Category Archives: politics of education

When Educational Research Battles Polictical Research

learner-centered classrooms, politics of education, ,

The New York Times Magazine last week had an interesting piece on new science indicating that physical exercise mitigates anger.  The science here is new only in the sense that this is a study that clearly indicates this link, but as others have written over the years, the link between physical activity (and sleep) and emotional/intellectual stability and strength is pretty clear. We know this.

So why, then, do we not change our schools to reflect what the facts tell us will improve the learning of our students? Because of political research. The Brookings Institution and others release studies about the effectiveness of individual schools that often ask political questions, not academic ones, which then affects funding for schools, which, in turn, affects how effective schools are. When we ask whether student test scores are rising, we are asking a political question, not an academic one, since the science is clear that testing does not actually measure or improve learning.

So what’s the answer? I don’t know, but getting our politicians to stand up to political pressure and look at what is actually best for students is a good start. That can be done on Capital Hill, but what about in your school? Can you talk to your teachers? The principal? The school board? “All politics is local” Tip O’Neill famously said, and the individual school I send my child to is a good place to start.

Have Threats of School Violence Become Unremarkable?

politics of education, school safety, , , ,
Police at Lyman Moore School
Police at Lyman Moore School

While looking for something else on the web, I stumbled across an article from last week in one of the little local free newspapers that cover the region. It seems that one of the three Middle Schools in town had an incident last Monday where someone found some sort of note in a bathroom threatening mass killings. The school locked down the entire building and the police came in and searched every locker and every bag while students — who were not allowed to use cell phones or make calls home — were kept in whatever classroom they were in at the start of it all.

When parents started getting wind of this, many of them naturally went to the school, where they were greeted by police wielding assault rifles keeping everyone away. Some hours later, they were allowed to see their children.

The fact that this school was locked down and they brought in police to facilitate searches is one thing, but the remarkable thing to me is that the little local newspaper is the only place in print that seems to have covered it. A couple of the local tv stations did stories on it, but our regional newspaper did not cover it, our local NPR station did not cover it, and the School Department blog does not mention it. (I searched by the school’s name and went through the week’s news at each site and was unable to find any mention of the event.) The news sites that did cover it did so only when it was taking place, and I have been unable to find any follow up about what happened or what their investigation turned up. Was it a ‘prank’? Was there a real threat?

Have school lockdowns become so common that they are no longer newsworthy to the bigger news sources? I fear that we are moving towards a world where these sorts of things are just part of the common social fabric, not because inquiring minds want to know, but because these events directly impact the sense of community in those schools, and how much students can concentrate on their studies and learn in those environments. Students who attend a school where lockdowns are routine and unremarkable will necessarily learn to distrust their community. And what happens when our culture at large is filled with people who grew up with that sort of distrust?

Treating girls differently

politics of education, sex education, teaching cultural competencies, , ,

NPR did a short piece on ‘sexting‘ yesterday on All Things Considered. They opened with two 16-year-old girls who took a cell-phone picture of themselves naked together. One girl had erased the pic, the other sent it to a friend and, after one thing led to another, everyone at school had it on their phones, the administration had print outs, and lawyers were involved.

But here’s the catch: both girls were punished (suspended from being cheerleaders), but no one else was. Aside from issues of what the school has jurisdiction over (can they suspend students for weekend behaviors?), the fact remains that the administration saw fit to suspend the girls from their team–the cheerleading squad–but none of the football team who apparently forwarded the photos on were punished at all.

So why do we still insist on holding girls and women to different standards than men and boys? This school is simply reinforcing the gender double-standard that says that boys can be sexual, but girls must be chaste. The adminstration may not see it as such, but when they use the defense “The girls understood that as athletes, they would be held to higher standards of behavior”, but don’t hold the male football players to that standard, they are underscoring the old saw that women should know better. Never mind that one of the girls involved didn’t forward the picture on and deleted the original, meaning she did less than the football players.

Schools, of course, do this sort of thing all the time. It’s called abstinence-only education. We pay for it as taxpayers and the curricula developed for it, while differing state-by-state, seems all to reinforce the double-standard. Statements like “girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn’t invite lustful thoughts,” and blaming a victim of rape based on her reputation for having sex (i.e. being a ‘slut’) coupled with the fact that the boy was drunk and therefore, didn’t really know what he was doing. Pretty awful stuff.

So what is your school teaching your kids? Have you asked? What are you telling your kids about being a boy or being a girl and what that means? Are you having authentic, non-judging conversations about sex or just telling them “don’t do it” and letting them figure it out on their own (they will!).

Boys of Color

advertising, language in the classroom, learner-centered classrooms, managing behavior, media literacy, politics of education, school safety, Toys and Play, whites navigating racism, ,

The Rand Corporation, subcontracted to the California Endowment, has released a big study of inequities for boys and young men of color in California. Much of it is statistical evidence of what we already know: compared to white boys, boys of color have much lower educational attainment, grow up around more violence (exposure to violence outside of the home? Latinos are 2.1 times, African-Americans are 3 times more likely (p.19)), are more likely to die by homicide (Latinos are 5.1 times, African-Americans are 16.4 times more likely (p.19)), are more likely to be incarcerated (Latinos 2.1 times, African-Americans 5.5 times more likely (p.19)), have worse health (PTSD? Latinos are 4.1 times, African-Americans are 2.5 times more likely; HIV and AIDS? Latinos are 3.1 times, African-Americans are 6.9 times more likely), etc. etc. etc.

So much for a post-racial country.

These boys and young men are growing up in a world dramatically different than what the average white boy grows up in. Which is not to say that no white boys grow up like this, nor to say that all boys of color grow up like this, just that many more boys of color grow up like this than white boys, and these boys tend to struggle in school.

Teachers have, off and on, been known to write off some of these students: “I can’t get to him,” “he’s just too disruptive for my classroom,” or “if his parents are not going support his schooling and homework and studying, what can I do?” I am not arguing that there are not cases of students who simply cannot function in school, but many of these ‘excluded students’ can be taught, just not necessarily in the way their school functions. Many of these excluded students are students of color, judging in part from the statistics in the Rand Corporation report.

Learner-centered teaching and other related theories over the past couple of decades have talked about changing teaching dynamics to meet more students where they are (also see Howard Gardner’s theories), and this Rand Report echoes some of these changes in education:

Learning Using Non-Didactic Approaches. A final example of a practice that is represented among many of the effective program models is the recognition that participant learning should take place through experiential approaches, such as role-playing, rather than through didactic approaches, such as straight lecturing. (page 26)

One of the reasons we need to fund our schools fully is that, once we make the needed repairs to the physical structures of many schools so they are physically safe places, we need to focus on supporting teachers in redeveloping curricula to meet students where they are. In Teacher Man, Frank McCourt talks of having five classes of forty students each, and a 200 student load is simply too much to allow a teacher to give students feedback on their work, challenge each student appropriately, and return work in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, too many of those boys of color are being taught by this sort of over-worked teacher who can barely keep up with the grading and testing requirements, let alone engaging each student individually.

Political Meddling in Youth

managing behavior, politics of education, ,

When the economy tanks, some people work on helping each other out, and some look for how to mask their agendas.

In Georgia, some State House members are questioning why Georgia’s University System is supporting faculty with listed expertise in topics they don’t understand or maybe agree with, like oral sex. Aside from the fact that this is a terrific example of why we need the institution of tenure to protect faculty from meddling politicians, I have a major issue with this particular example.

In today’s youth culture, much has been made of changing attitudes in sex among youth, and how oral sex is not seen by many youth as being ‘real sex’. Georgia does not apparently collect sexual activity data, but here in Maine, 17% of 8th grade students have had sex, and in Alabama, which I picked just because it’s next door to Georgia, nearly 51% of 6-12th graders have had sex.

The reality is that nearly a third of 15-17 year-olds in this country have had sex. According to 2002 numbers from the CDC, 49.1% of 15-19 year-old males have had vaginal intercourse with females, and 55.2% have either given or received oral sex with females (they don’t seem to break out same-sex data with as much detail). For 15-19 year-old females, the numbers are slightly higher (53% vaginal, 54.3% oral).

The one other set of numbers (from the same source) that could be kinda scary is this: of 18-19 year-olds who have never had vaginal sex, 35.3% of females and 30.6% of males have given or received oral sex.

This means that there are tons of sexually active youth out there who may consider themselves “virgins” and, therefore, may ignore information about STDs.

Damn right I want experts in oral sex studying the topic. Ignoring things doesn’t make them go away, and often makes them worse. If we’d only talked about AIDS before it became the AIDS epidemic….

So, who are you?

politics of education, teaching cultural competencies, whites navigating racism, , , , , ,

We all develop a sense of who we are, and this process is a juggle of one’s sense of self and our culture’s sense of us. Even  as adults, we are constantly refining this sense of self and even working on several different versions of it. Much like having several different resumes that highlight our skills in different ways, we all have several different hats we wear, whether at work, with our children, or while pursuing a sport or hobby or other avocation. Right now I am a blogger, but I’m also a Dad, I’m straight, I’m white, I’m a researcher, I’m an employee, I’m a partner. And many things beyond that. As I approach 40, I am still struggling with what it means to be any number of these things, but for school aged youth, this struggle is often what their lives are consumed by.

Majka Burhardt has been blogging about a sense of understanding who she is, especially relating to what I understand is a very U.S.-centric question: “what do you do?” How do we articulate who we are in a one-sentence soundbite? And what if ‘what you do’ is not really fully how you understand yourself? Like Majka, I have climbed for all of my adult life, and this is a major way that I understand myself, even if I barely get out these days because of other responsibilities. So “what I do” is not necessarily who I am. This is also going to be true for many people of color, for women, for anyone who struggles against the culture. I’ve always struggled with the common dinner-party question Majka talks about: “what do you do?” and I’ve never come up with a really good alternative, but I’m certainly open to options. I usually ask something like “what do you do with your days” as a way to allow someone to answer outside of their job, but it still implies “what is your job?” to many people.

If we take this sense of self one step back to a more basic sense of human identity, I am male. But that simple fact does not encompass who I am anymore than the fact that I am a climber. I am male, but I have struggled against culturally-force-fed stereotypes of gender my whole life, especially in classrooms. I like to take students’ comments about being one gender or another and start a bigger conversation about what gender means in our culture: “Wow, so do you really think you’ve got to be ‘tough’ like that to be a man? Can’t women be tough too?”, or, perhaps more commonly, “do you really think women are less valuable than men? Why do you say ‘don’t be a girl’ like it’s a bad thing? What are you actually trying to say then?” 7th graders ‘get it’ when they are encouraged to talk about it, because so much of these gender stereotypes are ‘received knowledge’ that they’ve heard but never questioned. Dollface is talking about these gender stereotypes on her blog and asking what we’re doing to reinforce or break these gender stereotypes. For me, I always enjoyed talking about how I like to sew and quilt and cook and parent and yet still climb and get dirty and use tools and fix things: I can be my own definition of man.

One issue with these cultural stereotypes is the idea of homophily, which the Guardian had a piece on last week. Homophily is “The faintly depressing human tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us.” One of the reasons I always tried, as a teacher, to talk about my own experiences and life (to a reasonable degree) is that I was different than many of my students. I felt that if I talked about this, they would see that the stereotypes (of whatever, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, class, rural/urban, etc. etc. etc.) are just false social constructions. If teachers allow themselves to be vulnerable in this way, students often respond to that with authentic thinking. Other students, especially (in my experience), the LQBTQI students, seem to feel a sense of relief in an adult being open to these conversations and in an adult who is willing to talk about these issues.

So do we surround ourselves with only people like us? Is that a good or bad thing? Don’t we want to have interactions with other viewpoints? To what degree is this line of questions white- or male- or hetero- or able-centric? Can members of any non-dominant group truly surround themselves with only like points of view in a culture so fiercely dominated by straight-white-male-able-culture?

I guess the bottom line to me is that we ought to be having these conversations with youth early on.

When “the Market” runs the school

advertising, media literacy, politics of education, ,

Over the years, there have been lots of examples of corporate interests making their way into classrooms. Teachers are well familiar with the posters oh so kindly donated by companies which plug their products in one way or another, or even go so far as to steer the politics of teaching.

Is this just the way schools get materials today, since we can’t seem to find the resources to fund our schools fully? Should we see this as schools getting the job done by whatever means necessary, or is it more nefarious than that? Even though, in states like Maine, soda and candy are being banned along with the advertising for them, there are more than enough loopholes to drive a delivery truck through. At the school where I taught, when the ban went through, they changed the sign at the athletic fields from a Pepsi logo to a different Pepsi brand. Inside, the soda machines were stocked with other Pepsi brands, from water to juices, but it is still a Pepsi brand on the side of the machine. Why does the school keep them at all? Because the distributor pays the school a portion of the profits from the machines.

There are also lots of other examples of corporate interests trying to create ‘brand loyalty’ at a young age and pushing their products. There are even companies set up to market to kids in schools. What, then, is needed, is media literacy and getting kids thinking about ways to understand what they see around them and the motives behind that, especially as online marketing to kids gets more and more sophisticated.

But what if the corporate interests in the classroom are not so obvious as that Proctor and Gamble poster trumpeting the glories of their products? In the world of pharmaceuticals, many drug companies are paying universities for research on their drugs. This, in and of itself, is fine, but what happens when they pay the university to create a course based on their products? Several years ago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health started coursework around the benefits of hormone therapy, even though a clinical trial had actually been halted five years early because of the dangers of this therapy. For six years, doctors took this online course that was sponsored by, you guessed it, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, the makers of the hormone drugs! Now that someone asked questions about it, they’ve halted the course, but how many students (in this case doctors who will then go treat patients based on this information) were given information that is not only wrong, but potentially deadly to women who undergo this therapy?

There are plenty of subtexts here about how our culture values women (this sort of thing never seems to happen in clinical trials of men, or white people, does it….), but we need to find more effective ways to be sure that education is a completely free-standing institution that presents lessons based on the best information available, no matter if it’s 2nd grade or medical school.

American Apparel

advertising, media literacy, politics of education, ,

Dov Charney is a sexist lunatic who is given huge amounts of power by virtue of being the CEO of a hundreds-of-millions of dollars a year company. He founded American Apparel and seems to have the business acumen to keep it rolling, although I do wonder if it’s the corporate version of a Ponzi scheme and once it stops growing at 100% or more each year, it’ll catch up with itself and fold under its own weight.

But until then, Charney likes to dismiss domestic violence (contrary to all available evidence, he seems to think that nearly all DV is perpetrated by women). Charney likes to have sex with employees. Lots of them, and the models for their photos too. He doesn’t seem to grok that as the CEO, he has an enormous amount of power in the company and no employee under him should be expected to be able to make any decisions that do not take that power into consideration. He still claims these are consensual sexual acts.

Is it any wonder that American Apparel advertisements are criticized as being pornographic? I won’t even bother you with the link to the most pornographic AA ads, but suffice to say, collected, they are over the top.

So where do conversations about companies like this happen? Young people are buying this stuff, and a lot of it, and they continue to be the target of their marketing. Where are responsible adults talking to their kids about what these advertisements are actually selling? Can we have these conversations in schools? Because if we don’t, then people like Dov Charney will continue getting away with everything they do and making monster piles of cash off it…

h/t to Womanist Musings for the original post that got me looking at this. My response there was the start of this post….

questions or answers?

politics of education,

Questions are the most brilliant way to learn things. It has been said that when students ask more questions than the teacher, that is the definition of success in a classroom. I myself have too many questions and the older I get, the more experiences I gather, the more wisdom I accrue, the more questions I have. I think this is a good thing, and I certainly hope I can transmit it to students.

However, too much of our educational system is about answers. In the form of a number. And a class rank. We do such a disservice to students to lock them into numerical measures of success and tons of science indicates that what and how well students learn decreases when they are graded, but still the system persists.

What is the actual point of formalized education, then? If it is for students actually to learn, we would do whatever supports that goal, but unfortunately it is not. What is the actual goal? I don’t know exactly, but it seems to have to do with controlling the population. Don’t forget that the one of the reasons the original public schools in this country were conceived and created was to turn young people into better workers (ergo things like factory bells between classes).

If we actually revamped this system to create young people who can think for themselves and question critically, would that threaten the status quo? Would it threaten those in power? Is that why we don’t do that? Is that why standardized tests continue to prevail, even in the face of so much research showing they don’t actually measure learning?

Does that darn teevee reflect our culture?

politics of education, teaching cultural competencies, ,

The January issue of Harper’s Magazine, which has been out several weeks, has just made it to the top of my magazine pile. The delightful Harper’s Index, which routinely shows about 40 factoids that reflect in various ways our current culture, is, for this issue nearly trebled in size. (Harper’s is worth the subscription for the Index alone, fwiw.)

In this Index, two statistics jumped out at me about the “number of incidents of torture on prime-time network TV shows”:

From 1995 to 2002: 110

From 2002 to 2007: 897

These are the Bush Doctrine formative years, with Donald Rumsfeld at the Department of Defense (01-06) (and Paul Wolfowitz as his Deputy (01-05)), and the rise of Extraordinary Rendition and Guantanamo detainees and U.S. use of torture and U.S. citizens willing to give up rights to perceive some semblance of safety.

Of course, then, US policy affects how we treat each other as human beings.

Not necessarily because people are imitating what they see on TV, but because people come to feel that violence is a permissible response, because people come to feel that they cannot and should not trust each other, because people come to feel that we are not all working for the collective good, but for the good of ‘our people’. But how does one define ‘our people’? US citizens? Republicans? Men? White people?

So then: does TV cause us to be violent, or is it part of that big cultural biofeedback loop where US policy affects cultural views which affect TV portrayals which affect cultural views which affect US policy?

We must be mindful of these forces when we teach civics and history, as well as how we talk about interpersonal relationships. Our politicians are certainly aware of how to harness these forces to change public perception as a fore-runner to changing policy. But it is dangerous to teach students that policy changes happen in a vacuum, just as it is dangerous to allow students to assume that just because they see it on TV, that is how people interact with each other. One of the most important things we can teach students is critical thinking and the ability to question information and form their own opinions, right along with being respectful of others and trying to be aware of what others’ experiences are.