Still Separate, Still Unequal? (Final Thoughts)

by Jonathan D. Becker

category: Student Rights

Published August 04, 2009 @ 01:42PM PT

This is the final part in a five part series on race, schooling and educational opportunities. Part 1 can be found here, and Part 2 can be found here, Part 3 can be found here and Part 4 can be found here.]

Fifty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court declared that providing “separate but equal” educational opportunities to students based on race denied students of color the equal protection of the law. Largely, the holding in the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education has been examined with respect to equity of access to the institution of schooling generally. And, while much of the progress that was achieved by eliminating legally enforced (de jure) school segregation has been erased by de facto housing segregation patterns that beget de facto school segregation, it is also clear that students of color continue to be denied equal educational opportunities within the institution of schooling. That is, while the post-Brown focus was and continues to be between-school and between-district segregation by race, more subtle forms of racial discrimination have persisted and proliferated within schools and districts, even in the most “integrated” schools and districts.

In summary, fifty-five years after the promises of the Brown decision, here is where we stand:

• Today, nearly three out of every four African-American students in the U.S. attends a school that is majority-minority.
• 1 out of every 6 African-American children in the United States now attends a school where less than one percent of the population is white.
• In 1998, African-American students were 59% more likely to be identified as emotionally disturbed than Caucasian students.
• As of 2007, in the state of Virginia, African-American students were 54% more likely to be identified as disabled than other students.
• African-American and Latina/o students are less than half as likely to be enrolled in gifted and talented educational classes and programs as Caucasian students.
• While Internet access in schools and classrooms is consistently good and equitable, access to computers generally is slightly inversely related to the percentage of students of color in schools.
• The frequency with which African-American students use computers in schools is at least as high, if not higher, than other students. However, African-American students are much more likely to use computers to practice or drill on math facts than White students.

These are just a few of the indicators that begin to paint the "still separate, still unequal" picture.  There are additional indicators including differences in access to "high-quality" teachers; differences in access to modern, acceptable physical school facilities; etc.  These differences by race in educational practices and conditions coincide with (likely correlate with) the differences by race in educational outcomes that are so well-documented.

I've long imagined a class-action lawsuit alleging systemic discrimation based on race.  Such a lawsuit would surely be a failure since under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI, proof of disriminatory effect is not sufficient; there must be intentional discrimination.  Furthermore, as Kevin Welner describes, the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively denied private lawsuits pursuant to the Title VI regulations.  "By a 5-4 majority in Alexander v. Sandoval...the Court concluded that Congress only intended these regulations to be directly enforceable by the Office of Civil Rights—a political body with very limited resources—not by a private right of action."

If we add in Justice Roberts' recent proclamation that "[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." we are left at a place where policy efforts to remedy discrimination on the basis of race are most certainly doomed. That is, in the wake of Sandoval and the Seattle/Louisville school desegregation case, one would be hard-pressed to imagine an educational policy decision that explicitly considers race as a factor passing constitutional muster.

But, here's the tricky thing.  No Child Left Behind asks education agencies to disaggregate student test scores by race.  Do you think Justice Roberts would rule those efforts unconstitutional?  After all, by disaggregating test scores on the basis of race, we are discriminating on the basis of race, right?

I suppose the argument in support of disaggregation of test data by race is that closing the achievement gap is a compelling state interest, and the means prescribed by NCLB and state-level implementation of those ideas are narrowly tailored.  Well, I would suggest that equality of educational opportunities is a compelling state interest.  As Justice Kennedy wrote in his (sort of) concurring opinion in the Seattle/Louisville case:

Our Nation from the inception has sought to preserve and expand the promise of liberty and equality on which it was founded. Today we enjoy a society that is remarkable in its openness and opportunity. Yet our tradition is to go beyond present achievements, however significant, and to recognize and confront the flaws and injustices that remain. This is especially true when we seek assurance that opportunity is not denied on account of race. The enduring hope is that race should not matter; the reality is that too often it does.

I contend on the basis of the data I report throughout this series that equality of educational opportunity has been denied on the basis of race.  Therefore, we must find appropriate (narrowly tailored?) ways to remedy these disparities.  We must continue to have these courageous conversations.

Still Separate, Still Unequal? (The Case of Digital Equity in Education)

by Jonathan D. Becker

category: Student Rights

Published July 31, 2009 @ 07:31PM PT

[This is Part 4 in a series on race, schooling and educational opportunities. Part 1 can be found here, and Part 2 can be found here, and Part 3 can be found here.]

Fifty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court declared that providing “separate but equal” educational opportunities to students based on race denied students of color the equal protection of the law. Largely, the holding in the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education has been examined with respect to equity of access to the institution of schooling generally. And, while much of the progress that was achieved by eliminating legally enforced (de jure) school segregation has been erased by de facto housing segregation patterns that beget de facto school segregation, it is also clear that students of color continue to be denied equal educational opportunities within the institution of schooling. That is, while the post-Brown focus was and continues to be between-school and between-district segregation by race, more subtle forms of racial discrimination have persisted and proliferated within schools and districts, even in the most “integrated” schools and districts.

Less an issue of “within-school” racial segregation than one of segregation across schools and districts, consider the issue of digital equity in education. I've written a bit about digital equity in education (see e.g. http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v15n3/), but mostly in academic journals. So, I thought I'd use this space today to mashup some text from blog posts I've written before.

In homes, there are significant disparities in computer access and use by race. Fairlie (2005) found that African-Americans and Latina/os are much less likely to have access to home computers than are white, non-Latina/os (50.6 and 48.7 percent compared to 74.6 percent), and those differences are more pronounced for children than for adults. Using advanced statistical analyses, he concludes that, “[e]ven among individuals with family incomes of at least $60,000, blacks [sic.] and Latinos [sic.] are substantially less likely to own a computer or have Internet access at home than are whites.”  In the following table, we see some of those differences.

One problem these data present for educators is that the significant inequities that exist within homes present a huge barrier to using technology to extend the learning day and to bridge a home-school connection.  That said, there are opportunities for schools to level the playing field with respect to access to technology.  However, within schools, while disparities are less pronounced, digital inequities persist. Here are some selected statistics from an NCES report:

• In 2005, the ratio of students to instructional computers with Internet access in public schools was 3.8 to 1, a decrease from the 12.1 to 1 ratio in 1998, when it was first measured. However, schools with the lowest level of minority enrollment had fewer students per computer than did schools with higher minority enrollments. Specifically, according to my own analyses, schools in rural areas and schools with higher percentages of African-American students are more likely to have lower levels of computer access.
• In 2005, 94 percent of public school instructional rooms had Internet access, compared with 3 percent in 1994. There are no differences across school characteristics.

Thus, while Internet access in schools and classrooms is consistently good and equitable, access to computers generally is slightly inversely related to the percentage of students of color in schools.

What about use of technology in schools?  Let's look at some recent statistics on computer uses in schools disaggregated by race. [NOTE: these data are generated with the NAEP Data Explorer. Thus, these are nationally representative data].

Looking first at computer use for math, by race, in 2007, at 4th grade:

[NOTE: click on the following images to see larger graphics]

and then at 8th grade:

What do we see? Well, two things: First, computer use for math is more frequent in 4th grade than 8th grade (BTW, that's a consistent finding across lots of ed. tech. research; what's up with the secondary school teachers?). Second, at both grade levels, white students are more likely than African-American students to "never or hardly ever" use computers for math (and, yes, statheads, those differences are "statistically significant"). So, I can't say that African-American students use computers for math more than white students, but I can say they are less likely to "never or hardly ever" use computers for math in school.

In fact, that's pretty much the gist of what I report in the article in the Educational Policy Analysis Archive to which I linked above.  African-American students have slightly lower levels of access to computers in schools, but the frequency with which they use computers in schools is at least as high, if not higher, than other students.

The logical next question, then, is "What are the students doing on the computers?" Answering that question is difficult, mostly for a lack of appropriate data. For math. though, there are some interesting data.  By further sniffing through the NAEP Data Explorer, I "explored" differences in digitally-infused pedagogy by race. One of the items on the background questionnaire of the 8th grade NAEP in 2007 was as follows: "When you are doing math for school or homework, how often do you use these different types of computer programs?" One of the listed programs was "A program to practice or drill on math facts (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division)." Looking at the results for that item disaggregated by race, we get the following (again, click on image to enlarge):

Overall, African-American students are much more likely to use computers to practice or drill on math facts than White students.  The learning affordances of the modern Internet seem to grow exponentially these days, but even in 2007 terms, using computers for drill on math facts is hardly taking advantage of the power of computer-mediated learning.

The educational research I have done over the last decade has taken me to schools all across the United States.  I've been to schools in urban centers (e.g. NYC, Dallas, Houston, Miami-Dade, etc.), tiny rural towns (e.g. Beckley (WV), Gnadenhutten (OH), etc.) and everything in between.  I can report with great confidence that the schools wherein I have seen advanced, progressive applications of technology have been schools that serve overwhelmingly Caucasian populations.  Relatedly, if you consider all of the reasonably large-scale 1:1 computing initiatives in the United States, you would be hard-pressed to find such a program in a majority-minority community.

As the learning affordances of ubiquitous computing continue to expand, I worry deeply about creating a new sort of digital divide; one where students of color are not afforded the opportunities and advantages of learning in technologically innovative and important ways.  The educational technology community is by no means bounded, but there is unquestionably a large, but tightly connected group of individuals who are arguably the "leading" practitioners with respect to technology in education.  They are the folks who are connected through Twitter and through their blogs.  They are overwhelmingly Caucasian, and I strongly suspect that if we polled them about the populations of students they serve, that population would be overwhelmingly Caucasian.  A little over one year ago, Paul Bogush, a technologically-innovative teacher in Connecticut wrote:

Seventeen years ago a few months into my first teaching job, I was standing in an assembly when I realized something.  I was the only white dude in the room.

I was looking around Twitter today at who other people follow and I had the same feeling come back.  There are only white dudes in the “Twitter room.”  I could not find anyone who was not.  Out of every class that I have collaborated with this year only one person was an African American. Then I thought about the blogs I read, the wikis I check out, and the podcasts I listen to.  Same deal as the Twitter room.  What’s up with that?

Good question.  What is up with that?

Still Separate, Still Unequal? (The Case of Gifted and Talented Education)

by Jonathan D. Becker

category: Student Rights

Published July 30, 2009 @ 07:23PM PT

[NOTE: I apologize for not getting this posted yesterday. I didn't expect to spend 9 hours in LaGuardia airport yesterday with shaky Internet access...I'll just push everything back a day.  My bad.]

[This is Part 3 in a series on race, schooling and educational opportunities. Part 1 can be found here, and Part 2 can be found here.]

Fifty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court declared that providing “separate but equal” educational opportunities to students based on race denied students of color the equal protection of the law. Largely, the holding in the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education has been examined with respect to equity of access to the institution of schooling generally. And, while much of the progress that was achieved by eliminating legally enforced (de jure) school segregation has been erased by de facto housing segregation patterns that beget de facto school segregation, it is also clear that students of color continue to be denied equal educational opportunities within the institution of schooling. That is, while the post-Brown focus was and continues to be between-school and between-district segregation by race, more subtle forms of racial discrimination have persisted and proliferated within schools and districts, even in the most “integrated” schools and districts.

As a second example of this “within-school” racial segregation, consider the underrepresentation of students of color in gifted education programs.  The case of special education about which I wrote yesterday is a little more complicated given a couple of factors.  First, for certain disability categories, the diagnostic processes are reasonably objective.  Second, as Ira Socol suggests in the comments, there are aspects of the special education system that are consistent with what I would want for any child.

The underrepresentation of children of color in gifted education classes and or programs is less complicated.  Here are some statistics on the underrepresentation of students of color in gifted and talented education programs.  [NOTE: much like the data on special education, the data on student assignment to gifted programs tend to be old as well.]

• In 1997, African-Americans made up 17.2% of the total student population, but only 8.40% of those assigned to gifted and talented classes or programs.
• Latina/o students comprised 15.6% of the student population, but 8.6% of the students designated for gifted and talented classes or programs.
• King, Kozleski and Landsdowne (2009) report that in California in 2007, 7.2% of the students enrolled in public education were African-American, yet only 4.13% of those enrolled in gifted and talented educational program were African-American.

In odds ratios terms, we see the same story: According to the National Research Council Committee on Minority Representation in Special Education, Asian/ Pacific Islanders are 1/3 more likely than white students to be in gifted programs, while African-American and Latina/o students are less than half as likely to be enrolled in gifted and talented educational classes and programs as Caucasian students.

Those odds did not change considerably between 1976 and 1998.

Why is this less complicated?  As vexing as it is to define what it means to be "disabled," many of the problems with the assignment of students to gifted education programs have to do with a lack of agreement and an overall subjectivity around defining giftedness.  Thus, the discrimination here is more evident and explicit.

I am a little out of my league here as gifted education is not at all an area of expertise.  But, I know enough to recognize that this is clearly an issue of definition and identification (which is driven by the definition).  In other words, unlike special education, there is no legal mandate to offer services to children identified as gifted and/or talented.  Decisions to offer gifted education are made locally and, therefore, implementation varies widely across and within states.  Local education agencies can decide if they are to offer "extra" or "different" services for students identified as gifted and talented.  The first step in that process, then, is defining that population of students.  Therefore, what's most troubling about the statistics above is that school systems are clearly defining "giftedness" in a way that privileges Caucasian children.

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SELECTED REFERENCES

• Castellano, J., & Diaz, E. (2002). Reaching new horizons. Gifted and talented education for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
• Donovan, M.S., & Cross, C.T. (2002). Minority students in special and gifted education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
• Ford, D., Harris, J., III, Tyson, C., & Trotman, M. (2002). Beyond deficit thinking: Providing access for gifted African American students. Roeper Review, 24, 52-58.
• Ford, D. (2004). Recruiting and retaining culturally diverse gifted students from diverse ethnic, cultural, and language groups. In J. Banks and C. A. Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (5th ed., pp. 379-397). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
• Scott, M., Deuel, L. S., Jean-Francois, B., & Urbano, R. C. (1996). Identifying Cognitively Gifted Ethnic Minority Children. Gifted Child Quarterly, 40, 147-153.
• Sisk, D. (2003). Maximizing the high potential of minority economically disadvantaged students. In J.F. Smutny. Underserved gifted populations. Responding to their needs and abilities. (pp.239-260). New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc.
• Sternberg, R. (2007). Cultural concepts of giftedness. Roeper Review, 29, 160-165.
• Tomlinson, C., Callahan, C., & Lelli, K. (1997). Challenging expectations: Case studies of high potential, culturally diverse young children. Gifted Child Quarterly, 41(2), 5-18.

Still Separate, Still Unequal? (The Case of Special Education)

by Jonathan D. Becker

category: Student Rights

Published July 28, 2009 @ 10:17AM PT

[This is Part 2 in a series on race, schooling and educational opportunities. Part 1 can be found here]

Fifty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court declared that providing “separate but equal” educational opportunities to students based on race denied students of color the equal protection of the law. Largely, the holding in the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education has been examined with respect to equity of access to the institution of schooling generally. And, while much of the progress that was achieved by eliminating legally enforced (de jure) school segregation has been erased by de facto housing segregation patterns that beget de facto school segregation, it is also clear that students of color continue to be denied equal educational opportunities within the institution of schooling. That is, while the post-Brown focus was and continues to be between-school and between-district segregation by race, more subtle forms of racial discrimination have persisted and proliferated within schools and districts, even in the most “integrated” schools and districts.

As one example of this “within-school” racial segregation, consider the disproportionate number of students of color classified as special needs students. The Twenty-Second Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2000) documents the extent and seriousness of the problem:

• African-American youth, ages 6 through 21, account for 14.8 percent of the general population. Yet, they account for 20.2 percent of the special education population.
• In 10 of the 13 disability categories, the percentage of African-American students equals or exceeds the resident population percentage.
• The representation of African-American students in the mental retardation and developmental delay categories is more than twice their national population estimates.

Those are the simplest ways to understand the problem.  There are, however, other more refined ways of "measuring" disproportionality. The National Research Council's Committee on Minority Representation in Special Education, in a widely cited report, offers three such measures:

• The risk index (RI) is calculated by dividing the number of students of a particular race served in a particular disability category by the total enrollment of students of the given race in the school population. In other words, the “risk index” is the percentage of all students of a particular racial group identified in a particular disability category.
• The odds ratio (OR) is computed by dividing the risk index of a given racial group by the risk index of another racial group. Typically, odds ratios are reported relative to white students. In that case, if the risk index for a given racial group is identical to white students, the odds ratio will equal 1.0. Odds ratios greater than 1.0 means that students in the given racial group are at greater risk for identification, while odds ratios of less than 1.0 indicate that they are less at risk.
• The composition index (CI) is calculated by dividing the number of students of a particular racial group enrolled in a particular disability category by the total number of students enrolled in that same disability category. In other words, the CI indicates the proportion of all children served under a given disability category who are members of a given racial/ethnic group.

The following table comes from the National Research Council report. The data indicate significant overrepresentation of African-American students in the emotional disturbance category.  In 1998, African-American students were 59% more likely to be identified as emotionally disturbed than Caucasian students.

As evidenced above, much of the data used in reports or studies on the issue of racial disproportionality in special education are fairly old.  It is not uncommon to see relatively recent articles reporting on data from 5-10 years prior.  However, some of the most recent data are maintained by the Equity Alliance at Arizona State University. Through their partnerships with the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI) and the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt), they offer a powerful data visualization application where, across cities and states, special education data can be examined with respect to the distributions of students with disabilities across various disability categories by ethnic/racial category.  Using that service, examining my the state in which I currently reside (Virginia), I produced a graph that shows the risk index/ratio for African-American students across all disabilities over time.  The graph shows that, relative to Caucasian students and relative to all other races, African-American students are significantly more likely to be identified with a disability; the risk-ratio increased every year from 2001-2007.  As of 2007, in the state of Virginia, African-American students were 54% more likely to be identified as disabled than other students.

Poverty is often cited as an explanation for these disparities. However, while poverty and related factors correlate highly with the incidence of disability, the effects of gender and race remain significant even after controlling for socioeconomics. Furthermore, and most striking, according to the NAACP (2001), “and contrary to the expectations, is the finding that the risk for being labeled ‘mentally retarded’ increases for blacks attending schools in districts serving mostly middle-class or wealthy white students” (p. 18). In fact, Losen and Orfield (2002) tell us that African-American children, and especially males, are at increased risk for mental retardation and emotional disturbance identification as the white population of a district increases.  In other words, even and especially where African-American youth have achieved integration, they are disproportionately labeled and excluded from the general education setting.

The data on the overrepresentation of students of color in special education present a prima facie problem.  Efforts to address the problem have been codified.  According to this document produced last month by the U.S. Department of Education:

IDEA requires States and LEAs to take steps to address disproportionate representation of racial/ethnic groups in special education.  20 U.S.C. 1416(a)(3)(C); 34 CFR §300.600(d)(3)...States have a separate obligation, under 20 U.S.C. 1418(d) and 34 CFR §300.646, to collect and examine data to determine whether significant disproportionality based on race and ethnicity is occurring in the State and LEAs of the State with respect to the identification of children as children with disabilities, including identification as children with particular impairments; the placement of children in particular educational settings; and the incidence, duration, and type of disciplinary actions, including suspensions and expulsions.

In other words, this problem has been identified and is finally being addressed in the educational policy arena.  The extant research identifies the "disproportionate representation problem as a complex social process of intricate interactions among multiple determinant factors" (Mooney, 2007). Thus, whether the policy approaches to remedying the problem prove effective is still an empirical question at this point.

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SELECTED REFERENCES

• Artiles, A. J., & Trent, S.C. (2000). Representations of culturally/linguistically diverse students. In C. R. Reynolds, & E. Fletcher-Janzen (Eds), Encyclopedia of Special Education, (2nd ed. , Vol. 1, pp. 513-517). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
• Coutinho, M. J., Oswald, D.P., & Best A. M. (2002).  The influence of sociodemographics and gender on the  disproportionate identification of minority students as having learning disabilities.  Remedial and Special Education, 23 (1), 49-59.
• Hosp, J., & Reschly, D. (2002).  Predictors of restrictiveness of placement for African-American and Caucasian students.  Exceptional Children, 68 (2), 225-238.
• Ladner, M., & Hammons, C. (2001).  Special but unequal: Race and special education.  In C.E. Finn, A. J. Rotherham, & C. R. Hokanson Jr. (Eds.), Rethinking special education for a new century (pp. 85-110).  Thomas B. Fordham Foundation & The Progressive Policy Institute.
• Losen, D.J. & Orfield, G. (2002).  Racial Inequity in Special Education.  Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and the Harvard Education Press.
• Mooney, K. (2007) An Historical Case Study of the Intersection between Policy and Practice in One School District: Untangling the Disproportionate Representation of Students of Color in Special Education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Hofstra University. Hempstead, NY.
• NAACP Education Department (2001).  NAACP call for action in education.  Baltimore, MD: NAACP Education Department.  Retrieved on February 24, 2002 from http://naacp.org/about/resources/publications/education_call_to_actn_2.pdf.
• National Research Council (2002).  Minority students in special education and gifted education.  Washington D.C.:  National Academic Press.
• U.S. Department of Education (2000).  Twenty second annual report to Congress on the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
• Zhang, D. & Katsiyannis, A.  (2002).  Minority representation in special education: A persistent challenge.  Remedial and Special Education, 22, 180-87.

Pharmer's Market: The Cost of Producing "Successful" Students

by William Farren

category: Student Rights

Published June 26, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT

[A big welcome to William Farren with this first guest-post. Bill has long struck me as one of the most original and piercing critics of education around. You can see his "Did You Ever Wonder?" video in the left sidebar, below, for a taste. Bill writes at the radically sane Education for Well-Being. - Clay]

Not long ago, I finished reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, a book about the high price of cheap food and the disconnected thinking that produces it. It made me think that the way we produce food today--that is, ignoring nature's logic in the quest for efficiency--is very similar to the way we produce "educated" citizens. Ignoring millions of years of evolutionary design has resulted in some interesting (if not disconcerting) similarities between the two camps. Both industrial schooling and industrial agriculture seem to have developed pathological ways of looking at pathology.

Whether in the field, the feed lot, or the classroom, issues of low productivity and dysfunction are commonly attributed to the individual, rarely the larger system that controls it. When a farmer curses a corn plant's inability to repel a particular pest, he does so without reflecting on the fact that the plant has been taken out of its natural environment and placed into a man-made monoculture--a hotbed of disease. Plants grown in isolation lose the defenses and nutrients that neighboring species once freely provided.  In homogeneous rows designed for the convenience of machinery, a plant's exquisite defense systems become ineffective. "Corrective measures" in the form of herbicides and pesticides end up coating the plants and sterilizing the soil.

Pigs are faulted for biting other pigs' tails as a result of being weaned prematurely and packed together tightly. Animals living in stressful conditions, denied the expression of their once useful behaviors, lose the will to protect themselves in the face of danger. As a consequence, when infection sets in on a chewed tail, pigs are put down. (It's not profitable to nurse them back to health.)   Forward thinking hog farmers, in an attempt to stamp out this "vice", noticed that by docking the pigs' tails they could produce a sensitive nub that would force even the most demoralized pig to fight back.

Cows, ruminants which have evolved to eat grasses and fibrous vegetable matter, are today mostly fed a diet of government-subsidized corn. Here again, we ignore nature's design. Not having evolved for such a diet, cattle end up living in a state of permanent illness, propped up and kept in the system by a permanent cocktail of pharmaceuticals. Big Pharma is only too happy to fill in when nature is ignored.

Our education systems, seeking efficiency through standardization and conformity end up creating students who, just like their agricultural counterparts, are no longer well-adapted to their environment. Michael Pollan reminds us that, "Most of the efficiencies in an industrial system are achieved through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over." Like corn planted in a monoculture, removed from the diversity that protects it, or cattle fed an unnatural diet of corn, students today are fed a standardized diet of procedures and reproducible facts. This educational monoculture does nothing to nourish minds that have evolved to seek diversity, novelty and stimulation.

Those numbed by disconnected ideas unrelated to their needs are soon labeled attention-deficient, unmotivated, substandard. Stimulants, antidepressants and impulse inhibitors are used to conform the human mind to a deformed system the same way herbicides, pesticides and antibiotics are used in agriculture's great disconnect. Like the corn-fed cow raised on an unnatural diet of corn, constantly anemic and never well but kept alive through the use of drugs, students raised on disconnected facts, numbing routines, and endless testing often find themselves on the receiving end of a medical prescription. Those who don't have the stomach for such unsatisfying fare, who prefer not to be chemically altered, who'd rather have a more free-range existence, are eventually "counseled out". Simply put: they have not met the required production quotas of a system designed for scalable throughput.

In standardized environments, students with a high tolerance for monotony and the ability to repress their curious gene are deemed the fittest of the bunch.  Strangely, curiosity, a trait nature has selected for and which has served us well, seems to be selected against in schools.  Blue ribbon students grow their grade point averages en route to graduation and a chance to compete in the "real world". Their farm analogues, purposed for industry, have been selected to tolerate crowding, pesticides, sameness--but most importantly--to be high yielding. The corn farmer with the most bushels per acre is acclaimed for his skill at converting petrochemicals into grain. The feedlot operator's profits depend on how efficiently he can turn grain into meat. The highest ranked schools floss in the knowledge that they can efficiently convert standards and routines into high test scores.  Along the way, little thought is given to the soil that is depleted in the field, to the groundwater being spoiled by the feedlot, or to the creativity and innovation being extinguished in the classroom.  How productive is all this productivity?

It seems that despite (or maybe because of) our fetish with productivity, many of humanity's most pressing issues seem to be getting worse. The unnatural selection playing out in schools creates what every educational institution's mission statement pledges against: the creation of uncritical, passive, challenge-averse individuals, unwilling and unable to tackle the challenges of the 21st-century. It's simple to blame the students for being unproductive or unmotivated, for lacking curiosity. Indeed, they often are seen as the problem, especially by those who've designed the system. Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, however, reminds us that "the seed of poverty is in the institutions we have made, not in the person." With more effort and an inward gaze we'd see the deeper connections. We'd see students acting rationally in environments that ignore their evolutionary history. We'd understand that avoiding challenges and dropping out are simply logical responses to a system that discourages risk-taking and too often treats curiosity as a challenge to authority.

In their quest for efficiency and value, consumers have failed to notice the creation of false economies.  We are now using more energy (in the form of oil and gas) to produce a calorie of food than we ever have in our history. What nature used to do for free through biodiversity and solar power, now requires pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals. In the bargain, our industrial agriculture is destroying our two most important environments: our bodies and our planet. Cheap food has led to obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease. Meat marinated in medicine and the effects it has on people (never mind the animals) never seems to make it into the cost-benefit analysis. Polluted air, toxic water and soil depletion are not billed at the supermarket register. Taxpayers, subsidizing the food that malnourishes them, complain little. Taxpayers, supporting educational systems that miseducate them, complain little. What's the true cost of an educational system which "through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over", causes mind and spirit to atrophy, suffocating students' natural desire to know? Maybe the biggest loss comes from the creation of generation after generation who cannot tell the difference between a bargain and a heist.

Michael Pollan writes, "Our food system depends on consumers' not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing." Education today requires the same relationship. Educational policies seem to display a meager understanding about the importance of curiosity, awareness, or how we fit into larger systems. Education's checkout scanner--tuition and taxes--provide only a partial accounting of its true costs. Similar to industrial farming, industrial education produces no bargains while diminishing itself in the process. The price of producing a "successful" student may be higher than we think.

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William Farren: Interested in making education an instrument of well-being. Believes that schools, as the most important shapers of mental models, need to seriously retool in an effort to address the problems caused by dysfunctional economic models, biophobia, “nature-deficit disorder” and an immense lack of planetary situational awareness.

Keeps asking himself, "How is preparing students to enter a system that is at war with itself, preparing them for the future?"

Image by Plearn

Curriculum Watch: Abstinence-Only and Clean Coal Ideologues in Your Classroom?

by Clay Burell

category: Student Rights

Published June 24, 2009 @ 05:41PM PT

Just a couple of alerts about ideologues trying to sell their schtick to your children under "re-branded" packages:

1.The National Abstinence Education Association (source):

At an April 29 Capitol Hill briefing, Huber told the room that abstinence-only education is "not a 'just say no' message." "This is not abstinence only, this is a holistic message that prepares and gives students all of the information they need to make healthy decisions," Huber said. In fact, the NAEA isn't even calling its programs "abstinence only" anymore -- now they're "abstinence centered."

Similarly, WhyKnow -- a major provider of abstinence-only education curriculums -- recently changed its name to On Point, its tag line to "Direction for Life" and hired PR company Maycreate Idea Group to help recast its image. Lesley Scearce, executive director of On Point, said in an article for the Chattanoogan that the organization is trying to "get teens involved in new, positive directions that lead to a healthier, more fulfilling life. Without a re-naming, re-branding and re-positioning, this new direction wouldn't have been possible...."

Huber...assured her audience that "abstinence education talks about STDs and the medically accurate information regarding that" and that "abstinence education talks about contraception." But of course, the only time abstinence-only classes will talk about contraception is when they discuss failure rates -- often exaggerating those rates or spreading misinformation about the dangers of contraception. In the past, this tactic has been taken to extremes. In Montana's Bozeman High School, for example, teens in 2005 were taught that condoms cause cancer.

2. The American Coal Foundation (source):

An elementary school curriculum designed by the American Coal Foundation suggests that students learn about the costs and benefits of coal mining by using toothpicks and paper clips to "mine" chocolate chips out of cookies. They also go about "reclaiming" the "land" damaged in the process by tracing the cookies’ outline on graph paper. Costs are to be calculated by the amount of time spent per chip and the expanse of graph paper that needs to be reclaimed.

One of the discussion questions to follow the lesson is: "What do you think are some of the costs associated with mining coal?" (Read the rest...)

Things to keep an eye on....

Instead of a Fake "Brown," How About a Real "Plessy"?

by Clay Burell

category: Student Rights

Published June 10, 2009 @ 04:27PM PT

Oh, that bedeviling difference between de jure and de facto: On the Forum for Education and Democracy blog, Gloria Ladson-Billings takes on our national pride in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling by arguing it is, de facto, a case of national cant and hypocrisy - and hazards a modest proposal that, since we don't have the national will to make Brown v. Board a reality, we "progress backwards," as it were, by at least accomplishing the "equal" part of the "separate but equal" provision of Plessy v. Ferguson. A taste:

In its 1896 decision, Plessy v Ferguson, the United States Supreme Court said that as long as Blacks had access to equal public facilities, there was no need for them to have access to the same facilities that Whites did.  This remained the law of the land until 1954, when the Court reversed itself in the landmark unanimous decision, Brown v Board of Education of Topeka. "In the field of public education,” the Court wrote, “the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place."

However, the real life, on-the-ground enactment of desegregated, equal access to public education remains more of a promise than a reality. My thesis was that it would be better to have a “real Plessy” than to continue with a “fake Brown.”  Now, to be sure, no one is suggesting that Brown was not a significant step forward in race relations in the country. My point is merely that Brown, left unimplemented, does not move us anywhere near the equitable education we need and claim to endorse.

A real Plessy would mean that across this country, Black, Latina/o, American Indian, poor and immigrant students would have the same facilities as their White, middle-income peers. They would have a profession of teachers with the wisdom, qualifications and skills needed to provide high-quality instruction – not a “force” of novice teachers who, although eager, are unprepared and under-prepared to teach. They would have access to the same curricula and courses. They would have the same educational materials—textbooks, technology, science laboratory supplies, and fine arts supplies. And they would have the same funding to provide for their schooling.

Brown was a great moral victory. We needed it to remind us of who we strive to be as a democratic nation.  Until we fulfill its promise, however, the Brown decision is nothing more than a symbol—a testament to missed opportunities and broken promises. Similarly, the recent election of President Barack Obama represents a powerful symbol of hope and possibility in our nation. But the reality of difficult problems means we cannot afford the luxury of a symbolic presidency. We need this moment of hope to mean something to the educational futures of millions of students throughout the nation. (Read the rest...)