Education and Business
Criticizing Capitalism in Classrooms: Taboo? or Good Citizenship?
Published May 11, 2009 @ 10:23PM PT
The New York Times published an article this week on how teachers in classrooms around the world are using the environmental advocacy video, "The Story of Stuff," to get students to think about the consequences of our high-consumption, throw-away lifestyles. Teachers, scientists, and curriculum experts all agree that textbooks do a horrible job covering this topic, and argue that global warming and other environmental crises make it too important to ignore, or to give the three-paragraph short shrift alloted to it by textbooks. Here's the video on YouTube (the Story of Stuff website has a Flash version, with many resources not available on YouTube):
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The Times gives two examples of evidence that the video works to make students re-think their consumption habits: a 9-year-old boy struggles over the consequences of buying a Lego set at a "big box" store, and a high school senior persuades her mother to stop buying bottled water - "the bottles don't just disappear after we use them" - and to install a tap filter instead.
Some parents, though, complain that it is "anticapitalist" and "biased," and object to its use in the classroom.
Their complaints raise interesting questions: Is capitalism a subject that is to be shielded from criticism in classrooms out of ideological loyalty? Is capitalism unable to change and adapt in the face of emergent signs of its unsustainability? Or can shining an honest spotlight on its problems in classrooms lead to next-generation entrepreneurs and policy-makers who lead capitalism in healthier and more sustainable directions in the future?
As for that "bias" charge, it points, as member Jodi Rice points out, to recent discussions in this space about teaching students to think critically about their textbooks. One teacher using "The Story of Stuff" in his classroom in Portola Valley, California, did exactly that: he had his students create a series of video responses to the film, criticising what they felt was a too-heavy reliance on fear and a too-light inclusion of constructive suggestions. Here's the first video:
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More interesting was what happened next: students at a school in Mendocino, California saw the students' video, and made their own to suggest the kind of constructive responses possible. "Don't be scared," they say: "Here are your options." And here they are:
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It's all so interesting on so many levels. I wonder if Portola students ever responded to their peer teachers in Mendocino. It's certainly nothing like the analog schooling of my childhood.
Action: Support Education - Tell the Senate not to Sell Out on Health Care Reform
Published May 10, 2009 @ 12:48AM PT
President Obama and Arne Duncan like to compare U.S. education - unfavorably, typically - to that of Korea, where I currently live. Here's an educational comparison they don't share: the number of uninsured people in America is roughly equal to the entire population of Korea, where all 50 million Koreans are covered by national health care.
Maybe, just maybe, health insurance for all is a factor in those dazzling Korean test scores. Maybe the tough love our education "reformers" urge we show toward our underprivileged students should be shown also to our vested health care interests, their lobbying millions be damned.
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One of the unfortunate effects of the departmentalization of knowledge in schools - you know, history is separate from literature, science from math, on and on - is that it conditions us to think "inside the lanes," instead of see the connections across them. Reality is more complex than that.
If you agree, then you'll understand this: One of the best ways you can help improve public education and erase the achievement gap is to push for affordable health care for all.
The Senate Armed Finance Committee certainly isn't pushing for it for us - maybe because its chair, Montana Sen. Max Baucus, has taken more money from the health insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies than any other Democrat in Congress, and is excluding single-payer advocates from ongoing health care reform roundtable talks.
Ed Schultz does a great job of reporting on this one. Please watch, then go to this action to petition Baucus to let doctors and the majority of the American public have a seat at the table:
. Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
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Do I have to say anything more than that healthy parents and children are likely to learn better than unhealthy ones? And that making health care accessible and affordable to the more than 45.7 million uninsured Americans - and the millions more who are underinsured - will create more healthy parents and children?
Timothy Foley at the Change.org Health Care blog has been doing great coverage on the growing congressional sell-out of our best chance for true health care reform in a decade. I hope you're following it. Bernie Horn of the Campaign for America's Future has more here.
And again, I hope you'll sign Timothy's petition to Baucus. Time's running out.
The Case for Charters, Part 4: Disruptive Innovation: Why Traditional Ed Is Ill-Suited For Change
Published May 08, 2009 @ 06:00PM PT
In 2003, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published a book called The Innovator's Dilema that eloquently explains how many good companies that produce good products fail. Christensen outlines two different types of innovation that have an effect on any industry: sustaining innovations and disruptive innovations.
Sustaining innovations are improvements in technology that enhance the quality of the product being offered. Disruptive innovations are innovations that result in alternative products that at first are inferior to the mainstream product but that, over time, and with the application of their own sustaining innovations, can develop into a better choice for the majority of customers.
Christensen gives the example of how discount retail stores such as Target, K-Mart, and Wal-Mart grew to overtake the department store. Before discount retail stores, most Americans shopped at such stores as Bloomingdales, Macy's, Marshal Fields, Yonkers, Dayton's. Today we see these companies dwindle, while we see the discount retailers thrive. The only company mentioned here that has survived in any appreciable way is Dayton's. Dayton's, at the early onset of discount retail, started Target as a subsidiary company. Target was allowed to run as its own separate company and in time grew to "eat the parent." In 2005 Dayton's was sold to Marshal Fields as a shell of a business leaving the Target Corporation effectively having "eaten the parent."
We see this scenario play out throughout nearly all industries. Today's newspapers are going through the same problem as they are losing subscribers to online news sources. The cell phone is making a significant dent in the telephone business as more and more customers find they don't really need their land lines. This saga goes on and on. In this vicious cycle, the only companies that survive are those who embrace change and allow the disruptive force to take over the company. Those who fight against it always fail or are marginalized. Christensen goes on to explain how large organizations are incapable of monumental change. That is why the only department store company to survive was Dayton's. Dayton's did not actually survive; its subsidiary did.
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In 2007 Christensen applied this theory to education in his book, Disrupting Class. In that book, he identifies individualized learning plans and student-centered learning as the disruptive force on our horizon. He also speculates that online learning is one of the major vehicles that allow this to happen. However, there are other vehicles that carry this innovation. Homeschooling is by nature individualized and has always captured a small percentage of our population. Some private schools, such as the Sudbury schools, can be included in this category. Unschooling captures a fair share of this market. Finally, charter schools by nature are disruptive innovations (at least those that take a student-centered and customized approach to curriculum).
The question is, "Do we want our traditional school systems to be more like Macy's, Dayton's, or Wal-Mart?" If we don't embrace school choice options (including district-sponsored charter schools), we will see our traditional public schools dwindle the same way Macy's and company have seen systematic closures of their department stores. In their place will likely be "big box" charters like KIPP and Green Dot that have a similar effect in public education as Wal-Mart has in business. If our public school districts sponsor their own charter schools and allow them enough autonomy to be independent, we have a much better chance of weathering this storm and coming out relatively unscathed.
The changes that a charter school can make cannot be practically implemented in a traditional school system. These changes are systemic and massive. Large systems are designed to resist change. In many ways this is good, it prevents wild bad ideas from wreaking havoc on the system; but it also breeds complacency and reinforces the status quo. Yes, unions are part of this problem but so are school boards, taxpayers, and administrators. At a certain point we need to start building a new house. That doesn't mean we have to move into it right away.
Why Wal-Mart Schools are a Frightening Idea
Published May 07, 2009 @ 05:48AM PT
[The possible passing of the Employee Free Choice Act] is the demise of a civilization. This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it....As a shareholder, if I knew the CEO of the company wasn't doing anything on [EFCA]... I would sue the son of a bitch... I'm so angry at some of these CEOs, I can't even believe the stupidity that is involved here....If a retailer has not gotten involved in this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to [former Sen.] Norm Coleman and all these other guys, they should be shot. They should be thrown out their goddamn jobs.
--Bernie Marcus, Co-Founder of Home Depot (source)
Robert L. Borosage, Co-Director of the Campaign for America's Future, writes a column in the May 5 Huffington Post that touches slantwise on the current drive to weaken teachers' unions. In "Corruption is Dangerous to Your Health," Borosage writes about the banking lobby's successful blocking of a reform that would have allowed judges to modify mortgages in bankruptcy court, and thus save many homeowners from foreclosures:
This isn't about America being a "center-right country," the myth that pundits still peddle about the American people. This is about Congress being bought and sold, pure and simple...
[...]For example, with the swine flu alert sweeping the country, President Obama and the Centers for Disease Control urge people with flu symptoms to stay home. This is a common sense measure to limit the spread of what might be a dangerous virus.
Only one problem, as the New York Times reminds us in an editorial this morning. About 60 million Americans don't have paid sick leave. Many can be fired if they stay home. And if not fired, many simply can't afford to lose the hours.
43% of private sector American workers have no paid sick days at all. And needless to say the most vulnerable have the least protection. A 2007 EPI study showed that workers at the bottom of the wage scale, those making less than $7.38 an hour, are five times less likely to have sick days than workers at the top of the scale, those making greater than $29.47 an hour. Only 16% of low-wage workers have access to paid sick days.
[...] More than 160 countries, the Times tells us, have laws that ensure all their citizens receive paid sick leave and more than 110 of them guarantee paid leave from the first day of illness. The US does not. The reason goes no further than the influence of money on politics.
We once provided much of our social contract through the corporation rather than the Congress. Strong unions could negotiate a family wage, health care, overtime pay, paid sick leave, paid vacations, and pensions. Many non-union employers offered benefits similar to those provided by union companies. But over the last decades of this conservative era, as unions grew weaker under attack, more and more corporations simply shredded those agreements. (Read the rest.)
So what's the "slantwise" connection? Simply this: The biggest players in the charter school movement - the Walton Family of Wal-Mart fame, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, New York City Mayor Bloomberg and his appointed school chancellor Joel Klein - are all on record as being anti-union. The Walton family's hiring practices at Wal-Mart are infamous for creating precisely the class of working poor that Borosage discusses above:
The Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart is the single biggest investor in charter schools in the United States, giving $50 million a year to support them. The Waltons specialize in giving money to opponents of public education. “Empowering parents to choose among competing schools,” said John Walton, son of Wal-Mart’s founder, “will catalyze improvement across the entire K–12 education system.” According to a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) report, “Some critics argue that it is the beginning of the ‘Wal-Martization’ of education, and a move to for-profit schooling, from which the family could potentially financially benefit. John Walton owned 240,000 shares of Tesseract Group Inc. (formerly known as Education Alternatives Inc.), which is a for-profit company that develops/manages charter and private schools as well as public schools.” Wal-Mart is a notorious union-busting firm, famous for keeping its health-care costs down by discouraging unhealthy people from working at its stores, paying extremely low wages with poor benefits, and violating child labor laws. The company has reportedly looted more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from state and local governments. Its so-called philanthropy seems also to be geared to the looting of public treasuries. (source)
I could go on (and if I did, I would go to this 2004 feature on Wal-Mart's regressive employment practices, and their $2.5 billion annual cost to taxpayers having to foot the emergency room bills of Wal-Mart's un- or under-insured employees, in the New York Review of Books).
But instead I'll close with these questions: In these economic times, when fewer and fewer have living wages and benefits, and labor is a shell of its former self due to three decades of anti-union legislation, why should we be sanguine about trusting the Waltons, Bill Gates, and company with the fate of the teaching profession? Do we really expect them not to do their best to add America's 4,000,000 teachers to the already swollen rolls of America's under-paid and under-insured former middle class? Will worsened working conditions and Wal-Mart-low morale among teachers result in better student achievement?
In short, do we really want schools on the Wal-Mart model?
--image source
Web Round-up: Sedating Children, Defending Creationism, Separating Ethics from Sexuality
Published May 05, 2009 @ 07:50PM PT
Interesting reads beyond the mainstream round-ups:
The War for (Prescription) Drugs: "Eight million kids today have been diagnosed with mental disorders, and most receive some form of medication. Is this child abuse?" Idea for inner-city drug dealers: open a pharmacy, and suddenly you're legal, but still rolling in the dough.
Will the Courts Defend Young Astrology Believers Next? A California court ruled that a teacher's "statement calling creationism 'superstitious nonsense' did violate the First Amendment clause against establishing a religion." The teacher may have gone about it unwisely, but how is his statement wrong?
Is a "Virginity Fetish" Hurting Young Women? "It's time to teach our daughters that their ability to be good people depends on their being good people, not on whether or not they're sexually active." Careful, now: the author is not advocating a libertine pedagogy. She's calling for a moral discourse for girls that transcends "sexually active = immoral slut," "chastity = moral paragon." A good topic for the wall-flowers at the next local Purity Ball.
Spring has sprung! I hope it's as good for you as it is for me. Goodness knows it's been a rough winter for most of us.
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What "The Wire" Teaches Us About Education
Published April 30, 2009 @ 09:12AM PT
I'm one of those non-TV-watchers who discovers great shows years later than most people. Case in point: The Simpsons. I didn't discover that show's brilliance until around 2003. It took word of mouth through trusted friends to lead me to those waters.
I'd never watched HBO's The Wire, either, until last week. This time the word of mouth was not through a friend, but through a post by change.org contributor Sharon Higgins on her always-excellent Perimeter Primate blog. On "Oligarchs, Crime, the Underclass, Neglected Schools, and more," Sharon wrote:
Watch a new interview with David Simon, former Baltimore Sun journalist and creator-producer-writer of The Wire, on Bill Moyer's Journal. He discusses a variety of things such as America’s abandoned underclass, our current oligarchy, and the high level of national apathy. In the mix, he talks about inner-city education issues and crime.
Let’s just say...he gets it.
I followed Sharon's post to the Moyers (must-watch) interview, and followed that with a week-long marathon watching every season of The Wire. The short version: not only do Simon and his co-writer Ed Burns, a former Baltimore police detective and Baltimore city public school teacher, "get it." They deliver it. In my dreams, I'd teach an entire semester-long course using The Wire as the leaping-off point to explore politics and government, poverty, the war on drugs and criminal justice, white-collar crime, the contemporary labor movement, education politics, human trafficking, LGBT issues, mainstream journalism, and more. For my money, it would be time as well-spent as spending the same number of hours reading War and Peace in an English course. The entire five seasons form more of a novel than a series of short stories, unfolding and complicating the plot through over 50 hour-long episodes. Walking students through it would lead them, I'm convinced, to wanting to understand the complexity of all these issues more.
Here's what it has to say about the politics of high-stakes state achievement tests (it's in Season 4, I think). As you watch/read the fictional Baltimore mayor meeting with his campaign managers, tell me which mayors or other edu-politicians come to mind:
You can buy individual episodes of The Wire for $1.99 on iTunes. What a world.
A Foundation of Bubbles: Deconstructing the McKinsey Report, Part 1
Published April 29, 2009 @ 06:11AM PT
The report by McKinsey and Company, "The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in American Schools," has generated a lot of unquestioning fanfare in the media. Arne Duncan joined NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein in a conference to launch the report, and seized on it as "proof" that we need "radical" reform in our schools.
Klein promptly highlights Duncan's speech at the event in a video on his Education Equality Project website. The makers of the report, we've already noted, are also on Klein's payroll at NYC public schools. (We also noted McKinsey was previously on Enron's payroll.)
The report itself isn't remarkable in identifying the achievement gap. That's old news. What's new in the report is its claim that the gap is causing "the equivalent of a permanent, deep recession in terms of the gap between actual and potential output in the economy" (18).
That's an argument sensational enough to make headlines, and put teachers and principals right up there next to bankers and financiers as the culprits behind America's economic woes. There's nothing like a manufactured recession to divert us from a real one, and to divert the populist anger from that real one toward the invented one.
This is the first in a series of posts that will look more skeptically at the report than the mainstream press and the Duncan-Klein camp has.
1. A Foundation of Bubbles
The McKinsey Report itself states, "In this analysis, we focus mainly on 'achievement,' which reflects the mastery of particular cognitive skills or concepts as measured through standardized tests" (Footnote 1, p. 5). Thus the crisis this report alleges stands or falls on our willingness to accept that student performance on standardized tests is an accurate measure of student value in the workforce; it further rests on our willingness to accept the notion that the primary purpose of education is to create not citizens, and not well-rounded characters, but instead to create workers able to benefit an economy that more and more does not serve the interests of the working rank and file. Think Wal-Mart.
Nobody is saying that reading, math, and future employment based on proficiency in (and by no means mastery of) these two skills are unimportant. What should be said, though, is that other traits like creativity, global awareness, the ability to learn independently instead of needing to be taught, to work well with others, to innovate, on and on, surely also benefit our economy. If we accept that, then we should have no problem accepting that the current math-and-reading standardized test fixation carries an opportunity cost for every minute taken from broader studies in order to deliver test-prep classes to "juke the stats*."
We note a related irony on page 7 of the report, which describes the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) test upon which the study's international comparisons are based:
PISA is a respected international comparison of 15-year-olds by the OECD that measures "real-world" (applied) learning and problem-solving ability. In 2006 the United States ranked 25th out of 30 nations in math and 24th of 30 in science.
The irony? The high-stakes testing regime of NCLB has generated account after account of schools narrowing curriculum in order to focus on test-taking skills and knowing (or correctly guessing) the right answer on state tests. It's no surprise that this would produce low scores on the PISA test (which is unrelated to NCLB). PISA, as the report states, tests "real-world" application of mathematical and scientific thinking. NCLB test-prep sessions focus on the opposite of applied knowledge. I'd love to see a breakdown of how schools that performed well on NCLB-mandated state tests performed on PISA. My hunch is we'd see a picture of schools great at finding the right bubble, but horrible at applying learning and solving real-world problems.
Related: Re: "Juking the stats," if you haven't seen the Bill Moyers interview with David Simon, co-writer of the HBO series The Wire, by all means watch it. A snippet:
DAVID SIMON: Well, and facts-- one of the themes of THE WIRE really was that statistics will always lie. That I mean statistics can be made to say anything.
BILL MOYERS: Yes, one of my favorite scenes, in Season Four, we get to see the struggling public school system in Baltimore, through the eyes of a former cop who's become a schoolteacher. In this telling scene, he realizes that state testing in the schools is little more than a trick he learned on the police force. It's called "juking the stats." Take a look.
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ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.
ROLAND "PREZ" PRYZBYLEWSKI: I don't get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?
TEACHER: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.
PREZ: Juking the stats.
TEACHER: Excuse me?
PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I've been here before.
TEACHER: Wherever you go, there you are.
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DAVID SIMON: You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they're solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn't represent anything, once they got done with them.
Image by Potatojunkie
