Newly Published - "Dear Maxine: Letters from the Unfinished Conversation"

In our winter 2010 issue of the journal dedicated to the life and work of Maxine Greene, we announced that a new book was about to be published in the fall by Teachers College Press. The book, Dear Maxine: Letters from the Unfinished Conversation, is now available. Readers can find information at the Teachers College Press website.

From the website:


This collection brings together a prestigious group of individuals who have wondered, looked at, revised, acted, questioned, and changed their world because of their connection to American philosopher Maxine Greene. Teachers, students, colleagues, artists, and others, such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Herb Kohl, Mike Rose, Deborah Meier, and William Ayers, have written edgy, thoughtful letters addressed to Greene about her work, their own, and the spaces in between. Rather than just thanking this master philosopher/teacher, each sets out to discover what they have learned from Maxine Greene and to discuss the continued relevance of her work in aesthetics, education, and social imagination.

Maxine Greene has been referred to as “the most important American philosopher [on education] since John Dewey.” This wonderful collection continues the unfinished conversation that is her work.
Contents:
Foreword, Sonia Nieto
Acknowledgments
Publisher's Note, Carole Saltz
Prologue, Michelle Fine
Introduction: Maxine Greene and Human Freedom, Nel Noddings


1. The School and Society: Imagining and Reshaping Public Spaces
Imagining the Possible, Mike Rose
Walking the Dialectic of Freedom, Jim Garrison
Imagining Things Being Otherwise, Patty Bode
Stargazing, Wide-Awakening, Cultural Imagining, Ming Fang He
Living Beyond Walls, Robert Lake
The Consciousness of Possibility, Susan Mayer
Imagining Peace, Nonviolence, and the Life of the Mind, Rikki Asher
On Being Wider-Awake in the World, Kathy Hytten
Hiding in the Text: Body and Emotion, Donald Blumenfeld-Jones
We Who Are Not Yet, Jennifer Milam
Confronting Exclusion and Racism, JoAnn Phillion
Daring to Dare: Teaching for Wide-Awakeness, Pamela K. Smith
Not Turning Away, Julie Searle
Free People Need Public Spaces, Deborah Meier


2. “The Self: In a Tune Beyond Us and Yet Ourselves”
On Not Being Directed, Optimism, Nancy Lesko
Teaching Heaven and Earth: Beyond Philosophy, Roslyn Arnold
The Audacity of Eros, Nina Asher
Seeing the Darkness, Louise Berman
Fully and Profoundly Engaged, David Flinders
The Miracle of Authorship as a Moment of Truth, Glenn Hudak
Philosopher, Educator, Author, Friend, Linda Lambert
How Can an Educational Philosophy Withstand the Test of Practice?, Heidi Miller
Breaking Through the Crust, Wendy Kohli
An Anxiety of Influence, William Pinar
Negotiating Freedom, Shaireen Rasheed
Compassion in a Chaotic World, Teresa Rishel
Flunking Retirement, Barbara Thayer-Bacon
Channeling Maxine's Hillbilly Younger Brother, Shirley Steinberg
Lived Imperfection, Lynda Stone
You Are Our Muse, Leonard Waks


3. Strangers, Others, and Friends: Expanding the ConversationDown the Same Roads for Many a Year, Elliot Eisner
Accompanying the Artists as They Choose What to See, Peter Appelbaum
Big Maxine and little maxine, Suzanne de Castell
Burdening Aesthetics, Greg Dimitriadis
The Uncanny Legend of Maxine Greene, Noreen Garman
Learning Quality and Becoming Human, James Giarelli
The Dialectical Diva, Chris Higgins
An Interview that Never Began: An Afterword to Maxine Greene, Clyde Coreil
One of the Conditions of Happiness, Craig Kridel
24/7, William Ayers
The Slow Fuse of the Gradual Instant, Rebecca Luce-Kapler
A Conversation Over Time, Lorraine Kasprisin
A Gifted Teacher, Martha McKenna
An Unabashed Confession of Love, Herb Kohl
Being and Becoming, Maureen Miletta
Academic Courage and Grace: A Case Study from Maxine Greene, Eugene Provenzo
With Relentless Possibility, William Schubert
On the “Verge” of Possibility, Molly Quinn
Eleven Kind Words, William Reynolds
The Day Maxine May Have Bombed, George Willis
Our Imaginarium, Gloria Ladson-Billings


4. Blue Guitar Lessons: The Arts and Keeping Wide-Awake in the WorldWhat If?, Cathryn Williams
Keeping Wide-Awake, Jacqueline Ancess
Agradecida, Gene Diaz
Maxine and the Furry Blue Guitar, Bernadine Dohrn
Attention to Wonder, Kieran Egan
From Critical Awareness to Wide-Awakeness, James Henderson
Summer at the Park with Maxine, Roger Dell
The Point of Release, John Holyoke
Time with You, Madeleine Fuchs Holzer
Living in the Amber: Conversations Between Red and Greene, Pauline Sameshima
Questions, Anyone? Let's Hope So, Julie Teel
Maxine Says, Nick Sousanis
Awakening and Choosing, Sue Stinson
When Teaching Becomes Reaching, Graeme Sullivan
And the Stage Belongs to . . . the Philosopher, Scott Noppe-Brandon
A Performance for Maxine, Jean Taylor, Barbara Ellman, and Hillary Easton
Learning to Learn, John Toth


Epilogue: “Coming Together to Act on the Possibility of Repair”: Conversations with Maxine Greene, Janet Miller
References
About the Editor and Contributors

Robert Lake is an assistant professor at Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA


“Robert Lake has brought together the various pieces of Maxine Greene’s life in these pages: Here are teachers, dancers, graphic artists, educational philosophers, and others. No one in these pages is content with things as they are; we have learned from life and from Maxine that there are always unanswered questions.”
—From the Foreword by Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“Within the context of letters to a dear and esteemed colleague, the contributors to this book expand their readers' and their own perspectives on the complexity and the promise of teaching, learning, and living a generous life.”
—Karen Gallas, teacher and researcher

“For nearly sixty years, Maxine Greene has inspired us to question, to express ideas and insights, and to see past calcified logic and stunted expectation by valuing the necessary role of art, inquiry, democracy, and dialogue in education. These letters give the reader a renewed appreciation of her passion and energy, and of those who have learned from her.”
—A. G. Rud, Washington State University

Do Teachers have Free Speech Rights? An Update on Recent Court Decisions

Readers will remember the article by author Sam Chaltain in our winter 2008 issue of the journal, entitled, "Ways of Seeing (and of Being Seen): Visibility in Schools." Sam has his own website and blog at: "Democracy,Learning,Voice." Check it out. Sam gave us permission to reprint his article on teachers' rights from his website.


Free Speech for Teachers? Think Again . . .

by Sam Chaltain

Reprinted by permission from Democracy, Learning, Voice.


In case you missed it, there was a major case last week involving the First Amendment rights of teachers to make curricular content decisions. And the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling puts another nail in the coffin of the free-speech rights of public employees.

In the most recent case, an Ohio teacher’s contract was not renewed after controversy erupted over a few book assignments she made with her High School English class. As recently as a decade ago, the teacher may have had a legitimate chance in court (although not neccesarily). That’s because, prior to 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court evaluated public employee free-speech claims by using a test with two basic prongs. First, the court would determine whether the speech in question touches on a matter of public concern. If it did not, the teacher would receive no First Amendment protection whatsoever. If the speech did touch on a matter of public concern, the court would proceed to the balancing prong of the test, in which it would balance the teacher’s interest in commenting upon a matter of public concern against the school officials’ interest in promoting an efficient workplace of public service.

Prior to 2006, courts sometimes sided with school officials even though the public school teachers’ speech touched upon a matter of public concern. In one 2001 case, for example, the Eighth Circuit determined that a school principal did not violate the First Amendment rights of three teachers who were ordered to quit talking about the care and education of special needs students. Subsequent appeals in the case acknowledged that the teachers’ complaints about the lack of care for special needs students touched on matters of public concern. Nonetheless, the appeals court noted that the teachers’ speech “resulted in school factions and disharmony among their co-workers and negatively impacted [the principal's] interest in efficiently administering the middle school.”

Conversely, in 1993 the Eleventh Circuit reached a different conclusion in the case of Belyeu v. Coosa County Board of Education. In this decision, a teacher’s aide alleged that school officials failed to rehire her because of a speech she made about racial issues at a PTA meeting. The aide said the school should adopt a program to commemorate Black History month. Immediately after the meeting, the principal asked to speak with her and told her he wished she had raised this issue privately rather than publicly. A lower court determined that the speech clearly touched on a matter of public concern, but that the school system’s interest in avoiding racial tensions outweighed the aide’s right to free speech. On appeal, however, the Eleventh Circuit reversed, writing that the aide’s “remarks did not disrupt the School System’s function by enhancing racial division, nor, based on the nature or context of her remarks, was her speech likely to do so.”

This is all a precursor to 2006, however, when the U.S. Supreme Court effectively eliminated the free-speech rights of public employees in its 5-4 decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos. As my friend and former First Amendment Center colleague David Hudson explains, since Garcetti “public employers are able to defend themselves against allegations of retaliation by claiming that employees’ criticisms of government operations were made as part of their official duties.”

Indeed, a pattern has emerged in this post-Garcetti world, in which it has become almost impossible to mount a successful First Amendment lawsuit based on speech that relates to the workplace. In other words, a teacher who wishes to claim First Amendment protection for decisions about curricular content must do so knowing that the same protections s/he would be afforded as a private citizen will not apply to anything so directly related to his or her official duties.

Ironically, the 1969 case that is hailed as the high-water mark for student free-speech, Tinker v. Des Moines, features these lines: “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. This has been the unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years.”

No longer.

(Postscript: If you’re a junkie for First Amendment law, check out my three books on the subject, including answers to all of the most frequently asked questions as they pertain to First Amendment issues in schools.)



Sam Chaltain is a DC-based educator and organizational change consultant. Previously, he was the National Director of the Forum for Education & Democracy, an education advocacy organization, and the founding director of the Five Freedoms Project, a national program that helps K-12 educators create more democratic learning communities. Sam spent five years at the First Amendment Center as the co-director of the First Amendment Schools program. He came to the Center from the public school system of New York City, where he taught high school English and History. Sam also spent four years teaching the same subjects at a private school in Brooklyn.

Sam’s writings about his work have appeared in both magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post, Education Week and USA Today. A periodic contributor to CNN and MSNBC, Sam is also the author or co-author of five books: The First Amendment in Schools (ASCD, 2003); First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights (Oxford University Press, 2006); American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free: Stories Of Free Expression in America (Oxford, 2011); and Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Time for a Serious National Conversation on the Public Purposes of our Schools: An Interview with Bill Ayers

Readers will find the interview with Bill Ayers from Truthout.org an interesting departure from the mainsteam media's superficial coverage of our national debate on school reform. We reprint it in its entirety with permission from Truthout.org. In his interview, Ayers talks about the public purposes of schooling -- something often left out of the economic and privatized goals that have dominated the national debate -- and the real social and human conditions that need to be addressed. For readers who would like to read the article we published by Bill Ayers in our special issue on "Schooling as if Democracy Matters," go to: "Singing in Dark Times."



Back to School: An Interview With Bill Ayers
Friday 01 October 2010

by: Maya Schenwar, Executive Director, t r u t h o u t Interview

Reprinted by permission from Truthout.org



As the 2010-2011 school year grumbled to a start - and millions of public school students settled into overcrowded, underfunded, under-resourced classrooms - I sat down in Chicago with education theorist and activist Bill Ayers to discuss true democracy, false reform and his latest book (co-authored with cartoonist Ryan Alexander-Tanner), "To Teach: The Journey in Comics." In an educational culture increasingly permeated by top-down marketplace values, Ayers, who taught primary school for years, still believes in the possibility of a schooliverse where every teacher is respected and every student is valued as a full human being, where collaborative learning and growth trump the school-eat-school "Race to the Top." And by the end of our conversation, I did, too.

Maya Schenwar: In "To Teach," you talk about how a good school is defined by good teachers. What do you think of this practice that's been circling the country, of "reconstituting" schools and firing all the teachers? Does that logic work?



Bill Ayers: Not at all - not even close.

We're living in the darkest times for teachers that I've ever seen in my life. It's hard to fully understand how the conversation about what makes a robust, vital education for citizens in a democracy has degraded to the point where the frame of the whole discussion is that teachers are the problem. It's true that good schools are places where good teachers gather, but there's another piece to that: Good teachers need to be protected to teach, supported to teach, put into relationships with one another - and with the families of the kids - so that they can teach.

The attack on teachers is a classic example of what [cognitive linguist George] Lakoff calls "framing." We're hearing from every politician and editorial board in the land - including The New York Times and The Washington Post and The New Yorker - that we need to get the lazy, incompetent teachers out of the classroom. And everyone, including you and me, nods stupidly. Because what am I going to say? "My granddaughter deserves that lazy, incompetent teacher!" They're getting the conclusion that they want by framing the question as a statement. So there's only one answer; no one can take the other side of that proposition. But what if I got to the podium first and said, "Every kid in America deserves an intellectually grounded, morally committed, compassionate, caring, intelligent, thoughtful, well-rested and well-paid teacher in the classroom"? We'd agree with that, too! So, who gets to say what we're talking about?

There's always been a contest in this country between the notion of the public and the notion of the private individual. This is in our DNA: the struggle between a kind of radical individualism - that cowboy, pioneer, explorer mentality - and the idea of the common good. And this is fought out constantly. Since 1980, a sustained attack has been going on against the very idea of the public - that nothing public is useful or good, including the schools.

In the past five years, that attack on public education has ratcheted up to dimensions that were unthinkable 30 years ago. And so people talk about the public schools in a way that is disingenuous and dishonest - and also frightening in its characterization: they say the schools are run by a group of self-interested, selfish, undertrained, undercommitted teachers, who have a union that protects them.

An example: The New Yorker does a profile of a thing called the "rubber room" - a space in the central office where people who are judged incompetent to teach are awaiting adjudication under the contract. Remember, the contract doesn't only belong to the union, even though in The New Yorker and in the New York Times editorials, it's as if the contract is all the union - the school board is also party to the contract; they negotiated it! Anyway, The New Yorker profiles 15 teachers - and I have to admit, just like everyone else, it was lip-smackingly interesting to read about these very, very crazy people; how fun! But there were 15 of them, in this system of tens of thousands. Why is that what we're focused on? It's because a case is being built that somehow teachers and their unions are the whole cause of the misery.

What they're ignoring in all of these examples is the reality of poverty. They're ignoring the reality of lots and lots and lots of Americans who do not have a living wage. And if you want to change what's going on in schools, you have to realize that. We'd do more for education with a full-employment economy with a living wage than anything anyone can do by tinkering with the schools and firing teachers.

[Washington, DC, Chancellor of Education] Michelle Rhee got a cover story in Time Magazine right after Obama's election. She's the poster child for what they're calling "reform." The pivotal paragraph in that story says, "In the year and a half she's been on the job, Rhee has made more changes than most school leaders make in five years." It said she'd fired 36 principals, closed 21 schools, fired 270 teachers. Not a word about connecting the schools to their communities. Not a word about teacher retention. Not a word about the curriculum. Not a word about bringing resources to the starving system. She's a "reformer" because she's doing what the bosses of Enron did to Enron. That's ridiculous! A school is not like a business, and the market metaphor that's dominating the conversation actually misses everything important about schools.

This is the real tragedy for teachers: Education is like love. You can give it all away and still have plenty. You can share all the knowledge you have and not lose anything - except if you're in a system where one school is being judged against another school, one classroom against another classroom, one state against another state. Well, then - I'm not giving you my shit. You go ahead and struggle on your own, because you and I are in a vicious fight for the Race to the Top money, for teacher jobs, for everything. That's a catastrophe for the reality of how teaching is done at its best.

I speak to young teacher groups all the time, and I often start by asking, "Are any of you going into teaching because you think you'll get rich?" And they laugh. And then I say, "Are any of you thinking you'll have the overwhelming respect of your community?" They laugh again. And then they tell me, "My parents, my brother, my sister, my partner all told me not to teach." So I say, "Why are you gonna do it? What's wrong with you?" And what's "wrong" with them is a desire to do moral work in an immoral world. Yet, we're putting a stake in their hearts.

MS: And it's all about "fixing" the schools ...

BA: Right. If you read any of these stories about education - about KIPP [Knowledge Is Power Program], about Teach for America, about charter schools - all of [the media] have drunk the Kool-Aid on this ideological question of how to fix the schools. An example: There was a story in The New York Times after the recent Race to the Top competition. They say that Race to the Top is having a great effect on reform, even for those states that don't get it. What's the evidence? The "evidence" is that more schools have gone private, that the union is being crushed. That's the proof of reform!

In a New Yorker story on [Education Secretary] Arne Duncan, the writer says that in the world of school reform, there are two camps. One is the radical "reformers" who want to privatize everything; the other is those who defend the status quo. Really? I haven't seen one person defend the status quo! But that is the way the discussion is divided - there's not another side. So, my book "To Teach" from 20 years ago, and also the comic book, are an attempt to enter into this discussion on the side of teachers.

In the movie "Waiting for Superman," there's a cartoon aside that shows "how learning happens." They show the top of a kid's head being sawed off, and knowledge pouring in - and then the teachers' union and the bureaucrats come in and stop it. So, I'm arguing that learning is something quite different - and that a smart teacher is on a journey of discovery and exploration with the kids.

MS: How do you encourage that type of teaching on a national policy level? If you were Arne Duncan, what would you do?

BA: You have to start with the premises of a democracy. If you think about Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, medieval Saudi Arabia, apartheid South Africa, every one of those countries had educational systems that wanted their kids to show up on time, learn their subject matter, stay away from drugs, not get pregnant. We all want the same things, except, in a democracy - at least theoretically - you also want to base your educational system on a profound democratic premise: the incalculable value of every human being. That means that the savage inequalities in the education are an affront to democracy. All the systems I mentioned - Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia - along with math and science and phys ed and music, they wanted obedience and conformity, and they taught it relentlessly. That's why you can have a Germany or an Italy or a South Africa that produced brilliant scientists and brilliant artists, and also produced a culture that could march people into the ovens. You can have an educated population that is morally blind.

Theoretically, we'd want something different in a democracy. Along with math, science, music and phys ed, we'd want you to develop a mind of your own - to learn initiative, courage, imagination, curiosity.

Back to the Arne Duncan question: I'd make it very clear that the standard we have for public education in this country is a standard of excellence and equity. I would use the bully pulpit to say that all kids should be able to have the education that my kids had and that the Obama kids had. I'm not going to impose it - but I'm going to say that that's what we're aspiring to as a minimum: small classes; dedicated, unionized teachers; well-resourced classrooms; encouragement of curiosity.

Secondly, I would keep the military out of the schools. The military bases itself on following orders, and education should base itself on initiating and being courageous - and not necessarily following orders. Education is about asking the queer questions. So, no recruitment, no ROTC, no JROTC. In the cabinet meetings, I'd say, "Secretary Gates, get your fucking hands off the schools."

Next, I would initiate the Septima Clark Ella Baker Teacher Corps. That would be a funded attempt - using the stimulus money - to hire unemployed people, mothers, community members as aides, as trainees, as literacy coaches. Get everybody in the schools, and spend money to do that. Because if we've got a class size of 35 in the second grade, I at least want community members in there, helping the teachers out.

Next, I'd initiate a gigantic, messy, national conversation that would take place in every neighborhood, every barrio, every ghetto of every city and every town, to raise the questions: "What knowledge and experiences are most valuable? What makes someone an educated person? How do we make that knowledge and experience accessible to all students?" That's not the business of Bill Gates; that's the business of all of us.

I would also invest in teachers. I'd turn the conversation from disrespect to respect. One of the ways I'd do that: every teacher, every five years, would get a one-semester sabbatical. They'd get to take free courses, organize their own courses, travel, like college professors do. There has to be a sabbatical, because teaching is that kind of work - it's exhausting on every level. Also, I'd create a system of mentoring, in which every teacher would have a partner and a coach. Not just young teachers. That way we create conditions for horizontal rather than vertical staff development: I learn from you, you learn from me. I want that to be the culture of the schools; not "racing to the top." That horizontal development is what we need for democracy.

MS: What about test scores? You've written about how, not only are they invasive and interfering with learning, but they're also ineffective for assessment. So, what can we do to assess kids in a way that will actually work?

BA: This goes back to what I was saying about investing in teachers. There are lots of assessments that work. You have to start with the idea that as a second-grade teacher, which I was for years, my interest is how to get these kids to read more and read better. I'm thinking, how do I take them from where they are to a deeper and wider way of knowing? That's my goal as a second-grade teacher. As a policy guy standing above it, I'd have a very different goal: ranking these kids from winners to losers.

Whatever we do in assessment ought to link back to the teacher, to allow her or him to do a better job. So, what we want is assessment that helps us teach, not assessment that says, "you win, you lose."

As I argue in the book, we need to do portfolio assessments. My nephew graduated from Central Park East High School in New York, a public experimental school in Harlem. In order to graduate from that high school, he had to put together a portfolio that included his grades and test scores, but those were just two out of 15 items. It also included an original essay, an original piece of art, a physical challenge that he'd set for himself as a freshman, a critique of a piece of public art, a record of community service, an internship, a work-study plan projected five years hence, and more - 15 items. And then he sat down with his adviser, a family member, a friend, the principal and a teacher that he picked, and defended his portfolio. Now that's assessment - in the hands of teachers, close to the kid, close to the family, close to the community. That can help to make an educated person.

If you start with the premise that each person is of incalculable value, it must mean that the full development of each kid in the school is the condition for the full development of everyone. And the full development of everyone is the condition for the full development of each kid. If you start with that idea, you end up with that type of assessment - rather than a punitive, top-down system where you rank kids on a scale, then tell some that they're going to the unemployment lines and the prisons.

Another thing that I get into in the book, about assessment: there's no such thing as a "normal third-grader" or a "normal three-year-old." There are three-year-olds who read, and there are three-year-olds who pee in their pants and there are three-year-olds who pee in their pants while reading. The range of people [in an age group] is vast - in terms of capacities, in terms of thoughtfulness, in terms of health - so the idea that you can say, "third-graders must be this way" is bullshit. What we ought to do is have support for teachers, small classrooms, a range of activities and a range of ways to succeed, with the goal of challenging kids to move from where they are to deeper and wider ways of knowing, being and experiencing.

MS: I loved the description in the comic book of Chicago public high school Lawndale Little Village, and how that school came about. Can you talk a little bit about how a school like that can emerge, through grassroots activism?

BA: Well, it started when a group of mothers got fed up with the overcrowding at their kids' schools, and said, "You know what? We're gonna sit in." So they [staged a] sit-in. It became an electrifying moment in the city. Mayor Daley was furious. Then [former Chicago Public Schools CEO] Paul Vallas went down there and scolded them. He said, "Don't do this! This is ridiculous." But he said it in such a nasty, patronizing way that when they showed it on the news, it must have really infuriated Daley - Vallas was gone within a week. Arne Duncan came in, and his first act was to meet with them and give them their school. So, this is activism with bite, with punch.

And then, these mothers were no-bullshit: They started meeting with [local education experts] and investigating what makes a good school. I remember going to one of the meetings in the neighborhood, and the mothers had just come back from visiting North Side Prep and New Trier [two very well-funded Chicago-area schools], and they were reporting back. They described the gym, the auditorium, the Olympic swimming pool. I said, "Why do you want an Olympic swimming pool?" And they said, "Because we want whatever the other kids get. We don't want our kids to get less." And in a democracy, that's what it should be.

MS: It's funny. School is where you're first absorbing this national message - that we live in a democracy where everyone has equal opportunity. But school is also where people are experiencing some of the most obvious inequalities.

BA: That's right. The New Yorker did a puff piece on Arne Duncan, and it points out that the Obama children and Arne Duncan himself (and, parenthetically, my children) all went to the University of Chicago Lab School. At the Lab School, they had a class size limit of 15. And how did they get that? A union contract.

So Arne Duncan, the Obama kids and my kids went to a school with a class size of 15, a well-respected union and a curriculum that's based at least in part on following kids' interests and curiosities. When the Obamas went to Washington, anyone who knew the Obamas and knew the scene in DC knew the kids would go to Sidwell Friends, and that's where they went - class size of 15, well-respected unionized teacher corps, curriculum based at least in part on kids following their interests. Now if that's good enough for the Obamas and Arne Duncan, why are those things not even part of the discussion about what's good enough for the west side of Chicago?

I'm not such an idealist that I think we could get there tomorrow, but right now, class size is not even on the table. In Chicago, second-graders can have a class of 35, because of the budget. That's 20 more than the Obama kids get! And does that make a difference in terms of educational outcomes, as well as teacher morale and capacity? Of course it does - I've been in classrooms; I know there's a difference between 15 and 20, let alone 35.

John Dewey said it brilliantly: He said that whatever the best and most privileged parents have for their kids should be the baseline for what we want for all kids. Anything less undermines our democracy.
http://www.truth-out.org/back-school-an-interview-with-bill-ayers63774

The Global Infestation of U.S. Educational Ideas: A Cautionary Thought by Author Kay Ann Taylor

Editors: Today we welcome a post by guest blogger, Kay Ann Taylor. Our readers will remember the article that we published in our winter 2009 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy by Kay Ann Taylor, entitled, Poverty's Multiple Dimensions. In today's post, Dr. Taylor reflects on her recent visit to a conference she attended in Istanbul, Turkey where she learned about the extent that the United States focus on standardized testing has had on the educational thinking in other nations. Historically, U.S. educational ideas have had an influence around the world. Our author asks us to think about what ideas we are exporting today and if this is the "best the U.S. has to offer."


Exporting U.S. Education: Is Standardized Testing the Best the U.S. Has to Offer?
by Kay Ann Taylor
Kansas State University


As an educator and an individual, a major personal bias and belief is my non-belief in standardized testing (ST). With the onset and passing of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the festering in American education surrounding standardized testing has reached the status of some god-like or pagan entity that determines the futures of not only our children, but our teachers, schools, communities, country, and impacts our global efficacy. Those who are not educators (politicians) continue to direct and dictate policies and practices to those who are. How can and why does the American public at large and in general succumb to the edicts of this flawed, detrimental, and demeaning measure of human capacity? And, more to the point, why and how did exporting U.S. ST become so welcome, so revered, and, received so uncritically by our global community? Like cancer, the disease of U.S. standardized testing infects the global arena. I remain critical and skeptical regarding the gate-keeping effects of ST in terms of its impact and outcome on the lives, futures, education, thinking, and psyches of the human enterprise.

The polar views in the U.S. regarding ST are far from new. They are divergent in philosophical orientation, utility, purpose, interpretation, and implementation. There are scholars that support ST. Conversely, numerous scholars continue to challenge the oppressive nature of ST in that it lacks context and marginalizes English language learners, learners from low socioeconomic status, creates winners vs losers. Critics argue further that ST in no way represents learning, knowledge, understanding, much less real-life application. Additionally and importantly, some scholars contend that ST is racist and gender-biased. There is a distorted Darwinian element ingrained in ST, i.e., the survival of the fittest, which misrepresents Darwin for one, and rather, serves the interests of those seeking to maintain the status quo. Further, ST represents an outdated factory system of education that serves social efficiency, social control, social reproduction, and maintains the status quo for social mobility, thus begging the question, “Whose interests are served by standardized tests?” Believing that humans can be ranked, filed, and sorted on the basis of ST is one of the most destructive and dehumanizing practices education faces.

Standardized testing is big business. This hit me squarely during a session at the World Council of Comparative Education Societies this June (2010) in Istanbul, Turkey. I co-presented with my former M.S. student (now pursuing her Ph.D. in Russian Literature at another institution while teaching Russian Language at our university) based on her historical and qualitative thesis research in which she compared the first-ever national 2008 External Knowledge Testing in her Ukrainian country of origin to the historical onset of ST in the U.S. We went to our session location in advance to familiarize ourselves with the setting and to ensure the technology was in place. A Lebanese professor, who teaches in higher education in her country of origin, was there to attend the session and started a conversation with us. The title of our presentation, "Border Transmission and Reproduction Déjà Vu: Ukrainian External Independent Knowledge Testing—Reflections in the Mirror of U.S. Standardized Testing," captured her interest. Even before the session began, we discovered our topic was controversial because of our critical perspective.

As conference sessions go, ours was well attended by 25-30 people from almost as many different countries represented. There were two other countries and comparative topics in our session. Questions for all presenters were held until the end after everyone presented. Evidently, I have been naïve for quite some time because I was unprepared for the lively Q&A that followed regarding our research. Until our session, I remained blissfully unaware the extent to which ST from the U.S. has been exported globally. Plainly, we struck a nerve with most of our colleagues. From the discussion that followed directed at our research, it appeared to us that ST not only is well-received by our global counterparts, but that for many, it never was questioned critically regarding the numerous flaws and negative effects noted above.

After our session, I went outside to relax briefly. A young lady who attended our session stopped to visit with me. She is Brazilian by birth and informed me that Brazilian higher education institutions require the GRE. When I brought up my passion for Critical Race Theory (CRT), she smiled and informed me that she studied for three years with Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, and Claude Steele—all prominent CRT scholars. She likely was the only individual attending our session who was familiar with, understood, much less agreed with, our position.

This experience provided considerable material for my reflection. After returning from the conference, I visited with a colleague and shared what happened. To my surprise, he challenged our critical assessment of ST and informed me that he knows personally an administrator for one of the major testing companies in the U.S. He explained that in his conversation with this person, he was informed that the company exercises care in test construction with the host country’s interested parties to ensure native language and culture are represented and not misinterpreted. After visiting the company’s web site to see for myself, I engaged in more reflection about this phenomenon. What struck me is that what is highly likely in this international ST-creating process is that the same flaws and biases inherent in the U.S. system also are reproduced in each country constructing “culturally sensitive” ST. For example, as stated above, ST represents an outdated factory model of schooling in the U.S., especially in terms of social efficiency, social control, and maintaining social mobility for the status quo. As I continued my conversation with my colleague, I continued to delineate the negative aspects of ST. One comment made by my colleague that struck yet another chord, was his statement that ST in many countries is used for placement in education. This, of course, also caused me consternation as I responded that placement represents tracking—from my perspective yet one more oppressive and outdated practice that remains deeply entrenched to the detriment of many in the U.S. In a final attempt to convince my colleague, I posed the question, “Do we want our students to be good test takers or to be able to understand, engage, embrace creativity, and be able to apply what they know?” It was this question that finally afforded success in relaying my concerns about ST to my colleague.

I continue to contemplate this conundrum of ST plaguing our schools and educational system in the U.S. With every semester since the passing of NCLB, my undergraduate foundations preservice students enter my class increasingly expecting me to tell them what to think and how to do “it”. Colleagues at other institutions indicate similar observations in their parallel classes. I anticipate that this will continue to worsen with each class of K-12 students in our public education environments who are subjected to the edicts of NCLB.

Thus, I now am acutely and painfully aware of the global infestation of ST. The oppressive biases and stultifying effects of ST now appear to be accepted uncritically in numerous countries. Moreover, ST reinforces competition and isolation rather than cooperation, collaboration, and understanding—the latter qualities needed to serve all humans productively in our global setting. U.S. education is revered deeply by many international communities. Will this, in turn, affect the success of international professionals seeking to live and work in the U.S.? Will ST ensure for them that they are no longer required to start their education over in the U.S. in order to pursue a profession they were educated for and practiced, perhaps for decades, in their country of origin but their “foreign” education and experience is inadequate by U.S. standards? I doubt it.

Ultimately, my question remains: Is exporting standardized testing the best practice U.S. education has to offer?

Kay Ann Taylor is Associate Professor of the Foundations of Education, American Ethnic Studies at Kansas State University. Her article, the Poverty's Multiple Perspectives, appeared in our winter 2009 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy on the theme, The Hidden Dimensions of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty and Education.

Ideology vs. Sensibilities

I am often amazed at the great divide between people when ideological positions become reified to the point that we are blind to the life experiences and suffering of real individuals. This morning, I read an article in the Denver Post entitled, “Focus on Family says anti-bullying efforts in schools push gay agenda.” http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_15928224#ixzz0yhBtHIjB The conservative Christian media ministry group sees efforts to confront the problem of bullying and cyber-bullying in the public schools as part of a “gay agenda.” In the post below, Warren J. Blumenfeld, an Associate Professor of Multicultural and International Curriculum Studies at Iowa State University, looks at the real life experiences of children who confront this kind of bullying and the devastating effects it can have.

My “Gay Agenda”:
A Response to Focus on the Family
A Commentary by Warren J. Blumenfeld


Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian media ministry organization, asserted in published accounts (“Focus on Family says anti-bullying efforts in schools push gay agenda,” The Denver Post, http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_15928224, 8/29/2010) that gay rights advocates are forcing their viewpoints (their so-called “gay agenda”) in schools in the guise of bullying prevention.

Focus on the Family spokesperson, Candi Cushman, asserted that gay activists are the real schoolyard bullies while conservative Christians are the victims. According to Cushman, “We feel more and more that activists are being deceptive in using anti-bullying rhetoric to introduce their viewpoints, while the viewpoint of Christian students and parents are increasingly belittled.”

I have been gay most of my life, probably all of my life, and I have been involved in community organizing for the past 40 years, and I still don’t understand this term “Gay Agenda.” If you talk to two random “gay activists,” you will most likely find multiple viewpoints toward social change.

If making schools safe and welcoming spaces for students, faculty, and staff of all sexual identities and gender expressions (as well as racial, ethnic, socioeconomic class, religious, ability backgrounds, ages, everyone), then yes indeed -- this is certainly part of my “gay agenda.” Let us look at the reasons why this must be part of all of our agendas, including that of Focus on the Family.

Ryan Patrick Halligan was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1990. His parents described him as a rather shy boy growing up, who early on exhibited developmental delays in his speech, language, and motor skills. The family moved to Essex Junction, Vermont, where, by the fifth grade his peers bullied him at school on a regular basis. Rumors soon circulated throughout the school that Ryan was gay. By middle school in the seventh grade, his classmates continually teased and harassed him on school grounds and extended their taunts over email for having a learning disability and for allegedly being gay. On October 7, 2003, feeling that he could no longer live with the constant abuse, Ryan Patrick Halligan took his life. He was 13 years old.

Reports (Spero News, 2006) indicate that Ryan displayed many of the symptoms of youth targeted by face-to-face and on-line cyberbullying: he spent long hours on his computer, and he was secretive regarding his interactions on communication and information technologies. His parents saw him manifest a number of changes in his behavior: he increasingly lacked interest in engaging in social activities that included his peers, and he exhibited a pronounced change in his overall attitude, his appearance, and his habits.

Ryan’s father, John P. Halligan, established a web site in loving tribute to his son as a clarion call to prevent what happened to Ryan from impacting the lives of any other young people. John Halligan expressed his hope:

“This site is dedicated to the memory of our son Ryan and for all young people suffering in silence from the pain of bullying and having thoughts of suicide. We hope young people become less ashamed to ask for help when feeling suicidal. We hope adults gain knowledge from our tragedy. As a society, we need to find better ways to help our young people through their most difficult growing years (RyanPatrickHalligan.org).”

The American Psychological Association (APA) passed a resolution (2004) calling on educational, governmental, business, and funding agencies to address issues of face-to-face and cyberbullying. In the resolution, they particularly addressed acts of harassment “about race, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity” (p. 1). In addition, the resolution specifically emphasized the high rate of bullying around issues of sexual identity, gender expression, and disability:

“[C]hildren and youth with disabilities and children and youth who are lesbian, gay, or transgender, or who are perceived to be so may be at particularly high risk of being bullied by their peers.”

Though too late to help Ryan Patrick Halligan as someone with a disability and who was perceived as gay, possibly this resolution can assist in developing policies and can ultimately help in the reduction of bullying behaviors.

GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) found in its 2007 National School Climate Survey of 6,209 middle and high school students that 86.2% of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students experienced harassment at school in the past year, 44.1% reported being physically harassed, and 22.1% reported being physically assaulted at school in the past year, 73.6% heard derogatory remarks such as “faggot” or “dyke” frequently or often at school, 60.8% felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation, 38.4% felt unsafe because of their gender expression, and 32.7% skipped a day of school in the past month because of feeling unsafe. The report also found that the grade point average of students who were more frequently harassed because of their sexual orientation or gender expression was almost half a grade lower than for students who were less often harassed (2.8 versus 2.4).

On a positive note, the survey also discovered that schools can make a marked and powerful difference when they directly and visibly address the problem of bullying and harassment.

Students who are the targets of harassment and attacks by their peers are associated with higher rates of mental health problems. Risk factors for those targeted include increased school absenteeism, school difficulties including slipping grades, and dropping out of school. Also, they have increased risk of alcohol and drug use and abuse, as well as psychosomatic symptoms. They are also linked to serious mental health problems including depression, anxiety disorders, increased fear and withdrawal from family and peers, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), low self esteem, poor body image, suicidal ideation, attempts, and completion.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are integral members of families throughout this nation and the world. If Focus on the Family is seriously concerned with improving the quality of life and is truly focusing on families, they will join us in this effort to work to secure the safety and the equity of educational outcomes for all people, including our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.

Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, Associate Professor of Multicultural and International Curriculum Studies at Iowa State University. He is co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States.

Permission was granted to publish this commentary.


To view state laws on anti-bullying, go to: http://www.bullypolice.org/

To see an example of a Middle School Cyberbullying Curriculum developed by the Seattle Public Schools, go to:
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/prevention/cbms.html

Some Sad Statistics

Check out George Will's column in today's Washington Post:


For black children, daunting divides in achievement and family life
by George Will
Washington Post

A Dangerous Proposal

Editor: Today we welcome a post by guest blogger, Joel Shatzky. Dr. Shatzky is a contributor to the Huffington Post where readers can read his series of articles on the topic, "Educating for Democracy." Check out: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-shatzky/

In his post to our blog below, Dr. Shatzky asks us to consider a "dangerous" proposal.


A Dangerous Proposal

by Joel Shatzky
“Unofficial” Blogger “Educating for Democracy” on Huffington Post

A number of recent news items on education should demonstrate to educators how little attention the political establishment has paid to the legitimate concerns of teachers. That is because the so-called “educational reform” movements that were initiated during the Clinton Administration, codified by the Bush Administration’s “No Child Left Behind” program, and intensified by the Obama Administration’s “Race to the Top” have little if anything to do with improving education. They have to do with creating the illusion that they are improving education.

To improve education would mean also improving the social and economic life of young learners who are disadvantaged because of racial, ethnic and class discrimination by an economic system that is consistently failing to provide good-paying jobs to an increasing number of working class and lower middle class workers. This is a systemic problem and using the schools as the whipping boy for its failure is one way in which politicians deal with serious problems: distract the public with a simplistic solution instead of a challenging one.

The fraudulence of the “Educational Miracle” that improved test scores since Michael Bloomberg took control of the New York City schools system was revealed in a report by Daniel Koretz and Jennifer Jennings of Harvard University ( “State’s Exams Became Easier to Pass, Education Officials Say.” NY Times. 7/20/10). The findings of the study which included such practices as “test[ing] a narrow part of the curriculum, particularly in math, and . . .[that] questions were often repeated year to year . . .” exposed the manipulation of test scores to create the illusion of improved learning. The “higher standards” that Chancellor Klein is promising will be no more valid than the present “lower standards” the NYC school system has been promoting since the emphasis will continue to be on test prep instead of education.

The following day (7/ 21/10) The Times reported that 27 states are adopting “National Standards” for their education curriculums so as to be eligible for some of the “Race to the Top” funds by August 2. Laudable as it might be to have “national standards” (France has them), what procedures are going to be used to measure the success—or failure—of schools to “educate” their students up to these standards? Will there be penalties, as there are now, of school closings, student dislocation, loss of tenure, seniority, and, as a consequence, experienced teachers as a product of establishing and testing for these “standards?” If they are so important, why shouldn’t they be required for all schools in the country, private as well as public?

Although I know of no systematic study on the practices of private schools, from their literature and my discussions with private school students and teachers concerning testing, these educators do not spend any significant amount of time, if at all, “prepping” their students for standardized tests. It would be an interesting project to find out exactly how many private and elite public school teachers actually take these programs seriously, especially if they are left alone to teach and not play the role of bookkeepers.

Steve Nelson, the School Head at one of the more prestigious private schools in New York City, The Calhoun School, whose alumni include Ben Stiller, Wendy Wasserstein, the late playwright, and Peggy Guggenheim, the philanthropist, is cited in the school’s website: “While Steve acknowledges that standardized tests can help schools determine which content areas of their programs need strengthening, they fail to benefit students in any real way and can actually cause harm. By measuring a very narrow range of abilities--most notably, the ability to take a standardized test--the tests provide a mere snapshot of the student, and cause him or her to be defined by test scores alone. The tests do not account for different learning styles.”

This statement echoes that of thousands of educators across the nation; the only difference is that The Calhoun School recognizes and limits the potential abuses of standardized tests while public school teachers are increasingly at risk in doing so. Having been born to wealth or privilege is in itself an advantage for any young learner at a private school. The programs spreading throughout the country that will cripple public schools only increase the disadvantage of others.

In the research I’ve done on a pamphlet I’m preparing for those who read my blog, “Why Our Economic System Is Unsustainable (And What You Can Do About It),”
one of the many statistics I’ve discovered is that 43% of working people earn less than they spend and that the average family is going deeper into debt every year since long before the present Recession. This is due, in large part, to the stagnating wages that have, at least for men, remained very much the same as they had thirty-five years ago. By deflecting this wage stagnation through blaming the public schools, the political and economic leaders in this country have an excuse for the increasing trend toward economic—and I would add political—inequality.

The two principal initiators of these school “reforms,” Rod Paige under the Bush Administration and Arne Duncan under the Obama Administration, have been shown to be failures, if not frauds in the case of Paige, in the programs they administered as the superintendants of schools in Houston and Chicago. In Paige’s case, the improved test scores were found, in some instances, to be the product of cheating, and many of the statistics were skewed by not counting drop out rates. In Duncan’s case, some of his “reforms” proved even more lethal as rival gangs, forced to share the same “turf” because one of their schools was closed, began to wage gang wars, reflected in the rise in the recent murder rate in Chicago. Yet there has been no serious re-examination of the validity of Paige’s and Duncan’s programs in view of their actual records as “educators.”

The issues I’ve raised in this blog have been discussed and debated for almost a decade in one form or another as teachers have become more aware of the danger to their profession: its quality, integrity and the respect it should receive as these repressive, anti-intellectual and sorry excuses for “educational innovation” seem to be taking hold throughout the country. The issue of the rise of charter schools would be the subject for another blog but suffice it to say that from what I can see, they do not provide a solution to the problems of school learning and, in many cases, exacerbate them. Diane Ravitch’s study, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, is an excellent analysis of the way in which what might have been a good idea has turned into a nightmare.

But what is to be done? Instead of a Modest Proposal, I would like to offer a Dangerous Proposal. The only way the leaders of this country and enforcers of this policy are going to realize that they have to rethink their agenda is by teachers getting their attention. I believe that evidence of the strength of teacher opposition to testing instead of teaching is through a “Sick of Testing Sick Out”: a national “sick out” that would be determined by education activists and those among the three million teachers in this country who recognize that these destructive practices must stop. They must also offer, as they certainly should, alternatives to testing and a clear explanation as to why these programs have been bad for students.

I am a retiree with a pension and so I realize that there is a danger in organizing a national “sick out” for the future careers of young as well as experienced teachers. But I remember when my parents felt that they had to have a union to protect them from arbitrary treatment by principals and school boards and risked their jobs and pensions to go on strike with Albert Shanker back in the 1950’s. A one-day “sick-out” might be the only way to get the attention of politicians who assume that “business as usual” is the way to solve a serious social issue. In Florida, a “Right-to-Work” state, the Republican Governor vetoed a bill that would have stripped teachers of almost all collective bargaining rights due, in no small part, to a teacher “sick-out” that was supported by a majority of the parents in the state. Yes, this is a “Dangerous Proposal,” but I believe that doing nothing more than discussing and debating issues we know are ruining our public school system and the future of democracy in this country is even more dangerous.

Note: For any readers interested I am providing a link to a video I wrote and performed in (as the “Drill Instructor”) on the difference between “drilling” and teaching.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D712J1V2Jsg&feature=player_embedded


It was produced by ICOPE (Independent Commission on Public Education) ICOPE@yahoogroups.com .

Independent Commission on Public Education -- http://www.icope.org/

The link to my archived blogs on the Huffington Post is:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-shatzky/


Joel Shatzky is an early-retired English Professor who taught writing and drama at SUNY-Cortland (1968-2005) and is presently teaching English and writing at Kingsborough Community College. He has a half-dozen novels, scholarly, and topical studies to his credit, published by UNC Press, Greenwood Publishers and Drybones Press. Shatzky has published articles on theatre and education in the New York Times, Jewish Currents, Studies in Jewish American Literature, Players, and a half dozen other journals. As a playwright, Shatzky has written eight produced OOB shows, among the most recent, “Amahlia,” at 13th Street Rep. His article, “Education for Democracy,” was the lead article in the Winter 2009-2010 issue of Jewish Currents. Another will be coming out this Fall, a review of Diane Ravitch's study, The Death and Life of the Great American School System and an interview with Dr. Ravitch. Shatzky's book on the decline in student literacy, The Thinking Crisis (with Ellen Hill), was published by Authors Choice Press in 2001. Contact Joel at shatzkyj@cortland.edu. My website is joellshatzky.com.

An Impassioned Defense of Public Education: Diane Ravitch's Speech before the NEA

Below is a transcript of the speech by Diane Ravitch that was delivered before the 2010 Representative Assembly of the National Education Association. We reproduce it with her permission in its entirety to inform our readership.

Ravitch's new book,The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, questions many of her earlier commitments as the Assistant Secretary of Education under the President George H. W. Bush. In her impassioned speech before the National Education Association, where she received its Friend of Education award, Ravitch takes a critical look at the state of today's educational reform movement, the consequences that have followed its implementation, and the betrayal of public education as the "backbone of this democracy."


Speech Delivered at the 2010 NEA Representative Assembly

by Diane Ravitch

Thank you, John Wilson. [Ed.: Dr. Ravitch points out that the transcript on the NEA website omitted her acknowledgement of Dennis Van Roekel as well as John Wilson.] Thank you, all my friends in the NEA. Thanks to all my new friends in Colorado and Massachusetts and California. Thank you so much, California. The first time I spoke about my book was before the NEA scholars group in October. But the first time I went public was in San Jose, California. Thank you.

Let me first thank you so sincerely for this honor. I accept it with humility, with gratitude, and with respect for the more than three million educators that it represents.

Next, I would especially like to thank Camille Zombro of San Diego. Without Camille and without her help and the help of teachers in San Diego, I could not have written chapter 4 of the book. Read it and you will see why.

Well, it’s kind of amazing that this convention is being held in New Orleans. I was, just a few minutes ago, interviewed by documentary filmmakers who said to me, “Well, don’t you know that New Orleans is proving a new model?” The new model consists of wiping out public education and firing the unions, and it’s spreading across the country. And I said, “God forbid.” I pointed out to them what we all used to know, which is that public education is the backbone of this democracy, and we cannot turn it over to privateers.

Since my book appeared in early March, I have started out on what I thought would be a conventional book tour, but it really has turned into a whistle-stop campaign. I have been to 40 different cities and districts. I have another 40 planned starting in September. I talked to union members, to school board members, to administrators, to left-wing think tanks, to right-wing think tanks. I have met with high-level White House staff. I have met with about 40 members of Congress. I would say that I have met so far about 20,000 teachers, and after today I think I am going to increase it to 30,000.

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

Wherever I went, I met teachers who understood that there is a rising tide of hostility to teachers, to the teaching profession, and to teachers’ unions. You see it almost daily in the national media, in Newsweek magazine with its dreadful cover story about firing teachers, and Time magazine with awful columns, and in the New York Times and the Washington Post and all of the major media.

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

And teachers want to know, as you want to know, who will stand up for public schools and their teachers? At every appearance that I’ve made, teachers would come up to me afterward and they would say to me, “Stand up for us. Speak for us. Be our voice wherever you go.” And I promised that I would, and I have.

I promised to speak out against No Child Left Behind. It’s a disaster. It has turned our schools into testing factories. Its requirement that 100 percent of students will be proficient by the year 2014 is totally unrealistic. Any teacher could have told them that. Thousands and thousands of schools have been stigmatized as failing schools because they could not reach a goal that no state, no nation, and no district has ever reached. By setting an impossible goal, No Child Left Behind has delegitimized public education and created a rhetoric of failure and paved the way for privatization.

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

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

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

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

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

Teachers are rightly worried about the Race to the Top. I pledged to keep asking again and again why a Race to the Top replaced equal educational opportunity. Equal educational opportunity is the American way. The race will have a few winners and a lot of losers. That’s what a race means.

Race to the Top encourages states to increase the number of privately managed charters, to pass laws to evaluate teachers by test scores, to promote merit pay, and to agree to close or privatize schools with low scores or to fire all or part of their staff. All of this is wrong.

And thank you for passing a resolution expressing no confidence in Race to the Top. Why expand the number of charters when research shows that on average they don’t get better results than regular public schools? Last year, a major evaluation showed that one out of every six charters will get better results, five out of six charters will get no different results or worse results than the regular public schools. A report released just a couple of weeks ago by Mathematica Policy Research once again shows charter middle schools do not get better results than regular public middle schools.

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

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

If we pursue the path of privatization and deregulation, we better keep in mind what happened with the stock market in 2008. And to those who tout the benefits of vouchers and charters, I want you to point out this example to them, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee has had charters and vouchers now for almost 20 years. Twenty years with vouchers, almost 20 years with charters.

They have seen a steadily declining enrollment in the public schools, and meanwhile research now shows that African-American students in Milwaukee, the supposed beneficiary of all of this choice, have test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, test scores that are below those of their African-American peers in Mississippi and Louisiana.

There was no rising tide. Choice promoted no rising tide, and no boats were lifted. While all of this money was invested in choice, there were no benefits to the students.

The Race to the Top plan to use test scores to evaluate teachers is a very bad idea, badly implemented. Legislatures should not decide how to evaluate teachers.

SB6 was wrong in Florida. Thank you to the Florida Education Association and to all the parents and friends who stood with you who defeated that pernicious piece of legislation. And thanks to you for persuading Governor Charlie Crist to do the right thing by vetoing it. Now you have got to make sure that whoever is the next governor will veto it again if it dares to come back again.

191 is wrong in Colorado. Sorry to say that it was passed. It was signed into law, and the teachers may stand to be fired because the test scores didn’t go up consistently. And these are matters that are, in many cases, beyond their control. Teachers should be judged by professional standards and not by a political process. Research does not support evaluating teachers by test scores.

Students are not randomly assigned to classes. Teachers’ so-called effectiveness fluctuates depending on which students happen to be in a teacher’s class. The single most reliable predictor of test scores is poverty, and poverty, in turn, is correlated to student attendance, to family support, and to the school’s resources.

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

You know, a lot of teachers don’t pay attention to the national scene. They are busy teaching kids. They don’t pay attention to what’s happening in Washington. But when the Central Falls staff, the entire staff, was fired without a single teacher having an evaluation, the message went out that there is a new game of punishing teachers. And the message also went out when this was endorsed by Secretary Duncan and then reaffirmed by President Obama. This is not a good message.

We should thank our teachers, not fire them, not threaten them, and not close their schools.

Merit pay is another of the useless fads of our time. Merit pay has nothing to do with education. It destroys teamwork. It incentivizes teachers to compete with each other for money instead of collaborating for each other for the benefit of children.

Teachers need to share what they know and work towards one common goal — helping children and young people grow and develop. Merit pay will promote teaching to not very good tests. It may or may not improve scores, but it definitely will not improve education.

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

Currently, there is a campaign underway to eliminate tenure and seniority. To remove job protections from senior teachers would destroy the profession. Supervisors will save money by firing the most expensive teachers. Imagine a hospital staffed by residents and interns with no doctors. Bad idea.

Instead of the current wave of so-called reforms, we should ask ourselves how to deliver on our belief that every student in this nation should learn not only basic skills, but should have a curriculum that includes the arts, history, geography, civics, foreign languages, mathematics, science, physical education, and health. But instead of this kind of rich curriculum, all they are getting is a heavy dose of high-stakes testing and endless test preparation. And as the stakes increase for teachers and schools, there will be more emphasis on test prep and not what children need.

Policymakers have been far too silent about the role of the family. Teachers know that education begins at home, and that when families take responsibility, students are likely to arrive in school ready to learn. We need, not a Race to the Top, but a commitment to provide greater resources for those children who are in the greatest need. Schools and school districts continue to vary dramatically in their access to resources. The role of the federal government in education is to level the playing field, not to set off a competition for money. Nor do we expect the federal government to tell states and districts how to reform themselves based on the Chicago experience.

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

We need experienced principals who are themselves master teachers. We do not need a wave of newcomers who took a course called “How to be a principal.” We need superintendents who are wise and experienced educators, not lawyers and businessmen.

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

So here’s a thought for NEA. Print up four million bumper stickers that say, “I am a public schoolteacher, and I vote — and so does my family.”

Do not support any political figure who opposes public education. Stand up to the attacks on public education. Don’t give them half a loaf, because they will be back the next day for another slice, and the day after that for another slice.

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

For an interesting interview with Diane Ravitch, see http://blog.ceaohio.org/wordpress/?p=997

More on the League of Democratic Schools

In a post below, we described a visit to the Westside Village Magnet School in Bend, Oregon, one of the schools in the League of Democratic Schools. In the League's May newsletter, readers can read updates on the other schools. See page 6 for the highlights from LODS schools.

John Goodlad, the founder of the League of Democratic Schools, has recently published three articles in the Washington Post where readers can gain a deeper understanding of the motivations behind his life's work.

See:

Goodlad on school reform: Are we ignoring lessons of last 50 years? Part 1


Goodlad: Straight Talk About Schools, Part 2


Goodlad: How to help our schools -- Part 3



Common Characteristics of LODS Schools

 Democratic Purpose: LODS schools believe the primary
purpose of schooling is to develop in young people the
knowledge, skills, and attitudes students require for
successful participation in our nation’s social and political
democracy.

 Student Achievement: Students in such schools are
successful academically and socially.

 Ongoing Professional Development: All members of the
school community engage in continuous learning.

 Approaches to Learning: These are schools that use a wide
variety of approaches to learning, including engaging students
with parents and other adults within the community.

 Personalization: These schools deliberately personalize the
relationships among students, teachers, parents, and
administrators by faculty members’ gathering as a group for
dialogue and by making other arrangements to facilitate
communications among the members of the school community.


2010 goals for the League schools focus on developing "ongoing, sustainable mechanisms for deepening our community’s understanding and engagement around the public purpose of schools in our democracy."

A New Voice Enters the EcoJustice Debate

We announced below a lively debate taking place in our Rejoinder Section of the journal on the appropriateness of "crisis language" in engaging people in the conversation over sustainability and ecology.

Check out our most recent voice in the debate. See Don Burgess's article,
"Rethinking Eco-justice Within a Biophilic Framework: A Rejoinder," in the Rejoinder Section.

There are serious implications here for the way we introduce the young into the questions about our planet and our place in the web of life.

Join the debate.

Writing at the Master’s Table

Teri McMurtry-Chubb, a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Educational Controversy, has published an article in a recent law review that we believe our readers will want to check out. Teri uses Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism to examine possible causes, problems and solutions concerning the low numbers of women of color among legal writing professors, a field that is dominated by women. As a lawyer and law professor, Teri has brought an important legal perspective to our editorial board that reviews papers coming from all disciplinary areas. She provides a brief summary of the article below.

By Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb

"Writing at the Master's Table: Reflections on Theft, Criminality and Otherness in the Legal Writing Profession" by Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb is now available in the online version of the Drexel Law Review (Fall 2009). You may access the article using the following link: http://www.drexel.edu/law/lawreview/current.aspx


This article considers the convergence of race and gender marginalizations in the legal writing profession, a profession comprised almost entirely of women. Prior to its publication, scholarship on the marginalization of women in legal writing was written only about and from the perspective of white women. The content of this article seeks to deepen the discussion introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw in her seminal work on race and gender intersections, which argues that a single-axis framework of analysis that examines race and gender discrimination separately is insufficient to deal with the overlapping oppressions women of color face. Thus far, the literature on how legal writing programs discriminate against women lacks this intersectional dimension. The article draws on the narrative traditions of Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism to examine issues of race, gender, and status three-dimensionally within the racialized, gendered, and elitist structure that is the legal academy. The theoretical framework is provided by Adrien K. Wing’s multiplicative theory and praxis of being, in which Wing describes women of color as indivisible persons with multiple race and gender consciousnesses. The author examines the multiple race, gender, and status consciousnesses of women of color who are legal writing professionals.

Part I of the article highlights the precarious position of women of color in the legal academy and in the legal writing profession. Part II examines the characteristics of LRW programs that deter women of color from seriously considering legal writing instruction as a profession. Part III explores how the low number of LRW faculty of color affects how all law students are taught legal writing and reasoning skills. Finally, Part IV proposes some solutions.

Philosophy for Adolescents : the Teachers College Philosophy Outreach Program

Author David Hansen, whose article, A Response to a New Book about Maxine Greene’s Philosophy, appears in our current issue of journal, writes to tell us about a new project between the Philosophy and Education Program at Teachers College and the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University that is engaging young adolescents in the wonderful world of philosophy. David points out that most high school students throughout Latin America and Europe study philosophy . One wonders why such an important discipline is largely missing in U.S. schools. David describes the project below:

Philosophy Outreach Program
Teachers College and Columbia University
New York City

By David Hansen

The Philosophy Outreach Program is an after-school project designed to engage middle and high school students in philosophical discourse. A collaboration between the Philosophy and Education Program at Teachers College and the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, the Program currently involves eight high schools in New York City. Its faculty sponsors are Professors David Hansen and Megan Laverty at TC, and Professors Philip Kitcher and Achille Varzi at Columbia. The Outreach Program’s teachers visit the schools in pairs, one student each from TC and Columbia, in order to engage middle and high school students in philosophical inquiry. Tim Ignaffo and Guillermo Marini, who are Philosophy and Education Ph.D. students and co-founders of the program, say that the collaboration between TC and Columbia has proved to be an exceptional opportunity for benefiting school communities.

In justifying the program, Guillermo points out that most high school students throughout Latin America and Europe study philosophy. These experiences have inspired many international students in TC’s Program of Philosophy and Education to pursue the field as a career. He wonders if this opportunity “happened to American students, what might it lead them to?”

The Philosophy Outreach Program believes that adolescents are in a wonderful place to begin studying philosophy, as the decisions many of them make at that age about life, self, work and college are closely related to universal questions addressed by philosophy. Tim Ignaffo, who is currently the coordinator of the Outreach Program, suggests that young people ask themselves difficult questions about life’s meaning and purpose. Providing students arguments and the vocabulary to discuss these questions can be very empowering. He also notes that at a certain point in these discussions a realization dawns that “the questions that are popping up in my head have been engaged by every generation.” Students’ testimonials about their enjoyment of philosophy have increased participation in the Program at every school. The Outreach Program’s teachers have also been invited to be guest lecturers in some of the high school classrooms, speaking, for example, to science and English classes.

The Program is supported by recurring grants from The Squire Foundation, as well as from the Teaching Center at Columbia and the Arts and Humanities Department at TC. The Squire Foundation’s long-term goal is for U.S. schools to follow the European and Latin American example, making philosophy part of the core curriculum in all high schools. Though Guillermo and Tim appreciate that this goal is “extremely ambitious,” they note the recent adoption of philosophy as a required course in Ontario, Canada. To further their aims, the students in the Outreach Program are organizing a conference for this coming October, 2010, on teaching philosophy in schools.

C.A. Bowers critiques Bill Ayers' book on Social Justice Education

Editor: Both C.A. Bowers and Bill Ayers have written articles for the Journal of Educational Controversy in the past. Among other things, this blog is a forum for authors to continue the conversations started in the journal. Below Chet reviews Bill Ayers book, The Handbook on Social Justice in Education.


Is It Relevant as a Guide for Understanding Social Justice Issues in the Twenty-First Century? A Critique of the Handbook on Social Justice Education

Author: C. A. Bowers

The Handbook on Social Justice in Education, edited by William Ayers, Therese Quinn, and David Stovall was so highly regarded that the reference librarian at the University of Oregon placed it in a special collection out of a concern that it may be lost or damaged if allowed to be taken out of the library. As I read through the many aspects of social justice issues to be addressed by educators, which range widely from historical perspectives to the continuing challenges in the areas of race, gender, disabilities, and globalization, I was struck by how dated the collection of well-intentioned essays had already become. Perhaps the reference librarian was unaware that the Handbook would perpetuate the silences that characterize the last 30 or so years of thinking about how teacher educators should address social justice issues. There are some books that never become dated, such as Eric Havelock’s The Muse Learns to Write (1986), Karl Polyani’s The Great Transformation (2002 edition), and Daniel Worster’s Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1997). Other books, including many that address changes occurring in the world’s ecosystems, quickly become dated as their authors either continue to remain silent about the ecological crisis or write about environmental changes and their impacts on cultures that are quickly surpassed by more recent changes.

Books by educational reformers that fail to acknowledge that the ecological crisis is altering the prospects of humanity in fundamental ways cease to be useful guides for how to address the new injustices that are being magnified by recent environmental changes. Their usefulness is not only limited, but becomes part of the mis-education that students encounter in other university courses that fail to address the cultural roots of the ecological crisis. But the Handbook suggests another failure. Namely, it serves as evidence of the failure of educational theorists to break out of their mutual quoting circles that share the same silences. Unfortunately, many graduate students are likely to be encouraged to consider the Handbook as a primary scholarly resource that should guide their thinking, which would again lead to reproducing the silences and misconceptions their professors learned to take-for-granted in their own years of graduate study. These may seem like overly harsh criticisms of the editors and the contributors of what must have been initially viewed as an important contribution to overcoming social injustices in society. As scientists are warning that we may have as little as a couple of decades before global warming can no longer be slowed, and as we are already witnessing with the collapse of local ecosystems the suffering and deaths of millions of people, it’s time that educational theorists be held accountable for not rethinking the orthodoxies that now make their prescriptions for addressing social justice issues so dated.

My criticisms are not directed at such sensible recommendations as hiring faculty that are representative of a multicultural society, or at the need to incorporate into the curriculum awareness of the range of social injustices—ranging from race, gender, poverty, etc., or for the need for students to learn about the systemic roots of these forms of injustice. Rather, my criticisms fall into three different categories.

First, This 774 page tome has only one reference to “ecological analysis”, and it focuses on patterns of human interaction--and not on the cultural and natural system ecologies. And the phrase “ecological crisis” appears in one sentence along with the usual list of unresolved social problems. Given that even Wal-Mart as well as other major contributors to a hyper- consumer, toxic producing lifestyle are attempting to lighten their ecological footprint, and the plethora of books addressing both the nature of the ecological crisis and ways that local communities are working to recover their traditions of mutual support and self-reliance, the reader might expect that social justice issues might be understood in a more current way. There is now a huge literature on the impact of water shortages being experienced as a result of climate change, and it would seem that this would be a critical social justice issue. In the United States alone, twenty percent of the population does not have access to clean water. World-wide, there are more people dying from the lack of potable water than are being killed in current wars. The range of toxins that are affecting the development of children, as well as the range of illnesses experienced throughout society from the thousands of synthetic chemicals used in the manufacturing process, have been the focus of attention since Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring (now in its 27th edition), and the first Earth Day held in 1970. Climate change is now recognized as responsible for the melting of ice fields that are the source of water for hundreds of millions of people, as well as the droughts that are forcing people to become environmental refugees. The regions of the United States experiencing serious droughts in the last few years are contributing to unemployment, changes in diets, and a further decline into poverty. The evidence has been available in responsible media that social injustices will expand exponentially if one considers the implications of the changes occurring in just one area of ecological degradation. Scientists, for example, are documenting that the chemistry of the world’s oceans is becoming more acidic and is having an adverse impact on the bottom of the ocean food chain upon which the fish stocks humans rely upon depend. This, combined with over-fishing, has already led to the collapse of major fisheries in different regions of the world. If the shortage of fresh water does not lead to international conflicts, the lack of ocean sources of protein will.
One has to ask why these well-publicized changes have escaped the attention of the contributors to the Handbook. If they had given any thought to the social justice issues that have been the focus of a wide range of national and international organizations, one might have expected a radical reconceptualization of the social justice issues that can be traced directly to the globalization of the western model of development. These are issues related to actual homelessness, disease, death, hunger, and the refugee status of millions that involves the loss of the ability to achieve one’s most basic potential as a human being. How does one explain the silence on the part of the contributors to the Handbook? One possible explanation can be found in the long list of books cited at the end of each chapter. Most of the citations refer to articles and books written by colleagues in the field who share a similar educational background. There are few books cited written by environmentalists, by scientists concerned with how our bodies and environments are being poisoned by our industrial/consumer oriented lifestyle, and by community activists.

Second: While the Handbook includes recommendations for achieving social justice in nine areas, the failure to address how the ecological crisis, as well as the impact of economic globalization, are expanding the list of social injustices experienced by the majority of the world’s population, leads to an excessive amount of repetition. References to the contributions and failures of past approaches to multicultural education, to the need to foster critical thinking and a transformative lifestyle, to anti-biases in curriculum materials and pedagogy, and to the need to create positive learning environments, are important. But the repetitiveness of these recommendations does not help the reader obtain an understanding of the curricular changes that can help alleviate the scale of poverty, and will provide the conceptual basis for exercising communicative competency in resisting the further commodification and monetizing of the local cultural and environmental commons that is a major contributor to poverty. Again, the contributors rely upon the formulaic prescriptions of the late twentieth century, which include more critical thinking, more concern about the plight of social groups and individuals who face a myriad forms of injustice. But the prescriptions do not translate into recommendations for how individual and community gardens can be promoted, how traditional technologies for preserving food can be intergenerationally passed along, how volunteerism and mentoring in a wide range of non monetized and mutually supportive activities can be promoted, and how to enable students to recognize the differences between their experiences in the cultural commons and market-oriented sub-cultures that will lead to the development of the communicative competence necessary for resisting the further enclosure of what remains of their non-monetized lives.
With the spread of economic globalization, colonization to a western individualistic/consumer oriented lifestyle, and the unrelenting quest for new technologies and markets, one of the dominant features of the future will be scarcity—in access to protein, to potable water and water for agriculture, to sources of a dignified and community supporting livelihood, and to the intergenerational knowledge that has enabled many cultures to achieve a degree of self-reliance without destroying the bioregions they were dependent upon. The double bind the world is now facing is that the emphasis on material progress is leading to more forms of scarcity—including the loss of intergenerational knowledge and skills that enable people to live less consumer dependent lives.

Several contributors focus on the systemic causes of social injustices, and suggest that students should be engaged in a discussion of how to bring about needed changes. However, what they miss is that students should also be encouraged to engage in auto-ethnographies of their local communities in order to identify the forms of intergenerational knowledge and skill that need to be renewed. Indeed, the possibility that critical inquiry should also lead to an awareness of what should be conserved goes unrecognized by the contributors to the Handbook. Traditions such as the gains in civil liberties, as well as recent achievements by the labor, civil rights, feminist, and now environmental movements—all essential to addressing unresolved social justice issues—need to be part of the curriculum. Passing this knowledge on to the next generation is part of the process of conserving important social justice gains. Social justice education, contrary to the impression left by some of the contributors, should not represent all traditions as being the source of oppressive. The legacy of previous social justice struggles should be part of the collective memory, as it provides evidence of the importance of collective action focused on the common good—a value that is increasingly being marginalized in our consumer and technologically addicted culture.

Third: Since both the students who are victims of social injustice, as well as those who will dedicate their lives to improving the prospects of others, will encounter mostly a middle class, consumer-oriented curriculum that may include shallow introductions to the cultures of minority groups, the following questions arise: Do the contributors to the Handbook provide guidance for recognizing how to reframe the analogs that are encoded in the vocabulary that students encounter in most areas of the curriculum? Will readers of the Handbook be able to recognize how the vocabulary in the curriculum serves as a form of linguistic colonization of the present by past thinkers who were unaware of environmental limits? Granted, social justice-oriented educators are more likely to be aware of the linguistic colonization that goes on in multicultural classrooms. But they are unlikely to be aware of the history of the analogs that frame the meaning of words in the curriculum they take-for-granted, such as “individualism”, “progress”, “traditions”, “ecology”, and so forth. Introducing students to the fact that words have a history would seem especially critical in a social justice-oriented curriculum—and there was no mention of this in the Handbook.

Nor is there any discussion of how to introduce students to the many ways in which the idea of individual intelligence is problematic—for ecological, cultural, and moral reasons. It would seem that if the contributors spent less time reading the writings of their professors and colleagues who share the same silences and historically rooted misconceptions, they might be able to focus on how to introduce their students to the many cultural alternatives that serve as evidence that intelligence is not an attribute of the autonomous individual. That is, they might understand how to introduce students to the limited ways they already exercise what can be called ecological intelligence—and the problems that arise in the students’ interpersonal relationships when they assume that the preconceived prejudices, ideas, and judgments they act upon are based on their own perceptions of reality. That is, when they ignore the differences which make a difference in their ongoing relationships with other students, parents, others in society—and in their relations with the other participants in the local and global ecological systems they are part of, their sense of being an autonomous individual (which was promoted in different ways both by Rene Descartes and by many current educational reformers) cannot help but promote further social injustice. There are many non-western examples of how the exercise of ecological intelligence fosters mutually supportive community relationships as well as how to live in more ecologically sustainable ways, but the question to be asked of social justice educators is: How do we begin to help students make the transition to exercising in a more conscious way their ecological intelligence? Somewhere in the 774 pages of the Handbook this question should have been raised, particularly since one of the major contributors to the many forms of social injustice that exist in American society is the lack of awareness of how the hyper-subjective sense of individualism and entitlement marginalizes an awareness of how one’s actions adversely impact others, including cultural groups.

Hopefully, the Handbook will be viewed by educational historians as a well-intentioned effort of educational reformers who are out of touch with the dominant realities of their times. And hopefully, these historians will possess the conceptual ability to explain the linguistic reasons that one generation that has been colonized by many previous generations succeeds in colonizing the next generations. This hope should not be interpreted as giving support to Paulo Freire's universal recommendation that each generation should rename the reality of the previous generation. The process of linguistic colonization is far more complex than he understood or his followers understand today. But this is another story—and another potential source of misunderstanding.
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