Here is a vexing topic, at least for this instructor of cultural foundations of education. What can you expect students to read in a typical semester? In a 500 (master’s level, but open to advanced undergraduates) course that I teach on higher education in film and fiction, I am assigning 6 novels with a total number of pages around 2200.So, over 16 weeks we are talking about 140 pages per week. I have been advised both ways, that this is too much for some of our students, especially those who work, while some of my professorial colleagues say this is not too much. After all, we are talking about...
Curriculum and the different flavors of nominalism
As far as my philosophy-of-ed naivete is concerned, perhaps the best example of a contemporary equivalent of whole-cloth curriculum theorizing in the vein of progressivism, Summerhill, etc., is Marion Brady's Seamless Curriculum. As someone who has taught at different levels but whose arguments don't explicitly come from any single intellectual root, Brady is iconoclastic and sometimes hard to read when he tries to squeeze his curriculum perspective into a shorter piece of writing. Disclosure: My difficulties may come less from Brady than from my own background, which is fairly far...
Tom Green, in memoriam
Tom Green died yesterday morning. Among many other accomplishments (see http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/board/green.html) Tom was the “factotum” of the original PHILOSED listserv, from about 1988 to about 1994 (correct me if I’m wrong with the dates). I will remember the intense discussions we had on PHILOSED in those days with extreme fondness. It was, for many of us, the community of scholars that we craved. PHILOSED was the first serious use of technology for building community in the philosophy of education community. In that sense, it was the honored ancestor...
A modest administrative reform proposal
We interrupt the silly competition to see who can get away with the most fraud in the 2006 Weblog Awards for best educationalisteseazamatazz blog (a tentative congrats to Michael Bérubé's loyal readership for having beaten out the readership of a defunct homeschool blog, an Ivy League gossip site, and all the others) to present a serious extension of the last 20 years' worth of education reforms and changes in educational leadership in major urban school districts. From the bulimia of decentralization-centralization to the hiring of politician-CEOs and admired-als, we have learned a great deal...
Community Organizing and Urban Education V: “Cutting an Issue” (Clarity and Passion)
[To read the entire series, go here.]One of the most challenging tasks of a community organizing group is to come up with a specific issue to pursue. The world is full of what organizers call “problems,” aspects of the world we don’t like—e.g., world hunger, or educational achievement. Problems, however are too big and vague to grapple with in any coherent manner. In fact, just thinking about them can be disempowering.So what organizers try to do is cut “issues” out of problems that can be concretely dealt with in a coherent and achievable manner. It turns out that this is an extremely difficult...
Liberal democracy, folk positivism, and test scores
This afternoon I had lunch with Stephen Turner, author of Liberal Democracy 3.0 (2003), which is about the relationship between expertise and liberal democracy. His take is a somewhat cynical but important one to consider, that we're inevitably moving towards (and have already shifted towards) a political system that liberally uses expertise as a way to displace political decisions out of political arenas. His book has been important to me as I try to revise the part of my book manuscript that focuses on the tension between technocracy and transparent political dialogue. Stephen told me it just...
Some Thought on the Big Picture Company
Take Ted Sizer’s idea of portfolios, throw in John Taylor Gatto’s notion of community as school, and mix with just a tad of Neill’s Summerhillian freedom. That’s a good opening recipe for the Big Picture Company.I’m blogging on this because of Craig’s request for a little more information on this topic that I mentioned in a comment to Ken’s posting about re-envisioning the educational system. I must admit that I am very much an outsider to the Big Picture Company and have only followed it as an interested layperson who is always searching out paradigmatically alternative educational models.What...
Rethinking American Education
The link I have provided associated with this posting is for a diary posted today at dailykos. I have been a visible poster there for a number of years, and last year organized a panel session for the first Yearlykos in Las Vegas with Jamie Vollmer and Governor Tom Vilsack, discussion the situation in American Education today. I have been tasked to organize another session this year, with the unenviable and impossible task of totally rethinking American education. After reading several posts here recently, I thought it not inappropriate to share what we have been doing, and that plural pronoun...
Folk positivism
(or So there, Michael Bérubé! and other pseudo- philosophical rants)With Michael Bérubé's challenge to his fellow nominees in the 2006 Weblogs Award Best Educational Blog category (hey, see that icon in the left margin? go vote for us now!), I'm going to ponder one of the problems I'm considering in Accountability Frankenstein. To wit, how the heck can we create accountability systems rooted in distrust of school officials and teachers (and students!), while simultaneously crafting systems that have a fairly blind trust of tests. That trust in test instruments undermines one of the main arguments...
The Nano-Cultural Curriculum
Just like the human recalcitrants in the Matrix movie trilogy, multiculturalists have moved far underground in hopes of re-grouping someday when rule by the Illusion Machine finally runs down from a shortage of fresh, fleshy batteries willing to be sucked dry and discarded like so many husks. You have go get 2-3 pages deep, nowadays, into a Google News Search before finding anything going on in what was once celebrated at ground level as multicultural education. One of the few hits I could dig up was this conference at SUNY-Birkenstock (New Paltz), where...
CSFE and the Future of Foundations
I’ve been holding off responding to the numerous comments to my previous post about the future of foundations in Virginia. I was hoping that Steve Tozer (AESA President), Kathleen deMarrais (AESA Past President), (see the AESA officers) or Jamie Lewis (President, CSFE) would have posted something. I was CSFE vice-president for the last year (I resigned in October) and thus did not want to muddy the conflict-of-interest waters. But here goes.The Council for Social Foundations of Education (CSFE) used to be the primary link between a host of social foundations-related organizations (e.g., AESA,...
More on NSTA and oil company sponsorship
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurie-david/crooked-curriculum-oil-c_b_35829.html[Laurie David] The scandal at the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) just keeps getting worse.Since the Washington Post published an op-ed I wrote asking if NSTA's puzzling decision to reject 50,000 free DVDs of Al Gore's global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth might - just might - have had anything to do with more than six million dollars the organization has accepted from ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, ConocoPhillips and the American Petroleum Institute, the muck keeps piling up. . .New evidence flatly...
KIPP As New Age Psychological Sterilization
A version of this piece was posted to Schools Matter 08.12.06: I've seen several commentaries on the Tough advertisement for KIPP in New York Times Magazine a week ago Sunday, but the following comments sent to EDDRA by Howard Berlak get very close, it seems to me, to the heart of the matter regarding KIPP: I visited a local KIPP school about a year and a half ago after the SF Chronicle published a puff piece announcing KIPP as the answer to failing schools and the race gap --essentially the same story told in the recent NY Times article. When I was there...
Interdisciplinarity and disciplinary standards for tenure
The Modern Language Association's Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion report is out, along with an op-ed column by Michael Bérubé, Scott Jaschik's Inside Higher Ed article on reaction to the report, Chronicle of Higher Ed reportage (free!), and a response by University Diarist Margaret Soltan. Roughly speaking, the MLA report says, "Hey, you departments who are still demanding a monograph publication for tenure and still training grad students for that life? Get with the program. Requiring that new scholars publish monographs (and refusing to recognize other writing...
Community Organizing and Urban Education IV: Lawyers, Activists, and Moblizers Are Not Organizers
[To read the entire series, go here.]To understand what coherent, systematic community organizing is, it’s helpful to discuss what it is not. When people talk about social action, they often mix together a range of approaches that are actually somewhat distinct. I discuss three different approaches, here. Of course, one could distinguish more types, or fewer. But these three—legal action, activism, and mobilizing—are often referred to by organizers.Legal ActionLawyers are often quite important to those engaged in social action. Lawyers can get you out of jail, and they can help you overcome...
No More Foundations Courses in Virginia?
The Virginia Department of Education is currently considering removing foundations of education coursework from teacher education requirements. This has been a while in the policy pipeline (I have been corresponding with colleagues in Virginia about this for over a year), and it appears poised for passage. The strange thing is that the VA Board of education gives no rationale for this change.So here is my problem. How are teacher education programs going to meet Virginia’s own regulations (which, as far as I can tell, are accurate as of this summer) that state that programs must provide: “A sequence...
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