This Is Not News

This week in ethics, we’re thinking about the way that society punishes the people who do something that society deems wrong. We may be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, because even though we’ve discussed a couple of ethical perspectives, we have lots of room left to discuss and evaluate what actually is right and wrong. But it’s not a bad idea to think about the stakes of making decisions about ethics. If we as a society decide something is wrong, what is the best way to respond to people who act against that decision? What are the consequences that come from different levels of harshness? What does the way that we treat “wrongdoers” say about the way that we view people in general?

Plus, since this class is using film to illustrate some of its questions, this topic is an opportunity to watch The Shawshank Redemption, which remains my favorite movie. The students usually respond well to it, too, and getting to see a bunch of people see it for the first time is its own thrill. There’s a scene in the movie where Andy Dufresne wants the warden to spend some money to upgrade the prison library. The warden replies that the public only wants the government to spend money on three things in prisons: more bars, more guards, and more guns. Andy is persistent, though, and gradually builds the prison library into a resource that helps at least a dozen prisoners get their high school diplomas. (He has some other projects in the film, but I won’t spoil those if you haven’t seen it.)

This NPR story about Folsom State Prison (made famous by Johnny Cash) from 2009 shows that conflict playing out in the real world – as we spend more money on bars and guards and guns, we spend less on educating and training convicts for life after prison. Whether that actually makes anyone safer or improves anyone’s life is a very open question. I like using this story because I can play the audio from the original radio story and give students the printed article version, so that gives students a couple of different paths to absorb the information. With the article in hand, I ask the students to answer a set of questions that connect to the prison-and-punishment theme. I also hope that thinking about the questions will help the students think about how the media can construct a story to support certain conclusions. It’s definitely worth listening to the story and thinking about what the story says – and doesn’t say – about the prison guards union.

I’ll put the reflection questions after the jump.
Read the remainder of this entry »

When I think of different ways to set up a learning institution, I usually wind up thinking about Jane Addams and Hull House. The settlement house movement of the late 19th and early 20th century has a lot of lessons to offer us in the progressive education community. That’s not terribly surprising, since Addams worked closely with John Dewey when they were both in Chicago. Reading Democracy and Education is great, but seeing how Addams and her colleagues worked to put that theory into practice is invaluable.

I teach Addams’ “The Function of the Social Settlement” whenever I teach an epistemology class because I like to have my students talk about their vision of their education, especially its practical benefits, and see how that fits with Addams’ vision. There’s a passage that always sticks out to me. She talks about how one of the middle-class, college-educated residents at Hull House wanted to take a group of working-class immigrants from the surrounding neighborhood on a tour of one of Chicago’s museums. The immigrants found it difficult to appreciate the works they saw, because they had no background knowledge of the traditions or contexts involved. – knowledge that their guide had spent a lifetime acquiring. The mistake, Addams says, is thinking you can take someone from culture and background and dump them into an entirely different context and expect them to appreciate the new environment. You can not, she says, throw “a fringe of art” onto a day spent at a factory; you can’t throw it on a life that is not immersed in it or connected to it and expect the art to make any kind of connection.

A fringe of art. I love that phrase. (It’s repeated in her memoir, 20 Years at Hull House.) And I think about it often as I try to put my own educational philosophy to work in an environment that seems ill-fitted to it at places. I believe in the Deweyan, pragmatic ideal of inquiry more than ever. I see the potential for approaches like project-based learning to bring that ideal to life. But as I look at my own practices, I wonder if I am not trying to throw a fringe of inquiry onto my teaching.

When I started teaching at the high school level, I had a lot of ambitious dreams about allowing my students to use the technological resources at their disposal to research the world around them, identify problems or areas of confusion, and then figure out what historical events in the curriculum connected to that present-day question. The reality that I’ve come to face is that many (not all) of my students – like many of the people in the world – don’t really care about how the world around them works. They don’t want to take it apart of fiddle with it or tweak the settings to make it function a little better. They just want it to work so that they can get back to doing what they’re doing. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this in a lot of cases. I believe Apple has made about a kajillion dollars satisfying this desire in technology users. But it makes it harder to find that initial point of curiosity that can serve as the launching pad for an investigation.

Starting the inquiry is only part of the question, of course. The next issue is, once a student has found a problem to investigate, how can the student do so in a fruitful way? Here I find a difference between the way I think about inquiry and the way my students think about inquiry. My approach is to start gathering sources, to read and listen and watch things until I have gathered a body of information. Then I can look in that body of information for facts that connect together and try to tell a story about whatever I’m researching. Of course, I began my career as a student long before Google; heck, long before Yahoo and Lycos. For many students today, the path to inquiry begins with typing a question into a search engine and ends with copying the first hit onto their paper. The more I read about the iPhone 4S and Siri, the more I expect that teachers in a few years will be requiring their students to talk into the smartphones rather than keep them hidden at all times.

While I appreciate the convenience, I also think there’s something to be said for doing things the long way and understanding the knowledge that you’ve built. So I’m trying to teach my students the skills they would need for inquiry the long way – close reading of texts; broader keyword searches; finding and summarizing main ideas; outlining; evaluating media sources; and plenty of others. By the time I’ve really helped students practice and build some of these skills, I barely have enough time in my district-mandated schedule to squeeze in a project or two, especially if I’m trying to make a connection to events in the contemporary world that don’t quite have a spot on my planning and scheduling timeline. It’s hard to tell if there’s real inquiry happening, or just a fringe.

I will certainly continue to refine my own practice. As I build better relationships with my students I hope I will see more opportunities for genuine inquiry into subjects that they are about passionately. But I also believe that this is way beyond any one teacher. There are schools around the country that build a culture of inquiry from a young age, but there aren’t enough. We need to create more, to help students find the spark of education-for-personal-growth early and then build the skills and habits to help that spark grow. If we do, I think we’ll be pleasantly surprised by what we discover together.

Gotta get back on the blogging bandwagon, and I’ve been mulling on this one for a while.

It just so happened that I heard two very different visions of a teacher’s role in planning lessons and curricula in the same day. I was reading Mary Beth Hertz’s blog entry about planning the technology curriculum at her school. She specifically mentioned how she was able to refine and improve that curriculum as she got to know her students better and she increased her own understanding of who they were and what they needed. She moved from that experience to a general need for administrators and policy makers to provide a greater role for teachers in the planning process.

Know that we are professionals whose expertise is children. Let us use what we know about our students and about teaching and learning to craft a curriculum together that best meets the needs of our community. Let us have input into the document. Foster conversations across grade levels about skills and concepts students need to have or understand to be successful. Stop calling purchased reading series and social studies textbooks ‘curricula.’

It’s a good post, and I recommend you read the whole thing. It certainly fits with my own sympathies and my own vision of a teacher as a guide, someone who can draw on his or her own experiences in order to help students create learning experiences for themselves. I’m in my third year teaching World History at Parkway, and I think I’m just starting to get to know my students, my colleagues, my textbook and myself well enough to put together resources and a plan through the day that will be helpful to the students and build skills they need. (Notice I didn’t say anything about being a guide and creating learning experiences there. That’s a post for another evening.)

But the same day I read that post, I was talking to a colleague in the staff room. This colleague has a variety of experiences in and out of the classroom, and his argument was that one reason why teachers feel so burdened and exhausted is that they have multiple responsibilities, all of which could serve as a full time job. There’s knowing your content. There’s planning the lesson. There’s delivering the lesson. There’s all the stuff that we call classroom management, and there’s all the stuff that goes with assessing students’ performance after the lesson. How in the world can someone design 180 high-quality lessons a year on a part-time schedule, and then have the energy to go out and deliver it? A corporate presenter might spend weeks or even months honing a single presentation, but what teacher has that kind of time? We’re workshopping the whole thing as we go, doing a couple of live dress rehearsals and hoping that we come up with something good enough to get a return engagement the next year.

My first instinct on hearing this was to rebel. How many teachers have I heard complain about the scripted lessons they have? How many already don’t feel like they have the respect, trust and freedom to ad lib where their judgment tells them it’s appropriate to do so? This was taking authorship and creativity out of the teacher’s hands, and I couldn’t see how it could be a good thing.

Then I thought about actors. Their whole job is to take someone else’s words and ideas, infuse life into them, and make them their own. I thought about the fact that my musical tastes tend toward singer-songwriters, and I often give the act of interpreting and performing a song short shrift in favor of emphasizing the writing part. There’s got to be a place for this in education somewhere, some way that we teachers can tap into the brilliance of really good lesson planners the way an actor can tap into the brilliance of Shakespeare.

I think there can be, if the planning talent is there. I would never script a teacher’s lessons word for word. I would give more teachers the freedom to deviate from a plan or a timeline if they thought it was appropriate. But there is a real skill in assembling a plan and the resources to pull it off. I’m especially thinking of things like simulations or related activities. I’ve been working for years to design a good simulation of a run on the banks, and just like game design and other forms of design, it is tough to get all the pieces in the right order. I never feel like I have enough time to get every single piece lined up. I’m going to keep trying and I like the challenge, but the time it takes me to get this bank simulation right is time I can’t spend doing something to make the French Revolution come alive better. There’s a tradeoff that comes with designing from scratch.

I really feel that tradeoff when it comes to my Ethical Issues class. I’ve been designing and redesigning it from the beginning since the day I started at Parkway. And designing a high school course is nothing like designing a college class. When I design a college class, I pick a text or two, assign the readings, put some lecture notes together and then walk into class and improv the discussion based on what the students are interested in. There’s no improv in high school, at least not my high school. Every lesson needs to be structured from beginning to end down to the last question and the final activity. I am just now figuring out how to take the ethics content I’m familiar with and present it in a way that can connect to a high school audience that has no prior philosophical experience. And I am exhausted. Sure, it’s a feeling of success to be getting somewhere with the course, but it’s a limited audience. If I were at a different school with a different culture or a different group of students, what I’m doing now wouldn’t work. If I handed my notes and lesson plans to another teacher from my school, he or she would probably feel lost. There’s no way to scale up my specific adaptations, which means someday I’ll be reinventing the wheel again.

As I think about the pros and cons, I’m generally OK with that. But I’m pretty sure I’ll be throwing some cover tunes into my set list in the process.

So in the ethics class, we watched The Matrix to set up the problem of skepticism. (Side note: I remember teaching my first Philosophy class in fall ’99. As I lectured on Descartes, a bunch of students told me about this new movie that was totally an example of what Descartes was talking about. I scoffed at first, but they were right. Once it was so cutting edge. Now my students laugh at the cell phones and Keanu’s kung fu poses.)

I decided to follow up with this Wired story from a few years ago about Ray Kurzweil’s belief that in the not-too-distant future we’ll be able to back our brains up as computer programs. I’m still trying to help my students work through the article itself, but it does set up an interesting way of looking at the mind-body problem. If you can preserve the “information” parts of who you are, even without the more obvious physical aspects, are you still you? That there are people working on this even today is a nice way to take the philosophical question out of the abstract. Plus I still have somewhat fond memories of doing my undergrad thesis on the philosophy of AI. 🙂

These days, I admit, I fear that even if we could transform ourselves into intelligent programs, we’d just have to spend all of our time updating our drivers. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Apple will come up with iMind.

President Obama announced the long-anticipated waiver policy for No Child Left Behind on Friday. If you’re not an education policy wonk/geek: The No Child Left Behind law requires that all schools demonstrate that 100% of their students are meeting state standards by 2014, or else the schools will be considered to be failing. Besides the label, there are various consequences that can come from this label, including loss of funds or a requirement for administrative and staff shakeups. So no one wants to be labeled as failing. States have been setting targets each year for how many students should be meeting the standards. As we get closer to 2014, those targets are rising quickly. For example, in Pennsylvania this year, a high school must have about 80% of its 11th graders score “Proficient” or “Advanced” on our state standardized test, the PSSA. Next year, the target goes to roughly 90%. The year after that, it’s 100%. Very few schools are hitting that 90%-100% range, so education officials in states all over the country have been crying out that the targets need to be revised.

The standard way to do that would be for Congress to revise the law. NCLB is not actually a brand-new law that was signed in 2002. It’s a renewal of the Elemental and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (and a package of amendments to other laws), which established a lot of the policies through which the federal government provides funding to states and school districts. The ESEA needs to be reauthorized every five years, and that reauthorization is an opportunity for Congress to make significant changes in education if it sees fit to do so. The ESEA came up for renewal in 2007, but Congress has not been able to pass a new version of the law. So the initial targets are still in place.

The law does give the Secretary of Education the authority to issue waivers to states from the law’s requirements. It does not say on what basis those waivers should be given. So the Obama Administration, especially Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has been saying for months that if Congress did not pass a revision of the law, the Department of Education would start issuing waivers to states that met certain criteria. Republicans in Congress, and plenty of people of every ideological persuasion outside of Congress, have claimed that this is an overreach – the president should not be able to tell states that they don’t have to follow a federal law because they’re doing something that he likes better. Obama has not been deterred, and on Friday he announced that states could begin applying for the waivers.

I have to say that I do not have the principled objection to this executive action that others in the education community do. If Congress didn’t want these waivers to be given, they could have left the waiver power out of the 2002 legislation. If Congress wanted to set the terms under which the law would be revised, they have had almost five years to do so. It’s the role of the executive branch to figure out the best way to implement the laws passed by Congress, and that often requires the executive branch to determine certain rules, regulations, and requirements. If we as voters don’t like the way that a president uses that power, it’s our job to vote him (or someday her) out of office.

But while I think that the Obama Administration is right to take some action on the question of NCLB requirements, I am leery of the specific requirements that it is setting for states to get the waivers. I do not know what details are being given to education officials, and all that I have to go by are the president’s speech on Friday and the fact sheet issued by the White House. They emphasize that in order to get the waivers, states must show that they are developing “college and career ready standards and assessments,” systems of “differentiated recognition, accountability and support” and new methods of “evaluating and supporting teacher and principal effectiveness.” In that sea of buzzwords, there’s a lot of potential for bad ideas.

I have been crabby about the ways that education standards and objectives are phrased for a long time, but rather than get into detail, let’s jut note that “citizenship-ready” isn’t in there anywhere. You can get a degree or work at a job without having the skills and the understanding to be a good citizen. But too often we don’t write our standards in ways that point to what we need to build our communities.

The recognition, accountability and support measures are incredibly vague, but I assume that the districts and states that are going to have to write these policies know what the administration has in mind. From the fact sheet, it looks like the system is supposed to take students’ income level into account somehow, which could be a good thing depending on how it’s implemented.

And then we get to evaluating teacher effectiveness. The headline controversy there, as it should be, is going to be on the use of standardized test scores to determine who the good teachers are. Based on what the Obama Administration has done with the Race to the Top program, I am not hugely optimistic on that score. I also worry about whether we have enough consensus on the definition of “good teaching” to make such evaluations possible. In my more optimistic moments, I think that good teaching is something that can be recognized by people who take the time to observe a teacher and group of students over a sustained period of time, And then my pessimism wonders how we are going to find the time to do that when so many schools are stretched to their limits because of budget cuts and other factors.

The devil is in the details, and we don’t have many of those yet. I fear that we are at the beginning of another well-intentioned misstep in education policy, but I dearly hope that I am wrong.