Money, Education and Democratic Voice

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

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

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.

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

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 

by

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

By

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.

Editor: For an update and elaboration of William Lyne's position, see his later post, "Who Breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel."


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.