Check out the weeklong NCLB debate between Richard Rothstein and Russlynn Ali at the LA Times:Day 1 | Day 2!--...
The Militarization of Chicago Schools and Beyond
Posted, too, at Schools Matter.George Schmidt has been writing in his brave tabloid, Substance, for some time about the growing influence of the military in the public schools of Chicago. Now the mainstream media is starting to notice, and with Congress lifting the cap on such programs, the urban military school offers an unprecedented opportunity for Washington to develop a steady stream of trained recruitment targets for continuing war plans and other follies of empire.These new military schools are mostly black and brown, and poor, you understand. Who...
Online Community Organizing Course: Publicly Available (Community Organizing and Urban Education)
This semester I have been teaching an online course: “Organizing for Social Action in Urban Communities.” I have posted the draft lectures for the entire course here, under a Creative Commons license, so that readers are free to use them they wish. As I note in the “Overview”: The course is NOT intended to teach students how to be a community organizer. They don't learn how to work with the media, or run a house meeting, nor other practical skills like that. Instead the course is designed to help students learn how to THINK like an organizer.The actual lectures represent a first draft...
Eduwonkette blog theme of the week: Fordham and Ogbu
In the last few weeks, Eduwonkette has been writing her blog entries in themes. Last week was "Test Score Spin Doctors," focused on the distortions of NYC's Board of Education. This week is Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu's "Acting White" Hypothesis. Because Ogbu's arguments about culture and education, and the 1987 article Fordham and he cowrote, are provocative and the most interesting academic equivalents of the culture argument on the achievement gap, I strongly encourage folks in social foundations to read these blog entries. I'll probably add some commentary towards the end of the week here....
Ed Links (Between Disciplines)
From Bookforum.com: School Links From The Economist, from broken windows to broken schools, bringing accountability and competition to New York City's struggling schools, imperfect though it is, New York's attempt to improve its schools deserves applause, while elsewhere in America, school reform is slower and messier, but the pressure for change is coming from parents, which bodes well. Research suggests early academic skills, not behavior, best predict school success. Where students can't hug: Draconian bans on public displays of affection in a growing number of schools have parents and students...
Book Review of McLaren and Jaramillo...
Here's another review of the new book by Peter McLaren and my new colleague Nathalia Jaramillo. I particularly like the cover art. As I recall, it is a self portrait several times over of the artist.HT to Peter for the link...
Ed Links (Broadly Interpreted)
Do schools kill creativity? Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. With ample anecdotes and witty asides, Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize -- much less cultivate -- the talents of many brilliant people. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. The universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online. A typical review: "If you have not yet seen Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, please stop whatever you're doing...
A Model of Student Engagement
(Cross-posted at Technopaideia)I have been reading* a book recently in preparation of a book review for the Journal of Philosophy of Education. The book, by my good friend David Granger, is John Dewey, Robert Pirsig, and the Art of Living. While some of the book gets mired in somewhat arcane issues of interest primarily to scholars, it is an exceptionally well-written book, with some keen insights into the nature of nature, the arts, and education that might have broader appeal.I've been paying particular attention to what the book has to say about the dispositions or attitudes of students who...
GAPS
In response to Dr. Horn's post...Reducing the “achievement gap” to what goes on inside of schools has proven to be an effective way for policy makers to ignore all of the other “gaps” outside of America’s classrooms.While researcher after researcher has shown that outside influences contribute to student performance and achievement, proponents of high-stakes, standardized reforms continue to press for more “rigor,” as if harder work alone will mitigate every outside factor influencing children’s lives.Rather than focusing exclusively on the “achievement gap,” policy makers and educational reformers...
Faculty Scholar Productivity
For those interested in keeping up with the Jones, or at least wanting to know what they are doing, along comes another ranking system. This one, interesting enough, measures faculty scholar productivity.Developed by Academic Analytics, it purportedly measures faculty productivity. As stated on their website:The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index™ (FSP Index) is a method for evaluatingdoctoral programs at Research Universities (across all Carnegie researchclassifications), based on a set of statistical algorithms developed by LawrenceMartin, Ph.D. and Anthony Olejniczak, Ph.D.. The FSP Index...
Work Hard, Be Nice, and Other Lies My KIPP Teacher Told Me
For white philanthropists, the major appeal of the KIPP charter chain gang schools is the non-stop behavioral control system aimed at producing compliant worker bees who learn to internalize any real or potential shortcomings as evidence of individual weakness or failure. If things don't work out, then, as the KIPP brainwashers promise, then who is to blame? This is not a new pedagogical approach--it was used successfully at Hampton Institute in the late 19th Century to train a generation of black teachers like Booker T. Washington, who would become complicit...
New Worries About Prejudice…And Old Worries About Poor Understanding of Race
This is in response to a front-page Sunday NY Times article which I found maddeningly imprecise. The journalist confuses the notion of race so many times through the different perspectives that the average reader can only continue to assume that there is such a thing as a fixed and genetic race.Let me, just because I can’t stand imprecision about this, make a few points. While I am not a geneticist or a physical anthropologist, there are enough fallacies to sink this article. At the heart of the confusion is that she uses two different notions of race seemingly interchangeably, when only one of...
More Ed Links: Suffering Children: The Effects of Trauma on Learning, or, Another Reason to Question the Field of Education’s Narrow Focus on Pedagogy
Note: the point is not that traumatized children can't learn. But the effects of trauma create yet another barrier and challenge (on top of other basics like HUNGER) that too many inner-city children, in particular, have to overcome.How can we expect teachers to respond to the deep needs of these suffering children in overcrowded classrooms? How can we hope to solve the "education" problem if we don't address the effects of trauma? What is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)? “An anxiety disorder associated with serious traumatic events and characterized by such symptoms as survivor guilt,...
Ed Links
The Science Education Myth Forget the conventional wisdom. U.S. schools are turning out more capable science and engineering grads than the job market can support. [AS: Like I said, education doesn’t create jobs.] An Ounce of Prevention A social program that works. Where's the funding? Gangland USA Map of gangs across America. Policy brief links education to public safetyAccording to the Institute, the states that invest more in education have lower rates of violent crime and incarceration. Other briefs deal with the intersection of policy with housing, employment, and drug treatment with...
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