Our Partner School to Provide Leadership to Community in Promoting Childhood Literacy

As many of our readers already know, the Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal at the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University, that houses the Journal of Educational Controversy, also partners with a creative, innovative and progressive school, the Whatcom Day Academy, to promote a democratic vision on what schools can be. Our work together is also associated with the League of Democratic Schools, a project initiated by educator, John Goodlad. On our institute’s page, readers can read about the philosophy of the school and view some of the videos featuring actual practices in the school along with a slide show of student art in which Susan Donnelly, the head of the school, guides the viewer into seeing more deeply into the artistic creations and evolution of young children’s drawings. On that page, the viewer can also view a section of a public forum that the Institute sponsored, in which teacher, Vale Hartley, describes her use of Socratic questioning with her young students along with short video clips that illustrate her technique. Readers can also read Vale’s article in our journal’s issue on Schooling as if Democracy Matters  and Susan’s articles in our issue on Art, Social Imagination and Democratic Education.

One of the goals of both the Institute and the Whatcom Day Academy is to provide leadership to the community. I am so pleased to announce that Susan Donnelly in conjunction with Professor Matthew Miller of Western Washington University has received a $30000 grant that will enable them to both develop new ideas for childhood literacy practices but also to share their ideas with the community.

Congratulations to Susan and Matt. We hope to share more about this in future blogs.

But our readers will not have to wait too long to learn more about Susan’s school. Susan Donnelly is the co-editor for the upcoming summer issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy. In addition to our printed articles, readers can anticipate a lot of video footage highlighting innovative practices in schools. The theme for the issue is, “The Education and Schools Our Children Deserve.” For a look at another school in the League, see our post below on Schools that Make a Difference: A Look at the League of Democratic Schools.

Alfie Kohn to Speak in Bellingham

Author Alfie Kohn will speak on the topic, "Schools Our Children Deserve," on Friday, October 9th at 7pm at the Syre Auditorium, Whatcom Community College. The event is sponsored by the Whatcom Day Academy and the Explorations Academy in conjunction with the Journal of Educational Controversy.

The journal will be publishing a special issue on this theme in the future that will be dedicated to Alfie Kohn, who has agreed to write the prologue. Kohn's concerns and progressive ideas for schooling are exemplified in our partner school, the Whatcom Day Academy. The Academy partners with the journal and the Woodring Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal that houses the journal in an effort to highlight a vision of the kind of school all children deserve and to engage the public in a national dialogue on this topic.

Stay tune for videos and articles as we create this vision.

Alfie Kohn's website.

Obama’s School Choice: Shouldn’t the education that Malia and Sasha receive be available to all?

Our colleague David Marshak has just published this provocative piece for the August 3rd issue of Education Week and has permitted us to reproduce it on our blog. David is professor emeritus at Seattle University and our colleague here at Western Washington University. In his article, he describes the Sidwell Friends School that President Obama's children attend and asks why all children don't have this kind of education available to them. In asking this question, David exposes the wrongheaded direction that the public school is taking today. All children may not be able to attend this kind of elite private school, but all children ought to attend a public school system that is guided by the enlightened philosophy that shapes this school's vision. In reading David's description of the school, I saw many similarities with our partner school, the Whatcom Day Academy, that I talk about in a post below where we describe the creation of the new Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal that houses the Journal of Educational Controversy. To read about the philosophy of our partner school, the reader can go to the link on our Institute's website. Also check out our YouTube video below and hear teacher, Vale Hartley, describe her classroom at the 2008 Educational Law and Social Justice Forum.


ESSAY BY DAVID MARSHAK


Education Week
Published Online: August 3, 2009
COMMENTARY

Obama’s School Choice

Shouldn’t the education that Malia and Sasha receive be available to all?

By David Marshak

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wants to intensify the industrial, modernist character of American public schools. He wants a longer school day, a longer school week, and a longer school year. He wants national subject standards, which will inevitably lead to one national test. And he wants to institute merit pay, which is a euphemism for paying teachers to produce higher test scores. And this sort of merit pay, combined with national academic standards and one national test, will inevitably result in even more public schools becoming test-prep factories. Thus, more and more of the same.

Every one of these putative remedies grows from a belief that intensification of the command-and-control, modernist, factory model of production is what schools need to improve their performance.

Arne Duncan seems to have no understanding that the most effective organizations in our society, both for-profit corporations and nonprofits, have evolved beyond command-and-control cultures. The author and business professor Peter M. Senge describes these new entities as “learning organizations,” which are built on the foundation of systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning.Senge explains why Duncan’s desire to intensify the factory model of schooling is destined for failure. “Today’s problems come from yesterday’s ‘solutions,’ ” he says. Factory-model schools, though always flawed by racism and classism, worked reasonably well when America was primarily an industrial society. But given our evolution into a more postindustrial culture, the industrial elements of schooling—mass production, rigid time and curricular structures, simplistic age-grading, and depersonalization and alienation—have become the problem, not the solution.

A postindustrial society requires postindustrial, post-modern schools. We could find a good example of this kind of education by following President Barack Obama’s two daughters to school one morning. Since their move to Washington, Malia and Sasha Obama have attended the Sidwell Friends School. It is both private and expensive, but these are not its essential characteristics. Sidwell Friends is more profoundly defined both by the values that it rejects—and by those that it embodies.

Sidwell rejects the modernist, industrial paradigm of schooling that makes school like an assembly line engaged in mass production, that claims all children should learn the same stuff at the same time. It also rejects the modernist claim that children’s individuality and inner knowing are irrelevant to education.

Sidwell embraces a post-modernist paradigm of schooling defined by the following elements:

• Sidwell is a prekindergarten through 12th grade school, with 1,097 students. This is about 84 children in each grade, a small enough number so that no child is lost in the crowd. If Sidwell had a free-standing high school, it would have all of 336 students.

• Sidwell offers “a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement, and independent thinking in a world increasingly without borders.” It does not limit its curriculum to the antiquated 19th-century subjects, as does every set of state curriculum standards—or the new national standards that Arne Duncan is pitching.

• Sidwell encourages its students “to give expression to their artistic abilities.” It does not cut the arts out of the curriculum to focus only on math and reading, as so many schools have done in our testing-obsessed era, but understands that the arts need to be an integral element in every child’s education.

• Sidwell Friends School is a community that values “the power of individual and collective reflection.” It values not only knowledge that is outside the child or teenager, but also what children and adolescents know within themselves. Sidwell encourages reflection and inner knowing, neither of which are acknowledged in any state’s academic standards.

• Sidwell promotes “an understanding of how diversity enriches us,” recruits a diverse student body (39 percent of its students are persons of color), and offers a global and multicultural curriculum.

• In its curriculum and communal life, Sidwell emphasizes “stewardship of the natural world” and engages its students both in learning the science of ecology and in developing the ethics that are at the core of the concept of stewardship: that every individual has a personal responsibility for ecological health and sustainability.

• Sidwell also promotes service, and its curriculum and communal life engage its students in understanding “why service to others enhances life.”

• Sidwell explicitly acknowledges multiple forms of accessing knowledge and truth: “through scientific investigation, through creative expression, through conversation, … through service within the school community and beyond.” All state standards are far more simple-minded.

• Sidwell recognizes that schooling is about both individual learning and learning how to work together well with others. “Work on individual skills and knowledge is balanced with group learning, in which each person’s unique insights contribute to a collective understanding.”

• Sidwell is a school that focuses on personalization of learning and on educating the whole person. “Above all,” its literature declares, “we seek to be a school that nurtures a genuine love of learning and teaches students ‘to let their lives speak.’ ” Sidwell’s central ambition is “to recognize and nurture each person’s unique gifts.”

Yes, Sidwell Friends is an expensive private school; the tuition is about $29,000 a year. And it has one teacher on staff for every seven students—plus small classes and expensive facilities.

But Sidwell’s commitment to implementing a post-modern paradigm of schooling based on the personalization of learning, a global and multicultural curriculum, an emphasis on ecology and environmental stewardship, service to others, multiple forms of knowledge, and personal responsibility and excellence has little to do with money. It’s driven primarily by the value of educating the whole person, and any school in America could enact a program founded on that same value.

If Barack and Michelle Obama have abandoned industrial-paradigm, modernist schooling and have chosen to send Malia and Sasha to a post-modern school focused on the personalization of learning in the context of a caring, responsible school community, isn’t it time for every family in the nation to have the same opportunity?

And if President Obama sends his own kids to such a school, why are he and Arne Duncan advocating policies that would intensify the most defective features of industrial schooling, rather than trying to transform schools to make them more like Sidwell Friends?

David Marshak is a lecturer in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University, in Bellingham, Wash., and is a professor emeritus at Seattle University.


First published in Education Week on August 3, 2009.

Announcing the new Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal

Talk is one thing; action is another. We hope to engage in both. We believe that action without reflective talk is mindless and talk without action is an opportunity missed. Talk is not empty, however, as proponents of the practical and critics of theoretical knowledge sometimes charge. It is merely an opportunity awaiting reflective action. It provides the interpretive frameworks for new ways of understanding, new paradigms for restructuring our experiences, new challenges to older ways of thinking. Sometimes it adds to the growing body of knowledge that has been provided by those who went before us and on whose shoulders we stand. Other times, it confronts the entrenched orthodoxies that blind us and make parts of our experience of the world invisible to us. That is perhaps why John Dewey believed that there was nothing more practical than a good theory.

The journal is a place for talk, a place to look deeply at the tensions, perplexities and controversies of our time. But we also have an activist, progressive arm. In 2004, the Woodring College of Education and the Whatcom Day Academy entered a partnership to explore the role of schooling in promoting and sustaining a democratic society. Our work is affiliated with the League of Democratic Schools, a project initiated by John Goodlad. Our newly formed Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal incorporates our work in developing the journal and our work with the League. In a special section of our website, we share ideas and innovative practices for democratic schooling. Readers can also view our YouTube clip below of Whatcom Day Academy educator Vale Hartley as she discusses democratic practices in her classroom at the 2008 Educational Law and Social Justice Forum that was sponsored by the journal. Vale wrote the article, "The Elementary Classroom: A Key Dimension of a Child's Democratic World," for the winter 2008 issue of our journal.

On our institute's website, we write that "Our goal is to provide an alternative voice for research and scholarship on the educational controversies and initiatives that arise in teaching and learning in pluralistic, democratic societies." One might ask: an alternative to what? We believe that the language of education today has lost its bearings and its moorings. As I mentioned in my posting of March 27th below, silent assumptions underlying our language have controlled the national debate for decades. The language of the market place has become the language of education. Students are talked about as the human capital that keeps the national economy competitive. Although we give lip service to the democratic purposes of education, the language of the market place prevails and all other discourses are on the edge. In a public school system that serves both democracy and capitalism, the public deserves a deeper conversation of the tensions that exist between these two forces. And educational professionals need more public space to create a learning environment that takes seriously the democratic purposes of our schools.

The Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal at the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University is an attempt to achieve both the goal of talk and the goal of action. It is the home of both the journal and our work in creating a laboratory for democratic practices. The Institute is in its early stages and we will be sharing our progress with our readers of this blog in the future. In the meantime, we would appreciate thoughts and ideas from our readers on what they would like to see from such an Institute. How would it be beneficial to you. Please add your comments to this posting and let us hear from you. Also, does anyone have ideas of Foundations and other organizations that would be interested in joining our efforts and working collaboratively with us?