Education Politics
Obama Nixes Federal Funds for Abstinence-Only Sex Ed
Published May 08, 2009 @ 12:50AM PT
A very modern "Amen" to this one. Obama's fiscal year 2010 budget eliminates federal funding for teaching abstinence-only sex ed:
Instead of promoting abstinence ed, Obama is proposing a new teen pregnancy prevention initiative that supports "evidence-based" and "promising" models. Once again, Obama is reversing policies set in place under President Bush, who asked for more than $100 million in funds last year for abstinence-only programs. Several states opted to turn down federal funds rather than be forced to forgo contraception education in public schools.
The new budget includes $50 million in funds for states to use for teen pregnancy prevention programs. What's not clear, though, is which comprehensive sex education programs will be funded. There's quite a bit of difference among them, with some far better than others. It's also not clear how "evidence-based" will be defined. Just how many studies are needed to determine if a program is effective? And how few are needed to deem a program "promising"? You can see the full budget here; scroll down to page 39 to see the part about teen pregnancy programs. (source)
How Top Countries Test: Lessons for Arne Duncan from Linda Darling-Hammond
Published May 07, 2009 @ 10:52AM PT
In one of my recent criticisms of the much-hyped McKinsey report, I promised to follow up with the following presentation by Linda Darling-Hammond, of the Stanford School Re-design Network, that compares and contrasts the assessment approaches of the world's top-ranked education countries to those of the United States. The presentation is from a conference sponsored by the Forum for Education and Democracy, which describes Dr. Darling-Hammond's presentation with this blurb:
“What we have thought of as fairly rare in [the USA] is quite common in most of the high-achieving countries internationally,” Linda Darling-Hammond began. Beginning with a list of 21st century skills, Darling-Hammond contrasted US tests - which require recall of a simple fact or ask students for a one-sentence explanation - with exams abroad that include designing science experiments, refining computer programs and explaining the reasoning behind solutions for complex problems. “[In many nations,] there’s a teaching and learning system, that operates to provide rich curriculum and strong outcomes,” Darling-Hammond said. “They are what assure that the higher-order skills are actually taught and practiced.”
It's 20 minutes long, but well worth the watch (the discussion of science assessments around 15:00 is especially noteworthy).
For those of you who don't know, Darling-Hammond led Obama's education transition team, and was the top choice for Secretary of Education among many progressive education reformists. Instead of getting this education professor to lead our reforms, though, Obama chose instead Chicago's Arne Duncan, who never taught in a classroom and has no background or advanced degrees in education. It's hard not to regret that choice - and not to wonder why we hear almost nothing about Darling-Hammond's ideas from Duncan - while watching the presentation.
Anyway, enjoy:
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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
Newsweek Jukes the Stats for Arne Duncan
Published May 06, 2009 @ 08:28AM PT
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
--Winston Churchill
A couple of weeks ago it was Thomas Friedman practicing stenography instead of journalism in his op-ed on the McKinsey report; now it's Newsweek. In this week's feature article on Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman, who replaced Arne Duncan when Duncan followed Obama to take the Education Secretary position, Newsweek characterizes Duncan's stint in Chicago as follows:
Backers of mayoral control point to successes in Chicago, where 64 percent of the students met or exceeded state standards on achievement tests in 2008, compared to 36 percent in 2000. Under Duncan's leadership, test scores improved overall, and the city revamped dozens of schools, typically dismissing administrators, teachers and staff in underperforming schools, and starting over from scratch.
Chicago's Catalyst Notebook blog offers some much-needed complication to Newsweek's wholesale swallowing of Duncan's record there:
As CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan boasted about ISAT [i.e., Illinois Standards Achievement Test - the "state standards" assessment mentioned in Newsweek above] gains, even though the district showed poorly on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card.
[...] According to the most recent scores, only 16 percent of Chicago’s 8th graders were proficient in reading and math on the NAEP; while more than 70 percent of 8th graders met reading and math standards on the ISAT.
So: Duncan's test scores in Chicago rose on the state tests, but stayed dismal on NAEP. Too bad Newsweek couldn't see here the same thing Diane Ravitch saw with NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein's similar boasting about New York state test performances:
On the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] — widely acknowledged as the gold standard of the testing industry — New York City showed almost no academic improvement between 2003, when the mayor’s reforms were introduced, and 2007. There were no significant gains for New York City’s students — black, Hispanic, white, Asian or lower-income — in fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade reading or eighth-grade mathematics. In fourth-grade math, pupils showed significant gains (although the validity of this is suspect because an unusually large proportion — 25 percent — of students were given extra time and help). The federal test reported no narrowing of the achievement gap between white students and minority students.
The city’s Department of Education belittles the federal test scores and focuses on the assessments given by New York State. And, indeed, the state scores have soared in recent years, not only in the city but also across New York state However, the statewide scores on the N.A.E.P. are as flat as New York City’s. Our state tests are, unfortunately, exemplars of grade inflation.
Brought to you by the "juking the stats" department, compliments of The Wire.
--screenshot from The Wire, HBO
More on Fighting Bias in History Textbooks
Published May 03, 2009 @ 04:46PM PT
In the pantheon of fundamentalist history, the man revered above all others is General Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, perhaps the most brilliant military commander in American history and certainly the most pious. United States History for Christian Schools devotes more space to Jackson, “Soldier of the Cross,” and the revivals he led among his troops in the midst of the Civil War, than to either Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant.
--Jeff Sharlet, "Through a glass, darkly: How the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history" (Harper's Magazine, 2006)
So let's assume the worst: the Texas fundamentalists on the state Board of Education succeed in their new attempt to impose an extreme religious right bias on the state history standards. The textbook industry predictably runs its race to the bottom by appeasing these ideologues, adding chapters claiming America was founded as a Christian nation, framing social issues from women's rights to gay rights to the environment in a faith-based, fundamentalist "light," and so forth. And high school history teachers in Texas - and, since all textbooks aim to capture the Texas market, practically every other state in America - find themselves having to teach with these blindered texts. How can the teachers simultaneously use the textbook and, as James Loewen urges, "teach against" it?
By a delicious coincidence, the Texas news came out just as I was writing about plans to teach history next school year by having students create an online, wiki-based "critical companion" to whatever textbooks we'll be using in our classes. The Texas agenda makes the project more relevant still. And best of all, several readers have weighed in on possible weaknesses of the idea, helping me think harder about how to structure it to optimal effect. I hope you'll do the same.
Claus von Zastrow summarized the idea best in a comment to the "Calling Bullsh!t on Textbooks" post:
You describe a wonderful learning process: Read a textbook for what it is worth; Call bulls**t when it seems facile or exclusionary; Do research online or elsewhere to verify/challenge the textbook's assumptions, or to discover a fuller account. At the end of this process, you know enough about the textbook to render a critique, you know about ideas/facts/perspectives not presented in the textbook, you know a bit more about how and where to find information, and you have a more fully refined bulls**t sensor. And you've broadened your body of knowledge considerably.
This goes well beyond the argument (or perhaps straw man?) that we don't need to know facts because we can look them up online.
The approach, it seems to me, values both knowledge and skills.
Then Jodi Rice identified a possible pitfall in the "Why Teachers Should Blog" post:
There *is* always the danger that some people might take things too far in the other direction, using what they believe are their "critical thinking" skills to criticize and eschew legitimate sources of information and replacing those legitimate sources with their own. Cf: Conservapedia. (Their question would have seemed to be "to what degree, and in what ways, are fundamentalist Christians and other ultra-conservatives represented in Wikipedia?") Not that I'd advocate Wikipedia as a replacement for a good text or other sources of information, but I do think it goes a bit far to say that "Conservapedia is more trustworthy than Wikipedia, because most of the senior staff are real people." Oy.
I replied:
Jodi, it's a good point, but actually an event I'd welcome as a teachable moment re: internet literacy, website evaluation and, best of all, open debate about any controversial directions students might take such a project.
A great thing about making the project wiki-based is that any student making the move you imagine would be doing so publicly, and would be open to equally public challenge on the same wiki page. I can't help but think it would lead to deeper learning. (I actually saw this happen in a Moodle forum a few years ago, in which Christian students, apparently assuming all of their classmates shared their beliefs, characterized atheists as "immoral," and opened a floodgate of atheist, agnostic, and Buddhist students in the classroom challenging the caricature - totally unplanned, and one of the most valuable learning experiences for many students, and their parents, in the class.)
Jodi agreed with the website evaluation and internet literacy points, but pointed out some possible "instructional design" flaws that demand attention (emphasis added):
I guess my point about Conservapedia, in particular, is that it is moderated such that people posting attempts to balance its point of view will be excised -- Conservapedia's own statement about how it is moderated is quite revealing. They believe they are being "truthful" and unbiased/unpartisan, but the fact that their site is named Conservapedia already undermines that claim.
What I worry is that, in the name of doing the same kind of activity you are doing by having students create their own texts through wikis, some people may be creating texts that are just as limited as the textbooks they're setting aside, with the added danger that because they're creating their own texts, they're not objective about them at all. After all, Conservapedia began as a classroom project by a history teacher who believed Wikipedia was "anti-Christian" and "anti-American." I'm thinkin' he ain't so much about the objectivity.
That's as far as we've come.
A few responses, before I turn it over to anybody out there wanting to play:
First, it bears pointing out that I'll be implementing this project at an international school in Singapore, with students from Asian, European, North and South American, Middle Eastern, and African backgrounds. So the danger of a single ideology dominating the project is minimal (except, perhaps, in an economic sense, since all of these students will occupy positions of economic privilege).
Second, I picture the students not so much "creat[ing] their own texts [and] setting their textbooks aside" as putting their textbooks front and center, and creating critical responses to (quoting Claus) those textbooks' biases, omissions, perspectives, and assumptions on the wiki. Concretely, I'm picturing chapter by chapter summaries, each followed by a "controversies" section a la Wikipedia.
Using our hypothetical example of the Texas fundamentalist U.S. History textbook, that would mean students would summarize, say, its section about America being founded as "a Christian nation," and then would address the controversies surrounding that view in the "Controversies" section.
Imagine "Billy" adding a critique of the founders-as-Christians perspective by citing the many Deists among the founders, and "Jane" disagreeing with that. A poorly-moderated wiki would allow Jane to simply delete Billy's text; a better-moderated would one require her to edit it with her own, sourced, refutation of Billy's claim. And, as in Wikipedia, the "Discussions" page would be run by a moderator playing umpire to all changes, based on the background debate between the disagreeing parties taking place on that discussions page.
Third, as for "objectivity," I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the term. Historical narratives are never objective, as far as I can see, by virtue of the simple fact that the historian selects what to include and exclude, what to emphasize and marginalize. So rather than aiming for objectivity, "accuracy, veracity, validity, and balance" might be better grails for the quest.
Jodi's input makes me think that perhaps certain key historical "angles of analysis" should be parceled out to students from the start: the "lenses" of gender, race, economic class, religious viewpoints, international relations (e.g., colonizing v. colonized), bourgeois and workers, for starters. Each student or group representing each factor would criticize the textbook in each "Controversies" section following each summary.
That's as far as I can take it right now. What excites me most about the idea is that it seems sure to lead to real debates among the students, rather than "schooly," teacher-assigned ones. Equally exciting is the idea that students will learn not only how to read what is in texts, but as importantly - what isn't.
This was long, but if you made it this far, I really hope you'll extend or strengthen the idea in comments. (Thanks to those of you who have already.)
Who knows? It might one day help Texas avoid an educational Alamo.
Texas Fundamentalists Set Their Sights on Social Studies Standards
Published May 02, 2009 @ 12:55PM PT
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.
- Mark Twain, Following the Equator; Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
The Texas fundamentalists on the State Board of Education have shifted their sights, now, from creationism/Intelligent Design in the science standards to Bible-based social studies standards. From the Texas Freedom Network:
The Texas State Board of Education is set to appoint a social studies curriculum “expert” panel that includes absurdly unqualified ideologues who are hostile to public education and argue that laws and public policies should be based on their narrow interpretations of the Bible.
TFN has obtained the names of “experts” appointed by far-right state board members. Those panelists will guide the revision of social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools. They include David Barton of the fundamentalist, Texas-based group WallBuilders, whose degree is in religious education, not the social sciences, and the Rev. Peter Marshall of Peter Marshall Ministries in Massachusetts, who suggests that California wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were divine punishments for tolerance of homosexuality.
There are a lot of good folks in Texas, so I don't mean this image literally - but you can't help but fantasize that the Texas fundies could all gather in an obscure corner of Texas and, just for that little slice, do as their governor recently threatened, and secede. They could warp the minds of their young only, and leave the rest of Texas, and the United States, to learn in peace.
Stephen Colbert and James Loewen on FOX News' "War on History Textbooks"
Published May 01, 2009 @ 11:20AM PT
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| I's On Edjukashun - Textbooks, AmeriCorps & Strip-Search | ||||
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Fox News wants schools to teach nationalism. I'd rather we teach patriotism. The two aren't the same.
Better still, let's teach recent history more, and distant history less, so high school graduates aren't unleashed into the real world with an understanding of history that ends with, say, the Vietnam War.
In Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Yout American History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen shares a useful way to think about history, compliments of African cultures. "Many African societies," he writes,
divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. Many, like George Washington or Clara Barton, can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.
Loewen applies this schema to an all-too-familiar peculiarity about how U.S. history is taught:
Authors of American history textbooks appear all too aware of the sasha - of the fact that teachers, parents, and textbook adoption board members were alive in the recent past. They seem uncomfortable with it. Revering the zamani - generalized ancestors - is more their style. By definition, the world of the sasha is controversial, because readers bring to it their own knowledge and understanding, so they may not agree with what is written. Therefore, the less said about the recent past, the better. (2d ed., 259-60)
Loewen spends the rest of the chapter documenting how U.S. history textbooks shy away from any analysis of events in the sasha period - Vietnam, the Iraq invasions, 9/11, social movements like feminism and gay rights - that may anger parents and other adults. He also documents how little coverage, in terms of total number of pages, each decade from 1960 onward receives in comparison with pre-1960s decades. He also notes that many teachers lack deep knowledge of these years, and so treat them to a superficial skim.
The upshot? Loewen:
The sasha is perhaps our most important past, because it is not dead but living-dead. Its theft by textbooks and teachers is the most wicked crime schools perpetrate on high school students, depriving them of perspective about the issues that most affect them. The semi-remembered factoids students carry with them about the Battle of Put-in-Bay or Silent Cal Coolidge do little to help them understand the world into which they move at graduation. [...] Leaving out the recent past ensures that students will take away little from their history courses that they can apply to the world (279).
FOX complains that too little is said about Islamist terrorism in chapters about 9/11. I might meet them there, if they'll meet me on this: more needs to be said in those textbooks about the background of U.S. Middle East policy from, say, 1900 to the present. Maybe a quote like this:
Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world (Loewen 266).
Before FOX rejects this as the anti-Americanism of some left-wing hack, they should digest the quote's source: Michael Scheuer, first chief on the CIA's bin Laden unit.
If we can handle a "fair and balanced" approach to the sasha, our students might graduate into democracy more than "bookful blockheads" who, come their moment in the voting booth, are frighteningly clueless.
