“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.
Showing posts with label educational policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label educational policy. Show all posts
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids
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.
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.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Thomas Friedman's "Theory of Everything"
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:
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.
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.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
An Open Letter to President Barack Obama
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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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."
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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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."
Friday, January 7, 2011
A Wikipedia for Legislation and Public Policymaking?
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
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
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Religious Groups Oppose Nation’s Educational Policy and “Race to the Top” Strategy: A Call for Justice in Public Education
In an extraordinary letter to President Obama and Members of Congress, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, a community of 36 communions with a combined membership of 45 million people in more than 100,000 congregations across the country, issued a pastoral letter criticizing the direction of national educational policy and offered an alternative vision of public education. Sent as an “Ecumenical Call for Justice,” the report expresses concern about the inappropriate use of the language of business to discuss public education, the de-emphasizing of federal money designed to address the conditions of children in poverty while emphasizing competitive grants, the punitive approach to low performing schools that are struggling, and the demonization of public school teachers.
The letter raises a fundamental question: “While competitive, market based “reforms” may increase educational opportunity for a few children, or even for some groups of children, do they introduce more equity or more inequity into the system itself?” Essentially, do we live in community or merely in a marketplace?
We reproduce the letter below for our readers:
An Alternative Vision for Public Education
A Pastoral Letter on Federal Policy in Public Education:
An Ecumenical Call for Justice
May 18, 2010
Dear President Obama and Members of Congress,
The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA is a community of 36 Christian communions with a combined membership of 45 million persons in more than 100,000 congregations across this country. Our member churches – from a wide spectrum of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Evangelical, historic African American and Living Peace churches – do not agree on all things! We stand united, however, in our conviction that the church is called to speak for justice in public education. We affirm that each life is infinitely precious, created in the image of God, and therefore, that every child should be given opportunity for fullness of life, including a quality and affordable education.
We further affirm that our society’s provision of public education—publicly funded, universally available, and accountable to the public—while imperfect, is essential for ensuring that all children are served. As a people called to love our neighbors as ourselves, we look for the optimal way to balance the needs of each particular child and family with the need to create a system that secures the rights and addresses the needs of all children. We know that such a system will never be perfect, and we pledge as faithful citizens to continue to improve the schools in our communities and to make our system of schools more responsive.
We value democratic governance of public schools.
We support democratic governance of public schools. Because public schools are responsible to the public, it is possible through elected school boards, open meetings, transparent record keeping and redress through the courts to ensure that traditional public schools provide access for all children. We believe that democratic operation of public schools is our best hope for ensuring that families can secure the services to which their children have a right. On balance, we believe that if government invests public funds in charter schools that report to private boards, government, not the vicissitudes of the marketplace, should be expected to provide oversight to protect the common good.
Public schools must guarantee each child’s right to educational opportunity.
We value the contributions of parochial schools managed by some of our communions and the contributions of charter schools operated by some of our congregations. We affirm, however, the position of our 1999 General Assembly that “as a general rule, public funds should be used for public purposes.” Knowing that traditional public schools continue to educate more than 90 percent of our nation’s 50 million school children, we again echo the 1999 General Assembly that called “on our members to direct their energies toward improving the schools that the majority of children will continue to attend.” As you craft the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, originally the 1965 cornerstone of the War on Poverty, we ask you to remember that the Civil Rights Movement sought to ensure expanded opportunity for all children through public education. In 1954 the Supreme Court eliminated de jure segregation and guaranteed access for all to public schools previously available only to the privileged, and in 1965 Congress began providing federal funding for public schools serving children in poverty through Title I. We are concerned today when we hear the civil right to education being re-defined as the right to school choice, for we know that equitable access to opportunity is more difficult to ensure in a mass of privatized alternatives to traditional public schools or in school districts being carved apart into small schools of choice. Experimentation with small schools must not cause us to lose sight of society’s obligation to serve all children with appropriate services; we must continue to expect public school districts to provide a complete range of services accessible to children in every neighborhood of our cities. Choice-based alternatives being proposed in local, state, and federal policy pose serious questions that we ask you to consider regarding equal access and public oversight. Here are just a few examples:
While competitive, market based “reforms” may increase educational opportunity for a few children, or even for some groups of children, do they introduce more equity or more inequity into the system itself?
We reject the language of business for discussing public education.
Not only has the language of the marketplace entered discussions of school governance and management, but we also notice that the language of business accountability is used to talk about education, a human endeavor of caring. The primary mechanism of the No Child Left Behind Act has been annual standardized tests of reading and math for all children in grades 3-8, followed by punishments for the schools that cannot rapidly reach ever increasing test score production targets. We worry that our society has come to view what is good as what can be measured and compared. The relentless focus on testing basic skills has diminished our attention to the humanities, the social studies, the arts, and child and adolescent development. As people of faith we do not view our children as products to be tested and managed but instead as unique human beings, created in the image of God, to be nurtured and educated.
ESEA Reauthorization must expand educational opportunity.
As you craft the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we call on you to be faithful to the law’s original purpose: expanding educational opportunity by providing additional support for the schools that serve our nation’s poorest children. We ask you to address what are too rarely named these days: the cavernous resource opportunity gaps—from state to state and from school district to school district— underneath the achievement gaps that No Child Left Behind has so carefully documented. We ask you to allocate federal resources for equity and insistently press states to close opportunity gaps. It is time to guarantee for all children in the United States a comparable opportunity to learn that includes a quality early childhood education, highly qualified teachers, a curriculum that will prepare students for college, work and community, and equitable instructional resources. It is also time to recognize that the blessings of healthcare remain unequal among American children, as do enrichments like after school programs, and summer experiences.
We value public school educators.
Our biblical heritage and our theology teach us that we live in community, not solely in the marketplace. As we strive to move our imperfect world closer to the realm of God, we recognize that we are all responsible for making sure that public schools, as primary civic institutions, embody our love for one another. We are called to create institutions that serve families and children with hospitality. We are called to work as citizens for the resources that will support a climate of trust and community within each public school. We are also called to value those whose vocation is teaching. Lately we have been dismayed by federal policy that encourages states to change laws to eliminate due process, to devalue the credentials of excellent teachers, and to fire teachers and principals as though that were a tested recipe for school reform, when we know that no research supports the President’s proposed “turnaround” model that purports to improve a school by firing the principal and at least half the staff. We look for a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that honors the professionalism of teachers and treats these individuals with respect. Wholesale scapegoating of public school teachers is an ugly and unfortunate development in federal policy.
We pledge to partner with you for just reform.
We pledge to partner with you in prayer and action, working for reform that values the whole child as uniquely created, values teachers, and encourages and equips the family and community to participate in nurturing the full development of every child. We pledge to partner with you by:
We ask you to partner with us to challenge the unfair and detrimental language of the current discourse in educational reform, to re-examine untested assumptions about public education policy, and to ensure that untested models of school reform are not imposed from above in our nation’s most fragile school districts. Too often criticism of the public schools fails to reflect our present societal complexity. At a moment when childhood poverty is shamefully widespread, when many families are under constant stress, and when schools are often limited by lack of funds or resources, we know that public schools cannot be improved by concentrating on public schools alone. They alone can neither cause nor cure the problems we face. In this context, we must address with prayerful determination the issues of race and class, which threaten both public education and democracy in America.
Sincerely,
The Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary
The Rev. Peg Chemberlin, President
On Behalf of the Governing Board of The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA
To view the letter and a list of the members of the governing board, go to:
http://www.ncccusa.org/elmc/pastoralletter.pdf
The letter raises a fundamental question: “While competitive, market based “reforms” may increase educational opportunity for a few children, or even for some groups of children, do they introduce more equity or more inequity into the system itself?” Essentially, do we live in community or merely in a marketplace?
We reproduce the letter below for our readers:
An Alternative Vision for Public Education
A Pastoral Letter on Federal Policy in Public Education:
An Ecumenical Call for Justice
May 18, 2010
Dear President Obama and Members of Congress,
The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA is a community of 36 Christian communions with a combined membership of 45 million persons in more than 100,000 congregations across this country. Our member churches – from a wide spectrum of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Evangelical, historic African American and Living Peace churches – do not agree on all things! We stand united, however, in our conviction that the church is called to speak for justice in public education. We affirm that each life is infinitely precious, created in the image of God, and therefore, that every child should be given opportunity for fullness of life, including a quality and affordable education.
We further affirm that our society’s provision of public education—publicly funded, universally available, and accountable to the public—while imperfect, is essential for ensuring that all children are served. As a people called to love our neighbors as ourselves, we look for the optimal way to balance the needs of each particular child and family with the need to create a system that secures the rights and addresses the needs of all children. We know that such a system will never be perfect, and we pledge as faithful citizens to continue to improve the schools in our communities and to make our system of schools more responsive.
We value democratic governance of public schools.
We support democratic governance of public schools. Because public schools are responsible to the public, it is possible through elected school boards, open meetings, transparent record keeping and redress through the courts to ensure that traditional public schools provide access for all children. We believe that democratic operation of public schools is our best hope for ensuring that families can secure the services to which their children have a right. On balance, we believe that if government invests public funds in charter schools that report to private boards, government, not the vicissitudes of the marketplace, should be expected to provide oversight to protect the common good.
Public schools must guarantee each child’s right to educational opportunity.
We value the contributions of parochial schools managed by some of our communions and the contributions of charter schools operated by some of our congregations. We affirm, however, the position of our 1999 General Assembly that “as a general rule, public funds should be used for public purposes.” Knowing that traditional public schools continue to educate more than 90 percent of our nation’s 50 million school children, we again echo the 1999 General Assembly that called “on our members to direct their energies toward improving the schools that the majority of children will continue to attend.” As you craft the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, originally the 1965 cornerstone of the War on Poverty, we ask you to remember that the Civil Rights Movement sought to ensure expanded opportunity for all children through public education. In 1954 the Supreme Court eliminated de jure segregation and guaranteed access for all to public schools previously available only to the privileged, and in 1965 Congress began providing federal funding for public schools serving children in poverty through Title I. We are concerned today when we hear the civil right to education being re-defined as the right to school choice, for we know that equitable access to opportunity is more difficult to ensure in a mass of privatized alternatives to traditional public schools or in school districts being carved apart into small schools of choice. Experimentation with small schools must not cause us to lose sight of society’s obligation to serve all children with appropriate services; we must continue to expect public school districts to provide a complete range of services accessible to children in every neighborhood of our cities. Choice-based alternatives being proposed in local, state, and federal policy pose serious questions that we ask you to consider regarding equal access and public oversight. Here are just a few examples:
- When large high schools are broken into smaller schools or when charter management or education management organizations are brought in to operate small schools, what happens to children with special needs and English language learners when small schools cannot provide the more expensive services such children need?
In so-called “portfolio school districts” which are projected to manage an ongoing churn of new schools coming into existence and weak schools being forced to close, won’t closing public schools and moving the students increase student mobility in cities where poverty already means that too many children change schools too often? What is the consequence for a neighborhood or a community when a public school is closed or its entire staff fired?
When there is competition to attract students to a range of small schools or charter schools, and when these schools are sought out by parents who are active choosers, what happens to the traditional neighborhood public schools which are left to serve the majority of special education students, English language learners, and homeless children?
What happens to children whose parents, for whatever reason, do not participate in choice? We recently heard students whose families simply bring them to register at the neighborhood public school called “over the counter” children. Many of us and many of our children have at some time in our lives been “over the counter” children. We have assumed that universally available and easily accessible public schools were part of the American Dream.- The federal Race to the Top competition brings federal pressure on states to remove statutory caps on the authorization of new charter schools. When charter schools are regulated state-by-state, how can the federal government ensure that what has been very uneven charter school regulation across the states be made more uniform to protect the public interest?
- Finally as it is proposed that federal grants be made more competitive—in the Race to the Top competition and the President’s recent “Blueprint” for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—by de-emphasizing Title I formula grants and increasing Title I competitive grants, how will we protect the educational opportunities of children in states and districts that are the losers? While the Title I formula program has been too small to make up for the impact of family poverty and the 3:1 inequality of school funding among the school districts in most states, it remains the federal government’s primary tool for distributing funds by formula according to need, for the purpose of expanding opportunity for poor children.
While competitive, market based “reforms” may increase educational opportunity for a few children, or even for some groups of children, do they introduce more equity or more inequity into the system itself?
We reject the language of business for discussing public education.
Not only has the language of the marketplace entered discussions of school governance and management, but we also notice that the language of business accountability is used to talk about education, a human endeavor of caring. The primary mechanism of the No Child Left Behind Act has been annual standardized tests of reading and math for all children in grades 3-8, followed by punishments for the schools that cannot rapidly reach ever increasing test score production targets. We worry that our society has come to view what is good as what can be measured and compared. The relentless focus on testing basic skills has diminished our attention to the humanities, the social studies, the arts, and child and adolescent development. As people of faith we do not view our children as products to be tested and managed but instead as unique human beings, created in the image of God, to be nurtured and educated.
ESEA Reauthorization must expand educational opportunity.
As you craft the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we call on you to be faithful to the law’s original purpose: expanding educational opportunity by providing additional support for the schools that serve our nation’s poorest children. We ask you to address what are too rarely named these days: the cavernous resource opportunity gaps—from state to state and from school district to school district— underneath the achievement gaps that No Child Left Behind has so carefully documented. We ask you to allocate federal resources for equity and insistently press states to close opportunity gaps. It is time to guarantee for all children in the United States a comparable opportunity to learn that includes a quality early childhood education, highly qualified teachers, a curriculum that will prepare students for college, work and community, and equitable instructional resources. It is also time to recognize that the blessings of healthcare remain unequal among American children, as do enrichments like after school programs, and summer experiences.
We value public school educators.
Our biblical heritage and our theology teach us that we live in community, not solely in the marketplace. As we strive to move our imperfect world closer to the realm of God, we recognize that we are all responsible for making sure that public schools, as primary civic institutions, embody our love for one another. We are called to create institutions that serve families and children with hospitality. We are called to work as citizens for the resources that will support a climate of trust and community within each public school. We are also called to value those whose vocation is teaching. Lately we have been dismayed by federal policy that encourages states to change laws to eliminate due process, to devalue the credentials of excellent teachers, and to fire teachers and principals as though that were a tested recipe for school reform, when we know that no research supports the President’s proposed “turnaround” model that purports to improve a school by firing the principal and at least half the staff. We look for a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that honors the professionalism of teachers and treats these individuals with respect. Wholesale scapegoating of public school teachers is an ugly and unfortunate development in federal policy.
We pledge to partner with you for just reform.
We pledge to partner with you in prayer and action, working for reform that values the whole child as uniquely created, values teachers, and encourages and equips the family and community to participate in nurturing the full development of every child. We pledge to partner with you by:
- encouraging congregations to value public education and teachers through sermons, worship, and prayer;
- supporting parent education and adult literacy;
- encouraging congregations to partner with public schools to provide tutors, school supplies, exposure to computers and many other supports;
- supporting out-of-school supports like better and widely available pre-school and after school programs; and
- continuing to educate our members about the value of Community Schools that surround public schools with social supports.
We ask you to partner with us to challenge the unfair and detrimental language of the current discourse in educational reform, to re-examine untested assumptions about public education policy, and to ensure that untested models of school reform are not imposed from above in our nation’s most fragile school districts. Too often criticism of the public schools fails to reflect our present societal complexity. At a moment when childhood poverty is shamefully widespread, when many families are under constant stress, and when schools are often limited by lack of funds or resources, we know that public schools cannot be improved by concentrating on public schools alone. They alone can neither cause nor cure the problems we face. In this context, we must address with prayerful determination the issues of race and class, which threaten both public education and democracy in America.
Sincerely,
The Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary
The Rev. Peg Chemberlin, President
On Behalf of the Governing Board of The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA
To view the letter and a list of the members of the governing board, go to:
http://www.ncccusa.org/elmc/pastoralletter.pdf
Monday, March 22, 2010
David Saxe, litigant in Saxe v. State College Area School District, tells his own story
We have added a new article to our rejoinder section of the Journal of Educational Controversy. In the first issue of our journal, we focused on a controversy that emerged from the court case, Saxe v. State College Area School District, that was decided by Judge Samuel Alito before he was appointed to the US Supreme Court. The case reflects the tension between two values – liberty and equality – that both form the bedrock of our liberal democracy.
David Saxe, the litigant in the case, has decided to end his silence of ten years and tell his own story. Saxe argues that the characterization of his motives as “homophobic” or “religious fanaticism” was unfounded. On the contrary, he argues that he was actually defending the first amendment of the US constitution. You can find his article in our Rejoinder Section or go directly to:
Union next to our liberty most dear: Anatomy of Saxe v State College Area School District and Constance Martin, Righting Wrongs in the Sea of Rights
Judge Alito had found that the anti-harassment policy that David Saxe challenged was too vague and couldn’t pass constitutional muster. How might an anti-harassment policy be written that would be found constitutional?
We invite readers to add their thoughts with a formal rejoinder or a more spontaneous comment on our blog.
David Saxe, the litigant in the case, has decided to end his silence of ten years and tell his own story. Saxe argues that the characterization of his motives as “homophobic” or “religious fanaticism” was unfounded. On the contrary, he argues that he was actually defending the first amendment of the US constitution. You can find his article in our Rejoinder Section or go directly to:
Union next to our liberty most dear: Anatomy of Saxe v State College Area School District and Constance Martin, Righting Wrongs in the Sea of Rights
Judge Alito had found that the anti-harassment policy that David Saxe challenged was too vague and couldn’t pass constitutional muster. How might an anti-harassment policy be written that would be found constitutional?
We invite readers to add their thoughts with a formal rejoinder or a more spontaneous comment on our blog.
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