Entry Nine: Classroom Organizations

Generally there are two bad classroom organizations: chaos and lecture. They are bad because student learning does not regularly occur. True chaos is rare because social groups start organizing themselves into hierarchies, pecking orders, and social networks around various commonalities (for instance, language, class, popularity, skin-color, religion). Lecture is much more common, and minimally effective except in transmission-based models of instruction and for high performing students who already have learned how to learn. I abominate transmission-based models of instruction, but I see a small place for brief lectures; they allow the teacher to tell his or her autobiographical experiences with the content and to provide stories that motivate student learning. Learners should be engaged in the content and process learning through means other that lecture, except for that small minority of learners who are completely auditory.

The good teacher envisions the organization of the classroom into participatory groups and learning activities, acting as guide to both functional classroom structure and learning. Lecture is kept to brief motivating transmissions while student engagement in learning activities is maximized through hands-on manipulation and minds-on engagement with physical materials, mental processes, inquiry, and multimedia. Students are taught in interactive sessions that last for a few moments (measured in seconds) to longer blocks of time. In these longer blocks of time, students respond in various ways, almost continuously involved; they answer teacher questions chorally or individually, write notes (teacher directed in early grades, but increasingly self-directed from second grade), read, write, ask questions, discuss ideas, demonstrate processes with teacher guidance, use computers, listen to recordings, watch video, and compose multimedia projects. In formal lectures that may be appropriate in high school, the student responses are individually engaged with note-taking and written questions as the learner works mentally with the information and processes being described; sometimes this process is called ‘active listening’ and exemplifies the constructivist learner who is building mental and linguistic knowledge at all times.

Differentiation is a buzz-word currently. It means that the good teacher changes instruction, strategies, activities, technologies, and materials to meet learner needs. Differentiated instruction is the tool that breaks apart the ‘one size fits all’ mentality. Learners need a variety of approaches to developing skill, competence, and mastery of knowledge and processes; good teachers have a repertoire of such approaches rather than relying on one. The teacher’s repertoire needs strategies for gaining learner attention and building learner practices that internalize what the learner needs to perform in various situations with the knowledge, skill or process that must be demonstrated. Differentiation means, to me, that the teacher is engaged in providing experiences for the learner that are in the Vygotskian zone of proximal development (ZPD). For example, a ten-year-old child reading four-grade levels below expectations cannot read the same text as the child performing at grade-level expectations. What can the teacher do? Here’s a list:

1.     provide more of the same instruction (related to background knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension skills, decoding skills),

2.     provide different instruction(related to the learner’s instruction differences but building background knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension skills, decoding skills),

3.     teach the child alternate coping strategies for dealing with difficult texts and monitoring understanding and learning (again related to background knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension skills, decoding skills),  

4.     read the text to the child,

5.     have someone else read the text to the child,

6.     have technology read the text to the child (test to speech and Kurzweil devices),

7.     change to alternate (easier) materials that the child can read but cover the same topic,

8.     change the topic of the instruction to engage the child more effectively but reaching towards the general goal of the curriculum.

All of these require an extremely skilled teacher with a wide repertoire of teaching and a deep understanding of the curriculum. Meeting the needs of a learner having difficult academically or socially is impeded by current rigid structures of the school, including age-grade placement fetishes and testing mania. Classes and groupings need to become more flexible. Specialist teachers need to move independently through classrooms and schools, providing support to teachers and children. Teachers and specialist need time to confer and plan together to meet needs of learners having difficulty; rarely does repeating the same instruction work for learners having problem, so alternative programs are needed to match the characteristics of learners.

Since classrooms are complex communities of learners, an observer cannot understand what is going on in a classroom without interacting in the community and discussing the structures with the teacher (outside of classroom teaching time). Students are learning more that just information; they are developing habits and procedures that should improve their abilities to learn in other settings. They are developing moral and ethical frameworks and attitudes towards the school and learning in institutional settings. Understanding what a good teacher does takes time and conferencing with the teacher or teachers about the challenges and structures of the classroom.

All classrooms are structured. Period. The observer may not like the structure and may not understand it, but it takes time to see how things work in an individual classroom. IT’S WRONG TO CALL ANY CLASSROOM UNSTRUCTURED. If there are children and a teacher present, there is structure (although the empty set is a structure also). Teachers and administrators use “unstructured” to refer to a classroom structure that they don’t understand or just don’t like. Observers need to get beyond this, and discuss and describe the structures in place. For instance, many whole language (and some other) classrooms use workshops (reading workshop and writing workshop). These workshops are very carefully structured, crafted around the teacher’s idea of building students’ reading and writing procedures, and the students learn the structure and engage in the processes, colluding with the teacher in making the classroom function. Both children and teacher are parts of this complex social structure where language (oral and written) is used for communication and learning. The naïve observer (often an administrator, certified without competencies in curriculum) who only spends a few moments in the classroom without interacting with the children about their tasks will not understand how the classroom is structured or see how the activities are tied to grade-level standards. Good teachers must communicate to naïve observers about the importance of classroom structures and not let administrators or legislators bully teachers into adopting less productive structures.

How to organize various activities with groups in a classroom is an art form. With twenty children in a class, just the number of mathematically possible groups is staggering -- more than 2,432,902,008,176,649,000 (if you include order of assignment to the group with tasks within the group), and if the teacher is included or not in the group, the number doubles. A classroom of 25 had something like 1.6 x 10²⁵ . Need I go on? The big idea is for every teacher to have envisioned the structure of his/her classroom as an environment and as a set of dynamic processes that flow over short time periods like seconds, minutes, or hours, and that evolve over longer time periods like days, weeks, or months. These structures should meet the needs of the teacher and the students for engagement, learning, productivity, performance, assessment, success, emotional well-being, and aesthetics. The teacher envisions cycles and products within the curriculum that keep all children learning with new content and review of important processes, differentiating for the needs of the various learners in the classroom. Teachers of literacy use various materials: text books (hard copy and electronic), children’s literature or adolescent literature (books that are age-appropriate or age-appropriate multimedia – yes, video can be literature!), enrichment reading materials (teacher selected material to build background, experiences, language, and vocabulary through a wide range of texts on various topics), self-selected readings (the child selects, but of course with guidance from teacher and parents), and children’s writing. 

Teachers need a repertoire of strategies and organization schemes to perform their practice in the classroom and to motivate learners to collude with them. This takes conscious knowledge of a complex performance repertoire, caring, cooperation, collusion with the learners, community, an ability to change, and above all commitment.  Rather than using one or two teachers as a model, every teacher has to develop a style. What will your teaching style be? What are its key ideas?

Further reading:

Bruner, Jerome. (1996). The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, Jerome. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, Jerome. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, Jerome. (1961). The act of discovery. Harvard Educational Review, 31, 21-32.

Bruner, Jerome. (1966). Toward a Theory of Instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gardner, H. (1991). Intelligence in seven steps. Available: http://www.newhorizons.org/crfut_gardner.html.

Gardner, Howard. (1993). Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice. Basic Books: New York.

Gardner, Howard. (1993). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Basic Books: New York.

Gardner, Howard. (1991). The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach. Basic Books: New York.

Glasersfeld, Ernst V. (1996). Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. Falmer Press: London.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). New York, NY: Plenum.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and Language (A. Kozulin, Trans., Ed.). Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press.

Vygotsky, Lev. (1987). The Collected Works. Problems of General Psychology. vol 1. New York: Plenum Press.

Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaker Blog

GTIrbs.blogspot.com

Response from the White House

April 15, 2011 Dear Friend: Thank you for sharing your thoughts on education.  I appreciate hearing from you.  I am committed to providing the best possible education for our Nation's students because our children deserve it and because, today more than ever, America's prosperity rests on how well we educate them. Across the country, we have many great schools and dedicated teachers.  We should be proud of these successes, and eager to discover and support what makes them great.  We must also realize that not all children get the education they deserve, and many schools need urgent reform to better help our students reach their full potential.  Through the Recovery Act, my Administration has made a historic investment toward improving public education and providing greater access to a complete and competitive education for every child.  This investment will make high-quality, early learning programs available to more young children.  The Recovery Act will also help strengthen the teaching profession by recognizing talented teachers who improve learning and by encouraging them to stay in the schools that need them most.  We are committed to exploring innovative approaches that advance teaching and learning through high standards and expectations for all students, and to developing meaningful assessments.  These steps can ensure our graduates are prepared for success both in their higher education and careers.  A child's education does not begin and end with a school bell, and responsibility must extend beyond a school's walls.  Our future success depends on a greater level of engagement between parents, communities, and schools on behalf of children.  We all share the duty to educate our students, and if we hold them to the highest standards, they will meet them.  Please join me online to read more at:  www.WhiteHouse.gov/issues/education. Sincerely, Barack Obama

Entry Eight: Languages

Children come in all sorts of languages. Their language IS correct and should not be corrected. They have knowledge of formality and situations with various participants. If they know how to talk (and most of them do!), they know phonology, morphology (words and word parts), lexicon (vocabulary), syntax (grammar), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (how to do things with words in various situation). They may or may not know Standard Formal American English (SFAEng), and they may not have had the experiences of the white middle class or the schooled culture – these two can put the child at an extreme disadvantage. Their language shows who they are and something of the experiences they have had. Good teachers know this and use it. Good teachers teach code switching and SFAEng as part of the writing process, not with grammar books, exercises, and corrections. Furthermore, good teachers model SFAEng.

The insanity begins when all schools (based on governmental regulations) admit children based on their age and expect all children to make the same progress at the same time. These government regulations set policies in an absolutist manner; the same policy holds for all no matter the background or language. With modern computer systems, we have the mechanisms to track individual progress and standards that set general expectations; they allow the tracking of individuals in very sophisticated ways that can be based on various types of performances in real situations. Why don’t we use them? Why are we still using age as our major sorting system for children rather then their performances towards standards.

Roger Bacon observed that "all languages are built upon a common grammar." I’m going to quibble about this because Bacon was only looking at Indo-European languages, which were closely related (especially English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Latin, and Greek). For instance English is basically a positional language with standard subject-verb-object (SVO) order for declarative sentences. Among the list of European languages, only German uses a verb final structure commonly; but Japanese is verb final (and the tense and mode markers are at the end of the verb), and the order of all the other parts of the sentence is optional (additionally Japanese has a double subject structure that is hard to duplicate in English; it’s sometimes called the topic-subject and the comment-subject). SFAEng is explicit, direct, and redundant in expression of subjects, various dialects of English allow the elision of the copula (the verb “to be”), but Japanese is implicit, indirect, and omits many contextually understood words and markers (*’was going to the university’ isn’t acceptable in English, but in Japanese,  ‘daigaku-ni ikimashita’ would invariable elide the subject pronoun for the speaker or the spoken to person which Italian and Spanish can do sometimes). English has very few grammatical inflections (like I -> me/my/mine depending on the grammatical case), but every noun in a Japanese sentence (oral or written) must have its grammatical marker expressed explicitly (German does this with articles, but Japanese has no articles). Japanese does not use grammatical gender or number but has complicated sets of counter words that are used for the construction of plurals.  English and Japanese both use pitch, stress, and rhythm for complicated implications of meaning (play with different ways of saying these exact words: ‘I did not say you stole my red sweater from the hook.’ and analyze what each means in difference contexts as the patterns of pitch, stress, and rhythm change), but Japanese has a complicated alternate vocabulary and inflection patterns called “women’s speech” that is used in specific gender situations; I have some indications that there is also a specialized “men’s speech”, for hype-masculine settings, but I haven’t read anything to support than. Both languages use layers of words to indicate politeness and status of speaker and listener. The issue of noun and noun-like structures cause problems for the analysis of Japanese because it does not fit into the same patterns as Indo-European languages.

What is a noun? What is a verb? (Hint: these ARE NOT properties of words, despite what’s in dictionaries.) Why do children get so confused with grammar instruction focused on parts of speech? Part of the reason seems to be that teachers are confused about the functional properties of words in sentences and haven’t gotten the message that words take on different functions and meanings depending on how and where they are used in sentences. All the old grammar books that focus on parts of speech as if they were properties of words are wrong. Now add the layer of multiple languages to the child in the classroom. The child knows how to talk in one or more of these, but the organizational structures of sentences (syntax) are not necessarily the same. Is there any wonder that confusion is common?

In classrooms today, we encounter tremendous language variation. Children come speaking varieties of English from all over the country and the globe; they come from different cultures and languages. For instance, I encountered this utterance just before Mardi Gras in New Orleans: ‘we-ya(t du( mawde- graw da(n ye-u( di(s ye-u(’ [where e- represents long ‘e’, a( represents short ‘a’, and u( represent a schwa], the standard spelling and syntax would be something like ‘We are at the Mardi Gras down here this year’. Notice that in this dialect the words ‘here’ and ‘year’ are homonyms, and the copula (the verb ‘to be’) is elided as in several European and African languages. Is there any surprise that a child whose family and cultural groups use this dialect of English have difficult with short and long vowels on tests in SFAEng? They are fluent and proficient in their abilities to communicate; they are not inferior, and they use of language is pragmatically competent while teachers speaking SFAEng are immediately judged by them as non-fluent and incompetent speakers by all members of their language groups. They judge SFAEng speakers as deficient in language skill and lacking communicative competence for situations of daily life. In this dialect, ‘ya’l’ and ‘alu’ya’l’ are respectively the plural familiar and plural formal forms of the second person pronouns.

The good teacher must understand the autobiography of the child from this language community and the biography of the community language, accept it, and gradually teach the child to code-switch between the home dialect and SFAEng. Good teachers who come from this language community recognize the two dialects and can switch from one to the other, maintaining their modeling of SFAEng as they teach.  Now add to the language complexities in a classroom with other dialects and levels of proficiency with English, dialects of Spanish and other European languages, dialects of Chinese (Sino-Tibetan languages), Hindi (and other languages from South Asia like Thai, Vietnamese, Hmong, Khmer), dialects of Arabic, African languages, Polynesian languages (and their variants in places like Japan and Korea), and Native American languages (Mayan has over 30 dialects). This diversity is much more complex that most politicians and policy wonks can conceptualize, but good teachers need to keep up with all of it.

Further Reading:

Delpit,  Lisa, & Perry, Theresa. (eds.). The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children. Beacon Press: Boston.

Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaker Blog

GTIrbs.blogspot.com

Entry Seven: Anti-Testing

I don’t do tests. Tests only show what the learner does in a testing situation. I want evidence of what the learner can think about and do, and that means that DATA IS IMPORTANT, but not all data is created equal and much of test data is useless. I want to see what the learner does in non-testing situations or at least a simulation of a real situation. That mean learners should be engaged in all sorts of performances with the real tasks of reading (orally and silently), discussing readings, writing, writing about readings, building artifacts related to text with multimedia, acting with objects in the environment, and acting with others in real time. The teacher needs to observe these performances and constructions in real time using rubrics, asking questions, and giving feedback.

I'm getting ready to mount an anti-testing tirade. Maybe it will need to become a movement.  I need to rant a bit about the controls that politicians are trying to put in place: Get your filthy politician hands off our schools. The results of your standardized tests don’t show what the students are doing or what they can do. Get more good teaching and time to teach into the schools. Get professional, knowledgeable teachers into the schools. Get smart teachers into the schools. Get teachers who know the differences among the short, long and other vowels into the elementary school; we don’t need automatons who follow a script about vowels without regarding the children, their current knowledge, and what they can do. Children don’t need lengthy streams of facts and trivia about vowels; then need application of specific knowledge of a particular vowel or two to decode a word and then focus on meaning. Get teachers who can teach in a variety of modes for a variety of learner needs. Get the political "one size fits all" out of the schools and allow us to differentiate, basing advancement on demonstration of real reading (both oral and silent), the ability to discuss that reading coherently, and writing, not multiple-choice idiocy.

We want all of our students competent with basic skills.  But what are the basics? Martin Luther provided the Germans with the Bible in their native tongue and the commandment that they read it for themselves. King James provided similar inculcations. For me, reading, understanding, and discussing various text related to age-appropriate themes is the mandatory basic skill for success in schools, and writing about them is next; third is being able to do things. Our basic skills should include using information technology critically and participating in the conversations about our society and political system. Passing a multiple-choice test on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights does not constitute an acceptable level of understanding of the government of the U. S. Thinking about people and processes of our society critically and synthesizing ideas into a new whole for yourself and others to solve some problem, which is communicated orally, in writing , or on video (youtube is probably mandatory), is the ultimate basic skill. But we don't get at these basic skills with multiple-choice, machine-graded tests – no matter what level is specified by an external accountability system.

Teachers do need to keep data on their students’ performances. They need to show performances early in their contacts with their students and produce data showing progress. These data should examine where students were at the prior assessment point and the changes over time for various groups of learners. It should provide an answer to the following question: Which learners are demonstrating which types of performance over time towards the goals of the school? 

If the state wants external measures and data, then the state should hire evaluators who do this testing and perform analyses. States might have to include standardized tests, but the teachers should not be allowed to administer any standardized tests, and the standardized tests should NEVER be the sole evaluative criterion.

Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaker Blog

GTIrbs.blogspot.com

Ravitch Speech at AERA in New Orleans

I heard Diane Ravitch speak last night at the conference of the American Educational Research Association. She was in a medium-sized room that had to be opened to double its capacity and that still wasn’t enough for the crowd that overflowed into the halls and corridors of the hotel. She held up improving PISA scores and the education system in Finland as the aspirational goals that the current testing mania wishes for the U.S. The problems with these two include many statistical issues and the difficulty of moving a large diverse population ahead with a poorly paid and poorly trained and low status teaching profession. In addition, the belief that any administrative background from outside of education will lead to improved administration and therefore the improvement of student test scores.

The flaws of the film, Waiting for Superman, become more and more apparent to her as she follows the money and the one-sided narrative. Charter schools are not usually better than matched public schools; indeed, only about one in six shows scores that exceed matched public schools. Furthermore, the billionaires who produced this film have an agenda that does not pay attention to research or data about the public schools. They move in corporate reform circles and believe that testing will lead to improvement, so they support more testing.

Administrators at school levels are the ones responsible for tenuring bad teachers and not removing them from the schools. It’s not the teachers’ unions. Firing teachers based on test scores will not work because that will barely raise test scores to the average; it will demoralize teachers and lead to regression to the mean for test scores. How do we find administrators who can recognize good teachers? They have to be trained to ask parents about the quality of teachers because parents will know within a month of starting school.

The idiosyncratic autobiographical blindness of policy makers, bureaucrats, and legislators has led them to believe that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are widely accepted as good by educators and the public alike. They do not understand the amount of time being devoted to test preparation and testing is increasing so dramatically that children are not having the time to learn and teachers are not having the time to teach the content that the children need. What these policies are doing is learning to various forms of testing dishonesty throughout the country as the tests are used for purposes that were never intended. For instance, merit pay does not lead to better teaching and better test scores, but the Obama administration is putting a billion dollars into that without any evidence of success. Testing does not lead to improved learning although is does lead to slightly improved test scores.

Corporate school reform and the billionaires meddling in public education without ever experiencing public education as a student or teacher is most probably a search for control and wealth. After all, Bill Gates wants more of his computer software in all children’s hands throughout the world because that will indoctrinate them into demanding that software as adults. The view that teachers are interchangeable and should be paid the minimum comes from a corporate view that the schools are factories and the teachers are the line workers. They point to miracle schools that have some self-proclaimed measure of how wonderful they are; for instance, all of their graduates go to college, but they fail to point out that the attrition from entrance to the school to graduation is about 90% and the amount spent on each student per year is three to five times that of the average public school.

Her call to activism includes researchers, administrators, teachers, and parents. We must communicate to the president, governors, legislatures, and bureaucrats that the current testing mania is not working. So here’s my draft letter:

Barack H. Obama

President of the United States

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Washington, DC 20500

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

Dear Mr. President:

It is too late to fix No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB and other federal initiatives in education are leading to a decline in our American school systems. These much touted reforms, based in the testing movement, are causing teachers, even the best teachers in public schools, to have less and less time to teach; consequently, their children are having less and less time to learn. I believe that NCLB and other laws that include testing students uniformly across the country should be eliminated. The funds should be redirected to pay off the deficit and to increase opportunities for teachers to develop excellence in teaching content areas, with a two-fold emphasis on academic knowing and pedagogy while using advanced internet technologies.

The idiosyncratic autobiographical blindness of policy makers, bureaucrats, and legislators has led them to believe that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are widely accepted as good by educators and the public alike. They do not hear or see the objections. They do not understand the time being devoted to test preparation and testing is increasing so dramatically that children are not having the time to learn, and teachers are not having the time to teach what children need. These policies are leading to various forms of testing and data dishonesty throughout the country as tests are used for purposes that were never intended. Testing does not lead to improved learning although is does lead to slightly improved test scores. If this testing mania continues, children will have to learn outside of school because testing will become the entire business of the school.

Because of the time devoted to testing, the curriculum is narrowing. Many schools have eliminated art, music and physical education, but the elimination of social studies and science in the elementary grades is growing because of the focus on testing in the areas of literacy and mathematics. A teacher recently explained to me that her eighth-grade, inner-city, African-American students believed that Martin Luther King, Jr. freed the slaves, and they did not know that many of our early presidents, including George Washington, owned slaves.

I believe that we need excellent teachers in our schools. They must be bright and talented and committed to spending more than five years honing their profession as teachers. They also need our support because without them our children will not have a chance in the next century.

Sincerely,

Richard B. Speaker, Jr., Ph. D.

I sent this to the president this morning.

Further reading: http://www.dianeravitch.com/

Ravitch, D. (2010). The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books.

Blog: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/

Entry Six: More On the Nature of Science and Education

What makes a science? A science must have theories that lead to hypotheses which can be tested empirically under conditions that control the variables involved and the initial conditions. A science must have data, and the data must be used to decide whether the hypotheses of the empirical test can be falsified or must stand as unrefuted.  Thus, scientific knowledge, theories, and hypotheses are always open to change, revision, and updating based of further work in the field. 

What are the initial conditions that must be considered in a school setting? Each individual is unique. Child, teacher, administrator, bureaucrat, politician: each brings an autobiography to the school setting; some are rank beginners, others have years of experience in the institution while some few have become specialists in some particular area. Each has knowledge, interests, skills, and expectations, developed within a particular cultural group. Some of these groups have traditionally had access to power; others have not. 

Politicians are fond of saying, “one size does not fit all,” and that they support education, but they are hypocrites. Beware of policy wonks; they have a view that bruits conformity and lacks the nuance to deal with complex systems, and every classroom is a complex system.

Educational measurements rarely control for initial conditions. They rarely consider growth. The NCLB Act and the accountability systems fostered by it require all students to perform on the single annual snapshot of the school.  When should these snapshots be taken? Why? NCLB proscribes that the snapshots be taken annually for accountability as defined by the state boards of education and state legislature.

How is a replicable model possible when each situation is unique with differing initial conditions, participants, and cultures? Perhaps what we should be looking for are broad design parameters and patterns which researchers and innovators can use to guide the construction of technology enhanced learning for teachers and their students. Instead of looking for the grail (to use a metaphor), we should be looking for the fresh water that will sustain our lives and provide insights into how we can design curriculums that incorporate teacher and student voices from the beginning rather than at the end. Schools never keep pace with the emerging technologies and advances in thought because the prime movers in the schools (teachers and students) are hamstrung by time constraining mandates and the conservative traditions of educational institutions. Instead of doing, teachers and students are required to pretend most of the time; instead of learning, teachers and students are required to demonstrate on minimal competency measures disguised as high stakes tests. This critique is not new because John Dewey said basically the same thing over 100 years ago, and in that hundred plus years, our educational systems have worked to maintain themselves and to hide the patterns of subverting change and the new.

Education is a cottage industry in a techno-bureaucratic world. Each classroom has unique characteristics that the bureaucrats and politicians want to stamp out because of uniform accountability, misrecognition of the purposes of education, misunderstanding of the functions of tests, and quality control. Most want to use technology and data as mechanisms of this control, but in the flattened hierarchy of social networking, teachers can and must subvert this process of control by communicating their strategies of resistance and modeling the processes of social equity. One increasing problem in the U.S. is fear – fear promulgated by the politicians, bureaucrats, and government to try to manipulate the outcomes of many events where they need a herd mentality to rush panicked legislators and their constituents into controlling legalisms. Indeed, education is a political act, and education cannot be separated from human politics.

Political and social discourse now moves through a wide range of multimedia, accessible to those who use the Internet and TV as their information sources. Critical consumers of multimedia are embedding themselves in this discourse and finding various modes of resistance and demonstration from e-mail to blogs to political activisms. Some drop out of various parts of the discourse while participating in others, but their presence can be amassed in a variety of ways that include the ballot box, nonviolent actions, and, in the most feared status, violence. The violence is not just symbolic, although the symbolism of selection of terror targets is essential; it is physical and often the last refuge of the marginalized. What seems missing from the political and critical dialogue on terror as defined by the political hegemony and their violent radical counterculture is the discourse on marginalization that leads to the acceptance of violence as an appropriate resort. Indeed, the very discourse on terror among the political hegemonic powers and the fear that they have engendered among their populations may perform the act of radicalization that leads to the violence of radicalized fanatics.

The topics of caring and liberation are not currently part of this political and social discourse. Instead there is the ethos of “getting my share” and “taking what I can grab from anyone so long as I’m not caught,” which are combined in a view of life as a zero sum game where the expressive agent (me) will receive fewer of the benefits, rights, and privileges of living in a wealthy society if the other (the marginalized you or generic “other” who belongs to some difference class, caste, or group, vaguely defined) receives more. This view ignores the importance of vast and complex economic systems in which most live and favors a conservation that radicalizes the “other” into a demonic presence. It replaces the general passive view of “living in a golden age” with an active apocalyptic fear of the present and future.

A message of caring and liberation is viewed as feminized and weak. Liberation of others is conceived as stealing from self or from future generations of the me-group, but especially my immediate children. Media biases are swallowed without critical consideration; currently all intellectuals, progressives, and liberals are ipso facto evil and bent on destroying the nature of society and the privileges of the me-group. Especially threatened are those who have a vested worldview of being a privileged group, selected by some moral, ethical, or theocratic criteria, and directions for their own salvation. Their caring and liberation is directed at their me-group and hate is directed at all other as the me-group defines “other.” The me-group is particular worried about anything that suggests that their continued existence might be under threat: reproduction and the erotic must be carefully controlled, so pregnant women must produce more offspring. and the “evil” of homosexuality must be extirpated. Power and the good must be concentrated in the members of the me-group, in what can hardly be called anything but racist, from most points of view (of course, all outside the me-group).

The me-group rejects living in a mixed, multicultural society where others have the same rights and privileges and responsibilities. They want homogenized culture focused on theirs as the only “correct” viewpoint and decry all variation while, hypocritically, wanting to select from all the possible consumables of the market-driven consumer society. They fail to see culture as a vial, changing and now multi-technologically-based system.  They see poverty, difference, and youth as forces that could subvert their status quo and must be diverted into “appropriate” social activities through indoctrination and cycles of failure. The me-group fears that their culture is dying or at least losing power because of the “invasion” of so many purveyors of difference.  In attempts to control the use of power in their favor, the me-group reverts to symbolic violence and works to redefine curriculum, “truth,” and the schools into centers for the indoctrination of the “other” into the me-group realities of power reproduction. The current systems of school accountability are designed to control access to knowledge and thinking of the poor and marginalized by ensuring that they are housed in failing schools that will continue to be reorganized to prevent strong teachers from developing caring, libratory, and socially progressive critical questioning from the students and their parents, because the accountability is being held as an objective measure of the success of the school rather than an instrument of social and racial oppression. The me-group wants the “other” to accept their power and domination rather than to question it, and, more to the point, become participants in the oppression fostered by accountability.

The me-group builds an ethno-centered consciousness, a group consciousness that controls its members. The only possible discourse is self-discourse within the group; the only possible consciousness is within the me-group and its shared discourses.  Any contrary information or viewpoint is immediately rejected. Any attempt to break the cycles of the me-group navel-staring becomes a radical attack on the me-group. The me-group radicalizes for defense of its own. The attacks on the me-group status quo bring out an arsenal of virulent speech and the threat of physical violence in violation of the qualities of civil public discourse and respect for others and their opinions.  Part of this is because the me-group only chooses to read me-group messages unless threatened in some way, building a self-reinforcing dispotia of beliefs and control without the goal of symbiotic collusion with other groups.

Too many amateurs are at the helm. Administrators and central administrator are not highly trained professionals in education; they choose teachers who are rank amateurs rather than one that are highly trained and involved in personal professional development.They have increasing difficulty even identifying a good teacher and good teaching. Thus, we need a Good Teaching Initiative to lead the way into a more balanced and expanding curriculum led by good teachers who are expert at meeting learner needs.

Further Reading:

Delpit,  Lisa, & Perry, Theresa. (eds.). The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children. Beacon Press: Boston.

Dewey, John. (1939). Freedom and Culture. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York.

Dewey, John. (1920). The School and Society. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Glasersfeld, Ernst V. (1996). Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. Falmer Press: London.

Hooks, Bell. (2004). We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. Routledge: New York.

Hooks, Bell. (2000). Where We Stand: Class Matters. Routledge: New York.

Kuhn, Thomas. S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (3^rd Ed.). University of Chicago Press. 

Lakatos, Imre, & Musgrave, (Eds.). (1970). Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge: Volume 4: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965.  Cambridge University Press.

Noddings, Nel. (1998). Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA.

Noddings, Nel. (1998). Philosophy of Education. Westview Press: Boulder, CO.

Popper, Karl. (2002). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge Classics.

Speaker, R., Laskowitz, R., Thompson, C., Speaker, P., Chauvin, B., Darby, D. & Willis, E. (2005, October). Collections, Critical Selections and the Teaching Repertoire: Examples from Autobiographical Memoirs and Multimedia Teaching Units. In R. E. Griffin, S. B. Chandler, & B. D. Cowden (Eds.) Visual literacy and development: An African experience (pp. 187-196). International Visual Literacy Association: Pilanesburg, South Africa. 

Turiel, Elliot. (??). The Culture of Morality: Social Development, Context, and Conflict. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England.

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