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achievement gap, alternative, American, charter schools, children, classrooms, education, experience, freedom, harvard, inspiration, interview, kirsten, learning, olson, policy, politics, reform, schools, teach for america
Kirsten Olson is a leading writer in the U.S. describing education from a student’s point of view. Her recent book Wounded By School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up To Old School Culture(2009) was one of the ten bestselling books at Teachers College Press this past year, and was nominated for Book of the Year by Foreword. Reviewers have called the book “brilliant, insightful, unsparing, hopeful.” Cooperative Catalyst, an online group where Kirsten blogs on the necessity of educational transformation, is one of the most rapidly growing educational blogs at WordPress. Kirsten recently became a founding board member of IDEA, an emerging national non-profit that seeks to reinvent public education so that all kids can be creative, curious and collaborative learners. A popular speaker at education conferences, Kirsten is a member of the Socratic Seminar on Educational Innovation at Columbia University and on the advisory board of the Institute for Humane Education. Kirsten is also the author of Schools As Colonizers (Verlag 2008), which examined the ideas of the radical school critics of the 1960s, and dozens of articles about education. Her educational leadership consulting practice is based in Brookline, MA, which works with schools and educational groups all over the country.
DaretheSchool: I am so excited to interview you. You have such an amazing scope of experiences. Considering your views on education and learning, I must say I was surprised to see you graduated from Harvard. How were your experiences at this institution?
Kirsten: Well that’s a long conversation! I had fantastic mentors there. I worked with Sara Lawrence Lightfoot and Pedro Noguera and they are very important people to me. Harvard is an institution that is about power and privilege. During the time I was there, many people at the school were supporting No Child Left Behind, and helping to create our current accountability environment that has proven to be disastrous for kids and schools. I feel grateful that I was able to go to Harvard, but also very aware of some of the problems that students who go there emerge with in terms of power and privilege. So it is a real dilemma. At the end of the day, I knew I could be a more powerful warrior for the things that I believe in spite of being in an institution that reinforces power and privilege. That was the calculation that I made. Having that particular degree ultimately does allow you to be in a variety of different worlds. However, you also have to be really careful because institutions have institutionalizing effects in terms of thinking.
DaretheSchool: Why do you educate?
Kirsten: Education is at the heart of human transformation. Some of the most powerful emotional and spiritual experiences of my life have been around learning. I believe education is at the center of what it means to be a human being in terms of people connecting and finding ways to collaborate to make the world better. Making the education system better feels like a place I can make the most impact. It feels like really meaningful work because the system is profoundly broken, dysfunctional and toxic. It is important to discover how we learn and help others learn, along with the implications of this for our community and the world at large.
DaretheSchool: How was your k-12 experience?
Kirsten: I was aware from very early on that this was a system that was incredibly unfair. I saw people given labels as pieces of self- identity. In first grade I remember my peers being sorted out in high, middle and lower reading groups and thinking of themselves as smart or dumb. I remember being aware that this seemed unfair and wrong. As a white, upper-middle class person (although I didn’t have this kind of consciousness then), it became increasingly apparent to me that the system was rigged to privilege people who were already privileged and to get them to believe that they deserved their privilege. When I was in high school there was not a single student of color in any of my honors and AP courses. There was this unfounded belief that this was a meritocratic environment, and if you were not successful it was your fault individually. That seemed like a lie to me. I also noticed that the system was designed to make you stupid and even students who were privileged in the education system were made stupid in particular ways. All of my most powerful learning experiences were happening outside of school and I felt like I had to protect myself. For instance, I would read interesting books but behind my textbook, or if I thought interesting thoughts, I kept them hidden from the school. It was an environment intent on making you passive, conformist, and less interesting.
DaretheSchool: I want to talk more about your work at the Institute for Democratic Education in America. What is your role?
Kirsten: IDEA is a national activist organization that focuses on ways to transform the education system. It focuses on groups of people all around the country who have been doing great work who feel disconnected with the current trends in the school system. IDEA is focusing on getting to a place where we are a coherent and weighty player when discussing what the future of education should look like. It was started by a group of people who came out of the democratic education movement in Israel and around the U.S. I came to IDEA because a group of founders knew about the work I was doing as an activist and a writer and wanted me be a part of this founding group. I’ve been with IDEA for about a year and it has a talented and wonderful staff and we’ve expanded in incredible ways after just a year. We know there is an incredible need for our work and we’re making sure we have the funding and support our move forward.
DaretheSchool: Considering the current political environment of high standards, how do you survive in terms of securing funding and support?
Kirsten: That era began in 2001 with NCLB. We now have 11 years of evidence that this accountability environment, and the supposed enforcing “high standards” through testing, has tremendously eroded the quality of instruction, demoralized the American teaching force and threatens to break up the remaining trust in the public education system. (Although I would say this was probably what it was designed to do.) I believe that era is collapsing under its own weight. There is now so much research and evidence about the negative effects of these policies, that it will cease to have authority, which means something else will emerge. The question becomes: does the system become privatized in the charter model or is it possible to rebuild public trust around a variety of new educational models? The idea of “one best system” is an old school idea. There is no one system. Real learning doesn’t look like that however, we have this large hierarchical system that employs 3 million adults and we don’t know what to do about that. But to answer your question, I believe the old system is collapsing around us, but the new question is what are we going to do instead or in addition to? That is what we are wrestling with.
DaretheSchool: You speak of public versus charter and this is an issue that I wrestle with myself. What are your thoughts about this subject?
Kirsten: I would like to see many different education models emerge and be supported by public funds. I don’t just want to see wonderful schools only serve the kids who already have choices. I worry about all of these wonderful alternative learning environments being created and only people who have the means are able to access them. Meanwhile, the people who are left in the public school system are folks who have no choice, no resources, and no social capital. That’s a scary prospect and would be terrible for our country.
DaretheSchool: I completely agree. I think the charter model started out as a really progressive idea but got twisted along the way.
Kirsten: It’s so true. I’ve worked with many, many charter schools and some of them have been the least adventuresome intellectual environments that I have ever been in…Particularly the KIPP schools.
This is a colonialist model of education. Largely middle and upper middle class people deciding how poor kids should be educated. It’s very problematic and it’s just not being talked about enough. Also, there is this idea of trying to “cure” kids of their community. They call it the new paternalism, but it looks a lot like 19th century colonialism to me! Moreover, it is a command and control instructional environment. A child who goes through this sort of schooling until the 8th grade will not be able to go to a highly-selective private school and all of a sudden be authorized to think their own thoughts, when all they’ve ever been taught it how to please the teacher and the adults best. The model advocates for control and custody of students along with a culturally imperialist model. Teach for America, KIPP, Uncommon schools, and Achievement First, are crafted as social movements and young folks right out of college get so filled with a sense of belief about mission of erasing inequality, which is intentional, that these questions don’t come up. There’s a kind of fervor to this, and an intensity of belief. This makes it really hard because most people are not very questioning about the underlying assumptions behind this form of education.
DarethSchool: Do you have any plans for future projects in the field of education?
Kirsten: In my lifetime, I am hoping for a collective effort to begin a set of hybridized, multi-choice education communities that all parents would CHOOSE to send their children to. I envision these learning communities as being rich, welcoming, warm, challenging, and hospitable environments. These environments would place the brilliance and potential of children at the forefront. I believe that a public commitment to educating children is a way for us to express our commitment to each other. We need to find ways to express our connectedness in our education system and we are currently so far away from that.
DaretheSchool: Is there any writer or reformer who has really influenced your work?
Kirsten: John Holt’s How Children Fail. I found this book in the discard pile in the library during graduate school, just to articulate how out of style his thinking was. I think Holt is better than Dewey in describing how learning is a deeply spiritual enterprise. It’s about having self-confidence, being bold and believing in yourself and he writes beautifully about how school thwarts that. It’s lovely writing grounded in the classroom. I also love Ivan Illich, a great critical theorist of institutions. He wrote about the way institutions work so hard at preserving themselves no matter how dysfunctional they get and that’s a lot of what we’re seeing now. We are seeing how difficult it is to move away from a system that doesn’t work. The last one would be bell hooks. She writes about what it means for kids to be colonized by a system that is unfair and how that impacted her work as a teacher. She talks about what that means for her in her work and her biography as an activist.
DaretheSchool: Favorite quote?
To learn more about Kirsten, please visit: www.kirstenolson.org
Dana Bennis said:
Dare the School (Heather) – I’m just discovering this blog and love it, especially it’s name. A reference to George Counts perhaps?
Great interview here, I’m so glad you are helping to get Kirsten Olson’s wise words and important perspective out there more. While I resounding with so much, the part that strikes me as most important to “get out there” more is the reality of intensive charter schools (and now influencing regular public schools too! – http://nyti.ms/pIMEr2) that believe the only way to help lower income youth is by subjecting them to more drill and less creativity in the classroom. Those students are the ones who most can benefit from educational environments filled with respect, love, creativity, and individual support.
Thanks again!
daretheschool said:
Hello Dana,
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your insight. Yes it is a reference to George Counts. One of my favorite education theorists.
-Heather
Shawn Straderrader said:
Thanks for the awesome interview Heather!
I appreciate you asking Kirsten about public versus charter schools. I think it needs to be discussed more often and by many more people in order for a highly accessible and meaningful education system to arise. To many folks, education reform just means adding more charters around the nation, and though charters aren’t necessarily a bad thing, breeding more and only charters as a means of reform denies a large demographic of people access to a quality education and the path to personal empowerment.
Great stuff! 🙂
Nancy Flanagan said:
Great interview–it’s energizing to hear about the seeds of IDEA and its rapid growth. If there are “windows” when transformative change becomes possible due to confluence of events and ideas, this may be one–the current frame through which Americans decide that they’ve had enough of standardization, punishment and limits and move to preserve one of our best national ideas: a free, trusted, high-quality public education for every child.
Here’s my take on the money quote from this piece:
“…eroded the quality of instruction, demoralized the American teaching force and threatens to break up the remaining trust in the public education system. (Although I would say this was probably what it was designed to do.) I believe that era is collapsing under its own weight.”
Not only its own weight, but a growing awareness that the system we have now was, in fact, explicitly designed to take down a (flawed) public good and replace it with a marketplace model, launched and leveraged by public money. If we are going to talk about education and democracy in the same breath, we have to address the fact that education has been a huge, untapped market with almost limitless opportunity for entrepreneurial gains.
Those who despair over genuinely failing urban schools and are willing to try almost anything to give children in those schools a better start are often willing to throw the educational baby out with the bathwater–to take down the current system because it doesn’t serve all students well. And those whose real goals are cornering that open market have taken advantage of weakness in the present system.
There are reasons–important, vital-to-the-nation reasons–for preserving good public education. And lots of international evidence about what happens when education becomes something you buy, rather than a public good.
daretheschool said:
Oh so incredibly true Nancy. I appreciate your insights.
Karen E said:
Thank you for this inspiring interview, and for offering a generous dose of truth-telling to such an important topic.
Ashley DiSabato said:
I too appreciate the insightful conversation you shared from your interview with Ms. Olson. I read your posts in preparation for a presentation/book talk Ms. Olson is giving at CCU next week. I can’t wait to have the opportunity to ask her some questions about ways to avoid possible wounds in the classroom. I’m looking for specific examples and/or strategies. I think that the book was very effective in enticing much needed reflection. I also think that even when an educator has a kind heart, a love for children, and a wish to do what is best for students, there are still possibilties that some students are wounded by the choices made by their teacher.
Greg Geer said:
As a professor of educational leadership all of my students read Wounded by School. The consensus is that even if the student doesn’t become a principal the book makes them reflect on their practices as teachers. It is widely talked about by our students and I think has has an effect on them.
Denver Cromer said:
I was so thrilled as an educator to read the news that states will soon be given the power to opt out of NCLB. Having spent the first half of my teaching career prior to NCLB and the second half with it, I have seen it erode so much of what is really meaningful for both students and teachers in education. It was quite interesting that Dr. Olson speculated that the actual intent of NCLB could have been to erode the faith and trust in our public education system. This had never occured to me, but now it seems obvious that this could have been the very intent of the legislation. I love conspiracy theories!
Gretchen Holzberger said:
Thank you for sharing this insightful interview with Kirsten Olson. I feel that students carry stigmas with them as they enter new levels in schooling, such as from elementary to middle school and middle school to high school. Teachers will talk to former teachers about the students before giving them a chance to thrive in a new classroom environment. These so-called labels set the students up for failure before they even enter the classroom. Reading Ms. Olson’s Wounded by School enabled me to reflect not only on my own classroom wounds, but on how I can be more proactive in helping my students heal from their wounds or in preventing new wounds.
Lindsay Purdy said:
Thanks for the great information. I agree that our system is failing so many of our students in today’s classrooms. The pressure to do well on standardized tests has created a tense environment that does not promote a joy of learning. Students have put their self worth into what the test scores say about them. As a teacher it really breaks my heart to watch this happen. Ms. Olson’s book is a great resource for school leaders, parents and students. It illustrates the different ways that schools are hurting students and are unaware of it. Wounds are inevitable, but some can be avoided.
Marshall Hursey said:
Dr. Olson has also opened my eyes to flaws in the educational system. As a teacher and future administrator, it is up to me to try to create a system that adresses my student’s needs so they do not lose their joy of learning. I work in a Title I school. Many of our students need those choices in school environment that Dr. Olson refers to help foster their education and joy for learning.
Amy Elliott said:
Great interview. One thing that stands out to me from both this interview and her book Wounded by School, is that Olson stresses the need to focus on the potential of children and assessing their growth as compared to standards of measurement we currently have in place. Focusing in on the individual learning style and adapting instruction to meet his/her needs are crucial to implementing the type of change necessary to alleviating future wounds from being inflicted.
Ashley Cameron said:
You did a great job with your interview! As a teacher, I find it very refreshing that Ms. Oslon sees the importance of establishing a joy of learning in our schools. With the high stress of meeting required mandates and preparing for tests, it is easy to forget that key element. As a future administrator, her book opened my eyes to the importance of having a school with teachers, students, and parents who all feel comfortable with the school environment and enjoy learning.
Clay Cook said:
Great interview! Dr. Olson perspectives are refreshing and welcome! I recently read Wounded by Schools and loved it. I completely agree that school are in definate need of reform; that we cannot continue to do things the same old way and expect different results. Upon reading Wounded by Schools, I realized that many of the wounds I suffered in the early years of my educational journey crossed over into other categories. They also changed as I aged. I have also come to reflect on my teaching and any wounds that I may have caused. I am now very aware of wounding and what I can do to stop it.
Kim Cummings said:
This book is very meaningful to me as an educator, and our responsibility to constantly evolve to meet our students needs. I enjoyed this interview with Kirsten Olson and found it insightful as a furture administrator. I agree with all of the previous posts regarding the creative limitations, especially those established through NCLB. I too look forward to an educational overhaul that values the diversity of learners and instructors versus a traditional, conform driven educational institution.