Where's the Power in Arts and Education?

Barry's Arts Blog posts a list of the most influential people in the non-profits arts field. You can check his blog as to why they are influential, but here are the top 10 (he lists 25).

1. BOB LYNCH - PRESIDENT & CEO OF AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS
Consensus number one on majority of responses. Flush with cash from the Ruth Lily gifts, Bob has guided expansion of Americans for the Arts initiatives into advocacy, business, research, alliances, arts education, marketing and emerging leadership – building the nation’s largest and strongest arts service provider organization. Clearly the premier spokesperson for the arts sector in America. His seemingly laid- back, diplomatic style belies real ambition for the organization. A true political player – smart, savvy, and boundless enthusiasm.

2. MARION GODFREY – PEW FOUNDATION
Highly respected senior foundation leader much in demand for her thinking acumen and big picture analytical skills. Depth of experience adds to her bona fide creds. She is a voice of authority.

3. BEN CAMERON - DORIS DUKE FOUNDATION
Former TCG head now at Doris Duke Foundation. Power and influence come from oratory skills and keen analytical insights. Much in demand speaker. Huge network of fans. When he speaks, people listen.

4. DICK DEASEY – EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR ARTS EDUCATION PARTNERSHIP
Long standing arts education leader. Knows the arena as well or better than anyone. Gets out into the field rather than staying office bound. If arts education is, in reality, a separate and distinct sector, he is the head man.

5. ALAN BROWN – PRINCIPAL WOLF BROWN CONSULTING
Likely the most respected independent consultant in the whole arts & culture field. Hugely influential. Respected by arts organizations, funders, artists and other consultants. Current guru of audience development theories.

6. SAM MILLER – EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR LINC (LEVERAGING INVESTMENT IN CREATIVITY)
Pioneer in the burgeoning area of direct artist services. Persuasive case maker, detailed thinker. Very focused. Global traveler and large network of contacts. . Both smart and realistic. Bringing the artist to the decision making table.

7. CLAIRE PEEPS – DURFEE FOUNDATION
Though the Durfee Foundation based in Los Angeles is relatively small, her position as Chair of the Board of Grantmakers in the Arts has given her a large platform and influential voice in helping to shape Foundation agendas. Well liked. Term over soon.

8. DANIEL WINDHAM - WALLACE FOUNDATION
MOY ENG - HEWLETT FOUNDATION
TIM MCCLIMMON – AMERICAN EXPRESS FOUNDATION
SUE COLITON – PAUL ALLEN FOUNDATION
Four prominent leaders of Foundations with arts programs, each with large agenda, huge budget and lengthy experience in the field. Strategic thinkers. Closely watched by other foundation leaders.

9. DANA GIOIA – CHAIR NEA
Chair of NEA always in the Top Ten due to huge impact of funding in rural states and broad grants budget. Bully pulpit used well. Was effective in increasing NEA budget via working well with Congress. As his term is nearly over, his stock is now fading. Lame duck status.

10. JONATHAN KATZ EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR NASAA
Long time leader and voice of state arts agencies. Wide network and deep experience. Understands the issues in depth; helps set agendas and priorities. Affable personality makes him accessible and well thought of.

Richard Kessler at Dewey21C has posted a list in response: The 10 Most Powerful People in Arts Education.  (It's not a very creative list - but perhaps it might be true.) Here it is:

1. Joel Klein, Chancellor, New York City Department of Education
2. Ramon Cortines, Senior Deputy Superintendent, Los Angeles Unified School District
3. Arne Duncan, CEO, Chicago Public Schools
4. Rudy Crew, Superintendent, Miami Dade County Public Schools
5. Carol R. Johnson, Superintendent, Boston Public Schools
6. Arlene Ackerman, The School District of Philadelphia
7. Michelle Rhee, Chancellor, District of Columbia Public Schools
8. Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers
9. Reg Weaver, President, National Education Association
10. Checker Finn, President, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation

Okay, here's five more, that cross the threshold from power to influence:

11. Cyrus Driver, Deputy Director, Education and Scholarship, The Ford Foundation
12. Sarah Cunningham, National Endowment for the Arts
13. David Shookhoff, Manhattan Theater Club/New York City Arts Education Roundtable
14. Gigi Antoni, Big Thought of Dallas
15. Eric Booth, Consultant

What about childhood?

I have been perusing through Emile: Or on Education (1762) by Jean Jacques Rousseau, believed to be one of the first books to outline child-centered educations. He says:

We know nothing of childhood; and with our mistaken notions the further we advance the further we go astray. The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man.

When we define education with a focus on outcomes, industry, and workforce, we forget about educating the whole child and rather than attempting to make children adults. What about entering into their world and learning with them?

I recently watched Autism: The Musical. Tricia Regan, founder of The Miracle Project, talked about the trouble she had "controlling" her (mostly non-verbal) son's behavior. She, with the influence of other artists, realized the power in trying to enter his world, rather than drawing him out of it. If he was jumping and screaming, why not do that with him? If he was running around the room, why not do that too?

I was also reminded of the power of the figurative voice. Tricia's son was non-verbal, often having outbursts of uncontrollable behavior. It was amazing to see when he was finally put in front of a speech machine and said something to the effect of: "Mom, I want to put you on the spot. I wish you would listen more."

It reminded me of this previous post on critical pedagogy and special needs populations. The "voice" is so important, but also must be broadly defined and cannot be limited by the ability to talk or write.

The Storytelling Project's Antiracism Curriculum

Discuss race and racism with your high school students through the arts with The Storytelling Project Curriculum. (It's free.) The Storytelling Project was developed at Barnard and in NYC schools and includes over 30 lessons appropriate for high school students that include arts-based storytelling activities to discuss racism. Students study various stories of racism from dominant ones to concealed ones to their own. 

NYC Opportunity: Support Queer Students

Free! Here's the info:

Beyond Tolerance 2.0

"Building Alliances with Community Organizations to Support Queer Students and Teachers"

Saturday, September 20, 2008
12:00 PM to 3:30 PM
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender
Community Center
208 W. 13th Street
New York, NY 10011

NYQueer is a working group of the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) focused on gender and sexuality as they relate to school communities. The daily pressures of teaching students at any level (K-12) are such that teachers often feel as if they do not have the time, the support, or access to the resources they need for addressing gender and sexuality in the classroom. More specifically, they are unsure how to challenge heteronormative assumptions and combat homophobia and transphobia.

Recognizing the wealth of resources that both individuals and organizations in NYC have to offer in this area, NYQueer has teamed up with The Ali Forney Center, GLSEN, LIVE OUT LOUD, Hetrick Martin Institute, Connect 2 Protect, Bronx Community Pride Center, and the YES Program to create a workshop that brings together teachers and community based organizations working to support Queer youth.

This event will give teachers an amazing opportunity to learn about the many resources and services NYC community organizations have to offer our youth. Come learn how to better support our queer youth and create safer schools for queer students and teachers.

*This is a free event. Please RSVP.*

For more information or to RSVP write to: nyqueer@nycore.org or visit www.nycore.org.

Some Questions on Education, Business, and Power

I don't think anybody anywhere can talk about the future of their people or of an organization without talking about education. Whoever controls the education of our children controls our future. --Wilma Mankiller, first woman elected Chief of the Cherokee Nation

(Thanks, Education for Liberation and NYCore for including this quote in your Plan Book.)

A book to add to your list- The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can't Be Businesses by Larry Cuban.

"Ford Motor Company would not have survived the competition had it not been for an emphasis on results. We must view education the same way," the U.S. Secretary of Education declared in 2003.

That's a pretty scary statement.

Who runs our schools? The biggest names:

• Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Education: never a teacher.
  
• Rod Paige, Former Secretary of Education: never a teacher (As far as I can tell. Anyone know for sure?) Majored in Phys. Ed and went straight to college sports coaching. Involved in that famous Texas Miracle, err...Myth...
  
• Joel Klein, Chancellor, NYC Department of Education: never a teacher.

Is a business mentality the solution to our troubled education system? Should hedge fund managers be running charter schools? What happens when we place test results as the bottom line? 

Should private schools be for-profit?

Little Emperors: Chinese Culture and Education

Psychology Today's piece, Plight of the Little Emperors, focuses on the pressure that students in China are facing today.

The situation for urban young people in today's China, from preschoolers on up, is this: Your entire future hinges on one test, the national college entrance exam—China's magnified version of the SAT. The Chinese call it gao kao, or "tall test," because it looms so large. If students do well, they win spots at China's top universities and an easy route to a middle-class lifestyle. If not, they must confront the kind of tough, blue-collar lives their parents faced. With such high stakes, families dedicate themselves to their child's test prep virtually from infancy. "Many people come home to have dinner and then study until bed," says Liu. "You have to do it to go to the best university and get a good job. You must do this to live."

I haven't been posting lately, mostly because I've been busy teaching at a Chinese summer enrichment program in Brooklyn. It's been an interesting experience. The kids are great. But the program has allowed me to understand a little bit more about Chinese culture--particularly some Chinese notions of education. I marvel at the respect and dedication that the students and families place on education. 

Learning from my students about their culture and journeying with them in my drama class has been a positive experience. But the administration's views of education have been troubling to me. My drama class of 5th and 6th grade boys devised a theatrical piece about a ten-year old immigrant boy, titled Lee's Adventure: China to America. We worked hard with the goal of eventually performing it for students and families on the last day. In the end, it was cut from the final "awards ceremony" because it wasn't viewed as projecting a "quality" or "professional" image--even though the administrator had never stepped into our classroom to view it. Not even once.

So, it didn't surprise as much me when I read this piece on the little girl cut from singing the Chinese national anthem at the Olympics. She had the perfect voice--but didn't portray the right "image." 

In the end, we didn't get to perform Lee's Adventure or even videotape it as we'd hoped. When I sat down with the boys to reflect on our drama class experience, I was surprised. I wanted to give them a chance to be angry at me or at the school. While they were disappointed not to perform, one student said, "You know, it doesn't really matter if we have people watching our play. We know we did a great job for ourselves. I kinda think that's what's important." The other students agreed. That made it worth it.

Planning to Change the World - One Day at a Time

Education for Liberation Network and The New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCore) have published Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Educators. The 2008-2009 Plan Book aims to help teachers incorporate social justice into classroom activities. (And is useful for those of us who use paper, rather than blackberries to keep track of our schedules! Of course, I don't know any teachers who have blackberries...)

What's useful:

The book offers a number of quotes related to social change & education. A couple of my favorites (although they are all inspiring):

• Prejudice is like a hair across your cheek. You can't see it, you can't find it with your fingers, but you keep brushing at it because the feeling of it is irritating. --Marian Anderson, opera singer
  
• No government has the right to tell its citizens whom to love. The only queer people are ones that don't love anybody. --Rita Mae Brown, author and activist for gay rights
  
• I don't think anybody anywhere can talk about the future of their people or of an organization without talking about education. Whoever controls the education of our children controls our future. --Wilma Mankiller, first woman elected Chief of the Cherokee Nation.
  

There are conversation/journal questions throughout, to be used to spark discussion with students. For example, "Would you stand up for someone else's rights? Have you ever witnessed someone else's rights being violated? What did you do or what might you do next time?" They aren't daily or even weekly, so I wish there were more. 

I also like the ideas and titles for social justice recognitions to give to students. (I won't give them away here though...)

The calendar includes a number of significant dates--the best part is that these dates are paired with teaching resources in the back of the book. For example, March 9, 2009 will be the 50th anniversary of A Raisin in the Sun's Broadway debut--the first Broadway play written by a black woman. The book includes a link to a unit plan on the play that includes 18 lessons and resources materials. These dates and lesson plans/resources are an exciting part of the book.

A few pages of the book outline the work and successes of teachers for social justice. Also useful, but I'd like to see more.

Things that would make great additions to this book:

• Elementary/Secondary Editions (differentiated)
  
• More questions for conversations (daily or weekly)
  
• Additional examples of the work of educators
  
• An online version of the calendar
  
• A website to track user's success or implementation of discussions or lesson plans

The bottom line:

A useful buy. The lesson plans, dates, quotes, and discussion questions are excellent resources to add to a social justice educator's toolkit. Why buy a planner at Office Max or Target when you can get Planning to Change the World for the same price?

"Half a Chance" - Black Males and Public Education

Check out Given Half A Chance: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males. Here's an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

The 2008 edition, Given Half a Chance: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males, details the drastic range of outcomes for Black males, especially the tragic results in many of the nation’s biggest cities. Given Half a Chance also deliberately highlights the resource disparities that exist in schools attended by Black males and their White, non-Hispanic counterparts. The 2008 Schott report documents that states and most districts with large Black enrollments educate their White, non-Hispanic children, but do not similarly educate the majority of their Black male students. Key examples:

• More than half of Black males did not receive diplomas with their cohort in 2005/2006.
  
• The state of New York has 3 of the 10 districts with the lowest graduation rates for Black males.
  
• The one million Black male students enrolled in the New York, Florida, and Georgia public schools are twice as likely not to graduate with their class as to do so.
  
• Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, South Carolina, and Wisconsin graduated fewer Black males with their peer group than the national average.
  
• Illinois and Wisconsin have nearly 40-point gaps between how effectively they educate their Black and White non-Hispanic male students.
  

These trends, and others cited in Given Half a Chance, are evidence of a school-age population that is substantively denied an opportunity to learn, and of a nation at risk.

Rethinking Dialogue: Critical Pedagogy and Special Needs Populations

I was perusing through the blogs and forums on The Paulo and Nita Freire Project and came across an interesting discussion forum: Critical Pedagogy and Special Needs Students:

I have been thinking about Critical Pedagogy in relation to various oppressed groups. If Critical Pedagogy advocates dialogue in its practice, how can we apply critical pedagogy with students with special needs?

Vanessa Paradis offers this response:

What is dialogue? Is it limited to words that we speak or write down on paper? Dialogue can occur in many formats (art, movement, touch, music, presence, assistive technology, etc..) as can be noted from all of the different blogs on the site. What all dialogue must have in common is love (Freire's radical love) compassion, and humility with an overriding motivation for social justice. McLaren and Jaramillo (2007) state, "The longing for dignity and justice for others, as well as for ourselves, has been a primary motivation for critical educators worldwide to engage in the politics and practice of critical pedagogy" (p. 196).

Our concept of dialogue expands with critical pedagogy. What are all of the ways we might engage in dialogue with people? I ask this because I do not have the answers myself and it is an issue that I seek more knowledge for, especially given that I have a daughter with autism and I have seen her struggle with trying to communicate something she so desperately wants to say, but it stays locked up in her brain anyway, until she cries out in frustration.

We also need to expand how labels and diagnostics define people's capabilities; the ideal would be no labels at all. Setting limits based on a Cartiesian ontology is a tragic error and serves to keep people locked into confined spaces from which they might otherwise escape (Kincheloe, 2006). A perfect example is the IQ test and allowing it to tell us what a person cannot do. Kincheloe (2006) states, "Since the self is always in context and in process, no final delineation of a notion such as ability can be determined. Thus, we are released from the rugged cross of I.Q. and such hurtful and primitive colonial conceptions of 'intelligence'" (Contructing a Critical Ontology, para. 2). This requires us to step outside the boxes we have constructed and to look through different frameworks or lenses.

When we define the prerequisites for dialogue as the ability to speak and write in the ways of the dominant culture, who are we seeking to shut out from dialogue? Who is afraid to enter the dialogue? 

Another pitfall occurs when we make assumptions that certain populations are "unfit" for particular dialogues. In his Introduction to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Donald Macedo writes about an occasion when he and Henry Giroux were asked to speak at Massasoit Community College (MA) to a group of unwed mothers in a GED program. The program mentioned that many of the women were considered "functionally illiterate." Macedo mentions one woman's response after the speech:

Professor Giroux, all my life I felt the things you talked about. I just didn't have a language to express what I have felt. Today, I have come to realize that I do have a language. Thank you.

The particular language in which dialogue takes place is not necessarily what is important. What is fundamental is that individuals, in relationship to others, find languages in which to communicate, dialogue, and create and recreate the world. The dialogue that, as Freire would say, "unveils reality," is a relationship. Must we limit this "unveiling of reality" to certain vocabularies, languages, degree-holding groups, or those deemed to have higher abilities or higher IQ's? Those that are experts? 

Who do we limit with our constructions of dialogue? How do we limit the power of art, music, drama, dance, laughter as languages and dialogue?

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.

schoolracetalk.org

Mica Pollock, author of Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in Public Schools, Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools, and Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School, has launched schoolracetalk.org.

The blog will carry on conversation about issues of race in school. 

Brooklyn Students Say They Aren't Interested in Fighting Other People's Battles

Brooklyn high school students say they aren't interested in joining the military, despite recruitment efforts.

"In the military, I would fight for someone else's perception of what is right and wrong, and I don't want that," said Jarel March, of East New York, a student at Williamsburg Preparatory High School.

Book to Read: Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters by Stanley Aronowitz

"In Against Schooling, Stanley Aronowitz passionately raises an alarm about the current state of education in our country. Discipline and control over students, Aronowitz argues, are now the primary criteria of success, and genuine learning is sacrificed to a new educational militarism. In an age where school districts have imposed testing, teachers must teach to test, and both teacher and student are robbed of their autonomy and creativity. The crisis extends to higher education, where all but a few elite institutions are becoming increasingly narrowly focused and vocational in their teaching. With education lacking opportunity for self-reflection on broad social and historical dynamics, Against Schooling asks “How will society be able to solve its most pressing problems?” Aronowitz proposes innovative approaches to get schools back on track."

The book is expensive, but here's a link to an Aronowitz article: "Against Schooling: Education and Social Class."

SAT Spin

A recent study shows that the revamped SAT isn't any better at predicting college success than the old test was. The College Board began to revise the test in 2002, adding a writing section and taking away the analogies portion, when the University of California recommended that the school use a more curriculum- based approach to testing, saying that the SAT favored students from middle to high income families. (Think of the money lost if students applying to University of California schools weren't required to take the SAT!) The new test format was released three years ago. 

“The changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how predictive the test is of first-year college performance,” the studies said.

College Board officials presented their findings as “important and positive” confirmation of the test’s success.

Huh? Sounds similar to Bush's spin on the Reading First results.

“The new SAT was supposed to be significantly better and fairer than the old one, but it is neither,” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director at FairTest, a group that is critical of much standardized testing. “It underpredicts college success for females and those whose best language is not English, and over all, it does not predict college success as well as high school grades, so why do we need the SAT, old or new?”

“Given the data released today, what was the point of all the hoopla about the SAT’s revisions beyond preserving their California market?” Mr. Schaeffer said. “This is all spin. It’s been a marketing operation from the get-go.”

Why do we need the SAT???

Book to Read: Eugenics and Education in America by Ann Winfeild

Bill Ayers has an interesting post about Ann Winfeild's Eugenics and Education in America: Institutionalized Racism and the Implications of History, Ideology, and Memory (Complicated Conversation: a Book Series of Curriculum Studies).

 

Ayers' review:

Written out of the official story as quackery and the handiwork of a few nut-cases, Winfield demonstrates beyond doubt that eugenics was not only respectable, mainstream science but also that its major tenets were well-springs in the formation of American public schools with echoes in the every day practices of today. Formed in the crucible of white supremacy and rigid hierarchies of human value, American schools have never adequately faced that living heritage.

We no longer talk of “miscegenation” or “imbeciles,” of course, and we are likely to look upon forced sterilization and race-based marriage laws as archaic. But Winfield undermines any sense of smug superiority we might grant ourselves by drawing a direct line from those repulsive labels and practices to our own obsessions with “standards” and “accountability,” test scores and grades. White supremacy surely changes its spots but it remains durable and dominant.

I Love Bridging Differences

A great blog to read: Bridging Differences. It's a conversation between Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier both at NYU's Steinhardt School of Education who have "found themselves at odds on policy over the years."

Deborah comments on "Blaming Teachers" and Bloomberg's recent speeches on NYC's test score "victory:"

Bloomberg is one of many that view anything that isn't built around a harsh competitive spirit, with easy to count winners and losers, and money at stake can't work. Maybe even shouldn't work. Further, if you believe that nothing worthwhile happened prior to the arrival of one's own new bold plans little attention need be paid to those "on the ground." Crisis thinking has that inevitable downside—one has no for serious thought, for persuading or being persuaded by the reluctant in face of imminent danger. * All independent power blocs that stand in the way (like parents and teachers) must be immobilized so that swift and inflexible action can be taken from the top. (Bloomberg should reread War and Peace.) For noble ends, short cuts in truth-telling are allowed. We remember (and disremember) best what proves our point. (Mea culpa too.)

Artsbridge: The Art of Imagination, Dialogue and Conflict Resolution for Israeli and Palestinian Youth

Boston Globe article features Artsbridge camp founder Debbie Nathan. Artsbridge provides dialogue training and art therapy to students caught up in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. You can view a video about the program at its website.

Students in the Artsbridge program will collaborate on sculptural artwork. 

Each student will be given the opportunity to place his or her contribution into a circle. If they want to touch another participant's work, they must ask permission. Where the kids choose to place their objects, say the organizers of Artsbridge, will reveal a lot about their perceived relationship to the group and their expectations for the program.

Art can be a powerful tool for dialogue and imagining new possibities. Maxine Greene says, "For me, the child is a veritable image of becoming, of possibility, poised to reach towards what is not yet, towards a growing that cannot be predetermined or prescribed. I see her and I fill the space with others like her, risking, straining, wanting to find out, to ask their own questions, to experience a world that is shared." Community created art work mimics this becoming and possibility, and opens up a shared space for questions, risks, and possibilities.

Though Nathan lived in Israel from 1976 to 1979, on a recent trip to interview candidates for the program she was struck by the depth of despair on both sides of the conflict.

"If you woke up tomorrow and the world was perfect," she asked every youth who applied for the program, "what would it look like?"

None of the children could begin to answer, she said this month at a daylong retreat for the Artsbridge board members at Nathan's house in Swampscott. She is haunted by the shocked looks that came over the students' faces when she asked whether they could imagine peace in their lifetime.

"They hadn't even thought about it," she said.

When she asked the prospective campers what they would ask for if they were granted three wishes, she recalled, almost all of them wished for health for their families and peace for their communities. She couldn't help but wonder how American students would respond.

"These kids' stories are so powerful to me," she said.

Coalition Advocates on Capitol Hill for Culturally Based Teaching

From Diverse Issues in Higher Education:

Teachers must be sensitive and inclusive to all students’ cultural backgrounds, educators and advocacy organizations said during a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

The briefing, “Culturally Based Teaching: A Model for Student Success, ” provided educators and student advocates with the opportunity to share their views and provide federal policymakers with first-hand accounts on how using a culturally based education model will empower students and help close the achievement gap.

Dr. Willard Sakiestewa Gilbert, president of the National Indian Education Association (NIEA), comments:

“These approaches include recognizing and utilizing native languages as a first or second language that can incorporate traditional cultural characteristics and involve teaching strategies that are harmonious with the native culture knowledge and contemporary ways of knowing and learning.”

(This comes at a time when Oregon's Secretary of State Office has released that an initiative limiting non-English language teaching in schools will appear on the ballot in November.)

The Coalition also suggests preparing more culturally teachers and recruiting and hiring more minority teachers that come from students' own communities.

Bottom line:

Dr. Luis A. Vázquez, associate graduate school dean at New Mexico State University, said that students will be more likely to excel academically if they can relate to what is being taught.

Vázquez used his parents as an example. One only made it to the fourth grade and the other to the seventh grade. He added that the lack of cultural identity in his family members’ school curriculum was generational.

“Nothing in the textbooks looked like them, nothing related to them,” Vázquez said, adding that students today do not need to feel like “they are guests in somebody else’s house” while in school.

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?

Mississippi High School Holds a New Kind of Prom

Charleston High School held its first interracial prom in April. Previously, the school's proms were privately and separately organized for blacks and whites. One black student was even kicked out after trying to attend the white prom.

The event was filmed for an upcoming documentary called Prom Night in Mississippi. A photographer commented:

She [the photographer] describes one encounter in an African-American beauty parlor, in which an elderly woman who'd been part of the civil rights movement stopped in to see what the hubbub was about. The woman ended up giving an impromptu testimony about the history these young people were about to make. "It was almost like it didn't occur to a lot of the kids, until the day of the prom, how important what was going on really was," Farquharson reports.

Says one student:

"It was just magnificent," Buckley says. "That night, when we stepped in that door, everybody just had a good time. We proved ourselves wrong. We proved the community wrong, because they didn't think that it was going to happen."

NPR on Teacher Peer Review Systems

NPR reports on Toledo's peer review system for teachers. It's spread to 70 school districts in Ohio, Connecticut, and California.

Every year for the past 27 years, a panel of Toledo administrators and teachers has met behind closed doors to discuss teachers who've been deemed "incompetent."

Under peer review, a team of master teachers called "consultants" meticulously monitors and evaluates teachers in several areas: how they prepare, plan and present lessons, how well they know the material they teach, how they engage and discipline students — even a teacher's punctuality and dress are scrutinized.

Support Culturally Empowered Education

Updates on Karen Salazar, the LA Teacher fired for her Afro-Centric Teaching.

What We Can't Measure With Tests

Diane Ravitch at Bridging Differences has a meaningful post about humane education:

The clock will not be turned back. No matter how frequently or how beautifully you describe the joys of childhood, those who are making education policy will not be deterred or persuaded. Their agenda is competitiveness. They are in the throes of data-driven decision-making, which has become a sort of mantra that takes the place of actual thinking. How can you measure the joys of childhood? How can you measure wonder and awe? Go where the numbers tell you to go, they say; but what if the numbers are measuring trivial things? Do what the numbers tell you to do, they say; but people—not numbers—devise policy alternatives.

What I am suggesting is that your longing for a more humane approach to educating children has a huge constituency among teachers, but none among policymakers. What I am suggesting is that we should talk not about a past that has been lost, perhaps irretrievably, but how to change and mitigate the policies that are now destroying joy, wonder, and any hope of a better education.

Bush's DOE: A Pressure Cooker

Former Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, Susan Neuman, describes Bush's DOE as a "pressure cooker" in this NYT article.

Susan Neuman, a professor of education at the University Michigan who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush's first term, was and still is a fervent believer in the goals of NCLB. And she says the President and then Secretary of Education Rod Paige were too. But there were others in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and "blow it up a bit," she says. "There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization."

J.K. Rowling's Commencement Speech on the Power of the Imagination

Why it's so important to open up the imagination in schools, discuss, learn, and understand other cultures, eloquently put forth in J.K. Rowling's commencement speech at Harvard. You can view the full video at the site.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

When we fire teachers for being too Afro-centric in their teaching, when we attempt to pass laws that limit or ban multiculturalism in schools, when we attack schools like the Khalil Gibran International Academy, when we are scared to confront world realities in our classroom, we are choosing to live in these narrow spaces. 

But when we value the varied experiences of our students, when we study the horrors that can happen in our world, when we go beyond tolerance to challenge our heteronormative assumptions within our schools and classrooms, we choose to engage in the challenging, scary, risky, and wonderful spaces that fully employ our imaginative capabilities, ask us to change our assumptions, and push educators and students to grow together.

Book To Check Out: Slavery by Another Name

Matthew Yglesias at The Atlantic recommends Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon. At the book's website you can find more information about Blackmon, an exerpt from the book, and an interactive map and media.

...what's really striking about the subject is that despite how central the story of racial conflict is to the story of America, and despite how well-known certain key episodes in that history are, the shocking story that Blackmon has to tell here is virtually unknown.

I assume that this kind of thing forms part of the basis of black-white gaps in perception in the United States. The white version of American history certainly admits to the existence of racial oppression, but it's a very optimistic "up from slavery" story where the key figures are the heroes and the key episodes are the ones in which the good guys lost. But for fifty-five or sixty years following the collapse of the Confederacy, the cause of racial equality suffered nothing but setbacks. African-Americans are no doubt largely ignorant of these obscure episodes in a formal sense, but since it's literally part of their family background the history of backsliding and abandonment is going to color the black community's perception of progress made thus far.

It's one thing to recognize that America once tolerated great injustices and then put a stop to them. It's another thing entirely to recognize that the injustices came back and the whole period in which they did so has been expurgated from our official narrative.

The history that we don't seem to teach about in schools. From Slaverybyanothername.com:

In 2000, the National Association of Black Journalists recognized Blackmon’s stories revealing the secret role of J.P. Morgan & Co. during the 1960s in funneling funds between a wealthy northern white supremacist and segregationists fighting the Civil Rights Movement in the South. A year later, he revealed in the Journal how U.S. Steel Corp. relied on forced black laborers in Alabama coal mines in the early 20th century, an article which led to his first book, Slavery By Another Name, which broadly examines how a form of neoslavery thrived in the U.S. long after legal abolition.

Saying No To Deficit Theory, Culture of Poverty

Paul Gorsky, founder of EdChange, is highlighted in the Parsons Sun. 

"The achievement gap is not as much an achievement gap as an opportunity gap. ... By calling it an achievement gap it puts full responsibility on our most disenfranchised, and I think that is problematic."

Culture of poverty, first coined by Oscar Lewis and based on ethnographic studies of a few small Mexican communities, is the idea that poor people share all the same beliefs, values and behaviors -- such as frequent violence. He extrapolated his findings to suggest a universal culture of poverty.

While his theory was popular, his work inspired a massive amount of research, all of which came to one predominant conclusion -- there is no culture of poverty.
Within that concept, Gorski said educators approach students based on their deficits rather than their strengths.

The deficit theory argues that poor people are poor because of deficiencies based on stereotypes.

"There are two aspects to this I see playing out in education in implicit ways: It draws on stereotypes that are false ... and it ignores system conditions that give some people access and opportunities that others are denied."

To believe the poor are poor because of their own shortcomings ignores the impact of rising costs of health care, gasoline, housing, utilities and food.

"These costs affect everyone, but they most greatly affect the poor," Gorski said. "You have to ignore all the structural conditions and pretend they don't exist and you must ignore every influence that might be contributing to keeping the cycle of poverty in place."

The message:

To change, Gorski said teachers must understand how race, gender, disabilities and other factors interrelate and accept there is inequity and oppression and understand them as systemic and not individual acts.

More on Gorski:

• Interview on classism and poverty with National Journal of Education Reform Faculty
  
• White Paper - Good Intentions Are Not Enough: A Decolonizing Multicultural Education
  
• What We're Teaching Teachers: An Analysis of Multicultural Teacher Education Courses
  

LA Teacher's Teaching Was "Too Afro-Centric"

LA Public School teacher Karen Salazar's contract was not renewed because her teaching was too Afro-centric:

As a second year teacher, Ms. Karen Salazar has had a dynamic impact on the Jordan High School campus by connecting readings to the real lives and struggles that students go through. Her English Class has become a favorite among students on campus, where they regularly read and analyzed books and selected readings from people of color to whom the students can relate. Students, who typically skip some of their classes, show up religiously in Salazar’s English class.

...an administrator criticized her for having students read The Autobiography of Malcolm X : As Told to Alex Haley, a Los Angeles Unified School District-approved text. When she objected to this criticism, she was told that her teachings where too “Afro-centric.” She was then told that the school would not renew her teaching contract for the upcoming school year.

A student says:

“The school knows that Ms. Salazar is a very passionate and good teacher, and yet they want to fire her. It is not fair because there are many other teachers who don’t teach anything, and they never get fired.”

Another says, "she teaches us how to be strong and how to not let nobody oppress us." Youth from the school have planned to protest. Here's a video of their meeting:

Are we afraid that students will actually learn to think critically?

Funny that we don't see too many teachers being fired because their teaching is to "white-centric." 

Thoughts?

.....................................................................................

Update:

A press conference was held at Jordan High on June 11. Some highlights:

LA Times: School rallies around dismissed Watts teacher deemed too 'Afro-centric.'

About 60 students rallied Wednesday at the Watts campus, while a colleague of the fired teacher said he and 15 other instructors planned to resign or transfer to other schools to protest the dismissal of Karen Salazar, a second-year English teacher.
"You embody what it means to be a warrior-scholar, a freedom-fighting intellectual," she told students through a bullhorn in one video. "You are part of the long legacy, the strong history, of fighting back."

In another instance, Salazar rips the Los Angeles Unified School District, saying, "This school system for too long has been not only denying them human rights, basic human rights, but doing it on purpose in order to keep them subservient, to subjugate them in society."

Association of Raza Educators video and call for community support:

89.3 KPCC Radio Coverage

What you can do:

Send a letter or make a phone call in support of Salazar and her teaching.

"Ray" Cortines, Senior Deputy Superintendent (213) 241-0800
Richard Vladovic, Dist. 7 Board Rep. (213) 241-6385

Stephen Strachan , Principal (MAIN OFFICE) (323) 568-4100

NY Times Says Goodbye to Its Education Column

Sam Freedman's final article.

The greatest gifts this assignment gave me were a passport to watch the magic of the classroom and the opportunity to join in a public discussion. Again and again, I saw how a school can contain the whole world.

Steady Resegregation of Seattle Schools

The Seattle Times reports that Seattle's schools, like those of other cities, have slowly and steadily resegregated over the past 20 years. And now, given last year's U.S. Supreme Court ruling limiting the use of race to assign students to school districts, the board is even more limited on what they can do to solve the problem.

Leschi Elementary, about evenly divided between white and minority students in 1980, has a nearly all-minority population once again. The same is true for Brighton Elementary, Dunlap Elementary, Van Asselt Elementary — and all but two of the 26 schools that, the year before busing started, were considered racially imbalanced. Today, a total of 30 schools — close to a third of the district's buildings — have nonwhite populations that far exceed the district's average of 58 percent. In 20 of them, nonwhite enrollment is 90 percent or more.

"We like to think of ourselves as these enlightened, liberal folks," says School Board member Harium Martin-Morris. "But the fact is our schools aren't the way that people really think they are."

Student Loan Discrimination

While banks continue to offer loans to students at "top" colleges and universities, some, like Citibank, have shut out students at community colleges and less competitive higher education institutions. Read the full NY Times piece.

Citibank has been among the most aggressive in paring the list of colleges it serves. JPMorgan Chase, PNC and SunTrust say they have not dropped whole categories, but are cutting colleges as well. Some less-selective four-year colleges, like Eastern Oregon University and William Jessup University in Rocklin, Calif., say they have been summarily dropped by some lenders.

The practice suggests that if the credit crisis and the ensuing turmoil in the student loanbusiness persist, some of the nation’s neediest students will be hurt the most. The difficulty borrowing may deter them from attending school or prompt them to take a semester off. When they get student loans, they will wind up with less attractive terms and may run a greater risk of default if they have to switch lenders in the middle of their college years.

Tuition and loan amounts can be quite small at community colleges. But these institutions, which are a stepping stone to other educational programs or to better jobs, often draw students from the lower rungs of the economic ladder. More than 6.2 million of the nation’s 14.8 million undergraduates — over 40 percent — attend community colleges. According to the most recent data from the College Board, about a third of their graduates took out loans, a majority of them federally guaranteed.

“If we put too many hurdles in their way to get a loan, they’ll take a third job or use a credit card,” said Jacqueline K. Bradley, assistant dean for financial aid at Mendocino College in California. “That almost guarantees that they won’t be as successful in their college career.”

Jay Mathews has more on community college issues and a report from Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College, Columbia University: Covering America, Covering Community Colleges.

Making Room for Hope: Granito de Arena

"As teachers we have a moral, political, and social obligation to try to change things."

I was reminded today as I was reading an  essay by Scott Russell Sanders in The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear that it is important to "make room for hope." Here is my "hope" for today: Granito de Arena, a documentary directed by Jill Friedberg, Corrugated Films.

"What happens to a teacher in the United States, can happen to a teacher in Canada, or to a teacher in Mexico....If we are all confronting the same monster, a monster with many different heads, then we all have to flow together into the same river." 

Granito de Arena (Grain of Sands) documents the 25-year struggle of school teachers in Mexico and highlights the state of education pre- and post-NAFTA. It explores the fundamental role of education from a perspective similar to that of Paulo Freire and bell hooks--education as transformation as opposed to education as a means of producing human capital.

"This is a system that breaks everything it touches into little pieces, and which teaches us that life is about having, and life is about working, instead of life being about being."

"Everything is subject to the market, and education is no exception. You're going to have the very best education for the rich kids and what's left over for the rest."

Sound familiar?

The TFA Debate Continues

Core Knowledge Blogger Robert Pondiscio, writes A Memo To Wendy Kopp. He says:

Our toughest schools are no place for rookies, even well-educated, data-driven rookies. Being a first year teacher in a tough school makes for great memoirs, but all the good intentions and Ivy League degrees under the sun don’t make you a great teacher. We’re certainly not going to turn around thousands of underperforming schools on the backs of 22-year olds....

He suggests:

Place them in that high-functioning school for two years as pinch-hitters for some of our best, most experienced teachers, and send those master teachers to the same schools to which you’re sending TFA corps members now. We can call it the Teach For America Fellowship, and throw in a nice extra chunk of change to incentivize those master teachers without worrying about whether it’s merit pay.

Kopp responds:

It is a rare person who has what it takes to excel as a teacher in a low-income community, and it’s not at all a given that teachers who do well in more privileged communities will do well in urban and rural areas.

True. But this doesn't mean that the most inexperienced privileged teachers with do-gooder attitudes will be any better.

The most important thing for kids in low-income communities is that we recruit as many people as possible — whether new or experienced — who have the personal characteristics that differentiate successful teachers in high-poverty communities, and that we train and support them to be effective in meeting the extra needs of their students.

I doubt the same argument would work if you substituted "high income" and tried to advocate for putting inexperienced teachers in our "best" schools. And do TFAers really get the chance to fully develop these "personal characteristics" in order to meet the extra needs of students within their two year terms?

Teach For America is building a pipeline of leaders who are deeply committed to educational equity and deeply understand what it will take to ensure that children in low-income communities have the educational opportunities they deserve. Their initial teaching experience in under-resourced communities is foundational to their lifelong commitment to effecting the systemic changes necessary to ensure educational opportunity for all.

Studies show that most TFAers leave the classroom after two to three years. What about building a pipeline of teachers that will ensure educational opportunity for all? 

Education Next has an interesting debate on TFA between Arthur Wize, president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, and Julie Mikuta, partner at the New Schools Venture Fund. 

In terms of teacher development and accreditation, Wize suggests:

...a “teaching team strategy,” that gives only experienced teachers primary student responsibility, but in multiple classrooms and with the assistance of the novices. Senior teachers, appropriately compensated, lead instructional teams of other teachers, novices, and untrained personnel....

In an ideal world, all new teachers would receive their capstone preparation and induction in a professional development school or an urban residency program.
In an ideal world, all new teachers would receive their capstone preparation and induction in a professional development school or an urban residency program.

He cites NYC Teaching Fellows as an intermediate step--as its fellows must be enrolled in a Master's program in teaching and learning.

Teaching isn't community service. Teaching, like any other career, takes time to master. While TFA achieves its goal in filling the teacher shortage in urban and rural districts---shouldn't we be looking for more long-term solutions to the problem?

Wize says: 

Of course, every experienced teacher was once a novice, so not every student can have an experienced instructor. But there is almost universal agreement on the value of teacher experience, and research indicates a multiplier effect on students’ performance when they are taught by ineffective teachers over multiyear periods.

When will we decide to give our nation's poorest children the education that all children deserve?

Jay Mathews Reviews Keeping the Promise

Jay Mathews' write up of Keeping the Promise: The Debate over Charter Schools:

Journalists, particularly me, tend to get excited about charter schools, the independently run public schools that have produced -- at least in some cases -- major improvements in achievement for children from low-income families. The charter educators I write about are often young, energetic, witty, noble and pretty much irresistible. But their charter schools, which use tax dollars with little oversight, are relatively new and untried. Like all experiments, they could easily fizzle.

He continues:

But the book's overall message is that charters are not what the happy stories in the media make them seem, and there should be better ways to improve learning. Many people agree with that thesis. But the book failed to make the case for me because it offered no compelling or widely available alternatives for the young educators I know who want to save this generation of poorly schooled kids right now.

See an earlier post about Keeping the Promise.

Last Brown v. Board Plaintiff Dies at 88

The last surviving Brown v. Board plaintiff, Zelma Henderson, died at the age of 88 on Tuesday in Topeka, Kansas.

In an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 1994, Mrs. Henderson reflected on Brown 40 years later. "None of us knew that this case would be so important and come to the magnitude it has," she said. "What little bit I did, I feel I helped a whole nation."

A decision that is critically important to our nation's educational history:

“We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the court’s opinion. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

But 50 years later, seemingly little progress has been made. Last June's Supreme Court ruling limits school districts' use of race in making assignments for students. 

Charlotte, NC schools, like many others, are rapidly resegregating.

"It's getting to the point of almost absolute segregation in the worst of the segregated cities – within one or two percentage points of what the Old South used to be like," says Gary Orfield, codirector of the Civil Rights Project and one of the study's authors. "The biggest metro areas are the epicenters of segregation. It's getting worse for both blacks and Latinos, and nothing is being done about it."

About one-sixth of black students and one-ninth of Latino students attend what Mr. Orfield calls "apartheid schools," at least 99 percent minority. In big cities, black and Latino students are nearly twice as likely to attend such schools. Some two-thirds of black and Latino students in big cities attend schools with less than 10 percent white students; in rural areas, about one-seventh of black and Latino students do. Although the South was the region that originally integrated the most successfully, it's beginning to resegregate, as in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district.

More information and resources:

From The Civil Rights Project:

• Preserving Integration Options for Latino Children: A Manual for Educators, Civil Rights Leaders, and the Community
  
• The Last Have Become First: Rural and Small Town America Lead the Way on Desegregation
  
• Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation, and the Need for New Integration Strategies

From Jonathan Kozol:

• The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
  
• Still Separate, Still Unequal (article adapted from Shame of the Nation)
  

Documentary: Middle School/Middle Passage (the Journey)

Talks with Wolves, an arts residency program, documents their work with a Brooklyn school in Brownsville, NY in Middle School/Middle Passage (the Journey).

Understanding our own diverse histories and working with the diverse histories of our students and their families to generate learning. That's why it's so important that we don't allow things like this Arizona legislation to pass.



Find out more information about the documentary here.

Blogger Summit: Thoughts on Young Teachers in High Need Schools

"A system who gives the kids who need the most the teachers who are able to deliver it the least." -- Amy Wilkins of Ed Trust to Dan Brown of the Huffington Post

Bronx 8th Graders Boycott Tests

Over 160 students at a Bronx high school organized a protest over a practice exam for a state social studies test.

The students remark:

"We've had a whole bunch of these diagnostic tests all year," Tatiana Nelson, 13, one of the protest leaders, said Tuesday outside the school. "They don't even count toward our grades. The school system's just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams."

According to the petition, they are sick and tired of the "constant, excessive and stressful testing" that causes them to "lose valuable instructional time with our teachers."

The administration has placed the blame for initiating the riots on Douglas Avilla, a 30-year-old social studies teacher.

Avilla says:

My students know they are welcome in my class to have open discussions," Avella said. "I teach them critical thinking."

Students say:

"They're saying Mr. Avella made us do this," said Johnny Cruz, 15, another boycott leader. "They don't think we have brains of our own, like we're robots. We students wanted to make this statement. The school is oppressing us too much with all these tests."

Several students defended Avella. They say he had made social studies an exciting subject for them.

"Now they've taken away the teacher we love only a few weeks before our real state exam for social studies," Tatiana Nelson said. "How does that help us?"

Kudos to these students for taking a stand. Very impressive.

Gender Gap is a Myth, Report Says

The American Association of University Women has published "Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education."

From the Washington Post:

The most important conclusion of "Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education" is that academic success is more closely associated with family income than with gender, its authors said.

"A lot of people think it is the boys that need the help," co-author Christianne Corbett said. "The point of the report is to highlight the fact that that is not exclusively true. There is no crisis with boys. If there is a crisis, it is with African American and Hispanic students and low-income students, girls and boys."

Some more good reads

Recently attended a closing event for NYU's Catherine B. Reynolds Fellowship in Social Entrepreneurship.

Fellows were asked to bring along a book that had been meaningful to them on their social entrepreneurship journey. Some titles included:

• The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear by Paul Loeb
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Whirligig by Paul Fleischman
• The Alchemist by Paul Coelho
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
• Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits by Leslie Crutchfield, Heather McLeod Grant
• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer
• Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District by Peter Moskos