Keeping Kids Ignorant about Worker Rights
December 13, 2007
Though mired in side arguments about whether curriculum should be controlled at the state or local level (a fascinating objection, given state level standards and testing), I’m intrigued by a proposal in Wisconsin to mandate the teaching of collective bargaining an labor history. I’m particularly intrigued by how much support the proposed legislation has among teacher unions and the State Department of Education.
Taking the high road of advocacy for local control, rather than directly opposing the legislation, a spokesperson for a Republican legislator argues:
In a time when we’re having trouble teaching our kids the basic of history, is this really the time to be putting another mandate on when we’re not even doing the current stuff well?
In this volatile economy, teaching the history of the labor movement and about worker rights is something other than “basic”?
Failing Families, Failing Schools
December 12, 2007
Two studies on education and poverty are getting press this week.
In the first, the Educational Testing Service reports that a state’s performance on federal 8th grade reading tests can be accurately predicted by only four factors, none of which can be controlled by schools: The percentage of children living in single parent homes; the percentage of eighth graders who miss at least three days of school a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger read to by their parents every day; and the percentage of eighth graders reporting that they watch at least five hours of TV a day.
Reporting on the study, Michael Winerup of the NYT advises caution. The child watching hours of TV, for example, may have parents who have too little time at home because they are working two jobs. The study notes significant gaps in the quality of day care available to poor and privileged children. In other developed countries, the NYT article reminds us, mothers have paid leave after their babies are born.
It’s curious, then, that the title of study (The Family: America’s Smallest School”) and the NYT article’s headline, (”In Gaps in School, Weighing Family Life”), make no mention of these policy factors, as if this were all simply a matter of parenting style.
Meanwhile, the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment reports that students’ socio-economic background affects achievement more profoundly in the United States than in other high- achieving countries. Education Week ’s (you may need to register ) Sean Cavanagh reports:
The exam’s results are not surprising, given research showing that the U.S. system tends to provide underprivileged students with less demanding curricula, poorer-quality teachers, and fewer educational resources than their peers in wealthier U.S. communities, said Ross Wiener, the vice president of program and policy for the Education Trust, a research and advocacy group in Washington.
“We give students less of everything that makes a difference in school,” Mr.Wiener said. If the public is inclined to believe “we’re doing as well as we can for these students,” he added, the international data “demonstrates we’re simply not.”
Both studies challenge NCLB’s assertions that we can close achievement gaps primarily within classrooms decontextualized from their communities.
Both negate NCLB’s promise that the best that we can offer children left behind by regressive social policies are underpaid teachers, toiling away in poorly-funded schools.
It was another one of those moments when I didn’t know whether to launch into a lecture or to just smile and move on. It was an informal meeting of colleagues from different departments. The conversation had turned to our students, many of whom are first-generation college students. A woman — known on our campus to be particularly committed to issues of diversity — said “I just wish that they’d come to value learning for the sake of learning. They so often just seem to be here for the credentials”.
I didn’t lecture.
I didn’t hiss.
I did tell a story about a student in my course a few years ago who argued the same thing — that his high school kids from working class families didn’t “care” about learning the way that his middle class kids did. In class that day, I told another story about some research that I’d done in a private high school and the very creative but pervasive cheating that the kids told me about. I asked my student “so, how does an elaborate culture of cheating support your idea that middle class kids care more about learning for the sake of learning?”
My skepticism over whether differences in academic engagement can be explained by deep differences in the value placed on intellectual life is reinforced by this article from the SF Chronicle documenting rampant cheating among the highest achieving students in high school and college, and the students’ justifications of their cheating.
Similar articles are published fairly often in newspapers and education publications. I don’t think that it’s a secret anymore that many highly-ambitious kids casually cheat. Yet I have yet to hear any teacher or college faculty member talk about “them” and “their culture” as being sadly anti-intellectual, as they so often speak of working-class kids.
To justify class advantage, the respectability of the poor and working class must be denied.
My student’s response that day? He said that cheating at least showed that the middle-class kids valued the goals of education, and that made them better than his students who just didn’t bother to do their homework.
I didn’t lecture any more. I didn’t hiss.
My colleague’s response to my story about that high school teacher? A polite smile, and then a move to change the subject. I smiled back, and moved on.
But I do continue to marvel at the myths about class that are sustained in schools and colleges.
Critiquing “The Culture of Poverty”
August 17, 2007
Another good article on the limitations of Ruby Payne’s work from Teaching Tolerance, the journal of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
One paragraph caught my eye: When teachers in a workshop with the author began complaining about parents not showing up for meetings or conferences, he asked how many of them had driven to work that day. 100% had. He asked them, then, how many of the parents of the students owned cars, so that they could freely come and go. The answer was 11%.
How did we come to have schools in which teachers hadn’t already asked themselves that question, where they assumed, instead, that parents simply didn’t care about education or about their kids when they didn’t come to things that the school had scheduled?
And more importantly, how did we come to live in a society in which the fact that a good number of families simply cannot afford cars is invisible to even well-educated and well-intended people?
Stacking the Deck Against School Funding
June 22, 2007
While many of us teach and write about the many reasons (moral and otherwise) to address funding inequities in public education, the press regularly reports on “research” that suggests that substantial increases in school funding don’t produce gains in achievement. These studies are, in turn, cited by policy makers to counter demands for increased funding for schools.
I’ve always appreciated Jonathon Kozol’s response to such arguments: that if funding doesn’t matter, all of those savvy, well-educated parents in suburban schools would quit funding the smaller classes, art teachers, computers, well-stocked libraries, elaborate field trips, and science specialists for their own kids because those parents are not known for casually wasting their money.
But I’ve also wondered what is behind that “research”. Thus, I was interested in this essay from The School Administrator, in which the research methods of one such report are called into question. A quote from the essay:
[L]et’s begin with the report’s claim that even though “per pupil expenditures have increased by 77.4 percent (after adjusting for inflation)” over the past two decades, “student performance has improved only slightly.”
This claim is based on the incorrect assumption schools have the same spending needs now as in the mid-1980s. In reality, school expenditures have increased most on items that are unlikely to show up in standardized test scores, such as special education, dropout prevention, transportation services, health care for employees, school security and free- and reduced-price meals.
Dropout prevention programs offer the best example of the erroneous approach used in the ALEC report. A successful dropout program will keep low-scoring students in school, thus reducing average test scores for the school. The more money spent, the lower the scores.
The Think Tank Review Project, cited in this article, would seem to be a potentially good resource for verifying the claims made by various “research” groups weighing in on educational policy issues. At very least, these reviews could inform the public about conventions of research and, perhaps, support more critical reading beyond the headlines that such reports can generate. This assumes, of course, that the public has an interest in learning more about what does make schools work.
This assumes, too, that the public would be willing to read beyond the think tanks and policy analysts that support what they already believe about schools.
