E Wayne Ross – Page 91 – Critical Theories in Education

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor (Issue 14): Beyond the Picket Line: Academic Organizing after the Long NYU Strike

The fourteenth issue of *Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor* is now available online at http://cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/

“Beyond the Picket Line: Academic Organizing after the Long NYU Strike” features essays gathered by Michael Palm (Chair of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee at New York University), all of which address the implications of graduate worker activism for the future of higher education. The graduate union at NYU has the distinction of being the first to bargain a contract at a private university, and the first to see negotiations terminated by a private university administration. *Workplace 14* provides various critical accounts of the administration’s renunciation of the union, and a series of in-depth analyses of the strike that followed. Written by the strikers themselves—with one important contribution by a unionist at the City University of New York—these articles comprise one of our most urgent releases to date.

Contents include:

“Introduction to the Special Issue”
by Michael Palm

“The Future of Academia is On the Line: Protest, Pedagogy, Picketing, Performativity”
by Emily Wilbourne

“The Professionalizing of Graduate ‘Students’”
by Michael Gallope

“Making It Work: Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools” and the Unbearable Difference of GSOC”
by Elizabeth Loeb

“The NYU Strike as Case Study”
by David Schleifer

“Armbands, Arguments, Op-Eds, and Banner-Drops: Undergraduate Participation in a Graduate Employee Strike”
by Andrew Cornell

“Another University is Possible: Academic Labor, the Ideology of Scarcity, and the Fight for Workplace Democracy”
by Ashley Dawson

The issue also contains six new book reviews (edited by William Vaughn) as well as Wayne Ross’s *Workplace Blog.*

We are pleased to announce that Stephen Petrina (http://cust.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/petrina.html) has joined *Workplace* as a general editor. Stephen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia where he teaches courses in research methodology, curriculum theory, cultural studies, new media, and technology. His research explores the interconnections among cognition, emotion(s), and technology, concentrating especially on how we learn (technology) across the lifespan. Stephen was co-editor of *Workplace* 7.1, “Academic Freedom and IP Rights in an Era of the Automation and Commercialization of Higher Education” (http://www.cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/issue7p1/), and his recent articles have also appeared in *Technology & Culture*, *History of Psychology*, *History of Education Quarterly* and the *International Journal of Technology and Design Education*. Welcome Stephen!

Special thanks go to Stephen and to Franc Feng for their tremendous design work on the current issue. We welcome Franc as a member of the Workplace Collective.

We also want to express our gratitude to Julie Schmid for her continued editorial assistance.

Look for issues on “Mental Labor” (headed up by Steven Wexler) and “Academic Labor and the Law” (edited by Jennifer Wingard) in 2008.

(Please note that from this release forward, the journal will forgo the point system [1.1, 1.2, 2.1, etc.] and number according to our total collection of issues thus far. Although the last issue was 7.1 [the thirteenth release], we number this issue 14.)

Thanks for your continued support.

Solidarity,

Christopher Carter
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Oklahoma
Co-editor, *Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor*

E. Wayne Ross
Professor
Department of Curriculum Studies
University of British Columbia
http://web.mac.com/wayne.ross
Co-Editor, *Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor*

Giving up the Grade

This article was printed in the spring 2007 issue of Our Schools / Our Selves and the CCPA Monitor, both published quarterly by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

By: David F. Noble

Critical pedagogy has long condemned grading as an impediment to genuine education, but critical pedagogues continue to grade, as a presumed condition of employment. “I hate it but I have to do it” is their lame lament.

But they no longer have to do it. Throughout the thirty-odd years of my university teaching career I have always found ways around grading, primarily by giving all A’s, thereby eliminating grades de facto if not de jure. Last year for the first time, after long bemoaning my “anomalous” practice, York University officials formally prevailed upon me henceforth to designate my courses “ungraded” (a pass/fail option without the fail), thereby taking them off the radar and perhaps unintentionally establishing a promising academic precedent.

As a tenured full professor, of course, I do enjoy an unusual degree of job security, a privilege provided by a paying public in need of some truth and thus some unshackled, socially responsible scholars. Moreover, as a unionized employee I am protected by a collective agreement which requires only that I submit evaluations on time without specifying what they “should” be. Thus I am indeed in a good position to challenge the grading regime, but so too are many others who continue to grade.

Why? Typically, as already indicated, colleagues express a fear of administrative reprisal. But they embrace grades also for other, unspoken, reasons, perhaps unacknowledged even to themselves.

Grades offer teachers a convenient device for allaying their anxieties about their own abilities by shifting them onto their students, through an endless round of tests, examinations and evaluations. Grades get teachers off the hook; they preserve professorial authority and are indifferent to professorial incompetence. Bad faith protestations about administration requirements can mask the fact that grades serve the teacher at the expense of the students, and at the sacrifice of education.

But in all this the primary reason for the existence of grades—publicly-subsidized pre-employment screening—is rarely acknowledged. Grades appear to be a matter between teacher and student—until they are “submitted.” At that point those for whom grades are really given—those who have perhaps never even stepped into a classroom—gain access to the measurements of their prospective labour force. Here is the silent third party in the halls of academia, the so-called elephant in the room, to whom academia has too long been hostage. Eliminating grades eliminates the elephant from the room, emancipates academia and reintroduces education.

The elimination of grades at a stroke shifts academic attention from evaluation to education, where it belongs. When skeptical colleagues protest that it is not fair for me to give the same grade both to people who work hard and to people who fail even to show up, I remind them that these people are not getting the same reward because the people who work hard also get an education. “Oh, yeah,” they say, remembering as an afterthought what should be at the forefront of their profession.

Students themselves have collectively never resisted my refusal to grade them, and our experiences have been mutually rewarding beyond measure, and all measurement. With grades no longer a matter of concern, no time is ever wasted on discussions about evaluation—heretofore students’ primary preoccupation. Without having to fear or defer to professors or peers, students are freed for forthright and authentic engagement, an essential ingredient of genuine education, and discover that they are not alone, despite the rituals of competitive individualism enforced everywhere else around them.

With the substitution of encouragement for evaluation, intellectual excitement becomes the defining element in the educational ethos, replacing anxiety–which, as every parent knows, is lethal to learning. Abandoning grades annuls alienation: students no longer depend on others for a sense of their own worth.

Without grades, students do not have to try to read the professor’s mind—an impossible task anyway, so philosophers tell us—and can instead concentrate upon reading their own minds, self-knowledge being the grail of education. With grades gone, and having thus side-stepped the institutionally routinized regime of infantilization so corrosive of self-respect, self-confidence and self-worth, students can now begin to take themselves and their own thoughts seriously—for too many an altogether novel experience. This is the only true end of education.

The elimination of grades is no longer merely a theoretical proposition. It is an actuality, and a precedent, given my experience at York University. I now teach officially-designated “ungraded” courses with the formal sanction of the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and in full recognition of the Vice President/Academic. From this fertile ground, I advise my colleagues across the country: Try it; you are bound to like it. And so, I suspect, are your students, who will at last start receiving what they have been presumably been paying for and what we have been professing to provide.

Historian David F. Noble is a professor at York University in Toronto.

The False Gods of Public Education

From the The CCPA Mointor, published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives:

The False Gods of Public Education
By: Peter H. Hennessy

As a teacher and researcher in Ontario and abroad for 50+ years, I have come to believe that public education on this continent–and indeed throughout the advanced world–is serving some false gods: superior paper credentials in literacy and numeracy, computer proficiency, skill in doing standardized tests, and vaulting hurdles in the higher education and job markets. The alpha god of all these lesser gods is economic productivity.

It is always hazardous to challenge the gods because they enjoy so much public esteem. And if the god of economic productivity is a false god in public education, then what should be a true and beneficial god? Without hesitation, I award the honour to social inclusiveness, the sine qua non of a democratic school system in a democratic society. The false gods have served the advantaged segment of our youth population very well, but have left the bottom third at a disadvantage–and some of them on the dangerous margin of the social order.

Allowing for its many successes, let me sketch some ways in which public education is actually harmful, and why it needs to be changed fundamentally. Let me start with a summary list:

* Class distinctions engendered by schooling.
* Winners and losers.
* Some toxic effects of the school cocoon.
* Public health considerations.*

Class distinctions

About midway through the last century, secondary schooling in the United States shifted heavily towards sorting kids according to ability to ensure that the best got the best instruction while the others at least got sympathetic “treatment.” In Ontario, the Reorganized Program of Studies of 1962–the so-called Robarts Plan, in honour of Education Minister (later Premier) John Robarts–featured an elaborate scheme for streaming high school students into academic and vocational/commercial programs, with “academic” and “non-academic” streams or tracks within each category. The five-year “academic” types could qualify for university and the four-year “non-academic” leftovers would seek jobs or admission to a college of applied arts and technology. Twenty of these colleges were built in the province almost instantly, juiced by a bundle of vocational training money from Ottawa. No other province in Canada was as quick off the mark in the scramble for this money.

The politicians and their planners naively believed that the needs of an advanced industrial society would be served by sophisticated school counselling, informed parents, and compliant students. Within five years of its implementation, however,it was evident that the Robarts Plan was not working as intended. Instead of a nice balance between academic and vocational education and between five-year and four-year programs, reflecting the demographic make-up of the province, the five-year programs attracted a hefty majority of the students: 62%. Furthermore, these students were overwhelmingly registered in the academic stream leading to the universities and the professions. Many of the magnificently equipped shops and studios financed with federal money remained half empty, only to be closed 20 years later.

There was well-grounded suspicion that social class was a factor in the assignment of students to a program. Working class youngsters were pushed into two- or four-year programs for reasons that were suspect in some homes. The academic subjects in those second-rate programs were “watered down” and the teaching was mediocre. The best teachers, during a period of short supply, claimed the five-year classes. The four-year types were heavily skewed towards commercial/ vocational training. What came out in the wash was a streamed system, élitist beyond anyone’s expectations. The underside of the Robarts Plan, then, was the emergence of a dumping ground for “poor” students, poorly taught and poorly regarded by the public.

Since then, there has been a non-stop parade of new ideas and programs in public education: integration of elementary and secondary, special services for special kids (those with learning disabilities, the gifted, the physically disabled, newly arrived immigrants), more choice in senior high school course selection, cooperative education schemes, school architecture to foster independent learning and team teaching, community involvement in school planning. Throughout, one thing has not changed and that is the increasing ingenuity of educators, served by a very profitable testing industry, in sorting students according to their prospects in the urban-industrial economy .

My Queen’s colleague, Dr. Alan J.C. King, has conducted masses of research on this subject over the past 30 years. In 1988, King identified in Ontario high schools a backwater of failing advanced level students, unmotivated working class kids, and uninspired teaching. He traced declining standards to various efforts to keep general level students in school while large numbers of them worked part-time in service industry jobs.

The education planners, prodded by worried politicians, responded repeatedly with more rigor in the classroom which, among other things, has led to a worrisome rise in the drop-out rate continuing to the present time. This has happened because more rigor has typically taken the form of more and more subject matter to be memorized and reproduced on test papers. In his study of Ontario secondary education in 2002, Dr. King reported that only 32% of applied students (non-academic) completed the 16 credits of Grades 9 and 10 in the allotted two years. What used to be a dumping ground for non-academic types was turning into a wasteland of failures.

The Ontario Minister of Education, in 2002, responded to the crisis by saying to reporters: “The alternative is to water down the standards and just pass the kids, whether they’re getting the subjects or not, and just put them out there in the world not prepared to succeed.” The implication of that statement is that education in the Information Age consists of packing kids’ heads full of details, useful or not, relevant or not, and testing the hell out of them. That way, they learn the essentials and the teachers are held accountable.

Winners and losers

In the process described above, the provinces of Canada and the states of the U.S.A. have all jumped onto the standardized testing bandwagon–with dubious results. Some school systems conduct government tests every single year from Grades 1 to 12—Idaho, for example. Most systems mandate such tests at least twice in each of the elementary and secondary years. The tests lean heavily towards multiple-choice questions which can be machine scored. They cost a lot to administer–about $50 million annually in Ontario.

In Ontario, in 2000, the Mike Harris Conservative government added a Grade 10 literacy test to the existing bank of tests as a condition of earning a high school diploma. There could hardly have been a more stunning display of class bias than the failure of 70% of the Grade 10 vocational students in that first literacy test. In that same year, 78% of Grade 9 applied students failed the government mathematics test. Most of these students would not have been stuck with the stigma of failure had they been assessed for their actual performance in skills they were learning in and out of school. But the gods of literacy and numeracy are not served that way.

Here is an American story: In Massachusetts, a mere 26% of Grade 10 students were in the proficient or better categories after the first round of testing in 1998. Test scores have been improved since (which is no proof of intellectual growth) while the gap between white students and black/hispanic students remains wide. I got hold of a copy of The Boston Globe of September 4, 2004. In it there were six full pages of lists of government test results in that state, Grades 3 to 10, spread over the previous three years. I was able to identify the “best” and the “worst” schools and where the most “improvement” had taken place. The 275 public high schools were listed in the order of their pass percentages in English and Mathematics. Try to imagine the shame of living within the boundaries of the 275th high school! You would sell your house and move if you could find a buyer. In that sad school, only 52% passed the Grade 10 math test in 2004.

Alfie Kohn, Peter Sacks, Audrey Amrein, and David Berliner are American authors who have published studies of the testing mania which has swept over North America. They are part of a growing international movement to take back the schools from the testing companies which are reaping huge profits while undermining the autonomy of teachers and the legitimate role of parents in the teaching/learning process. Not long ago, the people of Finland renounced standardized testing and put their faith where it belongs: in the hands of teachers and principals.

Living in the school cocoon

Schools are dysfunctional places in many respects. They are fertile seed grounds for bullying, e-mail hate-mongering, smoking tobacco, doing drugs, engaging in unsafe sex, negative peer pressure about nearly everything, competition as a prime value, materialism, cliques and gang codes of behaviour, the iron bands of teen conventionalism in dress and language–any of which can be contributing factors in teenagers’ mental and physical health. Of course, schools are happy places, by and large, for the winners on the playing field and in the high marks game.

In the worst-case scenarios, there are outbursts of deadly violence, as happened in Littleton, Colorado, in April, 1999. The two killer kids at Columbine High School were reported to be outcasts willing to kill as their way of challenging the cliques who controlled the social scene at their high school. Not long after Columbine, mimic tragedies occurred in other parts of the U.S. and in Alberta.

These extreme cases point to the baneful effects of the high school cocoon which, contrary to human history, keeps youngsters in a state of extended adolescence until they are 18 years old. Historically, teenagers and even pre-teens worked side by side with adults, sometimes in ugly circumstances. The important point is that they interacted with the adult world every day and without the distractions of a teen culture. Gordon MacDougall, Vice-President of St. Lawrence College in Kingston, says that “mentoring should be part of our culture,” by which he means that adults should be engaged routinely in helping youth to understand the realities of successful living and positive citizenship. School, in a “mentoring” society, would cease being a cultural ghetto.

Another of my colleagues at Queen’s, Dr. Don Campbell (retired), is now writing a book about the youth justice systems of Canada and New Zealand. In it, he takes aim at the Safe Schools Act in Ontario (2002) in which a Conservative government passed into law measures to protect the “good” kids from the “bad” kids. In the application of the law, school principals were left with very little discretion in handling cases of verbal threats, swearing at a teacher, possession of alcohol or drugs, vandalizing school property, physical or sexual assault, use or possession of a weapon, selling drugs, and theft. These are the options: Suspension up to 20 days, expulsion for 21 days to a year, and/or calling the police to make an arrest and press charges.

Don Campbell notes that the Act provides no provisions for mediation, conflict resolution, nor due process in the accepted sense of that term. “The trouble with zero tolerance,” says Campbell, “is its intolerance.”

Public health considerations

In the early 1990s, Dr. Paul Steinhauer of Toronto launched Voices For Children, an organization for improving community awareness of needy children. Steinhauer claims that one in four children in our culture displays early signs of emotional or behavioural problems which put them at risk of academic failure, school drop-out, and anti-social or criminal activities. He says that children’s attitudes to school, either negative or positive, are set by Grade 3 or 4.

In 1995, Dr. Steinhauer attacked the plan of the federal Liberal government to reduce cash transfers to the provinces as part of a major effort to eliminate the deficit and bring the national debt under control. He said that cuts in federal grants to provinces would lead directly to cuts in social services at the provincial level, with consequent damage to support services (child care, mental health services, social assistance, low-cost housing) for the families most in need of them. That is exactly how things turned out.

For 20 years or more, public health officials have been warning of the effects of drugs prescribed by doctors to modify the behaviour of school students. U.S. psychiatrist Lawrence Diller reported that in 1996 the drug Ritalin and other related stimulants were prescribed for as many as three-and-a-half million U.S. children to help them succeed in school. Such reports support my suspicion that the traditional classroom, touted as the central cockpit of learning, was a factor in an epidemic of drug-controlled behaviour.

On April 7, 2001, The Globe and Mail ran a double-page spread by Dawn Walton about the explosion in the use, both legal and illegal, of Ritalin and Dexedrine. The reporter presented evidence that the open-handed medical prescription of behaviour-modifying drugs for children was leading to hard drug addictions later. Police departments in the big cities, she reported, were forming units for cracking down on the illicit use and sale of Ritalin.

The inference might be drawn that public education policies in the industrialized world are the only reason for the surging use of prescription drugs by school-children. That would lay an unfair burden of blame at the doorstep of education planners, teachers, and administrators. There is a complex of factors at work: diet, home atmosphere, parental pressure to succeed, school expectations, neurological make-up and, not least, the harmful effects of the consumer society.

William S. Pollack, a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School, has written extensively about the anxieties of schoolboys in our current fast-paced economy. In his recent book, Pollack quotes a 13-year-old boy in New England who said, “My dad scares the crap out of me: ‘If you want to be a pilot, if you’re not going to collect garbage, if you’re not going to flip burgers at McDonalds and you want to fly planes making $300,000 a year, if you’re going to invest, if you’re going to have children, if you’re going to have a houmungous house, if you’re going to have a pool, if you’re going to have a car, if you’re going to have your own plane, if you’re going to have a boat—then you’re going to have to do good in math.’ I’m like, okay, okay, okay.”

Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Gabor Mate, author of Scattered Minds, argues that Attention Deficit Disorder is a condition more reflective of our lifestyle and value system than a medical illness. (The opposite view is that the disorder results from a brain malfunction which is subject, therefore, to chemical correction). Dr. Maté concedes that he too prescribes Ritalin in those cases where the symptoms are clearly persuasive and where the young patient agrees to take the drug. Some parents defend Ritalin for having brought peace and order into their homes and better reports from school. Other parents report intolerable side-effects such as insomnia and digestive upset.

There is a bundle of anti-depressant drugs now being prescribed for children and youth as well as adults: Celexa, Prozac, Luvox, Remeron, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor. I do not know anything about the long-term effects of these drugs, but the alarming thing is that the people who manufacture and prescribe them do not know nearly enough, either. That is the claim of Dr. Joel Lexchin, author of widely-used guidelines for prescribing drugs. The newspaper story that probed this matter (The Globe and Mail, February 5, 2004) reported that Health Canada has added an advisory to its website urging teenagers taking any of these selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors to check with their physicians whether the benefits of the drugs outweigh their potential risks.

In the U.S., a major study completed by John S. March of Duke University in 2004 concluded that one in 20 adolescents in that country is clinically depressed and at risk of major depressive disorder, suicide, and long-term psycho-social impairment as adults. The primary conclusion of the study is that treating teen depression with a combination of fluoxetine (Prozac) and cognitive behavioural therapy is the most effective current treatment for the disease. The study did not specifically relate teen depression to schooling. All that we know is that school is a leading influence in the life of every child from 5 to 16 years of age.

Conclusion

The time has come to consider major changes in the culture and practice of schooling so that going to school contributes to good mental and physical health, as well as good marks. That seems like a very practical proposition.

Suggested further reading:
1. Davis, Bob – Skills Mania, Snake Oil in the Classroom, Between the Lines, Toronto, 2000
2. Kohn, Alfie – The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools, Houghton Mifflin N. Y., 2000
3. Maté, Gabor, Scattered Minds, Alfred Knopf, Toronto, 1999

(Peter H. Hennessy is a professor emeritus of education at Queen’s University, a lecturer, columnist, and the author of five books, including his latest—From Student to Citizen: A Community-Based Vision of Democracy—to be published this month by White Knight Books, Toronto.)

Rouge Forum Update—War and the Schools–a personal note from Rich Gibson

Dear Friends,

The San Diego City Schools are about to launch a massive outpouring of witless patriotism, centered on the notion: Support Our Troops.

Yesterday, some teachers behaved otherwise. They helped shut down the Port of Oakland, demanding money for schools, not war.

Good for those Oakland school workers!

The SDCS propaganda effort is co-sponsored by war profiteer Xerox, where CEO Anne Mulcahy recently proved her own loyalties to her partners in production by laying off one-third of the Xerox work force. The Support Our Troops surge will mean hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, of teachers will feel sharp pressure to produce support for a war that is clearly an imperialist war crime, fought for regional control and oil, at base: profits.

Who doesn’t want to support our troops? I don’t. Those are not “my ” troops nor “Ours” .Those are “Their” troops, until they behave otherwise.

They are engaged in war crimes all over world, most of them volunteering to fight what are really the enemies of their enemies,
and many of them know that, but they go forth and do it, do their main mission—killing people on behalf of a dying empire—anyway.

Why that is, is most assuredly complex. But, after all, we are what we do.

I had many returned Iraq and Afghanistan US troops in my classes at San Diego State (one of the most militarized areas in the US). As my field is directly concerned with the empire’s wars, we talk about them a lot, and my views are clear enough. My students know I go demonstrate at Camp Pendleton and the Naval Training Station every time I can, that I distribute lit on campuses and in high schools urging people not to go to the military and suggesting they disobey their officers, to refuse to fight, if they do go. They also know they have my full support in disagreeing in class, and out, if they demonstrate some reason for their positions—as members of the Rouge Forum who are now in Iraq, or in the service, know.

Nearly every one of the returned vets in my classes has been clear about why they were in Iraq (there is some dispute about Afghanistan). In Iraq, they are told, as they disembark, that they are there for the oil. Officers make it clear to the troops. The
military has to have oil to function. It’s key to imperial might. That is a far stretch from the claims of the past: fighting for democracy or fighting communism. Those motivators are replaced with: Shoot those people or they will kill your buddies and then kill you. It may be the lowest form of motivation in US military history, but it works.

I think US civil society has become ensnared in this “support our troops” problem.

By manipulating the issue away from imperial policies, to support for troops, pro-war mis-leaders have a found a powerful wedge. We shouldn’t allow it.

I’ll support the troops in reconsidering what they are doing, in offering ways to get out of the military, in showing people how to organize and disobey, in seeking benefits they may need, but I will not support them when they do their main mission.

A key reason that the US ran out of Vietnam was because the military was in disarray, troops refused to fight. It is equally true that this mass refusal came about in part because the Vietnamese changed their minds by killing them, defeating them
ethically, morally, politically, and militarily. Nearly 60,000 dead. It wasn’t just handing out leaflets at induction centers that turned the troops around.

Returned troops from Vietnam were not spat upon, but they were surely shunned. It was, at least on the working class campuses I was visiting, not cool to wear your ROTC uniform or announce that you were about to allow yourself to be drafted. That shunning may have had some power, or not. I don’t know. The film “Sir No Sir!” is revealing

Following Vietnam, the US leadership worked mightily to recreate the image (and reality) of the military, especially by creating the volunteer military. While there is an easily seen economic draft (and the levels of hopeless in the US are part of that), it remains that the troops I have met fully believe they are volunteers. This perception is significant in maintaining discipline (loyalty and obedience—the ethics of slaves) among military personnel who have, now, been sent back to Iraq three and four times, for reasons those troops know have nothing to do with improving the lot of Iraqis, nor Americans.

Part of recreating the image of the military was to fashion the myth of a loss in Vietnam created by “the stab in the back” on the home front, ie, a betrayal of “our troops,” by civilians. Part of that was to forge the myth of the spat up vet.

The left response to this seems to be the insistence that this volunteer military is more “ours'” than Bush/Clintons. As it is unlikely the US will suffer the kind of casualties in its smaller wars (leading, quite likely, to bigger wars), that it suffered in Vietnam (3500 dead is about 1/3 of a single bad day at Gettysburg), the change of mind among the US troops that is critical to challenging the system of capital is probably not going to come from fear of engaging. It will have to come from other pressures, including the pressure of letting the troops know that what they are doing is condemnable, and that they will get supported when they quit volunteering. Our task is to find options for them, and to offer methods of understanding why these wars are conducted, and who is really on whose side.

The “support our troops” mind-set is also dangerous in that it supplements the idea that there is some kind of mass consensus opposing war now. I don’t see that. I see a completely fickle US public that has turned on its own heroes, Bush/Clinton et al, for no
profound reason at all, other than it appears the wars have dragged on a bit long. This is a dangerous public, not prepared to resist war and racism, but primed to cheering winning wars. The shift in public opinion is an indication of how volatile Americans
are, not how wise we are. “Support our troops,” will just buttress a loud, “hoorah” when, and if, the US decides to pummel Tehran into oblivion—which is possible. The US public is, I think, opposed to losing long wars, not opposed to winning short ones, or
even appearing to be winning shorter wars.

I am not rooting for the death of anyone. I abhor violence, but I do not think the Masters are going to adopt the ethics of the Slaves. As fascism emerges around us, we need to struggle to come close to what is true, in order to find out what to do. What is fascism?

We are what we do. We should not encourage people to do what they are told to do or make a fetish of a flag when we all live in societies rooted in exploitation and violence. We are not, “all in this together in one nation.” We witness an international war of the rich on the poor, a class war that now takes the appearance of inter-imperialist wars, or fallacious wars on terror.

Educators are uniquely positioned in de-industrialized America to take leadership in opposition to the promise of perpetual war. At issue in part is whether or not we have the courage to fight for the freedom we must have to teach toward what is true about war, capitalism, imperialism, and racism—each flowing into the other.

Here is a link to Wayne Ross’ web site which holds a smart discussion with Nancy Patterson and Prentice Chandler about academic freedom today.

Chalmers Johnson, author of the recent Nemesis trilogy says Americans today cannot connect cause and effect, that Americans cannot think critically, that Americans slip into what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” referring to Nazi death camp boss Adolph Eichman who, though well read and able to recite Kant calmly at his trial, had given over his decision making processes to his Fuhrer.

This form of evil is simply the inability to think, to think critically, or identify with others—and the current state of the public’s willingness to tolerate a President and Attorney General openly set upon wiping out all civil liberties and conducting endless war is a warning sign. So is the lack of uprisings in schools where children should be urged to boycott these mindless flag ceremonies and go to the library to learn something they care about. Mindless curricula standards and high-stakes exams are designed to re-fashion the banality of evil. It works.

The US will not leave Iraq. The oil is too important. That’s why there are five permanent bases built there already, one of them the biggest US base in the world, along with the biggest embassy in the world. The promise of relentless war is, perhaps, the only truth coming out of the Bush administration, and the denial of that fact the Big Lie coming from Democrats.

We should not prepare children to be fodder for billionaires’ wars.

What educators do matters, more than ever. We are now pressed, like the troops, with a life and death question: Whose side are we on?

The Rouge Forum discussion group might be a good place to debate these issues.

Thanks to Wayne, Susan, Gil, Ann W, Robert K, Tommie, Dwayne, Jud, Candace, Polly, Sharon A., Floyd, Bernard, Phyllis, Sel, Connie and Doug, and good luck on the move to Doug and Jan.

best,

Dismantling NCLB and Refocusing Accountability

Refocusing Accountability: Using Local Performance Assessments to Enhance Teaching and Learning for Higher Order Skills, a Briefing Paper Prepared for Members of The Congress of The United States, by George Wood, Linda Darling-Hammond, Monty Neill and Pat Roschewski, is on the FairTest website.

You can link from it to legislative language to change NCLB in line with the recommendations of the paper. These recommendations are very consistent with the legislative proposals of the Forum on Educational Accountability, based in turn on the Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB. The FEA recommendations and the Joint Statement are also at www.edaccountability.org.

The text of the executive summary of “Refocusing Accountability” follows:

Executive Summary

Refocusing Accountability:
Using Local Performance Assessments to Enhance Teaching and Learning for Higher Order Skills

By George Wood, Linda Darling-Hammond, Monty Neill and Pat Roschewski

Performance based assessments, often locally controlled and involving multiple measures of achievement, offer a way to move beyond the limits and negative effects of standardized examinations currently in use for school accountability. While federal legislation calls for “multiple up-to-date measures of student academic achievement, including measures that assess higher-order thinking skills and understanding” (NCLB, Sec. 1111, b, I, vi), most assessment tools used for federal reporting focus on lower-level skill that can be measured on standardized mostly multiple-choice tests. High stakes attached to them have led schools to not engage in more challenging and engaging curriculum but to limit school experiences to those that focus on test preparation.

Performance assessments that are locally controlled and involve multiple measures assist students in learning and teachers in teaching for higher order skills. These tools engage students in the demonstration of skills and knowledge through the performance of tasks that provide teachers with an understanding of student achievement and learning needs. Large scale examples involving the use of such performance-based assessments come from states such as Nebraska, Wyoming, Connecticut and New York, as well as nations such as Australia and Singapore. The evidence from research on these and other systems indicate that through using performance assessments schools can focus instruction on higher order skills, provide a more accurate measure of what students know and can do, engage students more deeply in learning, and provide for more timely feedback to teachers, parents, and students in order to monitor and alter instruction.

Research evidence suggests that in order for performance assessment systems to work, governments must make significant investments in both teacher development and the development of performance tasks. However, this investment is often no greater than the cost of standardized measures. More important, it strengthens teacher quality and student learning. Performance assessment systems can be reliable and valid, having both content and predictive validity when appropriately utilized.

Based on the evidence that performance based assessment better meets the federal agenda of teaching for higher-level skills, reauthorization of NCLB should support and encourage state and local education agencies in developing performance assessments. Congress can amend Section 1111 (b)(3) of NCLB with a new paragraph (D) that authorizes and encourages states to move to performance based assessments and multiple measures incorporated into a system combining state and local assessments. Authorization for adequate funding to support this move should be included in the legislation.

America’s Founding Fictions

America’s Founding Fictions
The Washington Post

By Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Sunday, May 13, 2007; B02

The colonists landed, short of food and supplies, after a long and harrowing transatlantic voyage. The initial exploring party stole a large quantity of corn that the Indians had carefully stored away for the hard winter. They then dug up some graves, looted items that had been buried with the dead and ransacked Indian houses. Furious fighting with the natives soon ensued. Once they had selected a site for their settlement, the migrants endured a winter of death in which they lost more than half their number.

Ah, of course, you’re thinking — Jamestown. All that looting and fighting and stealing and death. It’s the creation story from hell. But think again.

That description is not of the troubled Virginia colony settled by a group of men popularly derided, then and now, as the scum of the Earth. Rather, it depicts the arduous first days of Massachusetts’s Plymouth colony, our favorite myth of the nation’s founding.

These aren’t the kinds of events we remember the Pilgrims by, even though the description is drawn from their own words. Instead, our national mythmakers have accentuated the positive to carve the story of the pious Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving out of Plymouth’s more complicated, less pure beginnings. In contrast, the earlier Jamestown colony, whose 400th anniversary we commemorate tomorrow, is depicted as a saga of unrelieved degradation and failure, relegated to second-tier status in the history books. But it shouldn’t be.

American history today begins with the Pilgrims because their experience in Plymouth has been molded to offer a more acceptable foundation story than the exploitative dog-eat-dog world of the early Chesapeake. The Puritans’ arrival in Boston, where they built John Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” clinched it for Massachusetts.

The Pilgrim story took over as our founding fiction after the Revolutionary War, when New England and the South began to pull in different directions. The Massachusetts colonists were labeled the Pilgrim Fathers in the 1790s, and the agreement they signed on arrival became the Mayflower Compact about the same time. Because Puritanism had come to be seen as repressive (think of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”), early American leaders such as Daniel Webster brought the Plymouth colonists forward as the kinder, gentler Puritans.

This is the origins story we prefer and the one we promote. We prefer it because we like to think that we are descended from a humble and saintly band, religiously motivated and communal in organization, who wanted nothing more than the freedom to worship God. The individualistic, grasping capitalists of Virginia offer much less appealing antecedents.

Encasing our national founding in a myth of immaculate conception feeds the assumption that the United States is unlike other nations, that it acts in the world only to serve the greater good. Sometimes it even makes the connection directly. Two days before Thanksgiving 2004, U.S., Iraqi and British troops began a major offensive south of Baghdad. The name chosen for the campaign? Operation Plymouth Rock.

But America’s true founding story is much more interesting and much more real. All early colonies had tremendous difficulties becoming established. The reports sent home from Jamestown were overwhelmingly dismal; it was all harder than anyone had expected, and everyone had different ideas about how to proceed.

Dismayed by the high death rate and the disorder of Jamestown’s first couple of years, the colony’s London sponsor, the Virginia Company — a kind of early venture-capital outfit — decided to compel the settlers to be virtuous. It imposed the most severe martial law, regulating every aspect of life to force the men to work for the collective interest. The death penalty was ordered for almost any infraction. If civic virtue could be achieved by force, the Virginia Company was going to do it.

In fact, martial law did stabilize the colony (although many ran away to take up life with the Chesapeake Algonquins). But it couldn’t foster true community development or create a thriving economy. Yet over the next several years, some colonists and backers came up with a different approach — and laid the foundations for what America is today. They substituted incentives for iron control. The land was divvied up among the colonists; a representative assembly gave landowners control of taxation; women were recruited as wives for planters; and the professional soldiers were removed.

And voila. The colony began to grow. To get a stake in this new society, young men and women were willing to take on the burden of working as indentured servants for a number of years.

The new design was in place by 1619, 12 years after the first colonists arrived. Life was still hard and major conflict with the Indians soon came, but the essential elements of success were in place. Every colony from that point forward followed the Jamestown pattern. The Pilgrims, who came in 1620, began as a communal experiment, but within four years, they, too, demanded division of the land and began to disperse into family groups.

Americans ever since have moved across the country in pursuit of the dream of land ownership, the innovation inaugurated on the James River. And they have prided themselves on the ingenuity that also surfaced first in Jamestown, where John Rolfe defied the odds by learning how to produce a marketable tobacco crop that became the colony’s gold.

Of course, there was a tragic downside, as there is to many success stories. As colonists north and south hacked their farms out of the wilderness, they ruined the Indians’ agricultural and hunting economy and forced the natives off their land. And ownership of property soon extended to ownership of labor, as Native Americans and imported Africans were enslaved in both New England and the South.

The truth of our history is that it produced winners and losers. Our founding is not a storybook Pilgrim fable. It’s something hardier and more complicated. And it’s reflected in Jamestown’s great accomplishment: that it was the place where English men and women worked through the messiness of real life in dire circumstances and found the secret to success in building a society — giving everyone a stake in the outcome.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman is a professor of history at New York University and the author of

“The Jamestown Project.”

Rouge Forum Update

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil Profits is updated at www.rougeforum.org.

Those good for our lifetimes posters attacking the perpetual oil wars are on sale, cheap!

But this week we want to call attention to a key appeal for support. Susan Ohanian’s web page has been a vital resource for educators and community people. With a handful of others, she initiated a petition against the NCLB which drew 30,000 plus signatures, and was quickly attacked by the president of the National Education Association, Reg Weaver (now busy trying to dismantle the NEA employees’ own pension fund).

Susan need some financial help to keep her web page going. Send what you can to:
Susan
P. O. Box 370
Charlotte, Vermont 05445

And remember to subscribe to Substance News, the best hard-copy material being published on educational and social issues today. Just 16 dollars a year!

Substance
5132 W. Berteau
Chicago, IL 60641-1440

In addition, radical educator Michael Baker was recently removed from his Nebraska classroom, never to return, for showing the film, Baghdad ER—and probably for creating his radio program, Room 101. The story of his dismissal is here.

and a link to the radio program “Room 101” is here…subscribe to the podcast.

Given that there may be another California Grocery Strike, readers might want to forward this piece analysing the last strike to their favorite grocer workers.

Our peace and justice coalition in San Diego is slowly moving toward a discussion on strategic planning, using several rubrics, this among them. Suggestions from educators and community workers in other groups are welcomed!

We are also working hard to block the invasion of the mercenary company, Blackwater, into San Diego County. Here is a web site of interest.

Here’s to Doug and Jan’s trip across the USA, Big Al’s red wedding, and thanks to Bob, Tommie, Susan H and O, Kerry N, Laura C., Sharon Agopian, Candy D, Bonnie Macintosh, Sandy Stone, Greg, Bill, Michael, Gerry, and Alan and Sarah.

All the best,

Why does the US government mislead the public about educational achievement?

Well, Jerry Bracey—a fellow with policy groups at Arizona State University and the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation—says the numbers reported in international comparisons of student achievement “are useful as scare techniques. If you can batter people into believing the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future — and you can control them.”

In short, test scores are used for fear-mongering (among other things) and, as Bracey points out in his May 3 Washington Post op-ed:

If the fear-mongers can scare you sufficiently (how many times have you heard the phrase “failing schools” in the past five years?), you might permit them to do to your public schools things you would otherwise never allow.

A Test Everyone Will Fail
By Gerald Bracey

The world of education is a world of tests these days. But why should tests be only for students? Here’s one for policymakers, politicians and adults in general. Bet you don’t pass.

The National Assessment Governing Board defined the “proficient” rating on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card, as the level that “all students should reach.” (The other levels are “basic” and “advanced”; the proficient and advanced levels are often reported together as “proficient or better.”) Given that, and given that Sweden was the top-ranked country among 35 in the most recent international reading study, answer the following:

1. If Swedish fourth-graders sat for our National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test, what proportion of them would be labeled “proficient or better”?

2. If Singaporean eighth-graders sat for our NAEP science test, what proportion would be labeled “proficient or better”?

3. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study of 1995, where did American fourth-graders rank in science among the 26 participating nations?

4. What percentage of American fourth-graders were labeled “proficient or better” in the 1996 NAEP science assessment?

5. What indicators of achievement have been rejected by the Government Accountability Office; the National Academy of Sciences; the National Academy of Education; and the Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing?

6. What are the first words in set-off text that one encounters in the “Leaders and Laggards” report released in February by the Center for American Progress and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?

Here are the answers:

1. Thirty-three percent.

2. Fifty-one percent.

3. Third.

4. Twenty-nine percent.

5. The NAEP achievement levels: basic, proficient and advanced.

6. “The measures of our educational shortcomings are stark indeed; most 4th and 8th graders are not proficient in either reading or mathematics.”

By comparing the results of foreign students and American students on tests administered in both nations, and then examining the American students’ scores on the U.S. NAEP, it is possible to reliably estimate how well foreign students would perform on the NAEP.

And it turns out that only one-third of those high-flying Swedish kids would be considered proficient readers; the NAEP figure for U.S. fourth-graders was 29 percent. The great majority of the remaining countries would have fewer proficient students than the United States. Using the NAEP standard, no country comes close to having a majority of proficient readers.

Under the NAEP standard, Singapore is the only nation in the world to have a majority of its students be proficient in science, and that by a scant 1 percent. Only a handful of countries would have a majority of students proficient in mathematics.

All those august organizations have rejected the NAEP achievement levels because the process is confusing to the people who try to set the levels and because the results are inconsistent: Children can’t answer questions they should be able to and can answer questions they shouldn’t be able to. The levels also give what the National Academy of Sciences called “unreasonable” results, including the fact that only 29 percent of U.S. fourth-graders were considered proficient or better by NAEP, yet America ranked third among 26 participating nations.

Other evidence is easy to come by. In 2000, 2.7 percent of American high school seniors scored 3 or better — the score at which colleges begin to grant credit for the course — on Advanced Placement calculus. Almost 8 percent of seniors (including those who did not take the test) scored above 600 on the math SAT; nearly a quarter (24 percent) of those who took it scored over 600. Yet NAEP said that only 1.5 percent of the nation’s seniors reached its “advanced” level.

So why does the government continue to report such misleading information? The “Leaders and Laggards” report illustrates why: The numbers are useful as scare techniques. If you can batter people into believing the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future — and you can control them.

In the 1980s, the “schools suck” bloc used such numbers to make us fearful that Japan, now emerging from a 15-year period of recession and stagnation, was going to take our markets; today, India and China play the role of economic ogres.

Recently, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in The Post that constant references to a “war on terror” “stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of policies they want to pursue.” Happens all the time in education. The most recent phony alarm comes from Eli Broad and Bill Gates, who are putting up $60 million hoping to “wake up the American people.” If the fear-mongers can scare you sufficiently (how many times have you heard the phrase “failing schools” in the past five years?), you might permit them to do to your public schools things you would otherwise never allow.

How BC Libs Aim to Reinvent Higher Ed

In the latest issue of The Tyee, Crawford Kilian, a prof at Capilano College, does an interesting analysis of the the plan to reinvent higher education in British Columbia. The plan is called Campus 2020 and it’s yet another example of how the neoliberalism is reducing teaching and learning into commodities for sale on the “free market.”