NCTE Convention notes

So, I've gone to the annual National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention this year. Worse still, I'm presenting. Jason knows this because his reflections on teaching plot helped inform some of my reflective activities for the presentation. tl;dr, a friend of mine and I submitted the proposal last year and then spent time this fall actually figuring out what we'll be doing in the presentation. The official title is "Talking their way to success: How to Establish an Environment, Introduce Tools, and Facilitate Practices to Support Deeper Student Talk." I do not like this title. Yes, that is exactly how it appears in the convention schedule, odd capitalizations and all. It was effectively designed by committee and it shows. But that's neither here nor there.

What I'm really interested in for this conference is actually less about what I do and more about what I learn while I'm here. There's a fairly activist stance implied in a lot of the sessions. The theme of the conference is Raising Student Voice. The headline speakers and numerous talks, presentations, and forums revolve around topics of self expression, advocacy, identity, and explicit politicization of education. I very much want to hear these arguments and think broadly about how they play out in schools. That many of the people presenting come from school systems in the South and Midwest also interests me because teaching in "red" states has a distinctly different flavor.

I've looked through my notes and here are a few of my thoughts on the sessions I've attended:

Session A - Teachers as First Responders: 911! Students Need Their Voices Heard 

I was worried this session would be super depressing and, in some ways it was. When I saw "first responders" in the title, I wondered if the session would focus on school shootings and how teachers can better be prepared to deal with a shooting shoulder happen in their school. Because that's the world we've made. (If you want to be upset about how we respond to shootings, read this article about a school safety convention in Florida and the hucksters who are looking to make a buck off taxpayer dollars.)

Thankfully, that was not the point of the session. Instead, teachers from the North Star of Texas Writing Project Their website is undergoing renovation so be aware that it's tough to find recent information. This is a common issue with teachers seeking to be resources for other teachers. There's only so much time in the day and after school often means continuing to work on other aspects of your teaching - these writers run PD and writing camps for kids several times a year so I'd imagine hosting a website is low on a list of priorities. There's something to be learned here about what it takes for teachers to truly be a solid resource for each other and co-develop ways of education without relying on less-than-helpful universities, non-profits, and foundations. One of the presenters mentioned she keeps a blog so I will leave a link right here.

Anyway, (can you tell I've not slept!) these teachers wanted attendees to think on the idea of teachers as first responders. What do first responders do that is similar to the work educators do? From audience responses, I recoded a few answers. Teachers and first responders respond to many kinds of crisis. Teachers and first responders allay the fear of not knowing what to do in a crisis - this came with a personal story of being rescued during Hurricane Harvey, which flooded Houston. Teachers and first responders have specific skills for specific kinds of crises. Teachers and first responders make sacrifices of time, money, emotional capacity, family involvement, and safety to help during a crisis. Listening to the responses really drove home the power of this metaphor.

As the panel discussed how they came to this conclusion, we were told other stories. One teacher had knowledge that a student was being beaten by his father. Their family were undocumented. If she reported the abuse, the family and child would all be deported, likely together. She knew this because it had already happened twice to students at her school when well meaning teachers complied with laws meant to protect children. Another teacher confronted the fallout of sexual abuse in a student's life as the student body gradually came to know about it and responded in ways both virtuous and vicious. They had been sharing stories like this with each other for months when they came to the conclusion that self-care was now a necessary component of their PD. Beyond teaching teachers about writing, they needed teachers to be able to care for themselves so that they could care for their students in crisis. You put the oxygen mask on yourself first. First responders do not always respond during active and dangerous events but only once the situation is safe enough that they can do their work effectively. After all, first responders would not benefit anyone if they also needed rescuing.

The focus of the second half of the session turned to writing. The skillset which supports writing also supports working through difficult and personal issues. It supports sharing and seeking help. It supports teachers' ability to know their students deeply so they can give help. It also supports the teachers' own self reliance and growth. Crises can be deeply generative and a source of creativity so long as an environment exists to support that kind of expression. When they teach PD now, these teachers often look at the social and emotional support systems for both teachers and students before they ever think about instruction and methods.

In the end, the session wasn't asking for a particular practice or action so much as the realization that teachers face tremendous difficulties because of the nature of their work. Nationwide, teachers are moving closer and closer into the role of social worker and therapist and first responder despite the fact that none of the responsibilities are considered in frameworks of accountability and achievement. It's up to teachers to be aware of their changing roles in society and to take care of themselves so they can take care of others. Not a bad way to begin a conference.

Session B - Sharing Student Stories through the Arts 

Originally, I was not going to attend this session but I caught one of the presenter's name: Michelle Zoss! My old professor from my teacher training MAT at Georgia State University was leading a series of roundtables which sought connections between the arts and work in language and literacy. The general theme was that incorporating "the arts" enhances learning because content is more multimodal, engaging, and it creates space for inquiry and conversation. I attended a pair of roundtables.

The first was about writing songs. There are obvious connections between music and poetry which probably every ELA teacher can grasp. The point was more about how to make the class more musical by using melodies and beats throughout the writing process. The presenter played the same chords over and over with only slight variation while we discussed the mood of the piece which might accompany it. We each wrote some lyrics which we tried to fit into the melody and then workshopped the each other's writing a bit to develop a single song. The final product was rough but I could see how the work laid out the process of writing in a different way. If I made that process explicit for some students, I might really stick with them. The presentation closed out with some possibilities for incorporating music if you can't play an instrument. He recommended garage band which is free on any apple phones or iPads and can act as a variety of musical instruments. Depending on the age group, students might play an instrument. One teacher recommended asking the school's music teacher to either come by for those lessons or record a few minutes of play for use in the lesson.

Second, I joined Dr. Zoss's table for crafting mosaics. Now, I'd done this about 8-9 years earlier with her in one of our classes but it's interesting how it meant a lot more now. At the time, I felt like it was a bit gimmicky and served little purpose. Now, and perhaps because I am attuned to questions of student talk, I found myself interested in the conversation as much as in the artwork itself. Zoss was asking a combination of simple personal questions about the conference attendees and deeper questions about the meaning of teaching, our ethical responsibilities to our students, and how we might make classrooms spaces where low-stakes activity can occur. As I ripped up a sheet of orange paper, I realized that the mosaic itself was really a vehicle for talk and that talk became a way for the teacher to confer with her students, a way for the students to co-construct knowledge (I learned about the geometric foundations of Moroccan murals, how ASL's use of movement makes using stationary images of sign language problematic, and why teachers felt there was still hope for the future). If the mosaic was connected to a classroom activity, Zoss argued we should just sit in the mess with our kids and participate ourselves. Chat away and guide the conversation but don't keep it too locked on a single activity. Often times kids make connections by straying off into another domain before returning to the task at hand. And sometimes kids just need to tear up some paper - that's okay too.

After the session I had a chance to catch up. She did not remember me but I did no expect her to since I have not done anything to keep in touch with GSU since graduating and getting a job. I still have a lot of harsh feelings toward the program but recognize that a 1 year accelerated course aimed at getting recent college grads certified and into a classroom entails making tough choices. In part, I just had to go teach for a while before the lessons from GSU really sank in. Sometimes those weren't the lessons Dr. Zoss or others were actually trying to teach but were, instead, the hidden curriculum at work. However, I plan to send an email her way in a little while with some info about my life since she las saw me and see if I can't be a better networker. This was a good chance to start!

General Session - Chimmanda Ngozi Adichie (look her up, especially this TedTalk)

Chimamanda Negozi Adichie is kind of a big deal. I'm probably the wrong person to express that sentiment because I have not read any of her fiction and only an occasional piece of her nonfiction work. Leading up to the conference and throughout the first day, everyone was talking about her keynote address with anticipation and excitement. I would describe it as the sort of feeling you get when you go to a concert with someone who is a superfan while you yourself haven't really heard their music. It's just not going to mean the same thing to you as it does to everyone else. That said, her address was fantastic. I think I'm still unpacking the layers of wit and insight in her words. Indeed, I probably should read her fiction because, if she writes like she talks, I'm going to enjoy it very much.

Adichie began with her privileged upbringing in Nigeria. Her father was a statistics professor and her mother the first woman to work as the registrar at a university. As such, they pushed her to read and do well in school from an early age. She claims her father kept files on his children and that she recently snooped through her file to find a report card her kindergarten teacher had written about her. In the comments he'd written, "She is a brilliant child but refuses to do work when annoyed." Reflecting on this, Adichie said she initially felt surprised her teacher knew her so well. The speech turned toward other teachers she'd had, good and bad, who shaped her desire to write and be a writer. At each spot, she paused for a moment and mused on what each teacher knew about her and how they really saw her.

Moving back to the present day, Adichie argued against the prevailing notion of schools as teaching "STEM or" - she pronounced this quickly the first few times to make the audience wonder what this stemor thing was. She called out statistics about how learning the arts, and especially reading and writing, was a clear way to teach critical and complex thinking, communication, and conflict resolution. She also said it was the best way to fight against being misrepresented. Telling your own story, developing your own voice, meant nobody could tell you who you were.

She drove this point home with a few examples from her life of people refusing to be curious. A bookstore clerk assumed she wanted children's books for her daughter with black characters but seemed to think it odd that she'd also want white and brown and yellow ones too. An academic friend of a friend who said he doesn't read the kind of writing she writes - implying she writes about black things and woman things and he, as a while male, will have nothing to learn from it. None of these people were allowing themselves to face what Adichie called the "true purpose of books" which is to make you uncomfortable. We should seek out ideas and experiences other than our own because without that comparative knowledge, we can't legitimately evaluate the world around us. Without knowing things about others, we can't know ourselves. That, she argued, is what contributes to conceptions of identity as something only subordinated people have and something only oppressed people care about. White Americans, she pointed out, like to ignore that they are actively engaging in ideas of identity all the time and it is a disservice to them because they can't know themselves. This went beyond a philosophical self knowledge and into some very practical considerations like our politics, teaching, consumerism, and worship.

Closing on a high note, she returned to her teachers arguing that none of them were free from stereotypes or bigotry but that they'd pressed themselves hard to see her as an individual with her own needs and desires. Adichie feel like the best work teachers could do today is to build that knowledge of their students into everything they did. "Let your students know you see them," she ended. The audience rushed out of the hall, even though there were more speeches to hear, because the first 200 people in line would get an autographed copy of Adichie's latest book.

Elementary Session - Luis C Moll 

I'm not much for elementary, even with my experience last year working in elementary environments, it's just not a model of schooling that fits me well temperamentally. I went to this session for only one reason and that was to see Luis Moll. His work in Funds of Knowledge is in the DNA of the way teaching is being changed for the better. Culturally responsive practices, home-school connections, building and sustaining student identities, disciplinary literacy, and discourse theory all originated with Moll's work on Funds of Knowledge in the 80s and 90s. In short, a Fund of Knowledge is a family or community's knowledge about a specific task passed formally and informally from generation to generation and across families. His work traced examples of agriculture, automotive repair, engineering, construction, business management, and numerous other areas where immigrant and Native American families in the American Southwest held deep pools of knowledge which allowed for their success and survival in an environment which was, at best, indifferent to them. One strand of his work brought him into the classroom and called for building meaningful connections between students' families, their Funds of Knowledge, and school curriculum. Since that time, Funds of Knowledge work has been done in communities throughout the world.

Moll walked the session attendees through his way of viewing and identifying the funds of knowledge on display in several videos recoded during some of his research. His point to us was that we needed to know more about our students than their academic performance. This means teachers ought to know about the occupational history and recreational history of a family. What do children's parents do for work? For fun? Their grandparents? How is that knowledge passed down? What can we develop from knowing about their Funds of Knowledge that might make school more relevant, meaningful, and representative of students' cultures?

While there, I lucked out and won a copy of one of his books. When it came time to meet the guy, I totally chickened out and bailed without getting him to sign it. His work is so influential to my thinking about the practice and ethics of teaching that I got a bit starstruck. What can I say?

Session E - The Power and Efficacy of Reading: What Reading Can Do for Homeless and Socially Challenged Students

This session was led by a friend of mine from my literacy specialist cohort, Dulce-Marie Flecha. I'd seen a "draft" version of this presentation that Dulce had given in one of our classes; however, that was 10 minutes and at NCTE she had to fill an hour and a half. It was excellent. The major point of the activities was how universal the challenges of teaching homeless students and students in crisis really is. There are more than a million homeless students nationwide and, although they are clustered in five states, one of the major paths out of homelessness for children is placement foster homes nationwide. Dulce's role is at a transition center in NYC which accepts local homeless students and students from migrant populations which have been processed by ICE. They are potentially in her school school for only a few weeks at a time before being sent off to homes around the country. She listed off Texas, Oregon, Illinois, Mississippi, and said she's sent students to twenty states in the few years she's worked there. The point being, even if you're not teaching students who are currently homeless, there is a change that some of your kids are formerly homeless.

Here are a pair of slides she shared about strategies for teachers who work with "highly mobile" students. I apologize about the angle and the quality, it's the best I could do given the circumstances. 

  

 













 Afterward, Dulce and I caught up and went to Session F together.


 Session F - #DisruptText: Dismantling and Rebuilding (Reimagining?) the Literary Canon

It's difficult to capture the fervor of the both the room and the presenters in the #DisruptText session but everyone was quite excited and motivated. I hear you can use hashtags on Twitter to locate these people so feel free to give that a try. There are a number of links I will be including, as well, like this one to their website. Disrupttext.org. One way I felt this presentation had a lot of credibility is because the three presenters were current high school English teachers and taught with a justice orientation in vastly different schools. One taught in the "typical" inner city school in Denver. Another taught at a diverse charter school in Philadelphia (iirc), and the third teaches in an elite suburban public school in Texas. Despite different contexts, they had all found a way to incorporate diverse voices and critical pedagogy in their classrooms.

So, it's not a stretch to say that some English teachers have been trying to move away from the idea of a literary "canon" for many years. Reading old dead white guys is a sure-fire way to kill engagement, push your students to dis-identify with school, and basically encourage a pedagogy of exclusion. The presenters made this case well but, more importantly, they modeled some quick ways in which teaching in a CRP/CSP way is possible even when you're working within a fixed curriculum. 

I felt one of the most interesting points they made was simply paring a required text like The Tempest with other texts to create a conversation around issues of social justice. Adichie is known for her speech about the danger of a single story, so why not teach multiple stories which inform each other? Perhaps a text from the Caribbean which makes Caliban's status as a colonized native more apparent? Maybe look at historical documents or maps which show where ships in Shakespearean times were sailing so student could see that Prospero's island isn't just any imaginary place but a location informed by the real world. These recommendations create space for deeply critical (and cognitively demanding) analysis. Here is a Disrupt Shakespeare Twitter "moment" (these are held regularly and compiled on their website and are a great resource, also you can see Dulce-Marie is an active participant - respect!).








Another resource shared with us was a"living document" of Diverse, Multicultural (Biopic) Voices in American Literature. It's definitely worth a look given that there are also some methodological tabs in there. Yet another interesting resource was a list of types of curricular bias. I envision this a working in two ways: first as a sort of self evaluation tool; second as an inquiry tool for the kids. Why not incorporate this kind of thinking into the fabric of each unit? For example: Why are we reading about the Harlem Renaissance in February? Why is that the only example of black culture we address throughout the year? etc.

Finally several links for discovering new literature, most offer curated or user-curated lists which can be organized around decolonizing your curriculum:

Epic Reads


Riveted

OurStory

Overdrive - Rent Electronic Texts (eBooks, audiobooks, etc). A note about Overdrive: it is not free but many school districts, school libraries, and local libraries have access through a variety of subscription services. 

Session G - James and Carl's presentation

I don't have a lot to say about our presentation on supporting student talk. It went well and was attended by about 30 people, such that we ran out of copies and our participants had to share some of the materials - which was fine. The basic premise was to begin with a reflection on how talk was going in each of their classrooms, then move into two exemplar activities. First was an interactive read aloud from a picture book in which Carl modeled when and why to pause and pursue talk. Second was a group activity where the "students" read a paired text and discussed the text in groups with instruction to compare and contrast with the read aloud text. Carl and I circulated to the groups and basically coached in about different activities. I coached them in setting conversation goals based on a hierarchy of talk. Carl coached them in digging deeply into a particular theme or idea with conversation aids. This went long and we ran out of time for the final activity, which was a discussion about the talk hierarchy and giving them an If,Then chart based on the hierarchy with some prompts included which they could incorporate into their own lessons. Afterward several teachers staid behind and thanked us, so I will choose to believe the presentation was a success. Later we had some rye and hung out with a few of the people from TC. 

Self Reflection Checklist (not that great but if you don't do talk at all, maybe helpful).

If, Then chart (seemed like everybody liked this) 

Carter G Woodson and Black Thought in Modern Education

At the close of my recent post about Modern Educational Thinking, I lamented that Kleibard’s overview of curriculum and education in the early 20th century contained no examination of the theories or practices affecting people of color. So, I turn to Brown & Brown & Grant’s Black Intellectual Thought in Education.

Although there is much to consider in this time period, I’d like to focus briefly on the work of Carter G. Woodson. Woodson is often thought of as the “father of Black History” but situating him in the intellectual currents of the time helps give a clearer view of the uniqueness and innovations of Black thinkers in the early 20th century. In some ways the challenges facing Black people in Jim Crow America necessitated the generation of cultural and racial theories which seem at home in discourses around race and society today.

It’s important to recognize the expansiveness of the White Supremacist project of this era. Following reconstruction, it seems as if almost the entire nation engaged in an aggressive purposeful forgetting of the causes of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Textbooks, for example, promoted racist attitudes and race science to “settle” the issue of including Blacks in American society. There’s a great article in the Chronicle of High Education about how the academy worked to sustain white supremacy. I recommend it because it gives a good view of just how fucked up we really are. Also, these attitudes constructed the racist discourse currently active in our politics and society.

In short, white academics constructed racist justifications for suppressing Black citizens. This included appeals to “science” to prove that Black children were incapable of learning anything beyond what was required for manual labor, that Black people were inherently lazy and needed white supervision to accomplish anything, and that Black men were constantly lusting after white women. It’s an incomplete list but you get the picture. This is ground better covered elsewhere, as in the article linked above, or the exhaustive work of Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Yes, that one!)

So, what response did Black people have to such ideas, at an academic level? There were a few. One response was the call for Black intellectual leadership. W.E.B. duBois argued that there needed to be a class of talented, educated, and eventually wealthy Black individuals and families to lead the masses of Blacks still relegated to sharecropping and manual labor. Opposed to this view was Booker T. Washington who felt that approach was too limited and, possibly, created a class of leaders who had little in common with their people. Instead, he felt there should be broad programs to focus on education. He specifically felt that education should help laborers gain skills which could be used to better their local communities. If the average Black person had to rely on skilled white labor, they were forever subject to the capricious and racist attitudes pervading white society. So, the argument became over whether to develop the capacity for self sustaining communities from the top down or the bottom up.

The racist stereotypes and the preeminence of the Dunning school of thinking intruded on these debates and created a more urgent need to challenge racialist thinking. Flowing from the work of Alain LeRoy Locke, the argument for a “New Negro” emerged. This was a view not far from what we would probably call cosmopolitan today. Locke felt that people of all races, and whites especially, would benefit from more contact with people unlike themselves. He urged the increasing presence of Blacks in media, journalism, and the arts. Through this social and cultural interaction society at large would develop a “new psychology” of Blacks in America and around the world. This is only a portion of Locke's work so please do not construe this as the whole of his thought.

Woodson critiqued this idea as failing to undo the harm of these stereotypes. If, as Woodson felt, the white view was one in which Black people had no history beyond that of enslavement and barbarism, how does saying ‘look how far we’ve come’ negate that view? The “New Negro” in some sense legitimized the white racist stereotypes and, therefore, was unable to adequately combat them. Woodson felt that instead of showing the world how great Black people were now, or could be soon, that the world needed to know that Black people were always great. Woodson’s life work grew out of this idea. Informed, in part, by the lack of any attention to Black history while pursuing his doctorate (the first African American to earn a doctorate in history) Woodson began to document Black history in detail.

Beyond publishing academic articles, he started journals, weeklies, newspapers, and other publications meant for consumption by the general public. Woodson wrote dozens of textbooks for use in segregated schools, and instituted Black History Week as a way for any school to focus exclusively on and celebrate the history of Black people. This later turned into Black History Month. He was specifically critical of the idea of “mis-education”. He felt that neglecting to teach Black children about their history denied them a chance to build a sense of self, place, and purpose in the world. Curriculum which purported to be educative was, in fact, precisely the opposite and only served to push Black children out of school.

Woodson's view of history of Black History was to its totality. He would write one day of the ancient metallurgists in Ethiopia who smelted iron before any Greek or Latin culture had emerged and then turn the next day to discussing how white universities could not hope to train teachers of Black children because they had no sense of the immediate conditions of Black people in their communities or in the country. In some ways, I feel like Woodson outlined the idea of culturally responsive pedagogy decades before it entered the mainstream of educational thinking. He may be one of the earliest thinkers to recognize that classrooms weren't simply communicating cultural norms and values but were active participants in constructing those norms and values. Hence his critique that "the 'educated Negroes' have the attitude of contempt toward their on people" because "he went to be educated in a system which dismisses the Negro as a nonentity" (Woodson, 1933, p1.). Curriculum, he felt, was central to communicating and reproducing the ideology of white supremacy and, crucially, even approaches which were not outright racist contributed to white supremacy through omission. This was just as true in Black schools as in white ones. Woodson articulated the groundwork of the hidden curriculum and the null curriculum some 70 years before they were published by white men in largely still white institutions of higher learning.

To return to my first statement, I think it's a stunning encapsulation of Woodson's critique that Kliebard's historical overview of educational thinking neglects to mention even a single important Black educator, administrator, or intellectual of the era including Woodson himself. It is made even more gobsmackingly omissive by the fact that its first edition was published not in 1926 but in 1986. The third edition was published in 2004!

I'll leave you today with Anna Julia Cooper's 1892 A Voice from the South which begins,

IN the clash and clatter of our American Conflict, it has been said that the South remains Silent. Like the Sphinx she inspires vociferous disputation, but herself takes little part in the noisy controversy. One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black Woman,

                         An infant crying in the night,
                         An infant crying for the light;
                         And with no language--but a cry.

        The colored man's inheritance and apportionment is still the sombre crux, the perplexing cul de sac of the nation,--the dumb skeleton in the closet provoking ceaseless harangues, indeed, but little understood and seldom consulted.

On Modern Educational Thinking, Part 3

Let's start with a quick tl;dr of what I've covered in the last two posts about Modern Educational Thinking:

3 (of 4) competing influence on education in the period leading up to the 1950s.

1. Humanists - A "Classical Education" focused on the Roman, Greek, and Enlightenment traditions with a heavy focus on ancient languages, textuality, history, geometry, and logic. Flaws include: limited applicability to the daily needs of the masses, few teachers had the knowledge to teach it, it was difficult and students were expected to be in class for long hours which competed with their families need for them to work/labor at home
2. Developmentalists - The first of the "scientific" theories which emerged out of equal parts German psychology and social Darwinism. The major premise of developmentalists remains influential today: children should learn material appropriate for their social and intellectual capabilities. Flaws include: "science" was a very flexible term that often included "random thoughts of random white guys", initial attempts at gauging children's social and intellectual development followed social-epoch theory, tended to assume that certain classes of people would never develop as far because they weren't as evolved. 
3. Social Efficacy - Social institutions should reflect the broad needs of society and the nation, including schools. This led to the pairing of schools deciding they needed to teach kids the citizenship values of the nation with the idea that schools should reflect the labor conditions which they were preparing students for. There was a big focus on testing and measurement to eliminate inefficient uses of time and money. Flaws include: immigrants and poors were assumed to have bad values, the masses were destined for factory floors so schools should literally emulate factories, curriculum often scaled back to the basics and applied via highly regimented direct instruction.

Which brings us to today's focus, the fourth big influence on Modern Educational Thinking, the social meliorists. Broadly speaking, the social meliorists felt similarly to the social efficacy crowd that institutions should be used for the good of the community; however, they diverged greatly in what that would look like. Especially focused on schools, social meliorists felt that school could be used to directly improve the individual.

Much of the split between these two philosophies came from the practical split between factory labor focused education and farm labor focused education. Up through the 1940s, as much as 20% of the US population was engaged directly in farming and half of the US population was rural through the 1920s. Unlike the factory, where it was uncommon for laborers to live, the demands of farm life necessarily included "domestic" components. These were not cognitively simple tasks, either. Farmers had to track, breed, and/or slaughter livestock, understand the botany and ecology of their crops, and plan both agriculturally and financially for future growing seasons. The early stages of social meliorism emerged out of the feeling that schools should aid their farmer-students in developing the skills to be self sufficient.

It's not hard to see how these ideologies were incompatible. On one hand, there was a move to radically simplify and atomize each step in a chain of labor. Each factory worker only needed to know his (and it was his) job and not the jobs of other workers. On the other hand, every farmer needed to know everything about the labor of farming, the management of a farm, and daily living on a farm.

I want to add some of my own analysis here, too. The social meliorists seem to me to be very closely aligned with the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. It's often assumed that progressive education came much later but I feel there is a deeper connection here. Although the texts I'm pulling from don't make this connection explicitly, the progressive movement was also born out of the economic situation of America's farmers. A lot of hay is made of the need for labor reforms and challenging the phenomenally corrupt state and federal government of the time but the origins came from a popular movement among farmers to challenge the power of the railroads. Farmers relied on the railroads to transport their goods to mills and markets around the nation which made them very sensitive to changes in freight pricing. The railroads operated with effective monopolies over vast areas of farmland and the earliest moves toward "trust busting" were by organized farmers. One early example was a change made in New York to state road laws. Prior to 1898, roads were maintained by local landowners at their own expense, competing directly with railways for the transit of goods over even relatively short distances. Railways would buy up land adjacent to existing roadways and then "fail" to maintain the roads, thus encouraging the use of rail. In 1898, New York assumed the responsibility of roadway maintenance at the state level and levied a transport tax for funding which primarily fell on the railroads. This was done as direct relief to the farmers of New York. By about 1910, most states had followed suit and the first federal agency overseeing roadways was created, the American Association for Highway Improvement. I know it's not a school-specific example but America's large rural population made it influential throughout the early 20th century and it acted as the kickstart for the Progressive era. This has some clear connections to the goals of the social meliorists, as we are about to see.

So, one of the ways this idea of self-sufficiency through broad knowledge entered the curriculum was through "experience curriculum" or, simply put, learning by doing. Obviously this has some important applications to farming and Massachusetts passed the Smith-Hughes Act in 1913 to encourage agricultural vocational training in the state's rural schools. This became a model piece of legislation and saw support from the US Farm Bureau. This legislation funded schools that did something similar to what we call "project based learning" today. Students would learn about farming by doing farming. Later curriculum reforms would be influenced by this approach. One important work was Kilpatrick's The Project Method published in 1918. Kilpatrick took the farming projects and argued that all of education could be based on projects organized around a central theme. Unlike the scientific-efficiency curriculum, inquiry and interests were placed at the center of Kilpatrick's project method. Teachers were "glue" connecting and unifying the educational matter underlying students' interests. From what I'm reading, it seems like Kilpatrick tapped into a current within schools which wanted to resist the influence of the social efficiency crowd because this articulation of this method became a popular alternative to the factory model of schooling.

You might expect me to be quite positive about the social meliorists and their progressivism but it was not all good. Much like other Progressive Era political reforms, there was a moral element to the social meliorists which sought not just to instruct the individual and promote self-sufficiency but to civilize individuals; that is, they were seeking to teach the then-popular christian values of moderation, temperance, and comity, too. Much like the temperance movement was a protestant effort to reign in the perceived moral failures of catholic immigrants, progressive education also included elements aimed at teaching virtue. This was not all that different from the mission to teach democratic values seen in the efficiency classrooms and, in this area at least, they found some common ground. A project in a progressive school might have revolved around finding ways to behave during public assemblies, like church, and in this way also sought to establish specific cultural norms, albeit through individual discovery. Another example would be John Dewey's Democracy in Education where he combines developmentalist psychology and social meliorist methods to argue that education creates the ideal democratic citizen (a social efficiency conclusion). Dewey was weird. I don't want to talk about him.

Similarly, research by social meliorists resembled research under the other curriculum regimes. Experts in schools of psychology, philosophy, and education departments, along with those in various foundations and think-tanks still held control. It was rare that any teacher had influence over the curriculum which she (and it has almost always been she) taught. Even through the roaring twenties and the formal separation of many schools of education from psychology or philosophy departments, teachers remained somewhat undereducated. Although an increasing portion had completed university education, there were large variations in what kind of training that meant. Decisions about policy and curriculum were considered best left to the experts and developed in academic or laboratory settings. There's a great story I learned recently about the Lincoln School. It was formed by Teacher's College was meant to be a laboratory school showcasing the best ideas in project learning and, controversially, drew its student body from the working class immigrant families of Manhattan. During this school's existence, it was almost impossible to get a faculty member of Teacher's College to actually visit the school because they viewed it as a waste of their time. No faculty of Teacher's College conducted research at the Lincoln School before it was closed in 1946!

Through the teens and twenties, social efficiency and social meliorism competed for dominance among a variety of curricula but during the Great Depression social meliorism truly became ascendant. As thousands and thousands of factory workers lost their jobs and farmers watched their crops blow away in the Oklahoma dust, teachers and schools felt the pain of the depression too. In Chicago, teachers went unpaid for months on end. Nationwide there were cuts to education. The social efficiency movement, associated as it was with the factories and industrial systems falling apart around the world, lost its luster quickly. Progressive educators like George Counts began to argue that letting the industrialists and efficiency movement continue to influence education would inevitably perpetuate the existing social order. In a sense, social justice entered the education world and its doorway was social meliorism.

Counts and others built on Kilpatrick's project method and the self-sufficiency of the previous generation's progressive era schooling to call for a curriculum that developed a sense of the coherent and integrated self - an explicit rejection of the reduction of a student to the task they were set to accomplish. They also sought to improve upon the progressive ideals, arguing that there was no sense of social welfare among progressive educators, only the "anarchy of extreme individualism", according to Counts. In 1932, following a comparative study of the Soviet education system, Counts published Dare the School Build a New Social Order, calling for a complex nationwide overhaul of schools. Among his ideas was the recentering of curriculum on the social welfare needs of the learners and the inclusion of teachers in matters of curriculum as they had more useful local knowledge.

While many of these ideas clearly came from the political left, most progressive educators were not outright Marxists. I would categorize them along the lines of modern democratic socialists who preferred the government and its institutions reign in the excesses of industry. As fascism emerged in Europe and revealed one possible outcome of a cozy relationship between the state and industry, social meliorism gained even more steam as a seemingly anti-fascist approach to schooling. What emerged throughout the country was a kind of hybrid between the structure of social efficiency and the aims of the social meliorists. Bell schedules and age-cohorts remained, as did the efforts to promote a particular vision of American democracy, but the aims of the curriculum were shifting from being about basic preparations for work on an assembly line to preparation for the much broader "duties of life." Teaching higher mathematics, like algebra and geometry, were broadly added to high school mathematics, as were foreign languages, history, and a focus on positive social relationships  added to curricula across the country. The seminal Eight-Year Study seemed to confirm the efficacy of this approach and prompted more schools to shift to this version of progressive education. Colleges, however, did not follow the recommendations to relax admissions standards, especially after World War II and the glut of new applicants.

The advent World War II also saw the needs of the federal government have their first direct impact on the curriculum. Criticisms of American social structures became more muted and perceived as unpatriotic. At the same time, demand for the kinds of people who would win the war increased. Unlike the first World War where it was paramount to have the most soldiers, the government felt technological and material supremacy was more important than outright manpower. Funds were made available for advancing math and science, especially as related to aviation and navigation. History and social science refocused around understanding the war. Industrial education also returned as factories were retooled to build the arsenal of democracy and demand for laborers returned.

In the postwar period, it became increasingly clear that there was a new entrant to the US education system. Whereas up until then, it was largely accepted that the "experts" should decide the scope of curriculum, now many argued that the government should ultimately decide curriculum. The debate between the four influence at the beginning of the 20th century subsided and a new debate emerged: just how much of a role should the federal government have in education? Inroads made during the war were hard to give up and many of the programs were regarded as successful. In my mind, the end of this early era, the Modern origins of our current education system, ended with two major events that cemented the role of the federal government in education. First, of course, was the need to compete against global communism. The launch of Sputnik led directly to the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958, legislating for the first time the entrance of the federal government into education. Second was the Civil Rights movement. Brown v. BOE was in 1954 and ruled that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. What followed were policies of massive resistance in various pro-segregation states and communities which limited meaningful change until the 1960s. Activists increasingly turned to federal level reforms to supercede states, culminating in 1964's Civil Rights Act. In 1965 the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided federal funding for education and further cemented federal control.

Both of these movements dramatically altered the discourse about education in the US even though none of the tensions between humanism, developmentalists, social efficiency, and social meliorism were resolved. From that point onward, the power over curriculum rested in the hands of policymakers at the federal level. This is not to say those initial four ideologies of curriculum ever went away. The Civil Rights movement drew heavily on the arguments of the social meliorists. Social efficiency ideas found a home with the need to make US technology competitive with the Soviet Union and, later, with a globalized marketplace and the advent of the current testing regime. The science of child development remained an important area of study and continues to drive decisions about early childhood education and literacy. Only the humanists seem quiet today. It's only in certain private schools and classics departments where their version of curriculum remains but the idea that learning "the classics" is essential is still around. While the list of classics may be different, many educators still believe there is value in a canonical set of texts. One major holdover from humanists is the reliance on "close reading" of a text, often to the exclusion of the reader or social context.

There are about a million things which I haven't mentioned. It's not exactly fair to a pair of well-researched academic books to try and cram them into a trio of blog posts but I hope it's been interesting, if not informative. I feel a bit more organized in my thinking about education in that era which was kind of the point of all of this.

That said, there are some important omissions which I ought to point out. The Kliebard text, which is the foundation of my summaries, is a very important text in education. It is one of the only attempts to condense many of the major educational ideas of this period into a manageable and coherent text. I've seen it cited in all kinds of circumstances and it will even be getting a new 4th edition sometime in the next year or two. Yet, it leaves out a really really important set of educators and students from this era: black people! This was the time of debate between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington about the uses of education for African Americans. This era saw the advent of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Separate but equal was enshrined as law by Plessy v Ferguson in 1896 and created an entirely separate class of schools for blacks, especially in the South, which lasted the duration of the period covered by Kliebard. Yet these events barely merit a mention in a book meant to be comprehensive.

Equally omitted, although oddly present, are women. Throughout the text Kliebard makes sure to mention that most teachers are women. He even points out that the reason teachers have low status in the US is partly because it is thought of as "women's work" and has been historically deprofessionalized. But that's it. I had expected an analysis of women striving for educational change, looking for respect in their chosen profession, or really any indication that women were more than the passive recipients of patriarchal oppression in the education field. I found little. It makes no sense, either, because this was an era heavily influenced by Elizabeth Peabody and Margarethe Shurtz. I have to turn to the Lageman text about the the history of educational research to learn, for example, that Ella Flagg Young who conducted her dissertation research at the Chicago Lab School under John Dewey had significant influence on his famous Democracy in Education and was the superintendent of schools for the City of Chicago!

Let's hope that the 4th edition sees the inclusion of these clearly integral parts of modern educational thinking.

On Modern Educational Thinking, Part 2

Last month I wrote a bit about some of the early trends in modern educational thinking. The turn of the 20th century saw many of the ideas we still have about schooling coalesce and I offered a glimpse at two of the four major ideologies driving educational change in that era. The humanists pursued a classical education and argued the traditional methods, curriculum, and purpose of schooling were the best for the intellectual and spiritual growth of children. One of the first major challenges to this view came from the developmentalists who felt that what students learn should be related to their mental and social development. However, this came with the odd baggage of "social-epoch theory" and was often combined with social darwinist thinking. 

Today I'd like to look at the next of two trends to develop in that era. Since both were roughly concurrent, I will start with the one which I feel has the strongest connection to today's education reform movement, social efficacy education. Although the developmentalists called themselves scientific, that term would today most look like the social efficacy movement. Let's not forget that it was easy to call yourself a scientist and never really do much more than speculate wildly but with some internally consistent logic. Phrenology was a science and was probably just as valid as culture-epoch theory - that is to say, not valid at all. 

So, social efficacy education also emerged from Germany and also depended greatly on Prussian models of schooling. One key difference here is that social efficacy was focused very closely on efficiency. Although the term social efficacy originates in Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution, the foundation for this way of schooling owes a lot of credit to the writings of Edward Ross. Ross's 1901 Social Control made the case for large scale national organization of society and many of his ideas filtered down to educational sociologists and reformers like Snedden, Finney, Ellwood, and Peters (apparently not everyone has a wikipedia!). According to Ross, all of our social institutions, including schools, should be geared toward building a more moral and civilized society. That these morals and civilization were white, western, and protestant christian was not just beside the point - it was the point. Much like the Prussian system of schooling, America needed to create its citizens through the inculcation of moral rightness. He felt that schools had the opportunity to replace the flaws of parenting and see children educated by "picked persons" who would eliminate anti-social tendencies. 

The second half of social efficacy education is probably the one you're more familiar with - the "industrialization" of the school environment. Classes were broken into discrete subjects, students sat in rows, followed a "bell", and generally proceeded through a day in a way which resembled factory labor. These reforms were championed by Frederick Winslow Taylor who, like Ross, was not specifically interested in education so much as in reforming all of society. His Principles of Scientific Management became the definitive book on running any manufacturing in the US. Much like today, schools were under pressure to meet the needs of industry - most students were still not completing high school and just about all of them became some kind of manual laborer, many in factories. Scientific management required that each individual task be broken down into the simplest constituent tasks and managers would order and organize these tasks in ways to cut costs, increase speed, and improve quality. 

Taylor didn't just promote his theories of management as the correct way to run a business. He felt they would improve every facet of life. Indeed he actually argued in front of Congress that principles of scientific management would bring about an end to war and that employers would, by the very nature of his principles, uphold the Golden Rule (an especially interesting claim given that two years later the outbreak of WWI would see those same principles march millions to their death). Under scientific management we would see the "substitution of peace for war; the substitution of hearty brotherly cooperation for competition and strife; of both pulling hard in the same direction instead of pulling apart; of replacing suspicion with mutual confidence; of becoming friends instead of enemies" (p.30). 

It's not hard to see how Taylor's scientific management and Ross' push for unified moral social institutions came together in schools. When people argue today that schools have not changed in 100 years, they are talking about the schools which this movement created. They are orderly like a factory and they are meant to produce a specific kind of social output by teaching the values American society "ought" to have. Schools nationwide saw another important application of this approach - they could build curriculum around it and point to a real and positive outcome after students completed their schooling: employment. 

In Gary, Indiana, John Bobbit remade the school system according to rules adapted from thinkers like Ross and Taylor. The school was renamed a "plant" (as in a place where manufacturing takes place) and the superintendent of schools war retitled "educational engineer". Not to different from today's districts having CEOs and boards of directors! In his classrooms, students were broken into "platoons" (again with the militarism) and he systematized the movement of platoons through the school spaces (if you've been in an elementary school ever, they still do this). With regard to curriculum, Bobbit also applied scientific management. Human experience should be broken into separate fields, the job of each field should be ascertained and specific activities identified. Around those jobs and activities, educational engineers and their staff would create instructional objectives and then build out the curriculum in detail on a day-to-day basis. Interestingly, Bobbit liked measuring students in a variety of ways and grouping them according to ability in order to cut down on educational "waste". After all, women would mostly not be working in factories and had roles at home which required different courses (home ec. anyone?).

Obviously there's a lot more going on here than just these few men. One great example I've totally skipped is the Douglas Commission in 1905 in Massachusetts. Massachusetts was the first state to have compulsory education and, even today, is a leader in education. In short, the Douglas Commission argues that schools in Massachusetts had changed too little in the last 80 years (so, since 1825) and they were doing a poor job of preparing students for the demands of living in an industrialized society. Honestly, you could substitute industry and factories for technology and the internet and this report would read just as well today. All over the US, similar conclusions were being reached and they all fall under the same social efficacy umbrella. Namely, schools need to make two things: citizens and labor. Citizens needed to uphold what were seen as American values. Laborers needed both the basic skills and temperament to work on the factory floor. Schools, it seemed, were in the best position to do this work and many teachers, administrators, and lawmakers were happy to direct them to do it. They were even happier that there was an intense focus on efficiency and cutting waste as it was their responsibility to ensure the proper use of taxpayer funds. 

As I said when introducing social efficacy, so much of the movement has lasted down to modern day schooling. Whether it's the physical movement of students through the school day or the idea that schools are engaged in citizenship, we see the work of these reformers continue on. I especially want to note the intermingling of labor needs with curriculum. I think this idea about schooling is probably still the strongest driver of school reform and changes today. Many many people reduce the role of school to preparing students for the workforce and the recent recession followed by a slow recovery has amplified these voices. It's not an accident that schools are under significant pressure to prepare students of all ages for work in STEM fields because that's where the jobs are (you'll all be doctors who program sexting apps!). It's also no mistake that schools are trying to reorganize themselves to look like today's workplaces. If we look back a decade to the NCLB/RTtT era we also see a renewed attempt to apply standardization across all classrooms and curriculua, something which would have made Taylor and Bobbit proud. 

But what of research in this era? After all, my recent return to blogging was prompted by my thinking about educational research. Well, unlike the humanists who pretty much didn't do research of any kind, and the developmentalists whose research was something akin to child study, social efficacy researchers came in two flavors. First, the practical research which was done by districts and schools was largely meant to be immediately applied. This was data driven and sought to eliminate wasted time, space, or money and much of it came directly from factory-style management practices. Not a lot was devoted to pedagogy. 

Second was standardized testing. Edward Thorndike, an early developer of psychological testing also sought to push schools to implement more standardized testing across ages and schools. His tests, however, were more focused on student's intellectual abilities. Meanwhile, Leonard Ayres, who had just previously run schools in Puerto Rico (recently "acquired" from the Spanish) was hired by a think-tank, the Russel Sage Foundation, to do school surveys. These were early forms of standardized tests which evaluated students knowledge across a variety of topics from curricular subjects to their recognition of important places and objects. Famously, students in Boston failed to identify farm animals and produce leading to one of the first culturally relevant test revisions. By the 1910s schools around the nation were implementing standardized tests on a regular basis as a means to drive curriculum, evaluate teachers, and identify the "feeble-minded". I also want to add that much of this early research was still considered psychological, not educational. It wasn't until later that most schools of education gained some degree of independence (or actually became their own school). 

One particular type of standardized test gained prominence among the social efficacy crowd, the IQ test. While at Stanford, Lewis Terman building on the work of German psychologists (who else did we go to during this period?) developed the very first tests for measuring a person's intelligence quotient. Terman's tests were put to use evaluating draftees and recruits and group men according to their mental ability during the US build up to WWI to. Following the war, industry and schools adopted these tests to better sort and group laborers and students. By the 1920s, statistical analysis of schools based on a variety of tests and data was commonplace. Two major trends in education research were well established: research was primarily quantitative, and research was primarily clinical and empirical. These laid the groundwork for the growth of behaviorist studies, which, I think you can see, have an interesting relationship to the ever growing need for factory workers.

In my next post, I will look at the final of the four major influence on modern US education. Like social efficacy education, I feel that this fourth influence still has effects today. In part as a response to the powerful social efficacy movement, but also partly because of progressive era reform politics, the social meliorists sought to use schools to fix society's problems. 

On Modern Educational Thinking, Part 1

Last week I ruminated on the evolution of my thinking about educational research. In short, I had joined my thinking to a large number of educators, policymakers, and researchers who valued quantitative measures as the best way to make decisions about education. This is a view I developed while working as a special education teacher and because I had to develop ways to redesign my entire classroom around teaching literacy. I spent time looking at handbooks of research and methodologies developed, largely, by educational psychologists, language pathologists, and cognitive linguists. The approaches were clinical. The research was clinical too - in one case I was reviewing FMRI results showing how reading, writing, listening, and speaking reinforced neural pathways and, in some cases, built new ones. These handbooks and articles were fairly uniform in their literacy recommendations: students should receive direct instruction in the specifics of phonemes, phonics, and grammar. These handbooks and articles were fairly uniform in their philosophy of education: the best practices emerged from quantitative measures of student performance. These could be full on experiments (and many of the articles were high quality randomized double blinded trials on students in literacy clinics) or they could be more practical research situated in classrooms or schools.

I am not totally divorced from the legitimacy of this kind of research. In fact, I think it offers the best option for students who need literacy interventions because they are not acquiring the reading and writing skills they need as they progress through grade levels. However, I made far too much of a connection between these kinds of studies and the larger testing apparatus. In part, I was chasing test scores too. My students improved dramatically in their literacy over the course of a few months of receiving direct instruction and the final measure, the one that would validate my work in the classroom, was the annual ELA exam given by my state. Because I assumed that my teaching was scientifically supported, I felt the test (and all high stakes testing) had some degree of scientific validity. It was a bit of flawed inductive reasoning on my part and motivated by my desire to do some good.  It turns out that my thinking wasn't unique or even that new. Indeed, the pursuit of more "scientific" curriculum and more "measurement" of learning is as old as modern education.

In the late 1800s, as Western countries rapidly industrialized in the wake of the industrial revolution, education moved from the domain of the wealthy and the connected to the masses. This was the result of a variety of forces but the primary motivator was economic. Manufacturing demanded a large and competent labor force able to mange valuable machinery. Laborers sought higher wages and prosperity, often best achieved through working in factories or other industrial activities. These pressures combined with a social impetus toward a more representative politics throughout Europe and America meant that the classical education of earlier centered came under pressure. Up to that point, education was largely along the lines of what we would today call a "classical" education or a "humanist" education. Students would learn Greek and Latin and would study the mythology, philosophy, mathematics, and history of both those ancient cultures in the ancient languages. Even the youngest of students would master the languages before mastering the remainder.

As that century closed, this view of education came under pressure from a movement for more scientific education. The masses would not value from mastery of the classics and weren't well served by learning ancient languages in elementary school - the average level of attendance was low and mostly through the early grades. What good would Latin do a young boy working mechanized looms in a Manhattan factory? The emerging science of psychology sought to answer these new demands. Becoming ever more separate from philosophy as a discipline, psychologists urged for schools to adopt a scientific approach to curriculum. The Kliebard text form which I am pulling some of this history calls this branch of reformers developmentalists.

Championed by G. Stanley Hall, developmentalists believed that schools ought to teach students in accordance with their mental development. If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. A lot of our current education, especially literacy education, is driven by a focus on students progressing through a variety of stages (probably the biggest name in modern literacy development is Jeanne Chall). At that time, Hall and his contemporaries were heavily influenced by German pedagogical models which had their origins in pre-unification Prussia. Although less militaristic than the German versions, Hall brought back the "science" of child development and pushed for major education reforms based on those ideas.

I should probably mention at this point just how unscientific Hall's science was. The developmentalists followed a theory of development called "culture-epoch theory." You see, "science" taught them that the brain developed through stages just as human society had evolved. A young child was like a cave-man and should learn content similar to that which would be of interest to a cave man - put them outdoors, let them draw, learn sounds, or play at hunting. Then, as the child progressed through to the "ancient" epoch they could begin learning famous mythology and stories from the bible. Eventually the child's brain would reach the renaissance and then the modern era as they entered early adulthood. This strange view was initially the most dominant challenge to a classical education and much of early psychological science was built on testing students to determine their "culture-epoch" and deliver appropriate content. Much of it was driven, too, by social Darwinism which argued that many people (read brown people, women, some immigrants) would never reach the modern era and didn't need to be in school for very long.

There were two reasons this view was so popular. First, it was built on established "science" of the day and was widely respected. At this point, schools of education were not common and often existed as subsidiaries to psychology or philosophy departments. Those departments often set the agenda for research and recommendations about policy or curriculum. Second, the culture-epoch theory offered a model to organize schools for the masses. Children could be broken up largely by age and the content delivered and apportioned according to their mental and social evolution. In an era where there was little or no continuity from one school to the next or one state to the next, a uniform curriculum was something people recognized as a way to exert control - especially in states where universal compulsory education was enacted. This "legibility" was seen as a way to make schools accountable. If kids were progressing through the epochs, it was generally seen as an evidence of teachers and schools doing their jobs. Since the developmentalists relied heavily on testing, schools and their overseers were able to keep a close eye on performance.

This whole approach sounds decidedly current - with the exception of the weird culture-epoch thing. But, let me pose a question: As I noted last week, there is very strong evidence that our current testing regime is totally invalid and contributes to the marginalization of minorities, especially black men. Is our high-stakes testing regime any more valid than the developmentalist approach of the 1880s? For me, it seems like the answer is no. Both offered a solution to accountability and both led to significant abuses which resulted in a system supportive of white supremacy.

Thankfully, the humanists and developmentalists were not the only game in town during the construction of our modern education system. Another scientific approach to education was in the offing, social efficiency.. Sharing the developmentalist fondness for measurement, the social efficiency crowd sought to educate the masses specifically for employment. In my next post, I'll take a closer look at the ideas underpinning social efficiency and how they compare to our "new" focus on educating children for the workforce.

Minor edits for clarity because I don't proofread! -J

Reforming my thinking about Education and Research

I've been doing some reading recently in preparation for this fall's classes and figured I'd write a little about what I'd been thinking. Last year I had attempted to write about the research I'd come across. Throughout the summer courses, I kept pace with some of the interesting articles and concepts but once the core classes for the MA began in the fall, I found myself with little to write about. Now, that's not to say I didn't do a lot of writing but very little was about research - or at least what I thought of as research.

In the universe of education, as I have lamented before, there isn't a lot of quantitative research which trickles down into the classroom. Both this MA and my prior MAT focused heavily on "teacher research" and on research methods drawn from sociology and anthropology. When we do find quantitative research, it's often coming from economics and political science departments or, more often, policy oriented non-profits, NGOs, and foundations. My friends and many long time educators recognize the problems in taking quantitative research from outside education as a means for driving school, district, and state policy. That's more or less how we got NCLB, Common Core, and RTTT which have not been the panacea of reforms that were initially hoped for. That's not to say all all quantitative research is bad or even that quantitative research from outside schools of education is somehow always disconnected from the reality of schooling. Indeed, I can't think of a better example than economist and data scientist Raj Chetty's recent work with the Census Bureau's Maggie Jones and Sonya Porter.

In fact, as a fan of Chetty's work since his 2015 look at income mobility, I was struck by the granularity of the conclusions. More so than any other large dataset work I am aware of, Chetty, Jones, and Porter exposed the out and out racism of our society and, especially, our school system. Of particular interest are the results for black boys growing up in the US, but what stood out to me was something Chetty said repeatedly in several interviews. I'll excerpt a large section here from an interview he gave to Talk Poverty:

We really don’t think differences in ability explain the gaps that we’re documenting, and there are two simple reasons for that. The first is the pattern that I just described of downward mobility across generations. It’s really only there for black boys. Black women do just about as well as white women once you control for their parental income. And that suggests first of all, if you look at most prior theories of differences in cognitive ability, The Bell Curve book for example, it does not present evidence that you’d expect these differences to vary by gender. Furthermore, if you look at test score data, which is the basis for most prior theories about differences in ability, the fact that black kids when they’re in school tend to score lower on standardized tests than white kids, that actually is true for both black boys and for black girls to the same extent. In contrast when you look at earnings there are dramatic gender differences.
And so that suggests that these tests are actually not really capturing in a very accurate way differences in ability as they matter for long-term outcomes, which casts doubt on that whole body of evidence. So, based on that type of reasoning, we really think this is not about differences in ability. One final piece of evidence that echoes that is if you look at kids who move to different areas, areas where we see better outcomes for black kids, you see that they do much better themselves, which again demonstrates that environment seems to be important. This is not about immutable factors like differences in ability.

Let me emphasize a particular part again: "that suggests that these tests are actually not really capturing in a very accurate way differences in ability as they matter for long-term outcomes, which casts doubt on that whole body of evidence."

What Chetty's done here is confirm with data what people in education have been saying for decades. Teachers responded to the post-2001 testing regime (followed by Common Core standardized testing) by pointing out that tests are often racially biased and often fail to adequately capture students' real-world abilities. I've written before that schools have fallen under a bastardized view of constructivism which posits that access to the content standards is all that's required for a student to succeed. So, after almost two decades of reorganizing our system of schooling behind a testing regime, we have high quality empirical evidence that the whole thing is directly harmful to black males.

Why is this "reforming" my thinking, as the post's title suggests? It's because that conclusion was something that had already been reached. I figured it out during my teacher training. I saw that view confirmed in my teacher research in 2009 and again in my teacher research this year. (It's just a draft, be kind!) My friends in education and my own experiences as a teacher indicated the system was deeply flawed, racist, and classist. Systemic racism something that ethnographic researchers have been documenting in US education since the late 1800s. Why, then, was I so dismissive of qualitative research's findings and role in the classroom, in curriculum, and in educational policy? Why wait for someone like Chetty, who appears to be somewhat unique in the field, to publish findings pulled from large data sets? Moreover, if the vast majority of data used to make educational policy is pulled from the standardized tests which are deeply flawed, what good is the data?

After reviewing a few of my old posts, I came across something I'd written:

Education, in general, dislikes quantitative research. Maybe this is a response to NCLB/RTTT and the current incarnation of the reform movement? Standardized testing is widely misused by states and districts and is a tool used by politicians to break the political power of teachers unions. This has bred distrust of any quantitative measures. In turn, any data which relies on high-stakes testing is seen as illegitimate by many educators whether the use of that data is accurate/valid or not. There are elements of social justice here because testing is seen as a proxy for race, socioeconomic status, and other factors. Any quantitative measure is potentially racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise heavily biased. 

Well, it turns out that standardized testing is racist. Data which relies on high-stakes testing is illegitimate. The critics of testing that I was so quick to doubt were right, and I should have given them more credence. Even my attempts to be even handed and consider multiple sides of issues were still filtered through my perception that data = test scores or something numerical and data != observations, interviews, or analysis of work samples, etc. What Chetty's work and my own work this past year have helped me to see is that I need to take a wider view of the qualitative side of things. I'm actually quite proud of what I wrote as part of my case studies for the Master's Project even if it was "only qualitative".

I've learned some other interesting things recently about the history of education and education research. Stay tuned for further posts because I'd like to tackle a pair of books: Kliebard's The Struggle for the American Curriculum and Lageman's An Elusive Science. What I've come to realize from reading these books is that education never forgets. Once an idea enters the educational universe, it sticks around and reemerges over and over. This is true of the supposedly scientific approach championed by the "reformers" who implemented our modern standardized testing regime.