Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Let's Carnival!

The 143rd midway of The Carnival of Education (hosted this week by What It's Like on the Inside) has opened-up the midway for your trick-or-treating pleasure.Round-out your educational experience by checking out what the homies are up to over at the latest edition of The Carnival of Homeschooling.--------------------------See our latest entries.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The Week in Ed Science Links


Rush, Little Baby

How the push for infant academics may actually be a waste of time - or worse.



What works in education: the lessons according to McKinsey

Now, an organization from outside the teaching fold—McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says*, need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind.

Social Decision-Making: Insights from Game Theory and Neuroscience

By combining the models and tasks of Game Theory with modern psychological and neuroscientific methods, the neuroeconomic approach to the study of social decision-making has the potential to extend our knowledge of brain mechanisms involved in social decisions and to advance theoretical models of how we make decisions in a rich, interactive environment.

Lifted from Bookforum.com: The tickle monster needs to lie down now

From Vision, a review of Nurture the Nature: Understanding and Supporting Your Child’s Unique Core Personality by Michael Gurian; Right From Wrong: Instilling a Sense of Integrity in Your Child by Michael Riera and Joseph Di Prisco; Raising Kids with Character: Developing Trust and Personal Integrity in Children by Elizabeth Berger; and Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues That Teach Kids to Do the Right Thing by Michele Borba. The power of birth order: Parents insist that how kids turn out depends on when they were born, and more and more, science agrees. The tickle monster needs to lie down now: Why don't parents like to play with their kids? Snooze or Lose: Overstimulated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour’s less sleep than they need, a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years.

Adventures in the wheel of consciousness

Ekai Txapartegi (UC-Berkley): Functionalism and the Qualia Wars. Tan Kock Wah (Sarawak): Heterophenomenology Debunked. A review of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness by Daniel C. Dennett. A review of Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World by Christopher D. Frith. An interview with Tim Crane on how the mind relates to the body. A review of When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary Reality by Stanislav Grof. With consciousness, there is no agreement on anything, except it's very difficult. An article on the ethics of erasing a bad memory. A review of The Head Trip: Adventures on The Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren (and more).

Report: Are Private High Schools Better Academically Than Public High Schools?

This study, based on an analysis of the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988-2000, finds that, once family background characteristics are taken into account, low-income students attending public urban high schools generally performed as well academically as students attending private high schools. The study also found that students attending traditional public high schools were as likely to attend college as those attending private high schools. In addition, the report also finds that young adults who had attended any type of private high school were no more likely to enjoy job satisfaction or to be engaged in civic activities at age 26 than those who had attended traditional public high schools.

5 Myths About That Demon Crack

At the peak of the panic over crack cocaine in the mid-1980s, Congress passed a rash of laws requiring longer prison sentences. One such law created a 100-to-1 disparity between crack and cocaine offenses. You have to get caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine -- but only five grams of crack cocaine -- to get a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.

A Sleepless Brain is a Sensitive, Angry Brain

On a poor night's sleep, tiny problems often seem large, and large problems become utterly defeating. That, at least, is how it feels -- and now neuroscientists have imaged the pessimism as it happens.

Ten Principles of Feminist Economics: A Modestly Proposed Antidote

Since such lists represent what are widely proclaimed (by their authors) as universally accepted principles and therefore worthy of teaching to students, we might also wonder about the missing or other perspectives. Despite the inherent dangers of constructing a list that purports to cover the key economic ideas of any perspective, in this paper we yield to temptation and offer a feminist alternative to these standard principles of economics.

The Economic Power -- And Pitfalls -- Of Positive Thinking

In general, people who are optimistic are more likely than others to display prudent financial behaviors, according to new research. In small doses optimism can lead to wise decision making, but extreme optimists "display financial habits and behavior that are generally not considered prudent," according to researchers.

Resistance To Thoughts Of Chocolate Is Futile

Thought suppression can lead people to engage in the very behaviour they are trying to avoid, according to new research. The study also found that men who think about chocolate end up eating more of it than women who have the same thoughts.

Brain Activity Differs For Creative And Noncreative Thinkers

Why do some people solve problems more creatively than others? Are people who think creatively different from those who tend to think in a more methodical fashion? Scientists found a distinct pattern of brain activity, even at rest, in people who tend to solve problems with a sudden creative insight -- an "Aha! Moment" -- compared to people who tend to solve problems more methodically.

Most Parents Can Accurately Evaluate Their Teen's Substance Abuse, Study Says

Addiction research suggests that most parents are aware of and accurately evaluate the extent of their teenager's cigarette smoking, marijuana use, drinking and overall substance use.

'Where Do I Know You From?' Recognition Shows Distinct Memory Processes

New research suggests that the sometimes eerie feeling experienced when recognizing someone, yet failing to remember how or why, reveals important insight into how memory is wired in the human brain.

The Week in Ed Science Links


Rush, Little Baby

How the push for infant academics may actually be a waste of time - or worse.



What works in education: the lessons according to McKinsey

Now, an organization from outside the teaching fold—McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says*, need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind.

Social Decision-Making: Insights from Game Theory and Neuroscience

By combining the models and tasks of Game Theory with modern psychological and neuroscientific methods, the neuroeconomic approach to the study of social decision-making has the potential to extend our knowledge of brain mechanisms involved in social decisions and to advance theoretical models of how we make decisions in a rich, interactive environment.

Lifted from Bookforum.com: The tickle monster needs to lie down now

From Vision, a review of Nurture the Nature: Understanding and Supporting Your Child’s Unique Core Personality by Michael Gurian; Right From Wrong: Instilling a Sense of Integrity in Your Child by Michael Riera and Joseph Di Prisco; Raising Kids with Character: Developing Trust and Personal Integrity in Children by Elizabeth Berger; and Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues That Teach Kids to Do the Right Thing by Michele Borba. The power of birth order: Parents insist that how kids turn out depends on when they were born, and more and more, science agrees. The tickle monster needs to lie down now: Why don't parents like to play with their kids? Snooze or Lose: Overstimulated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour’s less sleep than they need, a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years.

Adventures in the wheel of consciousness

Ekai Txapartegi (UC-Berkley): Functionalism and the Qualia Wars. Tan Kock Wah (Sarawak): Heterophenomenology Debunked. A review of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness by Daniel C. Dennett. A review of Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World by Christopher D. Frith. An interview with Tim Crane on how the mind relates to the body. A review of When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary Reality by Stanislav Grof. With consciousness, there is no agreement on anything, except it's very difficult. An article on the ethics of erasing a bad memory. A review of The Head Trip: Adventures on The Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren (and more).

Report: Are Private High Schools Better Academically Than Public High Schools?

This study, based on an analysis of the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988-2000, finds that, once family background characteristics are taken into account, low-income students attending public urban high schools generally performed as well academically as students attending private high schools. The study also found that students attending traditional public high schools were as likely to attend college as those attending private high schools. In addition, the report also finds that young adults who had attended any type of private high school were no more likely to enjoy job satisfaction or to be engaged in civic activities at age 26 than those who had attended traditional public high schools.

5 Myths About That Demon Crack

At the peak of the panic over crack cocaine in the mid-1980s, Congress passed a rash of laws requiring longer prison sentences. One such law created a 100-to-1 disparity between crack and cocaine offenses. You have to get caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine -- but only five grams of crack cocaine -- to get a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.

A Sleepless Brain is a Sensitive, Angry Brain

On a poor night's sleep, tiny problems often seem large, and large problems become utterly defeating. That, at least, is how it feels -- and now neuroscientists have imaged the pessimism as it happens.

Ten Principles of Feminist Economics: A Modestly Proposed Antidote

Since such lists represent what are widely proclaimed (by their authors) as universally accepted principles and therefore worthy of teaching to students, we might also wonder about the missing or other perspectives. Despite the inherent dangers of constructing a list that purports to cover the key economic ideas of any perspective, in this paper we yield to temptation and offer a feminist alternative to these standard principles of economics.

The Economic Power -- And Pitfalls -- Of Positive Thinking

In general, people who are optimistic are more likely than others to display prudent financial behaviors, according to new research. In small doses optimism can lead to wise decision making, but extreme optimists "display financial habits and behavior that are generally not considered prudent," according to researchers.

Resistance To Thoughts Of Chocolate Is Futile

Thought suppression can lead people to engage in the very behaviour they are trying to avoid, according to new research. The study also found that men who think about chocolate end up eating more of it than women who have the same thoughts.

Brain Activity Differs For Creative And Noncreative Thinkers

Why do some people solve problems more creatively than others? Are people who think creatively different from those who tend to think in a more methodical fashion? Scientists found a distinct pattern of brain activity, even at rest, in people who tend to solve problems with a sudden creative insight -- an "Aha! Moment" -- compared to people who tend to solve problems more methodically.

Most Parents Can Accurately Evaluate Their Teen's Substance Abuse, Study Says

Addiction research suggests that most parents are aware of and accurately evaluate the extent of their teenager's cigarette smoking, marijuana use, drinking and overall substance use.

'Where Do I Know You From?' Recognition Shows Distinct Memory Processes

New research suggests that the sometimes eerie feeling experienced when recognizing someone, yet failing to remember how or why, reveals important insight into how memory is wired in the human brain.

Let's draw low-income students into college

University of Texas system chancellor Mark Yudof argues that we should give low-income families some clue about their financial aid status before their children's senior year in high school. As he explains, the details are very tough to manage, but it's a smart idea, and it should be part of the breadcrumb trail to college we need to leave for students from low- and moderate-income families.

Let's draw low-income students into college

University of Texas system chancellor Mark Yudof argues that we should give low-income families some clue about their financial aid status before their children's senior year in high school. As he explains, the details are very tough to manage, but it's a smart idea, and it should be part of the breadcrumb trail to college we need to leave for students from low- and moderate-income families.

Carnival Call!

Entries for the 143rd edition of The Carnival Of Education (Hosted this week by the Science Goddess over at What It's Like on the Inside.) are due. Please email them to: the_science_goddess [at] yahoo [dot] com . (Or, easier yet, use this handy submission form.) Submissions should be received no later than 6:00 PM (Eastern) 3:00 PM (Pacific) Today. Contributions should include your site's name,

Monday, October 29, 2007

When Kids Grow Up Too Fast: The Maine Story

What's up with that Maine middle school that wants to hand out contraceptives to girls as young as 11?School officials voted last night to OK a plan to distribute contraceptives to children as young as 11 in Portland, Maine.The Associated Press says the decision follows at least 17 pregnancies in the last four years among students at the city's three middle schools. Children who have parental

Sunday, October 28, 2007

4 Million Dollars and 24 New School Nurses: Beyond Pedagogy to Collective Power (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

To read the entire series, go here.


WINNING CONCESSIONS

Last week, in the just-passed Wisconsin State budget, a couple of lines give four million dollars (in new state and federal money) to the Milwaukee Public Schools for 24 school nurses.

Sometimes it’s hard to trace the influences behind policy changes. But in this case, I know for certain that these lines in the budget are a direct result of the work done by myself and a small number of leaders in Milwaukee’s MOVE congregational organizing group. It is because of MOVE and our work that thousands of the poorest students in Milwaukee will have health services that they did not have before.

BE LIKE ME?

Most of us spend a lot of time working with teachers, or writing articles. Few of us spend any time working to generate power to contest the forces that prevent our ideas and pedagogical advice from leading to significant change.

Some have misread or misheard me as arguing that everyone should do what “I” do, and that anything else is worthless. This isn’t my argument at all. Many of us do very important work, and I’m working, myself, on a book about Dewey and democratic theory. So I’d be a hypocrite if I said everyone should put their pens down and get out of schools and join organizing groups.

The problem is not that everyone needs to change. People have different skills and gifts. Teachers need to learn to teach, and we still need to think about how to teach better.

THE NEED TO CHANGE DIRECTION

The problem is that work on schools is almost ALL we do, and it is NOT ENOUGH. Our focus has remained so narrowly on teacher education that we constantly ignore the fact that pedagogical and administrative skills aren’t really the core problems facing inner-city children.

What have we really done to change the reality of inner-city public schools and, more importantly, the success of students coming out of these schools in the last four decades or so? Maybe we’ve kept things from getting worse. Have we made things better on any broad scale? The honest answer would have to be: NO.

For the vast majority of children in inner-city schools, WE HAVE FAILED. I’m not sure how anyone could honestly argue anything else.

Furthermore, in an article I published a couple of years ago, I showed that the field has developed NO effective models for bringing inner-city schools into any significant authentic interaction with impoverished communities. Except in relatively rare (and always tenuous) circumstances, the institution of schooling in America lacks any significant capacity for healthy community engagement. In other words, a focus on schooling as our only task inherently rules out any real collaboration with communities.

Baldly stated, however, without empowered communities, we will not be able to change schools.

Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

ORGANIZING AS ONE OPTION

Community organizing is one of a number of different strategies for generating community power and consensus in impoverished areas that are increasingly oppressed in America. Elsewhere I have discussed some of these other approaches, but organizing is the one I am most familiar with. So when I talk incessantly about organizing it’s not because it’s the only answer, but because it’s an effective answer that I know something about.

Community organizing is not about winning on individual issues. It is about generating durable POWER for communities that currently lack power.

Winning these 24 new school nurses for MPS schools represents the most significant effect my work has ever had on actual students in schools. Yet this specific win, by itself, is not the goal. The point is that we were able to get the State and the district to pay attention to MOVE. Success in one arena, in the ideal, builds a reputation for effectiveness that can support other efforts in the future. For example, we are moving forward to look at dental services in impoverished urban schools in Wisconsin. I am able to sit at tables with other stakeholders and work together on a campaign to improve dental services not because I am a professor or because I know much about teeth (I don’t) but because I am a representative of MOVE.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

Schools of education as institutions should start making community empowerment a part of their core charge, institutionally. It’s not enough for a few individual professors to do this on their own time.

There are all kinds of worries about what can happen when academics get involved in community activities. But the fact is that there is desperate need for more resources of all kinds in impoverished communities if they are going to gain any significant power at all to resist and act. At the least, scholars bring with them the capacity to read scholarship. As Oakes and Rogers and others have shown, this can be an extremely important contribution to community efforts. And there are other ways to participate.

But in the long term, to be helpful without being harmful, we need to bring real expertise about community engagement and action into our faculties—either by gaining that experience ourselves, or hiring people who have it.

And we need to get beyond our focus—our obsession—with teacher and administrator education as sufficient, in itself, as a path towards long-term improvement in the future life success of inner-city kids.

To be honest, I don’t think any of this will really happen on any significant scale.

It is possible, however, that the field of foundations—because of its interdisciplinary nature, its amorphous focus, and its concern with equity more broadly—may be one of the most promising places for change. In fact, as Dan Butin and I argued at AESA, community engagement as a scholarly arena and as a source of enrollment might actually provide one avenue for saving foundations in American education. But that’s for another post.

[P.S.: If we don’t learn more about how POWER works, and about how to influence the powerful, we can’t hope for much impact in the policy arena (NCLB?) either.]

4 Million Dollars and 24 New School Nurses: Beyond Pedagogy to Collective Power (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

To read the entire series, go here.


WINNING CONCESSIONS

Last week, in the just-passed Wisconsin State budget, a couple of lines give four million dollars (in new state and federal money) to the Milwaukee Public Schools for 24 school nurses.

Sometimes it’s hard to trace the influences behind policy changes. But in this case, I know for certain that these lines in the budget are a direct result of the work done by myself and a small number of leaders in Milwaukee’s MOVE congregational organizing group. It is because of MOVE and our work that thousands of the poorest students in Milwaukee will have health services that they did not have before.

BE LIKE ME?

Most of us spend a lot of time working with teachers, or writing articles. Few of us spend any time working to generate power to contest the forces that prevent our ideas and pedagogical advice from leading to significant change.

Some have misread or misheard me as arguing that everyone should do what “I” do, and that anything else is worthless. This isn’t my argument at all. Many of us do very important work, and I’m working, myself, on a book about Dewey and democratic theory. So I’d be a hypocrite if I said everyone should put their pens down and get out of schools and join organizing groups.

The problem is not that everyone needs to change. People have different skills and gifts. Teachers need to learn to teach, and we still need to think about how to teach better.

THE NEED TO CHANGE DIRECTION

The problem is that work on schools is almost ALL we do, and it is NOT ENOUGH. Our focus has remained so narrowly on teacher education that we constantly ignore the fact that pedagogical and administrative skills aren’t really the core problems facing inner-city children.

What have we really done to change the reality of inner-city public schools and, more importantly, the success of students coming out of these schools in the last four decades or so? Maybe we’ve kept things from getting worse. Have we made things better on any broad scale? The honest answer would have to be: NO.

For the vast majority of children in inner-city schools, WE HAVE FAILED. I’m not sure how anyone could honestly argue anything else.

Furthermore, in an article I published a couple of years ago, I showed that the field has developed NO effective models for bringing inner-city schools into any significant authentic interaction with impoverished communities. Except in relatively rare (and always tenuous) circumstances, the institution of schooling in America lacks any significant capacity for healthy community engagement. In other words, a focus on schooling as our only task inherently rules out any real collaboration with communities.

Baldly stated, however, without empowered communities, we will not be able to change schools.

Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

ORGANIZING AS ONE OPTION

Community organizing is one of a number of different strategies for generating community power and consensus in impoverished areas that are increasingly oppressed in America. Elsewhere I have discussed some of these other approaches, but organizing is the one I am most familiar with. So when I talk incessantly about organizing it’s not because it’s the only answer, but because it’s an effective answer that I know something about.

Community organizing is not about winning on individual issues. It is about generating durable POWER for communities that currently lack power.

Winning these 24 new school nurses for MPS schools represents the most significant effect my work has ever had on actual students in schools. Yet this specific win, by itself, is not the goal. The point is that we were able to get the State and the district to pay attention to MOVE. Success in one arena, in the ideal, builds a reputation for effectiveness that can support other efforts in the future. For example, we are moving forward to look at dental services in impoverished urban schools in Wisconsin. I am able to sit at tables with other stakeholders and work together on a campaign to improve dental services not because I am a professor or because I know much about teeth (I don’t) but because I am a representative of MOVE.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

Schools of education as institutions should start making community empowerment a part of their core charge, institutionally. It’s not enough for a few individual professors to do this on their own time.

There are all kinds of worries about what can happen when academics get involved in community activities. But the fact is that there is desperate need for more resources of all kinds in impoverished communities if they are going to gain any significant power at all to resist and act. At the least, scholars bring with them the capacity to read scholarship. As Oakes and Rogers and others have shown, this can be an extremely important contribution to community efforts. And there are other ways to participate.

But in the long term, to be helpful without being harmful, we need to bring real expertise about community engagement and action into our faculties—either by gaining that experience ourselves, or hiring people who have it.

And we need to get beyond our focus—our obsession—with teacher and administrator education as sufficient, in itself, as a path towards long-term improvement in the future life success of inner-city kids.

To be honest, I don’t think any of this will really happen on any significant scale.

It is possible, however, that the field of foundations—because of its interdisciplinary nature, its amorphous focus, and its concern with equity more broadly—may be one of the most promising places for change. In fact, as Dan Butin and I argued at AESA, community engagement as a scholarly arena and as a source of enrollment might actually provide one avenue for saving foundations in American education. But that’s for another post.

[P.S.: If we don’t learn more about how POWER works, and about how to influence the powerful, we can’t hope for much impact in the policy arena (NCLB?) either.]

Trial update

We put Christopher Columbus on trial this past week. The verdict: Guilty.


Who, me?

Weekending

First of all, I have to recommend the Mill City Museum to my fellow Twin Cities social studies teachers. Small and manageable, the museum does a good job of providing a coherent (if a bit monochromatic) narrative of the city's history. I'd bring students here for examples of material culture and oral history, or for a unit on urban planning and geography.

The School of Bloggers had a lovely day walking around downtown yesterday to the museum from the central library (which I also hope to make into a field trip someday). At the museum, we found ourselves on a double date with a Minnesota Timberwolves player and his (much shorter) female companion.

The Watcher's Council Has Spoken!

Each and every week, Watcher of Weasels sponsors a contest among posts from the Conservative side of the 'Sphere. The winning entries are determined by a jury of 12 writers (and The Watcher) known as "The Watchers Council."The Council has met and cast their ballots for last week's submitted posts. Council Member Entries: Bookworm Room garnered the most Council Member votes with The MSM's Rush

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Hyperbole at the World Series

Last night on FOX I heard the Red Sox announcer call John Williams "the epitome of our culture."

I like John Williams as much as anyone -- I will inevitably like a movie if he is the composer, even if it's The Patriot. But the epitome of our culture?

Sadly, I think if anything is the epitome of our culture it's FOX.

Censorchimps: The Massachusetts Subspecies

It's been reported that a new subspecies of Censorchimp has been sighted on a school campus in the eastern United States. This particular variety, which has long been present in the Bay State, is attempting to feast on fears that some folks have about Harry Potter: WAKEFIELD - The summer reading feats of Lynne Bimmler's sixth-grade class are proudly chronicled on the St. Joseph's School website."

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Stereotype Threat, NCLB, and the Half-Way Solution

From Ed Week:

Stanford University psychologist Claude M. Steele made headlines in 1995 with a study that introduced the phrase “stereotype threat” into the national lexicon. Put simply, it’s the idea that people tend to underperform when confronted with situations that might confirm negative stereotypes about their social group.
Could there ever be devised a more consistent, hammering confirmation of stereotype for minority children and parents living economically disadvantaged lives: the more you struggle, the steeper the hill gets over time, and the more likely you are to fail the high stakes tests on which NCLB is built?

It is sadly interesting to note, too, that now as we finally start talking about interventions to address stereotypes and the achievement gap, there is a focus almost entirely on psychological interventions--as if the poverty that drives the achievement gap can be fixed by tinkering inside the heads of students and teachers. While surely the psychological space is critical in terms of shaping learning and education, fixation on the psychological can lead to a debilitating blindness to the equally-strong sociological realities that shape children's lives.

All the tinkering inside the head can only go so far in getting to a full solution to the educational achievement gap, as John Dewey knew over a hundred years ago. Focusing on they psychological, alone, can bring more negative consequences, in fact:
--this educational process has two sides--one psychological and the one sociological--and that neither can be subordianted to the other , or neglected, without evil results following (My Pedagogic Creed, Article I).

Again, from Ed Week, an interesting chunk of the article:

Mr. Steele’s original research involved black college students whose test performance faltered when they were told they were taking an exam that would measure intellectual ability. But the effect has since been documented in more than 200 studies involving all sorts of situations.

Scholars have found evidence of “stereotype threat” occurring, for example, among elementary school girls taking mathematics tests, elderly people given a memory test, and white men being assessed on athletic ability. Even something as subtle as asking students to indicate their race or gender on a test form can trigger the phenomenon, some of those studies have suggested.

Now comes a new line of research aimed at figuring out what to do about the problem. Focusing mostly on middle schools, the second generation of work is starting to point to tools and techniques that show promise in countering stereotype threat in the classroom and improving the academic achievement of students who are most likely to suffer from its effects, such as African-Americans, Latinos, and girls.

The hope is that such interventions might one day narrow persistent achievement gaps between many minority students and their higher-achieving white and Asian American peers, and expand the ranks of young women who pursue high-level studies in mathematics and science.

“You can scare people so much in the lab that you can make existing gaps wider,” said Joshua Aronson, an associate professor of applied psychology at New York University, who is conducting much of that research. “But the real message of this work is that you also can make the gaps narrower.”

. . . .

Mr. Aronson was the co-author, with Mr. Steele, of the study that propelled the “stereotype threat” idea into the national achievement-gap discussion more than a decade ago.

In that experiment, the researchers divided black and white Stanford undergraduates into two groups and gave each group the same test. One group got the message that the test had IQ-like diagnostic properties; the other group was told that the test did not measure intellectual ability.

The African-Americans in the group performed dramatically better in the latter situation, while white students performed equally well under both conditions. Mr. Steele and his colleagues contend the black students tested badly in the first instance because they feared their poor performance would confirm a stereotype that blacks were intellectually inferior.

Few groups, though, seem to be immune from stereotype threat. Mr. Aronson found in a 1999 study, for instance, that he could induce the same sort of effect in white male engineering and math majors with “astronomical” SAT scores simply by telling them that scores from their laboratory tests would be used to study Asian students’ apparent superiority in mathematics.

Faced with the risk of confirming a negative stereotype about themselves, students react in different ways, according to researchers. While some underperform, others redouble their efforts.

Most worrisome, though, is the large number of students from vulnerable groups who, over time, begin to avoid situations that seem potentially threatening. In one of Mr. Aronson’s experiments with middle schoolers, for example, Latino students—but not non-Hispanic white students—chose easier problems when they understood that the test they were taking measured mathematical ability.

“I think we need to worry about how students’ vulnerability can lead to real differences in ability,” said Mr. Aronson. “As students shy away from those things that could make them smarter, it becomes sort of a negative spiral.”

“We think middle school is when problems emerge,” he added, “and when you see minority kids start to disengage and girls start to get anxious about math.” . . . .

Stereotype Threat, NCLB, and the Half-Way Solution

From Ed Week:

Stanford University psychologist Claude M. Steele made headlines in 1995 with a study that introduced the phrase “stereotype threat” into the national lexicon. Put simply, it’s the idea that people tend to underperform when confronted with situations that might confirm negative stereotypes about their social group.
Could there ever be devised a more consistent, hammering confirmation of stereotype for minority children and parents living economically disadvantaged lives: the more you struggle, the steeper the hill gets over time, and the more likely you are to fail the high stakes tests on which NCLB is built?

It is sadly interesting to note, too, that now as we finally start talking about interventions to address stereotypes and the achievement gap, there is a focus almost entirely on psychological interventions--as if the poverty that drives the achievement gap can be fixed by tinkering inside the heads of students and teachers. While surely the psychological space is critical in terms of shaping learning and education, fixation on the psychological can lead to a debilitating blindness to the equally-strong sociological realities that shape children's lives.

All the tinkering inside the head can only go so far in getting to a full solution to the educational achievement gap, as John Dewey knew over a hundred years ago. Focusing on they psychological, alone, can bring more negative consequences, in fact:
--this educational process has two sides--one psychological and the one sociological--and that neither can be subordianted to the other , or neglected, without evil results following (My Pedagogic Creed, Article I).

Again, from Ed Week, an interesting chunk of the article:

Mr. Steele’s original research involved black college students whose test performance faltered when they were told they were taking an exam that would measure intellectual ability. But the effect has since been documented in more than 200 studies involving all sorts of situations.

Scholars have found evidence of “stereotype threat” occurring, for example, among elementary school girls taking mathematics tests, elderly people given a memory test, and white men being assessed on athletic ability. Even something as subtle as asking students to indicate their race or gender on a test form can trigger the phenomenon, some of those studies have suggested.

Now comes a new line of research aimed at figuring out what to do about the problem. Focusing mostly on middle schools, the second generation of work is starting to point to tools and techniques that show promise in countering stereotype threat in the classroom and improving the academic achievement of students who are most likely to suffer from its effects, such as African-Americans, Latinos, and girls.

The hope is that such interventions might one day narrow persistent achievement gaps between many minority students and their higher-achieving white and Asian American peers, and expand the ranks of young women who pursue high-level studies in mathematics and science.

“You can scare people so much in the lab that you can make existing gaps wider,” said Joshua Aronson, an associate professor of applied psychology at New York University, who is conducting much of that research. “But the real message of this work is that you also can make the gaps narrower.”

. . . .

Mr. Aronson was the co-author, with Mr. Steele, of the study that propelled the “stereotype threat” idea into the national achievement-gap discussion more than a decade ago.

In that experiment, the researchers divided black and white Stanford undergraduates into two groups and gave each group the same test. One group got the message that the test had IQ-like diagnostic properties; the other group was told that the test did not measure intellectual ability.

The African-Americans in the group performed dramatically better in the latter situation, while white students performed equally well under both conditions. Mr. Steele and his colleagues contend the black students tested badly in the first instance because they feared their poor performance would confirm a stereotype that blacks were intellectually inferior.

Few groups, though, seem to be immune from stereotype threat. Mr. Aronson found in a 1999 study, for instance, that he could induce the same sort of effect in white male engineering and math majors with “astronomical” SAT scores simply by telling them that scores from their laboratory tests would be used to study Asian students’ apparent superiority in mathematics.

Faced with the risk of confirming a negative stereotype about themselves, students react in different ways, according to researchers. While some underperform, others redouble their efforts.

Most worrisome, though, is the large number of students from vulnerable groups who, over time, begin to avoid situations that seem potentially threatening. In one of Mr. Aronson’s experiments with middle schoolers, for example, Latino students—but not non-Hispanic white students—chose easier problems when they understood that the test they were taking measured mathematical ability.

“I think we need to worry about how students’ vulnerability can lead to real differences in ability,” said Mr. Aronson. “As students shy away from those things that could make them smarter, it becomes sort of a negative spiral.”

“We think middle school is when problems emerge,” he added, “and when you see minority kids start to disengage and girls start to get anxious about math.” . . . .

Carnival-Carnival

The 142nd midway of The Carnival of Education (hosted this week by History is Elementary) has opened-up the midway for your educational pleasure.Round-out your educational experience by checking out what the homies are up to over at the latest edition of The Carnival of Homeschooling.--------------------------See our latest entries.

Conservatives Against Choice? What's Going On?

In this morning's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel comes this report about a new study from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. The full report apparently isn't out yet (later today, I think), but the Sentinel article seems clear enough.

The overall conclusion: Only 10% of MPS parents make school choices by a process that involves considering at least two schools and that brings academic performance data from a school into the choice.

"Given this number, it seems unlikely that MPS schools are feeling the pressure of a genuine educational marketplace," wrote the report's author, researcher David Dodenhoff.

Dodenhoff also concluded that parental involvement in MPS schools is low - he estimated that 34% of MPS parents could be considered "highly involved" in their children's schools. And he said his conclusions were probably on the high side because people tend to give the "right" answers when asked questions such as whether they are involved parents, even when the answers are untrue.

It's important to understand that
the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute [is] a conservative think tank that has supported school choice for almost two decades, when Milwaukee became the nation's premier center for trying the idea. The institute is funded in large part by the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an advocate of school choice.
Obviously,

"The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find," George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute, wrote in the paper's first sentence.

This is the same institute that has issued reports attacking choice critics, contesting the widely accepted idea that class size reduction has an effect on academic achievement, etc. An article on the front page of their website honestly argues that the incredible racial disparity in the Wisconsin prison population isn't problematic. (You can go through the reports listed on their website.)

The finding in this new report seems to strike at the heart of the assumptions behind the choice program in the first place, as the scholars apparently admit.

I am not an expert in the choice battles, but I have also heard anecdotally (and the article notes) that some choice proponents have become more realistic about the need for oversight of choice schools, among other things. I also know that there have always been a range of more and less dogmatic points of view behind the choice effort, and that some of the choice proponents in Milwaukee are pretty thoughtful people whether one agrees with them or not.

Even acknowledging this, however, has there been another example of a conservative institute like this, funded by the Bradley Foundation of all places, that has put out such a damning report? If this report is correct, then what, exactly, is left of the argument for choice? If the market doesn't work, then "choice" won't work, right?

(It's important to note that this isn't particularly new information. Less ideologically connected scholars have reported much the same thing in more "reputable" academic venues.)

I wonder what is going on, here? Any thoughts from those more deeply informed about the choice "movement"?

Note: the article states that the report concludes:
"Relying on public school choice and parental involvement to reclaim MPS may be a distraction from the hard work of fixing the district's schools. . . . The question is whether the district, its schools and its supporters in Madison are prepared to embrace reforms more radical than public school choice and parental involvement."
More radical than choice? What does this imply?

Conservatives Against Choice? What's Going On?

In this morning's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel comes this report about a new study from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. The full report apparently isn't out yet (later today, I think), but the Sentinel article seems clear enough.

The overall conclusion: Only 10% of MPS parents make school choices by a process that involves considering at least two schools and that brings academic performance data from a school into the choice.

"Given this number, it seems unlikely that MPS schools are feeling the pressure of a genuine educational marketplace," wrote the report's author, researcher David Dodenhoff.

Dodenhoff also concluded that parental involvement in MPS schools is low - he estimated that 34% of MPS parents could be considered "highly involved" in their children's schools. And he said his conclusions were probably on the high side because people tend to give the "right" answers when asked questions such as whether they are involved parents, even when the answers are untrue.

It's important to understand that
the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute [is] a conservative think tank that has supported school choice for almost two decades, when Milwaukee became the nation's premier center for trying the idea. The institute is funded in large part by the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an advocate of school choice.
Obviously,

"The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find," George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute, wrote in the paper's first sentence.

This is the same institute that has issued reports attacking choice critics, contesting the widely accepted idea that class size reduction has an effect on academic achievement, etc. An article on the front page of their website honestly argues that the incredible racial disparity in the Wisconsin prison population isn't problematic. (You can go through the reports listed on their website.)

The finding in this new report seems to strike at the heart of the assumptions behind the choice program in the first place, as the scholars apparently admit.

I am not an expert in the choice battles, but I have also heard anecdotally (and the article notes) that some choice proponents have become more realistic about the need for oversight of choice schools, among other things. I also know that there have always been a range of more and less dogmatic points of view behind the choice effort, and that some of the choice proponents in Milwaukee are pretty thoughtful people whether one agrees with them or not.

Even acknowledging this, however, has there been another example of a conservative institute like this, funded by the Bradley Foundation of all places, that has put out such a damning report? If this report is correct, then what, exactly, is left of the argument for choice? If the market doesn't work, then "choice" won't work, right?

(It's important to note that this isn't particularly new information. Less ideologically connected scholars have reported much the same thing in more "reputable" academic venues.)

I wonder what is going on, here? Any thoughts from those more deeply informed about the choice "movement"?

Note: the article states that the report concludes:
"Relying on public school choice and parental involvement to reclaim MPS may be a distraction from the hard work of fixing the district's schools. . . . The question is whether the district, its schools and its supporters in Madison are prepared to embrace reforms more radical than public school choice and parental involvement."
More radical than choice? What does this imply?

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Positive changes to the UUCA

Read this on the Star today. Tok Pa announced that there will be significant changes in the UUCA or the Universities and University Colleges Act soon and these changes will be reflected in the amendments to the UUCA Act 1971 which will be tabled in parliament soon. I think this is positive news, especially for those who have been advocating for significant change in this area. But do these changes go far enough? I think we'll have to wait and see until the actual amendments are tabled.

Some of the changes reported in the Star include:

1) Lecturers do not need to ask for permission to speak on academic matters
(Not really know what this means except perhaps to say that a lecturer can express his or her views about certain academic policies in class?)

2) Removing provisions for the automatic suspension and dismissal of students convicted of criminal offenses and substituting them with the university’s discretion to proceed with disciplinary measures.

3) Decriminalize student disciplinary laws (which means offenses already classified as criminal under other legislation will no longer be classified as such under the Act)

(I think 2 and 3 are similar and I guess that if a student is charged / arrested under the ISA or the Seditions Acts, it means that he or she will not be automatically suspended by the university?)

4) Provide for fairer student disciplinary procedures

5) Provide for staff and student representation on the university’s governing bodies.

6) There are also proposals seeking to enhance the roles of the board of directors, senate and vice-chancellor and to provide for more accountability.

(6 is consistent with the the National Higher Education Action Plan blogger about here)

Other more controversial issues which have not been reported include:

1) The ability of students in universities both public and private to engage in political affairs including joining political parties, a right which should be afforded to all active citizens who are above the age of 21 and are eligible to vote

2) The fairness of campus elections including allegations that 'pro-government' factions or groups have received the support or aid of university administrators

So far, I've been slightly agnostic in regards to the impact of 'student activism' on the quality of a university. I don't think student activism is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to be a world class university (or even an 'Asian class' university). LSE was a hotbed of social / leftist activism in the 50s and 60s but is now one of the most 'capitalistic' of British universities with lots of business tie-ups, a higher number of foreign students to increase the revenue and so on. It was a well known university when it was a hotbed of activism and it has gone from strength to strength under a more 'capitalistic' model. Berkeley was the center of the 'flower-power' movement in the US in the 60s and is still one of the more 'radical' campuses in the US (thought nothing like what it was in the 60s) along with Columbia but Harvard and MIT were by comparison, much more 'conservative'.

NUS in Singapore is clearly taking the more 'conservative' approach of making NUS a world class university by providing lots of monetary incentives to attract good people and promote good research but keeping a close tab on political activities of both students and lecturers. (For those who want an insight to the workings of the Spore government against lecturers, just google 'Christopher Lingle' and you'll see what I mean)

While I don't think student activism is highly correlated with the quality of a university, I'm convinced that having academic and student freedom to organized and freely express their thoughts is a necessary condition towards establishing a world class university. NUS will encounter resistance when it tries to break into the ranks of recruiting world class academics some of whom might not like working in a country where political freedoms and freedoms of expression are restricted. Different universities in the US and the UK have taken different routes towards making themselves world class but all of them have one thing in common - that there is academic freedom for students and lecturers to express their thoughts and views and to organize if and when necessary. Hence, the UUCA needs to be reformed such that it can be part of an overall package of initiatives to improve the level of academic freedom in our public universities. I can imagine that in a situation of greater academic freedom, UM, given its location in KL / PJ, will have greater student activism compared to let's say UUM in Sintok. But both universities will have the opportunity to create an environment which is conducive to academic freedom for both students and academics.

I think some of the moves made by Tok Pa in terms of reforming the UUCA should be applauded. But given some of the restrictions he faces (both internal, within the university system and external, within the constraints of the BN, especially UMNO), I won't be surprised if the amendments to the UUCA won't go far enough, at least for now, to create an environment where students and lecturers can freely express their views and opinions.

Alzheimer's And Education: The Bad And The Worse

It was somewhat heartening to learn that one's likelihood of developing Alzheimer's disease was lessened when one had more education, but it was downright depressing to learn that once one does develop the disease, the more education one has the faster one declines: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Having more years of formal education delays the memory loss linked to Alzheimer's disease, but once the

Carnival Entries Are Due!

Entries for the 142nd edition of The Carnival Of Education (hosted this week by History is Elementary.) are due. Please email them to: historyiselementary [at] mail [dot] com . (Or, easier yet, use this handy submission form.) Submissions should be received no later than 6:00 PM (Eastern) 3:00 PM (Pacific) Today. Contributions should include your site's name, the title of the post, and the post's

Monday, October 22, 2007

The Watcher's Council Has Spoken!

Each and every week, Watcher of Weasels sponsors a contest among posts from the Conservative side of the 'Sphere. The winning entries are determined by a jury of 12 writers (and The Watcher) known as "The Watchers Council."The Council has met and cast their ballots for last week's submitted posts. Council Member Entries: In a tie vote that was broken by The Watcher, Done With Mirrors came in

Weirdness

Usually the unsolicited emails we get at theschoolofblog AT gmail DOT com are pretty relevant to our interests. A tip of the hat to the people who troll blogs and manually enter in email addresses to send out press releases on various to-dos.

The most recent one, however, is sort of puzzling and also intriguing:

APWagner.com Announces North America’s Oldest Appliance Contest

APWagner.com, an appliance parts website, announces North America’s Oldest Appliance Contest. Visitors to the site can enter to win $15,000 in Cash and Prizes.

Buffalo, NY October 15, 2007 – APWagner.com announces North America’s Oldest Appliance Contest. Do you know of an old appliance? We want to see it!


...

North America’s Oldest Appliance Contest is a nationwide call to find the oldest appliance, working or not, in the United States or Canada. Contestants wishing to enter should send a 2 minute video of themselves and their appliance to www.apwagner.com .

The contest has six categories and each will have a winner. The grand prize winner with the Absolute Oldest Appliance will win Three Brand New Whirlpool Appliances plus $1,000 in Cash! There will also be winners for the Oldest Refrigerator, Oldest Range, Oldest Dryer and Oldest Washer.



...

For More Information:

Christine Smith

716-961-7142

Csmith@apwagner.com

www.apwagner.com



Even though this is sort of weird and random, I am actually really interested in seeing North America's oldest appliance!

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Airport Airblade Air-someness

The bathrooms in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport have gotten a lot of publicity lately. (My favorite was a song Garrison Keillor sang a few weeks ago -- listen to it here, it's right after the shout-outs.)

But what the bathrooms REALLY should be famous for is having the BEST HAND DRYERS OF ALL TIME.

I have never looked forward to using a bathroom hand dryer before. Now I'm considering taking a trip down to the airport just to use it.

One On One Interviews: Intentional Relationship Building for Organizing (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

Here is another of my introductory lectures to organizing. I just wrote this one this week, so it is very much a first draft (more, even, than most of the lectures). Click here for the text of the complete lecture and here or the complete series.

Community organizing groups are made up of relationships between individuals. Of course, this is not all that holds them together. Long-term groups depend on a loyalty to the organization and its historical relationship to the community. And, as we will discuss later on, the specific issues that a group works on can draw in commitment. But at the base level, at its best, a community organizing group is made up of relationships between individuals.

[I want to emphasize that I’m speaking of the ideal of this model of organizing, here. The fact is that the one-on-one process described below is very time intensive, and in my experience not enough leaders (like myself) really take the time to do them in the numbers recommended by the model. This, of course, raises questions about how effective this model is, since if people don’t actually “do” the one-on-ones, then they aren’t working. But the argument is that stronger organizing groups do. So let’s assume people do complete them, for now.]

“Community” is not something that is given in particular neighborhoods or cities. In the inner-city today, for example, people often do not know their neighbors and may actually fear some of the people who live or congregate on their blocks. Mobility in these neighborhoods is high, often for financial reasons, so it is harder for a coherent sense of geographic identity. And even when people do know each other, studies indicate that in poor communities relational ties generally don’t cross social class lines. In other words, poor people know other poor people, and more well-off people know those with economic situations more like their own.

Angela Davis argues that:

it is extremely important not to assume that there are “communities of color” out there fully formed, conscious of themselves, just waiting for vanguard organizers to mobilize them into action. . . . [W]e have to think about organizing as producing the communities, as generating community, as building communities of struggle. (cited in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, p. 161)

As we have noted, in Alinsky’s day there were many local formal and informal organizations that might be seen as reflecting aspects of a local community. Today, this is less true, not only in poor areas but in suburbs full of relatively isolated families as well. As Robert Putnam, among other scholars, has pointed out, the problem is not that people today don’t belong to any organizations at all, or that they don’t volunteer to help others. Instead, what have been lost are collections of people who see themselves as an ongoing, relatively permanent “we” that can act as collectives. Volunteering with Habitat for Humanity or at a local school, participating in a 12-step group for some addiction, etc., don’t necessarily produce the kinds of collectives that organizers are looking for. Again, churches represent one of the few exceptions to this trend.

However, as our reading on gender and organizing pointed out, these older organizations often functioned in a fairly hierarchical and patriarchal manner. While Alinsky might have found what he felt were authentic “native leaders,” the groups these leaders led were often less than participatory in their internal functioning. And even when they were more participatory, members may not have really known each other that well outside of their common participation.

Both of these issues can be as true today of the churches that many organizers work with. Organizers often find that churches fail to recognize the vital functions played by people who are not central leaders. And even though people may recognize each other at church, the fact is that most members probably don’t really know much about the people who sit around them in the pews (or on cushions, or whatever their tradition is).

As our last reading on more recent approaches to congregational organizing noted, today’s organizers don’t simply draw from churches as sources of “people.” They actually try to intervene in them. They try to get pastors, who seem sometimes to treat their parishioners like children, to think more about how they might play a more “empowering” role. They even make theological arguments, trying to convince those who think religion shouldn’t get involved in “dirty” reality that Jesus and Mohammed and others wanted their followers to care for this world, that they should care about their “works” as much as their praying. They try to help religious people understand that many of the key figures of their scriptures (like John, Abraham, etc.) acted very much like organizers. I remember, for example, a tense moment at an organizing training I attended where the facilitator directly challenged a Catholic priest about whether he was really willing to let go of some of his control over his “flock.”

We are not here to argue about whether they are right or wrong about religion. The important thing is to understand how organizers generally think, although I am, of course, open to any questions you might have. There are many religious traditions and cultures that find it difficult or impossible to embody this kind of attitude. In the end, you will need to decide what you will take away with you from our course, what you find convincing and what you don’t, what fits with whatever religious tradition you might hold dear. But even if you don’t “buy” key aspects of this argument, there may be aspects that you find illuminating or that you can appropriate in creative ways to serve your own beliefs and needs. Again, I won’t judge your responses by whether they are “right” or “wrong” in their opinions, although I will be examining whether you understand the perspective we are studying in this class.

One of the key ways organizers try to intervene in and “improve” the associations they recruit into their organizing groups is through the process of one-on-ones.

What Are One-One-Ones?

A one-on one interview is a “public” but “personal” interview with another individual.

The interview is personal in the sense that it often gets into quite intimate stories about someone’s life. Of course, it is always up to the person being interviewed what they are willing to share. But the fact is that people in our society are rarely asked such personal questions by someone who is actually interested in the answers. We seldom are asked to share our stories, and people are often quite willing to do so.

The interview is “public” according to the definition we discussed a few weeks ago in that your goal is not to generate an intimate friendship (although this may also be an eventual result). Instead, your aim is quite pragmatic and instrumental. You are trying to link this person in to a larger group, giving them and the organization more power to make the kinds of changes they would very much like to see in society. You want a “public” not a “private” relationship with this person.

Partly in order to help the people you interview to understand the “public” rather than “private” nature of these interviews, that you are not approaching them to become their “friend,” one-on-one’s are generally set up in a relatively formal manner. You don’t usually just start chatting with someone without warning. Instead, you ask someone to meet you in a particular place at a particular time so that you can talk with them, get to know them, and help them understand your organization. This formality is important because it sets the stage for what is going on. From the beginning the person knows that you are approaching them in the role of a leader or organizer and not as a private individual who just wants to chat. You approach a person in your role as organization member and are trying to recruit them as well

One-on-one interviews have three key goals:

  1. To develop a “relationship” with an individual that you can draw upon later.
  2. To discover a person’s “passion,” which will help you hook this person into particular issues they may be “self-interested” in working on.
  3. To ask this person to do something specific for your organization or group.

This is traditionally the list of aims, but there is actually a fourth goal:

(4.) You want to evaluate whether this person is worth the “trouble” of recruiting and drawing in to your organization. Is this someone who seems reliable? (Is this someone who is likely to be disruptive in meetings or can they disagree and engage without throwing a wrench into the entire process?) Are they passionate about anything enough to keep them engaged over the long-term? Remember that “public” relationships are, in the ideal, driven by self-interest, the need for “respect,” and a willingness to hold others accountable and to be held accountable oneself. A person may be perfectly useful as a participant to call into a mass action, but not someone you want as a leader.

Be careful about making such decisions too quickly, however. It is really impossible to know for certain how someone will act in an organization unless one has worked with this person. Further, characteristics like race and gender can bias our perspectives without us even knowing this. And we have already noted how our society tends to disparage the “leadership” activities of people who work more in the background instead of out front like a familiar patriarchal leader. Sometimes the people who look great turn out to be “terrible,” and the people who look terrible turn out to be great (although often in ways you may not have predicted before).

To read the rest, click here for an MS Word document.

One On One Interviews: Intentional Relationship Building for Organizing (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

Here is another of my introductory lectures to organizing. I just wrote this one this week, so it is very much a first draft (more, even, than most of the lectures). Click here for the text of the complete lecture and here or the complete series.

Community organizing groups are made up of relationships between individuals. Of course, this is not all that holds them together. Long-term groups depend on a loyalty to the organization and its historical relationship to the community. And, as we will discuss later on, the specific issues that a group works on can draw in commitment. But at the base level, at its best, a community organizing group is made up of relationships between individuals.

[I want to emphasize that I’m speaking of the ideal of this model of organizing, here. The fact is that the one-on-one process described below is very time intensive, and in my experience not enough leaders (like myself) really take the time to do them in the numbers recommended by the model. This, of course, raises questions about how effective this model is, since if people don’t actually “do” the one-on-ones, then they aren’t working. But the argument is that stronger organizing groups do. So let’s assume people do complete them, for now.]

“Community” is not something that is given in particular neighborhoods or cities. In the inner-city today, for example, people often do not know their neighbors and may actually fear some of the people who live or congregate on their blocks. Mobility in these neighborhoods is high, often for financial reasons, so it is harder for a coherent sense of geographic identity. And even when people do know each other, studies indicate that in poor communities relational ties generally don’t cross social class lines. In other words, poor people know other poor people, and more well-off people know those with economic situations more like their own.

Angela Davis argues that:

it is extremely important not to assume that there are “communities of color” out there fully formed, conscious of themselves, just waiting for vanguard organizers to mobilize them into action. . . . [W]e have to think about organizing as producing the communities, as generating community, as building communities of struggle. (cited in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, p. 161)

As we have noted, in Alinsky’s day there were many local formal and informal organizations that might be seen as reflecting aspects of a local community. Today, this is less true, not only in poor areas but in suburbs full of relatively isolated families as well. As Robert Putnam, among other scholars, has pointed out, the problem is not that people today don’t belong to any organizations at all, or that they don’t volunteer to help others. Instead, what have been lost are collections of people who see themselves as an ongoing, relatively permanent “we” that can act as collectives. Volunteering with Habitat for Humanity or at a local school, participating in a 12-step group for some addiction, etc., don’t necessarily produce the kinds of collectives that organizers are looking for. Again, churches represent one of the few exceptions to this trend.

However, as our reading on gender and organizing pointed out, these older organizations often functioned in a fairly hierarchical and patriarchal manner. While Alinsky might have found what he felt were authentic “native leaders,” the groups these leaders led were often less than participatory in their internal functioning. And even when they were more participatory, members may not have really known each other that well outside of their common participation.

Both of these issues can be as true today of the churches that many organizers work with. Organizers often find that churches fail to recognize the vital functions played by people who are not central leaders. And even though people may recognize each other at church, the fact is that most members probably don’t really know much about the people who sit around them in the pews (or on cushions, or whatever their tradition is).

As our last reading on more recent approaches to congregational organizing noted, today’s organizers don’t simply draw from churches as sources of “people.” They actually try to intervene in them. They try to get pastors, who seem sometimes to treat their parishioners like children, to think more about how they might play a more “empowering” role. They even make theological arguments, trying to convince those who think religion shouldn’t get involved in “dirty” reality that Jesus and Mohammed and others wanted their followers to care for this world, that they should care about their “works” as much as their praying. They try to help religious people understand that many of the key figures of their scriptures (like John, Abraham, etc.) acted very much like organizers. I remember, for example, a tense moment at an organizing training I attended where the facilitator directly challenged a Catholic priest about whether he was really willing to let go of some of his control over his “flock.”

We are not here to argue about whether they are right or wrong about religion. The important thing is to understand how organizers generally think, although I am, of course, open to any questions you might have. There are many religious traditions and cultures that find it difficult or impossible to embody this kind of attitude. In the end, you will need to decide what you will take away with you from our course, what you find convincing and what you don’t, what fits with whatever religious tradition you might hold dear. But even if you don’t “buy” key aspects of this argument, there may be aspects that you find illuminating or that you can appropriate in creative ways to serve your own beliefs and needs. Again, I won’t judge your responses by whether they are “right” or “wrong” in their opinions, although I will be examining whether you understand the perspective we are studying in this class.

One of the key ways organizers try to intervene in and “improve” the associations they recruit into their organizing groups is through the process of one-on-ones.

What Are One-One-Ones?

A one-on one interview is a “public” but “personal” interview with another individual.

The interview is personal in the sense that it often gets into quite intimate stories about someone’s life. Of course, it is always up to the person being interviewed what they are willing to share. But the fact is that people in our society are rarely asked such personal questions by someone who is actually interested in the answers. We seldom are asked to share our stories, and people are often quite willing to do so.

The interview is “public” according to the definition we discussed a few weeks ago in that your goal is not to generate an intimate friendship (although this may also be an eventual result). Instead, your aim is quite pragmatic and instrumental. You are trying to link this person in to a larger group, giving them and the organization more power to make the kinds of changes they would very much like to see in society. You want a “public” not a “private” relationship with this person.

Partly in order to help the people you interview to understand the “public” rather than “private” nature of these interviews, that you are not approaching them to become their “friend,” one-on-one’s are generally set up in a relatively formal manner. You don’t usually just start chatting with someone without warning. Instead, you ask someone to meet you in a particular place at a particular time so that you can talk with them, get to know them, and help them understand your organization. This formality is important because it sets the stage for what is going on. From the beginning the person knows that you are approaching them in the role of a leader or organizer and not as a private individual who just wants to chat. You approach a person in your role as organization member and are trying to recruit them as well

One-on-one interviews have three key goals:

  1. To develop a “relationship” with an individual that you can draw upon later.
  2. To discover a person’s “passion,” which will help you hook this person into particular issues they may be “self-interested” in working on.
  3. To ask this person to do something specific for your organization or group.

This is traditionally the list of aims, but there is actually a fourth goal:

(4.) You want to evaluate whether this person is worth the “trouble” of recruiting and drawing in to your organization. Is this someone who seems reliable? (Is this someone who is likely to be disruptive in meetings or can they disagree and engage without throwing a wrench into the entire process?) Are they passionate about anything enough to keep them engaged over the long-term? Remember that “public” relationships are, in the ideal, driven by self-interest, the need for “respect,” and a willingness to hold others accountable and to be held accountable oneself. A person may be perfectly useful as a participant to call into a mass action, but not someone you want as a leader.

Be careful about making such decisions too quickly, however. It is really impossible to know for certain how someone will act in an organization unless one has worked with this person. Further, characteristics like race and gender can bias our perspectives without us even knowing this. And we have already noted how our society tends to disparage the “leadership” activities of people who work more in the background instead of out front like a familiar patriarchal leader. Sometimes the people who look great turn out to be “terrible,” and the people who look terrible turn out to be great (although often in ways you may not have predicted before).

To read the rest, click here for an MS Word document.