Journal of Educational Controversy Blog

Washington State ACLU Achieves Settlement for Bullying Victim

2012-01-26T23:28:00.000-08:00

The ACLU of Washington State announced today a settlement for a former student who had been bullied throughout his junior high and high school years. Below is the ACLU's official announcement. Our blog has been following this serious problem in this state and across the nation.

January 26, 2012

Contact: Doug Honig, ACLU-WA

206-624-2184

Former Student Gains Major Settlement after Enduring Years of Harassment

A former student who endured severe and persistent harassment throughout junior high and high school has gained a major settlement from the Aberdeen School District, the ACLU of Washington announced today. The ACLU has represented Russell Dickerson III in a lawsuit saying that school district officials were aware of the harassment but failed to take steps reasonably calculated to end it. Under terms of the settlement, Dickerson will receive $100,000 from the district. Additionally, the ACLU will receive $35,000 in legal fees.

“Public school officials must be held accountable when they fail to meet their responsibility to act decisively when a student is subjected to harassment by his peers. This settlement sends a message to school districts statewide to take strong action as soon as they learn that a student is being bullied,” said Sarah Dunne, ACLU-WA legal director.

“I learned from my parents that you should never give up. You should fight for your rights – you don’t just walk away,” said Dickerson.

Russell Dickerson III, now 20, is an African-American resident of Aberdeen. For six years, from 2003 when he entered junior high until 2009 when he graduated high school, other students harassed Dickerson on the basis of his race, sex, and perceived sexual orientation.

At Miller Junior High, Dickerson was called names by other students and found notes in his backpack and taped to his back calling him “stupid nigger” and “dog.” Students tripped him in the hallways and threw food at him in the cafeteria. In one incident, three students pushed him to the floor in the hallway and smashed a raw egg on his head; only one of the students was disciplined.

At Aberdeen High School, the harassment escalated, with Dickerson subjected to a continuing barrage of viciously derogatory insults about his race, physical appearance, and suspected sexual orientation. Dickerson suffered physical harassment, with other students pinching and fondling his chest, spitting on his head, and throwing objects at him. Although an assistant principal discouraged Dickerson from reporting misconduct by the student’s peers, the student and his parents repeatedly reported incidents of harassment to district administrators, both verbally and in writing. Yet the district failed to take adequate steps to end the harassment.

In 2007 students in the district created a website mocking Dickerson and his perceived sexual orientation, and posted threatening racist comments on it. Students discussed the website at school. Grays Harbor Superior Court issued a no contact order between Dickerson and one of his harassers who had threatened on the website to lynch him, yet Dickerson became the target of retaliatory harassment after reporting the website to school authorities.

The school district’s failure to act created a hostile educational environment for the student. His academic progress was hindered, he was isolated at school, he felt discouraged from using his locker, and he avoided extra-curricular activities that put him in contact with his peers. Further, the student suffered extreme emotional distress, including an inability to concentrate on studies, serious depression, despair, and anxiety.

Filed in December 2010 in U.S. District Court in Tacoma, the lawsuit said that the deliberate indifference to ongoing harassment by the school district, which receives federal funds, violated federal law – Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The district’s negligent inaction also violated the Washington Law Against Discrimination.

ACLU-WA cooperating attorneys Michael Scott, Joseph Sakay, and Alexander Wu of Hillis Clark Martin & Peterson P.S. and ACLU-WA staff attorneys Sarah Dunne and Rose Spidell represented Dickerson.

What is Really at Stake in Arizona’s Ban on Mexican American Studies

2012-01-22T23:53:00.000-08:00

I have been asked to capture the essence of what is happening in the Tucson Unified School District in a few paragraphs for the newsletter and website of the Washington State Association for Multicultural Education (WSAME). I have served on the Board of Directors of that fine organization for a number of years. Check out their website to see some of the wonderful things they do.

I thought I would reprint my commentary here for our readers.

Arizona’s Ban on Ethnic Studies: The Latest Battleground over Ideology, Power, and Voice

Lorraine Kasprisin

Professor of Educational Philosophy, Western Washington University

Editor, Journal of Educational Controversy

Board of Directors, Washington State Association for Multicultural Education

The recent dismantling of the Mexican American Studies Program in Tucson, Arizona has less to do with facts over a highly successful thirteen year old curriculum taught in the Tucson Unified School District and more to do with ideological dominance and power over whose voices will be heard in a democracy.

In response to the long historical failure of the public schools to raise academic achievement and reduce the dropout rates of students of color, the Tucson Unified School District created a Mexican American studies program that would be more culturally responsive and socially relevant to the needs of the large population of Latino students in the district. By all accounts, the program has been highly successful. Readers can go to the Save Ethnic Studies website for details about audits on the program’s effectiveness. In 2010, in a highly charged political environment, the Arizona State Legislature passed HB 2281 banning any program that “prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that: promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” (Arizona Revised Statute § 15-112, 2010)

Despite the state’s own commissioned study that showed the Mexican American Studies Program fully complied with the law and had produced significant results in student achievement, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal , nevertheless, continued his pressure to suspend the program. In January of this year, faced with a multimillion dollar reduction in state aid as a penalty, the Tucson School Board voted 4-1 to dismantle the program. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is now considering a suit that was brought by students and teachers. The court found, however, that the teachers do not have standing but that the suit by students could continue. Teachers have set up a website, Save Ethnic Studies, where readers can follow the progress of the case, donate to the cause, and sign a petition.

The struggle in Arizona goes to the heart of democracy. As U.S. Rep. Raul M. Grijalva says, “This legislation against diversity might be focused on Tucson, but it has significant ramifications across the country.” (Biggers, 2011) It raises questions about who will have a voice and how that voice will be exercised. It asks whose history should be taught and how it should be portrayed. Ultimately, it raises questions about truth. Do we betray our students by presenting only a sanitized account of our history; do we pretend that this nation has never failed to live up to its ideals; do we continue to suppress voices that have been historically silenced, or more often, co-opted and appropriated by the dominant discourse. Or do we allow and encourage alternative narratives in a more inclusive democratic conversation. Public education is at the heart of these questions.

As teachers were ordered to box the censored books for storage in the Textbook Depository, one cannot help but wonder what messages were being sent by a political authority that was supposedly concerned about not promoting ethnic resentment. For young people whose encounter with these books led to self discovery, positive images of Latino identity, and transformative knowledge and action, the State’s actions must surely have been traumatizing and a lesson in the very oppression and hegemony that often defined the social conditions of their communities.

References

Biggers, J. (2011). Arizona's Ethnic Studies Ban Has National Ramifications, Warns U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, HuffPost, Posted: 5/11/11 11:00 PM ET. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/arizonas-ethnic-studies-b_b_860860.html on January 21, 2012.

Prohibited Courses and Classes; Enforcement. AZ Rev. Stat. §15-112 (2010) Retrieved from azleg.gov.

For more insights into this issue, I invite readers to visit the upcoming issue of our electronic journal, the Journal of Educational Controversy (Volume 6 Number 1) and read “The Hypocrisy of Racism: Arizona's Movement towards State-Sanctioned Apartheid” by Augustine F. Romero, Director of Student Equity and Co-Founder of the Social Justice Project, Tucson Unified School District, Arizona.

Tucson Teacher Reveals Ongoing Frustrations after the Dismantling of the Mexican American Studies Program

2012-01-21T17:04:00.000-08:00

Editor: There have been numerous articles, editorials, television interviews, etc, in the media since we first started to report on the events unfolding in the Tucson Unified School District after the dismantling of the Mexican American Studies program and the banning of certain books. But none is as revealing as the letters coming from the teachers to their supporters. Below is another letter circulating on listservs. The teacher mentions that some supporters across the nation are talking about a day of solidarity where the censored books are taught in classrooms around the country. February 1st , as the official day that the teachers are to be in compliance, is being suggested. We pass this information on to our readers so they can become aware of events as they are unfolding.

LETTER FROM TUCSON UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT TEACHER:

To my friends and all our supporters,

Let me try a few cleansing breaths before all of this.

First, I am deeply moved by the love, commitment and creativity to help, honor our plight and support our fight. Thank you all so much and I apologize to all of my friends who I have not responded to as of yet. We all are overwhelmed here in Tucson and I need a new email system for organizing all the love. Muchismas gracias y Tlazocamatli.

This week has provided more challenges. The teachers have still not received specific guidelines for curriculum and pedagogical changes that need to be made in order to be in compliance of the law. TUSD leadership has asked the site administrators to lead the process which means that my colleagues and I are all separated from each other, and have not yet come together as a group since the destruction of our program. It also is a way to divide and conquer since we are all struggling at our individual sites.

To be more specific, I meet alone with my site administration, with only my union representative as support, but separated from colleagues Maria and Ismael who also work at my school. The district leadership has done this move to wash their hands of us and any accountability to us. However, they continue to send out press releases that claim that books that are now boxed in a warehouse are not banned, and that anyone can teach critical issues like race, ethnicity, oppression, and culture, but do not mention the exception being the censored teachers in the MAS program. The double speak is unseemly and lacks honor. I am so happy that our friends around the nation are holding them accountable since the power structure in Tucson has made sure the local media tows the line. This has been the case for years.

What I can tell you is that TUSD has decreed that anything taught from a Mexican American Studies perspective is illegal and must be eliminated immediately. Of course, they have yet to define what that means, but here's an example of what happened to an essay prompt that I had distributed prior to January 10th.

{Chicano playwright Luis Valdez once stated that his art was meant to inspire the audience to social action. Illuminate specific points about social problems. Satirize the opposition. Show or hint at a solution. Express what people are feeling? The novel So Far From God presents many moments of social and political commentary.} Select an issue that you believe Ana Castillo was attempting to illuminate for her audience and write a literary analysis of how that theme is explored in the novel. Remember to use direct citations from the novel to support your ideas and theories.{Culture can play a significant role within a work of fiction. For generations in this country, the literature studied in English or literature classes rarely represented the lives and history of Mexican-Americans.} In a formal literary analysis, discuss what makes So Far From God, a Chicano novel and how this might influence the experience of the reader. Remember to use direct citations from the novel to support your ideas and theories.

The brackets indicate what I had to edit since the statements were found to be too leading toward a Mexican American Studies perspective. In plainer terms, they are illegal and out of compliance. A quote from a great literary figure, Luis Valdez is now illegal, and a fact about education in our nation's history is also illegal.

You can imagine how we are feeling, especially without any clear guidance to what is now legal and what is not, and what makes matters worse is that TUSD expects us to move forward and redesign our entire curriculum and pedagogy to be in compliance.

I cannot speak for all my colleagues but it has become clear to me that I must abandon nearly everything I used to do in the classroom and become "born again" as a teacher. At least for the foreseeable future, since the list of individuals that are waiting to pounce upon us at our first wrong step is long and filled with powerful figures.

However, we have not lost faith that we will overcome all of these atrocious, absurd, and abusive actions to our students and to learning environment centered upon love and academic excellence. Our students have already learned so much this year and this process is teaching them so much more. They are restless, ready to act and eager for their voices to be heard, and our community is equally supportive to their desires. Our lawsuit moves forward and the unconstitutionality of the law will be debated before Judge A. Wallace Tashima. Three of the four men who voted to disband our program will be accountable on November 6th since their seats on the school board are up this election. We are strong in spirit that a better day is ahead.

Lastly, there has been an idea put forward by my good friend, Keith Catone in Providence, that there should be a national day of solidarity where teachers would teach our curriculum all over the nation. I will be discussing this with my colleagues in MAS this weekend and then to Tara Mack and Keith. They have been amazing and fired-up to help, but I have had to navigate the Tempest in our classrooms and schools before more specifics come your way. The first day we are to be officially in compliance is February 1st, so that may be a wonderful, symbolic day to keep our spirit alive through the nation.

Respectfully,

Curtis Acosta

Chicano/Latino Literature Teacher (forever in mind and in spirit)

Tucson

Responses from Authors whose Books were Banned in Tucson, Arizona Schools

2012-01-17T20:05:00.000-08:00

Many of the books banned from classrooms in the Tucson Unified School District were important books, even classics like Shakespeare's Tempest. One of our favorite blogs, American Indians in Children's Literature, is collecting responses from some of the authors whose books were banned and posting them on the blog. Unfortunately, Mr. Shakespeare cannot respond for himself. Debbie Reese, who runs the blog, promises to keep adding to the list as she finds them.

To read, "Authors Banned in Tucson Unified School District Respond," go to the website of American Indians in Children's Literature.

Faced with a Multimillion Dollar penalty, Tucson School Board Dismantles Mexican American Studies

2012-01-15T19:31:00.000-08:00

Editor: After being ordered to shut down the Mexican American studies program or face a reduction of almost fifteen million dollars from state aid, the Tucson Unified School Board voted 4-1 to suspend the program. Below our readers will find links to some updated information from several different websites along with two letters from one of the teachers in the affected district that gives you some idea of the confusion and frustration that is being felt by the teachers. The letters are being circulated on listservs and we reproduce them here to bring our readers inside the current state of events. Also check out the list of books that could possibly be removed. Shakespeare’s Tempest????? Della Reese provides the list on her website, American Indians in Children’s Literature. Perhaps, the most telling comments came at the end of the article on the first website below:

The only other time a book of mine was banned was in 1986, when the apartheid government in South Africa banned ‘Strangers in Their Own Country,’ a curriculum I’d written that included a speech by then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela,” said Bigelow, who serves as curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine, and co-directs the online Zinn Education Project. ”We know what the South African regime was afraid of. What is the Tucson school district afraid of?

Who’s afraid of “The Tempest”?

Arizona's ban on ethnic studies proscribes Mexican-American history, local authors, even Shakespeare

As part of the state-mandated termination of its ethnic studies program, the Tucson Unified School District released an initial list of books to be banned from its schools today. According to district spokeperson Cara Rene, the books “will be cleared from all classrooms, boxed up and sent to the Textbook Depository for storage.”

Facing a multimillion-dollar penalty in state funds, the governing board of Tucson’s largest school district officially ended the 13-year-old program on Tuesday in an attempt to come into compliance with the controversial state ban on the teaching of ethnic studies….

To read this article, go to: http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/whos_afraid_of_the_tempest/singleton/ SALON

Tucson students confront loss of their Chicano studies class

A day after the Tucson Unified School District board votes to suspend Mexican American studies classes to avoid losing state aid, students are angry, sad and confused, a teacher says….

To read this article, go to: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ethnic-studies-20120112,0,5182077.story LA TIMES

Mexican American Studies Reading List

Cambium Learning, Inc. conducted an audit of the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson. The findings were published in May 2, 2011. The audit took place between March 7, 2011 and May 2, 2011.

The following books are listed on Appendix Item Mexican American Studies Department Reading List of the audit of the Mexican American Studies program. I am presenting the lists here, replicating the lists as shown on the audit. News stories indicate that book in the Mexican American Studies classrooms were boxed up and removed from classrooms last week. At this point it is not known if all the books listed below were boxed and removed. They were placed in storage.

To read this article, go to: http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2012/01/mexican-american-studies-department.html AMERICAN INDIANS IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE BLOG

Teaching critical thinking in Arizona: NOT ALLOWED

Very early on Saturday, January 15, 2012, I read an article in Salon that said that Rethinking Columbus and the Tempest were being boxed up and removed from classrooms in Tucson, Arizona. They were part of the curriculum of the Mexican American Studies program in the school district. Due to the objection of some people in Arizona, that program has now been shut down.

On January 13, 2012, Bill Bigelow of Rethinking Schools wrote about Rethinking Columbus being removed…….

As the day progressed, I began asking colleagues if anyone had a complete list of the books being removed. As of now (Sunday, January 15, 2012), several people are trying to find out more about the books that are being taken away….

To read this article, go to: http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2012/01/teaching-critical-thinking-in-arizona.html AMERICAN INDIANS IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE BLOG

LETTERS BY A TEACHER IN THE SCHOOL DISTRICT CIRCULATED ON LISTSERVS

Letter 1: (January 11, 2012)

An update for all our supporters:

Last night the Tucson Unified School District Governing Board voted 4-1 to immediately eliminate the Mexican American Studies program. All other ethnic studies programs are unaffected and I will know more today how this will impact our students and content of our classes. Many rumors are swirling around that the composition of the classes may change which would drastically affect our students through mass schedule changes. However, we are hopeful that they will not be so callous in this regard since it could impact their graduation status by entering a brand new class and teacher mid-year.

This optimism cannot be shared in regard to the content of our classes which we believe will be completely eliminated or altered beyond recognition. Assignment changes are expected for all of our colleagues, including the Director of Mexican American Studies Sean Arce. There is a silver lining. Hours before the vote, Ninth Circuit Court Judge A. Wallace Tashima rejected the state's request to dismiss our lawsuit claiming the law as unconstitutional and it continues to move forward. To be more specific, the students in the lawsuit were acknowledged to have standing, but the teachers at this time do not. This is great news since we are all working together for the best interest of our students and their future. My colleagues and I are more committed than ever to help the student-plaintiffs in every way possible. Thus, Save Ethnic Studies is still moving forward in hopes that we can still overturn this law in federal court and it could be as early as this spring. It is important, now more than ever, to visit our website and spread the knowledge that we will need financial support to win this case.

Last night was a small loss for our community, as well as socially relevant and culturally responsive education, but we are hopeful of victory over the injustice of this law in the months to come.

Please forgive me if I do not respond to emails quickly in the next few days. The drama and tension here is palpable. I do appreciate the words of encouragement and am confident we will win.

La Lucha Sigue!

In Lak Ech,

Curtis Acosta

Letter 2: (January 14, 2012)

First and foremost, thank you for your kind words and the positive energy you have sent our way this past week. We very much need it.

After meeting with our site administrators on Wednesday afternoon, we have been told that our entire curriculum and pedagogy must end immediately. Our students were mortified to hear the news and asked many amazing questions which we have few answers for except that the entire climate and content of our classes must drastically change.

In sum, we have been told that we cannot teach any race, ethnic or oppression themed lessons or units. However, there has been no specific guidance and since our pedagogy is also deemed "illegal" than we are not sure HOW to teach either. I asked if I could start teaching Shakespeare's The Tempest and was told no, due to the themes that are present and the likelihood of avoiding discussions of colonization, enslavement, and racism were remote.

Adding more uneasiness and first amendment chill to our lives, we are still unclear if we will be found out of compliance with the law if our students discuss themes of race, ethnicity or oppression. I will give your more details about the changes in our classrooms as this unfolds.

Lastly, we are to be frequently monitored, student work is to be collected and books were seized from our classrooms on Friday. I have included a link to an article that explores the banning of our books in more detail.

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/whos_afraid_of_the_tempest/

I am in Boston (Sat) and Providence (Sun) this weekend for screenings of Precious Knowledge so if you are in the neighborhood I will see you soon.

In Lak Ech (Tu eres mi otro yo/ You are my other me),

Curtis Acosta

Democracy Now Interview of December 29th on Arizona's Ban on Ethnic Studies

2012-01-05T23:48:00.000-08:00

Editor: In our post below, we mentioned the interview on Democracy Now with Tucson Mexican-American history teacher Lorenzo Lopez and his daughter, Korina, a high school sophomore, who are plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit to stop the ban passed by Arizona from going into effect. Also interviewed was Dr. Rodolfo Acuña, author of "Occupied America: A History of Chicanos," an important study of Chicano history in the United States. We have permission to reprint the interview in its entirety for our readers.

Tucson Orders Closure of Mexican-American School Program as Ethnic Studies Faces Nationwide Threat

Democracy Now

A daily independent global news hour

With Amy Goodman & Juan Gonzalez

December 29, 2011

An Arizona administrator has ruled that the public school district in Tucson must end its acclaimed Mexican American Studies program for grades K-12, saying it violates a new state law that bans the teaching of any class designed for a particular ethnic group or that "promote[s] resentment toward a race or class of people." But the program’s supporters say the classes push the district’s largely Latino student body to excel academically while teaching them long-neglected perspectives. We speak to Tucson Mexican-American history teacher Lorenzo Lopez and his daughter, Korina, a high school sophomore. Both are plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit to stop the ban from taking effect. We’re also joined by Dr. Rodolfo Acuña, author of Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, considered the definitive introduction to Chicano history in the United States. Dr. Acuña warns copycat laws are likely to follow in other states as part of a growing campaign against ethnic studies programs, in particular Chicano studies, throughout the country. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Lorenzo Lopez, Mexican American Studies high school teacher in the Tucson Unified School District.

Korina Lopez, Tuscon high school sophomore enrolled in a Mexican-American history class that she may never get to take.

Dr. Rodolfo Acuña, the man often called "the father of Chicano studies." He is the founding chair of Chicano Studies at California State University in Northridge, the largest such department in the United States with 30 tenured professors. Among his best-known books is Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, considered the definitive introduction to Chicano history.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to Arizona, the home of a growing debate over the future of ethnic studies classes in the public school system. Last year, Arizona passed a controversial law banning the teaching of any class designed for a particular ethnic group or that, quote, "promote[s] resentment toward a race or class of people."

School officials in Tucson defied the ban and continued offering a popular Mexican American Studies program. But on Tuesday, a judge ruled Tucson must end its acclaimed program, saying it violates the state ban. Judge Lewis Kowal wrote, quote, "Teaching in such a manner promotes social or political activism against the white people, promotes racial resentment, and advocates ethnic solidarity, instead of treating pupils as individuals."

Just before the law targeting the program went into effect earlier this year, high school students shut down a Tucson school board meeting considering a plan to cancel the courses.

PROTESTERS: Our education is under attack! What do we do? Fight back! Our education is under attack! What do we do? Fight back! Our education is under attack! What do we do? Fight back! Our education is under attack! What do we do? Fight back! Our education is under attack! What do we do? Fight back!

JUAN GONZALEZ: But as of Tuesday, Arizona’s superintendent of schools has ordered Tucson to cancel the popular Mexican American Studies program or face the loss of 10 percent of its district’s state aid, about $15 million a year. The ruling affirms a prior decision by the state superintendent of public instruction, John Huppenthal.

JOHN HUPPENTHAL: Our determination, we found that these classes were promoting ethnic resentment. They were promoting ethnic solidarity in ways that are really intolerable in an educational environment. Also think that this entire controversy was really a distraction that should have been handled at the local level, and the fact that it came to the state level is a symptom of more dramatic problems in the Tucson Unified School District.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Meanwhile, the program’s supporters say the classes push the district’s largely Latino student body to excel and teach long-neglected perspectives on Chicano history, literature and social justice. They’ve filed a federal lawsuit to stop the ban from going into effect. If the judge dismisses the case, Tucson’s accredited courses in Mexican-American studies for students in grades K through 12 will no longer be offered for the first time in almost a decade.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on this, we’re going to Tucson. We’re joined by Lorenzo Lopez, a Mexican American Studies high school teacher in the Tucson school district. We’re also joined by his daughter, Korina, a sophomore in high school. Both are plaintiffs in the lawsuit to save the program.

And in Los Angeles, we’re joined by a man many consider the the father of Chicano studies, Dr. Rodolfo Acuña, the founding chair of Chicano Studies at California State University in Northridge, the largest such department in the United States with 30 tenured professors. Among his best-known books is Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, considered the definitive introduction to Chicano history.

Let’s go first to Tucson. Let’s turn to Lorenzo Lopez, with his daughter, who is a Mexican American Studies teacher, Korina a student, sophomore. Talk about why you brought this lawsuit.

LORENZO LOPEZ: Well, we felt strongly that preserving the opportunity for our students to take a culturally relevant curriculum was important. It had a life-changing experience for myself. And we felt, as teachers, that it was important to preserve that opportunity for our students.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about this argument of the school—of the superintendent of schools and of the court that this is a divisive and teaching antagonism toward white Americans?

LORENZO LOPEZ: Well, the approach—the pedagogy that we employ is critical pedagogy, so we take an honest look at events that have taken place in the history of this country. And it’s not sugar-coated. So, in many—many people would say, "Oh, this curriculum should be reserved for the college level." But we disagree. We disagree. We feel that—we disagree with the assertion that it creates resentment. It provides a more complete look at the historical events that we cover and the historical contributions of Mexican Americans in this American fabric.

AMY GOODMAN: Korina, why is this class, the Mexican-American history class that you’re taking as a sophomore, important to you?

KORINA LOPEZ: Well, it’s very important to me because I know that it teaches a deeper understanding of history and the things you learn, and it just gives you a whole new appreciation of your community and society.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Lorenzo Lopez, I’d like to ask you, could you tell us what portion of the Tucson schools, public school system, is Chicano or Latino? And what has been the reaction in the general community to this effort by the state to do away with Mexican-American studies?

LORENZO LOPEZ: The majority of the school district, the demographics of the school district are mostly Latino. I believe they’re around 60 percent Latino. Most of the sites that we’re located in, that we teach classes in, are also a minority majority, highly Latino populations. So, one of the claims that was made was that, well, these classes are reserved specifically and only to Latino, Chicano students. And that’s completely false. I mean, a simple look at the rosters will dispel that myth.

The community, to a large extent, has been very supportive—of course, not entirely. There have been some critics locally. However, because of the efforts of a very active segment of our community, students included, as you displayed in the video earlier, we’ve been successful at retaining this opportunity for our students and future students.

AMY GOODMAN: In March, a Tucson Unified School District audit found its Mexican American Studies program gives students a measurable advantage over their peers. The audit was conducted by David Scott, the district’s director of accountability and research. In it, he wrote, quote, "Juniors taking a Mexican American Studies course are more likely than their peers to pass the [state’s standardized] reading and writing ... test if they had previously failed those tests in their sophomore year," and that "Seniors taking a Mexican American Studies course are more likely to persist to graduation than their peers." Can you explain that, Lorenzo?

LORENZO LOPEZ: Sure. Over the past few years, data has been collected from the students taking this class. They have been compared to their colleagues, to their cohorts, their graduating cohort. And this data has basically proven the effectiveness of these courses and of this program. If not for this data, I believe we would have been eliminated long ago. But the highly effective nature of this pedagogy and of this curriculum has allowed us to continue on and has honestly garnered much support in our community. It’s very difficult to argue with a highly successful curriculum and program that improves academic skills and standing for this highly marginalized segment of our community.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we’re also joined from Los Angeles by the man considered the father of Chicano studies, Dr. Rodolfo Acuña. Dr. Acuña, could you place what’s happening in Tucson in a national perspective? What does it mean in terms of multicultural studies in the United States and the general assault on the Latino community by some sectors of the political establishment?

DR. RODOLFO ACUÑA: Well, first of all, you know, the decision in Arizona was not made by a judge. It was made by a commissioner, commissioner that’s appointed by the governor and the attorney general and is an appointee, is not an elected office. So he’s not a judge. The ruling is a state ruling; it’s not a federal ruling. However, with that said, ethnic studies programs and Chicano studies programs throughout the country are under attack, but in a more subtle way in other states. They are under attack through the budget. They’re just eliminating many of the programs. Our program is, to use a very bad phrase, is too large to fail at our particular university. Right now, the ruling is not really a danger in such. The danger is that there’s going to be an awful lot of copycat laws passed in other states. That means that we’re going to have to expend an awful lot of money defending ethnic studies at the university level.

AMY GOODMAN: Your book, Occupied America, is considered the definitive introduction to Chicano history, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. The accusations against ethnic studies and Mexican-American studies, why it should be closed down, the quotes we just read, it engenders racial hatred, hostility, resentment towards whites—can you respond to this, Dr. Acuña?

DR. RODOLFO ACUÑA: Well, the state of Arizona, the superintendent of the schools commissioned a study, the Cambium study, that they paid $177,000 for, and it came back with the conclusion that it did not engender hatred, that it didn’t engender separation, it did not engender racism. So, consequently, you have experts, experts that were paid by the state of Arizona, that contradict the conclusions that have been made by the findings of the court.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of the—of Tucson having these programs in the public schools, in the high schools, as opposed to your programs are in the colleges, how many public school systems around the country have similar programs and could be affected if this movement in Arizona spreads?

DR. RODOLFO ACUÑA: I know of none. However, remember that the program in Tucson is the result of a suit. And they found that the school district was segregating Mexican-American students and that the school district was not complying with a 1970 order to desegregate their schools. So this was supposed to be part of the solution. It is still subject to federal supervision, the federal court supervision. However, the federal court has been derelict, and it has not enforced its own laws.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Acuña, why did you call your book Occupied America?

DR. RODOLFO ACUÑA: I called it Occupied America because it didn’t even refer to the United States. I said, when the Spaniards came and the Europeans came to the Americas, this was an occupation of the Americas. It was also the destruction of many cultures. Remember, the Mayan culture, the Aztec culture and many of the cultures were destroyed at that particular time, and there was an occupation. At that particular point, they lost the power of self-determination.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And also, your program at Cal State Northridge, the largest Chicano studies program in the country, how has it been able to flourish and develop such a national reputation?

DR. RODOLFO ACUÑA: Partly because we have a very good support from the students, we have very good support from the community, and you have some of the professors there that have supported us and some of the administrators that have supported us. Right now, we carry 166 sections of Chicano studies, and we have over 6,000 students a semester. But you have to remember, Chicano studies is a pedagogy. It is there to motivate students. You know, we’ve graduated more students that have gone through our classes of Mexican extraction and Latino extraction that have become doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers than the University of Arizona during the same time period. It motivates students. And the purpose of Chicano studies is to motivate students to want to learn.

AMY GOODMAN: And the content—we just have less than a minute, Dr. Acuña—of what you would describe as Mexican-American studies, as ethnic studies, and why you feel it’s important?

DR. RODOLFO ACUÑA: It’s an area studies, and you look at the information on Mexican Americans, Mexicans in the United States, through an interdisciplinary method. We have courses in literature, history, the arts, the humanities, education, and it is a multidisciplinary approach to learning.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Dr. Rodolfo Acuña, founding chair of Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge, the largest such department in the United States, with 30 tenured professors, 6,000 students. Among his best-known books, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. That does it for our show. Thank you so much to Lorenzo Lopez, a Mexican American Studies teacher, and his daughter Korina, high school sophomore, enrolled in the Mexican-American history program in Tucson that’s threatened with ending. And we’ll continue to follow it.

From: http://www.democracynow.org/seo/2011/12/29/tucson_orders_closure_of_mexican_american
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org.

Welcoming the New Year with our Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Journal of Educational Controversy

2012-01-01T16:48:00.000-08:00

We will soon be welcoming in the new year with the publication of our Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Journal of Educational Controversy. Our delay was caused by our attempts to experiment with new and innovative approaches in our electronic journal. For example, one section of our upcoming issue brings the reader inside a model school in the National League of Democratic Schools with a unique combination of print, websites, documents and video. We have over twenty videos of actual classroom practices that are embedded in the article. We also tried an experiment with our book review section. In place of one of the printed reviews, we feature a video with two professors and a school teacher discussing the book with a printed response by the author to the review of his book following the video. We believe that an electronic journal should not just be a clone of a printed journal, but should take advantage of everything this new medium makes possible.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all our readers for their loyal support of our journal. Send your ideas to us for future issues. We are also opening up our pool of reviewers. If you are interested in becoming a reviewer for the Journal of Educational Controversy, send us your vita at: CEP-eJournal@wwu.edu.

More on the Order to Close the Mexican-American Studies Program in Tucson, Arizona

2011-12-31T08:03:00.000-08:00

While you are waiting to read Augustine Romero’s article, "The Hypocrisy of Racism: Arizona's Movement towards State-Sanctioned Apartheid," in our upcoming issue of the journal (mentioned in our earlier post), check out the latest on the websites below.

1. “Tucson Orders Closure of Mexican-American School Program as Ethnic Studies Faces Nationwide Threat” Interview from Democracy Now

2. “Repeat After Me: The United States is Not an Imperialist Country—Oh, and Don’t Get Emotional About War’ From Rethinking Schools Blog

Get an Insider's View on the Events that Led to Arizona's Ban on Ethnic Studies

2011-12-25T14:43:00.000-08:00

We are getting closer and closer to the publication of our special issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy on "The Education and Schools our Children Deserve." We have been making readers aware of the various dimensions of the issue in the posts below. If you want an insider's view on the events we have been reporting on in our coverage of Arizona's ban on ethnic studies on this blog, take a look at our special, "In the News" section in our upcoming issue. The Director of Student Equity of the Tucson Unified School District, whose district was targeted by the legislation passed in Arizona to ban ethnic studies, tells us about the events that led up to the legislation. Get an insiders view from Director Augustine Romero and read the actual legislation in our upcoming issue. Dr.Romero tells his own story in the article, "The Hypocrisy of Racism: Arizona's Movement towards State-Sanctioned Apartheid."

Author Sam Chaltain Reveals his First Nominees for the World's Most Transformational Schools

2011-12-22T10:41:00.000-08:00

Editor: In the post below, we talked about author Sam Chaltain's attempt to elicit nominees for the world's most transformational schools. Here is his initial list (scroll down to the link at the bottom of the post) from the nominations sent to his website. Use the QED Transformational Change Model to decide how transformational each school is. Is your school a transformational school?

Your Nominees for the World's Most Transformational Learning Environments

by Sam Chaltain

I know most of us have already checked out for the year, but I wanted to share the nominees I’ve received so far in my ongoing search for the world’s most transformational learning environments.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve received recommendations either via Twitter or posted comments on this blog and/or Huffington Post. I’ve done my best to capture every recommendation I’ve received. If I missed yours, or if you have a new one to add, just post your comment and I’ll add it to the master list.

Keep in mind that this list, which features 58 nominees overall, merely aggregates what people have recommended. Of the nominees, 47 are schools or programs here in the United States: 9 public charter schools, 4 public charter school networks, 3 general networks, 13 public schools, 13 private schools, and 5 “others.” For the 11 international nominees, 6 could only be classified as “other” — an interesting contrast, I thought. In any case, see what you think, check them out at your leisure (and keep in mind the QED Transformational Change Model as a way of judging how transformational they are), and let’s all keep adding to the list.

Nominees for World’s Most Transformational Learning Environments

From: http://www.samchaltain.com/your-nominees-for-the-worlds-most-transformational-learning-environments

Author Sam Chaltain asks "What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?"

2011-12-21T13:32:00.000-08:00

Editor: Readers will remember Sam Chaltain's article, "Ways of Seeing (and of Being Seen): Visibility in Schools," in our special issue on "Schooling as if Democracy Matters," in our winter 2008 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy. We will be reviewing Sam's book, American Schools, The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community, in the upcoming issue. In the post below, Sam asks for nominees of the world's most transformational schools using the criteria of the QED Foundation’s Transformational Change Model?
We'd like to nominate the Whatcom Day Academy, our partner school in the League of Democratic Schools, as a transformational school. Our upcoming issue of the journal on "The Education and Schools our Children Deserve" will have an article about the school in a multi-media presentation so readers and viewers can see actual video of classroom practices. See our continuing column on other unique schools on this blog under the label "innovative schools."

We will provide a list of the nominees for transformational schools that Sam publishes in a future post. We wish to thank the author for permission to reprint his article.

What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

by Sam Chaltain

OK, people, let’s get specific: Out of all the schools in the world, which ones are the most transformational when it comes to imagining a new way to think about teaching and learning in the 21st century?

There are a lot of inspiring schools out there, so I want to repeat: which are the most transformational – by which I mean schools that are demonstrating, by policy and practice, 10 or more of the 22 core categories from QED Foundation’s Transformational Change Model?

What I find so useful about the QED model (scroll down a bit on their home page to see it) is the way it identifies the central pillars of a high-quality education, and then demarcates what each pillar looks like in a traditional, transitional, and transformational setting. In a traditional school, for example, we tend to assume the student bears the primary responsibility for learning; in a transitional environment, that responsibility shifts to the teacher (see, e.g., just about every recently proposed accountability policy in the U.S.); but in a transformational context, the responsibility is shared via a learning team that includes, and extends beyond, teacher and student.

Of course, learning teams are just one part of a holistic system of environmental conditions. That’s why, taken together, the QED change model helps clarify what we need, and which stages our own evolution will need to pass through, in order to pull K-12 schooling out of the Industrial-era model and into a new, Democratic-era paradigm.

Because that sort of clarity is in short supply, too often we hold up models of school reform that are, at best, examples of transitional progress, not transformational change.

With that caveat in place, please help me find the best set of transformational schools the world has to offer – and please ground your recommendations in the QED change model.

I’ll start the bidding with two examples, and a sample of the ways in which the school is modeling transformational practices:

Science Leadership Academy (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) – SLA is an inquiry-driven high school that opened its doors in 2006. Students at SLA learn in a project-based environment where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes.

Selected Transformational Practices:

•Philosophy: Traditional – Coverage; Transitional – Depth/Breadth; Transformational – Standards-based Inquiry

•Goals: Traditional – Test Results Targets; Transitional – Curricular goals; Transformational – Learner Aspirations & Life Options

•Assessment: Traditional – Of Learning; Transitional – For Learning; Transformational – As Learning

•Educator Development: Traditional – Re-certification Hours; Transitional – Group Learning; Transformational – Collaborative Inquiry

Riverside School (Ahmedabad, India) — Riverside offers a curriculum and experiences of engagement with the city that enables children to better understand their skills, potential, and responsibilities as citizens. It is also developing social intervention initiatives in the city to provide a wide array of activities (cultural, instructional, and recreational) that can be synchronized with the regular school curriculum.

Selected transformational practices:

•Model of Success is Based On: Traditional – The Willing and Able; Transitional – Inclusion; Transformational – Racial and Social Justice

•Context for Learning: Traditional – Classroom; Transitional – School; Transformational – Learning Community

•When/Where Learning Happens: Traditional – In School; Transitional – Coordination between in- and out-of-school; Transformational – Anywhere/Everywhere

•Student Investment: Traditional – Requirements; Transitional – Engagement; Transformational – Passion

To be sure, Riverside and SLA are just two of the schools out there doing several things really well, and being very intentional about the way they do so. What other schools are demonstrating a transformational approach to teaching and learning? And in which specific ways are they doing so?

I look forward to your recommendations and ideas.

From http://www.samchaltain.com/what-where-are-the-worlds-most-transformational-schools

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post)

What our Schools Ignore Teaching at our Peril

2011-12-18T10:05:00.000-08:00

“Only 2% of high school seniors in 2010 could answer a simple question about the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.” This statistic comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress—commonly called “The Nation’s Report Card." Why are state educational standards ignoring the teaching of the Civil Rights Movement and its history? The report, conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the publisher of Teaching Tolerance, examines the educational standards of all 50 states and the District of Columbia and finds that most states get a failing grade. Their announcement to the report reveals that “sixteen states do not require any instruction whatsoever about the movement. In another 19, coverage is minimal. In almost all states, there is tremendous room for improvement.” One wonders about other crucial areas that might be ignored like U.S. labor history, world religions, and other crucial subjects. What ideological forces shape what we learn and what we remain ignorant of? One of our reasons for publishing our upcoming issue of the journal on The Education and Schools our Children Deserve was to explore these deeper questions. We hope to open up a conversation that looks at education as the formation of a human life in all its dimensions and what that education requires.

Readers can read the SPLC 108 page report, Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011, here.

See where your state stands.

United Nations Speaks Out Against Homophobic Bullying and Violence

2011-12-17T11:17:00.000-08:00

The United Nations News Centre published two recent articles condemning homophobic bullying, violence and discrimination worldwide.

1. Homophobic bullying represents grave violation of human rights – Ban

2. UN issues first report on human rights of gay and lesbian people

When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids

2011-12-06T05:43:00.000-08:00

Here is a provocative piece from the Washington Post's "The Answer Sheet: A School Survival Guide for Parents (and Everyone Else)." The article, "When an Adult Took Standardized Tests Forced on Kids," is by Marion Brady, a veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author. Critical of today's obsession with standardized tests in the states, the author argues that "decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful."

Watch for our upcoming issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy on the theme, "The Education and Schools Our Children Deserve," that will be online soon. A frequent critic of testing, Deborah Meier, has an interesting article in this issue on what has been threatened and lost in our contemporary educational reform movement. Watch for it.

Washington State’s Unique Educational Ombudsman Office in Danger

2011-11-30T23:08:00.000-08:00

It seems as if we take two steps back for every step we take forward. In an earlier post below, we described the Office of the Educational Ombudsman in Washington State, an office that may be the first agency of its kind in the nation. We just received a letter that the office is in danger under HB 2127. Here is a portion of the letter from its office:

Last week, Governor Gregoire presented a Supplemental Budget calling for more than $2 billion in spending cuts which includes a 28% annual budget cut to the Office of the Education Ombudsman (OEO). This devastating cut will reduce our staff numbers significantly and we will not be able to serve state-wide parents, students and schools effectively. As you know our budget has been cut each year since we opened our doors in 2006, and we currently operate with 60% less of our original budget.

To date, OEO has resolved nearly 3,000 complaints and has saved millions of dollars to parents and school districts by preventing costly lawsuits and administrative hearings. We have kept students from dropping out, ensured that students learn in safe environments, and helped children with disabilities get their educational needs met. With our current budget of $547,000 a year, the return for the State’s minuscule investment is huge.

The Governor’s budget proposal is now House Bill 2127 which is currently in front of the House of Representatives and the Senate for hearings and debates. Legislators are taking public input and comments before making final decisions.

C.A. Bowers Announces New Books

2011-11-29T00:38:00.000-08:00

Editor: Readers will remember the article by C.A. Bowers in our issue on “The Hidden Dimensions of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty and Education.” The article was titled, “Rethinking Social Justice Issues within an Eco-Justice Conceptual and Moral Framework," and elicited a very spirited debate on our Rejoinders page. We would like to announce three new books by the author that we think our readership will enjoy reading. Watch for our special issue on "Sustainability and Education" in 2013. A call for papers will be announced by the end of the year.

Latest Books by C.A. BowersPerspectives on the Ideas of Gregory Bateson, Ecological Intelligence, and Educational Reforms

Perspectives on the Ideas of Gregory Bateson, Ecological Intelligence, and Educational Reforms

University Reform in an Era of Global Warming

Educational Reforms for the 21st Century: How to Introduce Ecologically Sustainable Reforms in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies

C.A. BOWERS

with chapters by

Rolf Jucker, Jorge Ishizawa and Grimaldo Rengifo

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Gregory Bateson’s Contribution to Understanding Ecological Intelligence

Chapter 3 An Ecological Intelligence Perspective on Social Justice

Chapter 4 The Democratic Nature of Ecological Intelligence

Chapter 5 How Ecological Intelligence Leads to Reframing the Origins of Moral Values

Chapter 6 How the Classroom Uses of Computers Undermine Ecological Intelligence

Chapter 7 Making the Transition from Individual to Ecological Intelligence

Other Perspectives on Ecological Intelligence

Chapter 8 Is a Systemic Education Transcending the “I” Even Imaginable: Some Reflections from German Speaking Europe, by Rolf Jucker

Chapter 9 Revitalizing the Ecological Intelligence of Andean Amazonian Communities: The Way Back to Respect, by Jorge Ishizawa and Grimaldo Rengifo

Available as a paperback or as an ebook from the Eco-Justice Press

University Reform in an Era of Global Warming

C. A. Bowers

Preface

Chapter 1 Rethinking the Mission of the University

Chapter 2 Slowing the Rate of Environmental Degradation

Chapter 3 Conceptual Double Binds that Must Be Addressed in Reforming Higher Education

Chapter 4 How the Western Philosophers’ Legacy of Abstract Thinking Marginalized Awareness of the Cultural Commons, Other Cultural Ways of Knowing, and Environmental Issues

Chapter 5 Perhaps the Most Difficult Reform to Undertake: Addressing the Linguistic Colonization of the Present by the Past

Chapter 6 The Cultural Mediating Role of the Professor—Across the Disciplines

Chapter 7 The Misuse of Academic Freedom in an Era of Global Warming

Chapter 8 The Leadership Role of Presidents, Deans, and Department Chairpersons

Chapter 9 Why the George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Theory of Metaphorical Thinking Fails to Address Linguistic Issues Related to the Ecological Crisis

Chapter 10 Educational Reforms that Foster Ecological Intelligence

Available from the Eco-Justice Press as a paperback or as an ebook.

Educational Reforms for the 21st Century: How to Introduce Ecologically Sustainable Reforms in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies

By
C. A. Bowers

2011

Preface

Chapter 1 Introduction to Ecologically and Culturally Informed Reforms in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies

Chapter 2 Teaching Ecologically Sustainable Cultural Assumptions

Chapter 3 The Classroom Practice of Commons Education

Chapter 4 The Political Context of Commons Education

Chapter 5 The Need to Move Beyond a 20th Century Orthodoxy: the Social Darwinian Thinking of Scientists, John Dewey, and Paulo Freire

Chapter 6 The Teacher’s Role as a Mediator Between the Cultural Commons and Consumer-Dependent Experiences

Chapter 7 How Computers Contribute to the Enclosure of the Cultural Commons

Available from the Eco-Justice Press as an ebook.

Institutional and Cultural Silence: What Are We Teaching Our Children?

2011-11-17T21:44:00.000-08:00

Editor: With our recent posts on the problem of bullying and harassment, we thought our readers would find this article interesting. It looks at the problem along with a number of recently related disclosures in the media within the framework of cultural and institutional silence. We thank Professor Blumenfeld for his permission to reprint his article.

Sexual Abuse and the Institutional Conspiracy of Silence

Warren J. Blumenfeld
Iowa State University

The allegations of sexual abuse and surrounding scandal, resulting in the firing of legendary football coach, Joe Paterno, and the president of The Pennsylvania State University, Graham Spanier, and the placement on paid administrative leave of assistant coach Mike McQueary, highlights in clear relief an overarching corporate/institutional culture of silence and cover up.

Whether it be allegations of sexual abuse of young boys over a 15-year period by former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky; convictions of sexual abuse on young boys and girls by priests that has rocked the Catholic Church; allegations of sexual harassment by Herman Cain, former National Restaurant Association CEO and current presidential hopeful, and reported NRA cash settlements to his female accusers; or the estimated one-in-three female soldiers who experience sexual assaults by their male counterparts and higher-ups within the military establishment, institutions frequently close ranks to protect alleged perpetrators at the expense of alleged sufferers. As they model a culture of conspiratorial silence, institutions send the defiant message that they care more about their institutions’ reputations than the alleged targets of sexual harassment and assault.

On an individual level, this is also apparent, for example, in episodes of schoolyard, community-based, as well as electronic forms of bullying. According to the American Medical Association definition: “Bullying is a specific type of aggression in which the behavior is intended to harm or disturb, the behavior occurs repeatedly over time, and there is an imbalance of power, with a more powerful person or group attacking a less powerful one.”

We seem to live in a culture in which adults often project the idea to young people that when they are the targets of bullying or when they witness bullying incidents, they must work it out themselves, and if they tell anyone, they are simply tattling.

According to bullying prevention educator, Leah Davies, however, a vast difference exists between “tattling” and “reporting.” Tattling is telling or complaining about the actions of a person or group intended to get another in trouble. Reporting, on the other hand, includes the divulging of information when an individual or others are hurt, injured, or are being injured. It is something intended to help oneself or another person.

Dan Olweus, international researcher and bullying prevention pioneer, enumerates the distinctive and often overlapping roles enacted in these episodes: the person or persons who perpetrate aggressive actions; the active followers; those who passively support, condone, or collude in the aggression; the onlookers (sometimes referred to as “bystanders”); the possible defenders; those who actually defend the targets of aggression (sometimes called “upstanders”); and those who are exposed and attacked.

Each day we all are called on to make small and larger choices and to take actions. At a homecoming dance at Richmond High School in California on October 27, 2009, for example, up to ten young men grabbed a 14-year-old young woman who had been waiting outside the dance for her father, dragged her behind a building, and gang raped her for over two and a half hours with approximately ten witnesses observing. Some even cheered on the attackers. No one notified the police. The perpetrators left the young woman in critical condition.

President Barack Obama, when asked about the events transpiring at Penn State commented that: “We can’t leave it to the system. We can’t leave it to someone else. We must take it upon ourselves to protect our children.”

So, which side are we on? This question brings to mind the truism that: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

Today as in the past, no more spot-on words were ever uttered, for in the spectrum from sexual harassment to sexual assault and rape, there is no such thing as an “innocent bystander.”

Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Iowa State University. He is co-editor of Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense), Editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge).

CANCELLED: Washington Educational Ombudsman to Speak on Bullying and Harassment on Nov. 17th

2011-11-16T03:30:00.000-08:00

We regret to inform everyone that the November 17th event with the Washington State Ombudsman that we just announced below has had to be cancelled. We are planning to reschedule the event in the spring.

I have received some inquiries asking me -- what is the office of the education ombudsman? The Office of the Education Ombudsman functions out of the governor's office and is independent of the public school system. It claims to be the "first agency of its kind in the nation."

Here is a description from its website:

The Office of the Education Ombudsman (OEO) resolves complaints, disputes, and problems between families and elementary and secondary public schools in all areas that affect student learning.

We function independently from the public school system and provide an alternative to costly lawsuits and administrative hearings. Our services are available to students from Kindergarten to 12th grade, and are free and confidential. Learn how to Request Our Services.

Our work contributes to quality public education, the closing of the achievement gap, and helps prevent students from dropping out. OEO is the first agency of its kind in the nation. Find out more in What We Do.

What is an Education Ombudsman?

OEO Ombudsmen are education professionals with extensive expertise in K-12 education, conflict resolution, mediation and family involvement in education. They advocate for fair processes for students in public schools.

How do Ombudsmen work?

Ombudsmen speak to all parties involved to understand the problem, research applicable laws and policies, facilitate and/or mediate conversations between parents and school officials, and guide all parties towards resolution focusing on what is best for the student.

Who should contact OEO?

Parents, legal guardians, students or educators who need to resolve a problem affecting a student. Also, professionals working with families who need to consult about public education.

What kinds of issues does OEO work with?

Ombudsmen tackle issues such as: bullying/harassment, suspension, expulsion, special education, enrollment, transportation, discipline, academic progress, truancy, and more.

You can learn more about the office at its website:

http://www.governor.wa.gov/oeo/

Here are some of their publications:

We Can Help

What Every Parent Needs to Know

Resolving Conflict at School

Participate in Your Child’s Education

Make the Most of a Parent-Teacher Conference

Bullying at School

How Does a School District Work?

Washington Educational Ombudsman to Speak on Bullying and Harassment on Nov. 17

2011-11-12T17:13:00.000-08:00

We are providing an opportunity for the community to learn about the problem of bullying and harassment in the schools. Every school district in Washington State is now required to adopt new state model anti-bullying and harassment policies and procedures. We have invited an expert who can provide information and answer questions. Adie Simmons is the Washington State Office of Education Ombudsman Director whose office deals with these issues. If you are in the area, come learn how these new requirements protect students from harassment and how families can get help.

Bullying andTeasing is No Laughing Matter

Thursday, November 17, 6:30 – 8:30pm

Bellingham Public Library Lecture Room, 210 Central Ave, Bellingham, WA

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal, the Journal of Educational Controversy, and the Whatcom County Chapter of the ACLU - Washington.

A Fresh Analogy for Democratic Schools and Democratic Life

2011-11-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Editor: Sometimes a fresh analogy can unplug our thinking and open avenues for new perspectives and questions. In the post below, Jim Strickland, regional coordinator of the National League of Democratic Schools, offers one such analogy. Jim's earlier post on a Declaration of Education Rights stirred some interesting discussions. Perhaps, his latest post can stimulate us to think about the "plugs" in our collective lives.

A Renewal Analogy

Jim Strickland

National League of Democratic Schools

I'm in the middle of reading an Einstein biography and was struck by how certain physical processes are mimicked in the institutional world. For example, imagine the whirlpool created as water drains from a sink. The whirlpool is a real entity, but its existence depends on the dynamic interaction between the water, gravity, rotation of the earth, and the open drain. Plug the drain (stop the dynamic process) and the whirlpool disappears.

In similar fashion, healthy, democratic schools are like these whirlpools -- products of a dynamic process, the process of continuous renewal. You can stir the water with a stick, but cannot create a sustainable entity (whirlpool) without unplugging the drain. In this analogy, I think of the open drain as the creative power of ongoing dialogue -- the bedrock foundation of the renewal process. Trying to have healthy, democratic schools (or any healthy institution) without the dynamic motion made possible by the "open drain" is an exercise in futility -- like trying to preserve whirlpools without motion.

Here's to you "plug pullers" of the world...!

Important New Report on Bullying and Suicide

2011-10-28T15:46:00.000-07:00

The Safe Schools Coalition announced a new report on bullying and suicide. We thought our readers would like to learn about it.

From the Safe Schools Coalition:

Dear Safe Schools Coalition Members and Friends:

The Suicide Prevention Resource Center has released Suicide and Bullying Issue Brief examining the relationship between suicide and bullying among children and adolescents, with Special Attention to LGBT Youth.

Legitimate source? Yes. The SPRC is supported by a grant (1 U79 SM059945-01) from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

SPRC’s Suicide and Bullying Issue Brief is a review and analysis of the literature. It examines the relationship between suicide and bullying among children and adolescents, with special attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. It also explores strategies for preventing these problems. This short publication can be downloaded at http://www.sprc.org/library/Suicide_Bullying_Issue_Brief.pdf

Bullying and Suicide--Klomek, A. B., Kleinman, M., Altschuler, E., Marrocco, F., Amakawa, L., & Gould, M. S. (2011). High school bullying as a risk for later depression and suicidality. Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior, 41(5), 501-516.

Link to Abstract -- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21793875

SOURCE: Suicide Prevention Resource Center’s The Weekly Spark, October 21, 2011

Excerpted from the brief, re: LGBT youth:

~ LGBT youth attempt suicide at a rate 2–4 times higher than that of their heterosexual peers.

~ A recent review of the research identified 19 studies linking suicidal behavior in lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adolescents to bullying at school, especially among young people with “cross-gender appearance, traits, or behaviors”.

~ LGBT youth experience more bullying (including physical violence and injury) at school than their heterosexual peers.

~ A review of the research found that the relationship between bullying and suicide risk was stronger for LGB youth than for heterosexual youth.

Excerpted from the report, re: prevention:

Comprehensive school-based prevention programs can help prevent suicidal behavior. Research and experience suggest that school-based suicide prevention programs should not focus narrowly on student education and life skills training but also include the following:

• Activities to identify young people at risk of suicide (such as gatekeeper training and screening)

• Referrals to mental health services

The evidence for the effectiveness of school-based bullying prevention programs is mixed.

Recommendations:

The following action steps may help create synergy in addressing both suicide and bullying.

• Start prevention early. Bullying begins at an age before many of the warning signs of suicide are evident. Intervening in bullying among younger children, and assessing both bullies and victims of bullying for risk factors associated with suicide, may have significant benefits as children enter the developmental stage when suicide risk begins to rise.

• Keep up with technology. Bullying often takes place in areas hidden from adult supervision. Cyberspace has become such an area. At the same time, young people may also use social media and new technologies to express suicidal thoughts that they are unwilling to share with their parents and other adults. Both bullying prevention programs and suicide prevention programs need to learn how to navigate in this new world.

• Pay special attention to the needs of LGBT youth and young people who do not conform to gender expectations. These youth are at increased risk for both bullying victimization and suicidal behavior. It is essential to respond to the needs of these young people, especially the need for an environment in which they feel safe, not just from physical harm, but from intolerance and assaults upon their emotional well-being.

• Use a comprehensive approach. Reducing the risk of bullying and suicide requires interventions that focus on young people (e.g., mental health services for youth suffering from depression) as well as the environment (especially the school and family environments) in which they live.

More Collateral Damage from the Alabama Anti-Immigration Law

2011-10-23T16:19:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press (October 22, 2011) reports that "Spanish-speaking parents say their children are facing more bullying and taunts at school since Alabama's tough crackdown on illegal immigration took effect last month. Many blame the name-calling on fallout from the law...." One can only wonder how many more are afraid to come forward.

Residents can report any incidents of bullying, threats or violence on a special telephone hotline and e-mail address that has been set up by the Justice Department.

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The problem of bullying is finally starting to gain national attention. A good film around which to start a community discussion is "Bullied, A Student, A School, and a Case that Made History." It is put out by the Teaching Tolerance folks.

Bullied: A Student, A School and a Case that Made History

Bullied is a documentary film that chronicles one student’s ordeal at the hands of anti-gay bullies and offers an inspiring message of hope to those fighting harassment today. It can become a cornerstone of anti-bullying efforts in middle and high schools.

Bullied includes:

•A 40-minute documentary film (DVD), with closed captioning and with Spanish subtitles

•A two-part viewer’s guide with standards-aligned lesson plans and activities for use in staff development

•Additional materials online

Bullied is designed to help administrators, teachers and counselors create a safer school environment for all students, not just those who are gay and lesbian. It is also intended to help all students understand the terrible toll bullying can take on its victims, and to encourage students to stand up for their classmates who are being harassed.

Readers can obtain a copy at: http://www.tolerance.org/bullied

Federal Appeals Court Blocks Alabama from Checking Student Immigration Status

2011-10-14T12:57:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: The Associated Press reports that the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a part of Alabama's anti-immigration law that required schools to check the immigration status of students. It has been reported that large numbers of Hispanic students have been absent from schools since the law went into effect.

The Latest Casualty of Alabama’s New Anti-Immigration Law: The Children

2011-10-02T10:00:00.001-07:00

A recent Associated Press article (September 30, 2011) has pointed out a disturbing consequence of Alabama’s new anti-immigration law – a vanishing number of Hispanic students from the public schools. One of the provisions of the new law requires schools to gather statistics on the number of new undocumented students attending the schools after September 2011. The AP article reports that “local and state officials are pleading with immigrant families to keep their children enrolled" and have tried to assuage some of their fears. Despite the reassurances that the law does not ban anyone from school, many families are reportedly starting to withdraw their children or planning to leave the state.

Although the law purports to collect statistics only, it is having a strong intimidating effect. In fact, in an early analysis of the original law, the ACLU had pointed out “that deterring children from school was one of HB 56’s motivating purposes. For example, HB 56’s sponsor, Rep. Micky Hammon, described the bill as motivated by the costs of ‘educat[ing] the children of illegal immigrants,’ and predicted that enforcing HB 56 will result in ‘cost savings for this state.’” (Go to http://www.aclu.org/ for “Preliminary Analysis of HB 56 Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act”)

The bill does indeed seem to have this effect of driving children away from the public schools even if it doesn’t require citizenship for enrollment in its schools. In fact, as far back as 1982 in a landmark case, Plyler v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not deny access to a free public education to children on the basis of their immigrant status. Despite the fact that this case was decided almost thirty years ago, the U.S. Department of Education had to recently remind school districts in a letter released on May 10, 2011 that expressed concerns that some districts were discouraging undocumented children from enrolling in their schools. At the same time, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has been hearing several complaints.

On September 28th, the N.Y.Times reported that most of the new Alabama law that had been challenged by the Obama administration and civil rights groups was upheld by Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn of the Federal District Court in Birmingham. While blocking the provision that would have barred illegal immigrants from enrolling in or attending public universities, she did uphold the section that requires elementary and secondary schools to determine the immigration status of newly enrolled students.

The civil rights groups challenged this last section on the ground that it would unlawfully deter students from enrolling in school, even if it did not explicitly allow schools to turn students away. The judge dismissed their challenge for lack of standing, though she did not rule on the argument’s merits.

The Obama administration has announced that it will be appealing the ruling and has filed court documents on Friday. We will continue to keep readers informed of future coverage of the case and its consequences.

A Look at Another Unique School

2011-09-07T08:08:00.000-07:00

We have been featuring descriptions of some unique schools on this blog to enable readers to explore the different possibilities that are out there. You can read about some of these schools under our label "Innovative Schools."

In one of our frequently read posts, David Marshak described the kind of progressive school that President Obama had sent his own children. See “Obama’s School Choice: Shouldn’t the education that Malia and Sasha receive be available to all?"

David is professor emeritus at Seattle University and our colleague here at Western Washington University, but he is also the president of the board for another progressive secondary school here in Washington State. In the post below, he describes some of the innovative features of this independent school for our readers. While Exploration Academy is an actual “bricks and mortar” school here in Bellingham, Washington, it has initiated an Explorations Academy Online (EAO), a new web-based learning experience, as part of its learning environment. The sixteen year old academy has been known for its interdisciplinary curriculum, service learning, wilderness experience, self-directed learning, and international expeditions, and David describes below the integration of this newer learning environment into the school. Rather than isolating adolescents in “industrial paradigm schools,” where students end up forming their own youth culture as a reaction to their isolation from adults, David believes they should be fully integrated into the adult world and allowed the freedom to take a significant role in their own learning as well as an opportunity to contribute their own unique perspectives in an authentic and meaningful way.

A Look at Explorations Academy Online

David Marshak

Explorations Academy Online’s program includes the following elements:
Learning Coach EAO begins by pairing each adolescent learner with an adult Learning Coach. The Coach and the learner talk face-to-face via Skype at least twice each week. Adolescents don’t want to distance themselves from all adults, just from their parents as they begin to establish their own individual identities. Adolescents want to interact with adults who want to interact with them in respectful and mutual ways.

Clusters Learners engage in one Cluster each term. A cluster is an interdisciplinary study, designed by EAO and led by the Coach, that is focused on one theme or question and that weaves together learning in the subjects of English, Social Studies, Science, and the Arts in a coherent and meaningful way. Some of the clusters available are Crime and Punishment, Life Cycles, You’re on Your Own, Water, Renaissance, and Shelter. Here teens engage in exploring conventional—and unconventional—academic content, but the content is structured in relation to contemporary issues, problems, and concerns that adolescents view as timely, relevant, and personally meaningful.

Learner's Investigations Each term the learner, in dialogue with her/his Learning Coach, poses a question that she/he wants to investigate. The learner and the Learning Coach frame this inquiry and the learner conducts it. The Learner's Investigation may relate to the Cluster that he/she is investigating, or it may be on a completely different topic. In this context teens design their own learning, with support from the Coach, and then they enact their design. Teens want freedom, and here they get it, although its bundled with responsibility and support.

Mathematics and World Language Learners study at least the equivalent of three years of high school mathematics, because math is required by most colleges for admission. The same is true for the study of a world language. These studies are required because many teens will want to go to college. Completing these prerequisites leaves that option open for learners.

Experiential Learning A significant part of the learning at Explorations Academy Online is experiential. The learner negotiates his/her specific learning experiences each term with his/her Learning Coach. Over a four-year career as a learner at EAO, the learner engages in at least two Experiential Studies in each category listed below:

THE ARTS: drawing, painting, singing, playing a musical instrument, pottery, or any other form of art or craft

ADVENTURE: hiking, backpacking, tracking, hunting, orienteering, or any other activity that is challenging and that takes place outside

SERVICE: any form of service to other people, animals, or the natural world

BODY/MIND DISCIPLINE: an activity that is physical and encourages awareness and mindfulness about that activity; for example, yoga, dance, tai chi, chi kung, aikido, long distance running, gymnastics

APPRENTICESHIP: a commitment by the learner to learn a skill(s) from an appropriate adult who is proficient in this skill(s); can be work-related, in the arts or crafts, or in any field of human endeavor

ECOLOGICAL EXPERIENCE: active engagement with an ecosystem in some meaningful way; for example, ecological restoration, gardening, permaculture, birdwatching, animal husbandry

In these experiences adolescents have a wide range of choice, within enough parameters to insure that they also have a wide range of experiences. So there’s a lot of freedom with clear boundaries. And all of these experiences take the learner out into the mainstream society in all of its complexities, so they interact with people of all ages every week.

Diane Ravitch to Speak at Seattle Town Hall on Nov. 17th

2011-09-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

Diane Ravitch will be speaking on November 17, 2011 at 7:30-9:00 pm at the Town Hall in Seattle, Washington. Her topic will be, "Getting Our Schools Back on Track." The Town Hall is located at 8th & Seneca Street in Seattle. Advance tickets can be purchased through the Town Hall at: http://townhallseattle.org/

Readers can read our earlier posts about Diane Ravitch here. We will be reviewing her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, in the upcoming issue of the journal.

Author John Covaleskie Targets Zero Tolerance Policies

2011-08-16T06:03:00.000-07:00

Editor: Readers will remember the recent article by author, John Covaleskie, on “Freedom Of Conscience And The Wall Of Separation,” in our summer 2010 issue. In that article, the author examined the role of religious discourse in the public life and public speech of a democratic polity. In the post below, John continues to explore other dimensions of democratic life and its betrayal with the growing reliance on zero tolerance policies in the schools. Zero tolerance policies have contributed to a national trend often referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline. The summer 2012 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy will explore this issue in depth. The deadline for manuscripts is December 31, 2011. Authors can find more information on the controversy here. The article below was cross-posted from the Social Issues blog and is printed here with permission of the author.

Zero Tolerance and the Failure to Educate

John F. Covaleskie

University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma

The older I get and the more exposure I have to schooling and educational policy in the United States, the more I wonder if we like children.

I was recently reminded of this when I saw yet another example of a very young child given an absurd penalty because of an over-literal interpretation of a “zero tolerance” policy in a local school (http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2011/01/21/First-grader-punished-for-finger-pointing/UPI-42171295600400/). The details of this case—first grade boy suspended because he pointed his finger as though it was a gun—are the sort that get people either laughing at the disconnect between the action and the severity of the response or outraged for the same reason. After all, a child’s finger, on even the most liberal interpretations of zero tolerance, is not a gun. But that response misses a deeper point: zero tolerance policies renege on the promise that schools are in the business of education for democratic life.

Mindless forms of “classroom management” have triumphed over efforts to help children become better people. And we know there are more positive and more effective – more educational – ways to respond to bad behavior in schools (see, for example Deborah Meier’s The Power of Their Ideas or Vivian Paley’s You Can’t Say, You Can’t Play). Perhaps it is because of the increasing focus on maximizing time on task in order to increase test scores, but I am not sure that is the reason: the policy of treating children like animals predates the regime of testing so often supposed to be its cause. Behavioral control has been the approach of “classroom management” for all of my professional life, and I started teaching high school in 1968.

One district where I was employed adopted Lee Canter’s “Assertive Discipline” program in the 1970’s; the catch-phrase of this program was “deal with the behavior, not the child.” I heard this from many teachers, always expressed with pride. The idea always puzzled me, however, because I has become a teacher because I wanted to deal with children, and in line with that commitment, I have always believed that a child’s behavior is a part of who the child is, and to treat those two things as separable is to fail to understand our role in democracy as much as it is to violate the integrity of the person the child is.

There are two reasons we should reject the emphasis on behavioral strategies for controlling behavior and “classroom management”: they are demeaning to both the children against whom they are used and to the teachers forced to use them, and they diminish the likelihood that our public schools will form democratic citizens. When they work, even when they are applied rationally, zero tolerance policies shape behavior by fear, not by consideration of what sort of people they should be, or what sort of choices they should make. Further, such policies send the message that the school and the adults in it do not think the child who breaks a rule counts for very much. They make clear to all children that the adults in the school consider the children to be disposable.

Zero tolerance policies explicitly state for all to see that we consider our rules more important than our children, and our children see this. Even the children who obey the rules understand where they stand in a regime of zero-tolerance. This will certainly increase the alienation children and young adults feel toward schools.

Children will sometimes behave badly. They will break rules, even really serious, important rules. Such events can be seen as opportunities to banish the miscreants, or as an opportunity to educate. Only the last honors our claim to be educators trying to prepare children to be citizens in a democratic society.

One of my former colleagues wisely suggested that the way to be more effective in classrooms is to “be the child,” to try to understand what need the child is meeting by misbehavior and then to help the child meet that need in more positive ways. This is not at all to suggest that classrooms should be places of permissiveness or places where there are no rules that matter. It is to suggest that our job is to help children understand and internalize the norms of democratic life the rules are meant to enact, and that they best learn democracy by living it. However, when we replace citizen formation with zero tolerance policies we do not prepare them for democratic life, but for what some now refer to as the school-to-prison-pipeline (http://justicepolicycenter.org/Articles%20and%20Research/Research/testprisons/SCHOOL_TO_%20PRISON_%20PIPELINE2003.pdf).

I do not understand why so many educators think the proper response to children who are alienated from the school’s social contract (I am making a large assumption here, I know) is to exacerbate and formalize that alienation with the official proclamation that they really do not belong. I do not understand how a culture that valued its young could make zero tolerance a policy.

One final irony: this incident took place in Oklahoma where—I could not make this up—there is a serious on-going effort in the state legislature to make actual guns on school, college, and university campuses legal.

Thomas Friedman's "Theory of Everything"

2011-08-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

In an interesting column on a "Theory of Everything" in today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman attempts to bring together all the disparate events occurring in our global social environment from globalization, middle class crisis, tea party, worker replacement, unemployment, education, IT, social media, growing income disparity, grassroots social protests occurring across the globe and calls for an "accessible future."

In his final summary paragraph, he writes:

We are increasingly taking easy credit, routine work and government jobs and entitlements away from the middle class — at a time when it takes more skill to get and hold a decent job, at a time when citizens have more access to media to organize, protest and challenge authority and at a time when this same merger of globalization and I.T. is creating huge wages for people with global skills (or for those who learn to game the system and get access to money, monopolies or government contracts by being close to those in power) — thus widening income gaps and fueling resentments even more.

As a writer of a blog on education, I couldn't help but reflect on how all these disparate movements should be informing our thinking about the the role of public education in a democratic society. Current mainstream thinking in our media about accountability, standardized testing, anti-teacher unions rhetoric, privatization of schools, and firing of teachers, etc, doesn't come close to the issues we should be addressing. Any thoughts?

P.S. Watch for our upcoming issue of the journal on the theme: "The Education and Schools our Children Deserve." It will go online this fall.

Seattle and Silverdale to Join other Cities in National "Save our Schools" Day

2011-07-28T17:45:00.000-07:00

Editor: We have published several posts on this blog about the National "Save our Schools" March that will be taking place in Washington D.C. on July 30th. There will be similar events taking place in cities across the country. Below is some information on events that will take place in two cities in the state of Washington: Seattle and Silverdale.

For our readers in Washington state, we are providing some information from the Washington Education Association here in Washington.

FROM THE WEA:

On July 30, educators, parents and concerned citizens from Seattle to Silverdale to Washington, D.C., and in many cities in between, will gather to reclaim control of our public schools.

The event, endorsed by NEA and WEA, is known as the Save our Schools (SOS) March and calls on Americans everywhere to demand:

Equitable funding for all public school communities.

An end to high-stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation.

Curriculum developed for and by local school communities.

Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies.

The D.C. event is just one of many that will be occurring across our country this Saturday. In Seattle, supporters will meet at 6 p.m. at the south side of the International Fountain at Seattle Center. Supporters will begin walking at 6:30 p.m. to join the Seafair Torchlight parade at Fourth Avenue and Denny Street. In Silverdale, supporters will participate from 10 a.m. to noon at the Silverdale Whaling Days.

The public is encouraged to show support for public education by wearing "Red for Public Ed" to the local events.

This is a day for people to stand up and be heard.

This is a grassroots movement. It is not funded by billionaires. It is supported by teachers, parents and citizens around the country who have a passion to be heard.

More information is available at SaveOurSchoolsMarch.org http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/. Please contact Washington's coordinators about local events: Renton teacher Becca Ritchie (who is handling questions west of the Cascades) and Yakima teacher Jane Watson (who is handling questions regarding events east of the Cascades).

See you Saturday!

A DECLARATION OF EDUCATION RIGHTS

2011-07-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

Editor: As many of our readers know, the Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal that houses the Journal of Educational Controversy participates in John Goodlad's National League of Democratic Schools. Jim Strickland, the regional coordinator for the Western region of the League and a special education teacher in Washington State, has prepared this "Declaration of Education Rights" document that we want to share with our readers for their thoughts. Jim is putting together two education rights workshops this summer -- one in Portland at the AERO conference (http://www.educationrevolution.org/ ) and one in Washington, DC at the Save Our Schools March conference (http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/). He is hoping to establish some sort of Education Rights Task Force to continue this work.

Toward a Declaration of Education Rights

by Jim Strickland
The National League of Democratic Schools

Abstract

In the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a Declaration of Education Rights would serve as a common ethical standard, or moral compass, for education in a democracy by which we can guide our practice, develop programs and policies, and continuously evaluate our efforts. In this essay, readers are invited to review proposed articles for such a declaration and suggest possible revisions and/or additions. The ultimate goal will be to produce a collaborative document that can be submitted to other groups for consideration, input, and eventual adoption.

Ever since December 10, 1948 when it was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has stood as an international moral beacon of human dignity and freedom. The Universal Declaration was never meant to be the final word on human rights, nor was it intended to impose a single model of right conduct on all nations. The Universal Declaration was written to be a living document, reinterpreted and reinvented by each succeeding generation, a common standard that can be brought to life in different settings in a variety of legitimate ways.

Education today is in dire need of just such a common ethical standard. Not a legally binding prescription, but a moral compass by which we can guide our practice, develop our programs and policies, and evaluate our results. In our ongoing efforts to provide the education our children deserve and our world so desperately needs, we need a mutual commitment to values that will inspire us and keep us from drifting off course. In education, as in all areas of life, if we do not decide where we are going, someone will be happy to decide for us.

It is in this spirit that the following suggestion for a Declaration of Education Rights (DER) is being proposed. These 13 articles were inspired from a variety of sources, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Alternative Education Resource Organization (www.educationrevolution.org), the Institute for Democratic Education in America (www.democraticeducation.org), and the Institute for Educational Inquiry’s Agenda for Education in a Democracy (www.ieiseattle.org). Each article is followed by comments which note the source and/or clarify the article’s intent or implications.

In order to be effective, a Declaration of Education Rights must balance several competing requirements. A DER must:

1) Establish the conditions necessary to promote and preserve basic human and civil rights.

2) Address the values and requirements of democracy. For our purposes, we are using a broad definition of democracy as a value system – a way of living and working together based on freedom, justice, equality, and mutual respect. [“Democracy first and foremost, is a shared way of life. It begins with who we are as individuals and the relationships we have with those around us, and it radiates outward from that center to encompass all of humanity… it is, in essence, about human relationships.” (Goodlad, et al, Education for Everyone, p. 82)]

3) Ensure the conditions necessary for the continuous growth, self-development, and creative participation of the learner.

4) Differentiate between education -- a community responsibility -- and schooling -- one component of this larger context.

Declaration of Education Rights

Preamble

Whereas a healthy, sustainable democracy requires the thoughtful and effective participation of its citizenry…

Whereas optimum political, social, and economic participation requires certain fundamental capacities and conditions…

Whereas it is the responsibility of democratic society to intentionally foster the development of these capacities and conditions essential to its continued vitality and to that of its citizens…

Now, therefore, this Declaration of Education Rights is proclaimed as a common standard of achievement for the continuous growth and self-realization of all people in the context of democratic community.

Article 1

Everyone has the right to participate meaningfully in his/her own education and the educational decisions that affect him/her. These decisions include those establishing the purposes, content, and assessment of learning activities.

COMMENTS: The right to participate in the decisions that affect us is a basic principle of democracy. The Institute for Democratic Education in America (www.democraticeducation.org) applies this concept to education in their stated mission “to ensure that all young people can participate meaningfully in their education and gain the tools to build a just, democratic, and sustainable world.” John Dewey also emphasized the importance of participation – “There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active co-operation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.” (Dewey, Experience and Education, p. 67) This article implies access to self-directed learning opportunities whenever possible.

Article 2

Everyone has the right to an education directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.

COMMENTS: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26. This right guards against overly narrow definitions of education as primarily a means to the economic and political ends of the powers that be.

Article 3

Everyone has the right to an education that acknowledges and respects his/her cultural, religious, and/or ethnic heritage.

COMMENTS: Every educational system is based on a particular set of beliefs, assumptions, and cultural perspectives. Without overt acknowledgement and respect for the cultural, religious, and/or ethnic heritage of the student, there is real danger that these important sources of personal and cultural identity will be undermined.

Article 4

Everyone has the right to an education that acknowledges multiple ways of knowing and assists in the exploration and understanding of various world views.

COMMENTS: A cornerstone of democracy is the realization that other people may see and experience the world differently from us. Engaging in thoughtful dialogue that leads to a deeper understanding of one another is critical in our work for peaceful coexistence in a diverse world, as well as a critical evaluation of our own perspective.

Article 5

Everyone has the right to an education that fosters the capacities necessary for effective participation in a social and political democracy.

COMMENTS: From the Institute for Educational Inquiry’s Agenda for Education in a Democracy (www.ieiseattle.org). Democracy by definition depends on the thoughtful and effective participation of its citizens.

Article 6

Everyone has the right to an education that fosters the capacities necessary to lead responsible and satisfying lives.

COMMENTS: From the Institute for Educational Inquiry’s Agenda for Education in a Democracy (www.ieiseattle.org). This emphasizes the second part of the dual role of education noted by John Goodlad in Democracy, Education, and the Schools – “The mission of schooling comes down to two related kinds of enculturation; no other institution is so charged. The first is for political and social responsibility as a citizen. The second is for maximum individual development, for full participation in the human conversation (with the concept of conversation expanded into a metaphor for the whole of daily living).” (John Goodlad in Soder, Roger, Ed., Democracy, Education, and the Schools, p. 112)

Article 7

All educational institutions shall unambiguously reflect the values of democracy in their policies, practices, curriculum, organizational structures, and outcomes.

COMMENTS: As Marshall McLuhan noted, the medium is the message. Dewey also emphasized the critical importance of the lessons we learn indirectly by way of the educational environment – “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” (Dewey, Experience and Education, p. 48) Democracy can only really be learned by a process of immersion. To be effective and sustainable, the means used must be aligned with the ends desired.

Article 8

P-12 education shall be free, as well as equitably and adequately funded. Technical, professional, and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of capacity.

COMMENTS: Adapted from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26. The emphasis on higher education being equally accessible to all on the basis of capacity implies (but does not explicitly guarantee) the removal of economic barriers to such participation when appropriate.

Article 9

Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education in which their children participate.

COMMENTS: From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26. The UDHR version reads, “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” The wording was changed to reflect an understanding of education not as something that can be given or imposed, but as something that requires the free participation of the learner. This article was originally included in the UDHR in the aftermath of WWII as a way to prevent oppressive regimes from using state mandated educational programs to indoctrinate its citizens.

Article 10

Everyone has the right to an education that acknowledges our place within the natural world, respects the interconnectedness of all life, and promotes the building of a just and sustainable world.

COMMENTS: This ecological literacy (see Orr, Ecological Literacy, 1992) is increasingly being recognized as essential not only to our quality of life, but to our very survival as a species and to the long-term health of our planet. The latter portion is taken in part from IDEA’s mission statement (see comments on Article 1).

Article 11

Education shall be compulsory through the primary years and freely available thereafter until the age of majority. No minor shall be denied access to a free and appropriate educational program for any reason. Furthermore, no person shall be compelled to participate in any educational program that does not protect the full range of these rights.

COMMENTS: The UDHR states that elementary education shall be compulsory, presumably to ensure the basic educational foundation required for optimum self-development and for effective political, social, and economic participation. After the primary years, the emphasis shifts from compulsory participation on the part of the individual to compulsory service on the part of society, with participation being optional at the discretion of the learner. This acknowledges the fact that coercive educational techniques are inherently counterproductive to “the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms,” as well as to the health and viability of democracy itself.

Article 12

Given that education is an ongoing process that extends far beyond the bounds of formal schooling, everyone has the right to live in an educative community that purposely contributes to the continuous growth and well-being of all its members.

COMMENTS: This highlights the difference between schooling and education, and promotes a vision of education as a community responsibility. Implied is the need to continuously advocate and work for the creation of truly educative communities. For our purposes, an educative community can be understood as one which depends on the real work and creative participation of each of its members, as well as actively promoting and protecting human and civil rights.

Article 13

No one shall be denied access to employment or postsecondary education, or be discriminated against in any way solely on the basis of P-12 academic credentials.

COMMENTS: It is unethical to use any criteria for employment that are not clearly necessary for the successful performance of the particular job being sought. Given the broad and varied nature of high school graduation requirements, for example, this cannot be said to apply to the high school diploma. This article also makes more feasible the development of and participation in alternative approaches to learning that do not result in standard academic credentials.

Another implication of this article is that schools will have to attract learners on the basis of the skills and experiences they have to offer rather than because they are the sole gatekeepers to economic participation. It safeguards against the accumulation of too much power in the education establishment to determine and/or limit the future opportunities of citizens. It does, however, leave open the possibility of using P-12 academic credentials and measures as one of several sources of information used together to assess a person’s aptitude for particular postsecondary jobs and programs.

Conclusion

The time has come for us to take a stand on what we believe to be the purpose and proper nature of education in our democracy. This Declaration of Education Rights is a first attempt to do just that – an articulation of values and principles intended to serve as a moral and functional compass for education in America.

Thomas Jefferson sparked a political revolution when he wrote that “we hold these truths to be self-evident”. But the moral and philosophical revolution that produced these truths had been steadily growing in our hearts and minds for hundreds of years. Jefferson merely affirmed them and recognized their revolutionary implications.

Like its inspiration, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Declaration of Education Rights contains some ideas that are intuitive and others that are more daring, but all of them reflect a revolution in thinking that is already under way. The implications are profound and far reaching.

In order to make this document as sound and powerful as it needs to be, we are asking for your feedback. Input will be used to refine this document for future use in public forums across the nation. Imagine the long-term impact of its official adoption, not only by schools, school districts, and educational organizations, but by state and federal departments of education as well.

Without a clear vision, it is inevitable that education will continue to drift in the winds of various political, economic, and special interest agendas. And as we drift, our children, our democracy, and our planet will suffer. Please help us chart the course for a redefinition of education that celebrates individuality while simultaneously promoting democracy – that reinforces creativity, nurtures greatness, and helps to build a just and sustainable world.

Declaration of Education Rights

Preamble

Whereas a healthy, sustainable democracy requires the thoughtful and effective participation of its citizenry…

Whereas optimum political, social, and economic participation requires certain fundamental capacities and conditions…

Whereas it is the responsibility of democratic society to intentionally foster the development of these capacities and conditions essential to its continued vitality and to that of its citizens…

Now, therefore, this Declaration of Education Rights is proclaimed as a common standard of achievement for the continuous growth and self-realization of all people in the context of democratic community.

Article 1

Everyone has the right to participate meaningfully in his/her own education and the educational decisions that affect him/her. These decisions include those establishing the purposes, content, and assessment of learning activities.

Article 2

Everyone has the right to an education directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Article 3

Everyone has the right to an education that acknowledges and respects his/her cultural, religious, and/or ethnic heritage.

Article 4

Everyone has the right to an education that acknowledges multiple ways of knowing and assists in the exploration and understanding of various world views.

Article 5

Everyone has the right to an education that fosters the capacities necessary for effective participation in a social and political democracy.

Article 6

Everyone has the right to an education that fosters the capacities necessary to lead responsible and satisfying lives.

Article 7

All educational institutions shall unambiguously reflect the values of democracy in their policies, practices, curriculum, organizational structures, and outcomes.

Article 8

P-12 education shall be free, as well as equitably and adequately funded. Technical, professional, and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of capacity.

Article 9

Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education in which their children participate.

Article 10

Everyone has the right to an education that acknowledges our place within the natural world, respects the interconnectedness of all life, and promotes the building of a just and sustainable world.

Article 11

Education shall be compulsory through the primary years and freely available thereafter until the age of majority. No minor shall be denied access to a free and appropriate educational program for any reason. Furthermore, no person shall be compelled by law to participate in any educational program that does not protect the full range of these rights.

Article 12

Given that education is an ongoing process that extends far beyond the bounds of formal schooling, everyone has the right to live in an educative community that purposely contributes to the continuous growth and well-being of all its members.

Article 13

No one shall be denied access to employment or postsecondary education, or be discriminated against in any way solely on the basis of P-12 academic credentials.

Bibliography

Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO), http://www.educationrevolution.org/

Dewey, John, 2002 (First published 1916). Democracy and Education. New York: Barnes & Noble Digital Library

Dewey, John, 1997 (First published 1938). Education and Experience. New York: Touchstone

Glendon, Mary Ann, 2001. A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: Random House

Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA), http://www.democraticeducation.org/

Institute for Educational Inquiry (IEI), http://ieiseattle.org/

Goodlad, J.I., Goodlad, S. J., Mantle-Bromley, C., 2004. Education for Everyone: Agenda for Education in a Democracy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Morsink, Johannes, 1999. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, & Intent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press

Orr, David, 1992. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press

Soder, Roger, Editor, 1996. Democracy, Education, and the Schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

March on Washington to Support Public Schools on July 30th

2011-06-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

There will be a march and rally in Washington, D.C. on July 30 to support and reclaim control of public schools by educators, parents and concerned citizens. Labeled a Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action movement, the four day event will feature Jonathan Kozol and Diane Ravitch as keynote speakers. Similar events will be held across the nation. This grassroots movement is calling on the public to demand:

• Equitable funding for all public school communities.

• An end to high-stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation.

• Curriculum developed for and by local school communities.

• Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies.

More information is available at SaveOurSchoolsMarch.org http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/.

School Segregation: An Update on our Journal's Continuing Coverage

2011-06-14T18:49:00.000-07:00

One of the purposes of our blog is to provide updates on topics covered in the Journal of Educational Controversy. Indeed, the journal itself is an experiment in creating a concentrated study of current controversies that is more than a one–time coverage of ideas but rather an ongoing in-depth look at a topic. Many of our journal’s issues have included an introductory section with articles that provide a broader context for understanding the topic, articles written in response to the actual controversy posed, and a section for related issues connected with the topic. The rejoinder section is intended to continue the conversation through peer review responses to the articles and the blog is intended to continue a more informal discussion of the ideas. Even our video series, “Talking with the Authors,” is intended to bring a broader understanding of the ideas by exploring the topic with the author in an interview that provides a look at the person behind the article. And our public forums, that are also videotaped and often made available in the journal, try to continue the exploration of these ideas in the context of a discussion or debate among the authors. Indeed, each issue of the journal is conceived as almost a mini-course on the topic with the conversation continuing into the future, something, we believe is unique for journals. Our goal is to provide a public space where scholars, educators, policymakers and the public can come together and engage in a deeper understanding of the controversies that arise in a pluralistic, liberal democracy.

Our winter 2007 issue on “Jonathan Kozol's Nation of Shame Forty Years Later” tried to do all these things. Dedicated to Jonathan Kozol, who was the journal’s distinguished speaker at our university, the journal published his prologue to the topic along with the video of his talk. The issue was published at the time his new book, The Shame of the Nation, the Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, had just come out. Fortuitously, it was also the time the U.S. Supreme Court had decided to hear arguments in the Seattle case on the use of race as a factor in public school admissions policy in PICS v. Seattle School District No.1 et al. So in addition to the articles in response to the controversy, we published a special section on “Washington State Politics and the future U.S. Supreme Court decision.“ After the issue went online, the High Court rendered its decision and we covered it in our rejoinder’s section. Some key players took part in our public forum that year.

Our Introductory Section for that issue contained a background essay to provide a context for the theme. Gary Orfield, distinguished professor of education at UCLA and co-director of the Civil Rights Project/El Proyecto de CRP, had permitted us to excerpt sections of his 2006 Report on Racial Transformation and the Changing Nature of Segregation. A member of our editorial board provided a short introduction to a selection of excerpts along with a link to the entire report. This morning, we just learned about a new manual that was released by the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA on Integrating Suburban Schools: How to Benefit from Growing Diversity and Avoid Segregation. According to the press release, the manual is intended to provide “invaluable guidance for education stakeholders in suburban school districts — including school board members, parents, students, community activists, administrators, policymakers and attorneys “ as they try to achieve “positive and lasting multiracial diversity.”

The 2010 census indicated a very large movement of African American and Latino families to suburbia. As CRP Co-director Gary Orfield notes, “Many hundreds of suburban communities that were all-white when they were constructed, and had experienced little diversity until the recent past, are now facing important questions about how they can achieve lasting and successful integration and avoid the destructive resegregation by race and poverty that affected so many areas in the central cities a half century ago.”

The manual offers the following information:

• A comprehensive discussion of the critical importance of diverse learning environments in racially changing suburban school districts.

• The history of court-ordered desegregation efforts and an overview of the current legal landscape governing school integration policy.

• General legal principles for creating racially diverse schools.

• The vital role that teachers and administrators play in building successfully integrated schools and classrooms.

• Specific examples of suburban school districts promoting high quality, inclusive and integrated schools.

• Strategies for teaching in racially diverse classrooms.

• Methods for building the political will and support in your community for voluntary integration policies.

• An extensive and reader-friendly list of education and legal resources including easily disseminated fact sheets on important topics related to school diversity.

Our readers can download the manual by going to the website of the Civil Rights Project at: K-12 Research Section. The press release also indicates that the manual may be copied or reprinted and used in classes without permission or payment.

An Update on our Journal’s Article on the USA Patriot Act

2011-06-05T12:26:00.000-07:00

In our special issue of the journal on the theme, “Schooling as if Democracy Matters,” we published several introductory essays to provide context for the articles that followed. The controversial scenario that we posed in the issue asked:

In this issue, we consider how we are to fulfill the traditional moral imperative of our schools -- to create a public capable of sustaining the life of a democracy. How do we do this in an age of the Patriot Act and similar anti-terrorism legislation in other countries, NSA surveillance, extraordinary rendition, preemptive wars, enemy combatants -- all likely to involve violations of civil rights and liberties and a curtain of government secrecy? What story do we tell our young about who we are, who we have been, and who we are becoming? How do we educate children about their identity in this global world? What sense are they to make of the "imperial" democracy they are inheriting? Is our new political environment a fundamental break with the past or an extension of longstanding trends? What are the implications of these forces for the education of the young on the foundations of our democracy and our collective identity?

One of our two essays in the introduction focused on the controversy over civil liberties in U. S. democracy as it existed in 2008. See Brett Rubio and Bridget Baker article, “Are We Targeting Our Fellow Countrymen? The Consequences of the USA PATRIOT Act.”

With some of the provisions of this act about to sunset, Congress had the opportunity to exercise its oversight obligations and re-examine carefully the current state of the law. The most recent congressional action with its brief debate on the Patriot Act and related intelligence measures was commented upon in an editorial in today’s New York Times. The Times lamented Congress’s failed duty “to carefully re-examine the provisions, trim back excesses, and add safeguards to protect civil liberties,” by ignoring “the whole point of requiring that the provisions be periodically reviewed.” Instead, the powers were extended for another four years without any changes.

Three specific provisions of concern are highlighted in the Times editorial:

One of the renewed provisions permits a roving wiretap on terrorism suspects who switch phone numbers or providers. While this is a useful tool, the lax rules for specifying who is the subject of the wiretap could invite abuse. Another provision permits the government to examine library, bookstore and business records without having to show that the material is related to a terrorism investigation. The third overly broad provision allows surveillance of “lone wolf” suspects with no known ties to a foreign power or recognized terror groups. It has never been used, but the low threshold for doing so is concerning.

Congress has one more opportunity to provide some safeguards through a resubmitted amendment that has been put forth by Senator Patrick Leahy, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, that would call for “enhanced auditing and oversight of how the powers are being used." The amendment also proposes “an early sunsetting of ‘national security letters,’ which the F.B.I. has used to obtain evidence without a court order, and which have been widely abused.”

The questions we posed in our 2008 issue are as important and current today as they were then. How are we engaging our students in these questions? What kind of public are our public schools creating?

Money, Education and Democratic Voice

2011-05-22T19:34:00.000-07:00

I read two articles today that stood in such stark contrast that I had to share them with our readers on this blog. Both describe their efforts as “grassroots.” The first was an article in the N.Y. Times entitled, “Behind Grass-Roots School Advocacy, Bill Gates,” by Sam Dillon (NY Times, May 20, 2011). The article talks about the staggering amount of money that is going into education by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. According to the tax forms filed for 2009 alone, the Bill Gates's foundation spent $373 million on education efforts of which $78 million was dedicated to its new form of education advocacy. According to Allan C. Golston, the president of the foundation’s United States program, the foundation plans to spend $3.5 billion more in education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy, over the next five or six years. Attached to the article are “Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009,” a tax form required for nonprofits that runs for 263 pages and includes more than 3,000 items and 360 education grants.

The approach marks a new strategy for the foundation that previously used its philanthropy to creating small schools . The new strategy is described in the article as much more ambitious. It is an attempt to work more systemically by reforming the nation’s educational policies. To achieve this end, the foundation “is financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.” But it is also “creating new advocacy groups.” Some of the examples the article reveals include:

The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations…..

Last year, Mr. Gates spent $2 million on a “social action” campaign focused on the film “Waiting for ‘Superman".....

There are the more traditional and publicly celebrated programmatic initiatives, like financing charter school operators and early-college high schools. Then there are the less well-known advocacy grants to civil rights groups like the Education Equality Project and Education Trust that try to influence policy, to research institutes that study the policies’ effectiveness, and to Education Week and public radio and television stations that cover education policies.…..

Its latest annual report…. highlights its role — often overlooked — in the development and promotion of the common core academic standards that some 45 states have adopted in recent months. ….The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which developed the standards, and Achieve Inc., a nonprofit organization coordinating the writing of tests aligned with the standards, have each received millions of dollars.....

In 2009, a Gates-financed group, the New Teacher Project, issued an influential report detailing how existing evaluation systems tended to give high ratings to nearly all teachers. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan cited it repeatedly and wrote rules into the federal Race to the Top grant competition encouraging states to overhaul those systems. Then a string of Gates-backed nonprofit groups worked to promote legislation across the country: at least 20 states, including New York, are now designing new evaluation……

Two other Gates-financed groups, Educators for Excellence and Teach Plus, have helped amplify the voices of newer teachers as an alternative to the official views of the unions. Last summer, members of several such groups had a meeting at the foundation’s offices in Washington....

The Times article actually starts with a story of some out spoken local teachers who testified before the Indiana State Legislature and who had written policy briefs and op-ed pieces about layoffs based on seniority. Said one state legislator, ““They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists.” Indeed, they may very well have been genuine, as the article points out, but ´”they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” ….. a group that is later revealed in the article to have received awards totaling $4 million dollars.

And that brings us to the crux of the Times article. Writes reporter Sam Dillon:

Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency. Few policy makers, reporters or members of the public who encounter advocates like Teach Plus or pundits like Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute realize they are underwritten by the foundation.

Perhaps, the concern was best put by Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was quoted as saying: “It’s Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education.”

The other article I read at the same time this week was sent out on a grassroots listserv called the Education Liberation Network. The group also has a website called the Education for Liberation Network. In the post, the author, Tara Mack, announces an event that is to take place in two months in Providence, RI, where hundreds of educators, activists and students will come together for a grassroots gathering called, “Free Minds, Free People.” The organizers want to make the event a catalyst for continued action rather than a solitary event.

They write on their listserv:

The Education for Liberation Network has an important contribution to make to that effort. One of the ways we aim to capitalize on that energy is to begin developing regional networks that will strengthen the connection between local work and national movement building. We want to bring the network closer to you.

They then make a plea for donations to carry out this work:

To start that work we need to have the resources in place before the conference. That's why we are coming to you now. Grassroots work takes grassroots investment. Today we are kicking off our One Great Reason campaign, a week-long drive …. that will help us keep the momentum of Free Minds, Free People going by moving straight from the conference into the development of our regional networks.

Each of us has a reason for being part of this community, a reason why this work matters to you. Each day this week a member of the Education for Liberation Network will share via this listserv his/her reason for being part of our community. If their stories resonate with you, I hope you will take moment to contribute to our efforts to strengthen and expand.

The amount that this grassroots network of educators is attempting to raise this week -- $1000.

With such disparities in money and access to media and seats of power, how does a society engage in a true democratic dialogue. How is a public being created for public education? Here are two very different efforts that lie at the heart of the contradictions in democratic power and voice.

Cross-posted on Social Issues Blog

Ten Commitments of a Multicultural Educator

2011-05-21T18:08:00.000-07:00

Editor: After posting a number of articles on this blog about the external forces against various multicultural movements in the schools, we want to share an article today about the dangers of internal forces and misunderstandings. In the post below, Paul Gorski shares his thoughts about the kinds of concerns and commitments that progressive educators in multicultural education need to rethink. We thank the author for his permission to reprint his article here and invite our readership to respond.

Equity and social justice from the inside-out: Ten commitments of a multicultural educator

by
Paul C. Gorski

George Mason University

Reprinted with permission of the author from the FEDCAN Blog

of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences -- May 20, 2011

History teaches us that many progressive initiatives, if not nurtured carefully, risk growing to reflect the very ideologies against which they were formed. This is a risk faced by multicultural education. So certainly we need to organize ourselves against attempts to discredit the value of multicultural education by those who are most invested in maintaining the status quo. To dismiss multicultural education is, after all, to dismiss ideals of equity and social justice.

To be sure, discrediting voices always will exist. And they will crescendo as we make advances toward greater equity and justice in schools and society. As a long-time board member of the National Association for Multicultural Education, I found cause for celebration when I learned that conservative organizations were infiltrating our conferences. The threat of progress inspires organizations hostile to multicultural education to unleash the shouters and naysayers. We must be at the ready to respond.

Troubling the Multicultural Education Choir

There is, however, an even more insidious threat to multicultural education and the ideals of educational equity and justice. I often hear people who care about equity concerns say, “We’re preaching to the choir.” In my experience, when it comes to multicultural education and advancing equity and social justice, the most dangerous threat comes from within the so-called “choir.”

Allow me to explain: Even those of us who fancy ourselves as ‘progressives,’ somewhere on a continuum between liberal and radical, are subject to the influence of dominant ideologies. How conscious we are of this influence, and how we respond to it, matters. There are, for example, a number of my multicultural education colleagues in the United States who criticize high-stakes testing regimens as “culturally biased” or “unjust” and then proceed to comply with the neoliberal thrust behind these regimens by obsessing in their scholarship or practice over a so-called “achievement gap.” Paradoxically, they tend to describe this gap exclusively in terms of standardized test scores.

I have observed, as well, that, although many of us who would reject the notion that we can assume anything about a student’s needs or aspirations or challenges or talents based on a single identity dimension, many buy into grossly simplified paradigms, like the “culture of poverty” myth or models that suggest there are “female” and “male” learning styles. The “culture of poverty” approach was dismissed in the social sciences forty years ago. Nonetheless, this form of deficit thinking still seems to drive conversations about class, poverty, and education in the United States and, increasingly, in Canada.

Celebrating Diversity Is Not Enough

So when I consider the future of multicultural education, my fear is hastened less by resistance from naysayers than by misdirection by multiculturalists. My worst fear is that a vast majority of the initiatives, practices, and policies enacted in the name of diversity or multiculturalism appear, at closer look, to resemble, at best, cultural fluffery and, at worst, cultural imperialism.

I’ve traveled around the world studying this phenomenon: a “multiculturalism” which has been whittled down so far that its equity and social justice roots no longer are evident in practice. Particularly in the colonized lands of the Americas, multiculturalism seems to be heavy, and getting heavier, on Taco Nights, intercultural dialogues, and multicultural festivals, and light, and getting lighter, on economic justice, racial equity, anti-sexism, and queer rights. And to whose benefit? Who or what are we protecting?

Don’t get me wrong. Festivals and dialogues have their places in multicultural initiatives. But when efforts for racial harmony replace movements for racial justice; when we find ourselves learning about stereotyped class “cultures” rather than examining economic injustice (or at least inequities in access to quality schooling); when we come to believe that cross-group dialogue is transformative in and of itself rather than what prepares us to be transformative: this is when we, as multiculturalists, turn our backs on inequity and injustice and do the bidding of the powerful in the name of “multiculturalism.”

•Listen to Paul C. Gorski, “Celebrating Diversity in not Enough: Finding Authentic Pathways to Equity.”

•Read: Paul C. Gorski’s “What we’re teaching our teachers.”

How, then, might we work to ensure that we are not undermining our own commitments to multicultural education? How might we ensure that we are working against oppressive ideologies rather than replicating them in the name of multiculturalism?

Ten Commitments of a Multicultural Educator

I propose the following “Ten Commitments of a Multicultural Educator” as a place to start. I offer these commitments not in a spirit of judgment nor with any illusion that I have reached any appreciable level of proficiency with them. Rather, I offer them as somebody who struggles each day to embody them. I offer this challenge to my colleagues, but no more so than I offer it to myself.

(1) I commit to working at intersections. Too often, those of us doing equity and justice work become so focused on a single identity or oppression – I have been focused largely on class and economic justice lately – that we fail to consider how identities and oppressions are intersectional. I cannot do anti-racism if I am not doing anti-heterosexism, anti-sexism, and so on. I commit to understanding more fully how issue-specific organizations are forced, even if implicitly, to compete for whatever little piece of pie (e.g., financial resources, media attention) we are afforded, perhaps in order to ensure that we do not organize ourselves and insist, instead, on a bigger piece of pie.

(2) I commit to understanding the “sociopolitical context” of schooling. What Sonia Nieto calls the “sociopolitical context” of schooling requires me to see the bigger picture, to understand multicultural work in the context of neoliberalism, corporatization, consumer culture, the other conditions which inform dominant ideologies regarding social and educational access and opportunity.

(3) I commit to refusing the master’s paradigms. I will not endorse neoliberal or corporate-centric principles by incorporating them, even if implicitly, into my multicultural work. I will not minimize educational inequity to test scores; refer to people as “at-risk” or families as “broken”; or discuss multicultural competencies as essential to “preparing us to compete in the global marketplace.” I will not call something an achievement gap when it more precisely can be described as an opportunity gap.

(4) I commit to never reducing multiculturalism to cultural activities or celebrations. I will transcend the “4 Ds” (dress, dance, diet and dialect). Although multicultural festivals and food fairs can be part of a bigger initiative toward multiculturalism, they do not, in and of themselves, make any school or organization or community more equitable and just. In fact, they more likely will strengthen stereotypes than unravel them.

(5) I commit to never confusing multiculturalism with universal validation. Multiculturalism is not about valuing every perspective equally. For example, multiculturalism does not value heteronormativity or male supremacy even when one explains that these views are grounded in her or his religion. A multicultural space – a school or classroom, for instance – cannot be both multicultural and hegemonic.

(6) I commit to resisting simple solutions to complex problems. While simple and practical solutions may be tempting they are a distraction from what needs to be done to resolve complex social problems and conditions. I commit to resisting the temptation to buy into models and paradigms that over-simplify complexities, regardless of how popular they are. That the town or school district next door endorses a person or an approach to multiculturalism is not enough; in fact, it might be the best evidence that the person or approach fits snugly into the status quo.

(7) I commit to being informed. I will do the work to find strategies for bolstering equity and social justice which are based on evidence of what works. I will look at this evidence in light of what I know about my own community. Moreover, I will not limit “evidence” to quantitative studies; I will seek the voices of local communities and stakeholders in the sorts of deep and narrative ways that cannot be captured in a quantitative survey.

(8) I commit to working with and in service to disenfranchised communities. I must practice the ethic of ‘working with’ rather than working on disenfranchised communities or on their behalf, particularly when I am in a position of privilege relative to them. I will apply my commitment to equity and social justice, not just in the content of my multicultural work, but also in my processes for doing that work.

(9) I commit to rejecting deficit ideology. I will refuse to identify the source of social problems and conditions by looking down rather than up power hierarchies. I reject the notion that people are disenfranchised due to their own “deficiencies.” I commit to challenging any suggestion that the way to fix an inequity is to fix the people most disenfranchised by it rather than by redressing the conditions which disenfranchise them.

(10) I commit to putting justice ahead of peace. Although conflict resolution and peer mediation programs can be useful in the face of some forms of conflict, they should not replace efforts to redress an injustice. Never, under any circumstance, should equity concerns be handled through processes which assume that parties occupy similar spaces along the privilege-oppression continuum. And in the end, peace without justice renders the privileged more privileged and the oppressed further oppressed; a condition which might be understood as the exact opposite of authentic multiculturalism.

At the heart of the ‘Ten Commitments of a Multicultural Educator,” is a commitment to self-reflexivity, and to asking myself – to never stop asking myself – how the work I do in the name of multicultural education is making a school or community or society more just. When I find that I am unable to answer that question, or that I have become so comfortable with what is that I fail to consider, in as deep a way as possible, what could be, and then I commit to doing something else.

Paul C. Gorski is an assistant professor in Integrative Studies at George Mason University in Washington, DC, and the founder of EdChange and Multicultural Pavilion.

http://blog.fedcan.ca/2011/05/20/equity-and-social-justice-from-the-inside-out-ten-commitments-of-a-multicultural-educator/#more-1531

Breaking News on Our Coverage of Arizona's Efforts to Ban Ethnic Studies: Chained Ethnic Studies Students Take Over School Board in Tucson

2011-05-05T17:34:00.000-07:00

Editor: I found this latest information from two other blogs and thought our readers would be interested. They give an account of the latest happenings on a story that our blog has been following. Both talk about some of the actions by students in their attempt to find their own voice in the controversy. The second also provides interviews with teachers.

BREAKING: Wisconsin Comes to Arizona? Chained Ethnic Studies Students Take Over School Board in Tucson

From Alternet

Posted by jeffbiggers
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/04/26/breaking-wisconsin-comes-to-arizona-chained-ethnic-studies-students-take-over-school-board/

Has Wisconsin finally come to Arizona?

In an extraordinary uprising at the Tucson Unified School District board meeting tonight, Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies (MAS) students chained themselves to the board members chairs and derailed the introduction of a controversial resolution that would have terminated their acclaimed program’s core curriculum accreditation.

Popular Tucson blogger and activist David Abie Morales calls it a “field trip for civics and democracy in action.”

“Nobody was listening to us, especially the board,” said MAS high school student and UNIDOS activist Lisette Cota. “We were fed up. It may have been drastic but the only way was to chain ourselves to the boards’ chairs.”...............

To read the complete post on Alternet, go to:

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/04/26/breaking-wisconsin-comes-to-arizona-chained-ethnic-studies-students-take-over-school-board/

From Huffpost Politics:

Nation Watches Arizona Witch Hunt Showdown: Exclusive Interviews With Ethnic Studies Teachers

Posted: by Jeff Biggers 04/26/11 11:35 AM ET

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/arizona-witch-hunt_b_853546.html

UPDATE April 27th: In an extraordinary uprising at the Tucson Unified School District board meeting last night, Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies (MAS) students chained themselves to the board members chairs and derailed the introduction of a controversial resolution that would have terminated their acclaimed program's core curriculum accreditation.

An increasingly baffled nation will watch as the long and twisted witch hunt of Tucson's Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies program takes a hasty Orwellian turn.

Despite the fact that a costly state-commissioned audit has been delayed and largely discredited, and a new federal suit has recently been filed by the affected Mexican-American Studies teachers, the once defiant Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) governing board could buckle under the state's bullying and consider a resolution that effectively castrates one of their district's most acclaimed programs. ....................

To read the complete article, go to Huffpost Politics:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/arizona-witch-hunt_b_853546.html

ACLU Attorney to Facilitate Workshop on "Civil Rights in Schools 101" at WWU on April 27th.

2011-04-23T19:23:00.000-07:00

For those of you in the Washington State area, we invite you to join us at a workshop called, "Civil Rights in Schools 101." It will be facilitated by Linda Mangel, the staff attorney and Equity Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington. See information below.

Civil Rights in Schools 101 Workshop

Facilitated by Linda Mangel, Staff Attorney and Equity Director, ACLU-WA

• Date: Wednesday, April 27, 2011

• Time: 5:30 -7:30 pm

• Place: Center for Education, Equity and Diversity (CEED), Miller Hall 005, Woodring College of Education, Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington

Possible Topics covered:

Bullying and Harassment
Rights of pregnant students
Free Speech Rights
Discipline
Truancy
Achievement Gap
Disparate discipline
Athletics
Cyberbullying
Cell phone searches

Sponsored by the Journal of Educational Controversy and the Center for Education, Equity and Diversity at the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University, and co-sponsored by the Whatcom County Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

Union vs. Anti-Union Movement: Forum on the Controversy over the Role of Teacher Unions to take place on April 20th at WWU

2011-04-11T01:31:00.000-07:00

The Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University will sponsor the 13th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum at 5:30-7:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 20 at the Wilson Library Presentation Room on WWU’s campus. The forum will discuss the topic of whether teachers unions are a benefit or an obstacle to the education of students.

Panelists will include: Mary Lindquist, president of the Washington Education Association, William Lyne, president of the United Faculty of Washington State and member of the Washington Education Association Board of Directors, and Liv Finne, Director of Education at the Washington Policy Center.

The forum is sponsored by Woodring’s Journal of Educational Controversy and Center for Education, Equity and Diversity, and is co-sponsored by the Whatcom County Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington

Below are position statements by the panelists.

POSITION STATEMENTS

WASHINGTON POLICY CENTER STATEMENT

By Liv Finne

Director, Center for Education

Unions are private organizations of people who join together to advance their economic interests, and every worker has a right to join a union as a basic part of the freedom of association.

Today, however, unions are a powerful force in public education and their consistent objection to meaningful reform makes them the primary obstacle to the changes needed to improve the education of children. Here are some of the school reforms that unions oppose:

• Allowing local communities to open public charter schools.
• Retaining the best teachers by basing layoffs on performance, not seniority.
• Promoting high-quality teachers with raises based on merit, not time served.
• Rewarding top-performing teachers with year-end bonuses.
• Allowing higher pay for teachers who take on the most challenging students.
• Allowing higher salaries to meet the demand for more math and science teachers.
• Making it easier to fire bad teachers.
• Lifting the ban on letting any qualified professional, not just people with special certificates, teach in a public classroom. State law allows private schools to hire the best person as a teacher, without mandates or restrictions. With few exceptions a college professor cannot teach in a public high school – she doesn’t have the right certificate.
• Letting principals hire and fire teachers based on what’s best for children, not what’s convenient for adults.
• Allowing parents to evaluate teachers and using this input to set raises and teacher assignments.

We need an honest conversation about how to improve our schools. Our research shows schools with the most effective learning environments for children are led by great principals who choose a team of highly effective and committed teachers. (See “Eight Practical Ways to Reverse the Decline of Public Schools,” by Liv Finne, December 2008).

The best schools create a learning environment that is based on high expectations and hard work, and that promotes a culture that values academic excellence. In general unions oppose letting school principals control spending, benefits, salaries, hiring and work assignments in local schools. Promoting excellence in community leadership and in classroom instruction is key to student learning, but these meaningful school reforms are not possible as long as unions oppose them. For these reasons, unions represent a serious obstacle to improving education for all children in Washington state.

WASHINGTON EDUCATION ASSOCIATION STATEMENT

Mary Lindquist, Washington Education Association President

Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. No one understands those conditions better than teachers, and teachers’ unions are teachers organized and working together to improve our students’ learning environment.

A recent Harvard Educational Review article highlighted the positive correlation between strong unions and better student SAT and ACT scores. Why? Teacher contracts address critical issues such as class size, teacher quality and team collaboration.

Critics of unions regularly demonizes teachers not in an effort to improve education but as part of a broad, well-organized and well-funded effort to undermine public confidence in public sector unions. Such efforts exaggerate the failure of public schools, do nothing to improve education and ignore the real threat ---- chronic under funding of our schools.

What’s at stake in this debate is whether or not public education should remain robustly public. Teachers’ unions protect all students' opportunities by remaining committed to the high quality, publicly funded education that fuels the economic prosperity.

UNITED FACULTY OF WASHINGTON STATE STATEMENT

William Lyne, President of the UFWW

The so-call education “reform” movement regularly demonizes teachers not in an effort to improve education but as part of a broad, well-organized and well-funded effort to privatize and exploit the education “market” for profit. Efforts to exaggerate the failure of public schools, decrease the funding of public education, and blame teachers do not improve education, but they do create the conditions for the exploitation of students and families for private interests.

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Editor: A second event will occur on the WWU campus a week later on Wednesday, April 27th at 5:30-7:30pm. A workshop on Civil Rights in Schools 101 will be take place at the Center for Education, Equity and Diversity in Miller Hall room 005 on the WWU’s campus. Linda Mangel, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, will facilitate the workshop on possible topics like bullying and harassment, truancy, discipline, the achievement gap, rights of pregnant students, disparate discipline, athletics. cyberbullying, cell phone searches. This event is also sponsored by the Journal of Educational Controversy and the Center for Education, Equity and Diversity and co-sponsored by the Whatcom County Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

Bullying: Breaking the Cycle

2011-03-30T15:30:00.000-07:00

We have posted several items on the problem of bullying and harassment below. Recently, KIRO TV 7 in Washington showed an interesting program called, "Bullying: Breaking the Cycle," as part of its family and community programs. We thought our readers would be interested in viewing some successful anti-bullying programs in the schools that are attempting to "break the cycle."

You can find four segments of the video along with other interesting information at:

http://www.kirotv.com/bullying/index.html

CALIFORNICATION

2011-03-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about living in Washington is that we have license to be incredibly snotty about all things California. Their earthquakes are worse than ours, their vapid Hollywood culture makes Seattle look positively European, everything is more expensive there, and we all know that everyone there secretly wants to move here.

And no matter how bad our state budget gets, theirs is always worse.

So the open letter that University of California President Mark Yudof sent to all Californians in January was enough to knock us right on our smug flannel Starbucks asses. “This is a sad day for California,” President Yudof wrote. “In the budget proposed by Gov. Brown, the collective tuition payments made by University of California students for the first time in history would exceed what the state contributes to the system's general fund.”

Here in Washington, we crossed that line two years ago. Under Governor Gregoire’s proposed budget, student tuition would account for 70% of our budgets and state support would drop to 30%. And under the budgets that the state House of Representatives and Senate will be proposing soon, it will be even worse.

Under Governor Brown’s proposed budget, state funding for universities would fall to 1998 levels. Here in Washington, we are already at 1991 funding levels. Governor Brown’s proposed budget would reduce UC per student state funding to $7210. Governor Gregoire’s proposed budget would reduce per student state funding at Western Washington University to $2900.

So think twice the next time you want to make fun of California. As bad as things are there, they are still light years ahead of us in understanding the social and economic value of public universities.

School to Prison Pipeline -- Call for Papers from the Journal of Educational Controversy

2011-03-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

The Journal of Educational Controversy announces its call for papers for Volume 7 Number 1.

THEME: The School-to-Prison Pipeline

CONTROVERSY ADDRESSED:

The School-to-Prison Pipeline refers to a national trend in which school policies and practices are increasingly resulting in criminalizing students rather than educating them. Statistics indicate that the number of suspensions, expulsions, dropouts or “pushouts,” and juvenile justice confinements is growing. Moreover, there is a disproportionate impact on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems. In this issue, we invite authors to examine the policy implications, the political ramifications, and the causes and possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, what are these policies teaching our children?

DEADLINE FOR MANUSCRIPTS: DECEMBER 31, 2011
PUBLICATION DATE: SUMMER 2012

http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/

Drinking From the Public Trough

2011-03-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

Along with whatever surprises the latest election may have brought, it did reaffirm the age-old verity that Money Talks. Various corporations spent over $36 million to defeat any measure that would have provided any new revenue to the state, and they hit a home run each time. Not the least among these corporations were the cornerstones of Washington’s economy, Boeing and Microsoft. Whatever their public rhetoric may have been, their money made a clear statement that public investment is not something they support.

This stance may make short-term bottom-line business sense, but it may also betray an alarming historical ignorance. And it may be mortgaging the corporate future of our state.

It’s not a stretch to say that Boeing and Microsoft (and all their billionaires and millionaires) wouldn’t exist as they are today without the massive investment of public funds.

The Grand Coulee Dam, built with federal money from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Public Works Administration, provided the electricity that powered the aluminum smelters in Vancouver and Longview that fed the Boeing factories in Seattle and Vancouver that churned out B-17 and B-29 bombers during World War II and B-47s and B-52s in the 1950s.

The internet, without which Microsoft’s tremendous success and phenomenal profits would never have been possible, grew in part from research done by Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the publicly funded University of California at Los Angeles who was educated at the publicly funded Bronx High School of Science and the publicly funded City College of New York. The early infrastructure for the internet was created by the publicly funded National Science Foundation and the publicly funded United States Military.

It would be difficult to find any US private company that does not benefit every day from the investment of tax dollars in education, utilities, health care, police departments, fire departments, and social safety nets.

This is especially true for education. A broad and well-funded public education system has been the key to the competitive advantage that the United States has enjoyed in the modern world. In order to continue to grow, capitalism must do one of two things: innovate or exploit. It must either continue to come up with goods and services for which people will pay the premium that supports a decently paid work force or it must produce crap as cheaply as possible by squeezing the maximum blood, sweat, and tears from a captive and exploited work force. A strong public education system (and the political maturity and social mobility that comes with it) is the key to pushing the capitalist needle more toward innovation than exploitation.

This is why the corporate approach to education, with its emphasis on top-down, administratively driven “reform” and its neglect of funding, is so disappointing and short-sighted. When Microsoft wants to develop a new product or improve an existing one, they hire the most talented people they can find, pay them well, and try to eliminate the impediments that stand between them and innovation. They don’t try to save money with inexperienced and underpaid researchers from “Research for America” or adjunct scientists. They don’t burden their R & D people with endless evaluation and accountability exercises and they don’t fail to invest.

Washington is in the bottom five in the nation in per student investment in both K-12 and 4 year higher ed. The infrastructure that we need to produce the next Leonard Kleinrock is crumbling and desperately needs investment. And yet the companies that stand to benefit the most from that investment continue to vote against it with loads of their cash. The long-term consequence of that for Washington state is going to be less innovation and more exploitation.

Blog to Run Regular Column on Washington State Politics and Education

2011-03-16T18:00:00.000-07:00

Editor: Because our journal and blog are published out of Washington state, we get a lot of inquiries about the politics of Washington state, legislative initiatives, union and anti-union activities, etc., around educational issues. We do have a special section on our menu called, "Educational Updates for the State of Washington: Political, Legal and Social Issues," but it just provides links to one time events or issues. Our new column will be ongoing and cover issues as they are occurring. Our blogger will be William Lyne, Professor of English at Western Washington University and also a member of our journal's editorial board. Bill is also on the board of the Washington Education Association in Washington and is president of the United Faculty of Washington State that represents the four regional universities in Washington that have recently unionized.

Because our journal and its blog are international, we would be interested in hearing about issues occurring in other states and around the world on these issues. Please enter into the conversation with a comment.

Our Partner School to Provide Leadership to Community in Promoting Childhood Literacy

2011-03-13T16:25:00.000-07:00

As many of our readers already know, the Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal at the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University, that houses the Journal of Educational Controversy, also partners with a creative, innovative and progressive school, the Whatcom Day Academy, to promote a democratic vision on what schools can be. Our work together is also associated with the League of Democratic Schools, a project initiated by educator, John Goodlad. On our institute’s page, readers can read about the philosophy of the school and view some of the videos featuring actual practices in the school along with a slide show of student art in which Susan Donnelly, the head of the school, guides the viewer into seeing more deeply into the artistic creations and evolution of young children’s drawings. On that page, the viewer can also view a section of a public forum that the Institute sponsored, in which teacher, Vale Hartley, describes her use of Socratic questioning with her young students along with short video clips that illustrate her technique. Readers can also read Vale’s article in our journal’s issue on Schooling as if Democracy Matters and Susan’s articles in our issue on Art, Social Imagination and Democratic Education.

One of the goals of both the Institute and the Whatcom Day Academy is to provide leadership to the community. I am so pleased to announce that Susan Donnelly in conjunction with Professor Matthew Miller of Western Washington University has received a $30000 grant that will enable them to both develop new ideas for childhood literacy practices but also to share their ideas with the community.

Congratulations to Susan and Matt. We hope to share more about this in future blogs.

But our readers will not have to wait too long to learn more about Susan’s school. Susan Donnelly is the co-editor for the upcoming summer issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy. In addition to our printed articles, readers can anticipate a lot of video footage highlighting innovative practices in schools. The theme for the issue is, “The Education and Schools Our Children Deserve.” For a look at another school in the League, see our post below on Schools that Make a Difference: A Look at the League of Democratic Schools.

Diane Ravitch Interviewed on the Jon Stewart TV Show

2011-03-07T17:42:00.000-08:00

Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System," appeared on the Jon Stewart show on March 3rd. You can view the clip here:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-3-2011/diane-ravitch

A Look at some Unique Schools around the World

2011-03-01T17:12:00.000-08:00

Editor: I once had a colleague who likened his life as a teacher to a person whom one meets at a fork in the road who provides guidance as we find our own way in the world and choose the direction our life will take. How little we as teachers really know about the extent of our influence on a life. Today, we welcome a guest blogger, Nathan Sutton, to share one such experience. Nathan has worked on our journal’s staff since September and is about to enter his internship this spring to become a high school teacher. In his post, Nathan describes his decision to teach abroad for his internship and describes a unique kind of school that we thought our readers would find interesting. Hopefully, when Nate returns from abroad, he will write a post on this blog or an article for our journal on what he learned from this experience.

Schooling for a United World

Nathan Sutton

My introduction to the mission of United World Colleges happened in Kathmandu in the summer of 2007. There I met a British man who had spent much of his adult life as a Zen Buddhist monk, but was, at the time, on sabbatical from a ‘college’ in Norway. He and his wife were taking time to volunteer in rural Nepalese villages. He had a calm air about him and an amiable personality. We shared a dinner and conversation about the world and our place in it. The man left my presence and I haven’t seen him since; indeed I never discovered his name.

The meeting with the monk-turned-teacher and its remarkable influence has remained with me now for nearly four years and I have been an avid follower of the United World College (UWC) and its mission. Today I find myself at the terminus of the Master in Teaching program at Woodring College, Western Washington University. The more I explore the philosophies, pedagogy and practices of various schools the more I am confident of my alignment with the philosophies of UWC and remain hopeful of my future with the organization.

I grew up on a small hobby farm in southern Minnesota. There was very little in the way of outside culture and no ethnic or racial diversity to speak of in the agricultural region of my upbringing. Yet my father somehow managed to find interesting people to bring to our dinner table – European bicyclists in need of shelter from a storm, a Mongolian Tai Chi instructor, or an actor from San Francisco. I always marveled at their stories and wondered how they made it to our home in our small corner of the world. After a family trip to Sweden to mark my parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary, I had a revelation and decided I liked being abroad. I was a teenager now and could better appreciate the concept of culture. For this trip that meant drinking wine for the first time, riding on the back of a bicycle powered by a beautiful Swedish girl and dancing at a beachside disco until sunrise; it was visiting the country home of my ancestors. Now I was the one inside of a home in someone else’s corner of the world. I was hooked on exploring culture – and I never looked back.

Various travels since then have offered me more in-depth looks at culture – sights I never imagined I would see, tastes I never knew existed, languages I never dreamed my tongue would shape. But the most important aspect of these travels was the people I met along the way. It was the relationships which fostered and (often) fizzled, stories shared and the universal gift of laughter bestowed which made the trips meaningful. People keep me inclined to explore around corners, curious about the vibrancy of humanity, and engaged in living with those around me, regardless of location. I want all of these feelings to continue and see United World College as an ideal occupation for encouraging and cultivating my passions.

The origin of United World College began with Kurt Hahn, an educator and founder of various organizations including the first UWC, the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, Outward Bound and more. Mr. Hahn believed in a holistic education of youth, where young people can discover more about themselves, others and the world around them than they ever thought possible. In order to do so, youth should be set with high standards in personal health and fitness, activity and adventure, community commitment and responsibility, and abundant academic exploration. In 1962, in Southern Wales, the first UWC opened.

Now there are 13 schools around the world, on five continents. According to their website, “almost 40,000 students from over 180 countries have studied at UWC schools and colleges and there are over 130 national committees.” The national committees help to recruit youth and process applications for international schools. Students at UWC hail from Afghanistan and Finland, China and South Africa, Palestine and Bosnia, Malaysia and Brazil, Iraq and Canada, along with scores of other countries. There is a constant and concerted effort by UWC to recruit youth from all walks of life and all regions of the world in order to maximize exposure to varying cultures and languages, art and conversation, customs and ideas.

The current thirteen UWC campuses around the world will be joined by other colleges currently in various stages of development. Each has a focus, but is bound to the following UWC values:

 International and intercultural understanding
 Celebration of difference
 Personal responsibility and integrity
 Mutual responsibility and respect
 Compassion and service
 Respect for the environment
 A sense of idealism
 Personal challenge
 Action and personal example
(Obtained from the organization’s website at uwc.org)

With these principles in mind, the UWC students and staff seek to explore the complexities of the world and its inhabitants. They seek to embrace individuality, independence and exploration while learning skills in partnership, conflict resolution, and an utmost respect for diversity. All of these concepts need not be mutually exclusive or conflicting – UWC recognizes this and passes it on to future leaders.

In a world such as ours, with increasing interactions among various peoples, economic and political turmoil, and ever-growing populations, the mission of UWC and its legacy seem all the more salient. I endeavor to be an effective and informed citizen of the world and to work with others with comparable ambitions. The youth served at UWC are from many nations and come from many different backgrounds. I want to meet these students, teach in their classrooms and, above all, learn from them and their colorful experiences.

"I regard it as the foremost task of education to insure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self denial, and above all, compassion."

– Kurt Hahn

The Anti-Union Movement in Wisconsin: Myth vs. Fact

2011-02-23T19:33:00.000-08:00

The Forum for Education and Democracy has set out to distinguish between the myths and the facts around the turmoil in Wisconsin as thousands continue to march on the Capitol to oppose anti-union legislation. They ask their readers to rethink some of the myths that are circulating. We share their ideas about the myths with our readers to rethink also.

•Myth #1: Public employees in Wisconsin and elsewhere are overpaid. The truth is they’re probably underpaid when you factor in things like level of education. In Wisconsin, nearly 60 percent of public employees hold at least a four-year college degree – double the private sector workforce. That’s because many are teachers and other professionals. When you compare apples to apples, they earn 4.8 percent less than comparable private sector workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

•Myth #2: Public employees aren’t sacrificing their fair share. In the last round of bargaining in Wisconsin, the American Federation of Teachers alone offered more than $100 million in concessions in the form of higher health insurance premiums, furlough days and increased pension contributions. In Ohio, unions representing public employees gave back more than $200 million in concessions, essentially balancing the budget on their own backs.

•Myth #3: High employee benefits got us into this budget mess. Wisconsin was looking at a budget surplus until Republicans gave $117 million in business tax breaks. The reality is that the state is now facing a budget gap, but the gap is 13 percent of the budget. The average gap in other states is 20 percent, so things in Wisconsin are actually better than the norm.

•Myth #4: The state retirement system is in trouble. Again, Wisconsin is in a better position than many states. The $72 billion Wisconsin Retirement System is over 97 percent funded according to the Center of Retirement Research, a non-partisan think tank. By comparison, the fund in neighboring Illinois is only 52 percent funded.

•Myth #5: The governor has no other option. This is clearly not the case. The public employee unions have already said they will give him concessions to erase the budget gap – if he backs off his pledge to crush their bargaining rights. Also, Wisconsin and other states have large amounts of unspent stimulus funds that could be used to ease the burden. If ever there was a rainy day, this is it!

John Dewey: America's philosopher of democracy and his importance to education

2011-02-18T12:35:00.000-08:00

Our journal's consulting editor, A.G. Rud, Dean of the College of Education at Washington State University, has produced a short YouTube video on "John Dewey: America's philosopher of democracy and his importance to education." As one commentary on YouTube put it, "Well done. Not an easy task to give an overview of JD and his more than 700 articles in 140 journals, and approximately 40 books." We agree.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMh1LYuZ3B4

Our 100th Post Provides Translator for our Global Readership

2011-02-17T14:49:00.000-08:00

Today marks our 100th post to this blog. We have added the Google Translator to the blog today to assist our ever-growing global readership. I was going to use "Babel Fish" that will translate an entire page, I believe, but that doesn't seem to work on this blog. Google seems to be limited to 300 characters. (You can go to Google Translate Homepage link on this page to copy in larger text but that is another step.) If anyone has recommendations on a useful translator, let us know. We want a very convenient and accurate translator for our readers. In the meantime, try it out and see what you think.

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UPDATE:
Ok -- after playing around with this, I found that if you go to the Google Translate Homepage link on this page, you can just type in our website address or URL and it will translate the entire page. Or you can just copy a post and translate it.

An Open Letter to President Barack Obama

2011-02-12T10:25:00.000-08:00

We have printed several posts on the direction of President Obama’s educational reform on this blog. (See all) Today we are reprinting with permission an open letter by Professor Daniel Tanner published in Education Week to continue the conversation.

An Open Message to President Barack Obama
By Daniel Tanner
Professor emeritus in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University

Education Week
Published Online: February 1, 2011
Published in Print: February 2, 2011, as An Open Message to President Barack Obama
Vol. 30, Issue 19, Pages 22-23

Reprinted with Permission

A principal conclusion of the American creed is the belief in public education. The United States leads the world with the oldest continuing public school system, universal secondary education, and open-access higher education.

President Obama, when you were elected in 2008, teachers, parents, and most of us with an abiding faith in the public school envisioned a new era of school support and renewal in accord with the hopes and promises engendered by your election campaign. Instead, the centerpiece of your education program so far, the Race to the Top, reinforces, expands, and intensifies the No Child Left Behind Act of President George W. Bush and the America 2000 manifesto of President George H.W. Bush—all of which have embraced nationalized high-stakes testing as the instrument of accountability imposed upon children and teachers. Their presidential agendas, and yours, have promoted the charter school movement. But your Race to the Top competition has gone even further in promoting external testing and splitting up the American school system through the federal support of charter schools.

As with your predecessors, your unrelenting faith in high-stakes testing as the key metric for accountability not only lacks validity, but also is likely to have many unintended deleterious consequences for curriculum and the attitudes students have toward learning. No nation has ever tested itself out of an educational or social problem. The public schools cannot be blamed for children victimized by impoverishment or the failures of other social institutions. Yet our public schools have willingly and eagerly accepted responsibility for all the children of all the people.

Early in the 20th century, John Dewey warned of the need to invest in building and strengthening our unitary school system by providing for adequate facilities and resources, and of a danger in splitting up the school system by forming yet another kind of school even though it might be the cheaper route.

Mr. President, you have repeatedly boasted that our nation has the world’s leading system of higher education. But this would not have been possible without a unitary public school system capped by a uniquely American invention: the inclusive comprehensive high school with its comprehensive curriculum.

Under your initiatives, children and adolescents are being denied access to a full and rich curriculum and facilities with modern studios, shops, laboratories, and libraries where they can really work at their studies. And instead of undertaking the needed funding for a rich, full curriculum for the renewal of the American unitary school system, you are calling, in effect, for it to be dismantled and broken up into charter schools when the body of research fails to support your strategy.

In our large cities, school capacity is commonly calculated by the number of seats. But children and adolescents are not made to learn by sitting and listening for most of the day. Children like to engage in active investigation—in looking into things to find out how they work. They like to construct things; they seek to engage in socialization through language, play, and collaboration; they love to draw, paint, sculpt, and sing; they want to learn to play a musical instrument—and all of this requires some physical freedom from their seats.

Standardized tests are error-oriented. Real education is idea-oriented. At a time when our greatest need is to build a more civil society for American democracy, the American high-stakes testing syndrome has gone to such an extreme that the New York state commissioner of education has declared, as reported in The New York Times, that teacher education programs should spend less time on abstract notions like the “role of school in democracy.”

Back in the years of the Cold War, our public schools were blamed for contributing to the alleged missile gap and the prospect of losing the space race. Federal initiatives resulted in curricular priorities in our schools given to mathematics and science, to be led by university scholar-specialists. What students learned from these initiatives was that they did not like math and science. The consequence was that university enrollments in those disciplines plummeted, leading the president of the American Chemical Society to declare in his 1967 address at the society’s annual meeting, “We have committed a crime against a generation.” Earlier, Harvard University President James B. Conant had called for a moratorium on national testing. The situation is far worse today.

The current assault on teacher tenure and unions also raises a great danger to American democracy. Virtually every modern democracy embraces teacher tenure in recognition that the teacher must be free to teach if the rising generation is to be free to learn. Over the course of our modern history, our schools have been subjected to the censorship of curricular materials, with pressures exerted against teachers who address controversial problems. The external national-standardized-testing epidemic effectively diminishes the prospects of addressing controversial issues or ideas in the classroom.

Your promotion of teacher merit pay based on test scores can be traced to the system of “payment by results” practiced in 19th-century English schools serving children of the poor. For the privileged, such a factory-like production scheme was deemed inappropriate and offensive. Your initiatives under the Race to the Top competition are reducing American teachers to the status of employees, whereas teachers are recognized and treated as professionals in almost every other civilized nation. Year after year, the Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Poll reveals that the public, as a whole, sees the biggest problem facing the public schools as the “lack of financial support/funding/money.”

There is a great danger to our democracy with out-of-school adolescents constituting by far the largest unemployed group. Sigmund Freud held that work defines one’s place in the human community. We cannot continue to ignore the consequences of social disaffection resulting from the massive and growing population of youths who are out of school and out of work.

Toward the end of the Clinton administration, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich belatedly found that his proposal for a German-style apprenticeship system in our country to solve the problem of unemployed American youths was unacceptable to the American public. At the time, I was participating in the annual meeting of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. At the conference, the air was buzzing in anticipation of a national plan for consolidating, or at least coordinating, the last two years of high school with the two years of community college as a four-year unit for vocational-technical education. Through what is known as the 2+2 or tech-prep program, adolescents would be able to bridge the chasm between high school and gainful postsecondary employment and higher education. In the mid-20th century, a committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences pointed out that if the public schools actually tried to carry out the purely academic program advocated for the high school by many university liberal arts professors, our whole national life would be in danger of collapse. Unfortunately, we backed away—beginning in the 1960s—from a commitment to meaningful preparation of young people for life after high school.

Mr. President, your metrics for determining school success treat the problems of education as problems to be worked out with a yardstick—to paraphrase the late American philosopher Boyd H. Bode. As Bode reminded us in his book Modern Educational Theory, “We put shoes on a child to protect his health and not to bind his feet.” The Race to the Top approach is relegating the studies and activities that children love—civic education, the arts, career education—to the bottom rung of the academic ladder.

At the opening of the 20th century, John Dewey, addressing parents in a lecture and essay titled “The School and Social Progress,” declared: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.” The American people should expect no less of our national leadership.

See Also
For a teacher’s response to Race to the Top, read: "A Letter to My President."

Daniel Tanner is a professor emeritus in the graduate school of education at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. He is the co-author of Curriculum Development: Theory Into Practice (Pearson Prentice Hall, 4th ed., 2007) and has written extensively on the history and politics of the school curriculum in the United States and internationally.
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Editor: Despite his educational reform direction, President Obama knows what kind of school children deserve as illustrated by the choice he made for his own children. For a look at the kind of education Malia and Sasha are receiving, see our post by David Marshak, entitled, "Obama's School Choice: Shouldn't the Education that Malia and Sasha Receive Be Available to All?"

Watch for our upcoming issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy on the theme: "The Education and Schools our Children Deserve" scheduled to go online in the summer of 2011. Our next issue in the summer of 2012 will focus on "The School-to-Prison Pipeline."

A Rational and Fruitful Discussion of the Achievement Gap

2011-02-01T12:25:00.000-08:00

We have posted several posts on the achievement gap in the past along with critiques on the simplistic solutions often offered --- close down schools, blame unions, etc. Today, we are pleased to reprint an article by Eric Cooper and Yvette Jackson of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education with their permission. Our readers will have the opportunity for a change to read a more insightful and rational analysis on confronting this very series social issue.

The 'Fierce Urgency of Now': It's Time to Close the Gap
Narrowing Race and Culture Gaps Between Students and Teachers

By Eric Cooper & Yvette Jackson
National Urban Alliance for Effective Education

Education Week
Published Online: January 25, 2011
Published in Print: January 26, 2011, as The 'Fierce Urgency of Now'
Vol. 30, Issue 18, Pages 22-23

Reprinted with Permission

The recent national conversation about our K-12 schools has done a remarkable job of reducing complex issues to simple choices: Failed traditional public schools or successful charter schools? Ineffective union teachers or excellent nonunion teachers?

And the list goes on—though not for very long.

The truth is that these conversations are the easy ones and not the ones that will solve the real challenges in underperforming schools. Just below the surface are far more perplexing issues of race and culture that continue to leave students of color behind academically and economically.

To be sure, the nation has made the performance of students of color a priority, at least in terms of tracking and documenting student achievement so that schools can’t hide behind top performers. But the focus on accountability that made closing academic achievement gaps a national priority has revealed another chasm that is harder to measure and equally pervasive.

Teachers in urban classrooms often feel unable to connect with students of color or students from cultures different from their own. This cultural and relationship gap is one of the biggest barriers to helping students of color reach their intellectual and academic potential. The teacher’s role is especially important for students who face daunting family circumstances and primarily depend on school for their intellectual and character development.

We know this because for 20 years teachers have been telling us so, asking for our help, and thanking us when they connect with students in ways that promote student growth and confidence. Students also know this. In survey after survey, students say they want caring adult relationships and teachers who understand them and their communities.

Nearly a decade ago, the No Child Left Behind Act offered hope for pushing through such barriers by pressuring states to revamp teacher preparation, define quality teaching, and put a high-quality teacher in every classroom. But today, just as surely as NCLB remains on the books, its goals for teaching are more an aspiration than a reality—particularly for African-American and Latino students. That is because neither NCLB nor resulting professional development has focused sufficiently on systemic ways to help teachers fully respond to the needs and identify the strengths of culturally and racially diverse students.

Today, far too many students of color sit in classrooms waiting for opportunities that will elicit and nurture their attention, creativity, and intellectual potential. They long to excel beyond the potential that their schools, teachers, and other adults see in them. But while they wait, many will see their skills atrophy, perpetuating the serious issues of underachievement by students of color.

Today, far too many students of color sit in classrooms waiting for opportunities that will elicit and nurture their attention, creativity, and intellectual potential.

We can end their waiting by acknowledging that teachers often do not feel qualified to bridge gaps in experience and background with students in ways that draw out students’ strengths, make connections with them, and maximize their potential. This doesn’t mean that these teachers are “bad” or can’t succeed with some students, but instead that these educators need new strategies and ways of thinking.

There is a lot we can do right away, starting with how we as a nation approach professional development. We must:

• Shift the perspective of teachers and schools so they no longer see students primarily as test scores and put too much focus on their weaknesses. Teachers need practices that help identify, affirm, and build on student strengths, using “dynamic” assessments and observations on how learners approach rigorous content. When students and teachers learn that a relentless focus on increasingly complex content is ultimately more important than the grades students receive, the more successful students become.

• Help teachers who feel unprepared to meet the needs of students of color or economically disadvantaged students. Classroom relationships are especially challenging for many of these teachers. Not knowing what is meaningful and relevant to students and misunderstanding reasons for their underperformance intensifies these challenges.

• Give teachers strategies that connect learning with the lives of their students. This will help students understand concepts and other classroom material and, just as importantly, allow them to demonstrate understanding and build their confidence.

• Design professional development that is part of long-term learning objectives that are embedded in curriculum, creates high expectations on a daily basis, engages students in the professional development with their teachers, and provides strategies and accountability measures to meet these expectations.

• Provide greater leadership. Too few principals are adequately involved in professional development, and the result is a gap between leadership, support, and lasting momentum.

We must be realistic about the challenges teachers face. It is not easy to believe that a 5th grader who is reading at the 2nd grade level and inattentive is going to be at grade level any time soon without extensive support. But the wrong assumption is that the student doesn’t care or doesn’t want to participate or learn. Instead, it may take a structured conversation with that student, a survey of personal interests, or a connection between learning and the real world. The barriers can be broken down.

If a teacher finds that the student was rarely read to outside of school, then someone should read to him. If that student loves exploration, then someone can read to him about exploration and the academics embedded in the texts. But don’t stop there. Once he’s interested, get him to talk about his interest and then expose him to virtual field trips to prepare a presentation on exploration using multimedia resources.

The next part of this journey unfolds when the students are assigned increasingly complex projects in which they mentor others. In this way, the goal is not the grade or a test score, but sustained effort. This kind of effort helps students and teachers get beyond “stereotype threats”—the destructive forces that encourage students to play down to lowest expectations, particularly widely held beliefs about their intelligence.

Re-evaluating how we address the needs of students of color is not an option. Today, on average, 55 percent of black and brown Americans graduate from high school, while the graduation rate for white Americans is approximately 78 percent. Sadly, many of those students who drop out end up going to prison. Nearly two-thirds of America’s inmates are people of color.

We can do better if we recognize that wide-scale improvement cannot be boiled down to simple choices between options that promise pockets of excellence. There are some 3.5 million teachers in the United States. Real change will mean engaging all of them—and especially those in urban centers who are seeking help.

Only then will we begin to break down barriers to high intellectual achievement that otherwise will condemn another generation of brown and black children to poverty or worse. Unfortunately, for these children, society has created circumstances where failure is an option. This will continue if that is the option we adults allow. We can do more, though we must do it now. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us of this when he spoke of the “fierce urgency of now.” Collectively we can do it. We must do it.

Eric Cooper is the president and founder of the nonprofit National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, in Syosset, N.Y. Yvette Jackson is the organization’s chief executive officer.

Grassroots “Save Our Schools” March on Washington & National Call to Action on July 28-31

2011-01-22T11:13:00.000-08:00

This blog has tried to follow some of the grassroots movements in this country as a balance to the official messages coming from Secretary Duncan and the U.S. Department of Education that are often reflected in the mainstream media. We have learned about a march on Washington that will take place July 30th.

This grassroots movement of parents, teachers, students, community activists, and “everyday working people” has been endorsed by educational voices like Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Joel Spring, Rethinking Schools' editors, David Berliner, among many others. Diane Ravitch will be one of the speakers at the DC rally. Prior to the march and rally in the park, participants will be able to participate in a number of seminars, workshops and advocacy meetings hosted by American University.

Here is their call to action:

DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM

For the future of our children, we demand the following…

Equitable funding for all public school communities

• Equitable funding across all public schools and school systems
• Full public funding of family and community support services
• Full funding for 21st century school and neighborhood libraries

End to economically and racially re-segregated schools

End to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation

• Multiple and varied assessments to evaluate students, teachers and schools
• No pay per test performance for teachers and administrators
• End to public school closures based upon test performance

Curriculum developed for and by local school communities

• Support teacher and student access to a wide-range of instructional programs and technologies
• Well-rounded education that develops every students’ intellectual, creative, and physical potential
• Opportunities for multicultural/multilingual curriculum for all students
• Small class sizes that foster caring, democratic learning communities

Teacher, parent and community leadership in forming public education policies

• Educator, parent and community leadership in drafting of new ESEA legislation
• Federal support for local school programs free of punitive and competitive funding
• End political and corporate control of curriculum, instruction and assessment decisions

Finding the current educational policies destructive and their own efforts to speak out largely marginalized, the organizers explain the motivation behind the movement:

Getting to this point has been a long journey. For the last few years, thousands of teachers and parents have been calling for action against No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and, more recently, questioning Race to the Top (RTTT).

Teachers, students, and parents from across the country have staged protests, started blogs, written op-eds, and called and written the White House and the U.S. Department of Education to try to halt the destruction of their local schools.

Numerous efforts have been made to get U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama to listen to US – the teachers, parents, and students who experience the effects of these disastrous policies every day. WE know that NCLB is not working. Unfortunately, it has been almost impossible to make our voices heard. Although we have the knowledge, the expertise, and the relationships with students that make education possible, we have been shut out of the conversation about school reform.

We, like all teachers and parents, want better schools. For our children’s sake, we are organizing to improve our schools – but not through the vehicle known as NCLB. It has been a disaster. Although there are various opinions about the many issues involved with school reform, it is now time to speak with ONE VOICE – that is, No Child Left Behind must not be reauthorized. We reclaim our right to determine how our children will be educated. We are organizing to revitalize an educational system that for too many children focuses more on test preparation than meaningful learning.We demand a humane, empowering education for every child in America.

For more information, go to: http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/

The Mark Twain Controversy over Racially-Charged Language

2011-01-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

Our readers are probably familiar with the current controversy over removing certain offensive words from Mark Twain's classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, to make the books more suitable for young people to read. Ever since New South Books, a publisher in Alabama, announced the upcoming release of its new edition, there has been a number of debates in the media, blogs, and online commentary between those who view the move as a form of censorship that sanitizes the past and corrupts the force of the novels and those who believe that removing certain offensive racial epitaphs makes the books more accessible to young students. While many have focused on the substitution of the word "nigger" with the word "slave," the new edition also substitutes "Injun" with the more acceptable "Indian."

One of our favorite websites, American Indians in Children's Literature, has provided an interesting analysis from a Native American perspective. The author, Debbie Reese, has given us permission to reprint the analysis for the readers of our blog.

An American Indian perspective on changing "Injun" to "Indian" in TOM SAWYER
by Debbie Reese
Monday, January 10, 2011

On January 3rd, Publisher's Weekly carried an article called Upcoming NewSouth 'Huck Finn' Eliminates the 'N' Word. The article says that NewSouth Books is planning to release a version of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a single volume titled Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The article also says that the editor, Alan Gribben, replaced "nigger" with "slave" and "injun" with "Indian."

I've received several emails, asking what I think of the change.

I imagine that I probably read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when I was in school, but I don't remember much. Waller Hastings (a colleague on child_lit) pointed to the lack of critical discussion of Twain's portrayals of Indians. News about the NewSouth book, and Waller's comment, too, prompted me to read (reread?) Tom Sawyer.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(Note: Page numbers below correspond to the eBook copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that I read in Google books.)

Some facts:

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was first published in 1875.
Two chapter titles include the phrase "Injun Joe."
The phrase "honest injun" appears two times.
The phrase "Injun Joe" appears 33 times.
The word "Indian" appears once.
The word "Indians" appears twice.
The word "powwow" appears once.
The phrase "war-whoop" appears three times.

[Update, 1/12/2011: Unless otherwise noted, illustrations shown are from the 1980 printing by the University of California Press, edited by John C. Gerber, Paul Baender, and Terry Fitkins. It includes original illustrations by True E. Williams. Twain selected Williams to do the illustrations. Page 273 of the text quotes Twain as saying "Williams has made about 200 rattling pictures for it."

Summary and my comments.

Summary: The first Indian that Twain introduces readers to is an unnamed figure in Tom's imagination. This takes place in chapter eight on page 74. Tom has been rebuffed by the girl he's sweet on (Becky) and runs off to the woods. There, Tom thinks about running away to "join the Indians" where he'll "hunt buffaloes and go on the warpath in the mountain ranges and the trackless great plains of the Far West." When he returns, he'll be with "a great Indian chief, bristling with feathers, hideous with paint." He'll go into Sunday-school "with a blood-curdling war-whoop."

Deb's comments: Tom's image reflects America's love/hate attitude towards American Indians. On one hand, we're admired and on the other, we're feared. Or----I should say---IMAGES of us are admired and feared. Tom wants to join Indians who (he imagines) are living the good life out west, hunting buffaloes. He is drawn to the warlike image, too, as he images going on the warpath with the Indians of his imagination. Tom dwells more on the aggressive warlike image of Indians in feathers and paint who utter sounds that terrorize courageous Christians and settlers.
Summary: In the next chapter, Twain introduces the character, "Injun Joe." Not counting the chapter titles in the table of contents, "Injun Joe" first appears in the story on page 84.

The scene is a graveyard. Tom and Huck are in the graveyard and hear voices. At first they're afraid, thinking the voices belong to devils but they see that the voices belong to three men, Dr. Robinson, Muff Potter, and, "Injun Joe." The doctor has hired Potter and "Injun Joe" to dig up a body. (We aren't told why the doctor needed this body, but the Report of the geological survey of the State of Missouri says that that near Hannibal is a cave where a "Dr. McDowell deposited a relative's corpse to see if it would petrify" (p. 36). The book was published by Bureau of Geology and Mines in 1874.)

Once the body is above ground and wrapped in a blanket, Potter and "Injun Joe" ask for more money. The doctor says he's already paid them, but Potter and "Injun Joe" want more. "Injun Joe" approaches the doctor, saying:

"Five years ago you drove me away from your father's kitchen one night, when I come to ask for something to eat, and you said I warn't there for any good; and when I swore I'd get even with you if it took a hundred years, your father had me jailed for a vagrant. Did you think I'd forget? The Injun blood ain't in me for nothing. And now I've got you, and you got to settle, you know!" (p. 85)

A fight ensues, during which "Injun Joe," with Potter's knife in hand, goes

"...creeping, catlike and stooping, round and round about the combatants, seeking an opportunity."(p. 86)

The doctor hits Potter, knocking him out and to the ground. Then,

"...the half-breed saw his chance and drove the knife to the hilt in the young man's breast." (p. 86)

The doctor dies and the "half-breed" mutters

"That score is settled--damn you." (p. 86)

"Injun Joe" robs the body and then puts the knife into Potter's hand. When Potter regains consciousness, "Injun Joe" asks Potter why he killed the doctor. Potter can't recall doing it, so Joe (throughout this conversation, Potter calls him Joe, not "Injun Joe"). Joe describes how Potter killed the doctor. Potter begs "Joe" not to tell anyone, and he agrees to keep quiet. The two part ways. The text says that the "half-breed" watched Potter leave. His knife was left behind.

Deb's comments: As developed by Twain, "Injun Joe" is a vengeful, lying murderer who moves like a cat. In framing "Injun Joe" as animal-like, Twain is not alone. Authors then and now do it. A recent example is seen in James Crowley's Blackfeet characters who gnaw on bones (see section on chapter six).

And, he's a half-breed whose Indian blood/identity is the reason he's a vengeful, lying murderer.

He uses "Injun" (not "Indian") to describe himself. What, if any, backstory did Twain work up on him? Who did Twain imagine his parents to be? (In Why Mark Twain Murdered Injun Joe Carter Revard says "halfbreeds" were children of white fathers and Indian women, many of whom were prostitutes.)

Did "Injun Joe" grow up in Hannibal? We know that he was poor and hungry and that five years prior to the murder, he had been poor and hungry enough to ask for a handout. According to Twain's preface, the book is set 30 or 40 years prior to its publication in 1876. A critical companion on SAWYER indicates that there was an Osage man named Indian Joe living in Hannibal. Twain used his name.
Would it make a difference in how readers view "Injun Joe" if they read "Indian Joe" instead? I think not! He'd still be a vengeful, lying, half-breed murderer. In fact, replacing the derogatory "Injun" to the too-broad-but-not-derogatory "Indian" actually works to make the character even less sympathetic. Readers may not know what an "Injun" is, but they definitely know what an "Indian" is! Removing the slur without changing the character doesn't alleviate anything derogatory... It absolutely pins wicked evil behavior on Indians.
Summary: From their spot in the graveyard, Tom and Huck witnessed the murder. In chapter ten, they run off and wonder what to do. They decide to stay quiet because

"That Injun devil wouldn't make any more of drownding us than a couple of cats, if we was to squeak 'bout this and they didn't hang him." (p. 91)

They go through an elaborate ritual, burying their written oath to remain quiet.

Deb's comments: Twain tacks on "devil" to "Injun Joe's" character. Other classic works of literature frame Indians as devils or engaged in "devilment" (see page 284 of Wilder's LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE where the text reads "Mr. Scott said he didn't know why so many of those savages were coming together, if they didn't mean devilment." That text is followed by Mr. Scott saying "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Death will be precisely how Twain deals with his Indian character.)

Summary: The next day (in chapter 11), the body and Potter's knife are found. "Injun Joe" tells the townspeople that he saw Potter kill the doctor. Tom and Huck watch in disbelief as "the stony-hearted liar" (p. 100) talks. The two boys expect God to strike the liar with lightning but nothing happens,

"for plainly this miscreant had sold himself to Satan and it would be fatal to meddle with the property of such a power as that." (p. 100)

"Injun Joe" repeats his lie at an inquest. Again, no lightning strikes him down, and so, Tom and Huck's fear that "Injun Joe" sold himself to the devil is confirmed. They're fascinated with him and decide to watch him, night and day, in the hopes of actually seeing him with the devil. The townspeople are angry at "Injun Joe" for participating in the grave-digging and body-snatching, but are afraid of him and leave him be.

Deb's comments: Earlier he was called a devil; now he's sold himself to the Satan, and not even God is willing to use his power against Satan...

Summary: Worried over what he's seen, Tom feels low and dreary. In chapter 12, his aunt tries various remedies and then starts giving him "Pain-killer." Bored, Tom gives some to the cat, Peter, by prying the cats mouth open and pouring Pain-killer in it:

Peter sprang a couple of yards in the air, and then delivered a war-whoop and set off round an round the room, banging against furniture, upsetting flower-pots, and making general havoc. (p. 107)

Deb's comment: Here, Twain is using the running-around-like-a-wild-Indian imagery, and, he's added the war-whooping sound to make sure the reader sees what he is imagining.
Summary: Tom is better and heads on to school, wondering where Becky might be. Not seeing her, he goes inside the school house and then sees her pass by the gate:

...Tom's heart gave a great bound. The next instant he was out, and "going on" like an Indian; yelling, laughing, chasing boys, jumping over the fence at risk of life and limb, throwing hand-springs, standing on his head--doing all the heroic things he could conceive of, and keeping a furtive eye out, all the while, to see if Becky Thatcher was noticing. (p.109)

She doesn't notice, so...

He carried his exploits to her immediate vicinity; came war-whooping around, snatched a boy's cap, hurled it to the roof of the school-house... (p. 110)

Becky rebuffs him, he's embarrassed, and sneaks off, crestfallen.

The next few chapters are about Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper, who've run off to an island where they play pirates. They get sick smoking cigarettes. When the boys don't return home, the townspeople think they drowned. At one point when Huck and Joe fall asleep, Tom takes off, headed home. Tom sneaks into his aunt's house and hears her, his brother, and Joe's mother lament the loss of the boys. He also hears when their funeral will be held. After they go to bed, Tom takes off again and returns to their camp on the island.

The boys swim and play, but start to feel lonely for home. When Huck and Joe decide to leave. Tom convinces them to stay by planning their return during the funeral (readers don't know the plan till it happens). That night a storm comes and soaks their camp. The next morning, the boys try to leave again, and Tom reminds them of the plan. They stay and decide to quit being pirates and "be Indians for a change" (p. 147):

...it was not long before they were stripped, and striped from head to toe with black mud, like so many zebras--all of them chiefs, of course--and then they went tearing through the woods to attack an English settlement.

By and by they separated into three hostile tribes, and darted upon each other from ambush with dreadful war-whoops, and killed and scalped each other by thousands. It was a gory day. Consequently it was an extremely satisfactory one.

They assembled in camp toward supper-time, hungry and happy; but now a difficulty arose--hostile Indians could not break the bread of hospitality together without first making peace, and this was a simple impossibility without smoking a pipe of peace. There was no other process that ever they had heard of. Two of the savages almost wished they had remained pirates. However, there was no other way; so with much show of cheerfulness as they could muster they called for the pipe and took their whiff as it passed, in due form.

And behold, they were glad they had gone into savagery, for they had gained something; they found that they could now smoke a little without having to go and hunt for a lost knife; they did not get sick enough to be seriously uncomfortable. They were not likely to fool away this high promise for lack of effort. No, they practiced cautiously, after supper, with right fair success, and so they spent a jubilant evening. They were prouder and happier in their new acquirement than they would have been in the scalping and skinning of the Six Nations. We will leave them to smoke and chatter and brag, since we have no further use for them at present. (pp. 147-148)

Deb's comments: They play Indian much as Tom imagined it earlier in the book. Mud serves as paint. They attack, ambush, kill, and scalp. Because they'd gotten sick smoking cigarettes, they're reluctant to smoke tobacco again. But, they're Indians, and they've got to smoke the peace pipe. They smoke just a little. It doesn't make them sick, and, that's what makes them jubilant---more proud and happy, even, than if they had been scalping and skinning Indians of the Six Nations.

Skinning Indians? Hmmm... What does Twain mean by that? Skinning Indians meant taking advantage of them. Is that what Twain meant? Or did he mean literally skinning Indians?

And what is Twain doing with the whole smoking theme? Did he own stock in tobacco?! Did he want boys to know that they should not be afraid to smoke if, on their first try, it made them sick?
Summary: The boys return home in the midst of the funeral service. They are greeted with joy. Summer comes and school is out. Potter's trial is about to take place. Tom talks with Huck, asking him if there is anyone who could force him to talk. Huck says:

"Get me to tell? Why, if I wanted that half-breed devil to drownd me they could get me to tell. They ain't no different way." (p. 190)

Deb's comment: Clearly, Huck is afraid "Injun Joe" will kill him.

Summary: The two boys swear again to each other to keep quiet, but they feel bad for Potter, knowing he is innocent and that the lie told by "Injun Joe" is the only evidence against him. Everyone gathers at the courthouse. "Injun Joe" is there, too. To almost everyone's surprise (readers learn later that, feeling guilty, Tom met with Potter's lawyer the night before), Tom is called to the stand and is asked where he was that night. Tom glances at "Injun Joe" and after a few minutes, says that he was in the graveyard and starts testifying. When he gets to the part about "Injun Joe" jumping up with the knife,

Crash! Quick as lightening the half-breed sprang for a window, tore his way through all opposers, and was gone! (p. 197)

Tom is a hero to the townspeople. Both Tom and Huck are afraid (Tom has bad dreams), now that "Injun Joe" is on the loose. Huck is glad he didn't have to testify. He's afraid, though, that it'll come out that he, too, was a witness to the murder.

In chapter 25, Tom and Huck embark on another adventure: hunting for buried treasure. They dig in several places. Finding nothing, they head to Cardiff Hill, the location of a haunted house. They go inside to look around. While inside they hear voices of men approaching the house. One of them is "Injun Joe." He and the other man talk about their "dangerous" plans. They've got silver coins with them that they decide to bury before they leave, returning for it later. "Injun Joe" remembers seeing a pick (it is Tom's pick) and uses it to dig. He notices fresh dirt on it. As he's digging, he finds a box of gold coins.

Tom and Huck happily consider all the money they'll have once the two men leave the house. But, the two men decide not to leave the silver or gold there, but to hide it "under the cross" in "Injun Joe's" "Number Two" den.

"Injun Joe's" companion tells him they have enough money and don't need to do that other job, but with "a wicked light" in his eyes, "Injun Joe" says its not about robbery, it's about revenge. The men leave, and the boys leave, too.

The next day Tom and Huck plan to find Number Two den. In chapter 29, Huck follows two men who have the box of gold. They go to Widow Douglas's house. Listening to them talk, Huck learns that her husband was a justice of the peace who had judged "Injun Joe" to be a vagrant and

...had me horsewhipped! ---horsewhipped in front of the jail, like a nigger! ---with all the town looking on! HORSEWHIPPED! --do you understand? He took advantage of me and died. But I'll take it out on her." (p. 236)

His companion tells him not to kill her. "Injun Joe" replies:

"Kill? Who said anything about killing? I would kill him if he was here; but not her. When you want to get revenge on a woman you don't kill her--both! you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils--you notch her ears like a sow!"

"By God, that's--"

"Keep your opinion to yourself! It will be safest for you. I'll tie her to the bed. If she bleeds to death, is that my fault? I'll not cry, if she does. My friend, you'll help in this thing--for my sake--that's why you're here--I mightn't be able alone. If you flinch, I'll kill you. Do you understand that? And if I have to kill you, I'll kill her--and then I reckon nobody'll ever know much about who done this business." (pp. 236-237)

Deb's comment: At the widow's house, readers learn that "Injun Joe" is not just a thieving, lying murderer. He's also racist and barbaric. Racist because he was humiliated at being treated "like a nigger" in front of everyone, and barbaric because he plans to torture and horribly mutilate the widow.
At this point in the book, Twain makes "Injun Joe" even more despicable. Now he's not only a liar, a thief, and a murder. He's racist and barbaric, too.

Summary: Huck races for help, stopping at the Welshman's house to tell him that two men are planning to hurt the widow. Huck goes with the Welshman and his sons, who take their guns to rescue the widow. When he hears their guns fire, Huck runs home. The next morning (chapter 30), Huck goes to the Welshman's house and learns that they did not catch the men. The Welshman questions Huck, trying to get info from him about the two men. Huck, intent on keeping his own identity as a witness to the murder a secret, stumbles over his words trying to describe the two men. But the Welshman is on to him, presses him, and gets Huck to blurt out that it was "Injun Joe." The Welshman says:

"It's all plain enough, now. When you talked about notching ears and slitting noses I judged that that was your own embellishment, because white men don't take that sort of revenge. But an Injun! That's a different matter altogether." (p. 243)

Deb's comment: Again---if we replace "Injun" with "Indian," does it make a difference in how readers view that character? I think not!

Summary: There is a plan to find the two men, but then everyone realizes Becky and Tom are missing. There is fear they're lost in a cave, and the townspeople spend three days searching for them.

In chapter 31, Tom and Becky are in the cave, lost. They discover that "Injun Joe" is also in the cave. In the next chapter, Tom and Becky are rescued and the cave entrance is sealed. Days pass. When Tom learns that the entrance to the cave is sealed off, he tells the judge that "Injun Joe" is in the cave. In chapter 33, the judge, Tom, and townspeople return to the cave and open the door.

Injun Joe lay stretched upon the ground, dead, with his face close to the crack of the door, as if his longing eyes had been fixed, to the latest moment, upon the light and the cheer of the free world outside. Tom was touched, for he knew by his own experience how this wretch had suffered. His pity was moved, but nevertheless he felt an abounding sense of relief and security, now, which revealed to him in a degree which he had not fully appreciated before how vast a weight of dread had been lying upon him since the day he lifted his voice against this bloody-minded outcast.

Injun Joe's bowie-knife lay close by, its blade broken in two. The great foundation-beam of the door had been chipped and hacked through, with tedious labor; useless labor, too, it was, for the native rock formed a sill outside it, and upon that stubborn material the knife had wrought no effect. (p. 267)

"Injun Joe" died a slow death. Knowing that it was useless to hack at the door with his knife, he ate candle stubs and bats. He had made a crude cup to collect water from drops that fell from a stalactite.

Deb's comments: Having just been lost in the cave, Tom feels some empathy for "Injun Joe" but is glad he's dead and safe from the "bloody-minded outcast." Twain gives readers a lot of details to help readers see the suffering he endured in his last days.

Summary: "Injun Joe" was buried near the mouth of the cave.

[P]eople flocked there in boats and wagons from the towns and from all the farms and hamlets for seven miles around; they brought their children, and all sorts of provisions, and confessed that they had had almost as satisfactory a time at the funeral as they could have had at the hanging. (p. 269)

Deb's comments: What is that flaw in humanity, that wants to see grisly events like hangings? Why is witnessing such things "satisfying"?! People attended "Injun Joe's" funeral, not to mourn him, but to celebrate his death.

Summary: Between finding the body and his funeral, some "sappy women" (p. 269) felt sympathy for "Injun Joe" and wanted the Governor to pardon him:

This funeral stopped the further growth of one thing---the petition to the Governor for Injun Joe's pardon. The petition had been largely signed; many tearful and eloquent meetings had been held, and a committee of sappy women appointed to go in deep mourning and wail around the Governor, and implore him to be a merciful ass and trample his duty under foot. Injun Joe was believed to have killed five citizens of the village, but what of that? If he had been Satan himself there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky waterworks. (p. 269)

Deb's comments: Why did Twain add that bit about the pardon? Did he imagine some of his readers might have sympathy for "Injun Joe"? Framing the signers of the petition as "sappy" and "weaklings" he may be asking his reader who they wish to be. Sappy weaklings? Not likely!

Summary: The day after the funeral, Tom and Huck go back to the cave and find the gold and silver. Though they're rich, they promise each other to follow through on their plans to become robbers.

Debbie's thoughts about "honest injun"...The first use of "injun" in the story occurs on page 17, and it isn't in reference to a specific character. By that point, we've already met Tom and Jim. Tom's aunt Polly has punished him, setting him to whitewash a fence. As he works, he realizes a boy named Ben is nearby. He doesn't want Ben to tease him, so, Tom steps back, admires his work, adds another brush stroke, studies it, adds another, and so on, as though its art, not work. Ben asks if he can try it, but Tom says no, that only one boy in a thousand or two could do it the way it needs to be done. Ben asks again if he can do it, and Tom replies:

"Ben, I'd like to, honest injun; but Aunt Polly---well, Jim wanted to do it, but she wouldn't let him; Sid wanted to do it, and she wouldn't let Sid. Now don't you see how I'm fixed? If you was to tackle this fence and anything was to happen to it---"

The phrase "honest injun" came up about a year ago in U.S. politics when chair of the GOP used it. I did a bit of research on it then, and thought that Twain was the first to use to in print. Today, I found an older use of it... It appeared in 1830 in a collection of items called Very Funny, Not too Funny; Just Funny Enough. (Note: The correct year for Very Funny is 1880, not 1830.) My colleagues in children's literature may be interested to know it was in an 1880 volume of St. Nicholas, the monthly magazine for children. Back to Tom Sawyer.... the phrase appears again on page 271.

It is a slur but I'm not sure how many people know it is derogatory. A lot of people don't know that "redskins" or "squaw" are derogatory. As I said earlier, I'm not sure what image comes to mind when a child hears the word "injun". I'm certain that a specific (stereotypical, monolithic) image comes to a child's mind when he or she hears the word "Indian."

My conclusions about the revised edition of Tom Sawyer?

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is not helped by changing "Injun" to "Indian." Alan Gribben (the editor of the revised volume) says in the Introduction to the volume that:

The editor’s decision for this edition of Tom Sawyer has been to render the sixty-seven repetitions of the outcast’s name as “Indian Joe” to assist in retiring another antiquated and insulting word (even though the very name “Indian” itself commemorates a misnomer dating back to Columbus). But the substitution of a merely informative racial sobriquet salvages Twain’s ethnic innuendoes regarding the motivation for Indian Joe’s animosity toward the town’s residents. A total of seventeen miscellaneous usages of the I-word have similarly been altered in both novels. For the same reasons the eight references in Tom Sawyer to “half-breed” have been converted to “half-blood,” which is less disrespectful and has even taken on a degree of panache since J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005).

I've never used "I-word" for "Injun" and I don't know of any Native scholars who've used it either. If you've seen it used, please let me know (send email or submit a comment below).

Earlier in the introduction Gribben says that Twain didn't have to concern himself with African American or Native American readers because they were occupied with recovering from degradation and trying to survive and hence, too busy "to bother about objectionable vocabulary choices in two popular books." Perhaps, but I'd like to see evidence of that claim. In saying that, I think Gribben inadvertently says that we (remember, I'm a tribally enrolled American Indian) couldn't do both---survive and engage in literary study and political activism. I know that's not true. We've been doing both for literally hundreds of years. In 1829, for example, William Apess, a Pequot man, wrote A Son of the Forest in which he said:

[T]he great fear I entertained of my brethren was occasioned by the many stories I had heard of their cruelty toward the whites—how they were in the habit of killing and scalping men, women, and children. But the whites did not tell me that they were in a great majority of instances the aggressors—that the had imbrued their hands in the lifeblood of my brethren, driven them from their once peaceful and happy homes—that they introduced among them the fatal and exterminating diseases of civilized life.

Gribben thinks changing "Injun" to "Indian" will make the book more likely to be used in schools. What schools, I wonder, does he mean? Does he think the change makes it more likely to be used in tribally-run schools? Or does he mean schools that don't have Native children in them?

His remarks (quoted above) indicate that he thinks that there's enough in the book for readers to understand the motivations for Joe's animosity. What do you think? Do you know of a teacher who is helping children see and understand the anti-Indian racism in the book?

I suppose there may be teachers who can do that, but my experience with other classics (like Little House on the Prairie) tells me otherwise. Teachers are over-worked, underpaid, and they are not respected for the tremendous job they do, so please know that I'm not dumping on them.

Instead, I am pointing to an overall lack of critical engagement with the ways that American Indians are portrayed in books and movies and textbooks. That lack of engagement spans most universities, from their colleges of Education to their English departments, to their schools of Medicine.

I wouldn't use the old or new versions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in any elementary classroom. I might use it in a high school course in a unit that studies racism in literature...

What would you do? Do you know of teachers who teach the book? How do they address "injun" or "Indian"? Do you think they point out anything at all to counter the image generated by Twain?

-----------------------------------------
Note, 1:57 PM CST, Jan 10, 2012

This is a public thank-you to colleagues on child_lit who've been discussing SAWYER and FINN over the last week. I highly recommend the child_lit listserv to anyone interested in children's books. Subscribe to child_lit today.

I shared the link to this post on child_lit. Waller noted something I didn't catch. I pointed out that "Injun Joe" is described as cat-like and I pointed out that when Tom gives the cat some of the pain-killer, the cat races about wildly and does a war-whoop. I didn't connect the two incidents. Usually, the animal characteristics used to describe Indians are wolves. I wonder why Twain used cats? On another note, there's an animated Tom Sawyer in which "Injun Joe" is a bear.

A Wikipedia for Legislation and Public Policymaking?

2011-01-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

I received an e-mail recently from an Andrew Schwartz who thought our readers might be interested in a project that he and others have started. It is sort of a Wikipedia for legislation and policymaking that citizens can construct together. What do you think of this idea?

Here is more from his e-mail:

WriteTheBillWiki.com is a site created by a group at Harvard that provides a user-friendly platform for public policymaking--it’s like a Wikipedia for legislation. Anyone can jot down some ideas, write a section of proposed legislation, or edit what has been written by others. If the issues you care about are not already featured on the site, you just add them. WTB is all about collaboration and moving the conversation forward!

WriteTheBillWiki.com is launching a 3-day editing blitz on education legislation, starting at 8:00pm tonight. We’re bringing together policy experts, legal scholars, teachers, students, community activists, and everyday citizens to draft pieces of REAL legislation. Over the next 3 days, we’re going to tackle topics like:

• Teacher evaluation and merit pay
• School vouchers
• Charter schools
• And any other issue you feel compelled to add

Once our 3-day blitz is over, our goal is to have REAL legislation that’s ready to be introduced by the new Congress.

PS - if you’d like to find out more, please check out the site http://writethebill.wikispaces.com/
or our quick (2 minute) video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYfe0zJ5gIc

A Special Farewell to Dean Stephanie Salzman: Early Supporter of the Journal of Educational Controversy

2011-01-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome back to our blog in 2011! I’d like to start off the new year with a personal thank you and a special farewell to Dean Stephanie Salzman of the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University as she retires from the college this month.

Dean Salzman’s early support for the Journal of Educational Controversy in its infancy could only be based on the faith of an idea and a vision that existed merely in the mind of this editor. As she leaves the college this month, Dean Salzman will leave a legacy of a journal that has grown phenomenally in the last five years. Her support was both an act of visionary leadership and an act of courage for a journal that was about to set out to disclose and analyze the controversies that arise among the many stakeholders who influence the direction of education.

As the journal reaches its fifth anniversary in February of 2011, I am reminded of the importance of such leadership in a university as well as the collective support of its faculty. When I was the director of the college’s Center for Educational Pluralism between 2003-2007, I asked the faculty in one of our newsletters for its views about exploring the controversies in educating for a pluralistic, democratic society. I had for sometime been concerned about the contradictions between the idealistic rhetoric used in educational discourse and the reality of our actions, our institutions and our society. To effectively approach the realities of our educational systems, I believed the nation had to have a serious and in-depth conversation about the tensions, perplexities and dilemmas that arise in education and boldly face its many contradictions. It would take us into a discussion of the “undiscussables” in our nation’s conversation with itself . For a democracy constitutes itself in the very discussion it is having.

As we expressed it in our mission for the journal:

Because many of the tensions in public school and university policies and practices are deeply rooted in the tensions inherent in the philosophy of a liberal democratic state, many of the value conflicts in public schools and universities can only be understood within the context of this larger public philosophy. In effect, the conflicting assumptions underlying our public philosophy frame our questions, define our problems and construct the solutions that shape our practices, policies, and research agendas. This journal will try to help clarify that public debate and deepen an understanding of its moral significance.

I believe that Colleges of Education have a twofold mission. One is to prepare the next generation of teachers and other educational professionals but a second is to elevate the conversation about education among its citizens. Indeed, the purpose of this blog is to bring our journal’s authors into conversation with other educational professionals and the general public in a national and global format.

Both the faculty and our administration agreed and have been the support behind this journal. Our wishes go with you Dean Salzman as you embark on the next stage of your life and thank you for believing in this project when it was only a vision.

Special Invitation to our Global Readership

2010-12-26T23:09:00.000-08:00

As the year comes to an end, we at the Journal of Educational Controversy are busy getting ready for our exciting and important issue on "The Education and Schools our Children Deserve" that is scheduled for publication in the summer of 2011.

In addition to publishing papers from some of the most progressive educational thinkers of our time, the journal will also feature examples from innovative schools and classrooms. I would like to extend a special invitation to our colleagues across the globe to consider submitting articles and videos that highlight the important work that their school is doing. We are particularly anxious to have examples from schools around the world so we can learn from each other on what is possible. We can extend the deadline for articles in this section.

For more information on the controversial scenario posed for this issue, go to our "call for submissions" page of the journal.

Recommended Changes to a future DREAM Act

2010-12-23T17:00:00.000-08:00

Although the DREAM Act was not passed by the current Congress, it will undoubtedly come up again for consideration. At its recent convention in October, the Illinois Federation of Teachers had recommended that the bill include more options. Concerned with the militarization and the limited options of the current bill, the IFT had recommended four changes for a more just version of the bill. Perhaps, a future bill will accommodate these changes:

1. Include a community service path to legalization

2. Include a vocational path to legalization

3. Allow undocumented youth access to Pell Grants and federal financial aid money to offer an honest chance to go to college

4. Allow youth to petition their parents for legal status

Student Sues School District after Enduring Years of Harassment

2010-12-09T18:16:00.000-08:00

The problems of bullying, harassment, and the "school to prison pipeline" are some of the tragic incidents that plague our young people and our public school system. We have approached this issue several times in this blog and are planning to have an entire issue of the journal devoted to it. Below is an account from the ACLU of some litigation that it is taking on behalf of a student here in Washington State who has endured six years of harassment all during his middle and high school years.

Student Sues School District after Enduring Years of Harassment

ACLU Suit Says Aberdeen Failed to Take Steps Needed to End Severe Harassment

A student who endured severe and persistent harassment throughout junior high and high school is suing the Aberdeen School District, the ACLU of Washington announced today. The suit says that school district officials were aware of the harassment but failed to take steps reasonably calculated to end it. The ACLU of Washington is representing the student in the suit, which was filed today in U.S. District Court in Tacoma.

The school district’s failure to act created a hostile educational environment for the student. His academic progress was hindered, he was isolated at school, he felt discouraged from using his locker, and he avoided extra-curricular activities that put him in contact with his peers. Further, the student suffered extreme emotional distress and psychological damage, including an inability to concentrate on studies, serious depression, despair, and anxiety. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“Public school officials must be held accountable when they fail to meet their responsibility to act decisively when a student is subjected to harassment by his peers. We hope that in the future other students will not have to endure what this young man faced,” said Sarah Dunne, legal director for the ACLU of Washington.

Russell Dickerson III, now 19, is an African-American resident of Aberdeen. For six years, from 2003 when he entered junior high until 2009 when he graduated high school, Dickerson was harassed by other students on the basis of his race, sex, and perceived sexual orientation.

As a student at Miller Junior High, Dickerson was called names by other students and found notes in his backpack and taped to his back calling him “stupid nigger” and “dog.” He found notes in his locker and in his school binder with viciously derogatory insults. Students tripped him in the hallways and threw food at him in the cafeteria. In one incident, three students pushed him to the floor in the hallway and smashed a raw egg on his head; only one of the students was disciplined.

The student and his parents reported the harassment to school administrators. The district Superintendent was aware of the harassment yet took no steps reasonably aimed at ending it. But an assistant principal recommended that the student consider changing his style of dress to avoid further harassment. Only after his father went to the school board did the district initiate a formal investigation of the ongoing harassment. A school insurance professional hired by the district to investigate concluded that Dickerson had been harassed but recommended no adjustments to the district’s anti-harassment policies or its implementation of them.

At Aberdeen High School, the harassment escalated, with Dickerson subjected to derogatory names including “nigger,” “nappy ho,” and “faggot.” Because he did not fit gender stereotypes for a young man and was perceived by other students to be gay, he endured derisive comments about his physical appearance and suspected sexual orientation. Dickerson suffered physical harassment, with other students pinching and fondling his chest, spitting on his head, and throwing objects at him.

In 2007 students in the district created a website mocking Dickerson and his perceived sexual orientation, and posted threatening racist comments on it. Students discussed the website at school. The district did nothing to prevent or mitigate the continuing harassment on school grounds, even after being put on notice that Grays Harbor Superior Court had issued a no contact order between Dickerson and one of his harassers who had threatened on the website to lynch him. Rather, Dickerson became the target of retaliatory harassment after reporting the website to school authorities.

In his first year in high school, an assistant principal discouraged Dickerson from reporting misconduct by the student’s peers. Nevertheless, the student and his parents repeatedly reported incidents of harassment to district administrators, both verbally and in writing. The district failed to take other steps reasonably designed to end the persistent harassment.

The lawsuit says that the deliberate indifference to ongoing harassment by Aberdeen School District, which receives federal funds, violated federal law –

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The district’s inaction also violated the Washington Law Against Discrimination’s protections against discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and perceived sexual orientation.

The lawsuit is seeking monetary damages to cover costs of counseling for Russell and post-secondary or vocational schooling.

Representing Dickerson are ACLU-WA cooperating attorneys Michael Scott, Joseph Sakay, and Alexander Wu of Hillis Clark Martin & Peterson P.S. and ACLU of Washington staff attorneys Sarah Dunne and Rose Spidell.

See also:

KUOW News
KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio. A service of the University of Washington

Huffington Post

American Civil Liberties Union of Washington

ACLU Related Links
•Read Russell Dickerson’s statement
•Read Russell Dickerson's father’s statement
•Read the Legal Complaint
•Watch the press conference
•Hear what Dan Savage says about the suit

New Curriculum on Democracy and Jazz

2010-11-25T21:48:00.000-08:00

Many of our readers will be interested in a new curriculum produced at Teachers College, Columbia University called, “Let Freedom Swing: Conversations on Democracy and Jazz.” On the eve of President Obama’s inauguration on January 20, 2009, a concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC brought together Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and jazz musician, Wynton Marsalis. It was from this event that the idea of a curriculum based on two American traditions – jazz and democracy – was conceived. Readers can access the DVDs and study guide at: http://letfreedomswing.org//

From the website: “Three key themes structure the videos and study guide: “We the People,” “E Pluribus Unum” (From Many, One), and “A More Perfect Union.” Each video is about six minutes in length. The study guide contains questions for discussion, teaching activities, and additional resources. The website contains the three videos, the study guide, information about the project, and additional print, digital, and video resources.”

The journal has published an earlier article on another curriculum produced at Teachers College called, “Teaching the Levees: An Exercise in Democratic Dialogue.” We are planning on publishing an article on this latest curriculum in our upcoming issue next summer.

Newly Published - "Dear Maxine: Letters from the Unfinished Conversation"

2010-11-18T19:34:00.000-08:00

In our winter 2010 issue of the journal dedicated to the life and work of Maxine Greene, we announced that a new book was about to be published in the fall by Teachers College Press. The book, Dear Maxine: Letters from the Unfinished Conversation, is now available. Readers can find information at the Teachers College Press website.

From the website:

This collection brings together a prestigious group of individuals who have wondered, looked at, revised, acted, questioned, and changed their world because of their connection to American philosopher Maxine Greene. Teachers, students, colleagues, artists, and others, such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Herb Kohl, Mike Rose, Deborah Meier, and William Ayers, have written edgy, thoughtful letters addressed to Greene about her work, their own, and the spaces in between. Rather than just thanking this master philosopher/teacher, each sets out to discover what they have learned from Maxine Greene and to discuss the continued relevance of her work in aesthetics, education, and social imagination.

Maxine Greene has been referred to as “the most important American philosopher [on education] since John Dewey.” This wonderful collection continues the unfinished conversation that is her work.
Contents:
Foreword, Sonia Nieto
Acknowledgments
Publisher's Note, Carole Saltz
Prologue, Michelle Fine
Introduction: Maxine Greene and Human Freedom, Nel Noddings

1. The School and Society: Imagining and Reshaping Public Spaces
Imagining the Possible, Mike Rose
Walking the Dialectic of Freedom, Jim Garrison
Imagining Things Being Otherwise, Patty Bode
Stargazing, Wide-Awakening, Cultural Imagining, Ming Fang He
Living Beyond Walls, Robert Lake
The Consciousness of Possibility, Susan Mayer
Imagining Peace, Nonviolence, and the Life of the Mind, Rikki Asher
On Being Wider-Awake in the World, Kathy Hytten
Hiding in the Text: Body and Emotion, Donald Blumenfeld-Jones
We Who Are Not Yet, Jennifer Milam
Confronting Exclusion and Racism, JoAnn Phillion
Daring to Dare: Teaching for Wide-Awakeness, Pamela K. Smith
Not Turning Away, Julie Searle
Free People Need Public Spaces, Deborah Meier

2. “The Self: In a Tune Beyond Us and Yet Ourselves”
On Not Being Directed, Optimism, Nancy Lesko
Teaching Heaven and Earth: Beyond Philosophy, Roslyn Arnold
The Audacity of Eros, Nina Asher
Seeing the Darkness, Louise Berman
Fully and Profoundly Engaged, David Flinders
The Miracle of Authorship as a Moment of Truth, Glenn Hudak
Philosopher, Educator, Author, Friend, Linda Lambert
How Can an Educational Philosophy Withstand the Test of Practice?, Heidi Miller
Breaking Through the Crust, Wendy Kohli
An Anxiety of Influence, William Pinar
Negotiating Freedom, Shaireen Rasheed
Compassion in a Chaotic World, Teresa Rishel
Flunking Retirement, Barbara Thayer-Bacon
Channeling Maxine's Hillbilly Younger Brother, Shirley Steinberg
Lived Imperfection, Lynda Stone
You Are Our Muse, Leonard Waks

3. Strangers, Others, and Friends: Expanding the ConversationDown the Same Roads for Many a Year, Elliot Eisner
Accompanying the Artists as They Choose What to See, Peter Appelbaum
Big Maxine and little maxine, Suzanne de Castell
Burdening Aesthetics, Greg Dimitriadis
The Uncanny Legend of Maxine Greene, Noreen Garman
Learning Quality and Becoming Human, James Giarelli
The Dialectical Diva, Chris Higgins
An Interview that Never Began: An Afterword to Maxine Greene, Clyde Coreil
One of the Conditions of Happiness, Craig Kridel
24/7, William Ayers
The Slow Fuse of the Gradual Instant, Rebecca Luce-Kapler
A Conversation Over Time, Lorraine Kasprisin
A Gifted Teacher, Martha McKenna
An Unabashed Confession of Love, Herb Kohl
Being and Becoming, Maureen Miletta
Academic Courage and Grace: A Case Study from Maxine Greene, Eugene Provenzo
With Relentless Possibility, William Schubert
On the “Verge” of Possibility, Molly Quinn
Eleven Kind Words, William Reynolds
The Day Maxine May Have Bombed, George Willis
Our Imaginarium, Gloria Ladson-Billings

4. Blue Guitar Lessons: The Arts and Keeping Wide-Awake in the WorldWhat If?, Cathryn Williams
Keeping Wide-Awake, Jacqueline Ancess
Agradecida, Gene Diaz
Maxine and the Furry Blue Guitar, Bernadine Dohrn
Attention to Wonder, Kieran Egan
From Critical Awareness to Wide-Awakeness, James Henderson
Summer at the Park with Maxine, Roger Dell
The Point of Release, John Holyoke
Time with You, Madeleine Fuchs Holzer
Living in the Amber: Conversations Between Red and Greene, Pauline Sameshima
Questions, Anyone? Let's Hope So, Julie Teel
Maxine Says, Nick Sousanis
Awakening and Choosing, Sue Stinson
When Teaching Becomes Reaching, Graeme Sullivan
And the Stage Belongs to . . . the Philosopher, Scott Noppe-Brandon
A Performance for Maxine, Jean Taylor, Barbara Ellman, and Hillary Easton
Learning to Learn, John Toth

Epilogue: “Coming Together to Act on the Possibility of Repair”: Conversations with Maxine Greene, Janet Miller
References
About the Editor and Contributors

Robert Lake is an assistant professor at Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA

“Robert Lake has brought together the various pieces of Maxine Greene’s life in these pages: Here are teachers, dancers, graphic artists, educational philosophers, and others. No one in these pages is content with things as they are; we have learned from life and from Maxine that there are always unanswered questions.”
—From the Foreword by Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“Within the context of letters to a dear and esteemed colleague, the contributors to this book expand their readers' and their own perspectives on the complexity and the promise of teaching, learning, and living a generous life.”
—Karen Gallas, teacher and researcher

“For nearly sixty years, Maxine Greene has inspired us to question, to express ideas and insights, and to see past calcified logic and stunted expectation by valuing the necessary role of art, inquiry, democracy, and dialogue in education. These letters give the reader a renewed appreciation of her passion and energy, and of those who have learned from her.”
—A. G. Rud, Washington State University

Do Teachers have Free Speech Rights? An Update on Recent Court Decisions

2010-11-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

Readers will remember the article by author Sam Chaltain in our winter 2008 issue of the journal, entitled, "Ways of Seeing (and of Being Seen): Visibility in Schools." Sam has his own website and blog at: "Democracy,Learning,Voice." Check it out. Sam gave us permission to reprint his article on teachers' rights from his website.

Free Speech for Teachers? Think Again . . .

by Sam Chaltain

Reprinted by permission from Democracy, Learning, Voice.

In case you missed it, there was a major case last week involving the First Amendment rights of teachers to make curricular content decisions. And the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling puts another nail in the coffin of the free-speech rights of public employees.

In the most recent case, an Ohio teacher’s contract was not renewed after controversy erupted over a few book assignments she made with her High School English class. As recently as a decade ago, the teacher may have had a legitimate chance in court (although not neccesarily). That’s because, prior to 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court evaluated public employee free-speech claims by using a test with two basic prongs. First, the court would determine whether the speech in question touches on a matter of public concern. If it did not, the teacher would receive no First Amendment protection whatsoever. If the speech did touch on a matter of public concern, the court would proceed to the balancing prong of the test, in which it would balance the teacher’s interest in commenting upon a matter of public concern against the school officials’ interest in promoting an efficient workplace of public service.

Prior to 2006, courts sometimes sided with school officials even though the public school teachers’ speech touched upon a matter of public concern. In one 2001 case, for example, the Eighth Circuit determined that a school principal did not violate the First Amendment rights of three teachers who were ordered to quit talking about the care and education of special needs students. Subsequent appeals in the case acknowledged that the teachers’ complaints about the lack of care for special needs students touched on matters of public concern. Nonetheless, the appeals court noted that the teachers’ speech “resulted in school factions and disharmony among their co-workers and negatively impacted [the principal's] interest in efficiently administering the middle school.”

Conversely, in 1993 the Eleventh Circuit reached a different conclusion in the case of Belyeu v. Coosa County Board of Education. In this decision, a teacher’s aide alleged that school officials failed to rehire her because of a speech she made about racial issues at a PTA meeting. The aide said the school should adopt a program to commemorate Black History month. Immediately after the meeting, the principal asked to speak with her and told her he wished she had raised this issue privately rather than publicly. A lower court determined that the speech clearly touched on a matter of public concern, but that the school system’s interest in avoiding racial tensions outweighed the aide’s right to free speech. On appeal, however, the Eleventh Circuit reversed, writing that the aide’s “remarks did not disrupt the School System’s function by enhancing racial division, nor, based on the nature or context of her remarks, was her speech likely to do so.”

This is all a precursor to 2006, however, when the U.S. Supreme Court effectively eliminated the free-speech rights of public employees in its 5-4 decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos. As my friend and former First Amendment Center colleague David Hudson explains, since Garcetti “public employers are able to defend themselves against allegations of retaliation by claiming that employees’ criticisms of government operations were made as part of their official duties.”

Indeed, a pattern has emerged in this post-Garcetti world, in which it has become almost impossible to mount a successful First Amendment lawsuit based on speech that relates to the workplace. In other words, a teacher who wishes to claim First Amendment protection for decisions about curricular content must do so knowing that the same protections s/he would be afforded as a private citizen will not apply to anything so directly related to his or her official duties.

Ironically, the 1969 case that is hailed as the high-water mark for student free-speech, Tinker v. Des Moines, features these lines: “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. This has been the unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years.”

No longer.

(Postscript: If you’re a junkie for First Amendment law, check out my three books on the subject, including answers to all of the most frequently asked questions as they pertain to First Amendment issues in schools.)

Sam Chaltain is a DC-based educator and organizational change consultant. Previously, he was the National Director of the Forum for Education & Democracy, an education advocacy organization, and the founding director of the Five Freedoms Project, a national program that helps K-12 educators create more democratic learning communities. Sam spent five years at the First Amendment Center as the co-director of the First Amendment Schools program. He came to the Center from the public school system of New York City, where he taught high school English and History. Sam also spent four years teaching the same subjects at a private school in Brooklyn.

Sam’s writings about his work have appeared in both magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post, Education Week and USA Today. A periodic contributor to CNN and MSNBC, Sam is also the author or co-author of five books: The First Amendment in Schools (ASCD, 2003); First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights (Oxford University Press, 2006); American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free: Stories Of Free Expression in America (Oxford, 2011); and Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

New Issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy Now Online

2010-10-21T15:26:00.000-07:00

The Journal of Educational Controversy is pleased to announce that the Summer 2010 issue titled, “The Professions and Scholarly Communities: Creating the Public’s Questions and Understandings in the Public Square” is now online.

Controversy addressed in the issue:

Professionals and scholarly communities in all fields 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 of the professional or scholarly community, and challenge the integrity of the choices that a professional must make in a particular case. At other times, the professional is faced with a conflict within the profession itself between deeply entrenched traditions and the challenges posed by newer paradigms. Under both circumstances, the professional is left with a decision about the ethical path to follow and the result will influence the public’s understanding and questions. This issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy examines instances where professionals are faced with a dilemma that either pits a democratic decision against the expertise of professional standards or a conflict within the profession itself when traditional paradigms are challenged. How does the professional examine the choices that would have to be weighed and consider the most ethical position that should be taken?

Following is a list of the articles featured in the journal:

Privacy and Library Records, a case study in Whatcom County
Joan Airoldi
with introduction by Daniel Larner

Freedom of Conscience and the Wall of Separation
John F. Covaleskie

The Give Away Spirit: Reaching a Shared Vision of Ethical Indigenous Research Relationships
Jioanna Carjuzaa
J. Kay Fenimore Smith

Outsiders/Within and In/Outsiders: Varieties of Multiculturalism
Kathy Hoover
Mary F. Rogers

Situating Our Racialized Beings in the Race Talk in the U.S.: African-born Blacks, Our Experience of Racialization, and Some Implications for Education
Rosaire I. Ifedi

High Stakes Motherhood and School Choice
Amy B. Shuffelton

Ethical Breach and the Schizophrenic Process: Theorizing the Judge and the Teacher
Heather Greenhalgh-Spencer
Bryce Bartlett, Hausch, Blackwell, and Saunders

Waiting for Superman: He’s “adequate” and near proficient!
Alice E. Ginsberg

Next Issue: The Education Our Children Deserve

We invite readers to contribute formal refereed responses to our Rejoinder Section or more spontaneous responses on our journal’s blog.