E Wayne Ross – Page 111 – Critical Theories in Education

Concentrated Poverty in New Orleans and Other American Cities

In the The Chronicle of Higher Education issue dated August 4, 2006, Bruce Katz, who directs the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, reports on the concentration of poverty and effects of “employment decentralization” in New Orleans and other American cities (many with booming economies).

The legacies of racism, segregation, and intergenerational poverty are clear:

On the very day the levees broke, the Census Bureau released a report on poverty in the nation, finding that Orleans Parish had a poverty rate of 23.2 percent, seventh highest among 290 large U.S. counties.

Yet the economic hardships were shared unequally. Although African-American residents made up 67 percent of the city’s total population, they made up 84 percent of its population below the poverty line. And those poor African-American households were highly concentrated in 47 neighborhoods of extreme poverty — that is, neighborhoods where the poverty rate topped 40 percent.

Of the 131,000 poor people in the city in 2000, nearly 50,000 (38 percent) lived in those neighborhoods of extreme poverty. That put New Orleans second among large American cities in 2000 and far above the national average in its concentration of poverty. For African-Americans, the “concentrated poverty rate” was even higher, at 43 percent. On nearly every social and economic indicator, New Orleans’s neighborhoods of high poverty lagged far behind the rest of the city and the region as a whole: Four in five children were raised in single-parent families; just 60 percent of working-age residents were part of the labor market; and only one in 12 adults held a college degree.

That isolation of poverty occurred in a region that was rapidly decentralizing. As poverty hardened over the years in the city, middle-class families (including African-American households) and jobs moved out, mostly to the surrounding parishes. Between 1970 and 2000, the city population shrank by 18 percent, while neighboring St. Tammany Parish doubled in population. Jobs followed people: New Orleans was home to two-thirds of the region’s jobs in 1970; by 2000 that share had dropped to 42 percent.

THE MATERIAL WORLD
Concentrated Poverty in New Orleans and Other American Cities

By BRUCE KATZ

It has been close to a year since Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, crippling one of the world’s most distinctive cities. As the metropolis struggles to recover, national attention has naturally focused on the significant environmental challenges bedeviling the rebuilding effort. Can the region become a paragon of high-quality, sustainable development given its vulnerable location?

But equal attention needs to be paid to the social challenges. Katrina laid bare the disparities that continue to separate Americans by race and class. Analysis by the Brookings Institution and other research centers has revealed the disparate effect that the city’s flooding had on poor, minority households and the distressed neighborhoods in which they disproportionately lived. Thus, a second overriding question: Can the city transform its poor neighborhoods into healthy ones that will attract and accommodate families with a broad range of incomes?

The challenges facing New Orleans are complicated by the sluggish nature of the rebuilding effort. According to the most recent estimate, the population of the city is 181,000, well below the pre-storm level of 463,000. Tens of thousands of evacuees have been living in the Houston area, with large additional clusters in Dallas, Atlanta, and elsewhere. So, a third question: How can we ensure that families in the Katrina diaspora have access to communities of economic vitality and educational opportunity?

To aid the recovery effort and to place New Orleans’s plight in a national context, the Brookings Institution released two reports in October 2005: “New Orleans After the Storm: Lessons From the Past, a Plan for the Future” and “Katrina’s Window: Confronting Concentrated Poverty Across America.” We are also publishing a monthly compilation of economic and social indicators that measure the pace of rebuilding efforts in the New Orleans metropolis (see Katrina Index: Tracking Variables of Post-Katrina Reconstruction). All of these publications can be found on the institution’s Web site (http://www.brookings.edu/metro).

The data paint a sobering picture. Before Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans was a city at once unique and typical. Its architecture; its mix of French, African, Spanish, and Caribbean cultures; its rich artistic history; and its location amid lake, river, and delta were all one of a kind. But New Orleans also provided an example of patterns of segregation by race and by income that pervade most struggling American cities.

On the very day the levees broke, the Census Bureau released a report on poverty in the nation, finding that Orleans Parish had a poverty rate of 23.2 percent, seventh highest among 290 large U.S. counties.

Yet the economic hardships were shared unequally. Although African-American residents made up 67 percent of the city’s total population, they made up 84 percent of its population below the poverty line. And those poor African-American households were highly concentrated in 47 neighborhoods of extreme poverty — that is, neighborhoods where the poverty rate topped 40 percent.

Of the 131,000 poor people in the city in 2000, nearly 50,000 (38 percent) lived in those neighborhoods of extreme poverty. That put New Orleans second among large American cities in 2000 and far above the national average in its concentration of poverty. For African-Americans, the “concentrated poverty rate” was even higher, at 43 percent. On nearly every social and economic indicator, New Orleans’s neighborhoods of high poverty lagged far behind the rest of the city and the region as a whole: Four in five children were raised in single-parent families; just 60 percent of working-age residents were part of the labor market; and only one in 12 adults held a college degree.

That isolation of poverty occurred in a region that was rapidly decentralizing. As poverty hardened over the years in the city, middle-class families (including African-American households) and jobs moved out, mostly to the surrounding parishes. Between 1970 and 2000, the city population shrank by 18 percent, while neighboring St. Tammany Parish doubled in population. Jobs followed people: New Orleans was home to two-thirds of the region’s jobs in 1970; by 2000 that share had dropped to 42 percent.

Hurricane Katrina unveiled these disparities in stark terms. African-American and poor people bore the brunt of the devastation because, for the most part, they lived in the lower-lying, more flood-prone sections of the city, such as Mid-City or the Lower Ninth Ward. Incredibly, 38 of the city’s 47 extreme-poverty census tracts were flooded. Many people in flooded areas lacked access to a car, a fact that became critical during the evacuation period.

Unfortunately, the pattern of urban concentrated poverty on the one hand and employment decentralization on the other is not unique to New Orleans. While New Orleans clearly ranked among the cities with the most geographically concentrated poor populations, many others were not far behind. Some of the cities — like Baltimore, Cleveland, and Milwaukee — are former industrial giants whose populations have suffered from severe economic restructuring over the past several decades. Others — like Fresno, Los Angeles, and Miami — have faced challenges in integrating new immigrant populations who often arrive in gateway neighborhoods with low levels of education and labor-market skills. Still others — Atlanta, Memphis, and Washington — lie at the heart of growing regions but continue to grapple with legacies of racism, segregation, and intergenerational poverty holding back their most distressed neighborhoods.

So, what to do?

Over the past several decades, scholars and policy makers have learned a lot about the negative effects of concentrated poverty and the benefits of policies designed to give low-income families greater access to housing in lower poverty neighborhoods, closer to employment and educational opportunities.

Many of those lessons have been compiled in a recent anthology, The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America (Brookings Institution Press, 2005). The volume, edited by Xavier de Souza Briggs, a professor of sociology and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focuses on four main questions: What limits housing choice, leading to an uneven “geography of opportunity” by race and class? What are the social and economic consequences of this geography? What special barriers to housing opportunity confront low-income families? And what political and policy lessons might we learn from efforts to increase housing choice?

Briggs and his authors find that the residents of poor, isolated communities face failing schools, unsafe streets, run-down housing, and few local jobs or employment networks. Other studies have revealed that residents of poor neighborhoods often pay higher prices for basic goods and services since their neighborhoods are dominated by parasitic firms like check cashers and payday lenders rather than mainstream businesses. (See, for instance, the Brookings report “The Price Is Wrong: Getting the Market Right for Working Families in Philadelphia.”) Together, these factors combine to limit opportunities and quality of life.

Yet entire cities, their suburbs, and the nation as a whole also pay a heavy price for concentration of poverty, according to research by Janet Rothenberg Pack, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Cities are forced to pay for the higher cost of delivering health, education, police, fire, judicial, and other services in high-poverty environments, often amounting to hundreds of dollars per city resident. With higher expenses come higher taxes, harming cities in their competition for middle-class families, which are the backbone of resilient economies.

Suburbs with weak central cities also see less appreciation in housing prices and incomes, given the interdependence of economies. One study, for example, found that a 1-percent increase in city employment raises home values by $6,000 in nearby suburbs.

And the concentration of neighborhood poverty leads inexorably to the concentration of school poverty, undermining almost every other effort by the public, private, and volunteer sectors to educate the children of low-income families.

Briggs and his authors analyze the accomplishments and occasional failures of policies designed to give low-income families more housing choices. One chapter distills the lessons from the federal Moving to Opportunity demonstration, which enabled recipients of housing vouchers to move to areas of lower poverty, growing employment, and high-quality schools. Another reviews the benefits of city- and county-wide “inclusionary zoning” regimes that require builders to include a certain amount of housing for low- and moderate-income households when they build market-rate multifamily developments or town-home communities. The book also examines the promise of replacing failed public-housing enclaves with well-designed, economically integrated developments.

The bottom line is that America knows how to promote housing choice and build mixed-income communities that work economically and socially. The only question is whether we have the political will to apply the best lessons and innovations not only to the rebuilding of New Orleans but to the housing of Katrina-displaced and other low-income families throughout the country.

Bruce Katz directs the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution and is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 48, Page B15
Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

More on the Faith Nights at Turner Field

On June 2, I posted an entry about the Atlanta Braves plan to have “Faith Nights” at Turner Field this summer.

Faith Nights (and Days) is a promotion that aims to turn the ballpark into an evangelical Christian testimony service. In a piece for The Nation titled ““You Can Keep the Faith,” Dave Zirin exposes the Braves promotion as a surreptitious collaboration with the James Dobson’s anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-sex education Focus on the Family organization.

Zirin calls for Faith Days and Nights at ballparks in the major and minor leagues to be “exposed, picketed and, most of all, shunned. Let the emissaries of Dobson preach in peace outside the park. Inside is sacred space.”

You can send a letter of protest to the Atlanta Braves via their web site.

Here’s my latest letter to the Braves:

I have been a long time Braves fan (since before the team moved to Atlanta) and as an Atlanta resident in the 1970s and 1980s I attended many games.

I wanted to let you know that I am deeply offended by the Braves “Faith Night” promotion. This promotion is blatantly exclusive of religious faiths outside of evangelical Christianity and it links the Atlanta Braves with an organization that is anti-gay and anti-Semitic.

Ostensibly a collaboration with Third Coast Sports, this promotion is apparently (according to the Third Coast Sports website) a partnership between the Atlanta Braves and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family an evangelical Christian group that is anti-choice, anti-gay, against sex education, and the leading proponent of the bogus notion of “reparative therapy” for homosexuality.

I find the very notion of “Faith Nights” at the ball park disheartening as baseball has (and should remain) a game that brings diverse people together, however, this crass marketing campaign to bring bus loads of church goers to the park actually works to build barriers between people. Personally, as die-hard Braves fan all my life, your collaboration with religious hate-mongers deeply saddens me.

E. Wayne Ross

Rouge Forum Update: The Unspeakable Spoken (August 1, 2006)

The Rouge Forum No Blood for Oil web page is updated.

The site includes important analytical offerings from Robert Fisk, Stratfor, West Point Grads Against the War, Historians Against War, and many others.

The dvd of “Sir! No Sir”, the story of the GI anti-war movement that paralyzed the military in Vietnam, is on sale now, great for classroom use.

This week we would like to say some things we hear no one else saying.

The current world wide debacle of perpetual war is the result the logical and necessary processes of capitalism which pit those few who own against the many who must sell our labor, work, to live. The few will not rule the many forever. Things change.

What is happening, at many levels, is an international war of the rich on the poor. This includes attacks on all kinds of worker organizations and the rise of racist inequality, everywhere. The term that best describes this is class war.

As a sub-set of class war, we witness intense inter-imperialist rivalry, for example in Iraq but also proxy war, as is a significant part of the case with Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah-Syria.

In this mix, as people’s lives become ever more desperate and hard to understand, religious irrationalism steps in to fill the void. Religion can offer us an ethic for the future, but It is not possible to resolve truly religious disputes, as all sides invariably test for truth within their own minds, rather in the material, real world. Religion, always married to intellectual and practical exploitation, is a mid-wife of racism and war.

Very few disputes, however, are solely religious disputes. Usually, somebody is coveting someone else’s nickel.

Class struggle goes on wherever people must work. In Lebanon, about 20 percent of the people are out of work, around 2/3 of the remainder work in service industries (tourism, etc., as banking was demolished in the earlier wars) about 20 % work in industry, and around 10% in agriculture. Every one of those workers is exploited by a series of bosses. Despite support for the Party of God, or the Christians, or others, this class struggle is the key underlying fact of life in Lebanon.

In Israel, about 10% of the people are unemployed. 21% of the people live beneath the poverty line, despite the US subsidized militarization of the Israeli economy. 20% of the workforce is in industry, another 30% in services, and the remainder work in transport, communication, etc. All those Israeli workers, despite what is initially mass support for the Zionist government, are exploited by a series of bosses as well.

The Israel/Lebanon wars today are, in part, also about oil. So is the growing sentiment about US action in Cuba, and Iran. Oil is key to every military in the world, which makes oil a pivotal resource for every imperialist nation which must have oil for home-capitalists to survive.

There is no easy way out of this, no peaceful way either. The only way out is to transcend capitalism. Of course, to only see the transformation of capitalism, or to only see the rise of religious fanaticism, would be to look down the barrel of a gun and only see one sight. Big transformations are built by small reforms, and the close personal ties, trust and wisdom, that struggles create. However, there is no disconnecting short term goals from long term necessity.

The key thing that determines likeness and difference in the world is social class. Every school worker in the US has more in common with school workers in Israel and Lebanon that any of us have in common with our own national leaders.

Organization, education, and action must address these connected realities of capitalism, imperialism, war, and the various forms of irrationalism that capitalism requires: racism, sexism, mysticism. It is past time for action.

We need to begin to discuss, at the very least, conducting the educational work that can fill the jails with direct action protests. Direct action can overcome apathy and fear. In schools, action can address the racist Big Tests (walk out), imperialist military recruiters, nationalist Homeland Security ICE cops, and regular cops as well (throw them out), class size (wildcats backed up by freedom schooling).

Most of us are educators, school workers, though there are quite a few military personnel on the RF list now, and many others. Our task is to connect reason with power, and act. And we need the audacity to say, “This is all wrong.” Someone must go first.

There is no litmus test on all the issues above for participation in the Rouge Forum. But the issues need to be discussed.

We are in the process of establishing regional and state coordinators for the Rouge Forum. Interested?

Sources: Israel and Lebanon: CIA World Fact Book

Oil , Lebanon and Iraq: Michel Chossudovsky The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil

Review of Sir! No Sir

Religion, Racism, War, and Schooling

US DOE doesn’t let facts get in the way of policy-making

In his USA Today column DeWayne Wickham outs the stealth school voucher program currently promoted by the U.S. Department of Education as a policy-recommendation that is not support by the Department’s own research.

Four days before Education Secretary Margaret Spellings held a news conference last month to tout a bill that would provide $100 million to help students escape troubled public schools, her department quietly issued a report that calls into question the efficacy of that idea.

If passed, the legislation would make available ìopportunity scholarships for students in poor-performing public schools to transfer to another public school, get tutoring or receive scholarships to attend a private school. Don’t be fooled by these options. Opportunity scholarships is a euphemism for school vouchers. It’s an attempt to mask a bad idea with an appealing label.

“We are one step closer to ensuring that parents can make choices that strengthen their children’s future and give them a great start in life, regardless of their resources or the communities they live in,” Spellings said July 18.

Before going out on that fragile limb, she should have read the study issued by the National Center for Education Statistics, a unit of the Education Department she runs. According to that report, which compared reading and math scores of fourth- and eighth-graders in public and privates schools, economics, social background and race had a negative impact on the test scores of private school students.

In the overall study, students in private schools outperformed public school students by a fairly wide margin on math and reading tests. But when the scores of the students of the same racial identity, economic status and social condition were compared, the researchers said, there was virtually no difference (with the exception of eighth-grade reading) between those who attended private and public schools. In other words, the results don’t support the idea that school vouchers are an educational life raft for students from failing schools.

ìThe results … are nothing more than we expected,î says Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association. ìWe know what it takes to improve public education, and it’s not vouchers.î

He’s right. Vouchers are a bad idea that conservatives have recycled. After the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in public schools, right-wingers in Virginia hatched a scheme to give ìtuition grantsî to parents who didn’t want their children to attend integrated schools.

One of the state’s jurisdictions, Prince Edward County, did just that for five years, offering white students tuition grants to attend private academies. Black students got nothing but an educational shaft. The proposed scholarships are a shaft of another sort for black students. They deflect attention from the failure of states and the federal government to ensure that all children have access to a quality public education.

This latest voucher scheme, if implemented, would likely give a small percentage of students in underperforming schools an escape hatch. The rest would serve as guinea pigs for conservatives’ argument that such a program will pressure public schools into doing a better job of educating those who are left behind. It won’t.

ìWe know what it takes to improve public schools,î Weaver says. ìCertified teachers. Smaller class sizes. Adequate and equitable funding. Safe and orderly schools and qualified staffs. And anything that takes away from that is not good.î

Spending $100 million on these scholarships is a bad idea. Most private schools don’t want students who have discipline problems, who have special needs or whose parents show no interest in their education. Giving these kids a scholarship isn’t going to change that.

Public schools, on the other hand, must try to educate a vast cross section of this nation’s youngsters. So instead of trying to deflect attention from the failure of states and the federal government to give public schools what they need to meet this challenge, voucher proponents offer them empty promises. This latest one is called ìopportunity scholarships.î

Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Start Counterattack

Has Kansas been touched by His Noodly Appendage?

The New York Times: Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Start Counterattack

August 1, 2006
Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Start Counterattack

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
KANSAS CITY, Kan., July 29 — God and Charles Darwin are not on the primary ballot in Kansas on Tuesday, but once again a contentious schools election has religion and science at odds in a state that has restaged a three-quarter-century battle over the teaching of evolution.

Less than a year after a conservative Republican majority on the State Board of Education adopted rules for teaching science containing one of the broadest challenges in the nation to Darwin’s theory of evolution, moderate Republicans and Democrats are mounting a fierce counterattack. They want to retake power and switch the standards back to what they call conventional science.The Kansas election is being watched closely by both sides in the national debate over the teaching of evolution. In the past several years, pitched battles have been waged between the scientific establishment and proponents of what is called intelligent design, which holds that nature alone cannot explain life’s origin and complexity.

Last February, the Ohio Board of Education reversed its 2002 mandate requiring 10th-grade biology classes to critically analyze evolution. The action followed a federal judge’s ruling that teaching intelligent design in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

A defeat for the conservative majority in Kansas on Tuesday could be further evidence of the fading fortunes of the intelligent design movement, while a victory would preserve an important stronghold in Kansas.

The curriculum standards adopted by the education board do not specifically mention intelligent design, but advocates of the belief lobbied for the changes, and students are urged to seek “more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”

Though there is no reliable polling data available, Joseph Aistrup, head of political science at Kansas State University, said sharp ideological splits among Republicans and an unusual community of interest among moderate Republicans and some Democrats were helping challengers in the primary.

Kansas Democrats, moreover, have a strong standard-bearer in the incumbent governor, Kathleen Sebelius, who has distanced herself from the debate.

“And if a conservative candidate makes it through the primary, there’s a Democratic challenger waiting” in the general election, Professor Aistrup said.

Several moderate Republican candidates have vowed, if they lose Tuesday, to support the Democratic primary winners in November. With the campaign enlivened by a crowded field of 16 candidates contending for five seats — four held by conservatives who voted for the new science standards last year — a shift of two seats could overturn the current 6-to-4 majority. The four-year terms are staggered so that only half the 10-member board is up for election each two years.

The acrimony in the school board races is not limited to differences over the science curriculum but also over other ideologically charged issues like sex education, charter schools and education financing. Power on the board has shifted almost every election since 1998, with the current conservative majority taking hold in 2004.

“Can we just agree God invented Darwin?” asked a weary Sue Gamble, a moderate member of the board whose seat is not up for re-election.

The chairman of the board, Dr. Steve E. Abrams, a veterinarian and the leader of the conservative majority, said few of the opposition candidates were really moderates. “They’re liberals,” said Dr. Abrams, who is not up for re-election.

He said that the new science curriculum in no way opened the door to intelligent design or creationism and that any claim to the contrary “is an absolute falsehood.”

“We have explicitly stated that the standards must be based on scientific evidence,” Dr. Abrams said, “what is observable, measurable, testable, repeatable and unfalsifiable.”

In science, he said, “everything is supposedly tentative, except the teaching of evolution is dogma.”

Harry E. McDonald, a retired biology teacher and self-described moderate Republican who has been going door to door for votes in his district near Olathe, said the board might have kept overt religious references out of the standards, “but methinks they doth protest too much.”

“They say science can’t answer this, therefore God,” Mr. McDonald said.

Connie Morris, a conservative Republican running for re-election, said the board had merely authorized scientifically valid criticism of evolution. Ms. Morris, a retired teacher and author, said she did not believe in evolution.

“It’s a nice bedtime story,” she said. “Science doesn’t back it up.”

Dr. Abrams said his views as someone who believes that God created the universe 6,500 years ago had nothing to do with the science standards adopted.

“In my personal faith, yes, I am a creationist,” he said. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with science. I can separate them.” He said he agreed that “my personal views of Scripture have no room in the science classroom.”

Dr. Abrams said that at a community meeting he had been asked whether it was possible to believe in the Bible and in evolution, and that he had responded, “There are those who try to believe in both — there are theistic evolutionists — but at some point in time you have to decide which you’re going to put your credence in.”

Last year’s changes in the science standards followed an increasingly bitter seesawing of power on the education board that began in 1998 when conservatives won a majority. They made the first changes to the standards the next year, which in turn were reversed after moderates won back control in 2000. The 2002 elections left the board split 5-5, and in 2004 the conservatives won again, instituting their major standards revisions in November 2005.

Critics said the changes altered the science standards in ways that invited theistic interpretations. The new definition called for students to learn about “the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory.”

In one of many “additional specificities” that the board added to the standards, it stated, “Biological evolution postulates an unguided natural process that has no discernable direction or goal.”

John Calvert, manager of the Intelligent Design Network in Shawnee Mission and a lawyer who wrote material for the board advocating the new science standards, said they were not intended to advance religion.

“What we are trying to do is insert objectivity, take the bias out of the religious standard that now favors the nontheistic religion of evolution,” Mr. Calvert said.

Janet Waugh, a car dealer and the only moderate Democrat on the board whose seat is up for election, said that just because some people were challenging evolution did not mean their views belonged in the curriculum.

“When the mainstream scientific community determines a theory is correct, that’s when it should be in the schools,” Ms. Waugh said. “The intelligent design people are trying to cut in line.”

The races have been hard-fought. With the majority of the 100,000 registered Republicans in Mr. McDonald’s northeast Kansas district usually ignoring primary elections, a few hundred ballots could easily be the margin of victory.

So Mr. McDonald, who with $35,000 is the lead fund-raiser among the candidates, printed newsletters showing his opponent, the conservative board member John W. Bacon, with a big red slash through his face and the slogan, “Time to Bring Home the Bacon.” Mr. Bacon did not respond to several calls for a response.

But many of the homeowners Mr. McDonald visited Friday night showed little interest in the race. Jack Campbell, a medical center security director, opened the door warily, and when Mr. McDonald recited his pitch, seemed disappointed. “I thought I won some sweepstakes,” Mr. Campbell said.

Last Thursday night at Fort Hays State University, Ms. Morris debated her moderate Republican challenger, Sally Cauble, a former teacher, and the Democratic candidate, Tim Cruz, a former mayor of Garden City, whom Ms. Morris once accused of being an illegal immigrant. (He said he was third-generation American, and Ms. Morris apologized.)

The audience asked about Kansas being ridiculed across the country for its stance on evolution.

“I did not write the jokes,” Ms. Morris said.

Spectators split on the winner.

“There are so many more important issues in Kansas right now,” said Cheryl Shepherd-Adams, a science teacher. “The issue is definitely a wedge issue, and I don’t want to see our community divided.”

History without books gets a test in California schools

It was only a matter of time before digital curriculum materials moved beyond the ancillary to the main event for publishers.

Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher ($2.5 billion in school sales last year), has introduced a digital materials for California’s social studies classrooms, which is apparently the first large-scale attempt to eliminate textbooks from classrooms.

Of course it remains to be seen if the digital format actually affects the pedagogical strategies of teachers, but in the meantime at least California students will have dramatically lighter backpacks.

History without books gets a test in California schools
By Jeffrey Goldfarb | August 1, 2006

LONDON (Reuters) – School children fond of chanting “No more pencils, no more books” may finally have their wish.

What began as a long-shot attempt last year by Pearson Plc to sell California educators digital materials to teach social studies has become reality in what could be the first large-scale step to eliminate books from classrooms.

Pearson, the world’s biggest publisher of educational materials, disclosed on Monday with its half-year results that about half the state’s elementary school students will learn about the American Revolutionary War and Thomas Jefferson using an interactive computer program.

The company also said its success in California, where about 1.5 million students aged 5-11 will use the program in classrooms this year, has led it to plan the same approach in additional states and with more subjects.

“Digital development costs us less and takes less time,” Pearson Chief Executive Marjorie Scardino said. “We’re speeding up how we’re rolling out those kinds of programs.”

London-based Pearson estimated it cost about half as much to develop as a textbook with supplemental materials, and added that it had about a 41 percent market share.

“We’re experimenting with the program and the price,” Chief Financial Officer Robin Freestone said, adding that Pearson gave California a discount compared with a book-based proposal. “It’s a major breakthrough, though. We managed to launch something for schools that didn’t need a book.”
The company said the California contract was valued at about $70 million, leaving some analysts guarded in their optimism about Pearson finding broader scale for digital curricula. While they saw some advantages for Pearson, they also found little that was technologically dazzling in the materials.

“All of their competitors are going to have to answer to this now,” said one media analyst, who asked not to be named because of bank rules restricting public comments.

“Pearson have got the first-mover advantage, but I doubt there’s any technical advantage. It can probably be replicated fairly easily.”

Pearson’s 2005 sales derived from schools, its biggest division, were about 1.3 billion pounds ($2.43 billion).

The California social studies contract was a longshot for Pearson, which had not even been planning to bid because of the strict guidelines the state puts on submissions for the subject.

“We didn’t think we could find a return,” Scardino said.

Instead, it opted to cull existing materials into a digital offering that included online homework assignments. It sent state officials a laptop computer instead of a pile of books in April 2005, and won state approval in November.

“Most schools have a big fat textbook on the table that doesn’t really entice students any more,” Scardino said.

Pearson’s multimedia product, created by its Scott Foresman unit, enables teachers to tailor lessons to individual students, includes video clips and is able to read aloud all of the lessons in English and Spanish.

“History and social science comes to life with exciting text, vibrant media clips and activities,” said Cheryl McConaughey, assistant superintendent at the Lamont School District near Bakersfield, California, in a statement supplied by Pearson. It was the first district to buy the materials.

“Our teachers are thrilled with virtually all aspects of the program.”

Press release on Pearson digital social studies project

What do Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, James Brown, Dolly Parton, Irving Berlin and Bob Dylan have in common?

Great idea here…I’ve had some success using blues music in social studies classes to teach about the experiences of African Americans as well as economic and class issues.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Pitt professor aims to help teach other subjects through music
7/30/2006, 12:29 p.m. ET
By ANDREW DRUCKENBROD
The Associated Press

PITTSBURGH (AP) — What do Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, James Brown, Dolly Parton, Irving Berlin and Bob Dylan have in common? They, among others, just may save music in American schools and put a powerful tool in the hands of teachers of all subjects.

A University of Pittsburgh music professor is disseminating a new approach to teaching history, English, social studies and other humanities by including music to be studied like any primary text. The results have been stunning for those teachers who have implemented his program in their curriculums.

“A large percentage of teenagers are bored with education, find that it has less to do with their real life and become disaffected,” said Deane Root, founder of the Voices Across Time program. “Textbooks already have vivid color and illustrations but miss out on music history. If music is one of the primary ways teenagers identify with each other, why not use it in the classes?”

Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin'” fits snugly into a class investigating the protests of the ’60s, for instance. Sting’s “Russians” makes sense in a chapter about the Cold War. Root’s project, however, also specializes in providing information about lesser-known songs from earlier periods.

Class discussions on slavery gain from the authentic voices expressed in spirituals such as “No More Auction Block for Me.” An understanding of the abject, pre-union working conditions in American sweatshops gains depth with a listen to “The Song of the Shirt.” Discrimination (“No Irish Need Apply”) and prohibition (“Father’s a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead”) are investigated through song, as well as the many U.S. conflicts, from the birth of the country to the Civil War to the World Wars and Vietnam.

The trick, said Root, is to get teachers to treat music in the classroom in a more integrated manner, “not using music as wallpaper or window dressing or a curtain you walk through as you come into the room.”

To do that, he realized he had to give teachers the tools to understand how to use this information: music and text. All at a time when school districts have been curtailing music literacy.

In the past 20 years, “cut time” has meant something completely different to music teachers in public high schools. Financially strapped school districts were already decreasing music programs before No Child Left Behind was signed as federal law in 2002. It requires students to pass annual exams in reading and math, causing school districts to shift the balance of classes to those subjects.

“Though many programs across the nation are stable and some might even be growing, data from the Council for Basic Education, from analysis of California Department of Education data, and certainly from anecdotal sources suggest that the trend is downward,” said Michael Blakeslee, spokesman for the National Association for Music Education.

“In Pennsylvania, it is rare to have music cut out completely, but things have been whittled down,” said Richard Victor, former president of the Pennsylvania Music Educators Association. “Classes taught five days a week are changed to four or three days.”

The fight is still on, in the greater cultural arena and in schools, to reinstate or provide better funding for music education and instrument lessons. Several studies have shown how playing an instrument increases responsibility and brain development, not to mention broadening cultural experiences.

But Root and others are making the bold case that music also is a potent way to help students learn other school subjects. “I want to change the whole notion that music is a periphery to education and show it is an integral part of the core curriculum,” he said.

Earphone cords emerge from nearly every teenager’s ears these days, attached to iPods, MP3 players, even cell phones. If they are not getting instrument study as much as they once did, listening to music is more important than ever.

“There is nothing in education school which teaches prospective teachers how to use music as a regular part of their lesson plan,” said Root.

He began researching Voices Across Time in 1995, but it wasn’t until 2004 that he could offer seminars for teachers — as a partnership between Pitt’s Center for American Music and the Society for American Music, and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Now, any interested secondary education teacher can apply for funding to the classes here in Pittsburgh and in workshops he puts on throughout the country.

“With the kids connected to their MP3 players, I knew it was important,” said Joanne Krett, who teaches English and humanities at Boyce Campus Middle College High School in Monroeville. In 2004, she participated in the first of Root’s five-week summer seminars, and the results from implementing his approach, she said, had a “phenomenal” effect on her students.

“I always had music playing as a mood setter in the classroom; I just never had the tools to use it effectively,” she said. “The kind of kids I teach are so turned off by traditional education. It definitely engaged them more.

Root and his assistants supplied Krett with a guidebook and CDs analyzing songs that intersected with the issues she was teaching. One such subject was American social history of the ’60s, often misunderstood by her students. “The kids have this view of the ’60s as hippies, they don’t realize that was a small movement in a greater conservative environment,” she said.

In addition to the standard historical materials, Krett had the students listening to two songs of the time: Neil Young’s “Ohio” and Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee.” The study of the lyrics and the music brought to life both sides of the cultural divide of the time.

Not only do the texts of these songs offer a deeper context to the turbulent times, students also find they learn much from the music. They already have the tools to decode songs simply from listening to them all the time, and that deepens their understanding of the lyrics and the issues.

“Students often form identities around musical styles because it contains a lot of information they can understand,” said Root, who also is chair of Pitt’s music department. “Songs from throughout history are packed with information. … Music is ubiquitous today, but it was everywhere in American history.”

Mark Albright has taught history at St. Agnes Academy in Houston, Texas, for 26 years, but was astounded by the effect that the project had on his students.

“This is very effective in getting them engaged,” he said. “They love the music, (and it) just dovetailed so nicely with all the other elements of the course. A book, a song, a picture — is a means. Using as many of them as possible, you can help students come to understand a broader richer, deeper cultural sense of the nature of people in another time.”

Albright also is amazed by other effects of including music in the curriculum. His students created a music video that speaks to the evolution of the image of adolescent women in society. Likewise, Krett had her students write new lyrics to “The Alcoholic Blues,” a song protesting Prohibition. “We asked them to take any policy and write a song in the same meter and rhyme to protest that. They loved it (and were) actively involved.” Subjects included curfew polities, the school’s dress code and the No Child Left Behind mandate.

Both Krett and Albright had only limited background in music before attending Root’s seminar, but Root was ready for that with activities that helped to make the learning curve less steep. For this summer’s institute, wrapping up this week at Pitt, Root booked several guest speakers and musicians. Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, the songwriters who did the soundtrack to Ken Burns’ documentary “The Civil War,” sang through songs with the teachers in a recent seminar.

Voices Across Time is one of several independent projects funded by the NEH on this subject. Another was created by music industry expert Joseph Horowitz. “What Deane and I are doing is strategizing to get music back into the curriculum via social studies and history, (getting) music into the high school in classes other than the band room.”

Horowitz’s project includes a book, “Dvorak and America,” and a soon-to-be published DVD-ROM by music historian Robert Winter that uses Antonin Dvorak’s historic visit to America in the 1890s as a portal into understanding American culture at the time.

Horowitz is impressed with how Root has expanded such a project to include music for every period of history or aesthetic movement. “Deane is miles ahead of me in linking to high school teachers,” he said. “I think he is a visionary.”

The irony running through the efforts of Root, Horowitz, Vanderbilt’s Dale Cockrell and others like a recurring bass line is that it has been through music’s precarious existence in schools that these new, rich avenues for its inclusion have developed.

“It is very wrong-headed and shortsighted and an act of ignorance to remove music to save money and raise test scores. They are actually removing the incentives to become a better student,” Root contends.

He hopes to extend his project to more teachers by finding a publisher and expanding the classes to other geographical areas.

“The kids are listening to music. Why can’t we use it?” Root asked.

Rouge Forum Update (July 25, 2006)

Much of Lebanon is in ruins. About 750,000 people are displaced. Nearly 400 Lebanese are dead, about 20 of them Hezbollah fighters. Perhaps 40 Israelis are dead.

In Iraq, where the US failed invasion is prompting real barbarism, about 100 people a day are being killed. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is finding a new base among the population, war lords and drug dealers (often US allies, but always allied only to themselves) rule the country-side and the US backed president cannot travel without American guards.

The US invasions fail, not so much because of operational stupidity (although there is plenty of that), but because the people of the countries the US invades quickly realize that, despite the soccer balls given to kids, and the English language books placed in libraries, the US is there to rob and exploit them and their land. That is impossible to hide. So, they resist, because they must resist to live.

The term “world war three,” is commonplace in the US press.

Gas prices leaped to nearly double their previous highest levels, creating sensible fears of inflation. GM and Ford stock now stand at junk bond status, as they lay off tens of thousands of their workers, with the full cooperation of the UAW.

The Representative Assembly of the National Education Association voted, about three to one, not to discuss the war. The American Federation of Teachers convention voted to support the Democratic Party’s position on the war, which is merely more war, better. The US union movement supports these wars.

Issues are sharpening, differences sharpening, because events grow intense.

Most of us are, in one way or another, connected with schools, education, and organizing. Our task, it appears, it to construct reason, to fight for it, by connecting reason to power. Power lies in organization.

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil web page is updated, with incisive articles from the likes of Juan Cole, Robert Fisk, Bill Blum, and many others.

We would like to call attention to our (unfortunately) classic “US Out of the Middle East” poster, for sale at cost, here. This poster was made first during Gulf War One.

This is a link to an exchange about school workers, our unions, and the current wars.

And this is a link to a critique of Jonathan Kozol’s Education Manifesto. Rethinking Schools, whose work we have always supported, refuses to circulate it, sad to say.

It is time to take direct, principled, yet militant action against perpetual imperialist war.

And perhaps you would forward news of the Rouge Forum to friends and colleagues.