Chronicles, volume one

Just finished Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan’s recently released memoir. Wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised to find Dylan writing in a fairly straightforward way. Rather than being obscure or coy about major life-events, he offers frank, detailed (but often incomplete) takes on narrow slices of his life.

Chronicles is basically a collection of riffs on the development of his artistic consciousness. The book jumps all over the place, ignoring chronology, but Dylan is a great storyteller and this comes through on nearly every page.

Once upon a time015.jpgDylan recounts a variety of episodes–breaking into the folk scene in Greenwich Village; growing up on the Iron Range of Minnesota; discovering the music of Woody Guthrie while hanging out in the Dinkytown section of Minneapolis; his calculated efforts to reject the “voice of a generation” label with albums like Self-Portrait and New Morning; and a long description of his time in New Orleans working with producer Daniel Lanois on his 1989 “comeback” album Oh Mercy. The vivid descriptions of emotional/artistic trials and triumphs in making Oh Mercy and playing Cafe Wha? and the Gaslight were my favorite bits in of the book.

He mentions hundreds of people, nearly all in a positive light. He related to Rick Nelson and Frank Sanatra Jr. as artists. (I don’t doubt the former, but I think Bob might be pulling our leg about Frank Jr. and a few other observations.)

The inspiration of Woody Guthrie is palpable, but wrestler Gorgeous George inspires the young artist too!

Dave Van Ronk is saintly and John Hammond, Joan Baez, Bono, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Ray Gooch (for his sofa and library), Roy Orbison, Tony Curtis, Archibald MacLeish all have roles to play, but you’ll find more about Sun Pie (an elderly black man who runs a little junk store called “King Tut’s Museum” outside Raceland, Louisiana) than you will about The Beatles, The Band, or The Dead.

Dylan has whet our appetite with Chronicles, Volume One and raised expectations for the planned second and third volumes.

Now on to Greil Marcus’ latest…Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads.

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Who owns culture?

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This past Thursday, the New York Public Library held a “sold-out” forum on the question of “who owns culture?” The stars of the show were Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessing, the author of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.

The New York Times quoted Lessing as saying “freedom to remix, not just words, but culture” was critical in the development of art. At one point Lessing asked, “What does it say about our democracy when ordinary behavior is deemed criminal?”

Tweedy and his band Wilco famously streamed their album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” over the internet, after being dropped from their record label Warner; ironically, they were then resigned by Warner subsidiary Nonesuch after the internet release proved successful.Tweedy expressed no sympathy for artists, like cyber narcs Metallica, who complain (or pursue law suits) against downloaders. “To me, the only people who are complaining are the people who are so rich they never deserve to be paid again,” Tweedy said.

The P2P technology continues to be assaulted in US courts by greed-driven coporations. Wendy Seltzer, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Wired magazine that lawsuits against those who trade or enable the trading of copyright music files online will continue to have little effect on P2P traffic.

Seltzer also said the MGM v. Grokster case now before the U.S. Supreme Court could very well determine the future shape of copyright law as it relates to the internet.

While P2P networks remain legal in Canada, as the battle against this technology intensifies in the US, effects are sure to be felt north of the border.

The spectacularization of education

In Our Spectacular Society

Are public schools the source of hidden riches and starting points for the transformation of society or are they impoverished zones to which the construction of real education can only be opposed?

Schools are sites of an unresolved ambiguity, the source of both alienation and–at least potentially–dis-alienation. The initial challenge for anyone interested in the creation of education that serves the public interest is to negate what has become the prevailing image of a successful school and what has come to constitute “good” learning and teaching.”Accountability”–strategies that rely heavily on measuring outcomes, especially student achievement, and attaching consequences, either positive or negative, to various levels of performance–is the prime concept driving education reform in North America.

These “reform” efforts are the ironic product of unaccountable corporate/state power that has made self-interested decisions ostensibly on behalf of the public (e.g., “No Child Left Behind”) when, in fact, the public has no meaningful say in what or how decisions are made or in what can count as legitimate knowledge for their children to learn. Coordinated control of goal setting, curricula, testing, teacher education and evaluation, works to restrict not only what and who can claim the status of “real” knowledge, but also who ultimately has access to it.

There can be no freedom apart from activity and within accountability-driven education all activity, other than the pursuit of the test score, is considered irrelevant.

Where accountability-driven educational reform prevails, teaching and learning are presented as an immense accumulation of test scores. Education that was directly experienced has become mere representation–students and teachers quickly learn that what you know or you can do doesn’t matter, only the score counts. Even assuming that the demands of these reforms could be met, this kind of education can never offer a qualitatively rich life, because its foundation is quantity, banality, and standardization.

We are now in an age in which all social relations within schools are mediated by test scores. The entirety of social activity is appropriated by the spectacle for its own ends and in education, like any other aspects of everyday life, there has been a continual downgrading from being, to having, to appearing. Educational reality has been replaced by image. In the topsy-turvy world of schools, what is true has become a moment of falsehood.

Local school communities are left without the authority to bring their collective resources to bear on a matter as important as the education of their children. The people who know children best–families and teachers–must give way to tighter control over how and what they learn to people in corporate board rooms and state capitols.

In today’s “reformed” schools every moment of life, every idea, and every gesture achieves meaning only from without. Direct experience and the determination of what is taught and learned by individuals themselves has been replaced by a passive contemplation of the images of “good” schools, students, and teachers. These images have been chosen by other people and are organized in the interests of only one portion of society–affecting the real social activity of those who contemplate the images.

The real social contradiction is between those who want (or are obliged to maintain) the alienation produced by accountability-driven education and those who would abolish it. What now passes as education reform implies the continual reversing of thing and image; material reality of learning has been reduced to an abstraction.

Education, as a whole, really is a critical knowledge of everyday life. In this form education constitutes the only reality in the face of the unreality produced accountability-driven education (which now seems more real than anything authentically human).

Genuine community and genuine dialogue can exist only when each person has access to a direct experience of reality, when everyone has at his or her disposal the practical and intellectual means needed to solve problems. The question is not to determine what the students are at present but rather what they can become, for only thus is it possible to grasp what in truth they already are.

Testing in the news

Next week at the American Educaitonal Research Association meeting in Montreal, Kathleen Rhoades, a researcher at Boston College’s Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy, will present an analysis of how news about educational testing is “framed” in the media.

Rhoades research–which was funded by the Ford Foundation–explores how reporters framed testing stories in 2001-2002. “Framing” establishes the range of discourse for a news issue–what is emphasized is judged worthy of attention and what is de-emphasized is implicitly set aside as unimportant.Rhoades found one overarching frame, labeled Accountability and three sub-frames: Market Forces, Analysis and Student Stakes.

Rhoades also found that all of these news frames advocated the use of testing as the primary means for reforming schools. Moreover, she found no news frames critical of this perspective. Thus readers were given a one-sided view of testing issues in news.

All four of these frames promote the “official” (e.g., Bush administration, NCLB, corporate) view that tests can and should be used in determining: accountability for test score performance (Accountability frame), school quality (Market frame), general educational quality and equity (Analysis frame), and student eligibility for grade promotion or graduation (Student Stakes frame).

See previous posts to this blog on testing which illustrate why the “official” view is problematic.

Guided by Robert Pollard

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What’s that voice in my head? Something has crawled in my ear, bored a hole in my brain, and now I’m guided by a voice. The voice is Robert Pollard’s and the real-life earwig is Guided by Voices.Admittedly, I was late to the scene. But, with the possible exception of Tommy Guerrero, the legendary Bones Brigade member and low-fi, funky, downbeat instrumentalist, I’ve listened to more GBV in the past two years than any other artist.

It started innocently, with “Teenage FBI” and “14 Cheerleader Cold Front.” Then on to “Surgical Focus,” “Things I Will Keep,” “Bulldog Skin,” “Everywhere with Helicopter,” “Motor Away,” “Hot Freaks,” “Glad Girls,” “Best of Jill Hives,” … “Watch Me Jump Start,” “My Kind of Soldier,” “To Remake the Young Flyer” … you can never get enough.

Tunes that check in at two-and-a-half minutes, vaguely bringing to mind The Cars, Cheap Trick, The Beatles or even Freddie and Dreamers; never sounding dated, even though they were created in Dayton, Ohio. And, always leave you wanting more.

Brilliant, obscure, enigmatic and addictive music. Listener beware. You will not be able to resist once Robert and the boys pull out their valuable hunting knife and bore a hole in your head.

“Fixing” No Child Left Behind

Tinkering with the No Child Left Behind Act is like trying to clean the air one side of a screen door: a waste of time.

It’s good to see The New York Times finally admitting that NCLB is flawed, but they still aren’t admitting its fatal flaw: testing will not and cannot improve schools.

The rebellion of states against the federal NCLB law is growing. This week Connecticut announced that it was preparing to sue the federal government, arguing that Bush’s education law forces the state to administer new standardized tests at a cost of millions of dollars and that Washington refuses to pay for them.

NCLB’s demands for increasing test scores are unrealistic and assure that virtually no schools with large populations of low-income students will meet benchmarks for “adequate yearly progress.”The National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest) points out four ways in which NCLB exacerbates real problems that cause children to be left behind:

* The gauge of student progress in most states has been reduced to reading and math test scores. Many schools have narrowed instruction to what is tested. Education is damaged, especially in low-income and minority schools, as students are coached to pass a test rather than learning a rich curriculum to prepare them for life in the 21st century.

* Most schools fail to meet the unrealistic demands imposed by the law’s “adequate yearly progress” provision. Virtually no schools serving low-income children clear the arbitrary hurdles. Many successful schools have been declared “failing” and forced to drop what works for them.

* Sanctions intended to force school improvement do the opposite. They pit parent against teacher, parent against parent, and school against school. They take funding away from all students to be used by relatively few students. The law’s ultimate sanctions–privatizing school management, firing staff, state takeovers, and similar measures–have no proven record of success.

* The federal government has failed to adequately fund the law. Most states are now cutting budgets to the bone, watching their education resources dwindle just as they are hit with the demands of the law. Neither federal nor state governments are addressing the deepening poverty that makes it difficult for so many children to learn.

HS graduation should depend on more than an exam

The BC grade 10 exam remains in the news. The Vancouver Sun endorsed the test in an editorial on April 2 and today’s Sun carries letters pro and con.

The Sun’s position (see below) that the test opponents’ fears are unfounded is nonsense.

The Sun’s editorial ignores the overwhleming evidence on the distructive effects of high-stakes tests in general.

Moreover, a new study out of Stanford University, released this week, shows when multiple measures (e.g., academic records, portfolios, research projects, capstones projects, oral exams) are used for graduation, rather than a single test, graduation rates and test scores increase.

The Stanford report concludes that “a multiple measures approach to high school graduation offers a more balanced and informative platform for holding students and schools accountable, one that stimulates discussion not only about how to improve curriculum and instruction, but also how to monitor a student’s individual growth and progress, improve preparedness for college, and build readiness for work in the future.”Here is the Vancouver Sun editorial:
Grade 10 provincials help students to develop valuable skills
Saturday, April 02, 2005

The camp opposing Grade 10 provincial exams is getting crowded, but its fears remain largely unfounded.

Surrey school trustees seem poised to join the opposition camp, as they now join the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, the Vancouver school board and the Vancouver district parent advisory council in expressing concerns about the wisdom of requiring Grade 10 students to take the standardized tests.

Opposition to the exams is twofold:

First, opponents worry that instead of focusing on important things like critical thinking, teachers might feel pressured to “teach the test” — to narrow the curriculum to ensure their students perform well on the exams.

Yet students need the ability to think critically to perform well on any exam. So teachers would be ill- advised to skip the fundamentals if they want their students to do well on the provincial tests.

Second, many opponents have expressed concern that the exams might increase pressure on students and thereby boost drop-out rates.

That concern is important enough. It’s possible that we do make too many demands on high school students, but scrapping the Grade 10 exams won’t solve the problem. After all, were the exams eliminated, they would merely be replaced by another form of evaluation.

Further, the tests aren’t likely to place kids under undue pressure since they account for only 20 per cent of students’ final marks (if that’s considered too onerous, it’s always possible to reduce the amount.)

In any case, if pressure really is a serious problem — and that’s something we’d have to study — the only way to solve the problem would be through a thorough curricular review, rather than by eliminating a single set of exams.

There’s also little evidence that the exams boost drop-out rates, and most students perform well on them. According to the Ministry of Education, 88 per cent of students passed English 10 exams, 79 per cent passed science 10 and 90 per cent passed the exam for principles of math 10.

That so many students do well reveals that our teachers and schools are doing something right. That’s one of the benefits of standardized exams — we can see how we’re doing, and we can also identify and assist schools whose students’ performance is sub par.

There’s an even more important reason to retain the exams. Exam writing isn’t just a test of knowledge of critical thinking ability, but is a skill in itself. By taking the Grade 10 exams, students will be better prepared for the Grade 11 and 12 exams (few people seem ready to eliminate the tests in those grades). The Grade 10 exam therefore acts as a dress rehearsal, a chance for students to practise writing a new type of exam before it counts for much.

Whether we like it or not, exams are a fact of life, both in high school and beyond. As such, rather than focusing on the negatives, opponents should recognize that the tests are preparation for the future, a chance for students to develop valuable skills that will help them throughout their lives.

Scrapping the BC Grade 10 Exams

Vancouver school trustees want to scrap the new grade 10 exams, which the Liberal government of British Columbia has put in place. This is great news for anyone interested in public schools that are more responsive to student and community needs rather than coporate interests.

The new Grade 10 test, which is part of the province’s graduation program, is yet another example of market-driven (neoliberal) educational policy which has come to dominate public schooling in the US and the UK. Neoliberal education policies impose strict “accountability” systems (high-stakes tests) that strip communities of control over the curriculum, deskill teachers, and de-motivate learning. Test-driven teaching and learning leads to under-serving or mis-serving all students.

In BC, perhaps the most influential test-pushers are found at the Fraser Institute, which has close ties to right-wing foundations in the US, such as the Heritage and Fordham Foundations–prime movers and propaganda machines behind the distructive No Child Left Behind Act.

There is already considerable resistance to the NCLB-like educational policies promoted by BC Liberals.Vancouver school trustees want to scrap grade 10 exams

Trustees want to scrap Grade 10 exams
Board fears added pressure could lead to increase in dropout rates

Krisendra Bisetty

Vancouver Sun
March 28, 2005

VANCOUVER – Vancouver school trustees are calling for the elimination of newly instituted Grade 10 examinations, citing factors such as extra work for teachers and added pressure on students that they say could increase dropout rates.

The request to the provincial Ministry of Education is one of 34 substantive motions that British Columbia’s school trustees will discuss and vote on during their annual general meeting in Vancouver this week.

Another motion calls for the ministry to ensure that school district policies specifically address the safety concerns of lesbian, gay, bisexual and “trans-identified” students, as well as those who are harassed due to perceptions of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Vancouver trustees want the examinations dropped from the graduation program this year, the first year that Grade 10 students in B.C. have been required to write provincial exams, which count for 20 per cent of their final mark.

“We have not seen any research that shows they improve student learning, which is the only reason to put them in place,” Adrienne Montani, chairwoman of the Vancouver school board, said in an interview Sunday.

Montani said there’s concern from high school principals, teachers and many parents about the impact of the exams.

“We are already seeing some of the direct and indirect consequences starting to happen,” she said, explaining that teachers are becoming occupied with test preparation and exercises.

“It takes away from other kinds of interactive, engaging, rich [forms of] learning.”

In their motion to the BCSTA, the trustees say that while assessment of students has its benefits, there is no evidence that standardized final exams in Grade 10 mathematics, science and language arts would improve student learning.

The added pressure of exams on students, especially those with learning differences and difficulties, is another concern, they say. “The exams could increase dropout rates among vulnerable students.”

Taken at the end of the year, the exams cannot at that point actually help students or teachers in the assessments, the motions reads. “There is the danger of teachers ‘teaching’ to the exams. Critical and creative thinking, which are important skills, cannot be measured by multiple-choice standardized tests.”

As well, they say that expecting teachers to mark the exams is a “downloading of extra work at a very busy time of the year.”

B.C. School Trustees Association president Penny Tees is expecting a thorough discussion on the motion, saying in an interview Sunday she isn’t surprised that trustees want to debate the issue because the student graduation program is still new.

Referring to a 2003 report by B.C.’s Safe Schools Task Force, Lower Mainland school trustees said in a motion that despite attention being called to the challenges faced by lesbian, gay and bisexual youth in provincial schools, the B.C. government has yet to initiate concrete action specifically addressing their safety and equity rights.

Many gay and lesbian youth told the task force they dread going to school because of the harassment and intimidation, they say.

Another motion put forward by the metropolitan branch of the BCSTA, which consists of Lower Mainland school boards, says public schools should share in B.C.’s $1-billion budget surplus.

It asks the provincial government to allocate a minimum of 14 per cent — the percentage of current funding for schools in the provincial budget — of the surplus to schools.

Recent funding increases by the government are insufficient, they say, to offset cost increases borne by school districts in the past several years.

Other matters up for vote include a motion by Burnaby trustees for a commitment from government that it won’t privatize and regionalize school support services.

About 300 B.C. school trustees will also vote on motions that:

– School board employees receive pay increases that are not less than the provincial consumer price index.

– The government be urged to apply the same criteria for public accountability to private schools as to public schools.

– The government enact legislation that prohibits retail stores from opening on Christmas Day, which is now about the only statutory holiday on which businesses are closed. Burnaby trustees say school-age part-time employees need at least one day per year when they cannot be asked to work.

For the first time, this year’s BCSTA meeting is being held in conjunction with the Canadian School Board Association congress.

Tees said about 200 CSBA delegates from various provinces will be at the four-day conference, which begins Thursday.

Shut up and march

Notes for “Shut Up and March: Patriotism and the Threat to Democracy in American Schools” (Symposium at AERA, Montreal, April 2005).

This panel, according to our organizer Joel Westheimer, “will clearly be one of the more earth shattering sessions at the conference, that we will together, remarkably, bring down the Bush presidency, that schools will never be the same after a bunch of researchers discuss patriotism with us.” I do not doubt him.

My assignment is to: present on patriotism in the social studies curriculum, historically and today; detail several ongoing debates about patriotism and its place in civic education and school curricula.I’ve only got 5-8 minutes. Here’s a bulleted list of points I’ll try to make, but will obviously run of out time doing:

* In the social studies curriculum, patriotism is pursued via “citizenship education,” through a framework of “traditions” initially described by Barr, Barth and Shermis (1977) but reworked by many folks over the years. The fundamental idea is that no matter the curricular/instructional approach (e.g., “cultural transmission,” teaching “social science knowledge,” or encouraging “reflective thinking”) the singular outcome of social studies education is the production of democratic citizens. These citizens might potentially be conforming patriots or dissenting patriots.

* Citizenship education represents the historically dominant justification of social studies and includes knolwedge or information, skills, values, and social-political-economic participation. However, there is no consensus on what “citizenhip/patriotism” means nor the implications of “citizenship” for curriculum and instruction. As Marker and Mehlinger said in their review of research on the social studies curriculum “the apparent consensus on behalf of citizenship education is almost meaningless. Behind that totem to which nearly all social studies researchers pay homage lies continuous and rancorous debate about the purposes of social studies.”

* Using I. M. Young’s framework of “five faces of oppression,” Vinson (2001) presents an analysis of “civic education” curricula such as CIVITAS and the National Standards for Civics and Government that illustrates the potential for both the oppressive and anti-oppressive potential of citizenship education.

* Ron Evan’s recent history of the social studies uses a “war” metaphor to (accurately) describe a field that is divided into camps with competing interests and goals for the social studies as a school subject.

* Key social studies educators (self-described “Contrarians”) have now hooked up with “movement conservatism” (e.g., well-funded right wing think tanks and foundations such as AEI, Heritage and Fordham Foundations) attacking pluralism and dissent. An effort that secondarily undermines the “tolerant pluralism” that has marked the acceptance of divergent curricular goals of the field of social studies education.

* The Contrarian’s primary document was published in 2003 by the Fordham Foundation, Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?

* WDSSGW asserts that: social studies education is in deep trouble primarily because the belief systems of education professors are based upon three premises: (1) American society is morally bankrupt; (2) an elite band of university professors, infused with a passion for social justice, knows best how to reform our flawed society; and, (3) classrooms in our nation’s public schools are an essential battleground for this societal transformation.

* For more a more detailed critique of WDSSGW see: Ross & Marker (2005) Download file

* All is not lost in social studies education. We must be doing something right as evidenced by one “point of light” I recently discovered. An essay on government, written by a fifth grader, which reads, in part: “Governments are afraid of a democratic world. Governments like to have control over the world so they are not throne [sic] by mongers [sic] wanting mere justice in the world. People should have free rights to express their feelings to governments with out being hassled by the man!! Is that to [sic] much to ask?”

* What we currently have is a social studies curriculum that (for the most part) aims to create “patriotic” consumers and spectators (in a framework of “neoliberalism”). In a spectator democracy a specialized class of experts identify what our common interests are and think and plan accordingly. The function of the rest of us is to be “spectators” rather than participants in action (for example, casting votes in elections or implementing educational reforms that are concevied by people who know little or nothing about our desires or interests).

* Social studies ought to be contributing to the development of a society in which there is a free flow of information and people control and manage their own affairs.

* The best way to achieve democracy is to initiate children into a form a social life characteristic of democracy: a community of full participation, in which empowers people; includes all; engages it members in active learning in meaningful real-world activities and that accomodates learners with diverse needs, interests and abilities; intentionally builds learning support strategies; and fosters partnering while building real collaboration withing the school and with families and the community.

Revised Notes