E Wayne Ross – Page 112 – Critical Theories in Education

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.

“I love rock and roll…”

So, first last Sunday’s New York Times reminded me of my old age with their piece on the “Graying of the record store” and well, when your as old as Gumby and Pokey, going to the punk rock show is just not the same, but it’s still lot’s of fun even if you are gray.

Colin and I took in the Van’s Warped Tour at UBC’s Thunderbird Stadium today and there were many more multicolored mohawks in the crowd than there were 50-year-olds. (Colin estimated there were at least 5 or 6 folks my age at the show—and all of them were up front (including me) at the Joan Jett and the Blackhearts set).

Colin’s favorites of the day were goth-punkers AFI. I liked Anti-Flag and Joan Jett—who played her 80s hits plus tunes from her new album “Sinner,” including a cover of Sweet’s “A.C.D.C.” and an anti-Bush tune “Riddles.” And we both enjoyed NOFX and Bouncing Souls.

Best moment of the day was Fat Mike’s (NOFX) rant against religion and his introduction of the Christian metal act that followed them on stage as “Jerry Falwell’s ‘Underoath.'”

50 albums that changed music

In celebration of the the fiftieth year of the British pop album chart, The Observer struck a panel of “experts” (ames Bennett, Kitty Empire, Dave Gelly, Lynsey Hanley, Sean O’Hagan, Elle J Small, Neil Spence) to pick the 50 albums that changed music.

Here’s the Top 10 of The Observer‘s list along with their reasoning (see link below for the full list):

1 The Velvet Underground and Nico
The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967)
Though it sold poorly on its initial release, this has since become arguably the most influential rock album of all time. The first art-rock album, it merges dreamy, druggy balladry (‘Sunday Morning’) with raw and uncompromising sonic experimentation (‘Venus in Furs’), and is famously clothed in that Andy Warhol-designed ‘banana’ sleeve. Lou Reed’s lyrics depicted a Warholian New York demi-monde where hard drugs and sexual experimentation held sway. Shocking then, and still utterly transfixing.

Without this, there’d be no … Bowie, Roxy Music, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Jesus and Mary Chain, among many others.
SOH

2 The Beatles
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

There are those who rate Revolver (1966) or ‘the White Album’ (1968) higher. But Sgt Pepper’s made the watertight case for pop music as an art form in itself; until then, it was thought the silly, transient stuff of teenagers. At a time when all pop music was stringently manufactured, these Paul McCartney-driven melodies and George Martin-produced whorls of sound proved that untried ground was not only the most fertile stuff, but also the most viable commercially. It defined the Sixties and – for good and ill – gave white rock all its airs and graces.

Without this … pop would be a very different beast.
KE

3 Kraftwerk
Trans-Europe Express (1977)

Released at the height of punk, this sleek, urbane, synthesised, intellectual work shared little ground with its contemporaries. Not that it wanted to. Kraftwerk operated from within a bubble of equipment and ideas which owed more to science and philosophy than mere entertainment. Still, this paean to the beauty of mechanised movement and European civilisation was a moving and exquisite album in itself. And, through a sample on Afrika Bambaataa’s seminal ‘Planet Rock’, the German eggheads joined the dots with black American electro, giving rise to entire new genres.

Without this… no techno, no house, no Pet Shop Boys. The list is endless.
KE

4 NWA
Straight Outta Compton (1989)

Like a darker, more vengeful Public Enemy, NWA (Niggaz With Attitude) exposed the vicious realities of the West Coast gang culture on their lurid, fluent debut. Part aural reportage (sirens, gunshots, police radio), part thuggish swagger, Compton laid the blueprint for the most successful musical genre of the last 20 years, gangsta rap. It gave the world a new production mogul in Dr Dre, and gave voice to the frustrations that flared up into the LA riots in 1992. As befits an album boasting a song called ‘Fuck tha Police’, attention from the FBI, the Parents’ Music Resource Centre and our own Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Squad sealed its notoriety.

Without this … no Eminem, no 50 Cent, no Dizzee Rascal.
KE

5 Robert Johnson
King of the Delta Blues Singers (1961)

Described by Eric Clapton as ‘the most important blues singer that ever lived’, Johnson was an intensely private man, whose short life and mysterious death created an enduring mythology. He was said to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi in exchange for his finger-picking prowess. Johnson recorded a mere 29 songs, chief among them ‘Hellhound on My Trail’, but when it was finally issued, King of the Delta Blues Singers became one of the touchstones of the British blues scene.

Without this … no Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin.
SOH

6 Marvin Gaye
What’s Going On (1971)

Gaye’s career as tuxedo-clad heart-throb gave no hint he would cut a concept album dealing with civil rights, the Vietnam war and ghetto life. Equally startling was the music, softening and double-tracking Gaye’s falsetto against a wash of bubbling percussion, swaying strings and chattering guitars. Motown boss Berry Gordy hated it but its disillusioned nobility caught the public mood. Led by the oft-covered ‘Inner City Blues’, it ushered in an era of socially aware soul.

Without this … no Innervisions (Stevie Wonder) or Superfly (Curtis Mayfield).
NS

7 Patti Smith
Horses (1975)

Who would have thought punk rock was, in part, kickstarted by a girl? Poet, misfit and New York ligger, Patti channelled the spirits of Keith Richards, Bob Dylan and Rimbaud into female form, and onto an album whose febrile energy and Dionysian spirit helped light the touchpaper for New York punk. The Robert Mapplethorpe-shot cover, in which a hungry, mannish Patti stares down the viewer, defiantly broke with the music industry’s treatment of women artists (sexy or girl-next-door) and still startles today.

Without this … no REM, PJ Harvey, Razorlight. And no powerful female pop icons like Madonna.
KE

8 Bob Dylan
Bringing it All Back Home (1965)

The first folk-rock album? Maybe. Certainly the first augury of what was to come with the momentous ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. Released in one of pop’s pivotal years, Bringing it All Back Home fused hallucinatory lyricism and, on half of its tracks, a raw, ragged rock’n’roll thrust. On the opening song, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, Dylan manages to pay homage to the Beats and Chuck Berry, while anticipating the surreal wordplay of rap.

Without this … put simply, on this album and the follow-up, Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan invented modern rock music.
SOH

9 Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley (1956)

The King’s first album was also the first example of how to cash in on a teenage craze. With Presleymania at full tilt, RCA simultaneously released a single, a four-track EP and an album, all with the same cover of Elvis in full, demented cry. They got their first million dollar album, the fans got a mix of rock-outs like ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, lascivious R&B and syrupy ballads.

Without this … no King, no rock and roll madness, no Beatles first album, no pop sex symbols.
NS

10 The Beach Boys
Pet Sounds (1966)

Of late, Pet Sounds has replaced Sgt Pepper’s as the critics’ choice of Greatest Album of All Time. Composed by the increasingly reclusive Brian Wilson while the rest of the group were touring, it might well have been a solo album. The beauty resides not just in its compositional genius and instrumental invention, but in the elaborate vocal harmonies that imbue these sad songs with an almost heartbreaking grandeur.

Without this … where to start? The Beatles acknowledged its influence; Dylan said of Brian Wilson, ‘That ear! I mean, Jesus, he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.’
SOH

Here’s the full list, and as usual with this sort of thing there’s lots of fun to be had arguing about the selections.50 albums that changed music
Fifty years old this month, the album chart has tracked the history of pop. But only a select few records have actually altered the course of music. To mark the anniversary, Kitty Empire pays tribute to a sublime art form, and our panel of critics argues for 50 albums that caused a revolution. To see the 50, click here

Kitty Empire
Sunday July 16, 2006
Observer

A longside film, the pop album was the defining art form of the 20th century, the soundtrack to vast technological and social change. Once, sets of one-sided 78rpm phonograph discs were kept together in big books, like photographs in an album. The term ‘album’ was first used specifically in 1909, when Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite was released on four double-sided discs in one package. The first official top 10 round-up of these newfangled musical delivery-modes was issued in Britain on 28 July 1956, making the pop album chart 50 years old this month.
Singles were immediate, ephemeral things. Albums made pondering pop and rock into a valid intellectual pursuit. Friendships were founded, love could blossom, bands could be formed, all from flicking through someone’s album collection. Owning certain albums became like shorthand; a manifesto for everything you stood for, and against: the Smiths’ Meat is Murder , Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

Before lasers replaced needles, albums had sides. They were a game of two halves, building towards an intermission; more than the sum of their constituent songs. At least, the good ones were. Some of them still are, except they can now last 70-plus minutes, over twice as long as their vinyl forebears. Is this bloat, or value for money? The debate rumbles on.

Entire lifestyles built up around albums, smoking dope to albums, having sex to albums. You lent your favourite albums out with trepidation; you ruefully replaced them, on CD, when they didn’t come back. Getting hitched paled into insignificance next to merging record collections with your loved one. Getting rid of the doubles made divorce unthinkable. Elastica once sang, of waking: ‘Make a cup of tea, put a record on.’ That’s how generations of hip young (and not so young) people have lived.

But for how much longer? Downloading favours the song, not the album. MP3 players favour personal playlists or shuffling. Listeners are already tiring of keeping company with an artist for an hour or more, as an album meanders beyond mere singles.

The album as we know it might not last another 50 years, maybe not even another 10. But just as artists show groups of paintings in galleries, songs will continue to be written in clumps, connected by theme or time, and presented to a public, just as the Nutcracker Suite once was.

On these pages are 50 clumps of songs, in descending order of importance, that we think caused a sea change in pop music, not always for the good, but without which many bands or entire genres would not exist. They are the sets of songs which have had the greatest lasting influence on music.

It was agonising, having to pick only 50. Why did we include NWA, but not Public Enemy? Probably because their influence was more pervasive. Why Fairport Convention and not The Incredible String Band? Because we had to plump for the single most influential album in British folk rock. And why no Rolling Stones? Because, brilliant though they are, they picked up an established musical idiom and ran with it rather than inventing something entirely new.

Our panel: James Bennett, Kitty Empire, Dave Gelly, Lynsey Hanley, Sean O’Hagan, Elle J Small, Neil Spencer.