• About

Dare the School

~ Shifting Perspectives in Education

Dare the School

Category Archives: education reform

Occupy Wall Street: The Education Edition (Part1)

10 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by daretheschool in education reform, Many Faces In Education

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

21st century, achievement gap, activism, alternative, American, children, economy, education, free, inspiration, interview, occupy, occupy education, occupy wall street, protest, social change, student, teaching, transformation, U.S.

I am very happy to say that I spent my weekend occupying Wall Street. During this time, I had the amazing opportunity to speak with people who are not only angry, but hopeful. They are individuals who protest our country’s economic policies not out of hatred, but out of love for our country. They see the word democracy as more than just rhetoric. They view democracy as a dream that must be fulfilled in our lifetime. During the past two days, I spoke with students, teachers, and professors about their views on education and how it connects to their activism at Occupy Wall Street. I was interviewed by one woman (obviously against the protest) who asked: Why education? If you are concerned with the public education system, shouldn’t you be protesting the Department of Education? What does this have to do with Wall Street anyway?

I proceeded to educate this woman on the direct correlation of economic status and academic achievement. After that, I schooled her on the current corporate and federal push to privatize our public schools. If we are to see a major transformation within our public education system, we must start by re-structuring our current economic system. We are currently seeing a push towards a “market based” education system. In other words: education for profit. We are seeing more policies that are put in place to drive education reform that is dependent on competition and profit. This movement has been coined: Neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism= movement away from state control towards corporate control. It depends on un-regulated trade and markets and argues that free markets, free trade, and the unrestricted flow of capital will produce the “greatest social good.”

Wall Street Occupiers are protesting the current neoliberal takeover of our government and society. De-regulation of the markets was a huge cause of our recession in 2007 and also speaks to the corporate bailout our federal government authorized. Moreover, neo-liberal ideology also supports the transformation of institutions of higher education into for-profit structures that are currently leaving millions of students in tens of thousands of dollars of debt. In addition, neo-liberal ideology supports the out-sourcing jobs in order to find the cheapest labor; leaving these same indebted college graduates with  false promises of a bright future. But enough of my ramblings, let’s hear from some other Occupiers.


Lauren: A 6th grade Language Arts teacher in East Harlem

Andre:  A Masters Student and Political Activist from Long Island

Barbara: Teacher Educator at University of Massachusetts-Amherst

“It is a right to transform the city, to make it the city we wish to live in, and in the process transform ourselves and how we live together.”

-Pauline Lipman

I am energized and inspired by this movement and it comforts me to know this is only the beginning.

Advertisements

Looking At Finland: Lessons from the #1 Education System in the World

23 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by daretheschool in education reform, global education

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

21st century, achievement gap, alternative, American, children, classrooms, economy, education, finland, free, freedom, learning, policy, politics, rankings, reform, schools, social change, social welfare, standardized, student, teacher, teaching, test, U.S., welfare

So Finland has been ranked #1 in the world for literacy, math, and science. However, this was not always the case. In the 1970s, Finland was an agrarian society that scored low in global education rankings. However, the country was not ready to settle for this as a reality. Finland realized that a changing economy equated to a changing education system. They decided to switch to a knowledge-based society. Radically restructuring their education system meant implementing an integrative approach that included the following:

  • Creating a National Standard
  • Getting rid of standardized tests
  • Integrating students of all ability types into one classroom (gifted learning with remedial)
  • Putting 3 teachers in the classroom. The third teacher working exclusively with struggling students
  • Requiring all teachers to have masters degrees
  • Treating the teacher as the professional.

I think the last point is especially key so I will restate it in all caps:

TEACHERS ARE TREATED AS PROFESSIONALS 

Finland has a distinct culture of trusting teachers to do their jobs, and to do them well.  Essentially, the country created these national standards and told teachers: “These are the concepts your students should learn but it’s up to you how they learn it.” No 700 page teaching manuals to abide by. Also, compared to the U.S.,  Finnish teachers spend only 50 percent of their time teaching. Some may ask: “Well if they’re not teaching what the hell are they doing?”

They are lesson planning, reflecting on successes and failures, action planning, meeting with parents, and collaborating with other teachers. And get this: they have offices! In Finland, teaching is seen as a highly esteemed profession, similar to that of a doctor or lawyer. For all people who apply to teaching program, only 15 percent will actually enter the classroom. The teaching profession is treated like the big deal that it is.

I know some people would argue, “OK that’s Finland, but who cares? We’re not some small, homogenous Scandinavian country, we’re America.” True, Finland’s political, economic, and cultural landscape is quite different. However, I wonder what would happen if we implemented some of these practices in the U.S. Could you honestly say we would see no progress?

What if U.S. schools had:

  • 3 respected teachers with masters degrees who had significant prep time along with use of their creativity.
  • No standardized tests to freak out about.
  • One National Standard to refer to (P.S. we currently have 50 state standards.)
  • Teachers splitting their time between instruction, planning ,and reflection. (another fun fact, Finnish students receive less instructional classroom time than any other developed country in the world.)

Yes I realize Finland is a social welfare state, something our country cringes to be associated with.

Welfare=lazy, stupid, moochers…(well except for FHA loans during the New Deal. That was different.)

But I digress. Yes, we might need to have a political and economic system that genuinely supports the success of All of our nation’s children BUT….

Can’t we start somewhere? Can’t we start by treating our teachers as dignified professionals rather than incompetent technocrats? Why not put 3 strong and qualified teachers in the classroom (p.s. Finland spends less dollars per child in their school system so money is not an excuse.) And do we really need all of these damn tests?

Just things I’m mulling over on this Friday morning.

Many Faces in Education Presents: Kirsten Olson

07 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by daretheschool in education reform, Many Faces In Education, New Paradigm

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

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?

    Kirsten: 

To learn more about Kirsten, please visit: www.kirstenolson.org

 

 

Places for Healing: Schools As Community Centers

06 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by daretheschool in asset mapping, community, education reform

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

asset, colonialism, education, healing, learning, new paradigm, policy, poverty, revolution, schools, social change, teaching

“ Nothing in this universe exists alone. Every drop of water, every human being, all creatures in the web of life and all ideas in the web of knowledge are part of an immense, evolving, dynamic whole as old, and as young , as the universe itself.”

-Symbiosis 1982

Schools are institutions of so much possibility, a place for developing young minds for better or for worse. During my interview with Marquett ,he spoke a great deal about the way many charter schools in low-income communities of color have taken the stance of isolation. Many of them attempt to create an island of their own, acting as a fortress in the community. Taking such a stance speaks a hidden language to students and community members that articulates the following:

1.    Your community isn’t good enough. Yes we are preparing you to be scholars and we want you to be college bound however, you must leave your community behind. If you do not separate yourself from your community, you will be failures just like the rest of them.

2.    Your community is a deficit. Why would our school be a part of it? It has no assets to give. Our institution has the knowledge and the power. Nothing of value can be discovered outside of it.

3.    Your community does not understand: Most of its members are uneducated and impoverished anyway. They will resent academic advancement along with the institution that provides it.

In my upcoming interview with Kirsten Olson (stay tuned!), she discussed how this is a colonialist mentality and I could not agree more. Sending these non-verbal messages to our children does nothing to boost their self-esteem and sets them light years behind in terms of achieving self-actualization. You cannot ignore or be ashamed of where you come from. If a school promotes this mentality, it speaks the language of domination. If the neighboring community is not incorporated into a child’s learning environment, the education is inauthentic and an all-around farce. For one second, let’s re-imagine when a community school can be. Mary Driscoll states it best:

 

“We want to imagine the possibilities of schools that do not see themselves succeeding in spite of the community, but rather that envision themselves as key institutional players of the development of the community.” (2001) 

School should be viewed as an asset to the entire community rather than a service provided strictly to the children who attend. When we think in terms of property value, it is easy to see how valuable schools can be. Home buying decisions can be dictated by the quality of the neighborhood school. However, once we think in terms of low-income communities, this notion seems to go out the window. Many times, we view school as a “safe zone,” a place of solace to escape the chaos and danger of the surrounding community. This mentality is backward and self-defeating. The children are reflections of the community they live in, as are the parents. Children bring their home realities into the classroom on a daily basis and it is not something that should be ignored. You cannot erase their histories and home lives by simply placing them in a classroom and uniform. The school should be treated as a community center, a key collaborator and helpful resource to the entire community.

Once a school is known for offering services to the entire community, it will be respected and revered. Let’s quit trying to ignore day-to-day realities. Instead, why don’t we collaborate and create places for healing? This might sound super lovey dovey and pie in the sky, but practices show that this method truly does work. Its formal name is asset mapping and it encompasses a very powerful yet simple element: focus on strengths rather than weaknesses. According to Paul Green and Anna Haines, “The asset-based approach builds on the experiences and interests of individuals and communities and matches with the needs and opportunities of the region.”

Many organizations and forward thinking schools are turning to asset-mapping to create the most impact. Asset mapping enables an institution to truly examine all elements of the community and to draw on strengths to fulfill its mission. It also helps communities respond to needs by discovering their natural assets in people, places, and things. In a nutshell, no person, or space is worthless. Everything has something to contribute. Asset mapping enables institutions to examine possibilities never seen before. Some community assets that are useful to map out include: education  institutions, service organizations, businesses, citizens groups and associations,  citizens with special talents or capacities, stakeholders in the community, etc.

Hmmm, I wonder how many schools use the asset mapping approach? I’m sure some do, but I also know that many do not. This makes all the difference in the level of engagement you will see not only in the students, but the parents as well. Asset mapping provides an opportunity for local citizens to have a place “at the table” and experience what it is like to play a meaningful role in community development. If you want the community to value your institution, you first need to demonstrate that you value them.

 

Motto for the day?: “Collaboration instead of Colonization.”

Free Schools Revisited: Revolution vs. Transformation

15 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by daretheschool in education reform

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

1960s, alternative, American, education, free, homeschool, learning, policy, reform, revolution, schools, social change, teaching, transformation, unschooling

“The public school exists to turn out manageable workers, obedient consumers, manipulable voters, and if need be willing killers” -Jonathan Kozol author of Free Schools

The most notable and recent movement for alternative education occurred in 1960’s to the early 1970’s, and was known as the “free school” movement. The free school movement was an effort to build small alternative schools where students participated equally in governance as well as enjoyed complete control over curriculum. Free school theorist Ron Miller estimates between 400 to 800 such schools opened between 1967 and the late 1970s.The free school movement arose in the midst of an entire cultural, social, and political climate of revolution and change. During this time period, there was what many activists called a “revolution of consciousness.” A spirit of rapid social change with movements such as civil rights, anti-war, women’s liberation, and free speech were in full swing. Most activists who participated in these movements were battling what they called a “technocratic” society.

Technocracy is “a social order that maintains stability and control by fitting human ‘resources’ into appropriate, predefined institutional niches.” Technocracy was considered to be a major contributor to the “social machine.” In many ways, the free school movement was meant to be a black-lash against technocracy. Radical theorists, considered a technocratic society to be a heartless society; a world in which citizens were merely mechanical parts to the overall social machine. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, America was recovering from, and lashing out against  materialism and conformity. Moreover, America was recovering from the age of McCarthyism; a time in which political institutions widely persecuted people and ideas that expressed originality or dissent in any way. All of this led to a massive backlash against consumer culture. The culture of conformity and materialism had also seeped into the education system. The free school movement was a response to an overtly unyielding “factory-like” system of educating American children.

Free school ideology aimed to completely break from the public education system. Participants in the movement were in no way concerned with working within the educational structure to improve it; rather they were looking to tear down the system completely and start anew. Free school intellectuals asserted that there was no saving the current system. Free schools were solely concerned about the education of the heart rather than the mind. There were no textbooks, individual subjects, or concrete lesson plans.” Additionally, teachers were not regarded as authority figures, but as friends and mentors. Free school ideology encouraged a strong focus on feelings. It sought to counter a society that intensely encouraged rationalism as the highest good. There was immense attention given to interpersonal relationships and communal experiences. Hierarchy was discouraged in the school structure. Although the free school movement arose from a huge amount of educational dissent, the movement declined very quickly. Most schools were only open for one or two years.

Free schools ultimately failed for a two reasons. First, there was a major lack of funding. There was no public funding to continuously support free schools. Most free schools lacked adequate supplies and resources to maintain their services. Many free schools quickly closed due to financial strife. Another major difficulty in the movement existed in conflicting ideologies amongst educational leaders and theorists. Due to the ambiguity of the free school philosophy along with the resistance to any order or leadership in the movement, there were many organizational problems. There were many disagreements amongst the parents, teachers and administrators and no effective means of solving them. Researcher Terrence E.Deal expressed that, “The counterculture ideology abhors organization, routinization, and bureaucracy, and as a result decision making in the alternative schools was participatory, consensual, cumbersome, burdensome, and ineffective.” As a result, free schools arose from a surge of idealism, yet lacked a realistic approach to support these ideas.

There are many lessons to be learned from the free school movement. First and foremost, although it simply takes an idea to spark a revolution; careful planning, meticulous organizing, and strong compassionate leadership is required to create systemic change. The free school movement marked a definitive moment in educational policy. For the first time in American history, policymakers and administrators were left to seriously consider issues of school choice and to re-consider the “one size fits all” public school system. Shortly after the decline of the free school movement, alternative schools and home schooling were endorsed. However, free school educators failed to create a new education system. There was too much of a focus on feelings and emotions and not enough of a focus on systemic change. Although the idea was great, there was no concrete plan to sustain the movement.

During the 1960’s and 1970’s “revolution” was the key word. The definition of revolution is, “a radical and pervasive change in society and the social structure, especially one made suddenly.” (dictionary.com) In the 21st century, revolution is an incomplete process. “Revolution” will only take an idea so far. Revolution is a very temporary state, a place in which sensationalism may arise, but practical steps will be severely lacking. There must be a call for transformation in the American education system.  The definition of transformation is, “changing in condition, nature or character; convert; to change into another substance or transmute.” (dictionary.com) Transformation will take more than just a group of passionate, well-intentioned people. It will require an extensive evaluation of facts and data, but much more importantly, human potential. Transformation will require a connection of the head and the heart.

Since the rise and fall of the free school movement, the U.S. has become much more open minded to forms of alternative education. The charter school movement is on the rise, which leaves an open door to more creative forms of learning.(Sometimes…) Public funding can be provided to a school with the principles described above and it will only take the success of one school. The success of one school that utilizes the principles of a new education paradigm will light the fire for the creation of other schools. At such an important time in history, we must dare to experiment. It is the least we can do.

Advertisements

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011

Categories

  • asset mapping
  • community
  • education reform
  • Education Technology
  • global education
  • Many Faces In Education
  • New Paradigm
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel