Educational Controversies from Other Parts of the World. Today's Look at Thailand.

Welcome back to our blog for 2010. We thought we would start out the new year by introducing our readers to educational controversies from other parts of the world. We think a global look will help us understand ourselves better as well as acquaint us with what is going on around the world.

This morning I received an e-mail from Alain Mounier, director of research at the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD) and adviser to several governments in Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. He has been teaching and carrying out research projects in Thailand for some years, and has created a research centre on education and labour (CELS) in Chiang Mai University. Along with his co-editor, Phasina Tangchuang, a senior researcher and director of the Centre for Education and Labour Studies (CELS), and an associate professor in the Faculty of Education, Chiang Mai University, he would like to announce a new book entitled Education and Knowledge in Thailand. The Quality Controversy, published by Silkworm Books.

The authors provide the following description of their book below:


This book is a comprehensive and critical account of current debates over the state of the Thai education system. Using contributions from philosophy and sciences of education--sociology, psychology, and didactic in particular--it focuses on the issue of the quality of education in Thailand, engaging especially with recent educational policy and reforms. The purpose is to contribute to the vivid and enduring national debate on this major and crucial issue and to corresponding controversies at a world level. It is an attempt to identify clichés that disguise a lack of careful thinking, to expose ideas that are merely fashionable, and to unearth implicit or hidden postulates and premises. While the authors document the dramatic quantitative expansion of Thai education, particularly in the past four decades, the major theme of the volume relates to quality issues at all levels. The authors identify four fundamental dilemmas of Thai education: 1) quantity vs. quality, 2) perennialism-postmodernism vs. progressivism, 3) work vs. education, and 4) diploma vs. knowledge. Each time the choice of the first term of each dilemma has been made quite clearly by the society and the government. Here in this choice lies the explanation of the low quality of education across the board. Quality of education could be achieved by extirpating seven important flaws in the Thai educational system: 1) inequality, 2) commodification, 3) localism, 4) vocationalism, 5) credentialism, 6) conformism, and 7) pedagogism.

Their Public Relations sheet highlights the following topics in the book:

• An original and critical scientific
analysis of the Thai education
system in historical and
comparative perspectives

• A critical look at the 1999
Education Reform

• A comprehensive survey of
education theories

• The first study of education in
Thailand using field data from the
last half-century

• A detailed analysis of the
determinants of educational
quality

• An analysis of current
impediments to educational
quality

We may provide a review of the book in our upcoming issue on "Schools Our Children Deserve." If you are interested in reviewing the book, let us know at CEP.e-Journal@wwu.edu

Education Policy Blog: Creating a Democratic Learning Community

Education Policy Blog: Creating a Democratic Learning Community

Check out the link above from the Education Policy Blog for more on Sam Chaltain's new book that we discuss in the post below.

American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community

Many of our readers will remember Sam Chaltain’s article, “Ways of Seeing (and of Being Seen): Visibility in Schools,” that we published in our winter 2008 issue of the journal on the theme, “Schooling as if Democracy Matters.” Sam is the National Director for the Forum for Education & Democracy. In his article, he describes the current state of invisibility so many students experience in our schools and lays the groundwork for rethinking the role of school leadership. “The central challenge in any organizational culture," writes Chaltain, "is to help people become more aware of the inner place from which they operate." Chaltain has now developed his ideas further in a new book, American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community, published by Rowman & Littlefield Education and featuring a foreword from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. If you are interested in reviewing this book for a future issue of our journal, please contact CEP-eJournal@wwu.edu We are thinking about experimenting with a new video review format. If you have the expertise and would like to try this new format, let us know.


Below are some of the advance reviews of the book:


"Our country's ongoing commitment to democratic principles can only be actualized if democracy lives in our public schools. This book reveals how schools can help students and teachers see and hear one another, create a strong community, and develop the sensibilities and skills for democratic life. It provides a framework for democratic leadership that is accessible, actionable, and grounded in good pedagogy."—Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, Stanford University

"Sam Chaltain expects schools to do more than merely give their students knowledge of the world. By helping them to make themselves known to the world, he believes that they will be able to meet the democratic goal of taking responsibility for it. This book offers ideas and practical examples."—Ted Sizer, founder, Coalition of Essential Schools and former Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Education

"A powerful concept provides the organizing theme of this refreshing book: our nation's school leaders must strike the right balance between freedom and structure in order to create healthy, high-functioning learning environments. But there is a pervasive, more subtle one that slips along with the turning of the pages: the curriculum provides knowledge and skills relevant to daily functioning, but the persona of the teacher powerfully shapes the becoming of each unique being."—John Goodlad, president, Institute for Educational Inquiry

"Sam Chaltain has written a provocative, daring book, one that tangles with how best to create community and tolerance within the walls of a school. Chaltain is on to something - that an understanding of freedom is essential to creating active, engaged citizens, and that supporting individual freedoms need not negate an orderly, structured environment. I urge you to read American Schools."—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here

"I want to thank Sam Chaltain for writing this book. I wish I had the guidance of his ideas when my colleagues and I created our own network of public schools. Sam explains through personal stories and case studies how the visible can become visible, how the disengaged can become engaged, and how structure and freedom can complete a well-rounded education. Sam shows education leaders how student achievements can be enhanced, how teachers can be supported to use their talents and interests to learn from one another, and how the larger community of parents and citizens can be mobilized to become part of the ongoing creation of powerful schools. What separates this book from others on school leadership is its clear set of doable practice focused relentlessly on the public purpose of schools. Sam is a much talented writer; lyrical in his descriptions, humorous in his candor, and greatly respectful of educators who try each day to be true to their larger calling."—Carl Glickman, professor at the University of Georgia

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

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

A Post by Kenneth Saltman

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

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