Tag Archives: NCLB

Students and Teachers! The Unasked Question: Why Have School?

Rich Gibson, guest blogger, asks Why Have School?

Dear Students and School Workers,

Perhaps you can challenge your friends, teachers, and colleagues, or maybe torment the worst one, with a little exercise I use at the beginning of every class: Why have school? Why are we here?

I ask that question in class one, advising students that I will follow it with these:

  • What are the main things going on in school?
  • What are the main things going on in society?
  • What might your answers have to do with each other?

Having done the interactive dialogue frequently, I can usually predict most of the student responses–but never all, and sometimes not the funniest ones.

Part of your task as a real student is to seek answers to the question: Who am I in relation to others, and what shall I therefore do? Asking our key question may help.

One good scenario: you will recapture the view that most very young children have, fairly quickly fogged over by much of schooling: I can understand and change the world.

You might practice the exercise with classmates before school begins.

Fair warning: very few teachers have asked this of themselves. They may be reluctant to do it, even angry you posed the question. But “why are we here?” must be posed and answered in every class. It’s the teacher’s, and your, responsibility to reasonably answer it–beyond “truancy laws.”

At this point, please take perhaps ten minutes to think through, and make some notes about your answers to those questions just above.

—————————–

Now (did you really, really do it?) I offer my thoughts which are radical, to-the-root analyses; more radical than most.

Why have school? Why are we here?

Let’s step back a moment in order to put school in its proper, social, perspective.

Schools are the key organizing point of de-industrialized North American life, and much of life elsewhere.

Evidence: There will be almost 50 million young people in k/12 schools in 2015. Nearly one-half of the youth in high school today will be draft-eligible for the next seven years. They’re just about all registered for conscription.

Numbers and positioning mean you are in a vital position to influence society–for better or worse.

Another 21 million mostly young people are in US colleges and universities.

School workers, not industrialized workers, are by far the most unionized people in the USA, more than 3.5 million union members. School unions are shrinking, but slowly, while industrial unions collapse, evaporate, because, in part, industry evaporates, and because industrial union leaders abandoned the idea at the heart of unionism—the contradictory interests of workers and employers.

The US will spend more than $629 billion on schools this year, about $12,300 per student. However, this average varies a great deal between states. California, once the finest and least expensive of state school systems, kindergarten through college, is now one of the worst, spending about half the national average. Then, as we shall see, there are remarkable disparities between districts.

What is going on in schools?

Elites sought greater control over schools since the wars on Vietnam accelerated a student-teacher-prof-veteran leftist movement that nearly upended what has always been a segregated and deceitful system of mis-education.

Once elected, the demagogue, Obama, invaded US schools with his Race to the Top (RaTT), a project personified by Chicago’s education huckster Arne Duncan. The RaTT, and later the Common Core, speeds what was already happening in capital’s schools under George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton before him–and adds a few factors for spice.

Note that the 40 year education strategy has always been bi-partisan, as with war funding, and bank bailouts.

The RaTT’s predecessor, touted by Democrats and Republicans alike called the No Child Left Behind Act had at least these key factors:

  1. The development of a regimented national curriculum to promote nationalism;
  2. High stakes standardized tests to promote segregation, indifference to learning, and ignorance with a pretense of scientific backing and;
  3. the militarization of schools in poor and working class areas.

The RaTT makes  logical extensions:

  • Sharpened demands for a national curriculum–the Common Core– in more subjects (beyond literacy and math),
  • Merit pay based on student test scores;
  • Attacks on all forms of tenure (made palatable to the public because they know through experience that there is no shortage of incompetents in schools);
  • Layoffs, hits on pay and benefits, increases in class size;
  • Tuition hikes driving youth out of college with razor-like precision, typically rooted in inherited wealth;
  • Some privatization, but hardly only privatization (the corporate state–described below–reflects both the unity and contradictions internal to the ruling classes who have different short term views of profitability);
  • Calls for national service setting up a syphon for middle class opposition to a draft;
  • Intensified moves into cities and schools in crisis, like Detroit and New Orleans, demonstrating again the contradictory goals of social control and profiteering;
  • Ruthless competition between school districts and states for limited RaTT
  • reward dollars;
  • A harsh rule of fear and intimidation sweeping across all of capitalist schooling;
  • The abolition of union contracts by fiat–administrative or government “emergency” declaration (Detroit Public Schools, and many, many, more);
  • Suspensions and expulsions of students, a race and class based maneuver that, step by step, obliterates youths’ ability to begin to achieve their potential.

Indeed, fear, from all angles, is the core emotional value in schools today.

The Jeffersonian ideal of education for enlightened citizenry is long gone, replaced by schooling for jobs and war.

What is the social context of school?

The education agenda is a class war agenda, and an imperialist war agenda. One begets the other.

In 2012, the Council of Foreign Relations, led by war-hawk Condoleeza Rice (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,”) issued its Education Task Force Report, demonstrating in clear terms that the education agenda is a war agenda: class and empire’s wars.

 Human capital will determine power in the current century, and the failure to produce that capital will undermine America’s security.Large, undereducated swaths of the population damage the ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct diplomacy, and grow its economy.1

Let us tick off the emerging realities of our times; the results of the many crises of capital contradicted by the promises of democracy.

The coming and recent elections should not only be studied as how voters choose who would most charmingly oppress the majority of the people from the executive committee of the rich: the government. It should be studied, more importantly, as how an element of capitalist democracy, the spectacle of elections, speeded the emergence of fascism as a mass popular force; that is:

  • The promise of perpetual war is real;
  • The US, incapable of defining a grand strategy (for example, harmony won through equality), is dying a death by a thousand cuts and organizing social decay–unable even to target a primary foe, dashing to hot-spots while other empires rise;
  • The corporate state, the rule of the rich, a near complete merger of corporations and government (2008 bank and auto bailouts);
  • The continuation of the suspension of civil liberties (as with renditions, police murders, mass incarceration, etc.);
  • The attacks on whatever free press there is;
  • The rise of racism and segregation (in every way, but remember the immigration policies);
  • The promotion of the fear of sexuality as a question of pleasure (key to creating the inner slave), and the sharpened commodification of women (Sarah Palin to pole dancers);
  • The governmental/corporate attacks on working peoples’ wages and benefits (bailouts to merit pay to wage and benefit concessions, to multi-tier wage rates);
  • Intensification of imperialist war (wars in Afghanistan escalates war on Pakistan which provokes war on Russia, etc, and the US is NOT going to leave Iraq’s oil);
  • Promotion of nationalism (all class unity) by, among others, the union bosses;
  • Teaching people the lie that someone else should interpret reality and act for us, when no one is going to save us but us;
  • Trivializing what is supposed to be the popular will to vile gossip, thus building cynicism—especially the idea that we cannot grasp and change the world, but also debasing whatever may have been left of a national moral sense;
  • Increased mysticism (is it better to vote for a real religious fanatic or people who fake being religious fanatics?);
  • One spectacle heaped on the next (celebrity worship, narcissistic electronics, etc.) and
  • Incessant attacks on radicals, isolating, discouraging, surveilling, and in some cases jailing those who not only practice radicalism, but who theorize to-the-root analysis.

Capitalist schooling exists within these social rising circumstances

Whose schools are these? These are capital’s schools.

This is, again, a capitalist democracy in which capital dominates democracy at every turn (bankster bailout, the auto-takeover on behalf of stockholders while auto workers’ lives were gutted, empire’s endless wars, etc).

Schooling is not education, the latter a “leading out,” the former, schooling,  a fethishized form of mis-education.

The capitalist market necessarily creates pyramid-like inequality, not only in the pocketbook, but in the mind.

Is there a single public school system in the US?

Actually, there is not. There are five or six carefully segregated school systems, based mostly on class and race.

The image of education in the minds of philanthropic economists is this: “Every worker should learn as many branches of labor as possible so that if…he is thrown out of one branch, he can easily be accommodated in another.” (Marx)

There is a pre-prison school system in much of Detroit, Michigan or Compton, California; a pre-Walmart/military system in National City, California; a pre-craft worker system in City Heights, California; a pre-teacher or social worker system in Del Cero, California; a pre-med or pre-law system in Lajolla, California and Birmingham, Michigan; and a completely private school system where rich people send their kids, like George W. Bush or Mitt Romney–or the Obama children.

Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, also sends his kids to private schools.

Rich schools teach different realities using different methods from poor schools. In rich schools the outlook is: “This globe is ours; let us see how we can make it act.” In the poorest schools, the outlook is, “Tell me what to do and I will do it.”

What are schools designed to do?

Schools are huge multi-billion dollar markets where profit and loss influences nearly everything.

Consider the buses, the architects, textbook sales, consultants, the developers for the buildings, the upkeep, the grounds, the sports teams, salaries, etc. Cost is always an issue in school. This is, after all, capitalism.

It is more than fitting to use a church analogy: schools as missions for capitalism and empire, and the vast majority of school workers, its missionaries. The theology: nationalism.

The average salary for public school teachers in 2013 was $56,383. Salaries of public school teachers have generally maintained pace with inflation since 1990–91. (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2009)

Multiply $56,383 by the total number of school workers, above. That’s a tidy sum.

These relatively good salaries, in comparison to the crash of industrial wages and jobs, served as an imperialist bribe to educators, winning them to conduct the child abuse that is high-stakes exams and regimented curricula–and not protesting the wars that erode their kids’ lives, for example.

But, as economic break-downs caused by overproduction and war evaporated at least some of the ability to make the pay-off—and as school workers became more and more alienated from each other, their communities and students through those same processes—the bribes and jobs began to vanish–as we witness today. School workers then begin to complain about the symptoms of their problems, as with high-stake exams, and not the core: imperialism and capitalism.

The reality of the imperialist bribe is especially evident inside the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Both unions are deeply involved with American intelligence agencies, like the Central Intelligence Agency’s front Education International (the inheritor of the Cold War CIA education fronts).

Why? For a reason parallel to the reason the American Federation of Labor was born: US workers will do better if “outside” workers do worse, thus tying the interests of US school workers with the nation’s bosses, hence their relentless support for Democrats.

It is a direct payoff. Reg Weaver, former NEA president, made $686,949 in his last single year of office. He now is on the board of EI, along with other past NEA and AFT bosses.

In 2010, about 10,000 NEA members at their Representative Assembly voted about 9,900 to 100 not to discuss the empires wars. In 2011, NEA was the first organization of any size to endorse Obama. Scratch our back with jobs and income and you can abuse kids and make war.

There is, in schools unlike most factories, a tension between elites’ desire for social control and profitability. This can be seen in the contradictions within elite groups about the privatization of schools. It’s also evident in the production and sale of textbooks: social control vs profitability.

It can also be seen in the liberal and unionite response to the current school milieu: “Defend Public Education!”

This is to defend a myth, on the one hand, to wish to harken back to non-existent halcyon days of schooling when it was not teaching lies, not segregated, and truly public.

On the other hand, the false demand is designed to treat schools like middle class job banks, to lure school workers into attempting to tax the rest of the working class to “win,” the further mis-education of their children–as did the California Teachers Association in 2009 with a ballot measure that failed, deservedly, by 2/3rds.

Better to “Transform Schooling!” or “Rescue Education from the Ruling Classes!”

More answers to why have school:

Skill and ideological training. Under skill training we might list, of course, “the three r’s,” along with music, art, athletics, theater, science, etc. That list comes fast and easy.

Ideological training is another thing. Ideological grooming would include nationalism (the daily salute to the flag, school spirit, etc.) as well as the training in viewpoints established by teaching distinct curricular substance (political science, civics, has nothing to do with economics) in the segregated schools, using different methods.

Beyond nationalism, one clear purpose of most schooling is to make the system of capital natural, almost invisible, and to present it as the highest, last, stage of human development.

Further, students must become so stupefied that they see no real contradiction between nationalism and the other central tenet of capitalist thought: individualism. Me! Education, necessarily a social effort, becomes an individual commodity, often in the form of test scores, used as a weapon for merit pay and, by realtors, to fix home values.

NCLB and the RaTT eradicated history in poor and working class areas and, in other areas, eliminated any sense of resistance, even the traditional right of revolution written into the Declaration of Independence: unthinkable.

The upshot of capitalist schooling is that many students, surrounded by the unsystematic, incoherent, mystical world-views of both the curricula and most teachers, come away learning not to like to learn.

Curiosity, a birthright of all children, gets crushed. Parallel to that dubious success, children in exploited areas learn they cannot understand or alter the world. So, people in pacified areas become instruments of their own oppression.

Baby-sitting and warehousing kids.

Babysitting is a key role played by capitalist schools. One way to find out, “Why have school?” is to experiment; close them. In our case, teacher strikes serve as a good test subject.

In school strikes (no sane union shuts down a football program), the first people to begin to complain are usually merchants around middle schools–who get looted. The second group is the parents of elementary students, quickly followed by their employers. (These realities can help demonstrate to elementary educators their potential power along with setting up kids’ entire world views).

The baby-sitting role is, again, funded by an unjust tax system and serves as a giant boon to companies that refuse to provide day care for their employees–but are able to duck taxes as well. This is redoubled by the fact that unions, like the United Autoworkers, completely forgot their 70 year old demand for free day care.

Schools fashion hope: Real and false.

On one hand it is clear that societies where hope is foreclosed foster the potential of mass uprisings: France in the summer of 1968 is a good example of what can happen; uprisings starting in school and quickly involving the working classes nearly overthrew the government.

Real hope might be found in showing kids and school workers alike that we can comprehend and change the world, collectively, and teaching them how.

Ask, “Why are things as they are?” every day. Or, in demonstrating that we are responsible for our own histories, but not our birthrights. Must we be lambs among wolves? Does what we do matter?

False hope might be the typical school hype: Anyone can make it; all you must do is work hard. Trumpery. Inheritance is, more than ever, the key to understanding social mobility, or immobility.

To the contrarians: there is nothing unusual about elites picking off children of the poor, educating them, and turning them back on their birth-communities as a form of more gentle rule. Obama would be one example of such a success. Skanderberg, the Albanian rebel trained by the Turks, would be a failure.

Schools create the next generation of workers, warriors, or war supporters.

Automatons or rebels, or something in between, a process with some witting direction. Those workers need to be taught to accept hierarchy, to submit, to misread realities like class war and endorse nationalism (school spirit) or racism (segregated schooling products). They need to accept their lot, to be unable to notice why things are as they are; why some live in abundance while others have no work—when there is plenty of work to do—why drudgery is so much part of most jobs. The core project here: obliterate the possibility of class consciousness.

What Cannot be Taught in Capital’s Schools in the USA?

School workers who follow the official line in school are prevented from teaching the core issues of human life: work, rational knowledge, love (sexuality) and the struggle for freedom.

Work: it is not possible teach truthfully about work because it is illegal in California and many other states to teach favorably about Marx. Absent Marx, no grasp of the labor movement, alienation, and exploitation.

Rational knowledge: very few teachers will be able to take note of the historical fact; people make gods, gods don’t make people. While multi-culturalism, a mask for nationalism that is still in style, may promote interfaith “tolerance,” history suggests religion is the ideology of death, and current events underline that reality. Which teachers will say that in a classroom?

Love (sexuality): It is illegal in California to teach sexuality as a matter of pleasure. Rather sex education is steeped in fear of diseases, pregnancy. Teaching people to fear their own bodies is key to producing the inner slave–most religions understand that.

The struggle for freedom: While I think it may be easy to justify the importance of the three paragraphs above, this fourth is my assertion that people will persistently struggle to be free. At issue is whether or not they grasp why they are not free, a radical analysis, or they battle the phantoms that their adversaries toss in front of them.2

Students, like everyone, struggle to be free, but how much freedom exists in schools–for anyone? Not much, if any, and what there is will probably be produced by spontaneous action. School imbues the practice of un-freedom.

What of the resistance?

People will fight back because they must. But the traditional organizations of resistance failed both the pedagogical project at hand, that is, teaching people why things are as they are, how to develop strategy and tactics on their own, and the practical project of direct action, control of work places and communities.  While people must resist, it is vital they grasp: Why?

Let us make another tick-list, this time about the school unions, a reminder and details from the paragraphs above:

*No leader of any major union in the US believes that working people and employers have, in the main, contradictory interests, thus wiping out the main reason most people believe they join unions. Bosses (for that is what they are) of the two education unions (the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers-AFL-CIO–by far now the largest unions in the USA) openly believe in what former NEA president Bob Chase called “New Unionism,” the unity of labor bosses, government, and corporations, “in the national interest.” There is nothing new about company unionism, however, nor the corporate state.Company unionism produces highlights like the AFT, the smaller of the school unions, to invite Bill Gates, dead-set on capitalist schooling, to be the key-note speaker to their 2010 AFT convention.

*Union bosses recognize their own opposing interests to the rank and file. The union tops, after all, earn much more than school workers. As above, Past NEA president, Reg Weaver, took in $686, 949, in his last year of office. Current president, Lily Eskelsen-Garcia, will make at least $450,000. Power in the unions is vertical, top-down, perfectly clear in the structure of the AFT, somewhat disguised, but every bit as real in NEA.

These mis-leaders who move up fairly slowly through a hierarchy learn a variety of strategies to manipulate people and, “protect the contract.”

These maneuvers, like grievance procedures, move workers away from the locus of their power, the work place, to geographically distant spaces where “neutral” arbitrators decide on vital issues. But the unions rarely file cases to arbitration and, nevertheless, lose about 2/3 of the cases they file.

Union bosses also divert member action to the ballot box–any place away from the job site—where, in the words of one top NEA organizer, “if voting mattered, they wouldn’t let us do it.” But electoral work keeps member volunteers busy and it reinforces the false notions school workers have about professionalism (professionals set their own hours and wages, they determine the processes of work–teachers typically are called professionals by people asking the workers to buy textbooks for their kids), allowing educators to win hollow” respect,” the chance to dress up and rub elbows with Important People, away from school.

*Corruption is endemic in the AFT where a steady stream of leaders have been jailed, not only for looting the treasury (Miami, D.C.) but also for child-rape and embezzling (Broward, Florida–twice).  NEA hasn’t suffered the kind of dramatic jailings AFT suffers, but, for example, my own boss in Florida, where I worked as an NEA organizer, was convicted of embezzling about $1/4 million from the union.

*The school unions draw on a member base that is about 85% white and reflect the racism that such a base inherently creates. Rather than fight to integrate the teaching force and schools, the unions urge more and more “education” classes (typically an utter waste of time), adding on expenses for students, meaning those with the least get shaved out with razor sharp precision–by class and race.

*The unions, like all US unions, do not unite people, but divide them along lines of job, race, years of tenure, staff and leaders from rank and file, that is, down to the narrowest interest–capital’s favorite question: What about me?

*Since the mid-1970’s, union bosses have supported every measure that elites used to regain control of schools which were, in many cases out of control. The NEA and AFT bosses today support curricular regimentation, high stakes racist exams, the militarization of schooling, merit pay, and charter schools (a key new source of dues income).

*The AFT organized the decay and ruin of urban education in the US, while the mostly suburban NEA let urban schooling be devastated, failing to recognize the truth of the old union saw, “an injury to one only goes before an injury to all.” That both unions steeped themselves in volumes of forms of racism (racist exams, racist expulsions, racist segregation, etc) should not go unnoticed or excused.

*The education unions serve to peddle the wage labor of education workers as a commodity to employers and to guarantee labor peace. In this context, there is a direct trade off: no strikes or job actions in exchange for guaranteed dues income; the check-off. That is precisely the historical origin of the agency shop. It is also a big reason why union bosses obey court injunctions against job actions; threats to the union’s bank account, that is, the union staff salaries.

*School unions attack the working class as a whole. One glaring example (May 2009) of this was the support the California Teachers Association and the NEA gave to a series of ballot propositions that would have dramatically raised the taxes of poor and working people while leaving corporations and the rich off the hook, again. NEA and CTA combined spent more than $12.2 million dollars on the campaigns, and lost overwhelmingly. CTA-NEA demonstrated to poor and working families that organized teachers are enemies–yet those same people are educators’ most important allies.

*These are the empire’s unions. Top leaders are fully aware that a significant portion of their sky-high pay is made possible by the empire’s adventures. NEA and AFT bosses work with a variety of international organizations on behalf of US imperialism. These adventures are frequently deadly as with the AFT’s unwavering support for Israeli Zionism, support for the recent oil wars, and, precisely to the point, work with the National Endowment for Democracy, a Central Intelligence Agency front, in wrecking indigenous leftist worker movements. While the AFT has been the spearhead of US imperialism inside the wholly corrupt “labor movement,” NEA has also been deeply involved. There is a long history of this, back to World War I and the AFL’s support for that horrific war. Again, the flag-waving theory behind it: US workers will do better if foreign workers do worse.

Unlike the private sector where less than 10% of the people belong to unions, school workers are the most unionized people in the country. It follows that it is important for change agents to be where the people are. But one must keep one toe in and nine toes out of the unions.

There are some indications that resistance inside the unions, and out, is rising. In Chicago, a recent election threw out the past, sold-out, union leadership. The CORE caucus organized for months, inside schools but, importantly, in communities among students and parents. Many hoped that new president, Karen Lewis, would serve as a beacon for future union reformers, should she overcome the temptations of office, the hierarchical union structure, the patch-work nature of the CORE foundations, and the full-scale attack that will be surely launched on CORE over time. In 2012 CORE led a massive strike. Events in 2015 suggest, however, that Lewis and CORE will fail to build a mass class conscious movement–and become just another union. We shall have to wait and see.

Social democrats, really social nationalists, have come to power in other teacher unions as well: Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Detroit, for example. What they have in common is their determination to not point to the system of capital and imperialism, despite the fact that many of them belong to so-called “socialist” parties. Perhaps they believe that people need to be taken by baby steps to more radical realities, that is, tricked into class consciousness. In a fun-house mirror sort of way, they look like the upper echelon union bosses, despite heavy doses of militant rhetoric.

The ongoing public workers’s strike in South Africa, a true class battle that includes the entire public work force (educators too) versus the Quisling African National Congress government might serves as an inspiration, if any US media covered it. They do not. Word, however, does slip out.

On March 4th, 2010, masses of students, school workers, and community people organized under banners that said, “Educate! Agitate! Organize! Strike! Occupy! Teach-in!”  Their actions, which included building seizures, express-way sit-downs, walk-outs, rallies, marches, and freedom schooling, varied from area to area but the connection of capitalism/war/racism/class war was made in every case I saw.

The organizers then called for similar actions on October 7th and a national conference in San Francisco in late October.

In the interim, the expert dis-organizers from the unions, the Democratic Party, and the usual sects showed up. That movement veered from its radical beginnings to the reactionary call, “Defend Public Education,” and mobilizing to get out the vote–rather like urging people into church where they know their children will be raped, where they are expected to tithe, but it’s all for the common good–some day.

In 2011, NEA and AFT co-sponsored, from the background, a “Save Our Schools” rally in Washington D.C. The rally cost $150,000 dollars. Less than 5,000 people came. The quid pro quo was, “No attacks on Obama. No criticism of the wars,” In the silence, the payoff worked, but with only 5,000 people, the fake rally also showed the unions’ inability to organize anything of significance. What they do well is dis-organize, deflect, and deceive. They will fashion pacified areas where people are instruments of their own oppression.

In the 2014-2015 school year, a movement grew to “Opt-Out!” of high stakes standardized exams which are, after all, racist, anti-working class–sorting tools that are not used in the private schools where Arne Duncan sends his kids.

But few leaders of this action ever commented on the “Why?” of the exams, i.e., class and empire’s wars, so they built a movement that appealed to many upper middle class groups, but left they key questions–and answers–blank. The core matter, class consciousness, remains untaught and unlearned.

The opportunism that drives the “”Opt-Out ‘Movement’” is perhaps best exemplified in historical context.

On July 3rd, 2000, National Education Association president, Bob Chase, spoke to the delegates at the NEA representative assembly: “(I) heard from more of you about standards and high-stakes tests than any other single issue since becoming president of the NEA…In some states, testing mania is quite literally devouring whole school systems like some education-eating bacteria.”3

Chase earlier promoted what he called, “New Unionism,” that is, the unity of unions and their members, government officials, and corporations, in the “national interest.” While there is nothing whatsoever new about company unionism, corporate state unionism, and the practice wasn’t entirely new to NEA (American Federation of Teachers president, Al Shanker pursued the same plan a decade before Chase) the NEA president codified what became NEA practice ever since.

NEA officers went on to talk anti-testing while helping create all the foundations of all the tests and offering minimal surcease to school workers who tried to resist the test fetishes.

At base, it is more than possible to be racist, sexist, nationalist and brimming over with pro-war sentiment, and oppose the test which would probably make your kid even more stupid.

In the near future, the union tops will use the illusion of the importance of the presidential election to divert millions of dollars and thousands of student and teacher volunteer hours into greater support for the corporate state: what eminent political scientist Chalmers Johnson called, “fascism,” nearly a decade ago. They will do everything they can to mask the fact of class war from above.

What Value do Teachers, school workers, Create?

Working within the school industry, which is itself a multi-billion operation, teachers engage an ideological battle, wittingly or not, that fashions the methods of thought, and thus actions, of the next generation of workers, soldiers, the middle-class buffer zones, defenders of elites like lawyers and military officers, and more. Can school workers act in concert with students, parents, vets, and others, to gain greater control of the value they create? There are hints, only hints, in the near past that they can: the Chicago teachers strike. In the now-distant past: the Students for a Democratic Society.

What can be done now?

People can be told that this is capitalism, rooted in exploited labor–and crises;

  • That there is a connection between capitalism and imperialism–endless war;
  • That the key reasons for the attacks on working people and schools are rooted in those two;
  • The education agenda is a class war agenda and an imperialist war agenda;
  • That the government is an executive committee and armed weapon of the ruling class–there they work out their differences, allowing us to choose which one of them will oppress us best;
  • That the overwhelming majority of union bosses have chosen the other side in what is surely a class struggle–the union hacks gain from the wars and capital by supporting those wars, winning high pay and benefits, and betraying workers, they’re a quisling force, junior partners to a very real ruling class;
  • That students, not teachers nor profs, are the primary target of capitalist mis-education and history shows they can and will take leadership, organize, and fight back;
  • That we can build a social movement that rejects the barriers US unionism creates, from job category to industry to race and sex and beyond.

The core issue of our time is the reality of endless war and rising inequality met by the potential of mass, active class conscious resistance.

We can fight to rescue education from the ruling classes although schools may be illusion mills, human munition factories, or missions for capitalism–the vast majority of teachers its missionaries.

What upends that is a mass, class conscious social movement that shouts the words that tyrants fear most: Equality! Justice! Retribution!

Escalating direct action to control work sites, communities, and importantly, the military.

Everything negative is in place for a revolutionary transformation of society (distrust of leaders, collapse of moral suasion from the top down, financial crises, lost wars, massive unemployment, booming inequality, imprisonment of only the poor, growing reliance on force to rule, eradication of civil liberties, corruption and gridlock of government at every level, etc.) What is missing is the passion, generalization, organization, commitment, and guiding ethic to make that change.

For a beginning, how about a one day, nation-wide, rank and file school strike, uniting all school workers, students and people of the communities: Monday, the day after the International Workers’ holiday–Mayday? The idea is in the wind among some of the rank and file.

There is no reason to look around for approval. It won’t come, top down. It is after all, just us.

Time is short. Justice demands organization.

Meanwhile, try those questions at the top in and out of class.

What defeats men with guns? Ideas!

Notes

References for the student counts, costs, etc., are at http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

More on US unionism here http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/23/counterfeit-unionism-in-the-empire/

Rich Gibson, a co-founder of the education-based Rouge Forum, is professor emeritus, San Diego State university and a former professor of labor history and social studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. He can be reached at: rg@richgibson.com 

Teacher Reflections on the Relationship Between Creativity and Standardized Testing in Ontario

Critical Education
Vol 5, No 3 (2014)

Accountable to Whom? Teacher Reflections on the Relationship Between Creativity and Standardized Testing in Ontario
Catharine Dishke Hondzel

Abstract
This paper describes the reactions and emotions teachers experienced when asked to discuss the impact standardized achievement testing in Ontario has on creative classroom practices. Using an interview guide format, eight teachers were asked to consider their perspectives on, and practices related to fostering creative behaviours in children, and their own creative teaching methods in light of accountability legislation. The responses teachers provided varied from bitterness and disappointment with the way standardized achievement testing influences their schools and classrooms to acceptance and optimism for the children’s future academic success. The results of this examination are framed with reference to accountability legislation in Canada and the United States, and the potential lasting effects of a high-stakes testing environment.

Keywords
Creativity; Standardized Testing; Accountability; Educational Reform; Ontario; Canada; Education Quality and Accountability Office; No Child Left Behind; Legislation; Teachers

New edition of “The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities” in production

I’m very pleased to announce that the Fourth Edition of the The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities is now in production at The State University of New York Press and will be available in 2014.

This fourth edition includes 12 new chapters on: the history of the social studies; creating spaces for democratic social studies; citizenship education; anarchist inspired transformative social studies; patriotism; ecological democracy; Native studies; inquiry teaching; Islamophobia; capitalism and class struggle; gender, sex, sexuality and youth experiences in school; and critical media literacy. Chapters carried over from the Third Edition, which was published in 2006, have been substantially revised and updated, including those: on teaching in the age of curriculum standardization and high-stakes testing; critical multicultural social studies; prejudice and racism, assessment; and teaching democracy.

As with previous editions——the first edition of The Social Studies Curriculum was published in 1997 and the Revised Edition was released in 2001——the aim of this collection of essays is to challenge readers to reconsider their assumptions and understandings of the origins, purposes, nature, and possibilities of the social studies curriculum.

A fundamental assumption of this collection is that the social studies curriculum is much more than subject matter knowledge—a collection of facts and generalizations from history and the social science disciplines to be passed on to students. The curriculum is what students experience. It is dynamic and inclusive of the interactions among students, teachers, subject matter and the social, cultural, economic and political contexts education. The true measure of success in any social studies course or program will be found in its effects on individual students’ thinking and actions as well as the communities to which students belong. Teachers are the key component in any curriculum improvement and it is our hope that this book provides social studies teachers with perspectives, insights, and knowledge that are beneficial in their continued growth as professional educators.

I am very appreciative to all the authors who wrote chapters for this and previous editions of the book, including: Jane Bernard-Powers, Margaret Smith Crocco, Abraham DeLeon, Terrie Epstein, Ronald W. Evans, Linda Farr Darling, Stephen C. Fleury, Four Arrows (aka Don T. Jacobs), Kristi Fragnoli, Rich Gibson, Neil O. Houser, David W. Hursh, Kevin Jennings, Gregg Jorgensen, Lisa Loutzenheiser, Joseph Kahne, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Christopher R. Leahey, Curry Stephenson Malott, Perry M. Marker, Sandra Mathison, Cameron McCarthy, Merry Merryfield, Jack L. Nelson, Nel Noddings, Paul Orlowski, Valerie Ooka Pang, J. Michael Peterson, Marc Pruyn, Greg Queen, Frances Rains, David Warren Saxe, Doug Selwyn, Özlem Sensoy, Binaya Subedi, Brenda Trofanenko, Kevin D. Vinson, Walter Werner, Joel Westheimer, and Michael Whelan. Each of one of these contributors are exemplary scholars and educators and their work has had a tremendous impact on my own thinking and practice as well as many other educators.

Contents
The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities
(4th Edition)

Preface

Part I: Purposes of the Social Studies Curriculum

1. Social Studies Curriculum Migration: Confronting Challenges in the 21st Century
Gregg Jorgensen, Western Illinois University

2. Social Studies Curriculum and Teaching in the Age of Standardization
E. Wayne Ross, University of British Columbia
Sandra Mathison, University of British Columbia
Kevin D. Vinson, The University of the West Indies

3. Creating Authentic Spaces for Democratic Social Studies Education
Christopher R. Leahey, North Syracuse (NY) Public Schools & SUNY Oswego

4. “Capitalism is for the Body, Religion is for the Soul”: Insurgent Social Studies for the 22nd Century
Abraham P. DeLeon, University of Texas, San Antonio

Part II: Social Issues and the Social Studies Curriculum

5. Dangerous Citizenship
E. Wayne Ross, University of British Columbia
Kevin D. Vinson, The University of the West Indies

6. Teaching Students to Think About Patriotism
Joel Westheimer, University of Ottawa

7. Ecological Democracy: An Environmental Approach to Citizenship Education
Neil O. Houser, University of Oklahoma

8. Native Studies, Praxis, and The Public Good
Four Arrows, Fielding Graduate University

9. Marxism and Critical Multicultural Social Studies Education: Redux
Curry Malott, West Chester University
Marc Pruyn, Monash University

10. Prejudice, Racism, and the Social Studies Curriculum
Jack L. Nelson, Rutgers University
Valerie Ooka Pang, San Diego State University

11. The Language of Gender, Sex, and Sexuality and Youth Experiences in Schools
Lisa Loutzenheiser, University of British Columbia

Part III: The Social Studies Curriculum in Practice

12. Making Assessment Work for Teaching and Learning
Sandra Mathison, University of British Columbia

13. Why Inquiry?
Doug Selwyn, SUNY Plattsburgh

14. Beyond Fearing the Savage: Responding to Islamophobia in the Classroom
Özlem Sensoy, Simon Fraser University

15. Class Struggle in the Classroom
Greg Queen, Fitzgerald Senior High School (Warren, MI)

16. Critical Media Literacy and Social Studies
Paul Orlowski, University of Saskatchewan

17. Teaching Democracy: What Schools Need to Do
Joseph Kahne, Mills College
Joel Westheimer, University of Ottawa

Part IV: Conclusion

18. Remaking the Social Studies Curriculum
E. Wayne Ross, University of British Columbia

Open Letter to the New York State Regents from New York State Professors Against High Stakes Testing

Open Letter to the New York State Regents from New York State Professors Against High Stakes Testing

March 30, 2012

As lifelong educators and researchers, from across the State of New York, we strongly oppose New York State’s continued reliance on high stakes standardized testing in public schools as the primary criterion for assessing student achievement, evaluating teacher effectiveness, and determining school quality. We write to express our professional consensus and concern, and to offer our assistance to the Regents in generating educationally sound alternatives to high-stakes testing as the primary strategy for assessment in New York State.

Researchers and educational organizations have consistently documented, and a nine-year study by the National Research Council has recently confirmed, that the past decade’s emphasis on testing has yielded little learning progress. In New York State and New York City, the consequences of testing policies have been most disappointing.

Disparate impact on students. Numerous studies document that the over-reliance on high-stakes testing bears adverse impact on student achievement and has been accompanied by widening racial/ethnic gaps. Using New York City as an example, we see that large numbers of students are performing below proficiency. High numbers of the city’s public school graduates fail the CUNY entry tests and are required to take remedial courses. Results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) suggest a failure to achieve significant reduction in the achievement gap separating New York City’s white students from African American and Latino students since 2003. The negative effects of our high-stakes testing environment are perhaps most pronounced for English Language Learners for whom the tests were not designed, who cumulatively and consistently fail to achieve proficiency within the limited school time (a year and a day) before they are required to take the exam in English. In 2010, 24% of 4th graders labeled as ELLs were deemed proficient in English Language Arts compared to 58% of non-ELLs. By 8th grade only 4% of ELLs were classified as proficient compared to 54% of non-ELLs. It is therefore little surprise that of the 2006 cohort, only 40% of ELLs graduated after four years compared to 75% for non-ELLs.

Negative impact on educators. High-stakes testing creates adverse consequences not only for students but also for educators. Statisticians and educational researchers have challenged the validity, effectiveness, and ethics of using high stakes test scores to evaluate educators. As argued in an open letter to Mayor Rahm Emanuel by CReATE (Chicago Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education), “There is no evidence that evaluation systems that incorporate student test scores produce gains in student achievement. [and] Teachers will subtly but surely be incentivized to avoid students with health issues, students with disabilities, students who are English Language Learners, or students suffering from emotional issues. Research has shown that no model yet developed can adequately account for all of these ongoing factors.” Given various value added measures, it is not possible to actually identify with accuracy the teachers who are most effective or least effective. This is already causing some highly effective teachers to leave the profession and may very well serve as a significant disincentive for aspiring new teachers to enter the field. The recent release of New York City Teachers Data Reports unleashed a hugely demoralizing media attack on the professional dignity of teachers.

Disparate impact on children who are disrupted by school closings. Finally, we are extremely concerned about the misuse of test scores as the primary criterion for the closing of schools. The 117 schools closings authorized by the New York City Department of Education since 2003 disproportionately affect children receiving special education services, those who receive free and reduced lunch, and those who are English Language Learners.

In conclusion, we stand with the 1400 principals who signed a petition against teacher evaluations based on high-stakes testing. We offer our intellectual support to the State to help generate public policies that bolster schools to be intellectually vibrant environments where inquiry-based pedagogy is encouraged, class sizes are reduced, educators are respected, parents are welcomed, and students are granted dignity while learning. We make ourselves available to the Regents to create just policies to transform the public schools in New York.

Bernadette Anand, Instructor and Advisor, Educational Leadership, Bank Street College
Gary Anderson, Professor of Education Leadership, NYU
Jean Anyon, Professor of Urban Education, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Lee Anne Bell, Professor, Barbara Silver Horowitz Director of Education, Barnard College
Douglas Biklen, Dean, School of Education, Syracuse University
Sari Knopp Biklen, Laura and Douglas Meredith Professor, School of Education, Syracuse University
Robert Cohen, Professor of Teaching and Learning, NYU
Edward Deci, Professor of Psychology and Helen F. & Fred H. Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences, University of Rochester
Greg Dimitriadis, Professor, Educational Leadership and Policy, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Arnold Dodge, Chair, Department of Educational Leadership and Administration, Long Island University -Post
Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Urban Education, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Ofelia Garcia, Professor of Urban Education, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Beverly Greene, Professor of Psychology, St. John’s University
Suzanne Kessler, Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Purchase College, SUNY
Wendy Luttrell, Professor of Urban Education and Social-Personality Psychology, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Ernest Morrell, Professor, English Education, Teachers College, Columbia University; Director: Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME); Vice President: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
Leith Mullings, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Mark D. Naison, Professor of African American Studies, Fordham University
Pedro A. Noguera, Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education, Executive Director, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, New York University
Celia Oyler, Associate Professor and director of Inclusive Education Programs, Teachers College, Columbia University
Pedro Pedraza, Researcher at El Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, CUNY
Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education, New York University and Former Assistant Secretary of Education
Michael Rebell, Professor of Law and Educational Practice, Teachers College, Columbia University
Richard M. Ryan, Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and Education and Director of Clinical Training, Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, University of Rochester
Ira Shor, Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center
Louise Silverstein, Professor of School-Child Clinical Psychology, Ferkauf Graduate School, Yeshiva University
Carola Suarez-Orozco, Professor of Applied Psychology and Co-Director, Immigration Studies at NYU
Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. Professor of Urban History and Director of Center for Urban Studies, University of Buffalo, SUNY
Ethel Tobach, Curator Emerita, American Museum of Natural History
Sofia Villenas, Director, Latino Studies Program and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Education, Cornell University
Lois Weis, State University of New York Distinguished Professor, Educational Leadership and Policy, University at Buffalo, SUNY

No Child Left Behind: A policy failure that is actually a success

Richard Rothstein’s post today on the Educational Policy Institute web site clearly describes how US education policy in recent years (e.g., the No Child Left Behind Act) has destroyed schools as places of learning. There is no doubt NCLB is a failed policy by any standards you want to invoke (see, for example, Larry Stedman’s comprehensive assessment of NCLB in the open-access journal Critical Education or Rothstein’s American Prospect article from 2007).

What has NCLB wrought? At the very least, Rothstein notes:

  • conversion of struggling elementary schools into test-prep factories;
  • narrowing of curriculum so that disadvantaged children who most need enrichment would be denied lessons in social studies, the sciences, the arts and music, even recess and exercise, so that every available minute of the school day could be devoted to drill for tests of basic skills in math and reading;
  • demoralization of the best teachers, now prohibited from engaging children in discovery and instead required to follow pre-set instructional scripts aligned with low-quality tests;
  • and the boredom and terror of young children who no longer looked forward to school but instead anticipated another day of rote exercises and practice testing designed to increase scores by a point or two.

But, NCLB’s failure is not Rothstein’s point today. Rather, his point is how Obama and his education secretary Arne Duncan have responded to this massive failure of policy making … by prescribing more of the same.

NCLB’s absurd demand, which “prohibit(s) the normal variability of human ability so that all children, from the unusually gifted to the mentally retarded, must achieve above the same ‘challenging’ level of proficiency by 2014,” can now be waived by the education secretary. But if states are unable to meet NCLB requirements (and none of them can), Obama and Duncan are “conditioning the waivers on states’ agreements to adopt accountability conditions that are even more absurd, more unworkable, more fanciful than those in the law itself.”

States will be excused from making all children proficient by 2014 if they agree instead to make all children “college-ready” by 2020. If NCLB’s testing obsession didn’t suffice to distinguish good schools from failing ones, states can be excused from loss of funds if they instead use student test scores to distinguish good teachers from bad ones. Without any reauthorization of NCLB, Mr. Duncan will now use his waiver authority to demand, in effect, even more test-prep, more drill, more unbalanced curricula, more misidentification of success and failure, more demoralization of good teachers, and more needless stress for young children.

Rothstein believes the Obama administration’s new policies, like NCLB itself,  “will eventually implode.”

But the damage being done to American public education has now gone on for so long that it will have enduring effects. Schools will not soon be able to implement a holistic education to disadvantaged children. Disillusioned and demoralized teachers who have abandoned the profession or have retired are now being rapidly replaced by a new generation of drill sergeants, well-trained in the techniques of “data-driven instruction.” This cannot easily be undone.

Politicians, the ruling class, and the mainstream media are impervious to the mountains of evidence illustrating how NCLB stripped the heart and soul of learning and teaching in US schools and failed in any measure to “increase achievement” (see Stedman’s work).

But is NCLB really a policy failure? Perhaps not. Like the trail of death, destruction, and terror left in the wake of  America’s imperialist wars, educational destruction created by NCLB is just so much collateral damage in an education agenda that is war agenda.

The ‘Highly Qualified Teacher’ Trope: Democratic Professionalism and Educational Policy in the Face of Risk, Uncertainty, and Blame

Critical Education
Volume 2 Issue 11 (September 21, 2011)

The ‘Highly Qualified Teacher’ Trope: Democratic Professionalism and Educational Policy in the Face of Risk, Uncertainty, and Blame
JoVictoria Nicholson-Goodman

Abstract

The descriptor, ‘highly qualified teacher,’ serves as a trope in educational reform rhetoric that invites interrogation if it is to be vaunted as a key signifier of utopian thinking about improving American education in our times. Such interrogation may be furthered by informed awareness of the past, critical attentiveness to the present, and engaged openness for a future that reaches towards democratic aspiration as its guiding ethos. A trilateral orientation of historical awareness, policy critique, and democratic educative theory are linked to interrogate how ‘quality’ as a construct is constrained and distorted in talk about ‘21st century skills’ and teacher quality as guarantors of global economic competitiveness. Of primary concern is how the distortion manifests in the face of risk and uncertainty as features of a ‘culture of blame’ under a neo-liberal logic that replaces democracy with corporatist control. The ‘highly qualified teacher’ trope is interrogated and subverted as it is contrasted with a ‘democratic conception of professionalism’ and ‘wide-awakeness’ in ‘the nightmare that is the present’.

Special report on Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal

In the wake of the recent Atlanta Public Schools test cheating scandal, Critical Education has just published a special report examining the performance of Atlanta students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The report, written by Lawrence C. Stedman, an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the State University of New York at Binghamton and an expert on historical and contemporary student achievement trends, analyzes Atlanta students’ performance on the NAEP during the 2000s to assess the contention of former Superintendent Beverly L. Hall that students made “real and dramatic” progress during her tenure.

Critical Education
Vol 2, No 9 (2011)
Table of Contents

http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/30

Special Report

——–

A Preliminary Analysis of Atlanta’s Performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress

Lawrence C. Stedman, State University of New York at Binghamton

Abstract

The Atlanta Public Schools system has been rocked by a series of reports documenting widespread cheating on the Georgia state tests. Its reputation, and that of its leaders, has come into question. In response, former superintendent Hall asserts that, despite any cheating, the city’s students made “real and dramatic” progress during her tenure and cites the district’s trends on NAEP as part of her evidence (Hall, 2011). In this report, I analyze Atlanta’s performance on NAEP during the 2000s to assess this contention. I use diverse indicators: district trends, national comparisons, grade equivalents, and percentages of students achieving proficiency. My preliminary assessment is that Atlanta’s progress has been limited and, in many cases, slowed. In spite of a decade of effort, Atlanta’s students still lag 1-2 years behind national averages and vast percentages do not even reach NAEP’s basic level. Less than a fourth of its 4th and 8th graders achieve proficiency, a key national goal; in some subjects and grades, it is as few as a tenth. At current rates, it will take from 50 to 110 years to bring all students to proficiency. Such findings raise profound questions about current approaches to school reform, including No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. The emphasis on targets and testing is failing and has contributed to cheating across the nation. More fundamentally, it has greatly distorted teaching and undermined authentic learning. While test tampering is a serious problem, we need to re-conceptualize what we mean by cheating. Every day, test-driven, bureaucratically controlled institutions are cheating tens of millions of students out of a genuine education. That is the real scandal.


Editors’ Note

From time to time, Critical Education will publish time sensitive and topical field reports that analyze issues challenging the existing state of affairs in society, schools, and informal education. Our first field report is Lawrence C. Stedman’s analysis of student achievement in Atlanta Public Schools subsequent to the investigation that revealed widespread cheating on state tests. In spite of the findings of the investigation that cheating was widespread, then school superintendent Beverly Hall claimed schools had made significant real progress in student achievement. Stedman’s field report investigates this claim.

Cheating scandals in schools have become almost commonplace. Campbell’s Law is often invoked as the explanation: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” No Child Left Behind has led American schools down a path seeking ever higher test scores, aspirations that are unreasonable and, based on the best judgment of measurement experts, unattainable. In spite of the unreasonableness and unattainability of the goals set by distant policy makers and capitalist corporate interests, educational professionals are pulled down this path and do what they can or what they are told to do to demonstrate improvement in learning. Anyone paying attention to the ever increasing importance of standardized testing as the main means of evaluating students, schools, teachers, and principals will understand how cheating could be come widespread. Indeed, the investigation of the cheating scandal in Atlanta revealed a culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation, which created a conspiracy of silence among educational professionals fostering deniability with respect to cheating. That teachers and administrators cheat should come as little surprise when educational policy creates unreasonable demands and then holds those educators to account through threats and intimidation. Cheating of this kind is not about trying to hoodwink any one; it is entirely about seeking to avoid the wrath of a system that will assuredly blame teachers and administrators for perceived failure to perform. It is about gaming the system, not about harming children. We should be left wondering why we have an educational system that backs educators into a corner that leaves them with little choice but to engage in actions even they find unethical.

The public is outraged by cheating, especially in its obvious forms, like in Atlanta where teachers and school administrators altered student test results by changing wrong to correct answers. Most people would agree that changing answer sheets is cheating, even if there are good explanations for why it might be done. But there are softer, maybe even acceptable forms of cheating, ones that reasonable people would argue may or may not actually be cheating. Is it cheating when schools and districts manipulate the pool of test takers by excluding groups of students? Is it cheating when teachers are exhorted to focus on students who are on the cusp of moving to ‘proficient’ at the expense of time spent with other students, either those who are failing miserably or obviously succeeding? Is it cheating when instructional time becomes intensive test preparation? Is it cheating when the subjects that are tested push out subjects that are not tested?

What counts as cheating is contextual and necessarily dependent on our perception of who or what is being cheated. When teachers and administrators change answers it isn’t students who are cheated, it is the system. (Stedman’s analysis clearly demonstrates that whether the students’ answer sheets were changed or not, NAEP results show a school system in which children are not doing very well.) The response to this sort of cheating is ever increasing surveillance and policing of test administration and scoring. Increased monitoring is less likely to prevent cheating and more likely to alienate teachers, principals, and students. Whether answers are changed or not, students are cheated by the much larger context of test driven teaching that limits what they know and can do. It is the test driven educational reforms and simplistic notions of what a good school is that cheat students out of a quality education.


Singer: Don’t know much about—history, geography or civics.

Don’t Know Much About – History, Geography or Civics
By Alan Singer

In April 1943, as the United States prepared to invade Nazi dominated Europe and hopefully rebuild the continent on democratic foundations, the nation was shook, at least mildly, by a study that showed a tremendous “ignorance of U.S. History” by college freshman (Benjamin Fine, “Ignorance of U.S. History Shown By College Freshman,” The New York Times, April 4, 1943, p. 1). A survey of 7,000 incoming students at 36 colleges and universities across the country exposed a “vast fund of misinformation on many basic facts.” Adding to the national concern was that most of these students had studies either American history, government, or social studies while in high school. Meanwhile, 80 percent of the colleges and universities did not require a United States history class to earn an undergraduate degree. For a week, the issue made the front page of the New York Times and was even debated in the United States Senate. Then it quietly faded from public attention, until it reappeared in 1976, 1987, and 2002 when new test scores were released (Alan Singer, “Past as Prologue, History vs. Social Studies,” Social Education, 68 (2), February 2004, pp. 158-160.).

People somehow thought that saying the Pledge of Allegiance in school and singing the National Anthem at baseball games were enough to promote patriotism and respect for democracy, that is until the next Cold War or War on Terror scare.

In recent weeks, ignorance of United States history and the functioning of the U.S. government made the front pages again when a National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) civics exam showed that among other academic weaknesses, “Fewer than half of American eighth graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights” and “only one in 10 demonstrated acceptable knowledge of the checks and balances among the legislative, executive and judicial branches.” Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who heads a group that promotes civics education, declared “Today’s NAEP results confirm that we have a crisis on our hands when it comes to civics education.”

In many ways today’s crisis is of the government’s making, both on the national and state levels. It is also a crisis precipitated by the actions of both political parties, the Bush Republican “No Child Left Behind” and the Obama Democrat “Race to the Top.” Both mis-education strategies stress continuous testing in reading and math at the expense of all other subjects, including history, social studies, and civics. Students, teachers, and schools are all evaluated solely on these tests items. NO CHILD ON TOP / RACE TO THE BEHIND has transformed many of our schools, especially in inner-city communities, into cold, dry, boring test prep academies rather than places were children learn how to learn and prepare to become active citizens in a democratic society.
According to a report by my colleague Andrea Libresco, after five years of No Child Left Behind 36 percent of the nation’s school districts had cut class time for social studies to focus on math and reading test preparation.

In New York State, civics education has been undermined by the virtual abandonment of social studies below the high school level. Standardized state social studies and history assessments have already been canceled for the fifth and eighth grades and may become optional in high school. Unfortunately, as State Educational Commissioner David Steiner conceded at a conference at Hofstra University on April 15, “What is tested is taught.”

These “reforms” will make civics education, history and geography at best haphazard learning in our schools. According to Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania, civic education is the most important subject talk in America schools and should have “moral primacy over other purposes of public education in a democratic society.” Brian Dowd, social studies K-12 coordinator in Massapequa, NY and co-chair of the Long Island Council for the Social Studies fears that “the Board of Regents,” by counting social studies again, “is about to put New York in ‘moral danger.'” The council is now conducting a letter writing and email campaign to press the state to keep current assessments and re-institute the ones that were suspended.

In the 1980s, Ry Cooder & The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces had a less-than-hit song called “Down in Mississippi.” It celebrated a state with some of the lowest economic and social indices in the country. My fear is that current national and state educational policies that stress reading and math test prep at the expense of everything else will not only undermine civic understanding, but leave us all “Down in Mississippi.”

Another disturbing thought is that people in power in this country may not want a truly educated population. When Osama Bin Laden was killed, both President Obama and former President Bush called it an act of “justice.” I asked an eleventh grade high school class in Uniondale, New York if they agreed and every student who spoke, and there were many, said “Yes.” I then asked how we define “justice” in the United States. There was general agreement that the key component is due process of law with the right to a trial. My final question was, whether you agreed with the killing of Bin Laden or not, do you think it can correctly be described as “justice”? Students were now not so sure. For me as a social studies teacher, the most important part of civics education is promoting this kind of uncertainty.

Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies, Hofstra University

New issue of Critical Education: “Why the Standards Movement Failed: An Educational and Political Diagnosis of Its Failure and the Implications for School Reform”

Part 2 of Larry Stedman’s analysis of the failure of the standards movement, just published by Critical Education.

Why the Standards Movement Failed: An Educational and Political Diagnosis of Its Failure and the Implications for School Reform
Lawrence C. Stedman

Abstract

In the first paper, “How Well Does the Standards Movement Measure Up?,” I documented the movement’s failure in diverse areas—academic achievement, equality of opportunity, quality of learning, and graduation rates—and described its harmful effects on students and school culture.

In this paper, I diagnose the reasons for the failure and propose an alternative agenda for school reform. I link the failure of the standards movement to its faulty premises, historical myopia, and embrace of test-driven accountability. As part of the audit culture and the conservative restoration, the movement ended up pushing a data-driven, authoritarian form of schooling. Its advocates blamed educational problems on a retreat from standards, for which there was little evidence, while ignoring the long-standing, deep structure of schooling that had caused persistent achievement problems throughout the 20th century. Drawing on reproduction theories and analyses of the neoliberal reform project, I make the case for repealing NCLB and Race to the Top and outline a progressive framework for reconstructing schools.

Critical Education: How Well Does the Standards Movement Measure Up?

Critical Education has just published its latest issue—the first of a two part examination of No Child Left Behind policies and the standards movement by Lawrence C. Stedman.

We invite you visit our web site to review this and other articles and items of interest.

Critical Education
Vol 1, No 10 (2010)
Table of Contents
http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/21

Articles
——–
How Well Does the Standards Movement Measure Up? An Analysis of
Achievement Trends, Academic Course-taking, Student Learning, NCLB, and
Changes in School Culture and Graduation Rates

Lawrence C. Stedman

Abstract

This is the first of two papers examining the standards movement. In it, I review data from NAEP, the SAT, the international assessments, transcript studies, and NCLB assessments, as well as surveys and case studies of changes in curriculum and pedagogy. The picture is a bleak one. Over the past quarter century, achievement has stagnated, dropouts and aliteracy have grown, and large minority achievement gaps have persisted. The quality of student learning remains poor. School changes, stratified by class and race, have constricted instruction and harmed students and teachers. NCLB has made things worse, not better. Even in the two areas where the movement has achieved some success—lower grade math achievement and high school academic enrollments—the gains were largely superficial, other forces such as teaching-to-the-test and social promotion contributed, and serious deficiencies remain.

In the second paper, “Why the Standards Movement Failed,” I examine the educational and political reasons for the failure—including its misconstruction of pedagogy and links to the neoliberal reform project—and propose a progressive alternative.