[To read the entire series, go here.]I am currently working on the introductory "lectures" for an online community organizing class I am teaching this Fall. Later on I'll be posting the first draft of the entire course online and will post an introduction on this blog. Below I'm posting the introduction to the "cutting an issue" module (FYI, it repeats some of the content of an earlier post). The complete lecture can be accessed here.Note that I'm no longer numbering posts in this series, and I'll be reorganizing the "series" page to put posts under more coherent subheadings.The "text" referred...
A Foundations Student Speaks on NCLB
I just wound up a summer session of my graduate foundations class. This is how one student closed her final essay in response to this question:Is it possible or likely that the purposes and aims that you will pursue and promote as an educator are or can be realized by all American children, regardless of race, gender, or where they happen to go to school? Using evidence supplied from this course, explain how and why your most important educational purposes or aims are equally accessible – or how and why they are or cannot be equally accessible. American education should be an equal-opportunity...
Flat Worlds, Poison Toys, and Political Thinking
What happens when you depend upon businessmen to make educational decisions, businessmen whose prime motivation in life is the never-ending uptick in corporate quarterly earnings? You end up with a politically-and-artistically- denuded curriculum that's heavy on science, math, and technology--and short on everything else. Welcome to Achieve, Inc. and the Business Roundtable's new vision of the American high school.When the world got flat, you see, the pedagogical braintrust, not at Teachers College, but the one at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, made the determination that economics is the only...
Multiple issues in multiple measures
In his July 30 statement at the National Press Club, House Education and Labor Committee Chair George Miller said that his plans for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act included the addition of multiple measures, an incantation that has provoked more Sturmunddrang in national education politics than if Rep. Miller had stood at the podium and revealed he was a Visitor from space. While Congress is in recess this month, the politics of reauthorization continue. I'll parse the debate over multiple measures or multiple sources of evidence, and then I'll foolishly predict NCLB politics over...
Interesting Discussion of Oakes's and Rogers's Book
I don't have time to post this week. But for those who are interested in community organizing and education there have been some new and I think informative posts and discussion about my review of Jeannie Oakes's and John Rogers's Learning Power. We're still talking! Go here and scroll down to the last few pos...
Community Organizing and Urban Education XIV: Parables of the River
[To read the entire series, go here. A one-page version of the entire series is here.]I have been working on introductions to learning modules for a community organizing course I will be teaching online in the Fall. One of the things I wanted to include was what some community organizers call the “Parable of the River” (or sometimes a waterfall) that is often attributed to Saul Alinsky. I was searching across the Internet to find a good representation of the parable and found a wide range of different versions. (To avoid writing introductions, I seem to have ended up writing this post . . ....
Civil Rights groups call for NCLB changes
this is crossposted from dailykosNo Child Left Behind, the title for which was stolen from the motto "Leave No Child Behind" of the Children's Defense Fund, has as a primary purpose to ensure that minority children and special education recipients receive full attention and opportunity to succeed - this is one reason the law requires the disaggregation of test scores by groups including race, Hispanic identity, and special education education classification. Thus when a common statement is issued by most of the important civil rights and disability organizations, it behooves to pay attention...
NCLB, "New Democrats," and the Information Age
[Re-posted from Mark Kleiman, with permission]I'm on a listserv embracing a bunch of real journalists and a bunch of bloggers, academics, activists, and think-tankers, representing a pretty good spread of Blue opinion. (Please, don't tell Mickey Kaus; you might hurt his feelings.)Two threads on that list come together in a way I haven't seen commented on before.One thread is about the extent to which the Information Age dictates basic changes in social policy. Crudely speaking, those who are politically centrist tend to think that the Information Age changes a lot, and that the thinking behind...
Community Organizing and Urban Education XIII: Public vs. Private
[To read the entire series, go here. A one-page version of the entire series is here.] Note: Much of this is elaborated from pp. 96-99 of Commonwealth by Harry Boyte. Innumerable books have discussed different ways to conceptualize differences and similarities between “private” and “public” realms, mapping these across history, different cultural groups, and different conceptual frameworks. Here, I discuss the model developed in the context of community organizing. According to one of Saul Alinsky’s lieutenants, Ed Chambers, one of Alinsky’s many shortsighted attitudes was about the private...
"Rethinking Educational Accountability" recording
An audio recording of the "Rethinking Educational Accountability" panel at YearlyKos is now available online. This session featured a discussion with Nebraska Education Commissioner Doug Christensen, Maryland teacher Ken Bernstein, and me (Sherman Dorn). The recording is 47 minutes long. You can listen with the online player or download the mp3 (which I think is 44 M...
Epistemological Redlining: The Price of Doing the Education Business
How much is a history or journalism course worth compared to, let's say, a business or engineering course? Or a math education course compared to an ed foundations course (I know, they are both worthless). Wonder what will happen to poor and minority enrollment numbers in high-premium knowledge areas as we double the tuition charged for those courses? I don't know the answers either, but it looks like we are about to find out before the discussion can begin.A couple of clips from the NY Times story earlier this week:. . . .Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major...
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