An incredibly important speech on education by Diane Ravitch

That is a brief clip of Diane Ravitch addressing the Representative Assembly of the National Education Association on July 6, where she was receiving an award as the 2010 "Friend of Education."

Please keep reading.

The complete text of Diane's speech can be read here. She has given me permission to quote as much as I deem appropriate, including the whole speech if necessary.

I won't do that. You can follow the link to read the entire text if so inclined.

Let me offer some selections to at least whet your appetite, as well as offer a bit of commentary of my own.

... in all of this time, aside from the right-wing think tanks, I haven’t seen met a single teacher who likes what’s happening? I haven’t met a single teacher who thinks that No Child Left Behind has been a success. I haven’t met a single teacher who thinks that Race to the Top is a good idea.

I remind readers that the Representative Assembly passed a resolution of no confidence in Race to the Top.

And as I talk to teachers, by the end of my talk, I hear the same questions again and again: What can we do? How can we stop the attacks on teachers and on the teaching profession? Why is the media demonizing unions? Why does the media constantly criticize public schools? And why does it lionize charter schools? Why is Arne Duncan campaigning with Newt Gingrich? Why has the Obama Administration built its education agenda on the punitive failed strategies of No Child Left Behind?

Newt Gingrich - now there's a great ally for a supposedly progressive administration, eh? And during the campaign, Obama railed against NCLB, yet too much of the administration policy continues to rely on the failed policies of that approach.

I will continue to speak out against high-stakes testing. It undermines education. High-stakes testing promotes cheating, gaming the system, teaching to bad tests, narrowing the curriculum. High-stakes testing means less time for the arts, less time for history or geography or civics or foreign languages or science.

We see schools across America dropping physical education. We see them dropping music. We see them dropping their arts programs, their science programs, all in pursuit of higher test scores. This is not good education.

I have been told by some people in the Obama Administration that the way to stop the narrowing of the curriculum is to test everything. In fact, the chancellor in Washington, D.C., the other day announced she plans to do exactly that. That means less time for instruction, more time for testing, and a worse education for everyone.

Some of us have worried about this trend for years - I remember a group of elementary school art teachers asking their state for a test on art so their classes would not be eliminated. As it happens, my course is one in which there is a test that has high stakes - students in theory must not only pass a government course but also a state test in government in order to graduate from high school (although the latter requirement has some loopholes). Let me say that for too many students their course in government gets reduced, especially in the Spring as the test approaches, to drill and kill, practice for the test. For a subject that should excite them, because it has direct affect on their lives, they get bored and frustrated.

In speaking out, I have consistently warned about the riskiness of school choice. Its benefits are vastly overstated. It undercuts public education by enabling charter schools to skim the best students in poor communities. As our society pursues these policies, we will develop a bifurcated system, one for the haves, another for the have-nots, and politicians have the nerve to boast about such an outcome.

Public schools, as I said before, are a cornerstone of our democratic society. If we chip away at support for them, we erode communal responsibility for a vital public institution.

Bifurcated - even worse than what we have by geography, where wealthy communities have excellent public schools rich in resources and the students have access to all kinds of elective courses, and poor communities, whether in inner cities, inner rings of suburbs or the hinterlands, lacking equipment, with decaying buildings, and overwhelmed with students arriving st school with less background and current problems.

democratic society - if we really believe in it, economics would not be the sole basis on which we make arguments about our schools.

Last year, a major evaluation showed that one out of every six charters will get better results, five out of six charters will get no different results or worse results than the regular public schools. A report released just a couple of weeks ago by Mathematica Policy Research once again shows charter middle schools do not get better results than regular public middle schools.

Unfortunately, the general media coverage of the Mathematica report was badly flawed, focused on the schools that did 'better' while not including any of the caveats about even these schools. Charters COULD be used to offer alternative ways of teaching/learning to specific groups of students. Diane's next two paragraphs are very important:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, on whose board I served for seven years, has tested charter schools since 2003. In 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2009, charter schools were compared to regular public schools and have never shown an advantage over regular public schools. Charter schools, contrary to Bill Gates, are not more innovative than regular public schools. The business model and methods of charter schools is this — longer school days, longer hours, longer weeks, and about 95 percent of charter schools are non-union.

Teachers are hired and fired at will. Teachers work 50, 60, 70 hours a week. They are expected to burn out after two or three years when they can be replaced. No pension worries, no high salaries. This is not a template for American education.

NAEP is the national report card on education. It is considered the gold standard of educational evaluation. It does not show that charters do better. One reason why some "reformers" like charters is that in many states they are a way around unions, and their teachers can be fired at will.


Let me skip down a bit:

And perhaps we should begin demanding that school districts be held accountable for providing the resources that schools need. Just like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top requires and pressures districts to close low-performing schools. The overwhelming majority of low-performing schools enroll students in poverty and students who don’t speak English and students who are homeless and transient. Very often, these schools have heroic staffs who are working with society’s neediest children. These teachers deserve praise, not pink slips. Closing schools weakens communities. It’s not a good idea to weaken communities. No school was ever improved by closing it.

Reread that please. Yes, you will read stories that supposedly focus on "high-performing" schools dealing with such students. In some cases the claims for high performance are based on selective use of data. In most cases the schools on which such focus is made get more resources (as do many charters), have longer days, etc. The "success" is claimed on the basis of test scores. What is not yet offered is any evidence that there are long-term gains in learning: that the students are developing skills and knowledge that they can apply outside of the test environment. Meanwhile we reconstitute schools. We use one of the four models approved by this administration, even though NONE has any research to demonstrate that they improve education.

There are passages about the right to unionize, which Diane supports, but which "reformers" oppose. Read this paragraph, and perhaps you will understand two things, (1) why teachers are reacting so positively towards Diane; and (2) why we feel unfairly besieged, that the playing field is tilted:

I have spoken out repeatedly to defend the right of teachers to join unions for their protection and the protection of the teaching profession. Teachers have a right to a collective voice in the political process. It’s the American way. I don’t see the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or the pundits complaining about the charter school lobby. I don’t see them complaining about the investment bankers lobby, or any other group that speaks on behalf of its members. Only teachers’ unions are demonized these days.

Teachers, and those who support them, ARE being demonized. By constrast, Hedge Fund managers (who are making major investments in things like charter schools for tax benefits) and Wall Street Firms (who came close to destroying the economy of this nation and the international community) get bailed out with our tax dollars, continue to pay bonuses, and spend millions to prevent appropriate oversight and regulation. Then they want to have a voice telling us how we should teach, how our schools should be run.

There is so much of value in the speech. By now I hope I have at least convinced you to take the time to read the entire thing.

Let me offer only a few more snippets, skipping over some very important material:

Around the world, those nations that are successful recognize that the best way to improve school is to improve the education profession. We need expert teachers, not a steady influx of novices.

One argument against Teach for America, for example. Now if those in that program actually stayed in teaching, people like Ravitch and me would have far fewer objections. The constant turnover in the schools in which they serve is unfair to those kids. The program benefits many in the TFA corps, and it certainly benefits TFA. It is not clear that the students are getting all that much benefit, and the model is not something that can really address the needs of the millions of students in inner city and rural schools.

The current so-called reform movement is pushing bad ideas. No high-performing nation in the world is privatizing its schools, closing its schools, and inflicting high-stakes testing on every subject on its children. The current reform movement wants to end tenure and seniority, to weaken the teaching profession, to silence teachers’ unions, to privatize large sectors of public education. Don’t let it happen.

The consequences of letting these "reforms" go forward unchallenged will be great damages far beyond the arena of public education. It will be further destruction of what is left of the union movement in this country. It will be increased privatization of what is left of the commons in this country/ It will be a narrowing of opportunity for too many of our young people. It will diminish us as a people as our young people receive narrower and narrower educations.

Diane urges those listening to her to be politically active, to remind people that there are millions of teachers, we vote, and so do our families, to not support anyone who is an opponent of public education.

Stand up to the attacks on public education. Don’t give them half a loaf, because they will be back the next day for another slice, and the day after that for another slice.

Don’t compromise. Stand up for teachers. Stand up public education, and say “No mas, no mas." Thank you.

Diane Ravitch received a rousing ovation for this speech. As a teacher, as a UNIONIZED teacher in a public school, I understand why.

I thought it important that as many people as possible encounter HER words, not just cursory news accounts. I think it important that voices that speak for teachers and for public schools be given as much of an audience as those who have described themselves as 'reformers' and seek to suppress or denigrate any opposing point of view.

That is why I asked Diane, a friend, if I could quote extensively. That is why Diane told me "You are free to cite or quote whatever you wish."

Thanks for reading.

Please pass on the link for her speech.

Peace.

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Democracy is a learning theory.

This is cross-posted from my own blog, Technopaideia, because it seems relevant to Education Policy Blog as well. -Craig

If you ask most Americans about the meaning of democracy, you will likely hear the response: “Democracy is when everyone gets a vote.” You might also hear about representative government, “one man, one vote,” or something about elections of executive, legislative, or judicial authorities. The American public thinks that democracy is the political system that the American revolutionaries fought England for—replacing its monarchy with our constitutional “democracy,” and why the United States has been the “leader of the free” world since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. A more sophisticated American will tell you, following Abraham Lincoln, that democracy is government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” suggesting that there is more to democracy than a particular mode of conducting elections.

Etymologically, “democracy” in ancient Greek meant rule by the “demos,” or "people," implying the possibility of participation in “rule” by “regular people,” rather than by the elite, as in an aristocracy or oligarchy. It strongly implies that no particular social class (at least not free white men above a particular age who own property) has any greater right to participation than any other. If we acknowledge that “participation” means more than just voting for elected officials—activities such as actual service in community organizations and political campaigns, on school boards, and in public discussions through newspapers, talk radio, blogs, and other media—you begin to get a sense that democracy doesn’t refer simply to a form of government or a political system but to a type of society.

A democratic society is a society in which each person has an equal opportunity to reach his or her potential. The great American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) explored this deeper meaning in much of his work, most notably Democracy and Education (1916). According to Dewey, democracy is “more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (Democracy and Education, 1916; MW 9:93). For Dewey, who believed that experience is, in a sense, everything, to communicate experience “conjointly,” or through mutual and dynamic participation by all, was to share in experience and thereby to share in growth, or an individual and society progression towards personal and social fulfillment, or the good life.

Democracy, then, is shared progression by all people—all people, not just free white men over a certain age with property—towards the good life, both as individuals and as a society. This progression happens because of conjoint communicated experience. To put it differently, society progresses through communication, which is—in essence—educative:

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience....The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated. To formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another would see it, considering what points of contact it has with the life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can appreciate its meaning. Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience. All communication is like art. It may be fairly said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power. (Democracy and Education, 1916; MW 9:8-9)

The implication of this line of thinking is that democracy is not only a form of government, or a mode of social living, but essentially a broad conception of education as the movement of individuals and societies forward, towards….well, towards something better. Dewey believes that the ultimate ends of such movement cannot be determined in advance—that goods, like other objects of experience, are continually reconstructed in the light of ever-changing experience. Since each new experience carries with it the possibility of new insights, knowledge, skills, or attitudes, each new experience contains within it the possibility of new conceptions of goods, new capacities for attainment, and new conceptions of how best to support such attainment by a greater number of persons within the society. Thus, experience for Dewey is inherently progressive…and an education that conduces to progressive experience is inherently democratic.

(By the way, this suggests a new way of looking at the particular role of democracy in the United States. Dewey writes: “An American democracy can serve the world only as it demonstrates in the conduct of its own life the efficacy of plural, partial, and experimental methods in securing and maintaining an ever-increasing release of the powers of human nature, in service of a freedom which is cooperative and a cooperation which is voluntary” Freedom and Culture, 1939; LW 13: 187.)

Further inquiry into the forms of education that are most conducive to “an ever-increasing release of the powers of human nature in service of … freedom” reveals that education can no longer be a simple matter of transmitting the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the older generation to the younger. Democratic education cannot be static—it cannot serve to limit the young or bind them unnecessarily to traditional ways of seeing and doing. Of course, it also cannot be completely disconnected from tradition…for tradition represents, in some form, the accumulated experience and wisdom of the society. So democratic education must both open access to stored knowledge and wisdom and—at the same time—develop the capacity among the young for critique of that tradition through inquiry, experimentation, and imagination of new ideals and the means for securing them.

It turns out that democratic education is considerably more difficult than a form of education that seeks primarily to induct the young into the ways of the old. Dewey spent considerable efforts during his career to try to outline the principles and methods of democratic education, and remained frustrated that many readers of his works seemed unable to escape the tired dualism of an education that is primarily grounded in tradition and one which is primarily aiming to free the myriad possibilities of each child. The best education, Dewey argued, would take account of both the curriculum—taken from the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of intellectual and social tradition—and the child, with his or her creativity, fresh perspective, and lively imagination.

It is important to understand how Dewey’s concept of democracy connects with this nuanced and hard-to-achieve conception of education. Education cannot be considered apart from the conditions of associated living in the society, and such conditions cannot be considered separate from education. Life rooted in “conjoint communicated experience” is inherently educative; young people in a democracy inevitably grow to become participants in shared activities and shared governance; and schools—as institutions explicitly designed to further education—must necessarily be continuously redesigned to serve—and reflect—democracy.

This isn’t the time or place to inquire further into what schools that serve and reflect democracy look like—nor shall I get drawn too far into the criticisms this particular perspective offers educational policies such as No Child Left Behind (for such analysis, see the Education Policy Blog which I participate in separately from Technopaideia). Rather, this summary of the relationship between democracy and education is designed to provide some background for understanding a sentence I heard at the recent American Educational Research Association annual meeting in New York City (March 24-28). The occasion was a symposium sponsored by the John Dewey Society (JDS) called “Cloistered Scholars and Community-School Engagement.” JDS president Jim Garrison put the panel together to further his notion—shared by others including the JDS Commission on Social Issues, on which I serve—that if scholars paying attention to Dewey’s works wish to do more than talk amongst themselves about arcane issues in the history of philosophy, but wish to further Dewey’s democratic vision in the real world, then they need to find ways to engage publicly in their local schools and communities.

Speaking on the panel were several scholars with impressive credentials not only in scholarship but in public service. Each put their comments in the context of ways in which university scholars can engage in activities which support democratic schools and societies. Mary John O’Hair, associate provost at the University of Oklahoma, described the K-20 project, which aims to link the university closely with schools throughout the state to foster higher quality curriculum and instruction. Derrick P. Alridge, history professor at the University of Georgia, talked about some little-known activities of African-American philosopher and activist W.E.B. Dubois involving the formation of a “People’s College” at Clark University in Atlanta in the 1940s. Carl D. Glickman, professor of educational leadership at the University of Georgia, talked about his career working in various projects related to school improvement, emphasizing the role that generalists can play in bringing together experts from diverse disciplines to work on complex problems often not effectively addressed through the kinds of universal policy prescriptions that emerge from state and federal legislatures or departments of education. Glickman was the one who said, almost in passing, that “Democracy is a learning theory,” which has become the title of this post and on which I will have more to say in a moment.

Perhaps the most interesting speaker on the panel, for me, was Ira Harkavy, who is co-author of a book (wth John L. Puckett and Lee Benson) entitled Dewey's Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform. According to that book, Dewey’s dream of participatory democracy cannot be realized without the full and conscious participation of schools from preschool to university level, with a special need for universities—which both train the teachers at other levels and set the expectations and content for the curriculum at all levels—to take the lead. This vision, of energizing and transforming schools through the active participation of universities, was one that Dewey took from the first president of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, after Dewey arrived in Chicago in 1894. Dewey took Harper’s idea and gave it a philosophical depth, and also connected it to Jane Addams' idea of schools as community centers. However, when Dewey left Chicago in 1905 and joined the faculty of Columbia University, he abandoned this vision, and turned away from using schools to foster democracy. Harkavy believes that this was a major mistake, and not only contributed to Dewey’s slide into irrelevance in terms of American educational practice, but also to the deterioration of American democracy as well.

Harkavy issued a call to arms for all American scholars to focus at least some of their efforts on promoting democracy in American society. His call is a compelling one. According to Harkavy, the problem of fostering participatory democracy in the United States and in the world at large is the “most singularly urgent” problem of our times, and is related to war and peace, terrorism, violence, and poverty, among other issues. It is also one of the most difficult to solve. Since it is so difficult to solve, working towards a solution will inevitably require new ways of thinking and working that will require new approaches to academic disciplines such as political science, sociology, psychology, public health, and education. And, as most academics know, the most difficult problems to solve are also likely to be the most rewarding to solve: not only in terms of solving a big problem but in terms of the collateral learning that results.

Indeed, according to Harakvy and Dewey, working to solve real and urgent problems is also the best way to learn about the world at large. This is one of the major ideas behind the expansion of the service learning approach to education, and is also at the root of problem-based and inquiry-based learning.

Harkavy described some of the efforts of the University of Pennsylvania to foster participatory democracy by helping the local community schools build curriculum focused on local community problems. By focusing on local problems instead of a seemingly irrelevant or generic curriculum, schools encourage students to become knowledge creators and problem solvers rather than passive recipients of knowledge and, what’s more, they become truly schools of the community, providing both the means and the motivation for parents and other members of the local community to become involved in the schools. Universities, Harkavy said, are the one institution most positioned to support these efforts in schools, since universities tend to endure through changing political times and despite funding variations, and universities have the expertise to help solve problems of all sorts. And, since universities have students—and students learn best by working to solve problems—universities have a natural workforce for helping local schools.

The biggest challenge both for schools and for universities is finding ways to connect the core academic mission of these institutions to the local problems. More effort needs to be devoted to this task. It doesn’t do merely to have students at all levels talk about local problems. Academic expertise, disciplinary skills, and scholarly dispositions must be fostered and leveraged through the changed curriculum. But through engagement in the processes of participatory democracy, students become immersed in participatory learning. In this way, democracy itself becomes an approach to learning.

Carl Glickman had one very specific suggestion for how university instructors can become more democratic in the way they teach, and foster more and better democratic participation. After three classes in each course he teaches, he takes time out to ask the students to discuss among themselves how the course is helping them, and what he, as the instructor, can do to make the course more relevant to their needs and concerns. Most students are surprised that an instructor is taking time to listen to what they feel they need, but it definitely helps his courses improve. The idea, according to Glickman, is to become better at listening to those whose lives are different from our own. By doing so, we move beyond seeing people in terms of single categories and come to see that each person’s perspective is unique, and complex, and that there are many different ways to come to terms with one’s own experience….but that coming to understand the experiences of others helps broaden our own understanding and helps us to learn from each other. Through paying closer attention to fostering better communication with the people around us, we can better participate in their lives, and in the solutions of their problems, thus strengthening local democratic practice at the same time. The main idea is that learning is a matter of making connections between various ideas, and that such connections are more likely with heightened communication among different perspectives, and that as such learning occurs, democracy is strengthened at the same time.

In this way, Glickman tells us, democracy is a learning theory. Learning theories are “attempts to describe how people learn, thereby helping us understand the inherently complex process of learning.” According to this theory, learning is inherently social, participatory, based on the communication of different perspectives, and active. Understood in this way, learning and democracy are simply two sides of the same coin, both leading towards, as I wrote above, the good life.

To the extent that universities can overcome their traditional isolation from daily life…and their traditional “ivory tower” mentality towards their local communities and the concerns of local people…they may find their own missions as centers of learning to be re-energized, and, at the same time, do some good for their own students, faculty, and staff, and for the world at large.

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New Report on "Democracy at Risk"

Today the Forum for Education and Democracy released an important new report on the 25th anniversary of the release of "A Nation at Risk." Entitled "Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Role in Education," the report--written by Linda Darling-Hammond, George Wood, Beth Glenn, Carl Glickman, Wendy D. Puriefoy, Sharon Robinson, Judith Browne-Dianis, John Goodlad, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Deborah Meier, Larry Myatt, Pedro Noguera, Nancy Sizer, Ted Sizer, and Angela Valenzuela--argues strenuously for a new approach to education at the Federal level.

The authors write:

"We do not provide equal access to a high-quality education to every child in this nation. And even though we have made strides in this direction, we have miles to go before this task is complete. There is a pressing need to redesign our schools to meet the demands of a global 21st century society in which knowledge and technology are changing at a breath-taking pace, and new forms of education are essential for individual and societal survival. Yet, our current policy strategies are constraining rather than enabling the educational innovation our school system needs. Indeed, the path we are pursuing promises to leave our schools, as well as our children, behind."

While the report notes that some innovations have been fostered "on the margins," such as the New Technology High School in Sacramento, California, the overall approach has been to maintain "a compliance-andcontrol regulatory approach that holds the bulk of the system in place, trapping most schools within the constraints of a factory model designed a century ago for another purpose."

The report specifically attacks the No Child Left Behind approach that uses "compliance checklists" instead of true reform initiatives. "Rather than providing access to new programs, technologies, and supports that could dramatically change schools and communities, the law has been managed in ways that push schools back to out-of-date notions of learning and stifle the use of new technologies."

[One example of the ways that NCLB stifles the use of new technologies is the ways in which it forces many schools--particularly those with high numbers of poor and minority children--to focus the curriculum exclusively on "drill" in so-called "basic skills," rather than the type of higher-order thinking tasks and inquiry-based problem solving that new technologies foster.]

The report cites statistics showing that reading improvement under NCLB has been slower than before the law was enacted, that high school graduation rates have started to decline again, that pverty rates among children in the US are the highest in the industrialized world, that the US ranking on international tests has plummeted, that "trust" and "community involvement" among people in the US is in rapid decline, and that increased expenditures on the prison system have far out-paced increases in spending on education.

The report draws a link between the poor quality of education in the US and the poor quality of democracy:

"The challenge is clear: Improving education and improving democracy go hand in hand. We need to build upon the natural curiosity of children to help them make sense of the world. We need to arm them with the knowledge and skills, as well as the resourcefulness and inventiveness, that will be required to invent solutions to tomorrow’s problems. We need to give them the tools to live their lives respectfully and collaboratively with others, building communities that can tackle the challenges that lie ahead. We must think of education as more than a collection of standardized tests if we are to reverse the decline of democracy and create a stronger fabric for “We, the people” among the next generation of citizens."

The report lays out four major priorities that a new Federal policy on education should include:

Federal Priority #1: Pay Off the Educational Debt

• Link federal education support to state progress toward opportunity to learn
• Meet the federal obligation for funding programs for students with special needs
• Invest in high-quality pre-school and health care that enable students to come to school ready to learn.

Federal Priority #2: Develop a World-Class Cadre of Skilled Educators

• Create incentives for recruiting teachers to high-need fields and locations.
• Strengthen teachers’ preparation by focusing on how to teach diverse
• learners, evaluating teacher performance, and creating professional development schools.
• Launch teaching residency programs in high-need communities.
• Support mentoring for all beginning teachers.
• Create sustained, practice-based, collegial learning opportunities for teachers.
• Develop teaching careers that reward, develop, and share expertise.
• Mount a major initiative to prepare and support expert school leaders.

Federal Priority #3: Support Educational Research, Development, and Innovation

• Document and disseminate promising practices.
• Invest in the development of higher quality standards and assessments for genuine accountability.
• Develop data bases, shared measures, and tools to advance educational practice.

Federal Priority #4:Engaging Local Communities

• Foster family engagement in school life and school improvement.
• Provide for genuine community involvement in school improvement processes.
• Place schools at the center of community education.

You can obtain a copy of the full report here.

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FEBRUARY DISCUSSION FORUM: Empowerment and the Failure of Progressive Education

[Note: this summarizes and extends on an argument made in this forthcoming article and in a book I am currently revising. Related discussions can be found at educationaction.org]

Perhaps to most, probably to many, the conclusions which have been stated as to the conditions upon which depends the emergence of the Public from its eclipse will seem close to the denial of realizing the idea of a democratic public.

--John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems

Fights for decent housing, economic security, health programs, and for many of these other social issues for which liberals profess their sympathy and support, are to the liberals simply intellectual affinities. . . . [I]t is not their children who are sick; it is not they who are working with the specter of unemployment hanging over their heads.

--Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

The field of education is often a decade or more behind intellectual developments in other fields. It is perhaps for this reason that the full impact of revisionist histories of progressivism (e.g., Fink, McGerr, Rauchway, Sinyai, Southern, Stromquist) has yet to emerge in our writings. It is important to understand, however, that the cumulative impact of this new work represents a fundamental challenge to the proponents of progressive democratic education. What these books show is the extent to which the progressives were trapped within the horizon of their own privileged experience. Collectively, with more or less sophistication, they developed a vision of a democratic society that expressed the utopian hopes of middle-class professional work-sites, families, intellectual dialogues, and social gatherings. Few had any significant experience with the less privileged. And even those who did, like Jane Addams, held tight to a vision of a democratic society where everyone would be able to collaborate intelligently and caringly with each other, where stark facts of unequal POWER would cease to rule.

From the perspective of turn-of-the 20^th Century progressives, those with less privilege and education appeared much like children, to be taken care of until they grew into full citizenship by internalizing the advanced practices of democratic engagement that grounded the dreams of privileged reformers (so did the upper class, but they had less influence there). On this point, thinkers as divergent as Walter Lippmann and John Dewey were essentially in agreement, even if Dewey had much more hope and respect for the less educated. Everyone had much to learn, but the ignorance and practical limitations of the lower classes in terms of their capacity for true democratic participation was a if not the crucial impediment to true democracy.

The progressives did accomplish much that was significant for the impoverished in America. But the key word is FOR. It is difficult to point to any significant accomplishments in actually empowering people who looked and spoke and acted differently than them.

Progressive educators today are the inheritors of the progressivism of yesterday. The focus of progressive education research is on making our classrooms places for holistic learning and collaborative engagement. And these are quite wonderful goals. But they have little or nothing to do with empowerment. The fact is that skills for collaborating with equals are only useful when one is working with equals.

(The progressive dream of our society as a room full of people from different places and experiences that all learn to work together and benefit from their unique capacities is increasingly proving to be just that: a dream. To his own chagrin, Robert Putnam of “Bowling Alone” fame found that relational “social capital” is built most effectively in places where people are similar, not where they are different—he sat on this data for quite a while to see if he could figure out how to interpret it differently, and he couldn’t. Research on power inequalities in classrooms indicates that one achieves some equality of participation not when you treat the less powerful like unique individuals but instead when you “empower” them as representatives of particular groups.)

The heroes education scholars look to are people who think and act like we do. We have generally failed to be self-critical enough to ask why we find particular approaches to democracy and inequality compelling. We look to Dewey, but almost completely avoid what Gramsci would call the “organic intellectuals” of labor movement and the field of community organizing.

The Civil Rights Movement is a perfect example. The collaborative, non-hierarchical visions of Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the similar vision of Myles Horton and the Highlander School are often held up as shining examples of democratic empowerment. Almost always obscured is the fact that the leaders of these groups represented the educated elite, mostly from the North. Further ignored is the fact that SNCC fell apart when indigenous working-class members began to assert themselves and their distinct cultural model of empowerment. It is at least arguable that many of the most effective actions of the Movement in the South emerged more out of these indigenous practices than from Baker and Robert Moses’s SNCC or Horton’s Highlander (see Hill).

Of course SNCC and Highlander were critically important. And Dewey was no ignoramus. Instead the key point is that these progressive visions are most useful as supplements to practices of collective empowerment that have been developed in contexts of inequality. Ironically, there is no real way to understand the real usefulness of these progressive visions until we can honestly bring them together with working-class and other models of empowerment on some level of equality. Each side, I believe (and there are more than two sides, here) has the potential to inform the other. But we can’t do this if we know little or nothing about the alternatives to progressivism that progressivism might inform.

Empowerment for those on the bottom is a collective and not an individual accomplishment. The problem is not a lack of knowledge. Even the most profound critical examination of oppressive social forces is not of much use if you don’t know what to do about what you have learned. (In fact, knowledge of this kind, by itself, is often quite disempowering.)

There is a paradox, here, of course. On the one hand we need to be more respectful to indigenous practices and ways of seeing. We need to seek out and value “organic intellectuals” who reflect the best and most effective practices of these communities. On the other hand, there is much too little happening to contest oppression and inequality in America. There are, in fact, skills that people in oppressed contexts need to learn if they are even going to begin to resist.

The problem with progressives was not that they wanted to teach people who needed to learn. The problem was that they tried to make “others” into mini-versions of themselves.

In the end, I think one useful criteria would be: what is the minimum that people need to learn for them to become empowered? What is the smallest intervention in someone else’s culture that we can make that will actually be effective? I am not under the illusion that these are easy questions to answer.

We know this, at least:

Many of our children grow up in cages; lie in bathtubs at night in fear of stray bullets; curl themselves into fetal balls from the gut-wrenching terror of post traumatic stress disorder; steel themselves from the pain of rotting teeth, wake coughing at night from treatable asthma; and tolerate school as long as they can with the full knowledge that it won’t do much for them just as it didn’t for their parents and neighbors.

These kids are not hopeless victims. They are often quite sophisticated in their analyses of their own conditions. But in most cases they also don’t really know what to do to change the futures they can see so clearly ahead of them.

So, a call to action:

1) Middle-class, professional education scholars should take some time to consider the possibility that we find progressive visions of education compelling because of who we culturally are as much as because of some inherent relevance in these theories and practices themselves. (Note: I include most scholars from working-class backgrounds in this broad call—success in any cultural milieu requires people to take on the characteristics valued there. Counter-intuitively, it may in fact be true that resisting middle-class ways of thinking is easier, in a pragmatic sense, for those of us who are the most thoroughly initiated into this culture in the first place. No one will ever accuse people like myself of not being able to play the academic game.)

2) Every once in a while, all of us should reflect on the fact that, regardless of how pissed off we are that we didn’t get much of a raise this year, we are some of the most privileged people ever to walk on this planet. In what ways does this privilege affect our work on a daily basis?

3) We should acknowledge that schools are usually places where less privileged parents feel unsafe and judged. Schools are not likely places for scholars, teachers, and working-class people to meet on any level of equality.

4) Education scholars whose work is not relevant to student and community empowerment should stop for a moment and justify to themselves why they have chosen the topics and focus they have. (You don’t need to justify this to someone else, just to yourself). Repeat as necessary.

5) Courses on the history and philosophy and sociology of education, at the least, should include works from the world of community and union organizing that reflect visions of education linked directly to collective empowerment from the perspective of impoverished and working-class people.

6) Graduate students should be encouraged to look beyond traditional visions of “learning” and “democratic education” to explore practices of empowerment focused on collective action. Ask them: “Who will this help and how?” “Maybe this will help kids do math better, but will that fact really help them much in their lives?” “Is education about ‘learning’ or about life success? And if it isn’t about life success, then why bother?” (Of course, it is possible to use mathematics education in empowering ways (see Moses). Again, in the end they need to justify it to themselves, not to established scholars, although established scholars may need to choose who they have the time to work with).

7) Scholars at top universities should explore innovative ways to find people who may not have great GRE scores but may have the experience and inner fortitude to produce unique and powerful work that can shift the field.

8) We should ditch the term “social justice.” Social justice is a goal, not a practice. You don’t teach social justice, you teach practices that will help you achieve social justice. Focusing on social justice often allows scholars to spin wonderful utopian visions of a beautiful world without thinking concretely about how it will be achieved.

9) The field of education as a whole should support a range of creative efforts that explore how more effective practices of student empowerment might be initiated in traditional public schools given the severe limitations such efforts will inevitably face. These efforts might include ways of concealing the teaching of practices of leadership and collective action within efforts that at least seem non-threatening to the powerful.

10) Scholars working in alternative education settings that can allow more radical efforts should explore ways for engaging students more directly in social action projects in ways that might educate them about how to resist power and oppression. (The fact is, students should be required in every school to master practices of community empowerment just as they are required to master mathematics).

11) Schools of education should find a way to integrate efforts to foster community empowerment into their offerings. Most important would be the development of new or adapted programs that ensure long-term student enrollment in these areas. Only when there is student enrollment that requires the hiring of professors with expertise in community organizing and engagement can we hope to escape the limitations of “faddism,” especially given the increasing economic pressures faced by most universities. This would require a fundamental rethinking of the “charge” of schools of education. It would involve a willingness to embrace challenges of “education” that emerge in the community and not just in schools. And it would necessarily include the acknowledgement that significant and durable school reform is unlikely to happen in impoverished areas unless these communities are empowered to demand, supervise, evaluate, and maintain these innovations.

12) Scholars interested in these issues in schools of education should join together with scholars in other fields with similar interests to form collaborative teams to share knowledge and develop multidisciplinary projects. (Other key areas would include: social work, public health, sociology, urban studies, communications, etc. I’m currently part of a team developing a Ph.D. in Public Health at my university, and the group has agreed—so far—to focus on knowledge of community empowerment as a key goal.)

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The Costs of Democratic Participation (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

[To read the entire series, go here.]

If we persist in our inquiry as to what is meant by a people’s program, raising a series of questions—“Who thought up the program?” “Where did it come from?” “Who worked in its creation?” and other similar queries—we rapidly discover that too often the program is not the people’s program at all but the product of one person, five persons, a church, a labor union, a business group, a social agency, or a political club—in short, a program can be traced to one or two persons but not to the people themselves. The phrase “people’s program” has become well worn with lip service, but whether such a program actually exists in practice is something else again.

--Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, p. 53 (1946)

There is a tendency among education scholars to genuflect before the idea of “democracy.” If we are going to participate in community or school change, the “progressive” position generally supports the idea that projects must emerge from “the people” as Alinsky argues here. And, in a general sense, it is difficult to challenge this desire. Of course it is important for those who are affected by a program to participate in its development.

But it is also important to understand that “participation” is not a costless activity. Furthermore, in complex areas where one needs extensive technical knowledge to make decisions about better or worse projects, effective decisionmaking by the “people” is inseparable from extensive educational activities. And then come difficult questions about how one is to ascertain what the “people” want or even who the “people” are. For example, as I have noted before, the organization I work with, MOVE, is made up of mostly middle-class church members. Figuring out what they want is not the same as figuring out what those who are most needy in our communities want.

I’m beginning to think that different levels of participation may be required for different kinds of interventions. With respect to some broad social service issues, it seems to me that it may be less important for the “people” to participate in deciding about which projects to pursue. For example, is it necessary to have long discussions about exactly what kind of dental service program we need for kids in school or about what kind of class size reduction plan we need, as long as we get one? Of course, it would be better to have these discussions. But lacking resources, doesn't it make sense to just “do it” when opportunities present themselves for fighting for new programs as opposed to stopping and engaging in long drawn-out community education and engagement efforts?

In general, it is usually less important to people exactly how new services are provided as long as they are provided. Kids need dental care and smaller class sizes. And parents don’t necessarily care whether we start with dental care or small class size--even if neither of these would be at the absolute top of their initial list if we did a survey of their desires for change.

For example, we have begun a process of developing an approach to providing dental care to students in the Milwaukee Public Schools. In focus groups, another organization found that many parents would rather take their kids to a private practitioner rather than have them treated in school. And this is fine. But we have almost one hundred thousand kids in MPS. 64% of them have significant tooth decay problems and less than 25% have even seen a dentist recently. The fact that some parents won’t want to use the service (or might use it even if they would prefer something else) won’t change what seems the undisputed fact that it would reach an enormous number of children who are not now served. I haven't heard anyone who actually opposes offering such services.

The fact is that this is the project that the most involved members of our organization think we can feasibly fight for—even if it isn’t the “perfect” program for everyone. The fact is that no one seems to know how to substantially increase private dental access directly for poor parents with state insurance. In part because there doesn’t seem to be any coherent alternative to a school-based plan, other groups have failed to put forward a comprehensive plan for student treatment at all (although they have recommended a patchwork of disparate changes that would be difficult to fight for as a collective). To some extent (from my distant and limited understanding) these other groups seem to have been paralyzed to one extent or another by a particular vision of democratic collaboration between institutions and local people.

It seems crucial to make sure that all programs include avenues for public participation so that they can be influenced by those they serve. But you can’t influence a program that doesn’t exist. You can’t fight for changes in service provision that doesn’t exist. It may be that the capability for local participation on an issue like this comes after the service is created and not before.

Other issues seem likely to require more extensive education and dialogue. For example, we are thinking about joining the fight of a couple of local school board members to reinstate arts programs and/or other extracurricular activities in MPS schools. An effort like this, which would involve shifting $$ from one area of the school budget to another (instead of providing new $$ like the dental plan would, above) seem problematic to pursue without extensive and broad input. There is deep disagreement out there about what schools should “do” or “be.” Should they limit their focus to the three Rs exclusively, or do they have a responsibility to provide more broad-based experiences to students? And do extracurricular activities really matter on an academic level? Are they simply add-ons that are fun, or do they, for example, keep students in school that might otherwise drop out? To me, it seems problematic for a few leaders to decide what the general population of their organization believes without engaging with them in some way.

There may be three different kinds of issues, here.

1. There may be issues like dental care or class size that don’t require as much intense democratic engagement or education. Anybody on the street can see why they are important and they don’t need to learn much to understand what needs to be done in a general sense.
   
2. Then there may be issues that require education and some democratic dialogue, but that revolve around issues that people generally will support unproblematically. People need to understand the complexities of these issues in order to participate effectively in the fight, but don’t need to have extended discussion about whether this particular fight is worthy.
3. And then there may be issues that require both education and more extensive democratic dialogue, like whether an organization should join an effort to bring extracurricular activities back given a limited pool of $ to do everything a school needs to do. They need to have discussions about whether this campaign is worth getting into in the first place. And they need to understand the structure of the budget—the specific details of where the funding will come from and the implications of this act for other programs—both to have the dialogue in the first place and to effectively fight for the change if they decide to pursue it.

To complicate this even more, as I noted above, it may be that democratic participation for different issues becomes important at different stages of a project. In some cases this may even happen after a particular campaign has been won so that there exist real opportunities to work on influencing a service that has not existed before.

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