pre-school paralysis

Just got around to reading The Junior Meritocracy piece in a recent NY Mag. Love what the head of The Calhoun School has to say:

I want a school full of kids who day dream. I want kids who are fun to be with. I want kids who don't want to answer the questions on those tests in the way the adult wants them to be answered, because that kid is already seeing the world differently. In fact, I want kids who are cynical enough at age 4 to know that there's really something wrong with someone asking them these theings and think, 'I'm going to screw with them in the process!'"

Aren't these many of our special education students? He also says:

You have to play with blocks. You have to make up stories. You have to muck around. Arithmetic and decoding language aren't life---they're symbolic representations of other things. And education is being diverted into focusing on these symbolic representations of the very experiences kids are being denied.

Higher Education Today

Paulo Freire says, “The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed). It can be argued that universities have largely become mechanisms that mold students to conform and adapt to the normative structures of society, rather than question the status quo. How often do we see a "problem-posing" environment in the higher education lecture-based or even seminar classroom?

Here's an interesting video created by students at Kansas State University: "A Vision of Students Today." You can find more information on the ethnographic project here.



One student in the video says her bubble tests won't help her deal with or prepare her the problems of the world--war, ethinic conflict, hunger....

Another student says, "I did not create the problems. But they are my problems." Higher education should promote pedagogies that encourage real dialogue in which students explore and understand their place in the world as both oppressors and oppressed, along with their potential to create and re-create new realities. Freire calls this "Conscientizacao," threatening the place of the status quo and questioning the prevailing picture. Going beyond the statement, “This is how life is,” and understanding one’s place within social mechanisms. Individuals and groups have the power to change the narratives of reality.

The college classroom has the potentional to be what Freire terms "co-intentional," but often isn't.

Teachers and students (leadership and people), content on reality, are both Subject, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators. (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 2007)

Another of my favorite essays that's only somewhat related: William Deresiewicz's The Disadvantages of an Elite Education."

Beyond Gap-Closing: Some Thoughts

Does the overwhelming focus on closing the "achievement gap" channel our energy in the wrong places?

Say we are able to eventually "close" the gap, eliminate it. What would the purpose of education be then? How would our schools, testing, and/or curricula change? Would education look or feel different?

When we focus on "gap-zapping," as EdTrust refers to it, do we change the way in which we practice education? Should we seek to close the test-score gap at all costs? Does the end justify the means? 

Are we short-changing our students?

Elite Colleges: Making Minds or Careers?

What are the disadvantages of an elite, top-notch, Ivy university? William Deresiewicz frames them pretty darn well in "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" from the current issue of The American Scholar.

Read the whole piece. Here are several tidbits that Dresiewicz pinpoints as serious disadvantages of the so-called "elite" educational institutions:

The first disadvantage of an elite education... is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.

Elite colleges and universities pride themselves in opening up doors to their students. But what doors are they closing?

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

I realize that I am just about to quote the whole article, so read it for yourself.

The bottom line?

The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.

Raising the "Achievement Gap:" In Perspective

Real World Educators for Active Learning has an important post about what it means to really improve public education: "Dialogues for the Rich (& Poor). In the quest to close the achievement gap, it's important to take a step back and look at what we've defined "achievement" as. What are students learning? What are we really aiming for when we seek to close the gap in test scores? Will education really be "equal" then?

Dr. Rios says:

Are people really concerned with fixing the public system? Who does this system currently serve? And finally, if historically the only consistent determining variable for student outcomes has been socio-economic status of the child – then we need to ask: How are wealthy kids being educated in this country and in whose best interest? Perhaps the problem is not about how much different students are learning and that Black students are learning less than White students; the problem is possibly what all students are learning and that all students are learning in ways that perpetuate oppressive ideologies (Kumashiro, 2008). Raising the “achievement gap” in the current education system is counterproductive if what is being taught is biased to begin with and the current system does not invite us to investigate into the nature of ideologies being taught to students who are considered “successful.”

She continues:

What are we teaching about life, sustainability and living together? What are our priorities and what do we value as a society? Can you promise our youth that if they “do all the right things” that they will be guaranteed a piece of the pie? Does working harder and for more hours increase your wage? Does your salary equate intelligence or your position in a company? Who is calling the shots in this country and what did they score on their SAT’s? When will the poor be able to stop dancing for money and when will the rich open their door – not for charity, but for humanity?

Being Cool In the Cafeteria

Some students in San Francisco schools choose not to take advantage of their subsidized lunches. Why? The stigma that is attached with it. "Only 37 percent of eligible high school students citywide take advantage of the subsidized meal program." See more here.