Critical Literacy scholar Ernest Morrell was the keynote speaker in November 2008 at the Multicultural Education Conference held here at SUNY New Paltz. He spoke passionately about bringing (a critical analysis of) popular culture into classrooms to an audience of teachers, secondary, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, administrators, and community members. His most insistent message was that teachers should teach their students as though the students' grandmamas were in the back of the room, observing the class. Further, when a teacher feels like giving up on a student, on a lesson, an idea, Morrell urged teachers to consider what a student's grandmama might dream for her grand baby.
Concerning our work on neoliberal “logic” this summer, the most cynical read of the arguments of this class are that schools do exactly what they are designed to do: maintain the social order which depends upon wide disparities of wealth, the reinforcement of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and discrimination based on language and immigration status. The dynamics and social contexts of schooling in the United States do work to deny many youth access to meaningful schooling, and do so historically and systematically. Schools, in this sense, work to reproduce existing hierarchies of race and class. Such interpretations of our course, while perhaps technically accurate, miss the significance of hope in our work these past weeks.
In the between-spaces of this course we have explored what can be determined about hope. What we have learned is that hope is complex, informed, creative, generative, sometimes contradictory, sometimes afraid, but always learning. This vision of hope, if infused into schools, into teaching and teacher education, into educational policy, can yield schooling that dares to delight in the future.
Here is our last lesson on hope in our course: Change does not usually happen in the ways we think change happens. Bewildering, yes, but worth remembering at the end of a long hard day.
It has been a pleasure to make meaning with you this summer. I hope our paths cross again soon, and that you keep me posted on your writing and thinking and teaching. Happy, happy summer. I am thrilled by what you have accomplished this summer.
"To say one is committed to 'critical' work in literacy education is not to say something simple, but something profound" (Morrell, 2008, p. 82).
This week, we read an assortment of essays that you will synthesize in your own blog posts.
On writing and teaching I am a writer. I write poems and short-stories, and essays about theory, schooling, and my research. A big part of the appeal of being an academic is that as an academic I can have a writing life. I work on my writing daily, often as soon as I wake up in the morning. I love to write. I read to write. I write to read. I write to know. I write to figure out.
One thing that has always struck me as a missed opportunity is that the kind of writing taught in schools is a kind of writing that is at best a shell of the writing that writers actually do. Luna, as we read earlier this summer, taught us that we have allowed academic or school literacy to stand in the place of what we might mean by literacy.
When I consult with schools and teachers on improving writing instruction, I ask them to think about the kind of writing that is practiced/praxised in their fields. What kinds of writing do chemists, mathematicians, biologists, historians, anthropologists, poets, essayists, do? This kind of writing is done, not because it is a shell or a performance, but because this kind of writing makes meaning. In this kind of writing, the writer is making meaning. Web 2.0 technology has yielded additional fora such as blogs and wikis in which writers can make meaning.
On critical mathematical literacy This week I have two video clips for you to watch in order to support your reading. Both are posted below this post. The first is from a PBS special on Robert Moses' Algebra Project. After the video loads, you can move the timer to minute 12:30, when the segment on Moses begins.
[Copy and paste this link into your browser http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/328/video.html ]
The second is a clip from the February 2, 2010 (airdate) edition of the Rachel Maddow show. The clip is in response to Tea Party member Tom Tancredo's call for a reinstatement of literacy tests for voting (the very literacy tests Moses was working to overthrow). For our purposes, you can stop watching at 2:35, but you may want to continue watching to see how Tea Party members are constructing literacy.
[Copy and paste this link into your browser: http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/02/09/3872703-when-the-tea-party-cheers-the-literacy-test ]
Delect and delight in your meaning making this week!
This week's readings traverse a complicated topography of gendered reading and literacy learning, and gender expression.
Stanley attends to a paradox of romance texts read by young women: at once they undermine young women's self-determinations of beauty, worthiness, relationship, and success, while they are also a rare place for young women to learn about relationships, sex, and desire. Her text prompts us to consider what, exactly, these texts do for young women, and what these texts may stand in for that would otherwise be absent in young women's lives.
Maher's text provides an overview of the significance of gender in schooling and education discourses. It both provides context and advances our discussions of the implicit yet central impact of gender on learning, on powered relations, and on what it means to be literate.
Williams provides concrete examples of the dynamics presented by Maher at play. This work extends readings by Gee on the literacy requirements of the new capitalism, and points to some implications of the ways in which new technologies and new literacies are gendered.
Finally, Hill's piece explodes our notions of gender as binary, and reminds us that gender, for most people, is not experienced as an either/or, but rather as a both/and, or even a neither.
It is important for us as teachers, as teacher-scholars to understand the differences between biologically determined sex, and socially constructed gender. Sex, as a category, is often determined at or prior to birth, by a medical professional, based on a look at the baby's genitals. Sex is fixed, is thought to be constant throughout one's life. It is a binary, one is either a male or a female.
In contrast, gender is socially constructed through culture, psychology-personality, and the body. Rather than determined by the doctor, gender is determined by the person, with help from (and sometimes in spite of) the family, the community, the world. Gender is not fixed, it can shift over time, it can change. Further, gender is expressed in ways much more complicated than can be captured by the binary of man/woman. For example, in some Native communities, some people are considered to be two-spirited, holding both male and female sensibilities. In many cases, two-spirited people are regarded with honor because they are considered as wise, precisely because they are two-spirited.
As educators, it is our work to respect and defend the dignity of all students in regard to their gender expressions.
I like that our readings explore the implicit centrality of gender, and then work to question assumptions of gender, of a gender binary, at work in each of these analyses. That the readings use the categories that they will later explode. Sometimes, this makes people feel uncomfortable because things are too slippery.
One thing that we can hold on to, is that we should believe what people, students, say about themselves in terms of their genders, and do what we can to make them know they are welcomed and respected in our classrooms.
I have included two short films that deal with some of the ideas from our work this week.
Please copy and paste the following links in your browser to view them:
This week's readings help us turn a corner in our course work from the algebra of considering the variable of human diversity, to the calculus of considering not only diversity of learners, but also the diversity or multiplicity of literacies.
We read extensively from James Gee, a prominent literacy scholar. Over the past several years he has argued for an expansion of literacy practices and instruction, as other course authors have argued. However, in contrast to other authors, Gee's analysis of new literacies incorporates an analysis of a new economy, a new-er world order of power relations of labor, innovation, and skill.
Pay attention to the new economy that Gee describes, and to the implications of social and economic class (shown in his comparison of how middle class and working class teens talk) on who has access to the kinds of literacy practices that float to the top of the new hierarchy that is forming.
Chapters 14 and 16, informed by Gee's work and New Literacy Studies, also describes lived and imagined new literacies among youth. This territory of unsanctioned literacies is fertile ground for our thinking about multiple literacies that meet the needs of students in an emergent economy.
I am including three short films in this post, each to support your reading this week. The first is a short talk by Jim Gee, in which he brings together the theses of each of the articles we read from him. The two others are by Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor at Kansas State University, created with help from his undergraduate students. The first can be interpreted as an extension of Gee's musings on the new economy, called "A Vision of Students Today," the second is an explanation of Web 2.0 technology, the technology that affords much of the change in economic relations that Gee predicts.
This week, we bring our attention to a largely unspoken but profoundly influential tenet of American thinking: that for everyone to have their fair share, everyone must have the same share; that fairness is only achieved through sameness. Indeed, the belief that sameness is fairness. Each of the readings this week examines this belief from a different perspective.
Each of our readings focus on case-studies that help us to identify the influence of the belief in sameness as fairness, and how real life confounds this belief. Some make steps toward dismantling this belief, and the rest of the work of arguing for or against sameness as fairness will be up to us. Our discussions will blend the abstract with lived experiences.
Kris Gutierrez (Chapter 7 in Literacy as Snake Oil) addresses this tenet most explicitly. Her chapter depicts the investment that various parties have in maintaining this belief.
Purcell-Gates (Chapter 8 in the Skin that We Speak) explores, through her story of how a mother, Jenny, is dismissed by school personnel, the intimate violence of ridiculing the mother tongue.
Ladson-Billings (Chapter 7 in the Skin that We Speak) theorizes the practices of "permission to fail" that she observed in classrooms. She presents an example of a teacher who refuses to allow students to fail, a teacher who refuses sameness as fairness.
Jackson and Cooper (Chapter 16 in Adolescent Literacy) lay out best practices for working with underachieving students.
However, nothing brings these loosely related but still disparate perspectives together like the following TED talk by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell's thesis of giving up the pursuit for the perfect Pepsi in exchange for the pursuit for the perfect Pepsis, has wildly interesting implications for how we as a nation, as communities, think about fairness, and about schooling. (An aside: funny that we draw such a powerful extended metaphor from marketing after our discussions of neoliberalism.)
[Part II] The second part of my blog for this week is aligned with the "Abbott Schools Debate" discussion prompt on the discussion board.
Ideas of sameness, fairness, and equality through differentiation of resources, instruction, and curricula are surely less muddled in the abstract. It is when brought to the realm of the real that generally held commitments to fairness, true everyone-gets-their-needs-met-and-their-dreams-cultivated fairness, start to unravel.
Consider the case of the Abbott School Districts, in New Jersey. If you are unfamiliar with this case, some internet searching will bring you up to speed, but here are the highlights. In 1981, the Abbott vs. Burke case was filed, arguing that the State of New Jersey failed to meet its constitutional obligation to provide all students with a thorough and efficient education. Plaintiffs provided evidence that urban and poor-districts were provided inadequate public schooling. The case was eventually heard before the New Jersey Supreme Court. Their 1985 ruling was unprecedented, because they argued that urban, poor school districts had the rights to the same quality of education as enjoyed by wealthier districts. They did not set a baseline, or a minimum degree of adequate education, but rather, ruled that poor students should have access to the same quality of education that wealthy students access.
A few years later, little had been done to realize this ruling, but a 1990 shift in finance law yielded the economic structure for this change. Recognizing that the widely used school financing formula in which property taxes fund school budgets was the major contributor to ongoing disparities between poor schools and wealthy schools, the state agreed to pay the difference in per pupil spending between poor districts and wealthy districts. If property taxes and set state funding in a wealthy district would result in $14,000 per-pupil spending, and property taxes and set state funding resulted in $9,000 per-pupil spending in poor districts, the state would provide funds, in this case $5,000 per student, to match the wealthiest districts.
Parents, administrators and elected representatives in wealthy districts vehemently contested this decision before the ink was dry.
Over the past almost twenty years, there have been a series of Abbott decisions meant to equalize schooling outcomes in New Jersey. These decisions, some say, have done little to mitigate high concentrations of poverty, drop-out, violence, and incarceration rates in urban centers. There are many debates on how the additional funding to the 31 districts, called Abbott districts, should be used. There have been some instances of corruption, and misuse of funds.
For our purposes, this case serves to flesh out the complexities of sameness as fairness. Wealthy parents who may agree in the abstract that all students deserve a quality education became outraged that low-income students would benefit by the same per-pupil spending as benefited by their children. Questions of deservedness- of who deserves better schools because they have paid for them, of who deserves the best, who deserves to be poor- run deep in this debate.
For critics of the Abbott decisions, sameness as fairness means that the state provides the same funding for every student, and funds that property taxes generate on top that result in disparities in per-pupil spending are just a part of life. For advocates of the Abbott decisions, sameness as fairness means that every student has the same per-pupil spending, though the ratio of state-provided and property-tax generated funds may vary widely.
Since taking office, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has refused to comply with the Abbott ruling. Last month (2011), the New Jersey Supreme Court rules that Gov. Christie absolutely must comply with the Abbott funding parity. Christie's response? As your classmate Mandi posted on the discussion board on June 12, Christie has announced a plan to privatize 200 of New Jersey's lowest performing schools, including the Abbott schools. His education commissioner advising him? Former President of Edison Schools, Inc. (a for-profit education management organization) Christopher Cerf.
When I have talked about this with students, friends and colleagues, they often remark that no one, no parent, will ever easily say, "Yes, give more to that child than to my child." It can be expected that any parent will want the most for her child, especially in education. However, like in the case of Academia Semillas discussed by Gutierrez, debates over sameness and fairness are waged in relationships of uneven power. Many ask, "Who would ever deny a child a comprehensive, free, complete education?" (Comprehensive, free, complete, and compulsory are the goals listed in the 2000 Dakar Framework on Education) The answer is, lots of people, if they believe that the education of other children somehow jeopardizes the education or possibilities for success of their own children.
Take all of the thoughts that you are having as you read and post to the discussion board.
The readings for week four are focused on the issue of assessment. Some people run for cover when confronted with assessment. Surely, since 2002 when NCLB was enacted, assessment has taken on a connotation as a killjoy.
In 2001, the NYCDoE completed a report titled An Examination of the Relationship between Higher Standards and Students Dropping Out that warned that at-risk students, particularly English Language Learners were made vulnerable by current testing policies.
"Research has consistently shown that increasing standards has an impact on the high school completion rates of the most at-risk student…if interventions are not consistently carried out for at-risk students, then students who are not able to keep up tend to give up and become drop-outs" (2001, p. 5.)
The report also acknowledges,
"While it is too soon to conclusively attribute the observed increase in drop out rate over the past three years to the higher grade promotion standards being imposed in New York City and the higher graduation standards being phased in by New York State, this trend is consistent with previous research showing a relationship between higher standards and lower school completion rates"(2001, p. 1).
Yet ten years later, the policies haven't changed.
In my own research with young people about the effects of high stakes testing on their schooling, youth told my co-researchers and me that the "test obsession" made their actual classes dreadfully unappealing. Benji told us, "If I saw one more bubble sheet I was going to go crazy." In his interview, he expressed a sense of loss and frustration for what his high school classes could have been,
"Now looking back at what my classes were like I feel angry that I didn't have the time to learn things that are important to me. It was always 'Pack it in, pack it in, pack it in, move on to the next things because it's gonna be on the test.' There would be things that caught my eye, that sparked my mind, but it would be like, 'No, keep it moving to the next lesson.'"
Renata, a high school teacher, left her teaching position in the NYCDoE in 2003, in large part because of the weight of testing on her curriculum and pedagogy.
Every day for about a month my ' do now' said 'Get ready to get ready for the test!!!' And I would, like, add exclamation points to it like it wasn't a travesty. It got to the point where I was feeling embarrassed… When a student asks you 'Why do we need to know this?' I feel like a good teacher should have a good answer. To say 'Because it's on the test' is disrespectful to them in all sorts of ways… I was very depressed, I barely made it through that semester… Then all summer I felt so-< /span> heavy about going back… In the end, I just couldn't go back.
Renata's observations of the pedagogical and ethical conflicts that arise in test-based curricula were echoed from the students' points of view in our interviews and focus groups. Young people often expressed feelings of resentment for teachers in standardized test-based courses for being "hypocritical." In one focus group, youth scoffed at teachers who said that the tests don't matter. "They said they don't matter but they did. [Otherwise] why is she putting so much pressure on it?"Later in the discussion, Yeo said, "I had a teacher who was always talking about loving learning. Asking us if we loved our learning today. I'm thinking, ' Are you so crazy you're loving this?'"
Beyond these ironies, the biggest irony of all- that tests don't even accurately or comprehensively measure student learning- is best captured by Willis: "Tests are unnecessary for being able to show that you put in effort, show that you care, that you pay attention; what's the point of having a test if it can't tell you these things?"
In 2001, the Rockefeller foundation hosted a group of educational experts to form a panel that would review the Regents exams. The panel found that the exams do not meet stated NYSED standards, that passing English Language Arts (ELA) and Global Studies exams does not indicate readiness for college, and that the ELA consistently "sanitizes" literature excerpts on the exam (Regents exam review panel report, 2001). In total, five such panels have convened, and their assessment of these assessments are consistent: these tests do not purport to do what they say they do, and they are often poorly and inaccurately constructed (performanceassessment.org/consequences/index).
In their critical analysis (2008) of the No Child Left Behind Act, Michael Rebell and Jessica Wolff describe the ways in which NCLB has contributed to a shift in the purpose of schooling, away from teaching and learning toward assessment. In part, this is because although the drafters of the act recognized two significant needs in the nation's education landscape, opportunity and proficiency, they drafted the act to respond only to proficiency.
…(P)oor and minority students, whose readiness for learning is severely affected by conditions of poverty, are nevertheless more likely than their more affluent White peers to attend lower-quality schools− however school quality is measured− and to lack adequate educational resources to meet their learning needs. NCLB does not speak directly to this central issue (Rebell and Wolff, 2008).
This mandate has exponentially raised the stakes for schools, as private firms and companies willing to step in and take over failing schools wait in the wings, licking their chops. If the proficiency for all target were merely a motivational goal, this might be an innocuous stand. But since thousands of schools around the country are being labeled "in need of improvement"- which the public reads as "failing"- because they have proved incapable of making sufficient progress toward an unempirical goal, this aspect of the law is causing considerable harm… This situation will become increasingly unworkable as we approach 2014. By that year, almost all schools in the nation will fall short of the AYP targets and are likely to be on the "needs improvement" list. (Rebell and Wolff, 2008, p. 5; Linn, 2004).
Further, in a recent audit conducted by the Fordham Foundation, only five states have tests that are in "solid" alignment with their state standards. New York State was determined to have a "fair" and "fair, borderline poor" alignment between tests and standards in Elementary, Middle, and Secondary Math, and Secondary Reading, and determined the state to have a "poor" alignment between tests and standards in Elementary and Middle Reading (Cross, Rebarber, & Torres, 2004). "Given the lack of alignment of many state tests with state content standards, a serious question arises as to whether many of the tests are, in fact, valid for the extensive purposes for which they are being used." (Rebell and Wolff, 2008, p. 120).
Standardized test based curricula, and the pressure on all parties for high scores combine to dissuade students from schooling. More compelling reasons for curricular lessons and high achievement need to be identified in order to counteract this trend.
It is within this context that I chose the readings for this week. Some of you made connections between Baker's trilingualism and acts of code-switching, and Lisa Delpit's chapter, No Kinda Sense, explores the role of code-switching in student success. In my view, the most valuable element of code-switching is that the code user is informed about contexts enough to make wise choices about appropriate and powerful code-usage. This is a crucial component of what we will later describe as critical literacy. Note also Delpit's instructive example of the hair braiding unit.
Delpit's chapter pairs harmoniously with Hilliard's chapter on Language, Culture, and the Assessment of African American Children. Though specifically discussing African American youth, Hilliard's argument can be extended to other groups outside the culture of power. You will see that Hillard's work echoes other authors we have read so far, but its value is in bringing all of the bitty pieces together in one narrative.
The true gems of this week are found in Luna and Carini. Luna tells us that, "academic literacy has historically been conflated with literacy in general" (596). Further, "(T)reatment of difference as deficit has resulted in the location of the problem of school failure in individuals and in the continued positioning of nonmainstream students as outsiders" (597).
Luna's insistence that, "(T)he implications of being "a culture in the grips of deficit thinking" (Hull, Rose, Fraser, & Castellano, 1991, p. 324) would seem to include limiting the diversity of abilities and backgrounds of high school and college graduate, thus constraining our societal vision and potential," (Luna, 597) is a complimentary angle to our discussions thus far.
Luna's definition of learning disabilities gives our conversation another kind of traction: "I use the term learning disabilities to refer to a socially constructed category indicating mismatches between diverse learners' abilities and specific academic demands" (Luna, 597).
Finally, Carini provides a counter-approach to mainstream approaches to assessment. I've gotta say it, this is an essay that I just plain love. Carini's emphasis is on close description, on looking at a student, at her work, at her thinking. It is so different than what operates as evaluation these days that you might feel like swatting Carini away as a pest, but de-link your thinking from the over-determined realities of contemporary assessment, and give her ideas some thought.
Carini's work exposes the true anxiety at work in all of this "test obsession." That is, after all these years of common schooling, we still have no real way of knowing if students are learning . Pause and consider what I am suggesting here.
The bonus reading from Week Two by Lomawaima and McCarty provide insight to ways that Indigenous peoples know their youth are learning. Carini provides another strategy.
I look forward to reading your posts this week, and to our live chat on Monday June 20 at 7. We'll take a closer look at Carini's work then.
Here is an interview with Carini about her the Prospect School. In the years since the publication of her chapter, the Prospect School was closed and reorganized as Carini's current education project, the Prospect Center. http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3746079
Finally, this week, we read Luna's definition of learning disabled, a "socially constructed category indicating mismatches between diverse learners' abilities and specific academic demands" (Luna, 597).
The notion of match or mis-match is crucial to our work in this course; not just a mis-match between abilities and demands, but also cultural mis-match, mis-matches in values and expectations, and epistemological mis-matches.
Appreciating the experiences of under-performing students as potentially experiences of mis-match can help us to shift the blame of failure off of students' bodies, and their families, and onto the mis-match itself. Who is responsible for softening the sharp edges of mis-match? Who has the power to be responsible?
Take some time to view Ken Robinson's TED talk on how schools "kill creativity." His short thesis adds another dimension to our discussions of the implications of 'test obsession.' Please weave your response to Robinson's talk into your discussion board posts and responses.
This week's readings are concerned with neoliberalism, and for-profit literacy programs with pre-packaged literacy curricula as extensions of neoliberalism.
I have prepared a powerpoint presentation that helps to concretize neoliberalism and neoconservatism, as discussed by Lipman and Apple. You can click on the box inside a box icon to make the powerpoint full screened. (I first prepared this Powerpoint for this course in 2009, which is why it bears that date).
On May 4, 2008 the New York Times published an article that detailed the dire situation for many US Americans needing healthcare in a climate of exponentially rising costs.Though 158 million do have some kind of health insurance, the portion of families’ household incomes going to healthcare has risen by 12% since 2001, making healthcare the largest annual expense for the average US family
Elsewhere, unanticipated crises such as the Minneapolis bridge collapse in August 2007, heavy rains in New York City that flooded and shut down the subway system, and the months long 2007 drought in Georgia spurred cries for the private take-over of roads, public transportation, and water management, not just in the crisis zones, but all over the country. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) scrambled to respond to the expanding needs of survivors, for-profit crisis management companies such as Halliburton, Bechtel, and Blackwater, already fatted by profits on the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, moved quietly into place to seize the opportunity yielded by FEMA’s severe inadequacy.
In early 2008, New York State garnered proposals from Wall Street firms who want to take over the state lottery system. States like New Jersey, California are already seriously considering privatizing state lotteries (Hakim, 2008). Between 2001 and 2008, the New York City Housing Authority lost $611 million in Federal funding, as public housing units all over the country have been destroyed, or as developments have been privatized.
In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld began privatizing warfare by hiring Blackwater to do combat in Iraq, a move that unilaterally interrupted pre-existing international checks and balances (via international tribunals and less directly through things like trade embargos).Hiring a for-profit company to engage in combat undercuts any ethical or economic factors that might encourage reason and restraint.A company that makes its money on war without the consequences of paying for it will be sure to keep the war going.
This is a different way of thinking about the shrinking of public/free space.Bruce Western writes,
"Between 1970 and 2003, state and federal prisons grew sevenfold to house 1.4 million convicted felons serving at least one year behind bars, and typically much longer. Offenders held in county jails, awaiting trial or serving short sentences, added another 700,000 by 2003. In addition to the incarcerated populations, another 4.7 million people were under probation and parole supervision. The entire correctional population of the United States totaled nearly 7 million in 2003, around 6 percent of the adult male population" (Western, p. 6, 2003).
In the US, more than 1 in 100 adults are in jail or prison. More than 1 in 9 Black men aged 20-34 are in jail or prison (Pew Center on the States, 2008), a “profound social exclusion” (Western, 2006, p. 7).“No other group,” Western writes, “routinely contends with long terms of forced confinement and bears the stigma of official criminality in all subsequent spheres of social life…”(ibid, p. 7).In the past twenty years, state spending on prisons has grown by more than 127%, while state spending on higher education has only grown by 21% (Pew Center on the States, 2008).The expansion of prison spending and increase of percentage of the population impact what is public and who are the public in ways that we haven’t even begun to understand.
Like other parts of the public sphere, education is vulnerable to privatizing reform when perceived to be in crisis.In a recent book, When School Reform Goes Wrong (2007), Nel Noddings positions the No Child Left Behind Act within a reform effort ignited in 1983 by A Nation at Risk, an open letter to the American people written by the National Commission on Excellence in Education.A Nation at Risk, Noddings writes,
"(I)s alarmist; it uses words such as war, foreign power, and unilateral disarmament.Readers who might otherwise look for carefully presented evidence may be swept into premature agreement by language that induces fear.When policymakers warn that the United States will lose its competitive edge, that other nations are producing more engineers than the United States, and that our students lag dangerously behind those of other nations, audiences rarely ask for evidence to support the warnings.They are moved by emotion" (Noddings, p. 21, 2007).
Noddings casts NCLB as a prime example of Orwellian double-think (leave no child behind while all children are left behind) and writes that some critics claim that “the designers and advocates of NCLB intend to weaken the public schools and thus pave the way for privatization” (ibid, p. 23).It’s not difficult to be suspicious;NCLB has mandated that all students and all schools demonstrate “100% proficiency” by the year 2014.“Virtually no informed parent, teacher, administrator, researcher –or legislator- thinks this mandate can be met.”(Rebell and Wolff, 2008, p. 5).As the deadline approaches,schools already struggling to make Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) have back loaded the widest increments toward proficiency.For example, “Under Ohio’s AYP arrangement, the rate of progress required for the years from 2002-2009 is only one third of the annual rate that will be required from 2010 to 2014” (ibid, 2008, p. 6; Linn, 2003).Last year, New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein hired a subdivision of Edison, Inc., the same company rebuffed by the Philadelphia school system in 2002 and New York City school system in 2007, to provide federally mandated tutoring to schools not making AYP under NCLB.Edison, Inc. made $9.6 million from this arrangement in the 2005-06 school year.
Authors Michael Rebell and Jessica Wolff refer to the ripple effects of NCLB’s 100% proficiency mandate as a “cascade of consequences” that grow more severe over five years of a school’s documented insufficient progress.Ultimately, in the fifth year of insufficient progress, schools are “identified for restructuring” and are “required to develop new governance structures, such as reopening as a charter school, replacing a majority of the staff, hiring a private management company to run the school, or being taken over by the state”(Rebell and Wolff, 2008, p. 60).There are no data that support that the kinds of improvements built into the NCLB progress schedule can be made within set time frames, and no evidence that the sequence of steps required of unsatisfactory schools will put them back on track (Sunderman and Orfield, 2006; Rebell and Wolff, 2008). Further, though federal funding for schools has increased, the increase does not cover the increased testing and administrative costs of complying with NCLB.The backloading of progress requirements, the “rapid-fire cascade of consequences” (Rebell and Wolff, 2008, p. 135), the inadequate funding, and the almost absurd goal of 100% proficiency all add up to a scenario destined for steep fall-out for public schools, as private firms and faith-based organizations are poised on the sidelines, waiting for their chance to make a play.By 2014, “almost all schools are likely to be on the “needs improvement’ list” (Rebell and Wolff, 2008, p. 5; Linn, 2003).
Public funding for basic human and civic needs is being repealed at every turn in a young person’s life.As firms position themselves to take over public transportation, public housing, and public schools, and as the healthcare system becomes available only to those who can pay for it in more pronounced ways, young people find themselves becoming more and more isolated from the lifelines that have defined the American way.Though we know that resources are unevenly distributed, and that much improvement is needed, school is the only place that some students will be able to get a healthful meal, see a counselor or nurse, be tested for a range of cognitive, learning, and physiological disabilities or impairments, have access to books, computers and the internet, and be free from the expectation to earn money.For fewer students, school will be the place where they learn English, get needed sexual health information and safe sex devices, and receive relevant career training and guidance.
Bruce Western (2005) argues that another institution has picked up the slack as other institutions have contracted: prisons.“(T)he penal system (has) assumed new responsibilities for public health, delivering treatment on a large scale for mental illness, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C”
Lawrence Cremin argued in 1989 that as non-school institutions have changed since World War II, schools have been expected to pick up the pieces.Further, as Cremin and Jean Anyon (2005) assert, the US has a “longstanding tendency of…try[ing] to solve certain social problems indirectly through education rather than directly through politics,” (Cremin, 1990, p. ix) or in Anyon’s work, through the direct change of social policy (Anyon, 2005)
Schools are expected to do so much because other public spaces have contracted.It is a profound irony that federal and state mandates focused upon accountability have feigned accountability while passing the buck: schools absorb the responsibility for meeting most social needs.
