Grassroots “Save Our Schools” March on Washington & National Call to Action on July 28-31

This blog has tried to follow some of the grassroots movements in this country as a balance to the official messages coming from Secretary Duncan and the U.S. Department of Education that are often reflected in the mainstream media. We have learned about a march on Washington that will take place July 30th.

This grassroots movement of parents, teachers, students, community activists, and “everyday working people” has been endorsed by educational voices like Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Joel Spring, Rethinking Schools' editors, David Berliner, among many others. Diane Ravitch will be one of the speakers at the DC rally. Prior to the march and rally in the park, participants will be able to participate in a number of seminars, workshops and advocacy meetings hosted by American University.


Here is their call to action:

DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM

For the future of our children, we demand the following…

Equitable funding for all public school communities

• Equitable funding across all public schools and school systems
• Full public funding of family and community support services
• Full funding for 21st century school and neighborhood libraries

End to economically and racially re-segregated schools

End to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation

• Multiple and varied assessments to evaluate students, teachers and schools
• No pay per test performance for teachers and administrators
• End to public school closures based upon test performance

Curriculum developed for and by local school communities

• Support teacher and student access to a wide-range of instructional programs and technologies
• Well-rounded education that develops every students’ intellectual, creative, and physical potential
• Opportunities for multicultural/multilingual curriculum for all students
• Small class sizes that foster caring, democratic learning communities


Teacher, parent and community leadership in forming public education policies

• Educator, parent and community leadership in drafting of new ESEA legislation
• Federal support for local school programs free of punitive and competitive funding
• End political and corporate control of curriculum, instruction and assessment decisions


Finding the current educational policies destructive and their own efforts to speak out largely marginalized, the organizers explain the motivation behind the movement:

Getting to this point has been a long journey. For the last few years, thousands of teachers and parents have been calling for action against No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and, more recently, questioning Race to the Top (RTTT).

Teachers, students, and parents from across the country have staged protests, started blogs, written op-eds, and called and written the White House and the U.S. Department of Education to try to halt the destruction of their local schools.

Numerous efforts have been made to get U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama to listen to US – the teachers, parents, and students who experience the effects of these disastrous policies every day. WE know that NCLB is not working. Unfortunately, it has been almost impossible to make our voices heard. Although we have the knowledge, the expertise, and the relationships with students that make education possible, we have been shut out of the conversation about school reform.

We, like all teachers and parents, want better schools. For our children’s sake, we are organizing to improve our schools – but not through the vehicle known as NCLB. It has been a disaster. Although there are various opinions about the many issues involved with school reform, it is now time to speak with ONE VOICE – that is, No Child Left Behind must not be reauthorized. We reclaim our right to determine how our children will be educated. We are organizing to revitalize an educational system that for too many children focuses more on test preparation than meaningful learning.We demand a humane, empowering education for every child in America.

For more information, go to: http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/

Community Organizing Group Compiles Studies on Charter Schools

A community organizing group based in Mississippi, the Southern Echo, has compiled a list of studies on the charter school movement on their website. The studies include those by the Rand Corporation, Stanford University, Teachers College, Columbia University, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and others. For our readers who would like to check out the various studies in one place, we are providing the link to the research on their website.

The Southern Echo describes its mission as working to empower the African American community through an intergenerational model of effective community organizing. With the mainstream media always covering educational change from the top down model, our readers may be interested in examining this grassroots movement directed at change.

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
New York Times
Published: March 12, 2010

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

To read the entire article, go to: New York Times

**********************************************************
The 2011 summer issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy will engage readers in a conversation on "The Education Our Children Deserve." The Times article reports that "there were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings" of the board. It is time for public intellectuals, scholars, and teachers to join parents, community leaders and the general public in a conversation about the public purposes of our schools in a democratic society. We encourage a wide-range of voices to enter the dialogue and to submit manuscripts.

Go to our "call for submissions" for more information.

Education for Liberation Network Launches New Online Community Forum

In an effort to keep readers of the Journal of Educational Controversy informed on the widening conversation about education across the nation and the globe, we will be using this blog occasionally to update you on other movements. Tara Mack has just announced a new online community forum established by the Education for Liberation Network that I mentioned in an earlier post. Check it out at http://edliberation.ning.com/


From Tara Mack:

Dear Educator,

I am excited to announce that the Education for Liberation Network is now launching an online community that includes discussion forums, member profiles, online chats, groups, an events calendar etc. Please check out this exciting new tool for bringing our community together and register today (http://edliberation.ning.com/).

This new forum also offers the network an opportunity to share the latest news from the fight for a more just education. You'll find recent headlines on the Community Home page in the Just Ed and More Just Ed Headlines section. I will be gathering news items and updating that section once per week. But I need your help to make that site a rich source of information.

Over the coming weeks and months please send me timely articles, blog posts, videos etc. related to liberatory education, both in the classroom and in the wider community. More specifically the items should be education, education organizing and youth organizing related news that prioritize the perspectives, needs and concerns of marginalized communities. This site could be great resource for our community, but only if lots of people contribute. I will publish as many of them as I can.

I hope you will become a member of this online community!

Are Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall Too Radical for Our Students?

Having just posted (below) Nino's song honoring the death of Agustin Gudinon, the farmworker who died of a heat stroke in the fields, we happened to notice this petition on the website of the United Farm Workers. In their petition, they alert the public to a debate taking place over the adoption of new social studies curriculum standards before the Texas State Board of Education. Why are figures like Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall even being challenged?

To read the concerns of the United Farm Workers in their own words, go to their website and see their petition: "Tell Texas not to remove Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall from school books." You can also find news clips on the subject at their website also.

Announcing the new Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal

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

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

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

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

The Perils of Public Scholarship

Yet another tenure case has blown up to become public fodder about issues of academic freedom and the role of the “public scholar.” Notwithstanding the individual misfortune of not gaining tenure, I want to suggest that this case is not really about the perils of doing public scholarship so much as it is about the perils for the future of public scholarship. I do not know Dr. Watkins or his field (finance) and have little to say about whether I agree or disagree with his views or with what the final tenure decision should have been. What I care about is how the notion of “public scholarship” has played out and the (dire) implications it holds for the future.

This is because the issue revolves around a seemingly exemplary public scholar (Boyce D. Watkins) who is situated in another seemingly exemplary institution committed to public scholarship (Syracuse University). And yet, the process and outcome of this case suggests that public scholarship and the notion of an “engaged campus” function as “empty signifiers” that have been implicitly predefined and as such prejudged to “count” only in particular modes. This bodes ill for all who truly believe in and work towards higher education as truly a part of rather than apart from their local and global communities.

This case has national import exactly because “public scholarship” is, as I see it, a subset of a broader movement for community engagement in higher education—a set of loosely interrelated practices and philosophies such as service-learning, civic engagement, community-based research, and participatory action research—that link classrooms and communities and theory with practice towards meaningful and sustained public impact. Public scholarship, per se, has been written about by Jeremy Cohen (at PSU) and others and can be linked fairly directly to, for example, the American Democracy Project and the Carnegie Foundation’s voluntary “community engagement” classification. Indeed, Dr. Watkins has publicly linked his tenure case to his university’s principles for such “scholarship of engagement.”

He is not alone. The last decade has seen an ever-increasing awareness of and buy-in to community engagement. The most recent HERI survey of faculty, for example, found that fully 88 percent believe that colleges should be actively involved with local community issues and the majority feel it is “very important” or “essential” to instill a commitment to community service. Obama’s presidency has only quickened such discussions and put a large chunk of federal dollars on the table to support such service-minded practices in higher education.

Syracuse University, where Dr. Watkins has been practicing his public scholarship, certainly talks this talk. Dr. Nancy Cantor, the president and chancellor of Syracuse University, has invested an immense amount of administrative time and political capital to argue for deeply linking academic expertise with real-world issues through a “scholarship in action”. In a foreword to a policy document “Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University”, Dr. Cantor (with President Steven Levine of the California Institute of the Arts) writes that:

As university presidents and chancellors, we say we want creative scholars who
are also committed to the public good. So how can we create environments that
attract them? Their ranks frequently include faculty of color and women in
underrepresented fields—just the kind we’d like to have. So how can we steer
them away from the revolving door of recruitment without retention? Many faculty
members experience a frustrating clash between their intellectual goals, which
include pursuing community-based scholarship and art-making, and institutional
tenure policies. To draw and keep such talent...we need to look hard at the
culture of the academic workplace...The range of scholarly products has
expanded, as have the pathways for dissemination. If we care about higher
education’s engagement with its communities, the local impact—as well as the
national and international implications of faculty work—must be recognized. And,
if we truly want to encourage the integration of teaching and action research,
we must reward it at tenure time...Even such normally sympathetic fields as
policy studies and social sciences more often tend to discourage junior faculty
members from collaborative work that is interdisciplinary and publicly engaged.
How many times have we heard, “You’d better wait until you get tenure before you
do that”? We brag about the fabulous work of our engaged faculty—but can we get
them promoted?...To attract and keep a diverse faculty, we need flexible but
clear guidelines for recognizing and rewarding public scholarship and artistic
production.

The problem is that such “flexible and clear guidelines” appear to be anything but. There are scant guidelines of what counts as community engagement or a rubric of how one might evaluate such public scholarship. (The only one I am aware of—The National Review Board for the Scholarship of Engagement—appears inactive.) While I am sure the Syracuse University tenure process was not capricious or arbitrary, their faculty manual does not mention how to review someone’s “scholarship in action.”

As such, public scholarship (and community engagement in general) appears to be an empty signifier filled by whichever group is able to wrest control over its definition. This empty signifier works exactly because it is positioned as abstract, neutral, and seemingly obvious. It is a grand narrative of an overarching philosophy and pedagogy that is able to span across and be embedded within all curricular and co-curricular programs and departments in the academy. An entire book series, for example, is devoted to showing how service-learning can be used across all disciplines. Engagement, likewise, is defined by the Carnegie Foundation as, in principle, spread across an entire institution. Yet it is exactly such a conceptualization that causes the community engagement movement to crash against a whole series of pedagogical, political, and institutional limits.

Thus even as the community engagement movement gains increasing visibility and currency in the academy, recent scholarship both within and outside of the movement has become more critical about its impact and sustainability. A recent summit of a who’s-who list of leaders and scholars in the community engagement movement noted that the movement has stalled, due, in part, to its being inadequately conceptualized and highly fragmented; it is, the attendees feared, on the verge of standing “for anything and therefore nothing.”

But that is actually not quite right. Community engagement has indeed come to stand for something. The problem is that this “something”—as an overarching, seemingly good-for-all practice—becomes a diluted and all-too-often innocuous vestige of the original transformational agenda. To take just one example (made all that much more relevant given this tenure case), Syracuse University has recently announced its first cohort of “engagement fellows.” These graduating seniors, the announcement states, “will participate in local projects that incorporate the principles of SU’s Scholarship in Action vision.” The projects include fostering a more cohesive downtown in Syracuse, enhancing sustainable living, and working with local youth on a “Say Yes to Education” initiative. These may be good and worthwhile examples of civic engagement; they are not, though, anything close to a radical or transformational vision as envisioned by the rhetoric of community engagement scholars and activists. And, if forthcoming research just coming out on the Carnegie Foundation’s “seal of approval” are right, neither are the vast majority of institutions deemed as being “engaged.”
I am not suggesting that those Syracuse seniors or most faculty members should be engaged in the practices and guided by the philosophy that has embroiled Dr. Watkins’ tenure case. What I am pointing out is that there is no meaningful or sustained academic discourse as to how we define our terms when we speak of public scholarship or community engagement.

This does not have to be the case. It is quite possible to have a field of study that is able to carefully, critically, and systematically investigate the sphere of democratic engagement and civic action as well as self-reflexively examine and determine its own boundaries, definitions, and norms of intellectual practice. It is possible, in other words, to discipline community engagement by developing “academic homes”—majors, minors, and interdisciplinary centers—where scholars can probe such ideas and practices. Psychology and sociology did this one hundred years ago for their respective fields of study. Women’s studies and Black studies did this thirty years ago. Jewish studies and global studies are doing this today. It is just as possible for a group of scholars to come together today under the umbrella of “community engagement” or some such term in order to focus on developing, critiquing, and expanding what it means to “do” community engagement.

This is not idle speculation. There are in fact several dozen such programs already scattered around the country that have developed academic and administrative structures, practices, and policies that foster sustained, immersive, and consequential outcomes for students, faculty, and the communities with which they work. For example, UC-Santa Cruz’s Community Studies department, Emory & Henry College’s Public Policy & Community Service program, Providence College’s Public and Community Service Studies, and UW-Milwaukee’s Educational Policy and Community Studies department bring together scholars across disciplines and departments to foster discussions—amongst themselves and their students—of what it actually means when we talk about and do things called “citizenship,” “democracy,” and “engagement.”

Being embedded in an academic program such as this goes exactly against the idea of “community engagement” as an empty signifier that seemingly floats across the higher education landscape. Rather, it allows dedicated and committed scholars to actually debate what scholarship in action may actually mean for students, communities, and their particular institution. In the end, of course, Dr. Watkins may not have wanted to be a part of such an academic program; and, even if he was, it may not have helped his tenure case. But what it would have allowed him to do is spend his time engaged in discussions with colleagues who, like him, thought long and hard of what it means to engage the public, in what means, and with what results.

The perils for public scholarship would then of course be different. But for all the discussion about the “public” nature of public scholarship, higher education still functions in highly non-public ways. Dr. Watkins is still evaluated by his peers (and not the larger public) on his academic (and not his public) work. It just so happens that by maintaining public scholarship and community engagement as seemingly universal and abstract signifiers, Dr. Watkins is actually left without any real peers who understand or can knowledgably engage with and critique his academic work. That is a shame not just for the tenure case of Dr. Watkins. It is a shame for all of us who are working to make the “engaged campus” a sustainable reality rather than pie in the sky.

The Perils of Public Scholarship

Yet another tenure case has blown up to become public fodder about issues of academic freedom and the role of the “public scholar.” Notwithstanding the individual misfortune of not gaining tenure, I want to suggest that this case is not really about the perils of doing public scholarship so much as it is about the perils for the future of public scholarship. I do not know Dr. Watkins or his field (finance) and have little to say about whether I agree or disagree with his views or with what the final tenure decision should have been. What I care about is how the notion of “public scholarship” has played out and the (dire) implications it holds for the future.

This is because the issue revolves around a seemingly exemplary public scholar (Boyce D. Watkins) who is situated in another seemingly exemplary institution committed to public scholarship (Syracuse University). And yet, the process and outcome of this case suggests that public scholarship and the notion of an “engaged campus” function as “empty signifiers” that have been implicitly predefined and as such prejudged to “count” only in particular modes. This bodes ill for all who truly believe in and work towards higher education as truly a part of rather than apart from their local and global communities.

This case has national import exactly because “public scholarship” is, as I see it, a subset of a broader movement for community engagement in higher education—a set of loosely interrelated practices and philosophies such as service-learning, civic engagement, community-based research, and participatory action research—that link classrooms and communities and theory with practice towards meaningful and sustained public impact. Public scholarship, per se, has been written about by Jeremy Cohen (at PSU) and others and can be linked fairly directly to, for example, the American Democracy Project and the Carnegie Foundation’s voluntary “community engagement” classification. Indeed, Dr. Watkins has publicly linked his tenure case to his university’s principles for such “scholarship of engagement.”

He is not alone. The last decade has seen an ever-increasing awareness of and buy-in to community engagement. The most recent HERI survey of faculty, for example, found that fully 88 percent believe that colleges should be actively involved with local community issues and the majority feel it is “very important” or “essential” to instill a commitment to community service. Obama’s presidency has only quickened such discussions and put a large chunk of federal dollars on the table to support such service-minded practices in higher education.

Syracuse University, where Dr. Watkins has been practicing his public scholarship, certainly talks this talk. Dr. Nancy Cantor, the president and chancellor of Syracuse University, has invested an immense amount of administrative time and political capital to argue for deeply linking academic expertise with real-world issues through a “scholarship in action”. In a foreword to a policy document “Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University”, Dr. Cantor (with President Steven Levine of the California Institute of the Arts) writes that:

As university presidents and chancellors, we say we want creative scholars who
are also committed to the public good. So how can we create environments that
attract them? Their ranks frequently include faculty of color and women in
underrepresented fields—just the kind we’d like to have. So how can we steer
them away from the revolving door of recruitment without retention? Many faculty
members experience a frustrating clash between their intellectual goals, which
include pursuing community-based scholarship and art-making, and institutional
tenure policies. To draw and keep such talent...we need to look hard at the
culture of the academic workplace...The range of scholarly products has
expanded, as have the pathways for dissemination. If we care about higher
education’s engagement with its communities, the local impact—as well as the
national and international implications of faculty work—must be recognized. And,
if we truly want to encourage the integration of teaching and action research,
we must reward it at tenure time...Even such normally sympathetic fields as
policy studies and social sciences more often tend to discourage junior faculty
members from collaborative work that is interdisciplinary and publicly engaged.
How many times have we heard, “You’d better wait until you get tenure before you
do that”? We brag about the fabulous work of our engaged faculty—but can we get
them promoted?...To attract and keep a diverse faculty, we need flexible but
clear guidelines for recognizing and rewarding public scholarship and artistic
production.

The problem is that such “flexible and clear guidelines” appear to be anything but. There are scant guidelines of what counts as community engagement or a rubric of how one might evaluate such public scholarship. (The only one I am aware of—The National Review Board for the Scholarship of Engagement—appears inactive.) While I am sure the Syracuse University tenure process was not capricious or arbitrary, their faculty manual does not mention how to review someone’s “scholarship in action.”

As such, public scholarship (and community engagement in general) appears to be an empty signifier filled by whichever group is able to wrest control over its definition. This empty signifier works exactly because it is positioned as abstract, neutral, and seemingly obvious. It is a grand narrative of an overarching philosophy and pedagogy that is able to span across and be embedded within all curricular and co-curricular programs and departments in the academy. An entire book series, for example, is devoted to showing how service-learning can be used across all disciplines. Engagement, likewise, is defined by the Carnegie Foundation as, in principle, spread across an entire institution. Yet it is exactly such a conceptualization that causes the community engagement movement to crash against a whole series of pedagogical, political, and institutional limits.

Thus even as the community engagement movement gains increasing visibility and currency in the academy, recent scholarship both within and outside of the movement has become more critical about its impact and sustainability. A recent summit of a who’s-who list of leaders and scholars in the community engagement movement noted that the movement has stalled, due, in part, to its being inadequately conceptualized and highly fragmented; it is, the attendees feared, on the verge of standing “for anything and therefore nothing.”

But that is actually not quite right. Community engagement has indeed come to stand for something. The problem is that this “something”—as an overarching, seemingly good-for-all practice—becomes a diluted and all-too-often innocuous vestige of the original transformational agenda. To take just one example (made all that much more relevant given this tenure case), Syracuse University has recently announced its first cohort of “engagement fellows.” These graduating seniors, the announcement states, “will participate in local projects that incorporate the principles of SU’s Scholarship in Action vision.” The projects include fostering a more cohesive downtown in Syracuse, enhancing sustainable living, and working with local youth on a “Say Yes to Education” initiative. These may be good and worthwhile examples of civic engagement; they are not, though, anything close to a radical or transformational vision as envisioned by the rhetoric of community engagement scholars and activists. And, if forthcoming research just coming out on the Carnegie Foundation’s “seal of approval” are right, neither are the vast majority of institutions deemed as being “engaged.”
I am not suggesting that those Syracuse seniors or most faculty members should be engaged in the practices and guided by the philosophy that has embroiled Dr. Watkins’ tenure case. What I am pointing out is that there is no meaningful or sustained academic discourse as to how we define our terms when we speak of public scholarship or community engagement.

This does not have to be the case. It is quite possible to have a field of study that is able to carefully, critically, and systematically investigate the sphere of democratic engagement and civic action as well as self-reflexively examine and determine its own boundaries, definitions, and norms of intellectual practice. It is possible, in other words, to discipline community engagement by developing “academic homes”—majors, minors, and interdisciplinary centers—where scholars can probe such ideas and practices. Psychology and sociology did this one hundred years ago for their respective fields of study. Women’s studies and Black studies did this thirty years ago. Jewish studies and global studies are doing this today. It is just as possible for a group of scholars to come together today under the umbrella of “community engagement” or some such term in order to focus on developing, critiquing, and expanding what it means to “do” community engagement.

This is not idle speculation. There are in fact several dozen such programs already scattered around the country that have developed academic and administrative structures, practices, and policies that foster sustained, immersive, and consequential outcomes for students, faculty, and the communities with which they work. For example, UC-Santa Cruz’s Community Studies department, Emory & Henry College’s Public Policy & Community Service program, Providence College’s Public and Community Service Studies, and UW-Milwaukee’s Educational Policy and Community Studies department bring together scholars across disciplines and departments to foster discussions—amongst themselves and their students—of what it actually means when we talk about and do things called “citizenship,” “democracy,” and “engagement.”

Being embedded in an academic program such as this goes exactly against the idea of “community engagement” as an empty signifier that seemingly floats across the higher education landscape. Rather, it allows dedicated and committed scholars to actually debate what scholarship in action may actually mean for students, communities, and their particular institution. In the end, of course, Dr. Watkins may not have wanted to be a part of such an academic program; and, even if he was, it may not have helped his tenure case. But what it would have allowed him to do is spend his time engaged in discussions with colleagues who, like him, thought long and hard of what it means to engage the public, in what means, and with what results.

The perils for public scholarship would then of course be different. But for all the discussion about the “public” nature of public scholarship, higher education still functions in highly non-public ways. Dr. Watkins is still evaluated by his peers (and not the larger public) on his academic (and not his public) work. It just so happens that by maintaining public scholarship and community engagement as seemingly universal and abstract signifiers, Dr. Watkins is actually left without any real peers who understand or can knowledgably engage with and critique his academic work. That is a shame not just for the tenure case of Dr. Watkins. It is a shame for all of us who are working to make the “engaged campus” a sustainable reality rather than pie in the sky.

Service for What? For Whom?

The House of Representatives last week passed the GIVE Act, which would, among other things, provide up to $6 billion in federal funds to increase AmeriCorps, expand volunteers to 250,000 (up from 75,000 currently), increase education funding, expand service-learning for K-12 education and colleges and universities, and expand service options for seniors and veterans. This bill is analogous to one currently in the Senate, the Serve America Act, which will most likely replace the House version. The Senate version was endorsed by both Obama and McCain back during the campaign on 9/11 in NYC. The likely money is that it will pass later this week.

I want to focus on one small aspect of this bill, what has been termed “Campuses of Service” in the bill. The short story is that each state will submit the names of three institutions (one 4-year public, one 4-year private, and one 2-year institution). The Corporation for National and Community Service then chooses 25 “Campuses of Service” out of all of these submissions. There are six criteria for judging the submissions; I want to focus on the first three (the fourth has to do with work study, and numbers five and six focus on graduates going into public service employment and careers):

• the number of service-learning courses offered
• the number and percentage of students who were enrolled in the service-learning courses
• the percentage of students on the campus engaging in activities providing community services, the quality of such activities, and the average amount of time spent, per student, engaged in such activities

What becomes immediately clear is that such criteria are neatly aligned to the Carnegie Foundation’s voluntary “community engagement” classification. This is the diffusion model of institutionalizing service-learning across higher education, most clearly seen in a highly popular rubric developed by Andy Furco. I have in my previous work contrasted this incrementalist vision with a transformational vision.

There is nothing wrong with either institutionalization model or the entire “Campuses of Service” premise if one believes that we in higher education actually know what we mean by “service” and “service-learning”; i.e., if in fact we actually know how to do it, how to teach it, and how to assess it. If, moreover, we know how to actually do the “4 Rs”: reflection, reciprocity, respect, and relevance.

The conventional wisdom is that we do. According to the most recent HERI survey, faculty have overwhelming become attuned to community engagement, with 88 percent believing that colleges should be actively involved with local community issues and the majority finding it "very important" or "essential" to "instill in students a commitment to community service." Campus Compact is thriving, and President Obama’s consistent calls for a culture of service makes the bandwagon pretty darn big.

Yet I am not so sure. For if one begins to dig down into the details, it becomes pretty muddy pretty fast. The “campuses of service” and Carnegie classification models are deeply and distinctly campus-centric. As Amy Driscoll, the point person for this initiative at Carnegie, acknowledges, community involvement and impact are the least amenable to institutions’ documented success. Or as Randy Stoeker, a key scholar in the community-based research movement, ruefully notes in a wonderful forthcoming book with Elizabeth Tryon, Unheard Voices, “By not knowing what service learning does to the communities it purports to serve, we risk creating unintended side effects that exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the problems those communities suffer from…We may be setting into motion dialectical processes that ultimately undermine the entire effort of service learning.”

The federal model is an attempt to develop a useful proxy variable for service through sheer force of numbers. The more courses, the more students, the more hours, then, seemingly, the better the service. But this is silly and dangerous. It promotes quantity over quality, through-put of students rather than sustained impact, and sky-high numbers rather than on-the-ground changes. Stoeker and Tryon’s work, for example, found that the short-term nature of service-learning was one of the major problems faced by community partners. This needs to be acknowledged.

Even the service-learning field itself is worried. A “democratic engagement white paper” getting lots of recent attention is a summary of a 2008 conference at the Kettering Foundation of the major players in the community engagement movement. The conference’s central guiding question was: “Why has the civic engagement movement in higher education stalled and what are the strategies needed to further advance institutional transformation aimed at generating democratic, community-based knowledge and action?” The conference attendees provided numerous responses (such as the lack of clear definitions and high fragmentation) before propounding a new model of “democratic engagement” rather than simply “civic engagement.” While laudatory, the binary nature of its vision and guiding assumptions of the academy and the community suggests, at least to me, that it will not have much traction for truly changing actual practices and policies in higher education. (I am writing more on this white paper for another time.)

So what’s my point? My point is that while the key players in the service-learning movement worry that their deeper vision of transforming higher education has not come to fruition, the movement they have launched is only further gaining steam. As I wrote a couple years back, my sense is that the service-learning movement is about to get swamped by the very institution it attempted to storm. This is of course not a one-way street. Higher education has of course embraced important aspects of community engagement. But look again at that HERI survey: Two-thirds of the faculty surveyed felt that community service should be considered when admitting applicants. Um. That’s really nice. But some states require every single high school student to perform community service in order to graduate. Maryland has been doing this since 1997. So does every Maryland applicant now have an advantage in the college admittance race?

More likely, what is being expressed by faculty is an idealistic and idealized sentiment of “service.” It is a sentiment that sounds great in rhetoric but has highly deleterious consequences in practice. It privileges a whole host of already hierarchical relationships about who serves whom, to what end, and for whose benefit. In the end, it all too often becomes all about the faculty teaching, the privileged college students volunteering, and the colleges which get the attention from all this activity. Not because anyone is doing anything “wrong,” per se. It’s just that the system as set up highlights and rewards exactly the wrong criteria for determining quality and impact.

Which takes me back, finally, to these “campuses of service.” What we are basically seeing is the institutionalization of service-learning exactly in the wrong way as envisioned by the founders of the movement. This is goal displacement, from attempting to make a difference to attempting to count the numbers. It is the end product of the quantification of the field. It is a mistake. All that is counted are students, courses, and hours. There is no community. There is no impact. What is left unquestioned, and thus unanswered are just the basic questions: ”Service-learning for whom?” and “Service-learning for what?”

Service for What? For Whom?

The House of Representatives last week passed the GIVE Act, which would, among other things, provide up to $6 billion in federal funds to increase AmeriCorps, expand volunteers to 250,000 (up from 75,000 currently), increase education funding, expand service-learning for K-12 education and colleges and universities, and expand service options for seniors and veterans. This bill is analogous to one currently in the Senate, the Serve America Act, which will most likely replace the House version. The Senate version was endorsed by both Obama and McCain back during the campaign on 9/11 in NYC. The likely money is that it will pass later this week.

I want to focus on one small aspect of this bill, what has been termed “Campuses of Service” in the bill. The short story is that each state will submit the names of three institutions (one 4-year public, one 4-year private, and one 2-year institution). The Corporation for National and Community Service then chooses 25 “Campuses of Service” out of all of these submissions. There are six criteria for judging the submissions; I want to focus on the first three (the fourth has to do with work study, and numbers five and six focus on graduates going into public service employment and careers):

• the number of service-learning courses offered
• the number and percentage of students who were enrolled in the service-learning courses
• the percentage of students on the campus engaging in activities providing community services, the quality of such activities, and the average amount of time spent, per student, engaged in such activities

What becomes immediately clear is that such criteria are neatly aligned to the Carnegie Foundation’s voluntary “community engagement” classification. This is the diffusion model of institutionalizing service-learning across higher education, most clearly seen in a highly popular rubric developed by Andy Furco. I have in my previous work contrasted this incrementalist vision with a transformational vision.

There is nothing wrong with either institutionalization model or the entire “Campuses of Service” premise if one believes that we in higher education actually know what we mean by “service” and “service-learning”; i.e., if in fact we actually know how to do it, how to teach it, and how to assess it. If, moreover, we know how to actually do the “4 Rs”: reflection, reciprocity, respect, and relevance.

The conventional wisdom is that we do. According to the most recent HERI survey, faculty have overwhelming become attuned to community engagement, with 88 percent believing that colleges should be actively involved with local community issues and the majority finding it "very important" or "essential" to "instill in students a commitment to community service." Campus Compact is thriving, and President Obama’s consistent calls for a culture of service makes the bandwagon pretty darn big.

Yet I am not so sure. For if one begins to dig down into the details, it becomes pretty muddy pretty fast. The “campuses of service” and Carnegie classification models are deeply and distinctly campus-centric. As Amy Driscoll, the point person for this initiative at Carnegie, acknowledges, community involvement and impact are the least amenable to institutions’ documented success. Or as Randy Stoeker, a key scholar in the community-based research movement, ruefully notes in a wonderful forthcoming book with Elizabeth Tryon, Unheard Voices, “By not knowing what service learning does to the communities it purports to serve, we risk creating unintended side effects that exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the problems those communities suffer from…We may be setting into motion dialectical processes that ultimately undermine the entire effort of service learning.”

The federal model is an attempt to develop a useful proxy variable for service through sheer force of numbers. The more courses, the more students, the more hours, then, seemingly, the better the service. But this is silly and dangerous. It promotes quantity over quality, through-put of students rather than sustained impact, and sky-high numbers rather than on-the-ground changes. Stoeker and Tryon’s work, for example, found that the short-term nature of service-learning was one of the major problems faced by community partners. This needs to be acknowledged.

Even the service-learning field itself is worried. A “democratic engagement white paper” getting lots of recent attention is a summary of a 2008 conference at the Kettering Foundation of the major players in the community engagement movement. The conference’s central guiding question was: “Why has the civic engagement movement in higher education stalled and what are the strategies needed to further advance institutional transformation aimed at generating democratic, community-based knowledge and action?” The conference attendees provided numerous responses (such as the lack of clear definitions and high fragmentation) before propounding a new model of “democratic engagement” rather than simply “civic engagement.” While laudatory, the binary nature of its vision and guiding assumptions of the academy and the community suggests, at least to me, that it will not have much traction for truly changing actual practices and policies in higher education. (I am writing more on this white paper for another time.)

So what’s my point? My point is that while the key players in the service-learning movement worry that their deeper vision of transforming higher education has not come to fruition, the movement they have launched is only further gaining steam. As I wrote a couple years back, my sense is that the service-learning movement is about to get swamped by the very institution it attempted to storm. This is of course not a one-way street. Higher education has of course embraced important aspects of community engagement. But look again at that HERI survey: Two-thirds of the faculty surveyed felt that community service should be considered when admitting applicants. Um. That’s really nice. But some states require every single high school student to perform community service in order to graduate. Maryland has been doing this since 1997. So does every Maryland applicant now have an advantage in the college admittance race?

More likely, what is being expressed by faculty is an idealistic and idealized sentiment of “service.” It is a sentiment that sounds great in rhetoric but has highly deleterious consequences in practice. It privileges a whole host of already hierarchical relationships about who serves whom, to what end, and for whose benefit. In the end, it all too often becomes all about the faculty teaching, the privileged college students volunteering, and the colleges which get the attention from all this activity. Not because anyone is doing anything “wrong,” per se. It’s just that the system as set up highlights and rewards exactly the wrong criteria for determining quality and impact.

Which takes me back, finally, to these “campuses of service.” What we are basically seeing is the institutionalization of service-learning exactly in the wrong way as envisioned by the founders of the movement. This is goal displacement, from attempting to make a difference to attempting to count the numbers. It is the end product of the quantification of the field. It is a mistake. All that is counted are students, courses, and hours. There is no community. There is no impact. What is left unquestioned, and thus unanswered are just the basic questions: ”Service-learning for whom?” and “Service-learning for what?”

Education Policy Blog: I blog because I teach

Education Policy Blog: I blog because I teach

For those new to our electronic journal and our blog or those new to blogging itself, I thought you might enjoy this thoughtfully-written reflective piece from the Education Policy blog. One of the goals of our journal and our blog is to encourage scholars, teachers and other educational professionals to enter into the public debate about education as "public intellectuals." Likewise, we believe that a vital democracy requires an informed and engaged public who enters into these serious discussions with those you spend their lives trying to live and understand the deeper meaning of the public purposes of education in a democratic, pluralistic society. As the , blogger in this piece writes, blogging can be a means for "connecting oneself to real debates in the real world."