E Wayne Ross – Page 108 – Critical Theories in Education

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Rouge Forum Update: Detroit and more

The Rouge Forum www page is updated—featuring articles from Robert Fisk, Juan Cole, and others addressing the failing oil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

This week, a salute to the Detroit school workers who have been on strike for six days, defying the state law. Their courageous job action demonstrates that the law is nothing but a reflection of political reality, which shrivels in the face of mass solidarity and direct action. The judges have simply refused to take note that the strike is a strike, proving that the only illegal strike is a strike that loses.

After attempting to open schools today, Tuesday, despite the Detroit teachers’ clear promise to strike, not scab, the Detroit Public Schools administration has closed the schools for Wednesday. The attempt to open schools on Tuesday was a reckless maneuver to test the strength of the strike. It resulted in thousands of kids being warehoused, at a ratio of about 1 adult to 150 kids, as subs did not often scab, and there were only about 500 administrators and others available.

Rouge Forum members filed Department of Human Services complaints against DPS, for illegally opening unlicensed day care centers with no certified adult supervision. A small child wandered out of one school and was found, blocks away, by a picket captain at another school, drawing considerable attention on tv. Administrators refused to let reporters into school buildings. It was, above all, the mass action of strikers that forced DPS to officially shut down for Wednesday.

The strikers have considerable community sympathy and support, although many of them rightly distrust the DFT, their union.

More updates as things develop…

SAVE THE DATE. The Rouge Forum is planning our conference for the first weekend in March, in beautiful downtown Detroit. All will be welcome. Details to follow.

The strike and civil uprisings continue in Oaxaca. We recommend you check The Narco News Bulletin online for updates.

Last, Substance News in Chicago needs your support. As RF readers know, we can function at very low cost because we operate online for the most part. However, it is vital that those who connect social change and education have a print newspaper that can circulate in homes where people are not online, and which can be left in lounges, etc. Substance fills that void.

Subs are just 16 dollars a year, but many people could send more…to…

Substance
5132 W. Berteau
Chicago, IL 60641-1440

Where’s Mao? Chinese Revise History Books

The New York Times: Where’s Mao? Chinese Revise History Books

By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: September 1, 2006
BEIJING, Aug. 31 — When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization.

Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette.

Nearly overnight the country’s most prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated standard history texts since the 1950’s. The changes passed high-level scrutiny, the authors say, and are part of a broader effort to promote a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today’s economic and political goals.

Supporters say the overhaul enlivens mandatory history courses for junior and senior high school students and better prepares them for life in the real world. The old textbooks, not unlike the ruling Communist Party, changed relatively little in the last quarter-century of market-oriented economic reforms. They were glaringly out of sync with realities students face outside the classroom. But critics say the textbooks trade one political agenda for another.

They do not so much rewrite history as diminish it. The one-party state, having largely abandoned its official ideology, prefers people to think more about the future than the past.

The new text focuses on ideas and buzzwords that dominate the state-run media and official discourse: economic growth, innovation, foreign trade, political stability, respect for diverse cultures and social harmony.

J. P. Morgan, Bill Gates, the New York Stock Exchange, the space shuttle and Japan’s bullet train are all highlighted. There is a lesson on how neckties became fashionable.

The French and Bolshevik Revolutions, once seen as turning points in world history, now get far less attention. Mao, the Long March, colonial oppression of China and the Rape of Nanjing are taught only in a compressed history curriculum in junior high.

“Our traditional version of history was focused on ideology and national identity,” said Zhu Xueqin, a historian at Shanghai University. “The new history is less ideological, and that suits the political goals of today.”

The changes are at least initially limited to Shanghai. That elite urban region has leeway to alter its curriculum and textbooks, and in the past it has introduced advances that the central government has instructed the rest of the country to follow.

But the textbooks have provoked a lively debate among historians ahead of their full-scale introduction in Shanghai in the fall term. Several Shanghai schools began using the texts experimentally in the last school year.

Many scholars said they did not regret leaving behind the Marxist perspective in history courses. It is still taught in required classes on politics. But some criticized what they saw as an effort to minimize history altogether. Chinese and world history in junior high have been compressed into two years from three, while the single year in senior high devoted to history now focuses on cultures, ideas and civilizations.

“The junior high textbook castrates history, while the senior high school textbook eliminates it entirely,” one Shanghai history teacher wrote in an online discussion. The teacher asked to remain anonymous because he was criticizing the education authorities.

Zhou Chunsheng, a professor at Shanghai Normal University and one of the lead authors of the new textbook series, said his purpose was to rescue history from its traditional emphasis on leaders and wars and to make people and societies the central theme.

“History does not belong to emperors or generals,” Mr. Zhou said in an interview. “It belongs to the people. It may take some time for others to accept this, naturally, but a similar process has long been under way in Europe and the United States.”

Mr. Zhou said the new textbooks followed the ideas of the French historian Fernand Braudel. Mr. Braudel advocated including culture, religion, social customs, economics and ideology into a new “total history.” That approach has been popular in many Western countries for more than half a century.

Mr. Braudel elevated history above the ideology of any nation. China has steadily moved away from its ruling ideology of Communism, but the Shanghai textbooks are the first to try examining it as a phenomenon rather than preaching it as the truth.

Socialism is still referred to as having a “glorious future.” But the concept is reduced to one of 52 chapters in the senior high school text. Revolutionary socialism gets less emphasis than the Industrial Revolution and the information revolution.

Students now study Mao — still officially revered as the founding father of modern China but no longer regularly promoted as an influence on policy — only in junior high. In the senior high school text, he is mentioned fleetingly as part of a lesson on the custom of lowering flags to half-staff at state funerals, like Mao’s in 1976.

Deng Xiaoping, who began China’s market-oriented reforms, appears in the junior and senior high school versions, with emphasis on his economic vision.

Gerald A. Postiglione, an associate professor of education at the University of Hong Kong, said mainland Chinese education authorities had searched for ways to make the school curriculum more relevant.

“The emphasis is on producing innovative thinking and preparing students for a global discourse,” he said. “It is natural that they would ask whether a history textbook that talks so much about Chinese suffering during the colonial era is really creating the kind of sophisticated talent they want for today’s Shanghai.”

That does not mean history and politics have been disentangled. Early this year a prominent Chinese historian, Yuan Weishi, wrote an essay that criticized Chinese textbooks for whitewashing the savagery of the Boxer Rebellion, the violent movement against foreigners in China at the beginning of the 20th century. He called for a more balanced analysis of what provoked foreign interventions at the time.

In response, the popular newspaper supplement Freezing Point, which carried his essay, was temporarily shut down and its editors were fired. When it reopened, Freezing Point ran an essay that rebuked Mr. Yuan, a warning that many historical topics remained too delicate to discuss in the popular media.

The Shanghai textbook revisions do not address many domestic and foreign concerns about the biased way Chinese schools teach recent history. Like the old textbooks, for example, the new ones play down historic errors or atrocities like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the army crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989.

The junior high school textbook still uses boilerplate idioms to condemn Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930’s and includes little about Tokyo’s peaceful, democratic postwar development. It will do little to assuage Japanese concerns that Chinese imbibe hatred of Japan from a young age.

Yet over all, the reduction in time spent studying history and the inclusion of new topics, like culture and technology, mean that the content of the core Chinese history course has contracted sharply.

The new textbook leaves out some milestones of ancient history. Shanghai students will no longer learn that Qin Shihuang, who unified the country and became China’s first emperor, ordered a campaign to burn books and kill scholars, to wipe out intellectual resistance to his rule. The text bypasses well-known rebellions and coups that shook or toppled the Zhou, Sui, Tang and Ming dynasties.

It does not mention the resistance by Han Chinese, the country’s dominant ethnic group, to Kublai Khan’s invasion and the founding of the Mongol-controlled Yuan dynasty. Wen Tianxiang, a Han Chinese prime minister who became the country’s most transcendent symbol of loyalty and patriotism when he refused to serve the Mongol invaders, is also left out.

Some of those historic facts and personalities have been replaced with references to old customs and fashions, prompting some critics to say that history teaching has lost focus.

“Would you rather students remember the design of ancient robes, or that the Qin dynasty unified China in 221 B.C.?” one high school teacher quipped in an online forum for history experts.

Others speculated that the Shanghai textbooks reflected the political viewpoints of China’s top leaders, including Jiang Zemin, the former president and Communist Party chief, and his successor, Hu Jintao.

Mr. Jiang’s “Three Represents” slogan aimed to broaden the Communist Party’s mandate and dilute its traditional emphasis on class struggle. Mr. Hu coined the phrase “harmonious society,” which analysts say aims to persuade people to build a stable, prosperous, unified China under one-party rule.

The new textbooks de-emphasize dynastic change, peasant struggle, ethnic rivalry and war, some critics say, because the leadership does not want people thinking that such things matter a great deal. Officials prefer to create the impression that Chinese through the ages cared more about innovation, technology and trade relationships with the outside world.

Mr. Zhou, the Shanghai scholar who helped write the textbooks, says the new history does present a more harmonious image of China’s past. But he says the alterations “do not come from someone’s political slogan,” but rather reflect a sea change in thinking about what students need to know.

“The government has a big role in approving textbooks,” he said. “But the goal of our work is not politics. It is to make the study of history more mainstream and prepare our students for a new era.”

National School Testing Urged

This is a development that many opponents of standards-based reforms (which rely on high-stakes testing) predicted at the dawn of the movement during the George H. W. Bush administration.

The US Department of Education’s Higher Education Commission is laying the groundwork for NCLB-like, standards-based reform of post-secondary education, including, perhaps, individual tracking of college and university student performance. So national testing of college and university students, while perhaps far in the distance, is likely a predictable result. The results of which will have a similar effect on undergraduate education as it has had on K-12 education (narrowed curriculum, de-emphasis on critical thought, and loss of academic freedom).

Washington Post: National School Testing Urged

Many states, including Maryland and Virginia, are reporting student proficiency rates so much higher than what the most respected national measure has found that several influential education experts are calling for a move toward a national testing system.

The growing talk of national testing and standards comes in the fifth year of the No Child Left Behind era. That federal law sought to hold public schools accountable for academic performance but left it up to states to design their own assessments. So the definition of proficiency — what it means for a student to perform at grade level — varies from coast to coast.Maryland recently reported that 82 percent of fourth-graders scored proficient or better in reading on the state’s test. The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “the nation’s report card,” show 32 percent of Maryland fourth-graders at or above proficiency in reading.

Virginia announced last week that 86 percent of fourth-graders reached that level on its reading test, but the NAEP data show 37 percent at or above proficiency.

Some experts say it’s time to be more clear about how well American schoolchildren are doing.

“The more discontented the public is with confusing and dumbed-down standards, the more politically feasible it will be to create national standards of achievement,” said Diane Ravitch, a New York University professor who was an assistant U.S. education secretary under President George H.W. Bush.

The political obstacles are formidable, including a long tradition of local control over public education. But the approaching presidential campaign, a pending debate over congressional reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind law and the wide gaps between assessments have raised hopes among proponents that the issue will gain steam. Some say gradual steps toward a national system would be better than none.

A recent study by Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, found that states regularly inflate student achievement. In 12 states studied, the percentage of fourth-graders proficient in reading climbed by nearly two percentage points a year, on average.

The NAEP (pronounced “Nape”) data show a decline on average in the percentage who were proficient over the same period, Fuller said.

Another Fuller-led study found only three states — Massachusetts, Missouri and South Carolina — with proficiency standards that come close to NAEP’s. (A similar rating by the journal Education Next showed that D.C. school standards have been stringent. It showed 14 percent of D.C. elementary school children reading proficiently on the D.C. scale and 11 percent on NAEP’s.)

Unlike state tests, which are used to help rate public schools and measure achievement of all students in certain grades, NAEP has a more limited mission. It tests selected pools of students in key subject areas to produce data on long-term educational trends.

NAEP standards were designed to establish what students ought to know to do well in the next grade and beyond, said Mark D. Musick, former president of the Southern Regional Education Board, who helped draft them. State standards, he said, more typically reflect what teachers say are the levels good students reach in their classes.

Although classroom experience varies across the country, Musick said, what students should know to be proficient in Algebra I is clear to most educators, and a national test would help set that standard.

The argument over national standards splits both major political parties. Many Republicans defend each state’s right to set its own standards, but the Bush administration includes advocates for a stronger federal role.

No Child Left Behind, which President Bush signed into law in 2002, struck a balance: It required a major expansion of state testing programs but left standard-setting authority to the states.

Many Democrats supported President Bill Clinton’s effort in the 1990s to encourage national standards, which was blocked by a Republican-led Congress. Other Democrats, particularly those allied with teachers unions, oppose judging schools by standardized tests.

Charles E. Smith, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, said many state officials tell him they are moving toward the national benchmarks.

A senior Maryland education official, for instance, said the state’s standards are aligned with some of the NAEP benchmarks. Some, he said, but not all.

“The gaps will generate differences in performance,” said Ronald A. Peiffer, Maryland’s deputy superintendent for academic policy. “If NAEP were the national test to which all states taught and tested, then there would be no gaps, and I would expect Maryland students to do much better on NAEP.”

Last week, the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation released a report from several experts, including advisers to Republican and Democratic administrations, that outlined ways to move toward national standards.

First, the federal government could order a new national testing program. The report said that surely would raise standards but would be unlikely to win congressional approval. Second, Washington could fund an expanded, voluntary national testing system. The report said that probably would raise standards and could be passed.

Third, states could build on efforts to share test items among themselves. That would be less likely to raise standards but politically feasible, the report said. Fourth, the federal government could take steps to ensure that state standards and test results could be easily compared with one another and with NAEP.

The experts in the report include Texas lawyer Sandy Kress and former deputy U.S. education secretary Eugene W. Hickok, both key education advisers to Bush, as well as Ravitch and former Clinton advisers Michael Cohen and Andrew J. Rotherham.

Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Fordham Foundation, a former Reagan administration official and one of the architects of the NAEP standards in 1990, said creating a national test would be difficult. “But I think it’s a manageable hurdle, especially with presidential leadership,” he said.

“There’s an assumption around that national standards are political suicide even if they make educational sense,” Finn said. “We need to bust through that.”

Musick said he believes the best way to introduce national tests would be in a few high school subjects, such as first- and second-year algebra.

Some educators see comparisons with NAEP as unrealistic. Gerald W. Bracey, an educational psychologist who writes frequently on testing, noted that 1996 NAEP results found only 30 percent of fourth-graders to be proficient or better in science, even though an international study that year ranked American fourth-graders third in science among 26 nations.

Others want to cut back on standardized testing entirely.

Deborah Meier gained fame for starting schools in low-income areas of New York City’s Manhattan that had experts rate students by viewing their schoolwork and discussing it with them. The schools did not rely on standardized tests. Instead of a national test, Meier said, the country should adopt “a combination of in-depth local instruments, independent review of schools and student work.”

She also said there is value in limited testing to sample student progress.

Skeptics of national testing have long noted the influence of politics on proficiency standards. Put simply, how many kids will voters allow to score below proficiency? Some policymakers are tempted to keep standards low so that schools will look successful; others seek to set them high to spur schools to improve.

Rouge Forum Update: Focus on Oaxaca (August 27, 2006)

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum No Blood for Oil web page is updated, with articles from Robert Fisk, Seymour Hersh, and others.

Two school workers’ struggles are highlighted in Rouge Forum Broadsides this week:

The Detroit Teacher Strike, set to begin Monday, August 28.

And a warning to the people of Oaxaca about an incoming Trojan Horse, filled with union bosses, from the USA.

In addition, The Rouge Forum now has its latest links posted to the delicious site at http://del.icio.us/rougeforum.

Take note of the cool antiwar posters available cheap on the Rouge Forum web page!

All the best for a great school year

YaleShmale

BBC: Canada university in campaign row

A small Canadian university has sparked controversy with its recruitment drive by using posters and a website mocking US President George W Bush.

Lakehead University in northern Ontario set up www.yaleshmale.com in a bid to attract potential new students.

It shows a picture of Yale graduate Mr Bush with the caption: “Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart.”The president of Lakehead’s student union called the campaign “repugnant”.

The university has issued posters bearing the black and white image of Mr Bush, who graduated from Yale in 1968, encouraging people to visit its campaign website.

It was literally a tongue-in-cheek way of getting attention
Frederick Gilbert,
Lakehead University president and vice-chancellor
Once there, users are invited to click on a link if they agree with the caption, and are taken through to a page promoting Lakehead, which is based in Thunder Bay and has 7,600 students.

“There are universities and then there are universities. So let’s not beat around the bush,” it says.

“Lakehead is different. We believe the person you become after you graduate is even more important than the person you were when you enrolled.”

There is then a further link to take users through to Lakehead’s official site for potential students.

‘Inappropriate’

The university has defended its campaign, which also includes prizes of a car lease and handheld computer games consoles, saying it has had a positive effect.

“It was literally a tongue-in-cheek way of getting attention,” university president and vice-chancellor Frederick Gilbert told Reuters news agency.

The website had received more than 7,000 hits, he said on Monday, and online comments had been 95% positive.

But he acknowledged the university had received e-mails which were “running in the opposite direction”, which was a concern.

“Older generations” and some of Lakehead’s students considered the campaign inappropriate, he said.

The university would not retract its campaign, however, although it would try to respond to individual concerns, he said.

Student union president Isabelle Poniatowski told Reuters the campaign was low-brow and lacked class.

“It still strikes me as being very repugnant,” she said. “Lakehead has so many positive attributes that you could really sell to people that live down south.”

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/5294690.stm

Published: 2006/08/29 11:22:17 GMT

Texas football coaches paid more than teachers

This is an appalling, if not particularly surprising finding…

Houston Chronicle: Football coaches still paid way more than teachers

Football coaches at schools in the state’s two largest classifications average $31,404 more in salary than teachers, slightly less than they did 10 years ago, the Austin American-Statesman reported Sunday following an examination of public records.

The Statesman reviewed the salaries for the 2005-06 school year from schools in Classes 5A and 4A through documents obtained under the Texas Public Information Act. The findings were very similar to a similar study done by The Associated Press in 1996, using records from the 1995-96 school year.

The latest numbers show coaches making an average of $73,804, compared to $42,400 for teachers.

A decade ago, the AP survey showed coaches making $54,000 and teachers making $31,000.Teachers have seen their salaries go up 36.8 percent, compared to 36.7 percent for coaches.

The Statesman reviewed the total compensation paid to the head football coaches and salaries of their highest-paid teachers, high school principals and superintendents for all school districts with schools in 4A and 5A. To be classified in 4A or above, schools had to have at least 950 students; that covered 461 schools. There were 428 schools in 4A and 5A during the AP review.

Among the new findings:

— Five coaches earn more than $100,000, topped by the $106,004 salary for Sam Harrell of Ennis High School. The leader in 1995-96 was Stephenville’s Art Briles at $82,658.

— The lowest-paid coach is Cornell Gray at Houston Furr. His salary of $42,300 is a tad below the average teacher’s salary. The lowest-paid last time was Dallas Wilson’s Damon Miller at $34,474.

— There are 27 coaches who earn more than their school’s principal.

— Southlake Carroll coach Todd Dodge, whose teams are 63-1 with three state championships and a mythical national title the past four years, ranks 36th among coaches at $90,510.

— Coaches in large school districts such as Austin, El Paso, Houston and Fort Worth are bunched toward the bottom of the pay scale.

— In Houston, the district’s highest-paid teacher makes $95,191 — far more than the $76,913 drawn by the district’s top-paid coach, Tom Nolan of Houston Lamar.

“The state sets a minimum salary, and paying teachers anything above that is a district by district decision,” said Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley, a former superintendent at Galena Park North Shore.

“Not everything is going to be equal,” she added, noting that math and science teachers tend to make more than English and history teachers. “I’ve been in the public school business for 35 years now, and it’s just the way it is.”

Donna Haschke, president of the Texas State Teachers Association, was glad to see teachers keep pace, but she’d like to see them narrow the gap much more.

“Sports has its place, and it’s an important, positive place in the curriculum,” she said. “But I think that we should be putting some of that time and money into education.”

Coaches receive a base salary, plus a coaching stipend that ranges from $1,000 to the $35,000 paid to Dodge. Their contracts usually are based on a 226-day work year, while teachers’ contracts are based on a 187-day year. It’s common for football coaches to log 70 to 100 per week during the season, including time on Saturdays and Sundays, compared to 40 to 70 per week for teachers.

“My wife is a teacher, and she doesn’t want to work the schedule I work,” said Lufkin coach John Outlaw, third on the salary list at $103,500. “She’s told me numerous times she doesn’t want to do it. And I don’t blame her.”

Coaches’ jobs are more scrutinized, with thousands of people in the stands watching them and results posted in the newspaper and debated within the community. Neeley noted that successful coaches also produce more college scholarships for players.

Over the last decade, D.W. Rutledge has gone from one of the top-paid coaches while at Converse Judson to executive director of the Texas High School Coaches Association. His view remains that coaches deserve what they are getting.

“I believe a coach has two tasks,” he said. “One is a minor one, and that is really teaching techniques of the game and skills of the game. The major task is the intangibles that coaches bring to the table. Good coaches teach leadership skills and sacrifice and dedication and unselfishness.”

Harrell, 49, is making 65 percent more than he did during the AP study. That’s the biggest bump among the 46 coaches still at the same school. And he’s among the rare high-earners who is merely the football coach and not also the coordinator of all athletic programs in either the school or school district. Few 5A and 4A coaches are classroom teachers.

“I consider myself the luckiest guy in the world,” said Harrell, whose teams won 4A state titles in 2000, 2001 and 2004.

Ennis superintendent Mike Harper said the football program generated $260,000 last year, making Harrell “worth everything we pay him.” Harper said administrators keep upping Harrell’s paychecks to prevent him from being lured away.

“Some days I think I get overpaid,” Outlaw said. “But then you have to deal with knucklehead boys and knucklehead mommies and daddies, and you realize that everybody in education is underpaid.”