Teaching Values: basic lessons in hypocrisy?

But of all wrong there is non more heinous than that of those who when they deceive us most grossly, so do it as to seem good men. -- Cicero De Officiis, Book 1, 13, 41.

You might have had a childhood experience similar to the following: your parents, or teachers, or religious leaders, intensely, seriously labored to impress on you that it was important always to tell the truth. (In the US it used to be presented to elementary schoolers that George Washington never told a lie so you shouldn’t, either.)

But if you mentioned that Grandma’s breath stank, or that something Mom made for dinner tasted bad, or that school was boring, you were scolded for being nasty or for deliberately saying what you knew wasn’t true, “just to be hurtful.” ("Fake news" as some of today's would-be 'moral leaders' drone about in their admonitions.)

Perhaps you let it be known you didn’t like playing or sharing with your cousins, or neighbors, or classmates. You may have been told by an adult, “You’ll like it if I tell you to like it, or else.” Being no dummy you soon realized that telling the truth brought pain; telling lies and calling those lies “the truth” brought you, more often than not, adult appreciation.

You may have learned that the word hypocrite was an important word. But even more importantly you learned that whatever a 'hypocrite' was, it couldn’t be any adult who had the power to punish you. If such a thought even crossed your mind, it was best you just kept quiet.

As we became older, supposedly wiser, we learned that (almost?) all general statements could be prefaced (if only to ourselves) with the phrase "Under certain conditions,..." We were initiated into the perpetual struggle between morality and acculturation.

This process was called “learning values.” It was an important part of what was called “growing up.” (So tedious, so omnipresent was this struggle -- many of us thought -- that we grew to defaulting to "what we wanted (felt)" so long as we could act as though in accord with the cultural or moral environment we found ourselves in.)

Apparently there are still many people around today who worry (feel?) that kids are not learning “values.” And they want the schools to teach, legislators to proscribe, or police to enforce “values.”

But can schools, legislators or police improve on what family and community, for better or not, already do?

To examine these issues further, see Values Education or Values Confusion?

Cordially-- EGR

P.S. Thank you Mahdiabbasinv. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:زبان_tongue.jpg

Pursuing Excellence: cultural rivalry disguised as common market?

Everybody talkin' 'bout Heaven aint goin' there… -- Thomas Arthur Dorsey (1899 - 1993) Walk All Over God's Heaven

"Excellence in All Things!" A friend was hired as the headmaster of a small (70 students, grades 9 - 12) private school, the dominant if not sole admissions criteria of which was the parents' ready ability to pay the tuition. This school touted its ability to transform reluctant or lackadaisical children into "Ivy League" students. In fact, scholastic achievement, as one might soberly expect, was rather variable.

At a school board meeting, several of the governing members proposed that the headmaster post and preach the slogan, "Excellence in All Things!" The headmaster suggested that such action would only provoke derision from their rather sophisticated teenagers and likely, also, a certain disdain for the competence of the staff. He, the headmaster, would personally be happy if each student could show better than mediocre accomplishment in a few areas of endeavor.

A particularly vociferous board member remonstrated that it was the headmaster's and teachers' duty to educate all the students to adopt the slogan and strive to actualize it. But another asked, "Which subjects should be favored if it turns out that time or other resources run short?" Thus began what turned out to be neither a very long nor very comfortable "discussion" among those present at the meeting.

Creating More Hamster Wheels. Many of us can look back over many, many years to see the sacrifice of the adequate, the good, even, to the pursuit of the excellent. Yet we seldom see memories of such pursuits raise much apprehension of yet another treadmill exercise. Is our communal memory so weak, our resources so plentiful or our embarrassments so forgettable? What accounts for this Sysiphean proclivity (in almost every area of organizational life)?

One kind of explanation for cavalier attitudes toward excellence comes readily to mind: disregard of how ideas of "excellence" vary even within the markets pursuing it.

Broadly characterized, a market is a (theorized) group of people looking to acquire what they perceive to be a benefit, some thing or state of affairs perceived to be of positive value. These market members pursue an exchange via some medium, be it money, labor, time, attention, material items, or the like.

These and related notions are quite run-of-the-mill. However, here we mean to include in our considerations "externalities," beneficial or damaging effects affecting persons or organizations which are not themselves involved in the markets creating those effects. The motivations of school directors and staff, paying parents and the students involved may be -- indeed, usually are -- somewhat different, despite school slogans proclaiming, say, "Our school community works together in pursuit of excellence!" (See SLOGANS: junkfood, dead-weight or poison?.)

Weak Markets Markets can be weakened by attrition or disorganization. If groups that are willing to bear the costs of pursuing "excellence" are lacking, of insufficient size or disorganized, "excellence" remains little more than a vacuous shibboleth. This is often seen with the promises so easily bandied about in our political campaigns: hopes for benefits are much more easily raised than are the sacrifices, e.g. taxes, to pay for them.

Sometimes a purported benefit is perceived to "cost" too much. Just as the initial costs and future upkeep may "price" a car "out of the market;" so, also, might the burdens of a social relationship with some persons, "high-maintenance" individuals, leave them unbefriended.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. — Baudelaire

Though many people will agree on the face of it that "excellence" is better than "mediocrity," lack of agreement as to what the term, "excellence," delineates may cause an actual market to dissipate.

A potential market may not coalesce because of disputes about which criteria exactly should be used to describe the hoped-for benefit. This is a general problem in every area of life with vaguely described benefits, such as security, responsibility, ownership; and, not least, achievement, education and excellence.

Consensus is often only apparent. Sloganistic terminology abounds. Practical criteria are either missing, or lost in controversy. Leaders of long established institutions, family, schools, churches and governmental entities, may not to be able to find common criteria of excellence that serve each of their particular institutional interests. (See Engaging Conflict: a Leadership Necessity?)

So, the pursuit of "excellence" and the quarreling about its "true" meaning are not the high-minded undertakings as they often made out to be. They're just fancy forms of rivalry; nonetheless, culture-clashes.

But,... better rivalry than warfare.

For further examples pursuing these issues, see "Sacrificing Public Education to "Pursue Excellence"?


Cordially
--- EGR

Impediments to Improving Teaching: confusing Role and Function

If you want something done, ask a busy person. -- Benjamin Franklin, Pearls of Wisdom

It was a staff development day in the junior high school where I worked in 1974 as a teacher of ESOL and coordinator of the ESOL program. I was asked to be leader for a mixed group of experienced and newly-hired teachers. The topic was “Designing a School.” A few minutes after our session began, I was called by my principal to be a translator to help deal with a dispute between the families of two students. I gave my group the following “assignment” to be done while I was away:

You are going to design a school for 500 pupils, ages 12 - 14. Your budget will be guaranteed at $5000 per student. There are no other restrictions. Use your imagination. Be inventive. (I should be back in 40 minutes.)

When I came back, I asked my colleagues what they had come up with so far. One replied, “It started off well, but we soon got involved in an argument over priorities.” I asked what the dispute was about. Another person piped up, “We couldn’t agree whether we needed more vice-principals or more counselors. It would be too expensive to hire as many as we all wanted for both occupations.”

I asked, “Did you consider at all why you would need either vice-principals or counselors? What was the school going to be about, so far as learning activities were concerned? The answer came back, “We didn’t get to that, because we wanted to get the humdrum necessities out of the way before we considered the more interesting stuff.” Apparently neither Experience nor Recent Mintage guarantees Wisdom or Inventiveness.

Assuming my group didn’t just run out, while I was away, for coffee and donuts, what seemed to be blocking their inventiveness was an all-too-common confusion between roles, which are defined by the type of organizations one belongs to, and functions, which are determined by the kinds of interactional environments one happens to be in.

The difference is clear and very important. Schools traditionally designate roles, i.e. which people are teachers and which are pupils. To each group, according to institutional practice, are reserved certain prerogatives, e.g. teachers have the authority to give pupils assignments; pupils are expected to do them. But surely neither group always functions within the role: teachers can be taught by their pupils as when, for example, the pupil give a presentation on a topic with which the teacher is little acquainted.

Institutionally, many schools have a specialist role, Curriculum Developer, to which is designated the function of creating materials for classroom use. But any competent teacher performs that function persistently as they adapt distantly prescribed documents to the realities of the everyday classroom and to flesh-and-blood pupils.[1]

In many schools, roles are revolving positions. Personnel are sometimes teachers, other times administrators, and often share functions among their difference roles as when teachers act as disciplinarians, or counselors, and vice-principals as substitute teachers.

Roles develop as schools become institutionalized to meet legal or communal expectations. When a new school starts up, invariably most personnel serve different and changing functions while the scope of their interactions develops. With stability -- read here, “assured funding, etc.” -- personnel become, like insects in amber, frozen into their roles. This is not a bad thing from the point of view of the pupils, who, especially when young, need emotionally the kind of constancy of role, and the consistency of function, that institutions provide. (See Controlling the School: Institutionalization)

Would-be reformers who imagine that ephemeral groups are invariably better educational environments might well consider the corporate world. Whose stocks retain and gain value with the passage of time?

On the other hand, if the world changes significantly, institutionalized organizations risk ossification. And the roles, the careers, of those persons within them, often obtained through long and painstaking preparation, decrepitate. Eventually, the institutional roles may disappear, even though the interactional functions remain.

For references and to examine these issues further, see Do Schools Really Need Curriculum Supervisors? 
Confusing Role with Function


[1]See also On The Viability Of A Curriculum Leadership Role: Avoiding Confusion of Role and Function


Cordially
--- EGR

Are (U.S.) Colleges Still Doing "Their Job?" (What is it?)

Were college academics better in the past? Were there real intellectual ivory towers?

From 1750 to 1800 the college curriculum was pretty much unchanged. For example, in 1802 - as Samuel Miller[1] tells it -- Harvard, for example, offered:

First Year: Arithmetic, English Grammar, French, Geography. Greek and Latin writers, Hebrew, Logic, Rhetoric, Universal History.

Second Year: Greek and Latin writers, Algebra, Arithmetic, French, Geography, Hebrew, History, Logic, Mensuration, Philosophy (Locke and Blair).

Third Year: Conic Sections, English Composition, Euclid, Forensic Disputations, Greek and Latin writers, History, Mensuration, Trigonometry.

Fourth Year: Astronomy, Elements of Natural and Political law, English Composition.Greek and Latin writers, Paley's Philosophy, Spheric Geometry and Trigonometry, Theology.

Don't some of these items seem rather elementary? Before we try to compare this curriculum with today’s college curricula, we should attempt to get answers to the following questions:

1. Who were the students this curriculum was prepared for? Ages? Background? Prospects?
2. How many attended college in 1802? How regularly?
3. Who taught this curriculum? How were they likely prepared to teach it?
4. How strict were the testing conditions? How frequent the tests?
5. What was at stake? Was the test retakable? How was it prepared for? (e.g. cram sessions?)[2]

College and University then were not what they are now. A lot came in between. And what they are now is not, unfortunately, what all too many people imagine them to be.[3]

For examples and to examine important related issues further, see Conflict in Higher Education Faculty Evaluation: an organizational perspective.
Cordially
--- EGR

FOOTNOTED REFERENCES

[1] Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century in Two Volumes: Containing a Sketch of the Revolutions and Improvements in Science Arts, and Literature, during that Period (New York: T and J. Swords, 1803)

[2] A Classic on American Colleges is Frederick Rudolph. The American College & University. A History. 1960. U of Georgia Press.Throughout.

[3] For multiple essays on college and university organization, see Aspects of organizational functioning and culture.

WHY MULTICULTURAL “RAINBOWS” ARE HOKUMby Gary K. Clabaugh

Immigrant children from every niche and cranny of the globe are flooding into our public schools; and bringing with them a bewildering array of cultural beliefs and practices.

Multiculturalists see this as an opportunity for teachers to turn their classrooms into multicultural rainbows where every shade of the worldwide social spectrum is encouraged to shine. Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that the foreign values and behaviors brought into the schoolhouse can and do often clash with one another. Some cultures even define themselves, in part, by their deep and abiding animosity toward other cultures.

Worse still, foreign cultures not only clash with one another, they often clash with core American values. For example, Americans have finally concluded that women’s rights should equal those of men. But the cultures of some immigrant children oppose that entirely. Some even tolerate honor killings while insisting that it is acceptable for wives to be beaten by their husbands.

Americans also are slowly coming to accept homosexuals as worthy of the same rights as other human beings. Some other cultures still prefer stoning them to death.

Then there is the matter of religious tolerance. Americans have, over time, wisely decided to agree to disagree. But some other cultures still enthusiastically persecute any religion other than their own.

Despite all the present day multicultural hokum, it is child’s play to assemble a long list of cultural values and behaviors that are utterly unacceptable if America is to retain its hard-won tolerance. Plus, let’s keep in mind that many immigrant children do not even want to be defined by their parent’s cultural practices and affiliations. They long to escape these confines and join mainstream America. Should educators join forces with their parents to keep these kids in the old-world fold?

Immigrants bring much that is of value to America. We have no corner on living wisely. But that does not alter the fact that multicultural education is far more problematic than it’s evangelicals would have us believe. Let’s forego all their mindless happy talk and give this matter the serious consideration it deserves.

For a more detailed version of this blog see The Limits and Possibilities of 'Multiculturalism' also offers a number of other commentaries on multiculturalism.

--- Gary K. Clabaugh

Multicultural Education: a solution to problems of immigration?

“This Melting Pot of ours absorbs the second generation over a flame so high that the first is left encrusted on the rim.” -- John Tarkov, American writer

Previously, when American school systems absorbed millions of immigrant children at the early part of the last century, there were only minimal adjustments made to help them along. The result? Tsk, tsk! A vast underclass of non-millionaires, who had to manage day-to-day working at some non-intellectual pursuit, who proudly called themselves Americans, although they could hardly tell a Mayflower from a daisy, or a pate from a fois or a gras. Happily times have changed. Now, we have multicultural education.

Those early immigrants appeared, on the surface, to get along with each other, even intermarrying, but underneath it all, there was dislike, even hatred, as words such a hunkie, polak, spic, etc., demonstrated.

Now we have educators who have been trained to believe that they are capable of various and extensive depth therapies: textbooks tell teachers -- whether or not programs provide training -- they must be prepared to diagnose and handle sexual abuse, Tourette's syndrome, student depression, suicidal impulses, and substantial variations in intelligence, competence and motivation.

Now we have multicultural education. We educators can now expunge those deep hatreds, and make each individual self-actualizing and independent, while at the same time, strengthening ethnic and cultural practices and beliefs.

With our new, revised concept of culture which means ... uh, whatever it means, we will analyze and understand the behavior of students, who even if they look and act normal we know to be different but that's ok 'cause we're all in the salad together. All struggling with each other for the occasional crouton.


To examine this issue further, see Multiculturalism & the Problems of immigration

Cordially,
-- EGR

The School Failure Mythology

edited 10/11/20

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,

Though each was partly in the right,

And all were in the wrong!. -- The Blind Men and the Elephant
John Godfrey Saxe (1816 - 1887)

Philadelphia’s new (2012) Superintendent of Public Schools has declared a substantial number of schools to be “failing schools” and has announced that they will be closed down. The newsmedia, which fanfares almost every new superintendent as an educational savior -- and remains strangely quiet when said saviors leave to escape the mess they have enhanced -- is again bubb-bubb-bubbling with delight.

The parents of the children who attend the “failing” schools are vociferously NOT delighted. They want the schools to remain open. The idea of having to pry kids out of bed earlier to be bussed through hostile gang territories to schools out of the neighborhood is clearly not a welcome prospect. And how, many ask, is destroying relationships with teachers and administrators the kids know supposed to help them avoid “failure.”

Also weighing in on (or dodging) the issue are teachers, administrators, and university people. For not too obscure reasons the teachers side with the parents, the administrators have determined silence to be the better part of valor, and the university professors of education tend to side with the superintendent, although there are nay-sayers.

Three basic facts are persistently disregarded:

1. Without a substantial, persistent consensus on what schools should be about, there are no practical standards to determine what counts as success or as failure, no matter what litanies of directives fall from the lips of funding agencies.

2. Just because one party (or a few parties) to the controversy presumes to impose a set of standards, does not automatically bring every interested party into agreement.

3. Ignoring or denying 1 and 2 above does not change their reality.

Many a state legislature in its profound unwisdom has put some phrase into their school code about providing each child with a “thorough and efficient education.” New Jersey did this back in the early 1970s. I was in a Temple University group asked by a New Jersey legislator in 1973 to help define "thorough and efficient education" after the legislation codifying the language had already been passed. Despite our best efforts, he did not manage to get the definition we produced, as “accommodating” (read here, “vague”) as it was, widely accepted when he took it home.

Through the early 2000’s I would ask administrators from New Jersey what had been decided about the meaning of the phrase “thorough and efficient education.” How was it put into practice? The general response was “inconsistently” or “haphazardly,” adding that it was a “mess of a criterion.”

The underlying situation is that our citizens have long entertained a variety of conceptions as to what schools should be doing and what should count as school success. The fact that there are, besides public schools, parochial and private schools in great variety is one proof of this.

Another proof is that, by and large, parents -- and students themselves -- do not see academic knowledge and intellectual skills to be school goals anywhere near as important as those aiming at the students’ emotional and physical well-being.

This was shown years ago in an intensive study reported in John Goodlad’s 1984 book, A Place Called School. In general, he found that intellectual goals in schools far exceed parental preferences; whereas, social goals do not meet levels preferred by students and parents. (Goodlad, pp. 62-69)

Little has changed, except for the increasingly strident hyperbole about “common standards,” and the attempts by governmental and professional educational organizations to impose their own conceptions of educational success on parents too poor or unknowledgeable to escape or resist.


For references and to examine these issues further, see School Image: Expectations & Controversies


Cordially
--- EGR

Do We Really Need Better Teachers? What For?

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind. -- John Godfrey Saxe (1816 - 1887)

What is a better teacher? Better for what? What is the “improvement” supposed to aim at? These are primary questions. Secondary questions are whether it is worth the cost compared to other options, or to the status quo. Who gains what from “improving teachers “-- whatever that means? Who pays for it?

A recently retired member, a world-explorer, has offered a real live elephant to your organization, The Harmony Club. “How would we take care of this elephant?” you ask Sam, a member and, in life, a car-parts dealer. “First, you get a better steering wheel for your car,” he replies.

You are perplexed. “A better steering wheel?” you respond. “What for?” “Well,” says Sam, “you’re gonna be pulling that animal around in a trailer a lot and you’ll need more control and comfort when you do it!”

“A trailer? Why will we need a trailer?” you demur. Sam replies, “To get the elephant back and forth to the vet and to the state and county fairs.” “And to visit my kids’ schools,” adds Susan, also a member and, in life, a school board president.

“Harmony Club will need to hire an accountant, too,” breaks in member Stewart, a business school professor, “in case we decide to charge people money to come see the beast.”

“But what about food and shelter and clean-up and TLC?” you ask.

“Piffle,” says Susan. “That’s small stuff. Let the neighborhood kids come visit the elephant to keep it company. The rest you can get other members to help you with. At this juncture we’re trying to deal with the really important things.”

Do we really need better teachers for our public schools? Better for what? And will the improvement be worth the cost -- since “better” often means “more expensive?” And what kinds of things here are being assumed to be benefits? (See Dissecting School Benefits: a typology of conflicting goals)

Let’s revisit the questions, “Do we really need better teachers?” and “What for?” We can look to examine several possible answers. The first group I will call Student-Oriented Aims.

Do we really need better teachers? What for?
Student-Oriented Aims:

a. for better test scores
b. for more learning
c. to increase student interest
d. to increase student motivation
e. to reduce boredom.

Note that these aims each immediately in turn raise the important questions: For which students? What other factors affect the outcomes aimed at?

Do we really need better teachers? What for?
Economic-political Aims:

f. to create new jobs (assumption: they are pertinent, ultimately to student-oriented aims)
g. to open educational budgets to new entrepreneurs.
h. to placate powerful yet ignorant critics

The great pretense in all kinds of (not just public) schooling is that Student-Oriented aims take precedence over Economic-political Aims. The reverse is nearer the truth. This is a reality and diluting our beers with tears is probably a pointless endeavor.

For more than a century, Americans having been beating the drum for better public schools and better teachers. What they have not been doing is addressing our two basic questions. This is possibly very wise until that time is reached when a tolerance for variation, if not a congruence, in aims can be reached. Muddled thinking about educational aims is the cost we pay to minimize open social conflict on these issues.

For more references and to examine these recurrent issues further, see School Reform via Teacher Professionalization: Is it Cost-effective?


Cordially
--- EGR

Tracking vs Differentiated Instruction: company stew or smorgasbrod?

Jack Spratt could eat no fat; his wife could eat no lean.
And so, betwixt the two of them, they licked the platter clean.
-- Nursery Rhyme

It makes a big difference in cost, preparation, and meal timing whether you serve the same mixed dish to everyone or have each person choose from a selection of offerings. School curriculum tends to vary from stew, for example, 11th grade English or geometry, to smorgasbrod, band, AP Calculus and astronomy.

Except to save time and money, it would not make sense to serve stew, if you knew some people would pick out the carrots; others, the meat; still others, the potatoes and everybody left the string beans. So we might try differentiated instruction (DI), instead.

SmorgasBoard by bigmick - flickr

On the other hand, very many varied foods may not be necessary, since people have tastes in common. In addition a smorgasbrod is likely to generate more garbage, as jalapeno-stuffed olives and raw oysters are passed over. It all depends on the clientele and the biggest constraint is cost.

Differentiated instruction (DI) is an attempt to serve each person his or her own special meal, a controlled smorgasbrod, if you will, based on curriculum theory. If, for example, the curriculum model for the school assumes are 4 ability levels, 7 “cognitive styles,” and 3 levels of subject development, then a teacher in a pure DI classroom would have potentially 4x7x3 = 84 basic models of preparation. Taught simultaneously! For a 45 minute class?!

Know-it-all pundits are always carping that education is not rocket science. No, it is harder, so far as the practice is concerned.

Pure DI is not practical. Kids get lost with only a few variations going on. And then there is the grading. How does a teacher give grades based on even three kinds of differentiation without seeming to parents and kids to be unfair? Because no matter how many times and with what sincerity you intone your mantra, “Equality is not necessarily fairness! Fairness is not necessarily Equality!” you will not convince the kids with the lowest grades – nor their parents. And why sweat the grades? What's the point? College, career, salvation? Will your smorgasbrod get you there?

So, suppose we de-emphasize DI and go back to tracking: put potato eaters together; and, also carrot munchers; and, meat grinders, etc. We say they are in different “tracks,” each with its own shared “curriculum stew.”

But where do these tracks lead? To the same place? Or, perhaps, we don’t know for sure. Then the word “tracking” is something of an illusion; at best, a schoolhouse distinction only vaguely mirrored in the outside world.

Did Steve Jobs study computers in school? Did Warren Buffet study stock investment in school? No and no. Do you know college-graduates working at retail selling? Have you heard of doctors or dentists who have dropped out to become painters or farmers? Probably yes and yes.

So where does all this tracking lead? College, career, salvation? Will your portion of stew get you there?

To examine four fallacious arguments for tracking, see Tracking in Public Schools

For some notes on constructivism and DI see Constructivism: the new scientism?

Cordially
-- EGR

The Public School’s Real Mission: Inculcating A Common Faith?

Faith is believing what you know ain't so.
 -- Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

The reason bad public schools are bad is that they badly governed, from top to bottom. Happily, bad public schools are in the minority, despite what some newspapers and other lickspittle TV pundits have to say about them.

“Badly governed” does not mean “governed with bad intention.” What it does mean is that school leaders seldom are willing to face facts which threaten their piece of mind. These school governors, -- state and local administrators, superintendents and principals -- are brim full of ideologies and nostrums they’ve inherited and which they insist on foisting off on the vulnerable.

Part of this is their not unreasonable belief that that much of the general public is in the same delusional state. No parent wants their kids learning things which would disturb the parents’ peace of mind. (This is why so-called “critical thinking” gets many a salute, but has yet to make any headway into the public school curriculum.)

In the olden days of kings and princes, the Established Church of a nation saw to it to inculcate the belief in their congregations that their ruler, as malignant as he might be, sat in power by the Will of God. Subjects were to accept their lot in life and forswear violence as an instrument of change. (See In Days of Yorengore)

In today’s United States of America, where both aristocracy and religious sectarianism in government are purported to be absent, it is the role of the Public Schools (and many a private and parochial school) to teach little more than that our “citizens” -- never “subjects” -- are obliged to accept their governors as the Will of the People.

As good citizens, they are to reject any attempts at governmental change which might involve “violent” activity -- no matter what Thomas Jefferson ever advocated. This "Citizen’s Faith" is what is most important; the recently tediously advocated knowledge-and-skills-focus on the schools has always been given little more than lip-service.

If getting knowledge and skills were really the mission of the schools, then there would be a far more careful preselection of students than our governors and their clients, including parents of schoolchildren are prepared to pay for. Kids are put in grades by age. This is a traditional and cheap sorting method. If some don’t do so well on their report cards, everyone who does not work in a school knows at whom to point the finger of blame.

Here is a method for raising test grades substantially in just two years:

a. for the next school year, retain in grade every public school student who does not have B+ average on standardized tests;

b. any student who is failing this year should be held back for two years;

c. make age 7 the beginning year for first grade; and

d. pull back the curriculum so that any intellectually rigorously formal curriculum is not encountered before 9th grade.

If these steps were to be taken, students would encounter the present high-stakes testing almost two years later in their academic careers and more likely do far better in them, especially in the middle schools.

I don’t expect the above steps to be even considered. Why? Because our school and political leaders, along with many, many parents of school children, just have too many mental impediments -- myths, misinformation, and narrowly focused esteem issues -- to deal with providing their students, their children, with an appropriate, humane, invigorating education.

For references and to examine these issues further, see The Capacity to Benefit from Formal Academic Schooling: 
two ideologies of distribution 




Cordially
--- EGR

Romantics and Idealists Promoting Service Learning: a road to civic engagement?

There's no such thing as second class citizenship. That's like telling me you can be a little bit pregnant. -- H. Rap Brown

The majority of educators I have worked with have been optimists; even more, they have been – much in the traditional literary sense of the word – Romantics.

Romantic n. A person who, rather than seeing the glass as half empty, insists on seeing it as half full; even when it is only a quarter full.

This is probably the source, not only of their optimism, but of the substantial nurturant generosity they possess.

Many, many educators are also – in common parlance – Idealists.

Idealist n. A person who is willing to forego the appreciation of a job well done for the right to complain that it was not done perfectly.

The virtue of Idealists is their continual striving for betterment.

The promoters of service learning tend to be both romantic and idealistic: service learning will bring our now apathetic students back into civic engagement. And what is “service learning?” Though there seems to be some general sense that it supports citizenship education, there is little agreement on the many variations discussed. And, in addition, there are the political problems.

Service learning is as likely to help revitalize civic commitment on the part of our children as is health education about diet likely to reverse obesity. Not that it's a bad idea, but a lot is against it.


To examine these issues further, see Romantics, Idealists and True Service Learning


Cordially,
-- EGR

Pursuing Common, Rigorous Curricular Standards: a perpetual cycle in American public schooling

Researchers Urge E.D. Effort to Define “Common Core.” Bennett’s Advisory Group Reviews Research Agenda at First Session -- T. Mirga, Education Week, April 24, 1985, p.9

In April of 1985 a panel of nine prominent educators advised the National Institute of Education to devote a greater percentage of its dollars to “define” a common core of knowledge for American students. Members of the panel expressed displeasure with what they said was an overemphasis on research on the cognitive development of students. More emphasis, they said, should be placed on subject matter.

Michael W. Kirst of Stanford said that the focus should not be on process orientation, but rather “on what needs to be taught in these institutions.” His proposal presumes, it appears, that curricular interventions directly affect learning outcomes, bypassing, somehow teaching and other presentation difficulties.

Joseph Adelson of the University of Michigan concurred with Mr. Kirst, adding that he was “amazed at how little students know.” Perhaps he expected that if NIE research emphasized “defining” a common core, his own future encounters would be with more knowledgeable students.

Chester Finn -- at that time of Vanderbilt University -- among others, questioned the need for a proposed Center for the Study of Writing. “The thought that this is major terra incognita strikes me as blarney,” said Mr. Finn. “People know how to teach writing; they just don’t do it.”

It is somewhat amazing that in the world of 1985, where it was a commonplace that academics were barely competent teachers, such hidden riches, a plethora of writing and teaching talent, lay ignored or unexploited! On Mr. Finn’s account, the academic -- who averaged (and still averages) four published articles in his/her lifetime -- is merely withholding his/her gifts from students. Perhaps, secondary and elementary teachers, who suffer no pressure to publish, are endowed with a proportionally even greater ability to write and to teach writing!

Imagine a seed salesman who occasionally visited a grocery store and recommended to the grocer changes in the kinds and amounts of seeds farmers should be offered on the basis of the produce the salesman "saw missing"in the store. It's very much like how these curriculum interventionists, Kirst, Edelson, Finn, Bennett and the others at that meeting, relate to the actual classroom learning of elementary and secondary students.

Rigor, in curriculum, is an aesthetic criterion, a matter of taste. It is seldom a causal criterion, touching on effectiveness. Physicists, for example will do all sorts of things with mathematics that mathematicians find “unrigorous.” Who benefits, we should ask, when the call for rigor is heeded? The curriculum interventionist is not unlike the proverbial man with a hammer who tries to fix everything by hitting it, until it is formed (or deformed?) to suit his preferences.

For references and links to cited articles and to examine these issues further, see ON THE VIABILITY OF A CURRICULUM LEADERSHIP ROLE 
Avoiding Confusion of Role and Function


Cordially
--- EGR

Too Many Broths Ruin the Cook

Too many cooks spoil the broth -- Proverb

There is only so much time in a teaching day. There are only so many things a teacher can do. Adding to the already overstuffed schedule doesn’t get more things done, unless they are done less than well.

Teachers classroom activites fall into three main groups: instruction, organization and discipline. If one of the groups expands, one or two of the others must suffer. This is not nuclear physics.

If kids have not been sufficiently socialized at home to contribute, or at least, not to interfere with instructional or organizational activities, then the teacher must waste the instructional time of the cooperative students on disciplinary action. This is not nuclear physics.

If school districts insist on dumping more and more faddish items into the curriculum, then less and less gets done. The essentials suffer. The kids miss out or do not develop those skills needed for their later years. This is not nuclear physics.

If administrators interrupt classes with non-urgent public address messages, or with special un-preannounced assemblies, it wastes teacher time in helping along his or her charges. This, also, is not nuclear physics.

What is so hard about applying common sense in schools?

------To investigate this issue further see See "What Can a Teacher Do?"

Cordially,

-- EGR

Educational Innovation: stuck in the mud!

Two quite opposite qualities equally bias our minds - habits and novelty. -- Jean de la Bruyere

Who was it that said, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door"? It doesn't matter who said it, because there is abundant evidence that it is not true.

Technical innovation presumably pursues efficiency. But efficiency is only one small aspect of total cost reduction. The strength of the competition, the availability of the product, its replaceability, compatibility, and familiarity will beat out novelty, even efficiency, any day.


This is not to deny that the educational potential of much technology is substantial. But whether or not the technology gets incorporated in the curriculum depends on circumstances normally overlooked by, if not beyond reach of, most educators. It is not merely a matter of whether it enhances learning.

To examine these issues further, see Beyond the Textbook? 
Unlikely Changes in the Curriculum 


Cordially,
-- EGR

Schooling Practice: ignoring power-nurture conflicts

“Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing -- Thomas J. Peters

New teachers worry about professionalism. They worry whether their peers, their superiors and even their students and their students’ parents will take them seriously. It’s a worry about being accorded the respect they think they deserve.

Why do they worry about respect? Because it gives them the authority they need to bring their students into the paths specified by the school’s curriculum. So they bolster that authority by following and preaching policies, rules and methods. And, behold, it generally works. They are acknowledged to be “the teacher.” And the students do “school activities” as they are bidden.

But teachers face, every day, day-in-and-day out, young, needy, human beings. The teacher’s inclinations are to slip into the role of counselor, parent, older sibling, friend. But then they would have to loosen, to give up on emphasizing policies, rules and methods. This undermines their authority, little enough as they have, and distracts from the stern demands of curriculum.

There are just too many individuals in their classes. And they confront, perhaps for the first time clearly in their lives, that fact that the idea of an “average student” is less a reality than an abstraction. Abstractions don’t have needs. Real kids do. The amount of individual attention parents want for their individual children is just not a possibility given even a small group.

So, to avoid the appearance of favoritism, or neglect, teachers -- often with heavy heart -- learn to apportion their attentions among their many students, knowing that some will find the teacher’s help hardly -- if at all -- nurturing; and others, almost an imposition.

Complicating this basic tension are official importunities that professionalism requires that teachers concern themselves, simultaneously, for special needs, gender, bullying, ethnic, cultural and personal differences among students. Missing any of these issues might result, during a professional observation by administration, in a less than satisfactory evaluation.

And there is also, the inescapable, often deep, moral dilemma: How much of the individual student’s comfort, freedom and self-esteem should be sacrificed, when necessary, for the good of the group?

For references and to examine these issues further, see Power in Schooling Practice: 
The Educational Dilemmas

Cordially
--- EGR

Schooling: from the trifling to the trivial

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake. -- Janos Arany

C'mon, let's be honest. How many taxpayers really care whether no child is left behind in the quest for the intersection of east- and westbound trains? How many administrators really care what percentage of your students understand the deep significance of Brother Lawrence's character in Romeo and Juliet? How many presidential candidates really care whether the kids from the hood or the barrio or the trailer park can list the steps in meiosis?

Education, alas, is of interest only to the educated, and in Georgia, that limits our constituency (and in your state too, in case you hadn't noticed) — but everybody is interested in success, and the first step in achieving success is avoiding failure. And since NCLB, all schools are obsessed with avoiding failure.

For many years I've told my teacher education students that the primary letters in teaching are not A, B, and C, but C,Y, and A. That has never been more true. Avoiding unfavorable publicity and unpleasant litigation is the principal worry of every principal, and a smart principal will make sure you are correspondingly principled.

We all want our statistics and portfolios and accreditation reports to be flattering, or at least not shameful. That in itself is human, but nowadays, I hear about little else, and that is anything but humane.

To examine these issues further, see The Public School's Sorest Need: ToTransfigure the Trivial

-- WAC

Curriculum for the Soul

A just laicism allows religious freedom. The state does not impose religion but rather gives space to religions with a responsibility toward civil society, and therefore it allows these religions to be factors in building up society. -- Joseph Ratzinger

There are areas in which public schools cannot do well but public school teachers succeed, and dealing wisely with the soul of a child is probably one of them. Be patient here, please: I am aware of and endorse the constitutional restraints on religion in public schools. I share with my separationist friends a distrust of religious activity by the state and many doubts about government’s ability to deal adequately with issues of faith and morals.

But we should remember that not only do the courts forbid any action by government schools not prompted by a “secular primary purpose” or which would “principally and primarily” aid religion; they also forbid any that would inhibit it, and they further require that these conundrums be resolved without creating “excessive entanglement” of government and religion. Much of religious parents’ dissatisfaction with public education undoubtedly arises from concern about the possible negative impact of public schooling on their children’s faith and morals.

Teachers may want to reconsider practices that could inhibit the development of faith in their children, and consider practices of general application that would accommodate grace without overstepping the bounds of law.

To examine these issues further, see Jacob’s Children and Ours:
Richard of St. Victor’s Curriculum for the Soul


-- WAC

Tolerate Everything, Stand For Nothing: the practical limits of tolerance

In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher.-- Dalai Lama

The biggest difference that I found between the native-born and the immigrant (or refugee) children that I taught for almost twenty years was this: the native-born kids could talk up a storm about tolerance and the "right" of people to be different. The immigrant children tended not to express such views. Not that anyone practiced them with any regularity

Americans profess both to celebrate their own individual ethnicity and to tolerate others different from them at the same time. This strikes many foreigners as schizophrenic, but uniquely American. "But then," one Greek visitor remarked to me, "you are all really Americans, even if you kid yourselves that you are different." He suggested that the truest celebration of ethnic difference was to be found among the Bosnians and the Serbs, who at that time were busily trying to ethnically cleanse each other from the map.

The pursuit in our public schools of "multiculturalism" not only perplexes immigrants who have come here with the full intent of becoming "Americans", it conflicts with the traditional mission of the schools to promote a democratic society by inculcating a common political culture.

To examine these issues further, see Immigrants in the New America: 
Is it time to heat up the melting pot?

-- EGR

Does Schooling Actually Harm Students?

updated 031520

Readin' 'n' writin' 'n' 'rithmetick
Taught to the tune of a hick'ry stick
-- Cobbs & Edwards (1907)

We’ve each been told a thousand times: “School is good for you!” Everywhere and always? Have you lost your memory?

Let’s ask a more general question. What disadvantages does the student suffer, when he or she is subject to one kind of curriculum rather than another? For example, one product of emphasizing math (or pick your own most hated subject) is that a large number, if not the majority, of students leave school believing:

a. they don’t like math;
b. they can’t do math well;
c. math is incomprehensible.

This situation is not improved, contrary to current misconception, when schools are pressured with faddish “high stakes” testing.

In the best case, where all curricular "targets" have been hit, we may still wonder what the collateral damage has been. It is not uncommon for academic students to get their diplomas although they are physically feeble or obese; and, for Jocks, especially “stars,” even if they are near illiterates.

The Hippocratic Oath, (partially rendered)

“I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone”

guides, somewhat, the practice of physicians and other medical personnel. But, educators have no Hippocratic oath. In education, blessing one's efforts to change schools with the incantation, "reform," seems to ward off collateral damage. Certainly, "reform" can never hurt.

To examine this issue further, see Pursuing Educational Targets: 
What is the Collateral Damage?

Cordially,

-- EGR

Speak English or Else! Keeping the dice loaded.

edited 1/14/18

Don't know nothin’ ‘bout history.
Forget about biology!
Hardly opened up a science book.
French, I never gave a second look.

You may be a doctor with a fine degree
But If you can’t speak English
Just like me,
You’re nobody I need to see.

--- Adapted from "What a Wonderful World"
by H Alpert, L Adler, S Cooke

There is substantial reluctance, active resistance, even, to permitting any language other than English (in any of its North American variations) to be recognized as an official language of the United States of America. Why might that be?

Part of it is the persistence of generally submerged ethnic, class and cultural competition for status. But there are more substantial issues to be recognized: native speakers of an American English dialect have a huge, unearned social and business advantage over those who come to it later in life. Many do not want to give up that advantage.

You may have gone through school learning little, yet you will still have a communication skill, a tone of voice, an enunciation, merely, learned as a child, that gives you an edge in the US over the most educated person who learned English as a second language. To a similarly hap-hazardly-educated American ear, you will sound "natural." (Exceptions to this prejudice, especially on the East Coast of the US or in Hollywood, is anything that passes for "British" English.)

No wonder you shrink from recognizing another language besides American English as official: you might lose an undeserved, purely fortuitous, competitive edge in many arenas of American life.

To continue these considerations, see Cultural Domination and the Teaching of ESOL, English to Speakers of Other Languages.

Cordially,
-- EGR