispanic American, Native American and Low Socio-Economic think tanks. It is a community inspired coalition aimed at making a difference for the education of its children who are struggling in our public schools. For a personal critique, read Thelma Jackson’s separate article, “Educational Malpractice in Our Schools: Shortchanging African American and Other Disenfranchised Students” in our journal’s Volume 2 Number 1, Winter 2007 issue on the theme, Jonathan Kozol's Nation of Shame Forty Years Later.

For readers who are interested in learning about the state's response to these ongoing community concerns, we have an update. During the 2009 legislative session, the Washington State Legislature is considering the problem of the achievement gap. A statewide advisory committee, which included some prominent METT members like Thelma Jackson, was created following passage of House Bill 2722 in the 2008 legislative session. Its charge was to investigate the African-American student achievement gap and recommend solutions to the problem. The committee has now presented its report, "A Plan to Close the Achievement Gap for African American Students," to the legislature. In a press release on the website of the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Mona Humphries Bailey, committee co-chair, says "We want to make sure that our State's 57,700 African American students are no longer left behind. We want to make sure that the system cares about them and that it sees them in all their individuality and potential." A copy of the report can now be read online.

What Ever Happened to the Schools in Post-Katrina New Orleans?

Editor: In our winter 2008 issue on "Schooling as if Democracy Matters," we published a review of Kenneth Saltman's book, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools. In his post below, Saltman adds to the conversation that was started by Margaret Crocco in her update on "New Orleans and its Citizens: Three Years Later" by sharing his views on what is happening to the public school system in New Orleans since the Katrina tragedy. We invite our readers to read the review, Smashed, by Christopher Robbins and join in the conversation.

A Post by Kenneth Saltman

BEWARE TALES OF PROGRESS THAT ERASE THE FULL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION AND DISPOSSESSION IN THE NEW ORLEANS' SCHOOLS

In my book Capitalizing on Disaster I detailed the vast experiment in neoliberal privatization orchestrated by right-wing think tanks and politicians in the wake of Katrina. I covered the imposition of a massive voucher scheme, no-bid contracting and corporate corruption by those with ties to the Bush administration such as Alvarez & Marsal and Rome Consulting, the dismantling of the public system and union by a for-profit consulting firm, and the replacement of public schools with a charter network. As I argued in the book this has to be understood as a concerted effort to dispossess poor and working class predominantly African American citizens of their communities by the business and political elite of the city and state and to turn them into investment opportunities. I contend that this is part of a much broader movement for privatization and deregulation which is not only about economic redistribution but about the redistribution of political control over public goods and services. As well, I argued these initiatives only make sense in relation to a history of racialized disinvestment in public services and infrastructure that resulted in a city with the least funded urban school system in the country. In short, I argued that the political right capitalized on natural disaster and in the process exacerbated the human made disasters that predated the storm. The consequences were a radical shift in educational governance and material resources away from those most in need of them. It seems to me that honest discussion about the state of the New Orleans schools and communities must take seriously this history and recognize that what is at stake in this is more than a vague notion of educational quality (especially the anti-critical kinds defined narrowly by tests scores) but struggles over material resources and cultural values by competing classes and groups. In other words the role that public schools play for a society theoretically committed to democracy has to be considered. When business and political elites wrest control of schools and communities from the public and then describe it as a gift to the public (the "silver lining in the storm") we are hardly approximating those collective ideals.

New Orleans and its Citizens: Three years later

Editor: Authors Margaret Smith Crocco and Maureen Grolnick, whose article, Teaching the Levees: an Exercise in Democratic Dialogue, appears in our winter 2008 issue of the journal, give us an update on their groundbreaking curriculum that ties it to the artistic efforts to give voice to Katrina's victims. Margaret Crocco writes that our readers will find this quite different from what they might read in the popular media. We invite readers to respond to her post or to her article from our Volume 3 Number 1 Issue on "Schooling as if Democracy Matters."

This posting is cross-posted on the Social Issues blog.

A POST FROM AUTHOR, MARGARET SMITH CROCCO

NEW ORLEANS AND ITS CITIZENS: THREE YEARS LATER

Margaret Smith Crocco, Teaching The Levees (Teachers College Press, 2008)

Anyone who saw Spike Lee’s masterpiece, When the Levees Broke, will remember its “star” – Phyllis Montana LeBlanc. Straight-shooting, opinionated, and profane, Phyllis and her husband, mother, sister and autistic nephew were stranded in New Orleans on August 28th 2005 as Katrina struck. Like many native New Orleanians, they discounted the warnings of a massive hurricane until it was too late to evacuate. As the water level in their apartment rose in the days after the storm hit , the rescue helicopters flew past, ignoring their cries for help and moving on to those in even more dire circumstances. Phyllis and her family climbed onto refrigerators to float through water infested with alligators and snakes the two blocks necessary to reach higher ground. Phyllis and her husband spent nearly three years in a FEMA trailer while the rest of her family was relocated to Houston so her nephew could get schooling.

Spike Lee’s decision to tell the story of Hurricane Katrina through stories such as Phyllis Montana LeBlanc’s was not just a brilliant directorial decision (witness the scores of cinematic awards the film has garnered) but a shrewd maneuver in addressing what’s been called the “psychic numbing” and “compassion fatigue” that often accompany natural disasters, genocides, and other human tragedies. If Lee’s intention was to provoke empathetic responses for Katrina victims, his strategy was on target, according to decision researcher Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon.

According to psychological research, we are far more likely to be motivated to help out in the face of disaster if we can put a human face on events. Slovic notes that “images seem to be the key to conveying affect and meaning, though some imagery is more powerful than others” (p.8). He goes on to comment that, “When it comes to eliciting compassion, the identified individual victim, with a face and a name, has no peer” (p.8). For a copy of the full article, see: http://journal.sjdm.org/jdm7303a.pdf

Of course, Spike Lee offers not just one face and one story but well over a hundred faces and stories in his film, which is effective in conveying the multiple perspectives on these events. Over four hours of such narratives, interspersed with analysis and commentary by experts on poverty, race, science and politics, viewers of When the Levees Broke get a full sense of the human dimension, suffering, and costs of Hurricane Katrina. The film makes an extraordinary effort to use art to address the potential collapse of compassion in the face of so much misery.
In an appearance at Teachers College, Columbia University in September 2007 at the launch of the “Teaching The Levees” project, New Orleans City Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell noted her gratitude for the tremendous outpouring of assistance from citizens—of all ages, races, and regions—to help New Orleans’ residents get on with life and rebuild (http://www.teachingthelevees.org/?page_id=90 ). I do not claim that Spike Lee’s film can be credited as the cause of this generosity. But to the degree that his film got the story out in such a compelling fashion on HBO, it is clear that When the Levees Broke gave a human face—or many human faces--to this epic story.

So, now, three years later, how are Phyllis Montana LeBlanc and New Orleans faring? Have compassion and volunteerism trumped the government indifference and belated investment in rebuilding to provide solace, support, hope, and meaningful recovery for residents of the city? Well, as you can imagine, the answer is a mixed one.

According to the Brookings Institute, which has produced an annual report on conditions in New Orleans since 2005 (http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2007/08neworleansindex.aspx ), positive signs can be found. In a report issued in late August 2008, Brookings indicated that New Orleans’ economy is improving; the population is returning slowly to a growing job sector; the trolley cars on Canal Street are reappearing (http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-0/122768062889950.xml&coll=1 ). Eighty-seven public schools have been opened, including many new charter schools, with many new teachers recruited from around the country. Affordable housing, however, especially for low income service workers in the city, remains a big problem. One prominent home rebuilding project (http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/081211PittHouses.asp) has been underwritten by Brad Pitt whose “Make it Right Foundation” (http://www.makeitrightnola.org/) has garnered extensive publicity for the architectural distinction of its homes as well as their high-profile celebrity backer.
The Brookings report also notes that “nonprofit groups, business leaders and some politicians are working hard to repair the city’s buildings and improve the criminal-justice and health-care systems.” Groups such as Women of the Storm, levees.org, Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans, Catholic Charities, and the Citizens Road Home Action Team, among others, are leading the recovery effort on multiple fronts.

Nevertheless, the progress of recovery has proceeded at what seems a glacial pace to many residents of the city. The Californian hired to help rebuild New Orleans, Ed Blakely, has been the subject of much criticism for the slow pace of the recovery, his absenteeism, and the lack of visibility of Mayor Ray Nagin in the process (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/us/01orleans.html?_r=2&ref=us&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin). Unsurprisingly, many politicians have come in for criticism, at the city, state, and national levels. Many residents are hoping the Obama-Biden administration brings new attention to the city’s plight.

And what about Phyllis Montana LeBlanc? She wrote a book, which appeared in August 2008, while living in the FEMA trailer. Entitled Not Just the Levees Broke: My Story and After Hurricane Katrina, the book was published by Simon and Schuster. LeBlanc did an interview with Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/08/27/phyllis_montana_leblanc/ ) and seems to have used her faith and family to sustain her throughout the ordeal of the last three years. Spike Lee wrote the forward to the book, and it seems that her colorful personality and commentary have made her into something of a celebrity herself.

Despite the positive aspects of this update on New Orleans three years later, it is also clear that the devastation wrought by Katrina and the continuing debate about how best to remedy the damage and prevent further disasters continue. Let me conclude by turning to other works of art, completed and in progress, which can also be seen as efforts to put a human face on tragedy.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Trouble the Water, the “home movie” shot by self-professed “street hustler” Kim Roberts and crafted by professional filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal (http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/08/21/trouble_the_water/), which won an award at the Sundance Film Festival. In the works is The New Orleans Tea Party by Marline Otte and Lazlo Fulop (see a clip on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzA4UR-w8PQ ). This film gets at some of the controversies related to rebuilding—by whom and for whom and to what end, with footage shot in early 2008. It also addresses issues of politics—global and local related to Katrina—and the effects of climate change on the city. Finally, the award-winning filmmakers who created Revolution ’67 (http://www.bongiornoproductions.com/REVOLUTION) about the 1967 race riots in Newark, New Jersey, Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno and Jerome Bongiorno, are working on a “love story” set in Venice and New Orleans—two cities threatened with extinction in the face of global climate change and rising sea levels. If a love story can make the threat of global climate change and a world that is too “hot, flat and crowded” (http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/hot-flat-and-crowded), as Tom Friedman puts it, real to us, then it will offer an interesting twist on Slovic’s theory that putting a human face on disaster is the best way to trigger a response in action.

If there’s any good news in looking back at the tragedy of Katrina, it may lie in enhanced recognition of the need for more democratic dialogue and civic action about the problems we face as a nation. We can thank enlightened filmmakers like those mentioned here for helping motivate us to engage in both talk and action. With a new administration coming to Washington, DC in January 2009, we can hope that they will join the citizens of New Orleans and concerned citizens across the country in taking the steps necessary to prevent other such disasters and help residents of the Gulf Coast to continue to recover from the lingering problems associated with Hurricane Katrina.

Education Policy Blog: I blog because I teach

Education Policy Blog: I blog because I teach

For those new to our electronic journal and our blog or those new to blogging itself, I thought you might enjoy this thoughtfully-written reflective piece from the Education Policy blog. One of the goals of our journal and our blog is to encourage scholars, teachers and other educational professionals to enter into the public debate about education as "public intellectuals." Likewise, we believe that a vital democracy requires an informed and engaged public who enters into these serious discussions with those you spend their lives trying to live and understand the deeper meaning of the public purposes of education in a democratic, pluralistic society. As the blogger in this piece writes, blogging can be a means for "connecting oneself to real debates in the real world."

What is the Real Pedagogical Value of the Obama Election?

Editor: Author William Lyne, whose article, "Beautiful Losers," appears in our winter 2008 issue of the journal, updates his thoughts in light of the Obama election. We invite readers to respond to his post or to his article from our Volume 3 Number 1 Issue. Watch for the upcoming video interview with Professor Lyne in our “Talking with the Authors” section of the journal.

A POST FROM AUTHOR, WILLIAM LYNE

MEET THE NEW BOSS . . .

“I want to know, Which side is the federal government on?”

John R. Lewis, in 1963, long before he went to Congress

When Congressman Lewis shifted his support from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic primaries, he said that he realized he had been on the wrong side of history. And certainly the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States is historic.

Obama is generationally, geographically, and philosophically not of the Civil Rights or Black Power movements. The most visible claims he has on neighborhood or movement street cred come from his wife and his former preacher. There was a telling moment at Obama’s first press conference after the election. The reporter who stood up to ask the obligatory “What kind of dog are you gonna get the kids?” question had her arm in a sling. Obama asked her what had happened and she said that she had hurt herself in the crowd in Grant Park on election night. Obama quickly reassured everybody that hers was probably the only injury in the park that night. Forty years earlier, Grant Park had been the site where police had arrested, beaten, and gassed demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention. Almost reflexively, Obama was doing what he had done throughout his campaign—letting people know that, while he might occasionally reach for the rhetorical figures of Martin Luther King or allude to Rosa Parks, he was not Bobby Seale, he was not the kind of Black president who was going to make the kinds of demands of a racist country that could lead to any kind of conflict. You needed a ticket to get into his Grant Park party.

And yet, once we get past the new president’s diasporic, multi-racial, and politically centrist identity, it is clear that personally he owes a great, great debt to the movements he distanced himself from and the hundreds of years of African American resistance, tenacity, and struggle that came before them. This guy is hard and he’s cool, an inheritor of Black American traditions that began with the Middle Passage. While every other politician in the presidential race (including Obama’s future running mate and his new Secretary of State) regularly put their foot in their mouth, some of them on a daily basis, Obama slipped up maybe twice. And one of those times, the time he talked about the people who express their internalizing of ruling class ideology by clinging to their god and their guns, he was both gracefully alliterative and right. The Obama campaign had a sleek, unsentimental discipline that was more reminiscent of the Tuskegee Airmen or the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment than it was of a U.S. mainstream political party. In order to beat the very formidable white structures of the Clinton machine and the Republican party, in order to succeed as a Black man in a very white institutional setting, Barack Obama had to be twice as good, three times as smart, and infinitely harder than anyone else. And he owes much of his ability to be all that to the many thousands gone before him in African American freedom struggles.

But as president, he’s not likely to end up much different from the rest of them. Sure, he will openly violate the constitution far less than Dick Cheney has, he won’t be the televised train wreck that Bush is, and he probably won’t have a weakness for blowjobs in the Oval Office. It will be refreshing to have a president who is thoughtful and smart and more competent staff will run government agencies and various social policies will move more toward the center. But at the end of the day, he’ll still be a president. And in our current political arrangements, no one gets within sniffing distance of a legitimate shot at the presidency without fully committing to the job description of steward of ruling class interests.

The only slim chance of genuine systemic change lies with the new electorate that played such a large role in Obama’s election. The millions of new voters who made Virginia and North Carolina blue and Karl Rove’s politics of hate irrelevant could not have been turned out without the reinvigorated infrastructures of various progressive political movements in this country that would not have worked as hard for any other candidate. The question now is, Will those movements who made Obama possible hold him accountable? And the answer is probably not. The energy that could bring real change began to dissipate in all those cathartic, teary celebrations on election night. Mardi Gras festivals are for letting the steam out of revolutionary engines. Instead of organizing in a forceful way to put real change on the table, the Obama electorate is punching its information into Obama databases, turning its eyes toward a symbol and chanting slogans of hope. And doing this in the face of overwhelming evidence that the new administration is going to be about business as usual. There is not one genuinely progressive or different face on any of the Obama teams. Eight years from now, we won’t still be fighting hopelessly stupid wars, but we will still have an imperialist and oppressive foreign policy. Health care will be a little bit more accessible, but it will still be driven by profit and millions will still not have it. There will be more jobs but they won’t be good ones. The bankers and CEOs will have retreated from their current embarrassment back to their corporate jets and private dining rooms. And in the genuinely immiserated regions of capital, the difference between Bush and Obama will not be noticeable.

So if the Obama election is going to have any pedagogical value at all, we must ground it in specific discussions of real American history, not a lot of empty blather about democracy, possibility, and hope. Instead of dumb liberal platitudes about transcending race, we should talk about the specific African American traditions, movements, and ancestors that made Barack Obama possible. We should put the Obama phenomenon in the context of slavery and rebellion, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the Black Radical Tradition around the world. We should teach about American political power outside of individuals, charisma, and personality, showing that Barack Obama isn’t going to lead us to the promised land any more than Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. And we should cast some light on the genuinely progressive movements that made Barack Obama possible and will inevitably be further undone by him. We need to clearly delineate what the sides are and show just exactly which side the federal government is on. John Lewis crossed over to the wrong side of history when he left SNCC for the DNC. Leaving the Clinton band to comp for Barack Obama didn’t get him back.

From Poetry to Praxis—Even in Public Schools

A POST FROM AUTHOR, MAXINE GREENE, Teachers College, Columbia University

From Poetry to Praxis -- Even in Public Schools

That amazing Tuesday night not too long ago showed us a variety of human responses—all triumphant, but diverse and different. We were not seeing a mere crowd (massive as it was) but looking at-or looking with—and feeling our hearts go out to individuals. The young, shouting and waving their arms, resembled a rock concert audience, caught up in rhythms, in communal delight. The older people—John Lewis, Ophra Winfrey, Jesse Jackson, the hundreds whose names we could not know—were caught up in their memories. They were memories of marches, dogs, police clubs, fire hoses, beatings, moments of civil disobedience and the sound of "I have a dream." The poetry of the moment, the sense of possibility, even in a Birmingham jail. Dr. King said that he might not be with them when they reached the top of the mountain with its view of freedom beyond the gathering clouds and the deaths and suffering. There was the death of Dr. King, and the song that kept sounding; "Deep in our hearts we are not afraid; we shall overcome some day."

How little has been taught in most schoolrooms. How seldom has the very word "overcome" been heard? Teachers and their students may know the words, but the throbbing meanings are too often lost. Few have been freed to feel the histories embedded in those words or to consider what they have been called upon to do.

Too few have been awakened enough to think about playing a part in the "community in the making" Dewey called "democracy." I refuse to attribute this neglect to any sort of determinism, although I am aware of the corporate interests, the "buy out" deceptions, the stiffening "power elite." There are a range of contingencies, many of them dehumanizing. There are cultures of silence, "savage inequalities." President-elect Obama spoke eloquently of change and left its direction and particulars for us to define. "Yes, we can---" This is surely a responsibility of educators, those committed to enabling the young, through dialogue, through shared action, to choose themselves as persons, as members, as people with a sense of agency with a sense of new beginnings. "Becoming different," as Dewey said, "becoming human," Freire said, urging learners to name their worlds, to engage in reflective praxis—to transform, to change.

Editor: Many of you will remember our journal's very first prologue, "From Jagged Landscapes to Possibilities," that marked the inaugural issue of our journal in 2006. The article was written by Maxine Greene, who was the inspiration for this journal. We are pleased to announce to our readers that our upcoming winter 2009 issue will be dedicated to Maxine's life and work. The theme for the issue is: "Art, Social Imagination and Democratic Education."

From our first editorial:

"As my mentor and teacher at Columbia University, Maxine taught me to confront the complexities and contradictions of life with all our human capacities. Not only reason and rational inquiry but imagination, poetry, humane impulses, empathy, and the courage to choose and act in a context of uncertainty were all important in keeping our ideals and humanity alive. As the authors for this journal tackle individual controversies and dilemmas in future issues, Maxine gives us a larger framework within which to see the meaning of our work and writings. How do we live a life in a world of uncertainty, ambiguity and contradictions? What life are we preparing the young to live? How do we help the young to live a life of agency in a world of uncertainty? How do we help them to confront the inevitable controversies that life in a pluralistic, democratic society will present without falling into despair, apathy, or nihilism, or alternatively, clinging to a comfortable but illusionary certainty? Perhaps, in some small way, our journal will provide a forum for examining the complexities of teaching, learning, and becoming in the modern world."
Lorraine Kasprisin

Democracy and the Obama Presidency

As the editor of the Journal of Educational Controversy, I would like to welcome you to our new blog. Although our journal has a rejoinder section for formal, refereed responses, we thought there needed to be a public space for more spontaneous discussion. Our current issue on "Schooling as if Democracy Matters" appeared before the historic events of November 4th that saw the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Henry Giroux, who wrote the article, "Education and the Crisis of Democracy: Confronting Authoritarianism in a post 9/11 America," for that issue of our journal has posted a follow up in light of the Obama election. We have decided to publish it as a separate post and invite our readers to contribute their comments and responses.

POST FROM AUTHOR, HENRY GIROUX

Obama and the Promise of Education

Needless to say, like many Americans, I am both delighted and cautious about Barack Obama's election. Symbolically, this is an unprecedented moment in the fight against the legacy of racism while at the same time offering new possibilities for addressing how racism works in a post-Obama period. Politically, I think it puts a break on many authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies operating both domestically and abroad, while offering a foothold not only for a fresh critique of neoliberal and neoconservative policies but also an opportunity to reclaim and energize the language of the social contract and social democracy. While the Bush administration may have been uninterested in critical ideas, debate, and dialogue, it was almost rabid about destroying the economic, political, and educational conditions that make them possible. In the end, the Bush administration was willing to sacrifice almost any remnant of democracy to further the interests of the rich and powerful, especially those commanded by corporate power. The Obama administration will fail badly if it does not connect the current financial and credit crisis to the crisis of democracy and its poisonous undoing by commanding market forces. Corporate power, rather than simply deregulation, has to be addressed head on if any of the ensuing reforms undertaken by the Obama administration are going to work. Similarly, the social state has to be resurrected once again against the power and interest of the corporate state, and that battle is not just economic and political but also pedagogical. Of course, the last thing we need is to overly romanticize the Obama election. We don't need lone heroes offering a path to salvation and hope. Obama's victory is not about the gripping story of his personal journey and ultimate victory as a Black man, but about the emergence of a certain moment in history when not only small difference matter, but new possibilities appear for making real claims on the promise of democracy to come. What this historic event should make clear is the necessity for various progressive and left-oriented groups to get beyond their isolated demands and form a powerful progressive movement that can push Obama to the left rather than allow him to drift to the center and right. Of course, this means that progressives will have to do more than embrace a language of critique, they will also have to engage in a discourse of hope but a hope that is concrete, rooted in real struggles, and capable of forging a new political imagination among a highly conservative and fractured polity. This is an especially important time for educators. New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof recently argued that one of the most remarkable things about this election is that Obama is a practicing intellectual and that the era of anti-intellectualism so pervasive under the Bush administration may be coming to an end. Surely a message that resonates with anyone interested in the power of ideas. But there is more at stake here than an appeal to thoughtfulness, critique, and intelligence, there is also the need to rethink the relationship between education and politics, the production of particular kinds of subjects as a condition of civic life, and the ways in which new and diverse sites of education in the new millennium have proliferated into one of the most powerful political spheres in history. The most important challenge, especially for educators, facing the US in a post Obama period, is to make the pedagogical more political and take seriously the educational force of a culture that is central to creating a new citizen, one that is defined less through the hatred and bigotry of racism and the narrow commodified identities offered through market fundamentalism than through the values, identities, and social relations of a democratic polity.

What Did You Do on Nov. 5th?

Whether you were for or against Barack Obama, his election as the 44th President of the United States marks an historic moment of transition in the nation. In response to our issue on "Schooling as if Democracy Matters," we ask you, the teachers of the nation: what were you doing on November 5th? How was the classroom affected by the news? Did you have any activities to take advantage of that teachable moment? What kind of conversations took place? It is incredibly interesting--and telling--to discuss how students reacted to this election. Join in the conversation.

Welcome!

Welcome to the official blog of the Journal of Educational Controversy, an interdisciplinary electronic journal for dialogue about our nation's education. We are very excited about this blog and about the increasing debate, more lively than ever, that comes with each issue of our journal.

Aristotle said, "Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy." This journal attempts to create a common forum for change, a place in which we can get angry at the right time and for a right reason. All public matters are traced back to the purpose and practice of our public education. We need spaces for debate about education so that ideas can be produced, discussed and applied.

Our journal has received over half a million hits since we started in 2006. We publish across a variety of disciplines, and our editorial board includes professors of law, anthropology, education, sociology, English, philosophy and diverse cultural and ethnic studies. Each issue poses a different controversy that is related to teaching and learning in a pluralistic, democratic society. Previous issues' topics have included Schooling As if Democracy Matters, Jonathon Kozol's Nation of Shame 40 Years Later, and Liberty and Equality: Conflicting Values in the Public Schools of a Liberal Democratic Society. Our next issue, on Thinking and Teaching About Poverty and Class, will come out this winter.

You can read the journal here and the calls for papers here. You can also watch speeches by authors and presenters, roundtable discussions and see our rejoinder section, in which readers respond to the articles. (Rejoinders are up to 1500 words.) We hope you enjoy it, and become excited to contribute to the conversation.