Defending Public Schools: Teaching for a democratic society

Defending Public Schools

Defending Public SchoolsVolume II

Teaching for a Democratic Society

EDITED BY

KATHLEEN R. KESSON AND E. WAYNE ROSS

Praeger Perspectives

The paper used in this book complies with thePermanent Paper Standard issued by the NationalInformation Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright © 2004 by Kathleen R. Kesson and E. Wayne Ross

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may bereproduced, by any process or technique, without theexpress written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: t/kISBN: 0–275–98295–5 (set)

0–275–98296–3 (vol. I)0–275–98297–1 (vol. II)0–275–98298–X (vol. III)0–275–98299–8 (vol. IV)

First published in 2004

Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.www.praeger.com

Printed in the United States of America

To Steven, Shaman, Räm, and Chris,who taught me the most essential things

about teaching, learning, and lifeK.R.K.

In memory ofMildred Newport Clutts and Bessie Ross

E.W.R.

Contents

General Editor’s Introduction: Defending Public Schools, ixDefending DemocracyE. Wayne Ross

Introduction: Teaching for a Democratic Society xviiKathleen R. Kesson

Part I Teacher Education And Teacher Development 1

Chapter 1 Cultivating Democratic Curriculum Judgments: 3Toward a Mature ProfessionKathleen R. Kesson and James G. Henderson

Chapter 2 Finding the Color of the Sky: Inquiry in 00Teacher PreparationCecelia Traugh

Chapter 3 Informing the Present, Illuminating the Past: 00Historical Knowledge and Teacher DevelopmentSonia E. Murrow

Chapter 4 Standards, Testing, and Teacher Quality: Common 00Sense vs. Authority in Educational ReformPaul Shaker

viii Contents

Part II The Labor Of Teaching 000

Chapter 5 A Dangerous, Lucid Hour: Compliance, Alienation, 000and the Restructuring of New York City High SchoolsPaula M. Salvio

Chapter 6 Pursuing Authentic Teaching in an Age 000of StandardizationKevin D. Vinson, Rich Gibson, and E. Wayne Ross

Chapter 7 An “Inhuman Power”: Alienated Labor in 000Low-Performing SchoolsKathleen R. Kesson

Chapter 8 Gender and the Construction of Teaching 000Susan Laird

Chapter 9 Another Brick in the Wall: High-Stakes Testing in 000Teacher Education—The California TeacherPerformance AssessmentPerry M. Marker

Part III Teaching for Social Justice 000

Chapter 10 Caring-Centered Multicultural Education: 000Addressing the Academic and Writing Needsof English LearnersValerie Ooka Pang and Evangelina Bustamante Jones

Chapter 11 The Role of Race in Teacher Education: Using Critical 000Race Theory to Develop Racial Consciousnessand CompetenceTyrone C. Howard and Glenda R. Aleman,

Chapter 12 Thinking Inclusively about Inclusive Education 000Mara Sapon-Shevin

Chapter 13 Things to Come: Teachers’ Work and the Broken 000Promises of Urban School Reform in an Age ofHigh-Stakes TestingDennis Carlson

Notes 000

Index 000

About the Editors 000

About the Contributors 000

General Editor’s Introduction:Defending Public Schools,

Defending DemocracyE. WAYNE ROSS

WHY DO PUBLIC SCHOOLS NEED TO BE DEFENDED?

Why do public schools need to be defended? This may be the first questionsome readers have about this multivolume collection of essays, and it’s a goodone. Certainly, the title suggests schools are under attack, and they are. Publicschools in the United States have always carried a heavy burden as one ofthe principal instruments in our efforts to create an ideal society. For example,public schools have been given great responsibility for equalizing gender andracial inequalities, providing the knowledge and skills that give everyone anequal opportunity to experience the “American Dream,” producing aworkforce with skills that enable U.S. corporations to compete effectively inthe global marketplace, and preparing citizens to be effective participants ina democratic society, just to name a few.

Critics of public schools come from across the political spectrum, but itis important to understand the reasons behind the various criticisms of publicschools. The diverse responsibilities of public schools present a huge chal-lenge to educators, and even when schools are performing well, it is diffi-cult, if not impossible, for them to deliver all the expected results when theirmission necessarily entails contradictory purposes. For example:

• Should schools focus on increasing equity or increasing school performance (e.g.,student test scores)?

• Should the school curriculum be limited to the development of students’ cogni-

tive processes, or do schools have a responsibility for supporting the developmentof the whole person?

• Should public schools serve the interests of the state, or should they serve theinterests of local school communities?

• Should schools prepare a workforce to meet economic needs identified by cor-porations, or should they prepare students to construct personally meaningfulunderstandings of their world and the knowledge and skills to act on their world?

• Should schools be an instrument of cultural transmission with the goal of pre-paring students to adopt (and adapt to) the dominate culture, or should schoolsfunction as an engine for social and cultural change, reconstructing society basedupon principles of progress aimed at amelioration of problems?

It is important not to view the contradictory goals of public education asmerely “either/or” questions as presented above. The terrain of publicschooling, as with all aspects of the human endeavor, is too complex to bereduced to dualisms.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN A DEMOCRACY1

In his magnum opus Democracy and Education, John Dewey—widelyregarded as America’s greatest philosopher—states that all societies use edu-cation as means of social control in which adults consciously shape the dis-positions of children. He continues by arguing that “education” in and ofitself has no definite meaning until people define the kind of society theywant to have. In other words, there is no “objective” answer to the ques-tion of what the purposes and goals of public schools should be.

The implication of Dewey’s position is that we—the people—must de-cide what we want our society to be and, with that vision in mind, decidewhat the purposes of public education should be. The challenge then is as-suring that a pluralism of views on the nature and purposes of public schoolsis preserved in the process of defining what they should be. This is the prob-lem of democracy. It also explains why public schools are the object of criti-cism from various points along the political spectrum (e.g., from liberals andconservatives) as schools become the context in which we work out, in part,our collective aims and desires and who we are as a people.

Our understanding of what happens (as well as what various people wouldlike to see happen) in U.S. public schools can be enhanced by taking a closerlook at our conceptions of democracy and how democracy functions in con-temporary American society.

Democracy is most often understood as a system of government provid-ing a set of rules that allow individuals wide latitude to do as they wish. Thefirst principle of democracy, however, is providing means for giving powerto the people, not to an individual or to a restricted class of people. “De-mocracy,” Dewey said, is “a mode of associated living, of conjoint commu-

x General Editor’s Introduction

nicated experience.”2 In this conception, democratic life involves paying at-tention to the multiple implications of our actions on others. In fact, theprimary responsibility of democratic citizens is concern with the developmentof shared interests that lead to sensitivity to the repercussions of their ac-tions on others. Dewey further characterized democracy as a force that breaksdown the barriers that separate people and creates community.

From a Deweyan perspective, democracy is not merely a form of govern-ment nor is it an end in itself, it is the means by which people discover, ex-tend, and manifest human nature and human rights. For Dewey, democracyhas three roots: (a) free individual existence, (b) solidarity with others, and(c) choice of work and other forms of participation in society. The aim of ademocratic society is the production of free human beings associated withone another on terms of equality.

Dewey’s conception of democracy contrasts sharply with the prevailingpolitical economic paradigm—neoliberalism. Although the term neo-liberalism is largely unused by the public in the United States, it referencessomething everyone is familiar with—policies and processes that permit arelative handful of private interests to control as much as possible of sociallife in order to maximize their personal profit.3 Neoliberalism is embracedby parties across the political spectrum, from right to left, and is character-ized by social and economic policy that is shaped in the interests of wealthyinvestors and large corporations. The free market, private enterprise, con-sumer choice, entrepreneurial initiative, and government deregulation aresome important principles of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is not new. It is merely the current version of the wealthyfew’s attempt to restrict the rights and powers of the many. Although de-mocracy and capitalism are popularly understood (and often taught) as “birdsof a feather,” the conflict between protecting private wealth and creating ademocratic society is conspicuous throughout U.S. history. The framers ofthe U.S. Constitution were keenly aware of the “threat” of democracy. Ac-cording to James Madison, the primary responsibility of government was “toprotect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Madison believedthe threat to democracy was likely to increase over time as there was an in-crease in “the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships oflife and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessing.”4

In crafting a system giving primacy to property over people, Madison andthe framers were guarding against the increased influence of the unpropertiedmasses. The Federalists expected that the public would remain compliant anddeferential to the politically active elite—and for the most part that has beentrue throughout U.S. history. Despite the Federalists’ electoral defeat, theirconception of democracy prevailed, though in a different form, as industrialcapitalism emerged. Their view was most succinctly expressed by John Jay—president of the Continental Congress and first Chief Justice of the U.S.

General Editor’s Introduction xi

Supreme Court—who said “the people who own the country ought to gov-ern it.” Jay’s maxim is a principle upon which the United States was foundedand is one of the roots of neoliberalism.

For over two hundred years, politicians and political theoretists have ar-gued against a truly participatory democracy that engages the public in con-trolling their own affairs; for example, founding father Alexander Hamiltonwarned of the “great beast” that must be tamed. In the twentieth century,Walter Lippman warned of the “bewildered herd” that would trample itselfwithout external control, and the eminent political scientist Harold Lasswellwarned elites of the “ignorance and stupidity of the masses” and called forelites not to succumb to the “democratic dogmatisms” about people beingthe best judges of their own interests.

These perspectives have nurtured a neoliberal version of democracy thatturns citizens into spectators, deters or prohibits the public from managingits own affairs, and controls the means of information.5 This may seem anodd conception of democracy, but it is the prevailing conception of “liberal-democratic” thought—and it is the philosophical foundation for currentmainstream approaches to educational reform (known collectively as “stan-dards- based educational reform”). In spectator democracy, a specialized classof experts identifies what our common interests are and thinks and plansaccordingly. The function of the rest of us is to be “spectators” rather thanparticipants in action (for example, casting votes in elections or implement-ing educational reforms that are conceived by people who know little ornothing about our community, our desires, or our interests).

Although the Madisonian principle that the government should providespecial protections for the rights of property owners is central to U.S. de-mocracy, there is also a critique of inequality (and the principles ofneoliberalism)—in a tradition of thought that includes Thomas Jefferson,Dewey, and many others—that argues that the root of human nature is theneed for free creative work under one’s control.6 For example, ThomasJefferson distinguished between the aristocrats, “who fear and distrust thepeople and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higherclasses” and democrats, who “identify with the people, have confidence inthem, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe . . . depositoryof the public interest.”7

Dewey also warned of the antidemocratic effects of the concentration ofprivate power in absolutist institutions, such as corporations. He was clearthat, as long as there was no democratic control of the workplace and eco-nomic systems, democracy would be limited, stunted. Dewey emphasizedthat democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the coun-try through its control of “the means of production, exchange, publicity,transportation and communication, reinforced by command of the press,press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” “Politics,”Dewey said, “is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation

xii General Editor’s Introduction

of the shadow will not change the substance.” A free and democratic society,according to Dewey, is one where people are “masters of their own . . . fate.”8

Therefore, when it comes to determining the purposes of public schoolsin a democracy, the key factor is how one conceives of what democracy isand, as illustrated earlier, there are longstanding contradictions about thenature of democracy in the United States. In the contemporary context,mainstream discourse on the problems and the solutions for public schoolshas been based upon the principles of neoliberalism and manifest in stan-dards-based educational reform, the subject of many of the contributions toDefending Public Schools.

WHY ARE WE DEFENDING PUBLIC SCHOOLS?

The editors and authors of Defending Public Schools are not interested indefending the status quo. Each contributor is, however, very interested inpreserving public schools as a key part of the two-centuries-old experimentthat is American democracy. Public schools are in a centripetal position inour society and, as result, they always have been and will continue to bebattlegrounds for conflicting visions of what our society should be.

We believe that public schools serve the public, “We, the people.” Webelieve that schools should strengthen our democracy in the sense that ourability to meaningfully participate in the decision-making processes thatimpact our communities and our lives is enhanced, not constricted. Educa-tional resources need to be directed toward increasing people’s awarenessof the relevant facts about their lives and increasing people’s abilities to actupon these facts in their own true interests. Since the 1980s and even be-fore, the purposes of public schools have been by the interests of the stateand of concentrated private/corporate power, as follows from what I de-scribed earlier, as neoliberalism. We believe that public education ought toserve public interests, not the interests of private power and privilege.

At a time when our democracy and many of the liberties we hold dearare in crisis, we propose that the preservation of public schools is necessaryto reverse antidemocratic trends that have accelerated under standards-basededucational reforms, which intend to transform the nature and purposes ofpublic schools and our society. Each of the volumes in Defending PublicSchools takes on a different aspect of education, yet these volumes are boundtogether by the underlying assumption that preserving public schools is anecessary part of preserving democracy. The following ten points provide asynopsis of what defending public schools means to us:

1. The statist view of schools treats teachers as mere appendages to the machin-ery of the state and seeks to hold them accountable to serving the interests ofstate power. Linked as it is to the interests of private wealth, this view defineschildren’s value in life as human resources and future consumers. Education

General Editor’s Introduction xiii

should foster critical citizenship skills to advance a more viable and vibrantdemocratic society. Schools should be organized around preparing for demo-cratic citizenship through engagement with real-world issues, problem solving,and critical thinking, and through active participation in civic and political pro-cesses. Informed citizenship in a broad-based, grassroots democracy must bebased on principles of cooperation with others, nonviolent conflict resolution,dialogue, inquiry and rational debate, environmental activism, and the preser-vation and expansion of human rights. These skills, capacities, and dispositionsneed to be taught and practiced.

2. The current system uses “carrots and sticks” to coerce compliance with an alien-ating system of schooling aimed at inducing conformity among teachers andstudents through high-stakes testing and accountability. This system alienatesteachers from their work by stripping it of all creative endeavors and reduces itto following scripted lesson plans. We believe that teaching is a matter of theheart, that place where intellect meets up with emotion and spirit in constantdialogue with the world around us. We call for the elimination of high-stakesstandardized tests and the institution of more fair, equitable, and meaningfulsystems of accountability and assessment of both students and schools.

3. Current federal educational policy, embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act,sets impossible standards for a reason. Public access to institutions of learninghelps promote the levels of critical civic activism witnessed during the 1960sand 1970s that challenged the power of the state and the corporations that itprimarily serves. The current reform environment creates conditions in whichpublic schools can only fail, thus providing “statistical evidence” for an allegedneed to turn education over to private companies in the name of “freedom ofchoice.” In combination with the growing corporate monopolization of themedia, these reforms are part of a longer-range plan to consolidate privatepower’s control over the total information system, thus eliminating avenues forthe articulation of honest inquiry and dissent.

4. The current system of public schooling alienates students by stripping learn-ing from its engagement with the world in all of its complexity. It reduces learn-ing to test preparation as part of a larger rat race where students are situatedwithin an economic competition for dwindling numbers of jobs. We believethat educational excellence needs to be defined in terms of teachers’ abilitiesto inspire children to engage the world, for it is through such critical engage-ment that true learning (as opposed to rote memorization) actually occurs.Students living in the twenty-first century are going to have to deal with a hostof problems created by their predecessors: global warming and other ecologi-cal disasters, global conflicts, human rights abuses, loss of civil liberties, andother inequities. The curriculum needs to address what students need to knowand be able to do in the twenty-first century to tackle these problems—and itneeds to be relevant to students’ current interests and concerns.

5. Teachers matter. Teaching is a public act that bears directly on our collectivefuture. We must ensure the quality of the profession by providing meaningfulforms of preparation, induction, mentoring, professional development, careeradvancement, and improved working conditions. High learning standardsshould serve as guidelines, not curricular mandates, for teachers. Restore teachercontrol, in collaboration with students and communities, over decision mak-

xiv General Editor’s Introduction

ing about issues of curriculum and instruction in the classroom—no morescripted teaching, no more mandated outcomes, no more “teacher-proof” cur-ricula. Local control of education is at the heart of democracy; state and na-tionally mandated curriculum and assessment are a prescription for totalitari-anism.

6. In the past two decades, the corporate sector has become increasingly involvedwith education in terms of supplementing public spending in exchange forschool-based marketing (including advertising space in schools and textbooks,junk fast-food and vending machines, and commercial-laden “free” TV). Webelieve that students should not be thought of as a potential market or as con-sumers, but as future citizens.

7. All schools should be funded equally and fully, eliminating the dependence onprivate corporate funds and on property taxes, which create a two-tiered edu-cational system by distributing educational monies inequitably. Include universalprekindergarten and tuition-free higher education for all qualified students instate universities.

8. Children of immigrants make up approximately 20 percent of the children inthe United States, bringing linguistic and cultural differences to many class-rooms. Added to this are 2.4 million children who speak a language other thanEnglish at home. Ensure that the learning needs of English language learnersare met through caring, multicultural, multilingual education.

9. Citizens in a pluralistic democracy need to value difference and interact withpeople of differing abilities, orientations, ethnicities, cultures, and dispositions.Discard outmoded notions of a hypothetical norm, and describe either all stu-dents as different, or none of them. All classrooms should be inclusive, meet-ing the needs of all students together, in a way that is just, caring, challeng-ing, and meaningful.

10. All students should have opportunities to learn and excel in the fine and per-forming arts, physical education and sports, and extracurricular clubs and ac-tivities in order to develop the skills of interaction and responsibility necessaryfor participation in a robust civil society.

In the end, whether the savage inequalities of neoliberalism—which definecurrent social and national relations as well as approaches to school reform—will be overcome depends on how people organize, respond, learn, and teachin schools. Teachers and educational leaders need to link their own inter-ests in the improvement of teaching and learning to a broad-based move-ment for social, political, and economic justice, and work together for thedemocratic renewal of public life and public education in America.

***

I would like to acknowledge the many people who have contributed tothe creation of Defending Public Schools.

Each of my coeditors—David Gabbard, Kathleen Kesson, SandraMathison and Kevin D. Vinson—are first-rate scholars, without whom thisproject could never have been completed. They have spent untold hours

General Editor’s Introduction xv

conceiving of, writing for, and editing their respective volumes. I have learnedmuch from them as educators, researchers, and as advocates for more justand democratic schools and society.

I would also like to acknowledge the truly remarkable contributions ofthe chapter authors who have provided Defending Public Schools with cut-ting-edge analysis of the most recent educational research and practice. Iknow of no other work on issues of public schooling that brings together acomparable collection of highly respected scholars, researchers, and practi-tioners.

I would be terribly remiss not to acknowledge the tremendous supportand invaluable advice I have received from my editor, Marie Ellen Larcada.Defending Public Schools was initially envisioned by Marie Ellen, and she hasbeen an essential part of its successful completion. Additionally, I would liketo thank Shana Grob who, as our editorial assistant, was always attentive tothe crucial details and made editing these four volumes a much more man-ageable and enjoyable job.

Thanks also to the folks who inspire and support me on a daily basis,comrades who are exemplary scholars, teachers, and activists: Perry Marker,Kevin Vinson, Steve Fleury, David Hursh, Rich Gibson, Jeff Cornett, MarcBousquet, Heather Julien, Marc Pruyn, Valerie Pang, Larry Stedman, KenTeitelbaum, Ceola Ross Baber, Lisa Cary, John Welsh, Chris Carter, CurryMalott, Richard Brosio, and Dave Hill.

Lastly, words cannot express my love for Sandra, Rachel, and Colin.

xvi General Editor’s Introduction

Introduction:Teaching for a Democratic

SocietyKATHLEEN R. KESSON

We could have subtitled this book Teaching in a Democratic Society, suggest-ing that the work of democracy in the United States is a fait accompli.Indeed, living as we do in a society that hopes to export its version of de-mocracy to less democratic societies, we might rest content on our achieve-ments, satisfied that the work of the revolution that established the UnitedStates has been largely accomplished. That we chose to subtitle this textTeaching for a Democratic Society refers to our belief that although we havemade significant progress in the hard work of establishing a society that ful-fills the promise of democratic ideals, democracy itself is a work in progress.Elizabeth Minnich reminds us, with her notion of “aspirational democracy,”1

that one way to read the history of the United States is as a history of strugglefor basic human rights and for recognition. In this sense, the struggle con-tinues—the struggle for equity, rights, inclusion, freedom, and opportuni-ties. We still have work to do.

John Dewey is well known for his definition of democracy as a state ofbeing, rather than merely a form of government characterized by voting.Referring to its cultural rather than its constitutional aspect, he called de-mocracy “primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicatedexperience.”2 The key words in this phrase, associated, conjoint, and commu-nicated, all refer to the nature of the human connections that are essentialin a democratic society. With Dewey’s definition, we come to understandthat in a democracy, the positive development of a society is closely corre-lated with opportunities for the growth of individuals and vice versa; the

xviii Introduction

growth and development of individuals contributes to a flourishing democ-racy. The individual good is inextricable from the common good.

Our society, like many Western societies, is a pluralistic democracy; withinour national borders there are many different ethnic, religious, racial, andpolitical constituencies. Our society is even more diverse than when Deweywrote Democracy and Education in 1916, which he wrote, in part, to ad-dress the problems of education in a diverse society. Our present historicalmoment is characterized by increasing immigration and geographic mobil-ity. In New York City itself, where I teach, hundreds of different languagesand dialects are spoken. One of our biggest tasks as a society is to come toterms with this diversity and the conflicts and inequities that arise in a plu-ralistic society. Here again, Dewey offers sound advice. In a democracy (de-fined here as a social system in which the people rule themselves), eachmember of the society “has to refer his own action to that of others, and toconsider the actions of others to give point and direction to his own [which]is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and na-tional territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their ac-tivity.”3 I believe he is putting forth an ethical stance here—a stance thatrequires us all to consider the effects of our actions on diverse others andto be responsive to the needs and desires of others. A society characterizedby such an orientation would be a caring society; it would be a society inwhich “eros,” or love, was a dominant force. Contrasting democracy withfascism, one author notes, “if the major emotional sources of fascism are fearand destructiveness, eros may be seen to represent the emotional currents oflove that a democratic culture obviously requires.”4

We need not rely on altruism, however, as a foundation for such a soci-ety. The increased contact with diverse others, says Dewey, provides stimulifor growth and liberates otherwise suppressed human powers, both intellec-tual and practical. According to Jim Garrison, Dewey believed that “ourunderstanding of reality depends on the various standpoints used to gatherperspectives.” Because of the limited number of perspectives any one of uscan gather, “finite creatures can only grow wiser if they share perspectives,for seeing things from the standpoint of others also allows us to multiplyperspectives.”5 According to Garrison, this is why Dewey thought “dialoguesacross differences” are essential to human growth and development. Diver-sity increases our intelligence! Democracy, in this paradigm, signifies muchmore than a formal system of government. It is a moral way of living thatinvolves an inquiry-based, growth-oriented, open-minded, reciprocal, andresponsive stance in the world.

Judith Green, a more contemporary philosopher, develops these ideasfurther with her thesis of deep democracy, noting democracy’s unrealizedpotential: “democracy” she asserts, is “a realistic, historically grounded ideal,a desired and desirable future possibility that is yet to be”…a direction forfurther evolution of the full range of formally democratic institutions, as well

Introduction xix

as for growth of democratic habits of the heart and of the processes of in-quiry and education that support them.6 Green defines “habits of the heart”as “those characteristic, feeling-based, culturally shaped and located frame-works of value within which we perceive the world and formulate our ac-tive responses to it.”7 Deep democracy, or the cultural dimension of formaldemocracy, requires citizens who are self-reflective, interpersonally engaged,caring, imaginative, inquiring, and communicative.

In many ways, our democracy is in crisis at the current time. Elsewhere Ihave documented some of the challenges facing democracy.8 These challengesinclude antidemocratic trends due to the globalization of the economy, theconsolidation of the media, the expanding gap between the haves and thehave-nots, conflicts due to pluralism, the erosion of civil society, and thepolitical apathy of youth. Lately, corporate scandal and malfeasance, coupledwith government deceptions (most recently in regard to the national secu-rity strategy of preemptive war), have left many people, not just youth, feel-ing cynical and hopeless about the future of democracy.

One of the central indicators of the crisis in democracy is the loss of “pub-lic spaces,” or to use Cornel West’s suggestive metaphor, the “public square.”The metaphor of the public square brings to mind the small New Englandvillage with its literal grassy green square, bounded on four sides by churchesand public buildings, where people gather for political events, music, oroutdoor fairs and markets. Although the public square can be an actual place,West uses the metaphor to refer to “the common good that undergirds ournational and global destinies.”9 Public spaces are disappearing, literally andfiguratively, as more and more of our lives become dominated by consum-erism, the market, and self-interest. For example, people used to entertainthemselves when the work was done by playing music, telling stories, anddancing together. Now most people are isolated in their homes watchingcommercially produced television for entertainment. Many of the activitiesthat used to be carried out by the family and the community—food produc-tion, child care, care for the sick and the elderly, shelter building, and clothingconstruction—are now part of the market system; they have become“commodified.” Our governing system is, for the most part, a “weak de-mocracy”10 in which people have surrendered much of their decision-mak-ing power to their representatives who, in too many cases, really representcorporate rather than public interests.

Our opportunities for genuine contact and interaction with diverse oth-ers is limited to whom we see in the workplace and perhaps on our shop-ping trips. In a landmark study documented in the book Habits of theHeart,11 Robert Bellah and his co-researchers document the many ways thatour communities are losing their coherence and meaning. They point toindividualism, isolation, and fragmentation as root causes of the turn awayfrom participation in public life. Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone:America’s Declining Social Capital, documents the decline of civil society

xx Introduction

over the past several decades. Civil society is that network of interlockinginstitutions that exists between individuals and their government: social clubs,social justice, environmental and human rights and other types of politicalorganizations, parent-teacher organizations, and other voluntary groupswhere people come together for recreation, problem solving, civic activities,and the improvement of their own and others lives. These thinkers all linkthe decline of community, civil society, and public spaces to the erosion ofdemocracy. As Green notes, “Government grows out of, depends upon, andinfluences the operation of many other aspects of community life that shapethe life context of individuals, families, groups, and semi-autonomous cul-tures.”12 Without vital participation in cooperative, reciprocal, civic activi-ties, we surrender our governance to the professional politicians, who, asnoted above, may or may not have our democratic interests at heart.

Because of the nature of education as a “shaping and socializing” insti-tution, schools and teachers have a central role to play in the cultivation ofcitizens able and willing to engage in the hard work of “deepening democ-racy.” Green acknowledges the central role of “educational experiences askey tools in the process of ongoing democratic reformation of individuals,cultures, and societies.”13 This is important work to do, perhaps the mostimportant social service there is. Public schools are one of the few remain-ing “public spaces” where citizens collectively decide on issues of publicgood. Although federal control of education is more intrusive than ever withthe No Child Left Behind Act, we do have a tradition of local control ofschools in the United States. Democratically elected school boards, histori-cally, have hired and fired teachers, chosen textbooks, and made decisions,along with educational professionals, about curriculum and forms of assess-ment. Admittedly, local school boards have not always made democraticdecisions. Local school boards in the south, for example, sustained a tradi-tion of segregated schools well into the twentieth century. But the publicschool, with its local governance system, is now one of the few remainingspaces where people of all religions, ethnicities, races, languages, and cul-tures have the opportunity to practice the “arts” of deep democracy: dia-logue, cooperation, problem solving, shared learning, and planning for thecollective future. Private schools, and home schools, while perfectly capableof delivering high-quality education, are by nature exclusionary. They canpick and choose who attends, who their children come into contact with,and who their children are influenced by on the basis of any number of fac-tors: religious beliefs, problematic behavior, family income, test scores, andmany others. We must not forget that private schools—in particular, whitefundamentalist academies—grew exponentially following the court-ordereddesegregation of schools in the south. And lest we rest content with the as-sumption that progress has been made, it’s important to note that in NewYork City, for example, the private school population is far richer and whiterthan the public school population. Equally troubling is the fact that in many

Introduction xxi

New York City public schools, students are essentially segregated by race,ethnicity, and social class.

Public schools are just that—public—and are by law required to “take allcomers”—black, white, rich, poor, kids with “special needs,” immigrant, non-English speaking—however one defines the many differences between hu-man beings. Privatizing education, as many conservative politicians andcorporate leaders would like to do, would remove education from public,democratic control and would separate people even further by social class,race, lifestyle, interests, and numerous other factors. Even more problem-atic, privatization threatens to siphon needed resources until only the poorare left in the public schools. But the promise of public schools—the idea,as Debbie Meier puts it “that every citizen is capable of the kind of intellec-tual competence previously attained by only a small minority”14—is an ideaand a reality worth struggling for if we are not to give up the idea of a com-mon democratic culture.

Defending public schools, as we propose to do in the pages of this book,does not mean that one must be a cheerleader for all that currently goes onin schools. As Herb Kohl says, “it is possible to defend public educationwithout having to defend the public schools as they currently exist.”15 Pub-lic intellectuals, including teachers, have a responsibility to act as cultural crit-ics, bringing attention to the ways in which schools are not realizing theirdemocratic ideals and helping the broader public understand the complicatedconnections between schooling and the crisis in democracy. In addition tooffering critique, educators also have a responsibility to instill hope and of-fer up alternative visions of potential futures. We have tried to live up to theseresponsibilities in these pages; while highlighting the despair that is causingtoo many fine teachers to leave the profession, and offering penetrating cri-tique of the conditions that are causing this, we place alongside this critiquemultiple positive visions of what could be.

Currently, the teaching profession is under assault in many ways. Teach-ers are faced with a standardization, testing, and management regime thatundermines many of the values they hold dear: that students have a rightto a rich, engaging, and experiential curriculum; that everyone deserves anequal chance; that students have the right to participate in decisions aboutwhat and how they will learn; that cooperation offers more opportunitiesfor learning than competition; and that teachers are responsible for thephysical, social, and emotional growth of students as well as their testscores. Politicians, business leaders, and the media have placed much of theblame for the academic failures of students and schools on the allegedshortcomings of teachers, as though the challenges of unemployment,poverty, language differences, dangerous neighborhoods, and shatteredfamilies did not exist. With all this disparagement, one wonders how somany teachers do find enough personal fulfillment in teaching to stay inthe profession.

xxii Introduction

Teachers matter. In my work as a teacher educator, I have listened tocountless stories from prospective teachers about why they have chosen thisdifficult and demanding profession. Usually, their reasons involve a formerteacher who made a genuine difference in their lives, one who turned themon to the delights of fine literature, who convinced them that they too couldlearn, or who supported them through a personal crisis. The responsibili-ties and obligations of teaching are unique to the profession. Many adultsmay be engaged in professions that guide and assist young people: doctorshelp heal wounds and illness and give health advice, counselors assist youngpeople in decision making and interpersonal relations, priests and ministersattend to the spiritual development of the young. Teachers, however, accord-ing to David Hansen, “place both intellectual and moral development at theircenter in [the] formal and public ways.”16 Though the practice of teaching,he says, changes and evolves over time, what remains is the fact that “it is apublic act that bears directly on the shaping of society.”17 What teachers do,and who teachers are, makes a difference to our future. In terms of the themeof this book, what teachers do and who they are makes a difference inwhether we move toward a future characterized by equity, social justice,cooperation, participation, and peace—deep democracy—or a future charac-terized by hostility, racial, ethnic, and religious tensions, competition,resegregation, increasing gaps between the haves and the have-nots, and acorporate government that governs in its own interests rather than in theinterest of democracy.

Many ideas have been put forth for the improvement of teaching. Some,like increasing teacher salaries to bring them up to par with those of otherprofessionals, mentoring new teachers, creating meaningful career ladders forteachers, and providing opportunities for teachers to carry out research intheir classrooms, strike us as worthwhile reforms to focus on. Other ideas—teacher-proofing the curriculum, creating competition among teachers withmerit-based pay systems, getting rid of teacher unions, and linking teacheradvancement to student achievement—seem punitive and potentially dam-aging to the profession. Few prescriptions for the improvement of the pro-fession, however, explicitly link the work of teachers to the deepening ofdemocracy. These chapters outline the contours of a profession that couldtake on the challenges of this important cultural work. In each chapter, youwill find a critique of existing conditions—refusals to accept that the waythings currently are is the way things have to be. There are some troublingmetaphors embodied in these pages—metaphors such as melancholia (Salvio)and alienation (Kesson). And there are troubling realities here as well—therealities of everyday oppressions (Traugh,) of racism (Howard and Aleman),and of the many ways that people exclude others on the basis of differencesof ability, ethnicity, language, or culture (Ooka Pang and Jones; Sapon-Shevin). Coupled with critique and the recognition that we live in troubledtimes, however, you will find positive, optimistic visions in these pages. Not

Introduction xxiii

impossible dreams, like those of Don Quixote, but realistic, practical ideasabout what teachers can do to fulfill the democratic promises of our publicschools. Images of authenticity, of empowerment, of “befriending,” of ac-tivism, and of inclusion—all present, powerful “counternarratives” to themore discouraging educational stories of the present time.

In part I, “Teacher Education and Teacher Development,” the authorstake a look at important and neglected aspects of teacher preparation, teacherdevelopment, and the assessment of teacher quality. Hearkening to JudithGreen’s idea that in a deep democracy, “intelligent judgment is the key toresponsible and effective action, whether individual or collective, and it re-quires the kind of pragmatic processes of inquiry that reveal and antecedentlyweigh the consequences of specific choices,”18 the first three chapters takeup the idea of teacher inquiry, looking specifically at how teachers learn tothink about educational problems and issues. In “Cultivating DemocraticCurriculum Judgments: Toward a Mature Profession,” Kathleen Kesson andJames Henderson, drawing from their collaborative work on teacher reflec-tion and curriculum wisdom, present a useful model to guide teachers in thecultivation of their capacities to practice democratic curriculum judgments.Though they advocate for the inclusion of sophisticated inquiry processesin preservice education, their work is perhaps most important in terms ofthe development of teacher leadership. They note that, just as the UnitedStates is engaged in the long-term experiment to become a mature democ-racy, so are teachers engaged in a long-term project to bring maturity to theirprofession, and they link the maturity of the teaching profession to the qualityof teachers’ judgments. They believe that an inquiry-based orientation toeducating young people is an absolutely necessary component of the com-mitment to educate for a deepened democracy.

Cecelia Traugh, in “Finding the Color of the Sky: Inquiry in TeacherPreparation,” draws upon her work in an urban teacher-preparation programto demonstrate the importance of placing “Inquiry” at the heart of the edu-cation of new teachers. She foregrounds the voices of new teachers as theystruggle with what it means to develop a consciously critical stance and towork against the grain of standardization and the teacher-proof curriculumthat characterizes much of the work in schools today. Such “de-skilling” hasa profound effect: “… rendered inert as thinkers, imaginers, and seekers ofmeaning, teachers become “objects” and become subject to manipulation,and they, in turn, educate children into habits of mindlessness.” The system-atic approach to developing the inquiry capacities in new teachers that sheoutlines provides a powerful antidote to such mindlessness and supports theimportant work of envisioning different ways of seeing, different ways offeeling and different ways of creating relationships.

Sonia Murrow, in “Informing the Present, Illuminating the Past: HistoricalKnowledge and Teacher Development,” approaches the question of inquiryand teacher thinking from a different, yet complementary, perspective, ar-

xxiv Introduction

guing for the importance of educational history to teacher knowledge anddecision making at a time when history is often left to the margins of teachereducation. Educational philosopher David Hansen speaks to the importanceof locating oneself in a professional history and tradition with these words:“If one conceives of oneself as working in a practice whose origins residefar in the past, and whose value will persist long into the future, one canderive additional sources of strength and perhaps even of imagination as ateacher.”19 Murrow develops a persuasive argument that such a historicalgrounding can give teachers an improved capacity for citizenship in a soci-ety of educators, strengthening their ability to have critical perspectives onthe relationships between schooling and society. Earlier we noted the im-portance of this “public intellectual work,” the responsibility that teachershave to educate the public about the democratic purposes of schooling.Understanding one’s professional history can lend depth and insight to theunderstanding of one’s present and provide imaginative alternatives for thefuture.

Paul Shaker, in “Standards, Testing, and Teacher Quality: Common Sensevs. Authority in Educational Reform,” takes on the difficult issue of assess-ing the quality of teachers. He contrasts the corporate/government inter-est in simplistic, quantitative measures with a more subjective and multivalentview that recognizes the complexity of assessing “quality.” Shaker connectsmany dots in the big picture of education and politics, linking the domina-tion of the profession by political interests with the issues of who controlsthe curriculum and the standards upon which learning is based. Echoingsome of Kesson and Henderson’s concerns about the maturity and integ-rity of the profession, Shaker maintains that “[A] wise and just society mustfind means to effectively draw the line between political control and profes-sional practice in education if it is to prosper in both material and spiritualterms.” He stakes out a position in this regard that links an ethical stancewith issues of quality control, suggesting an alternative framework for think-ing about teacher quality that deserves the attention of the profession andof policymakers. His chapter contains an illuminating brief history of Pro-gressive Education, highlighting the ways that “socially Progressive educa-tors take seriously the democratic vision of American society in which a fulleffort is made to provide equal opportunity for all.”

In part II, “The Labor of Teaching,” we move from an examination ofteacher preparation and teacher development to an assessment of the dailyworking lives of teachers. In this section, we look closely at what it meansto be a teacher in a public school today and face head on the crisis that iscausing so many fine teachers to retire early or find new careers. Two of ourauthors examine working conditions in New York City public schools, wherea massive restructuring of the entire system is currently taking place. Inter-estingly, they both include the word alienation in their titles, which suggestsa profession in crisis. Paula Salvio, in “A Dangerous, Lucid Hour: Compli-

Introduction xxv

ance, Alienation, and the Restructuring of New York City High Schools,”explores why so many teachers that she works with feel that they live in a“reactive state, devoid of influence and stripped of power.” She looks at theimpact of high-stakes testing and the “Ramp-up to Literacy” curriculum thathas been mandated for low-scoring students, and draws troubling connec-tions between the new centralized curriculum and instruction directives andthe resegregation of schools. “Work,” says Salvio, “must hold meaning; itmust afford persons the opportunity to engage with what is necessary as wellas with what is fulfilling.” But work, in the context of the “commodifiedcurriculum” represented by the Ramp-Up program, leads more toward“melancholia” than to fulfillment, a Freudian notion that Salvio explores withinsight and compassion. Kathleen Kesson, in “An ‘Inhuman Power: Alien-ated Labor in Low-Performing Schools,” explores the roots of the idea ofalienated labor in the work of Marx and looks at how critical pedagogy hasincorporated these ideas into its framework. She draws upon interviews withteachers in New York City for insights into how they are experiencing thelabor of teaching as “alienated” and, additionally, looks at how issues of raceand social class intersect with the experiences of these teachers. Both authorsarticulate moments of hope: Salvio in the melancholic revolt of two teach-ers who throw off the norms promoted by the Ramp-up program for anexplicit, alternative pedagogy that simultaneously incorporates the Ramp-upprotocol and challenges it; Kesson in describing a moment of resistance whena teacher understands the importance of “subverting the system”—in hercase, deviating from the scripted curriculum when issues of race and inter-nalized oppression seem more pressing.

The converse of alienation, in terms of teaching, could be defined as “au-thenticity.” In her chapter, Kesson conceptualizes “de-alienation,” or authen-ticity, ” as a “moving horizon defined by continuous intellectual growth, therefinement of craft, the integration of conception and execution, enhancedcreativity, and consistent use of and improvement in the quality of profes-sional judgments.” Kevin Vinson, Rich Gibson, and E. Wayne Ross take upthis notion of authenticity in “Pursuing Authentic Teaching in an Age ofStandardization,” arguing against the testing regime that has promoted “con-formity and oppression” and that “works against vigorous struggles for pro-found and substantive school change, both politically and pedagogically.”These authors care passionately about the democratic tasks of justice, equality,fairness, and anti-oppression. Drawing upon Dewey, they critique the cur-rent standards and testing mania on the basis of both good curriculum think-ing and the project of deep democracy. High-stakes testing, they argue,“represents not only an inadequate method of pedagogy, per se, but also athreat to democratic society—that is, a contradiction, an un- or antidemo-cratic means of preparing children for an engaged democratic social andpolitical life… in effect, the conditions and characteristics of standardizedtesting contradict those of democracy, leaving instead—in democracy’s

xxvi Introduction

wake—an institutionalized mechanism of authoritarian—externally pro-duced—social and intellectual conformity, a regime of “top-down” pedagogi-cal control.”

What would an authentic approach to teaching look like in practice? Allthe authors in this section point to many ways in which deep democracymight be operationalized within the context of classrooms, but Susan Laird,in “Gender and the Construction of Teaching,” looks at the simple yet pro-found notion of “befriending”—defined by her as “a gift offered to or byteachers or students as neither reward nor bribe, but as ‘a companion totransformation, . . . the actual agent of change, the bearer of new life.’” Be-friending speaks to the “deep” in deep democracy, the heartfelt exchangesbetween human beings that are at the core of genuine social transformation.Befriending is the “eros” of democracy—embodying the emotional currentsof love that a democratic culture obviously requires.

The challenges facing teachers who hope to teach in an authentic way,befriending students and furthering the work of deep democracy, are im-mense, as Perry Marker points out in “Another Brick in the Wall: High-StakesTesting in Teacher Education—The California Teacher Performance Assess-ment.” Blaming teachers for education’s perceived “failures,” notes Marker,“is part of the conservative culture of criticism” that has resulted in “sim-plistic and punitive reform efforts.” Not only do standards and high-stakestests undermine good teaching, Marker reminds us, there is no research evi-dence whatsoever that their use enhances student achievement and learning.Marker’s chapter raises important and timely concerns for both teachers andteacher educators, and reveals some of the hidden economic, political, andacademic costs of the new California Teacher Performance Assessment.

Part III of the book, “Teaching for Social Justice,” draws attention tocritical issues that must be understood by teachers who care deeply aboutthe work of teaching for a democratic society. In “Caring-Centered Multi-cultural Education: Addressing the Academic and Writing Needs of EnglishLearners,” Valerie Ooka Pang and Evangelina Bustamante Jones address thechallenge to teachers of increasing numbers of students who bring a widerange of linguistic and cultural diversity to public schools. Drawing upon caretheory, sociocultural theories of learning, and Dewey’s ideas of democraticeducation, these authors argue the importance of trusting relationships, acaring community, and appreciation for students’ cultural and linguistic back-grounds in work with English Language Learners (ELL).

Tyrone Howard and Glenda R. Aleman, in “The Role of Race in TeacherEducation: Using Critical Race Theory to Develop Racial Consciousness andCompetence,” affirm Green’s ideas about race, worth quoting at length here:

To refuse to face the real meaning and power of the concept of race within theordinary, historically conditioned, philosophically laden language-games ofAmerican society is to refuse to accept responsibility for the still unredeemed

Introduction xxvii

failures and obligations that have descended from the past to our present times,and that will be transferred to the future regardless of whether we acknowl-edge them—unless we face and transform both the meaning of ‘race’ and therace-related deformities in our attitudes, characters, institutions, and distribu-tions of basic social goods during our present era.20

Although Howard and Aleman believe that “schools can become the impe-tus behind the change that our society desperately deserves and needs,” theyremind us that deep democracy is indeed a work in progress and that racialpolitics are played out in countless school policies, practices, and programson a regular basis in many of our nation’s schools. Using critical race theoryas a conceptual lens, they argue for a much more sustained and systematicapproach in teacher education programs to the examination of race and rac-ism.

Quoting Judith Green again, “Deep democracy can guide the develop-ment of characters with socially conscious responsible agency, as well as theemergence of a more sensitive awareness of each individual’s gifts and needs,and a fuller realization of our most valuable human potentials.”21 MaraSapon-Shevin helps us to understand what this quote implies, in “ThinkingInclusively about Inclusive Education.” She brings home the very real de-mographic changes that are impacting our schools: “Demographers predictthat students of color will make up nearly half of the U.S. school-age popu-lation by 2020. Children of immigrants make up approximately 20 percentof the children in the United States, bringing linguistic and cultural differ-ences to many classrooms. Added to this are 2.4 million children who speaka language other than English at home, one in five children who live in pov-erty, and children who come from a huge variety of different types of fami-lies.” Add to this the many “special needs” and learning differences thatchildren have, and we must finally concede, as Sapon-Shevin suggests, thatthe word minority is “a term with diminishing utility.” We can no longerteach to a hypothetical norm, says this author, nor can we treat differenceas something unexpected, undesirable, or unnoticeable in the classroom.Inclusive classrooms need to be the “new norm” and “we must either de-scribe ALL students as different, or none of them.” Inclusiveness resonatesin every respect with the ideals of deep democracy. Mara Sapon-Shevin cap-tures the relationship between education and democracy quite well with herstatement that “Schools have always been and will continue to be powerfulsocializing agents; democratic, inclusive schools make democratic, inclusivesocieties more possible.”

We noted in the beginning of this introduction that democracy might bebest thought of as a work in progress and that it involves the ongoingstruggle for rights and recognition. Nowhere is this struggle more apparentthan in the historical battles over public schooling. In his fine piece, “Thingsto Come: Teachers’ Work and the Broken Promises of Urban School Reform

xxviii Introduction

in an Age of High-Stakes Testing,” Dennis Carlson notes the many ways thatteachers and students are adversely affected by the current wave of schoolreform and offers an argument in favor of teachers’ “politicizing” their in-terests—that is, to make the connections between their own professionalinterests as educators and broader social movements for the democratizationof public education and public life. He urges teachers to “link their owninterests with the transformation of urban schooling as part of a broad-basedmovement for social and economic justice, and for the democratic renewalof public life and public education in America.” Carlson thus positions teach-ers as activist intellectuals who understand the deep connection betweeneducation and democracy and who are willing to stand up for the principlesand beliefs that brought them into the profession. Teachers, Carlson remindsus, have been in the vanguard of progressive social ideals. They “have workedfor a more multicultural and inclusive curriculum, for more programs to helpthose young people struggling with the effects of poverty and discrimina-tion, for the rights of teachers to academic freedom, for the rights of gayand lesbian teachers and students, and so on. They have been among themost active fighters for the idea of public education in the face of a conser-vative discourse of privatization and the market.” These stirring words giveus hope, and they act as a clarion call to informed activism. This metaphorof “activist” contrasts sharply with metaphors of “inertness” or “passivity”or “compliance” or “alienation.” It is a metaphor of movement, of creativepower, of love, and of hope. We hope it catches your attention, captures yourinterest, and sparks your commitment. Perhaps, to paraphrase GeorgeCounts,22 schools (and teachers) just might “dare to build a new social or-der.” It is a vision worth holding onto. In these troubling times, we needvision—and we need hope and action and deep democratic solidarity.

— I —

Teacher Educationand Teacher Development

— 1 —

Cultivating DemocraticCurriculum Judgments:

Toward a Mature ProfessionKATHLEEN R. KESSON AND JAMES G. HENDERSON

INTRODUCTION

We have a hope and a vision for public education in the United States. De-spite trends to the contrary, we imagine increasing numbers of teachers as-suming responsibility for their day-to-day curriculum judgments. MaxineGreene, writing about this important aspect of teaching says, “For all of thepresent-day insistence on ‘uniform curriculum’ and on the right of admin-istrators and officials to shape curriculum, decide on assessment, and an-nounce standards, the practicing teacher within the classroom today has tomake existential choices at particular moments of classroom life. This meanschoices made on the teacher’s own responsibility, with all the anxiety thatcomes from there being no ‘right answer.’”1 Taking responsibility for “exis-tential choices” requires a sophisticated intelligence that signifies more thanmere technical knowledge. A profession with responsibility for exercising wisejudgment is a mature profession. In this chapter, we examine what needs tobe done to move teaching into congruence with other recognized matureprofessions, such as medicine and law.

Educators with more responsibility for making judgments would thinkdeeply about what they are trying to accomplish with their students and why,and their professional reflections would be informed by considering the “bigpicture” of American education. They would understand that the UnitedStates is engaged in a long-term experiment to become a mature democraticcivilization. They would recognize that their country has made progress since

4 Defending Public Schools

its birth but that it still has a long way to go, and they would believe thatthey can contribute to this historic effort in their own small ways. In simpleterms, they would feel pride that they are working as committed democraticeducators.

The public educators we envision are not naïve. They would recognizethat many of their teaching and administrative colleagues approach their workfrom different frames of reference. Some focus solely on the technical as-pects of the latest reform agendas or professional fads, while others act outof self-interested or ideological orientations. The self-interested educatorsmay feel that they do not have sufficient time or energy to consider “the bigpicture” implications of their work, or they may be satisfied to play theirtraditional assigned roles as long as everyone else does the same and as longas their salary and benefits are adequate. The ideological educators expectothers to think as they do; in fact, they may even describe themselves as“democratic” and label those who hold different beliefs as “undemocratic.”

The public educators we envision would also be cognizant of the deep-seated structural obstacles that constrain and inhibit their work. They rec-ognize that, in an ideal world, they would have the necessary resources, time,and professional support to exercise democratic curriculum judgments. Theyknow that this is not the case, but they still do the best they can. They arenot deterred or discouraged with the barriers they must daily confront. LikeVoltaire’s main character, Candide, they are neither hardened cynics nor wild-eyed romantics.2 They are realistic optimists, grateful that they have theopportunity to “cultivate their own garden.” Like the public educators weimagine, we believe that our vision for the future of American education isnot naïve. We think there are a sufficient number of public educators whofeel a deep “calling” to their profession and, if given the opportunity, wouldgladly cultivate their capacities to practice democratic curriculum judgments.Ideally, they would be provided with this opportunity during their preservicepreparations; but if this did not happen, they could still benefit from thiscapacity-building work in a wide range of in-service contexts. In this chap-ter, we will present one way that teachers can cultivate their capacities topractice democratic curriculum judgments and will conclude with a discus-sion of how this professional development approach can be enacted in di-verse preservice and in-service contexts. We feel very committed to what weare presenting in this chapter because we firmly believe that the maturity ofthe education profession is intimately tied to the quality of teachers’ curricu-lum judgments.

THREE INSIGHTS INTO DEMOCRATIC JUDGMENTS

Democratic curriculum judgments have three key interrelated features—liberal insight, Socratic insight, and pragmatic insight—that can be explained

Cultivating Democratic Curriculum Judgments 5

using analogies from other professions. Imagine undergoing an annual physi-cal exam with your physician in a particular way. You begin by taking sev-eral tests, including the monitoring of your blood pressure and heartbeat.Your doctor then gives you a rigorous physical exam, asking you a series ofquestions. During this questioning, the doctor and you also explore somespecific ways, such as the initiation of a diet and exercise plan, that you canestablish a healthier lifestyle. At the end of the entire process, which has takenabout ninety minutes, you are told that your health appears to be good.However, this judgment is somewhat tentative until the data from all of thetests come in. This will take a couple of weeks, and you will be called withthe final results. Your doctor has carefully considered a wide range of healthfactors in close consultation with you before reaching any decisions, and sheis clearly open to any information that can inform her judgment. She rec-ognizes that your good health is closely tied to the way you live your life,and she problem solves with you on this matter. Specifically, she wants youto think deeply about the consequences of your diet and exercise decisions,and she wants you to understand that, in many important ways, you are re-sponsible for your own health.

Turning from medicine to law, a judge trying a case weighs evidence frommultiple sources to try to assess the guilt or innocence of the parties involved.Judges rely on the testimony of other experts, they attend to the question-ing of witnesses, and they assess the truth claims of the plaintiffs and defen-dants based on both tacit and explicit kinds of knowledge. They take intoconsideration precedents set in other cases and the criteria for appropriatesentencing, and then they exercise (ideally) discretion and objectivity in com-ing to their judgments. Like physicians, they often try to convince peopleinvolved in court cases to think about the consequences of their actions andto take more responsibility for their behavior.

There are ways in which the clinical judgments of physicians, the legaldecisions of judges, and the curriculum judgments of teachers are related.There is, first, the liberal insight, which draws on the liberal arts heritage ofWestern classical education. This is the insight that professional freedom—professional “liberation” through “liberalization”—is realized through thecultivation of multi-intelligent decision making. Drawing on the work ofAdam Smith and Immanuel Kant, Samuel Fleischacker argues that judgmentsthat are informed by a “free play” of our faculties represent human freedomat its best. He explains:

It may sound unexciting to announce that one wants to make the world freefor good judgment, but this quiet doctrine turns out to be the most sensible,most decent, and at the same time richest concept of liberty we can possiblyfind. . . A world where everyone can develop and use their own judgment asmuch as possible is closer to what we really want out of freedom.3


This understanding of freedom is fostered in a quality liberal arts curricu-lum. In a recent speech to incoming undergraduates at the University ofChicago, Andrew Abbott notes that a liberal education nurtures “the habitof looking for new meanings, of seeking new connections, of investing ex-perience with complexity or extension that makes it richer or longer, eventhough it remains anchored in some local bit of social space and time.”4 Thisis exactly how we imagine your physician making a judgment about the sta-tus of your health. She leaves no stone unturned; she considers all possibili-ties; and she practices an “eclectic artistry”—a term coined by Joseph Schwabto describe sophisticated curriculum judgments that are informed by “theserial utilization or even the conjoint utilization of two or more theories onpractical problems.”5

We are also working with the Socratic insight. The responsible curricu-lum judgment we envision can be described as an exercise in practical wis-dom. Wisdom is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the capacityof judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; soundness of judg-ment in the choice of means and ends; sometimes, less strictly, sound sense,especially in practical affairs.” Judges operating in the theater of the court-room are concerned with the practical affairs of daily life and with ethicalquestions of right and wrong in the context of a democratic society. Thiskind of judgment is based not on absolutes but on prevailing cultural normsmediated by interpretative wisdom. Similarly, when teachers work as demo-cratic educators concerned with the “big picture,” they are committing them-selves to the practice of curriculum wisdom, a capacity that is similarlyconcerned with both the practical affairs of daily life (teaching young peopleto read and write) and ethical questions (teaching young people values suchas respect, honesty, and fair play). We feel it is best to approach curriculumwisdom from a love of wisdom perspective—the frame of reference that servesas the etymological source for “philosophy.” To love wisdom is not the sameas assuming that one is wise. In fact, it is its humble opposite. To love wis-dom is to practice an openhearted and open-minded life of inquiry. PierreHadot, who tells a story of the practice of wisdom from Socrates to thepresent time in Western societies, describes the love of wisdom as “a never-ending quest.”6

A love of wisdom practiced in any of the three professions we have dis-cussed requires a disciplined life of inquiry. It is not so much a specific wayof acting as it is a way of being. We imagine your physician working withyou in this inquiry spirit. Luckily for you, she continuously studies mattersof “good health” by reading medical journals, attending conferences, andparticipating in other professional development activities. Her decisions areinformed by the latest research findings. Just as important, she understandsthat “good health” is a way of being, and she works with you out of thisdeep understanding of a healthy lifestyle.


Finally, we are working with the pragmatic insight. There are two facetsto this insight. There is the recognition that means and ends in all humanactions are deeply embedded in one another due to the fact that the mean-ing of an activity is realized in its consequences. Cleo Cherryholmes explains:

Pragmatism looks to consequences that we endlessly bump up against. We re-spond to and live with outcomes all day, everyday. These results come fromour actions and those of others. They also come from events beyond our con-trol. Pragmatists anticipate outcomes. They look to imagined and actual out-comes. . . Pragmatists conceptualize the world where we, all of us, are constantlythrown forward as the present approaches but never quite reaches the future.Pragmatism is a discourse that attempts to bridge where we are with where wemight end up. The future, the other unknown side of this bridge, can certainlybe forbidding. There is little, if anything, that we can say with confidence aboutit. The temptation is to look backward. Pragmatism resists this siren’s song byaccepting the challenge to look ahead.7

The second facet of the pragmatic insight is the recognition that “demo-cratic goodness” should serve as the moral referent for our consideration ofthe consequences of our actions. Pragmatists take this position because theyfeel that democratic consequences have the most enduring value in humanlives. On the eve of World War II—at a very dramatic point in the contestof human civilizations—a seventy-nine-year-old John Dewey, possessing awealth of life experiences, gave voice to this moral outlook:

The democratic road is the hard one to take. It is the road which places thegreatest burden of responsibility upon the greatest number of human beings.Backsets and deviations occur and will continue to occur. But that which is itsown weakness at particular times is its strength in the long course of humanhistory. Just because the cause of democratic freedom is the cause of the full-est possible realization of human potentialities, the latter when they are sup-pressed and opposed will in time rebel and demand an opportunity for mani-festation. We have advanced far enough to say that democracy is a way of life.We have yet to realize that it is a way of personal life and one which provides amoral standard for personal conduct.8

We imagine our judge working in the courtroom in this pragmatic way. Herjudgments are based on a careful consideration of the consequences ofpeople’s actions as well as by their actions alone. Democracies are by defini-tion societies ruled by law. In an ideal democratic society, citizens would haveinternalized ideas of “good conduct” and there might be no need of arbi-ters to judge right from wrong and mete out consequences. In our imper-fect democratic society, we still have need of judges to deliberate over suchmatters and stand as intermediaries between moral standards for personalconduct and human behavior.


All the professionals we have mentioned have a high level of responsibil-ity toward their fellow citizens. Physicians engage in life and death decisions.Judges hold people’s freedom in their hands. And educators take actions ona daily basis that have long-term implications for children’s physical, emo-tional, social, and intellectual development.

AN APPROACH TO DEMOCRATIC CURRICULUMJUDGMENTS

All mature professions have intrinsic forms of research and inquiry thatfoster the interpretive wisdom necessary to making sound professional judg-ments. We have created an “arts of inquiry” guide for teachers that capital-izes on the liberal, Socratic, and pragmatic features of democratic curriculumjudgments.9 Our sense of artistry is tied to Joseph Schwab’s recognition thateducational practices require a certain subtlety and suppleness:

The particularities of each practical problem can be sought in the practical situ-ation itself. . . . The methods by which these ends might be achieved, have, how-ever, a complication of their own. Although they can be described and exem-plified, they cannot be reduced to generally applicable rules. Rather, in eachinstance of their application, they must be modified and adjusted to the caseat hand. Because of this complication, I call them arts.10

Our guide is designed to facilitate the practice of seven interrelated modesof curriculum thinking, or as we have termed these, inquiry modes. An in-quiry mode is like a literary genre, which embodies a particular way of know-ing, a mode or mood of operation, and an archetypal style or voice. We havechosen the metaphor of a hologram as a way of envisioning the relationshipsbetween and among the seven inquiry modes. In a hologram, while the wholeis constituted of parts, each part also contains the whole. Further, under-standing the whole from any partial perspective gives a slightly different fo-cus to it. We use ancient Greek terms for our seven modes to suggest theirarchetypal qualities and to acknowledge the ancient roots of our democraticheritage. Teachers who inquire into curriculum problems (and we referbroadly here to such activities as program design, curriculum development,lesson planning and instructional methods, assessment, and organizationaldevelopment) using such a multifaceted guide are better equipped to facili-tate meaningful educational journeys for their students in the context of the“democratic good life.” Further, this increased capacity for sophisticatedprofessional judgment supports the development of a mature profession.

The Seven Modes of Inquiry

We turn first to techné. Techné is etymologically related to the word “tech-nique” and signifies the practical activity by which people carry out their craft


and the tools they use, be it jewelry making, auto mechanics, surgery, orteaching. Techné is most associated with instrumental (“how-to”), means-ends thinking. In the solving of practical problems, teachers consider a widerange of technical solutions: Would this concept be learned best throughdirect instruction or by more exploratory, cooperative group work? ShouldI use math manipulatives to help my students understand fractions? ShouldI integrate a history unit with an English Language Arts unit? How can Icreate activities that will foster “higher-order thinking?”

Many teachers engage in formal and informal action research in their class-rooms, in which they identify problems to be solved, hypothesize solutions,make plans based on these hypotheses, implement solutions, and reflect uponthe outcome. Techné, as an inquiry mode, is similar to action research. Formany educators, this is the most important and familiar form of problemsolving. However, an educator may be a fine technician with a strong graspof her or his subject matter and still not lead students toward an apprecia-tion of democracy as a moral way of living. So we turn to another site onour inquiry map.

Poesis, etymologically related to the word poetry, concerns itself with theaesthetic dimension of life. Curriculum thinking in an aesthetic mode involvesmuch more than just considerations of technique. It calls forth emotionalresponses, creativity, intuition, and personal perceptions of beauty and or-der. Asking aesthetic questions suggests a deeper involvement with questionsof meaning. In many ways, contemporary teachers are expected to be func-tionaries, carrying out the standardized mandates of bureaucratic policies.But poesis is the enemy of standardization, because standardization dehuman-izes us.

Teachers who work out of a poesis mode think of teaching as a calling, ora vocation, that calls upon their best selves. In turn, they are engaged withcalling forth the best selves of the young people they work with. Rather thanfocusing on test scores, zero tolerance classroom management, or the ac-quisition of simple basic skills, such teachers are more concerned with thedevelopment of caring human beings who have the capacities for wonder,excitement, curiosity, empathy, creativity, and pleasure. Poesis, as an inquirymode, suggests a high level of personal knowledge. We believe that such self-reflectivity is a necessary component of wise judgments. However, it is notsufficient if the goal is to foster democratic living. In addition to familiaritywith technique and the aesthetic, poetic dimensions of living, teachers mustalso have a well-developed critique of the existing society and its dynamicsof power, authority, domination, and oppression. Praxis offers such a modeof critical inquiry.

With critical inquiry, educators cultivate their awareness of social, eco-nomic, and political inequities. Teaching for democratic living requires acareful reconsideration of the overt, tacit, and covert relations of power be-tween people, as well as the injustices built into institutions. When critical


inquiry is integrated into educator’s reflective practices, it is often calledpraxis. The resulting reflective action is directed toward increasing justice,equity, or freedom.

Teachers who work out of the praxis mode of inquiry are keenly awareof how larger social inequities play out in classrooms. They understand theways that the school curriculum and instructional methods can work to re-produce the oppression and inequalities of the larger society. They are sen-sitized to these issues as they work to create environments that are fair andinclusive and to raise issues of social justice in their schools and classrooms.

Dialogos is also a critical perspective, but this mode of inquiry is even morefinely attuned to issues of culture, language, and difference. Acknowledg-ing the range of cultural and familial differences in one’s classroom makesit hard to hold to any general standard of freedom, equality, or justice thatone may come to as a result of engaging in praxis. Dialogos recognizes that,while people may have shared experiences, their perceptions of these expe-riences are shaped in profoundly different ways by their different racial, class,ethnic, gender, sexual, age, and ability-related identities. Curriculum think-ing in this mode requires us to reach across these differences and foster dia-logue that leads to understanding.

Dialogic thinking may at times cause value conflict in a teacher’s profes-sional conduct. For example, a teacher might hold liberal values about gen-der equality and wish to promote ideas of independence and careerdevelopment to the girls in her charge. Certain families, for religious or cul-tural reasons, may have very different ideas about their daughters’ futures.Navigating these differences requires a high level of empathy and respect,and the disposition to honor diversity. The payoff is that the ability to sus-pend our habitual thinking and entertain a certain level of ambiguity resultsin a sharpened intelligence and new possibilities. Although the goal of demo-cratic living is well served by the dialogos inquiry mode, in itself it is notsufficient to move the project forward. When teachers exercise the wise judg-ment fostered by dialogos, they need other skills and capacities to navigatethe rocky terrain of difference and help bring about shared understandingsand commitments. The inquiry mode that helps us engage in collaborationand shared decision making is called phronesis.

Phronesis involves deliberative, collaborative inquiry into “problem defi-nitions” and solutions. One of the qualities of a democratic frame of mindis a commitment to shared decision making and to processes of consulta-tion, discussion, negotiation, and the democratic sharing of power. The termwas used by Aristotle to refer to “ethical rationality” but is often translatedas “practical wisdom.”

Teaching requires collaboration in almost every facet of the work: withstudents, parents, administrators, colleagues, and community partners. Dif-ferences of opinion and perspective characterize all collaborative efforts. The


development of wise judgment entails the capacity to consider other view-points carefully, especially those that are less powerful or absent from thetable, and to exhibit authentic responsiveness to people’s diverse needs andinterests. Phronesis reminds us to consider the multifaceted nature of prob-lems, to collaboratively construct knowledge about situations, to examinethe moral nature of our thinking, and to work cooperatively with others tosolve problems. Understanding our own personal moral stance and learn-ing how to collaborate in decision making with others is a necessary but notsufficient factor in the pursuit of wise judgment. In a democracy, ethicaldecisions have a public dimension. The ancient Greeks called this ethical/political association a polis, an inquiry mode that calls upon teachers to dothe work of “public intellectuals.”

Teachers in public schools are by definition “servants of the public good.”Just hearing the phrase “public good” brings to mind all the conflicts in-herent in a democracy. Who defines the “good?” Whose interests are servedby particular decisions? Ethics and politics are aspects of a unified practicalphilosophy. It is because ethics and politics are so intimately related that bothPlato and Aristotle were so concerned with the tensions between them andwith the central question of what is the relation between leading a good lifeand becoming a good citizen. In a democratic society, teachers are chargedwith educating citizens, a task that is often forgotten in the more prevalentdiscourse of educating students for the workplace. Educating citizens requiresthat teachers consider the essential questions of what constitutes a “good”citizen and how we collectively define the “good life.”

As public servants, teachers are called upon to exercise leadership and workwith the public around issues of general moral concern. Think for a minuteabout all the controversies or potential controversies around issues such aswhose story should be told in the history curriculum? What should be taughtin sex education classes? What literature should be on the library shelves?What forms of discipline should be used? Solving problems that are fraughtwith value conflicts such as these is not easy in a pluralistic society. This kindof leadership calls forth a high level of interpersonal skill, political understand-ing, courage, and principled action on the part of educators. Wise judgmentin the arena of polis requires a sophisticated form of intelligence, which webelieve will be enhanced by our final form of inquiry, theoria.

Theoria is etymologically related to the word theory. There are many dif-ferent understandings of the notion of theory: It can be an explanation ofthe nature of something or some set of things (e.g., multiple intelligencestheory); it can be a formal organized system of knowledge (e.g., curriculumtheory); or it can be an unproven but promising hypothesis (e.g., the theoryof global warming), just to put forth a few different definitions. There areabstract theories and there are practical theories, theories based on empiri-cal observations and theories based on speculation. We are using the word


in a specific way here that captures the Aristotelian sense of theoria as a con-templative form of inquiry, a visionary intelligence characterized by bothreason and intuition.

Teachers, although primarily concerned with practical day-to-day matters,need to have an intellectual and moral compass that steers their actionstoward a better world, a world characterized by peace, social justice,sustainability, and a deepened democracy. They must do this in a context ofa world that is fractured by wars and conflicts, oriented toward materialismand consumerism, and increasingly divided between the haves and the have-nots. To sustain this challenging work, one must be in possession of a vi-sionary intelligence that can envision and imagine that things can be otherthan what they are. To develop truly wise judgment in the face of such chal-lenges, teachers need to cultivate an independent, imaginative mind that isfreed of conventional wisdom and habitual thinking. Theoria requires thatwe ask the big questions, the existential questions: What kind of world dowe want to create? What impact will each of my actions have on the worldthat is being created from moment to moment? What knowledge is worthhaving? What is the meaning of education? What are the best qualities ofhuman “being”? What can I do to nurture those qualities in my students?

THE ENACTMENT OF CURRICULUM WISDOM

We envision public educators basing their curriculum judgments on con-textually specific questions that emerge out of an engagement with all sevenmodalities. We recognize that the model we have laid out presents a chal-lenging intellectual task requiring self-study and the careful observation ofand reflection on classroom “problems,” as well as the exploration and in-corporation of the ideas of experts. At its most effective, this “wisdom-seek-ing” is a collaborative task. Wisdom is not developed in isolation but in thecontext of dialogue and discussion—the open-minded sharing of ideas. Whenwe engage with others who have very different ideas from our own, ourconceptual horizons are stretched, and we open ourselves to new possibili-ties and transformative thinking.

Such intra- and interpersonal inquiry can be carried out in a number ofdifferent ways, in different venues, and at different times in the professionallives of teachers. Rather than think about teacher development in terms ofinvariant stages, with inquiry and reflection happening at later stages of theprofession, we suggest that it be infused throughout the professional life span.First, we would like to see preservice teacher education programs incorpo-rate sophisticated inquiry experiences into their curricula. We realize that thisgoes against the grain of much contemporary thinking. University-basedteacher education programs, under increasing pressure from state depart-ments of education to align their offerings more seamlessly with state edu-cational standards, have opted for more streamlined content and methods


courses, favoring technical training over more intellectually rigorous foun-dations courses ( philosophy, history, psychology, and sociology of educa-tion). Courses in teacher research, if they exist at all, are usually at thegraduate level and seldom are they taken prior to certification. University-based teacher preparation is itself under assault by political interests thatwould prefer simplified “alternative certification” processes. This latter per-spective assumes there is not a worthwhile professional knowledge base toteaching and that anyone with a reasonably good liberal arts education canlearn to teach with a few weeks of training. Returning to our earlier discus-sion of the professions of medicine and law, can you imagine a political dis-course that could successfully argue for less training for doctors, even asmedical knowledge expands and becomes more complex? In much the sameway, knowledge of learning and the brain, and of other educational issuessuch as language acquisition, diversity, multiliteracies, and culture, is expand-ing and becoming more complex. The challenges of teaching have never beengreater. Academic expectations are higher and testing more rigorous thanever. At the same time, our schools are more racially, ethnically, culturally,and linguistically diverse than at any time in our history, and many childrencome to school unprepared to learn. Isn’t teaching people to think and pre-paring them for life in a complex democracy as important as helping themrecover from illness and maintain good health?

Including classroom-based inquiry at the preservice level can, from ourexperience as teacher educators, provide new teachers with a strong concep-tual framework for problem solving and provide a foundation for a profes-sional life of inquiry. Teachers who are educated to identify problems, gatherdata, and engage in the analysis of problems from the multiple perspectivesembodied in our inquiry map have a stronger sense of agency and moral voicethan teachers who are merely trained to carry out the plans and policies of“expert others.” An inquiry approach to teacher preparation can orient teach-ers away from dependency on external sources for the solution to their prob-lems and toward informed autonomy or collaboration in curricular andinstructional decision making. Professional satisfaction is likely to increaseas one is empowered to make decisions about issues that directly affect one’spractice. We believe that in order to meet the very real challenges of edu-cating today’s U.S. students, even new teachers need to be educated to anew standard and that this standard should build upon the knowledge thatthey themselves generate utilizing a sophisticated inquiry map.

The one place where teachers are likely to encounter the theory and prac-tice of inquiry is in postcertification graduate courses. The assumption here,and rightly so, is that more experienced teachers, having mastered the ba-sics of curriculum, instruction, and classroom management, have freed upthe “conceptual space” to begin to engage in more systematic forms of in-quiry-based activity. It is in graduate courses that teachers are often for thefirst time exposed to the deeper theoretical dimensions of their professional


field. We can recount many occasions when our graduate students have askedsome version of this question: Why am I just now encountering these ideas?The question is often asked with some level of resentment, as though vitalinformation had been withheld. Our inquiry map represents, we believe, atopography of the theoretical field of curriculum, and while different pro-fessors might emphasize one mode over another, much of the theoreticalthinking in the field can be located within the seven domains of inquiry. Adeeper engagement with theory offers educators many opportunities: to seethe wider context of educational problems; to examine issues through dif-ferent explanatory lenses; to more carefully examine long-term consequencesof policies and practices; to “think outside” prevailing conceptual boxes; tounderstand the historicity and cyclical nature of educational thought; andto understand the political interests at work in policy decisions. Althoughteachers sometimes resist knowledge that seems “impractical,” most recog-nize the power that new concepts have in relation to practice. Becoming atheoretically grounded inquirer, or teacher researcher, is at the heart of thematurity of the teaching profession. Teachers who work from such an in-formed frame are in a position to become teacher leaders, to work with andinfluence policymakers, to testify at legislative hearings, and to mentor newteachers, among other professional activities.

Recall what we said earlier, however, about the collective nature of wis-dom seeking. Important as individual preparation and continuing educationmight be to the development of a mature profession, we believe that it is inthe creation of “cultures of inquiry” within schools that this vision mightbe most profoundly realized. Teaching is a very isolating profession. You mayhave heard reference to the “egg-crate” model of schooling, with teacherseach separated in their own little “cells” of activity. We think that a busy“hive” would be a better metaphor for schooling, symbolizing educatorsworking together who are tuned in to a set of shared values and principlesabout democracy and egalitarianism, who operate intuitively in the interestof the whole, who buzz eagerly in and out of each other’s spaces for insightand inspiration, who share information and collaborate to solve problems.If we take this idea of a mature profession seriously, and agree that teacherscan and need to assume professional responsibility for the decisions that af-fect their classrooms, then schools will need to be restructured to addressthe isolation. Time needs to be allocated to inquiry—serious time—time tokeep up with professional literature, to reflect on one’s object(s) of study,to meet and discuss research topics, to write up one’s findings, and to planand strategize together about how to better meet the needs of students andhow to renew schools. Without such a commitment to the necessary timeand resources to support this work, we cannot expect that more than a fewteachers will take on the inquiry challenge.

We believe that the future of public schooling is inextricable from thefuture of our democracy. Without a strong public commitment to education,


we may find ourselves without a public. Teachers have a crucial role to playin the preservation of public schooling; it follows from this that they alsohave a crucial role to play in the preservation and expansion of our democ-racy. We believe that an inquiry-based orientation to educating young peopleis an absolutely necessary component of this commitment. One of the bestdefenses of public schooling, thus, might rest in a commitment to nurtureand sustain the capacities of educators to exercise wise professional judgment.It may not be that exciting of a concept, given the many flashy and expen-sive prescriptions for school reform that abound, but to reiterate the wordsof Fleischacker, it might indeed be “the most sensible, most decent, and atthe same time richest concept of liberty we can possibly find.” The qualityof teachers’ curriculum judgments is, or should be, a central concern in edu-cation and educational reform. We conclude this chapter with a simple equa-tion that we would like you to keep in mind:

Comprehensive teacher judgment = mature teaching profession!

— 2 —

Finding the Color of the Sky:Inquiry in Teacher Preparation

CECELIA TRAUGH

Sometimes I think the conditions of everyday oppressions, of survival, renderso much of our imagination inert. We are constantly putting out fires and find-ing temporary refuge, which makes it difficult to see anything beyond thepresent. As the great poet Willie Kgositsile put it, “When the clouds clear/Weshall know the colour of the sky.” When movements have been unable to clearthe clouds, it has been the poets—no matter the medium—who have succeededin imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futuressocial movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky isfar more important than counting clouds. To put it another way, the most radi-cal art is not protest art, but works that take us to another place, allowing usto envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling.1

We live in a time, I believe, when human liberties and democratic values arethreatened and, within this context, a time when Americans seem to haveforgotten (or at least set aside) the vision of public education as a vehiclefor furthering large democratic purposes. I begin this chapter with this pas-sage from Robin Kelley because I think he describes a condition of our bodypolitic generally and in schools and teacher education, particularly. The en-forced circumscription of daily life in schools and classrooms drains our en-ergy, deadens our thinking and imagination, and helps us forget the humanroots of education. However, he opens up a possibility. As poets, we “clearthe clouds” and “know the color of the sky.” For me, and I think for Kelley,this means we work to be clear about human and democratic values and


through those values “envision a different way of seeing . . . a different wayof feeling,” a different way of creating relationship.

Alongside this passage I put a metaphor spoken in other times of greatconstraint in public schools by a friend, colleague, and supporter of grassrootsteacher activism, Lillian Weber. She urged all educators to “find the cracks.”2

This idea always brings to my mind the image of a crack in a cement side-walk or an asphalt parking lot through which blades of grass or dandelionsare growing. Left alone, that growing thing will contribute to the crumblingof the pavement. Working with teachers in New York City’s public schools,I frequently share Lillian’s image in the hope of their seeing possibilities foraction in their daily teaching lives. The metaphor is appreciated and readilyunderstood by most everyone; however, the process of finding a crack andknowing what seeds to plant is less clear.

Together Weber and Kelley speak of what teachers need to be able to doin order to “wake up” and fulfill their educational and human responsibili-ties to their students. Seeing the color of the sky and defining our aspira-tions in terms of large human values will make us better able to find cracks,see the possibilities in those cracks, and know what seeds to plant in them.In this chapter, I discuss descriptive inquiry as one way to help teachers bethe poets they need to be to educate children in deep and liberating ways. Ibegin with descriptions of context, that is, Kelley’s “conditions of everydayoppressions,” of descriptive inquiry itself, and of the conflicts teacher edu-cators must confront when these two different energies come together. I thendescribe how several teachers have used descriptive inquiry to find cracks,see differently, and grow as educators of children.

EVERYDAY OPPRESSIONS

The stories I relate here were originally told by New York City teachersworking in the public schools while earning their teacher certification andmaster’s degrees in education at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus.3

New York City schools are engaged in a massive effort to improve the qual-ity of public school education and raise the standards of the education chil-dren receive. The system is trying to re-create itself by standardizing contentand practice. “On the ground,” this standardization translates into controlover how classroom time is spent, how classroom space is organized, howteachers respond to and even see children, and how teachers grow and de-velop in and through their work. These stories are examples of only a fewof the ways teachers and children have their imaginations and thinking ren-dered inert, their visions of each other as human beings dangerously nar-rowed, and the potential of their relationship, the core of teaching andlearning, diminished significantly.

A teacher in his second year tells of being handed the mandated dailyschedule. He immediately realized that he was “out of compliance.”

Finding the Color of the Sky 19

That morning I had finished a two-day read aloud and discussion of the bookAnnie and the Old One. The story is about an old grandmother and her grand-daughter who does not want her to die. The granddaughter does many dis-ruptive things to prevent the rug from being finished since that is when the“Old One” has announced she will return to the earth. There was so much todiscuss and the kids were so engaged that I made the decision to just let thediscussion flow. . . . We ended up spending about 2 hours on this book andthe various dilemmas it presented.

This teacher was significantly “out of compliance,” as the mandated time for“Content Area/Literacy Centers and Guided Reading/ Conferring” was halfan hour, and if he had been “caught,” the consequences could have beenserious.

In a journal entry in her Classroom Inquiry course, a special educationteacher wrote of how she uses her anecdotal reports to document her children’sproblems with learning and behavior. As her professor, I challenged her onthis practice and asked what would happen if she described what the childrenwere able to do and the gains they were making alongside their weaknessesand misbehaviors. She told me that her supervisors require her to only writeabout the problems her children have. “Otherwise, how could we make a caseto parents?” This teacher’s circumstance is elaborated by a kindergarten teacherwho wants to use inquiry to tackle a difficult question. She asks:

How can teachers meet the needs of kindergarteners that are already labeledas learning disabled? This is one question that definitely boggles my mind. Howdoes a child at such a young age get stuck with a label that is going to carrythrough with them throughout their school years, before they are able to writetheir names or read a word in a book? . . . Whatever happened to “all childrenlearn and develop differently?” This concern has made me paranoid, because ithas me looking at my own [five-year-old] child a little more closely, wonder-ing if she is retaining and learning information “appropriate” for her age.

A student in an advanced Classroom Inquiry course selected the follow-ing passage in a teacher research text as important to think about:

If one of the goals of staff development is to “get everyone to do the samething,” then teacher research would be a bad model to follow. If, however, thegoal is to get each teacher to look more critically at teaching and learning (ratherthan acting as thoughtless drones who “implement the program,”) then en-abling teachers to become reflective practitioners could be one of the best formsof staff development.4

She responded to that passage as follows:

The goal of staff development at our school is, in fact, to get everyone to dothe same thing. It is more like a staff training in a new curriculum, or in a new


teaching method, being passed on—handed down, to be implemented by us,who are required to behave during staff training sessions as if we are “thought-less drones.” I do not see any real development of teachers taking place, be-cause we are not asked to reflect on our practices—past or present—or to con-tribute to the discussion. . . . In the teacher education I am receiving (at LIU),I am expected to think (question) reflectively on varied information gatheredduring teacher research and analyze how each piece might be of benefit to [my]students. At the same time, the profession demands that I behave contrary tomy training, that I should not think “out of the box,” that I should believe inself-contained special education classrooms instead of the inclusive model, thatI should accept a points-reward system as the only one that can satisfactorilywork for my students. In order for me not to have to shift between two gears,I have to enact the best form of staff development on my own and constantlyreflect on my practice.

Why do I name elements of these stories as “everyday oppressions”? Becauserendered inert as thinkers, imaginers, and seekers of meaning, teachers be-come “objects” and become subject to manipulation, and they, in turn, edu-cate children into habits of mindlessness.

DESCRIPTIVE INQUIRY IN TEACHER PREPARATION5

In arguing for the inclusion of teacher research in the knowledge basesfor teaching, we are not simply equating teacher research with practitionerknowledge or with any kind of writing by a teacher, nor are we attemptingto attach to the term teacher the higher status term researcher in order toalter common perceptions of the profession. Rather, we are proposing thatteacher research makes accessible some of the expertise of teachers and pro-vides both university and school communities with unique perspectives onteaching and learning.6

The teacher educators in the School of Education, Long Island Univer-sity, Brooklyn programs believe that helping students of teaching learn howto approach teaching as inquiry enables them to approach work in classroomsand with children as primary source material, develop a consciously criticalstance, and begin to imagine different ways to think about and work in theirschool settings. Collaborative descriptive teacher inquiry plays an importantrole in helping students learn how to reimagine and rework settings thatdon’t work for children. For us as teacher educators, inquiry helps reworkthe balance between theory and practice so we can better help our studentsground learning in prior knowledge, direct experience, and work with chil-dren.

Descriptive inquiry asks educators to observe and describe their work andthe work of their students. Through disciplined processes, these educatorsraise questions about teaching and learning and generate new approaches and


understandings. The inquiry processes help create inquiry communities inschools and other educational settings. In these communities, participantswork together to imagine/create shared educational visions, learn new waysto talk about students and their capacities, and develop an educational dis-course based both on human values and on what is particular to the schooland its people.

Descriptive inquiry aims at the development of a stance, a way of look-ing. This stance is distinguished by several qualities.7

• It is a stance that does not seek the authority of the quick or single/universalanswer. It works not to frame issues as “either/or.” It works to enliven the imagi-nation.

• It is a stance that recognizes the limits of our knowledge of other people and ofthe world around us. It tells us that we have to work to keep dialogue open andfluid. When we get stuck in only seeing in the way “it is supposed to be,” wecan’t see what else is or could be there.

• It is a stance that rests in our “living” the question and in the connections ques-tions allow us to make. This allows us to both contextualize and deepen anyunderstandings that come through that living and to bring difference to the tableand keep it there.

Conflicts Generated when Different Energies Come Together

Teacher educators at LIU, Brooklyn, are committed to having descrip-tive inquiry as a core of the program. Our aim is to develop teachers who,as active inquirers, observe, describe, reflect on teaching and learning prac-tices, and know how to frame meaningful questions. This commitment putsinto play a set of values that differs in many ways from those values currentlybeing enacted in New York City schools, the schools in which our studentsteach or hope to. Overall, these differences are about conflicting visions ofwhat it means to educate. Particularly, some of these differences include:8

• Standardization and, in turn, a kind of simplification and objectification of peopleand of educational issues in contrast to the variety and complexity that comes fromincluding individual voices, questions, and differences;

• Prescriptive questions and expert answers in contrast to ongoing inquiry and theacknowledgment of the limits of our knowledge;

• Rule-based teaching methods and teacher-proof materials in contrast to viewingteachers as practical intellectuals who can learn to exercise professional judgmentand to teach in ways responsive to the children and particular context of the class-room;

• A focus on children’s problems and what they can’t do in contrast to recogniz-ing and describing children as filled with diverse and multifaceted capacities; and

• A focus on punishment in contrast to developing relationship and community.


DESCRIPTIVE INQUIRY IN ACTION

Jeannette9 was introduced to observing and describing as modes of in-quiry and knowledge making in her first semester of her undergraduate pro-gram. She learned to describe children using the format of the DescriptiveReview of the Child.10 This offered her a way of seeing and thinking aboutchildren that was entirely new to her and to her classmates. Jeannette hadto consider and make room for this different way of seeing and thinkingalongside her habitual ways of considering children and how they are in class-rooms and other settings. Completing a Descriptive Review was the begin-ning place for Jeannette’s reconsideration. The work she did laid the groundfor becoming an observer of children and understanding them in their termsand so giving them room to be persons in their own right. It also laid groundfor her to reconsider the role of the teacher. This ground became a place towhich she returned as she proceeded through the program and reflected onher readiness for teaching.

Jeannette’s first close description was of a natural object, a branch. Shedescribes this first attempt this way:

I began from the stem and then worked myself out to the different branches.Drawing the branches was pretty simple but it became difficult when I tried todraw the individual leaves. The leaves took on different shapes, shades and full-ness. In sections where I had most difficulty drawing exactly what I saw, I drewwhat I felt would be closest to what I saw. At first I believed I wouldn’t havegreat difficulty drawing the branch, but then I realized that I was incorrect.Half way through the drawing I knew that I would not be able to draw it ex-actly as I saw the branch, but I would come as close as possible. The drawingturned out all right but it taught me that I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.11

Jeannette names here some basic truths about knowing and representingwhat we know. What seems simple, a branch, in reality is complex. In hereffort to capture what she sees, she is not able to do it exactly, perfectly. Herdrawing must be an approximation, as any effort to capture reality and notover-simplify it must be. Jeannette also notes that she needs to resist mak-ing snap, habituated judgments.

Reflecting on the Descriptive Review she developed this first semester inher education as a teacher, Jeannette connects not judging with developingunderstanding. In addition, she includes a new idea about teaching: It is okayto have questions and to keep them open. It is okay not to have an answer,especially if that answer comes in the form of a label for a child.

It is strange, but the thought that keeps coming up to my mind is the answerthat I had given on the first day of this teaching and learning course. . . . “Ihave a habit of having to know the answers. If there is something that is leftunanswered, then I am not content and it will eventually get the best of me. I


need to learn to accept the fact that I will not always have or get an answer.”And this is actually what this descriptive review has helped me to learn. I havebecome better at dealing with questions left unanswered. I have come to real-ize that not all unanswered questions are a sign of inability. Instead, I can nowlook at a question as a foundation on which to build. The process has taughtme not to strive for short conquests (categorizing a child) by trying to answerall questions, but instead to gain greater triumphs (understanding a child).12

Jumping ahead two years to Jeannette’s student teaching semester, we findher writing another Descriptive Review. A couple of things stand out to mein this work. One is that she uses this review as a place to think about a childwho poses problems for her and for her cooperating teacher. This is unusual,as student teachers often feel vulnerable and protect themselves from poten-tial critique.

The main reason why I chose to write about Franky was that I found him tobe a challenge. I could have written about other students in the class, but Frankymade me wonder as a future teacher, how can I or will I ever be able to reachthis child? My first instinct when it came to writing this paper was to avoid anystudents that may pose a problem for me, but this I realized was simply beinga coward. How can I avoid a child who needs help? Whether or not I find theprocess of trying to reach a child difficult should not be the cause for not at-tempting to do what the child expects and needs of me.13

A second point I highlight is Jeannette’s efforts to capture this child’s com-plexities. Even though he is “difficult” to work with, Jeannette wants to seehis various sides. She works to aptly describe Franky and so honors him. Thefollowing are examples I have pulled out of the full Descriptive Review. Ichose this first passage because, in it, Jeannette tries to capture a compli-cated point through description.

As for the adults, I find that Franky is at most times more helpful than coop-erative. What I mean is that he is usually easier about helping an adult set upthings, or put away things, than he is about having to behave a certain way.He simply doesn’t appreciate being reminded what he should or shouldn’t bedoing. If he is being asked by the teacher to sit down and listen or don’t dothat, at times he’ll get angry and yells, “Oh my God!” and he’ll stump off with-out permission and doesn’t return even when he’s being asked to do so by theteacher.

In this second passage, the generosity of the descriptive space Jeannette iscreating is increasingly evident.

It is apparent that Franky does have some behavioral and academic difficulties,but I would like to end this child study on a good note by saying that Frankyhas had some really good moments. One day during Spanish writing the class


was asked to look up “n” words in their books by the substitute teacher. It tookFranky a few minutes longer than it should have taken him, but eventually hedid start. He walked over to the bookshelf, picked up the bin of books withthe green labels on it (he did this on his own) and brought it to the table. Hetook his sheet of paper and pencil and began looking for the “n” words. Atone point he even started helping the other students. “Here, you can use thisbook. There are some “n” words in it.” At times, a couple of the other stu-dents would accept his help and take the book from him to write their ownlists. As I observe him, I can see how confident he appears to be. He is focusedand appears to be a real serious worker. As he glances through the book, I cansee a spark every time he finds an “n” word. He actually enjoys finding thesewords and has even said, “I am good at finding words.” This is Franky’s sec-ond time at looking for Spanish words in the books and on both occasionsFranky has had a positive experience because I feel that he believes that he isat this point at the same level as everyone else, which is something that doesn’treally happen quite often. This time around, Franky didn’t only work well onhis own and did a good job about writing his word list, but he in turn was alsoable to help another student. What a moment.14

This work with the Descriptive Review and the inquiry it fosters is basic tothe stance toward children Jeannette is developing. I find her stance to bedescriptive and generous. Elements of that stance are the importance of:

• trying to go beyond the simple surface of things and capture the complexity ofreality;

• rather than falling back on quick judgments, working to understand by aimingto see multiple facets and so more than one possibility in children and in events;

• keeping questions open as an element in the development of understanding ofchildren and teaching.

Terri15 was introduced to observing and describing as modes of inquiryand knowledge making in her second semester as a master’s student in spe-cial education through learning to use the format of the Descriptive Reviewof the Child. This experience was followed in the fall of 2003 with a courserequiring her to document and study an aspect of her teaching practice. ForTerri, it was the question-raising process that was deeply important.

Initially I wanted to focus my study on the role of fear in my classroom man-agement. However, after weeks of observation and personal reflection, my ques-tion about my proposed topic began to change. The more I observed mystudents, the more questions kept popping up. I realized that classroom man-agement couldn’t be based on fear because the fear factor in controlling howothers behave can backfire. In other words, the students may adhere to rulesand regulations only because they are afraid of repercussions from me. This doesnothing to teach them why they must follow certain rules. All of this was onmy mind.


At the same time, I also began to see that what I wanted for my classroomhad to be part of a broader scope. If I want to be a good teacher, then I haveto do things that would leave a lasting impression on my students. I realizedthat one cannot be an effective teacher in a classroom where the students areout of control and the teacher is stressed out and unable to manage behavioralproblems. . . . There is no argument that good teachers need excellent class-room management skills.

However, I wanted more than that. I wanted my students to know as theygrow older and are no longer in my classroom that they must still be respon-sible for what they do. The way we live our lives as teacher or students (in thiscase) will impact on the quality of our lives. So the focus of my study will beon how I can teach my students the importance of making right choices overwrong ones.

As far as the focus of my study, my research is more clearly defined. Fromclassroom management and fear to helping students make right choices, mystudy has changed over time. Now, I think it has a more positive theme, thatis, of really helping my students as opposed to trying to find a punishment tosuit every infraction. I also know that I must serve as a role model and do thingsthat constantly involve them in making their lives better.16

Terri’s inquiry has opened up for her some very large questions: What areright decisions? What are wrong ones? What role does a teacher’s moral andethical position play in her teaching? These are questions that have been partof philosophical debate for scores of years. There are no simple answers.Terri’s willingness to raise the question about fear as she did early in thesemester and then to let her question evolve as she talked to children andsaw her behavior and relationships with them through their eyes is a “cloudclearing” in Kelley’s terms. It shows a kind of courage needed to imagineand make profound changes in practice.

Andréa. My last example is a brief story told by a New York City Teach-ing Fellow, a master’s level student in her second year of teaching. She toldthe story in a paper about how she identified the focus for her “capstone”inquiry project.17 This African American student was teaching kindergartenin District 13, Brooklyn, and was required to do a mandated ninety-minuteliteracy block with her children. This block of time must contain indepen-dent reading, shared reading, guided reading, and phonemic awareness in-struction.

During our first month of school, all of the kindergarten teachers were pulledtogether for a grade conference.…At this meeting we were informed that therewould be additional expectations placed on the children’s literacy developmentfor this year. They would be expected to have mastered fifty sight words, knowall their letters and sounds, be reading on an ECLAS reading level of a 2 orbetter, and be operating on a phonemic awareness level of 2 or better. Theseare pretty realistic goals and, at first, we were all open to the grade goals being


set. However, the next list of demands was upsetting to say the least. [The REAGrant Literacy Coordinator] announced that our mandatory daily independentreading time for K should restrict students to only read books that we haveprechosen for them and placed into individualized plastic bags labeled with theirname and color-coded to match their guided reading level. In September, wehad not as yet completed our ECLAS assessments to place students in guidedreading groups. Nor had we had a full month of school as yet. All the teacherspresent, especially me, were visibly displeased with this new “independent read-ing” requirement. I did not feel that selecting books for children and placingthem in plastic bags that were appropriate for their reading level was appropri-ate in September. When we began to verbalize our disagreement with her plan,she revised her statement and told us that it was a goal for January. She thenexplained that independent reading will be the first issue that we should all beaddressing because of the increase in school time designated for that purposeonly. Children are expected to be counted present at 8:25 A.M. and are expectedto be engaged in reading books until approximately 8:45 A.M. on a daily basis.

After this meeting, I was angry. I did not like the fact that my pupils’ aca-demic goals were being dictated to me by another entity. Who were they toimpose all these rules for literacy on me? Who were they to make me imposeso much pressure on five-year-olds during their independent reading time? Whowas I to argue with more than twenty years of experience? Why was my stom-ach in knots? Do I feel comfortable restricting my students to certain booksand not giving them choices? How can I do my job without rocking the boat?While all of these thoughts were going through my mind, I couldn’t help butthink that this would be a good subject for my research. I’ve already got thepassion, now how to go about observing my students while they browse.

I decided not to concentrate on the pressures of our academic goals and tofocus more on what my class does during independent reading. My focusingquestion is what effect will browsing books have on emergent readers? I beganstudying my children during independent reading time on the carpet. It wasimportant for me to let them have the use of the entire classroom library andgive them choices. We arranged the library by reading level baskets and thenadded genre baskets. We have several genre baskets with books on the follow-ing topics: animals, transportation, family/friends, fairy tales and folktales, so-cial studies, ABC books, and math books. The philosophy behind my methodof free browsing for my class is that I believe it is important to allow my pupilsthe freedom to select books, read picture cues, and use their own language totell a story from pictures. This way, when I begin teaching reading strategiesin small groups, they will have a designated time to be free to practice theirreading skills, without any scrutiny or assessment from me.

At this point in her discussion, the teacher shared a story about her ownlearning to read. In it, she tells how her experience influences what she doeswith children. “If it had not been for the patience and resilience of my par-ents teaching me to read, I would not be able to provide an environmentand give my children choices so that they can become emergent readers inmy classroom.” And, then, she lays out aspects of her stance regarding lit-


eracy and her questions about the educational context within which sheworks.

Whether they are simply browsing, reading picture cues, making up their ownimaginary story, or paraphrasing from memory of a read aloud, children canmake sense of print on their own terms. Every child comes to school with hisor her own personal plethora of knowledge. They may not be familiar withconcepts of print or one-to-one correspondence, but most of them are able tospeak and listen. Through language experience and exploration with text, dur-ing shared readings, read-alouds, and their own personal manipulation of books,kindergarteners will be able to “read” a book using all of the schema and readingskills that they know to date. They will identify pictures and say aloud whatthey mean to them. After reading instruction and several lessons on readingstrategies, they will be ready to tackle texts on their reading levels all on theirown. However, I believe that for every child this miracle may not happen withinthe confines of one year. Maybe it will all come together for them during firstgrade. In Community District 13, reading strategies are introduced in kinder-garten so that mastery of an ECLAS level 6 will occur before a child enters thesecond grade. After early childhood grades, children are expected to performon and prove they are meeting their grade standard by passing their annual mathand English Language Arts Stafford 9 tests. Because of the disappointing num-bers of children who are failing these standardized tests, our city education lead-ers are looking to introduce academic instruction on reading and inquiry-basedmath at the kindergarten level. Kindergarten teachers are expected to teach fromthe standards books, and “free play” has been obliterated. The amount of pres-sure that academic kindergarten places on the teachers and the students whostudy and teach balanced literacy is paramount. These pressures to have ourkindergarten class reading on an ECLAS level of 2 by the end of the year, withmastery of 100 basic sight words, sometimes causes a huge imbalance when onewonders if the expected academic goals of kindergarten pupils are developmen-tally appropriate or not.<

A difference of idea and value opened up a line of inquiry for this teacherwho then documented what happened during independent reading time inher class. This story illustrates the way teachers can use inquiry:

• to help locate themselves in relation to the mandates they face;• to help keep their focus on children;• to help them develop knowledge from their work, in this case knowledge about

beginning reading; and• as an element in their development as thoughtful decision makers in their class-

rooms.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

Creating a context within teacher education where inquiries of the kindillustrated by Jeannette’s, Terri’s, and Andréa’s work can happen is essential


if teachers are to be what our democratic society needs them to be, that is,“genuinely free-thinking intellectuals, models of critical thought, creativelyengaged and caring individuals who are responsive to student interests, andwhose full cognitive and affective powers [are] evident in the quality of theirprofessional judgments.”18 Descriptive Inquiry gives us a location in whichwe can do the kind of work necessary to “know the colour of the sky” andto “find the cracks” and plant the seeds.

“Freeing our imaginations from slavery may be the most difficult strugglewe have ever faced…[and] we…must do the complicated intellectual workof dreaming and imagining.”19 As I suggested earlier, for New York Cityteachers, engaging in that difficult struggle and doing the complicated in-tellectual work runs counter to many of the workplace values and expecta-tions to which they are accountable. Teacher educators also must do the“complicated intellectual work” of confronting the conflicts and understandthe contradictions we create within our students. Done well, the inquiriesour students undertake become collaborative projects with us and their fel-low students joining them. But it is hard work.

In the stories I share, I cite many questions students have generated outof their work. The questions are the potential “cracks” in the sidewalk.However, it is important to note that the act of asking a question about one’swork has become more and more difficult for teachers. Teachers seem to belearning that questions are signs of weakness and not knowing and so mustbe kept private and unspoken. Helping teachers believe what they may sayto their students, that questions are a form of thinking and evidence ofstrength, is hard intellectual and emotional work.

Teaching is a human enterprise and requires us to recognize and valueour own humanity and the humanity of our students. However, the schoolcontext of labels, test scores, and fear of misbehavior and loss of control cancut educators in schools off from themselves and parents and children. Help-ing teachers to look beyond/underneath these blinders is part of the ongo-ing struggle to inquire and break old habits. It is also hard intellectual andemotional work.

The context of standardized curriculum and methodologies and of high-stakes accountability makes it more and more difficult for teachers to valueand exercise their own intellectual powers. The idea that they can gener-ate understandings they can act on out of the details of their classroomsruns counter to being held accountable for implementing a set of cannedpractices. Teachers must locate themselves within this tension unless theyare to either become the proverbial cog, the “thoughtless drone,” or leavethe work of teaching. Helping teachers find their agency and voice is partof learning the inquiry process and, again, is hard intellectual and emo-tional work.


I close with a further thought from Robin Kelly. “I am urging a revolu-tion of the mind. This is no mere academic exercise. It is an injunction, aproposition, perhaps even a declaration of war.”20 Fiery words for teachereducation and for teachers. However, without such intellectual and spiritualfire, teaching and the education it aims for will continue to lose their po-tency.

— 3 —

Informing the Present,Illuminating the Past: Historical

Knowledge and TeacherDevelopmentSONIA E. MURROW

When we say a person is thoughtful, we mean something more than that hemerely indulges in thoughts. . . . Thoughtful persons are heedful, not rash;they look about, are circumspect instead of going ahead blindly. They weigh,ponder, deliberate—terms that imply a careful comparing and balancing ofevidence and suggestions. . . . Moreover, the thoughtful person looks intomatters; he scrutinizes, inspects, examines. He does not, in other words, takeobservations at their face value, but probes them to see whether they are whatthey seem to be.

—John Dewey1

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, I make an argument for the importance of educational his-tory to teacher knowledge and decision making at a time when history isoften left to the margins of teacher education. First, I describe how histori-cal knowledge and inquiry present unique lenses through which teachers canexamine past and current educational phenomena. Next, so to provide con-text for its peripheral status in today’s education programs, I present a briefoverview of educational history’s changing position in the preparation ofAmerican’s teachers. Finally, I explore the relevant work of John Dewey tounderscore the value of historical knowledge and inquiry to teacher knowl-edge and decision making. Dewey’s work illuminates vital connections be-tween teacher knowledge, teacher decision making, and reflective practice,all of which I argue are enhanced by exposure to educational history.


WHY IS HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE IMPORTANTFOR TEACHERS?

Today’s teachers face multiple challenges ranging from student, curricu-lar, and pedagogical concerns, to administrative and policy issues, which of-ten reach beyond the classroom. Moreover, many models of school reformexpect teachers to be active participants in school change, serving as mem-bers of school-based management teams and in other capacities, requiringthat they understand schooling in sophisticated ways.

For example, the authors of the National Commission on Teaching andAmerica’s Future report What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future,suggested that teacher preparation be reinvented. For an improved curricu-lum of teacher education, they placed emphasis on content area preparation,a greater focus on learning development, more knowledge about curricu-lum and assessment design, multicultural competence, preparation for col-laboration, technological skills, and an emphasis on reflection and inquiry.2However, nowhere in the report is historical inquiry mentioned as a neces-sary part of teacher knowledge.

Research on teachers’ thinking has begun to uncover some of the com-plexities inherent in teachers’ work, but most of this research focuses exclu-sively on what teachers do in the classroom with students during a preplannedteaching and learning exchange.3 Lee Shulman of Stanford University ex-plored the ways in which teacher knowledge has been centered on contentand pedagogy, though alternating in importance depending on the momentin history. The knowledge base for teaching, according to Shulman, is theknowledge of teaching content and pedagogical technique. Shulman wouldlike teaching content to be stronger as a whole and argued that teachers withweak content area background invite the often quoted slur about teachingby George Bernard Shaw, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”4

The contention that historical knowledge can support teachers in theirwork calls for a broadly conceived understanding of teachers’ roles, whichis not limited to content and pedagogy, but reaches beyond the classroominto other spaces where teachers must serve as advocates for effective school-ing. The philosopher Maxine Greene wrote about teacher education: “Therehas been a tendency to treat official labelings and legitimations as law-like,to overlook the constructed character of social reality.” Given the challengesfacing schools today, teachers must look beyond what is directly in front ofthem to extend their vision by including historical information that is oftenignored or left to the periphery.

HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE AND TEACHEREDUCATION

Greene suggested that the significance of historical study for the teacher“lies in the possibility it offers for the shaping of large perspectives, enabling

Informing the Present, Illuminating the Past 33

that the teacher make some sense of the inchoate present through which hemoves.”5 If knowledge of the educational past can benefit teachers in theirown classrooms, the more obvious reason for exposing them to the historyof education pertains to their professional roles, so that they can participatein fuller and more informed ways as educators in the school and educationalcommunities beyond.

Presented in this chapter are separate but related arguments for histori-cal study as a meaningful aspect of teachers’ knowledge. First, historical in-quiry can provide an understanding of the problem-solving strategies thathistorians employ. Second, historical inquiry can foster professional identityby providing teachers with common narratives and reference points. Andthird, historical inquiry can contribute to a satisfaction of understanding thatcan also support professional identity. Thus, study of history can give teachersan improved capacity for citizenship in a society of educators, strengthen-ing their ability to have critical perspectives on the relationships betweenschooling and society. Historical inquiry can support “professional practice,”which entails deliberation and reflection on educational problems while us-ing multiple modes of inquiry, sometimes referred to as “reflective practice.”6

REFLECTIVE PRACTICE AND TEACHER EDUCATION

An influential trend in the teacher education literature that emerged inthe early 1980s and crystallized with the publication of Donald Schon’s piv-otal work, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, hasbeen termed “reflective practice.”7 Proponents of reflective practice vary, butall seem to recognize that most of what teachers do is done on their feetand is rarely supported by prescribed steps of how to approach specific prob-lems.8 Teachers and other professionals operate within a model that requiresthat they make meaning of situations based on various methods of inquirydeveloped from knowledge of the field, professional training, and past ex-periences in the classroom.

Reflective practice is most often understood as having relevance to theteaching and learning exchange with students. However, professional prac-tice is also associated with professional activities not exclusively tied to class-room instruction. Historical inquiry, along with other modes of inquiry thatconstitute teachers’ knowledge (including personal experience, contentknowledge, pedagogical knowledge, awareness of child development, psy-chological inquiry, philosophical inquiry, and sociological inquiry), representvaried modes of inquiry that teachers can draw on while participating inprofessional practice. Simply stated, historical inquiry is just one of the mul-tiple modes of inquiry relevant to teachers’ work and concerns.

Because discussions of historical inquiry are generally absent from theteacher education literature, it can be assumed that the history of educationis most often considered an academic subject that is separate from the


practical work teachers do in schools everyday. Paul Violas, of the Univer-sity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, argued that if we conceive of teach-ers simply as technicians who should only teach the curricula they have beengiven by a superior, then they do not need historical understandings to evalu-ate curricula or educational goals; however, as he concludes, this limited con-ception of teaching will not solve the problems of today’s classrooms.9

Because history is widely perceived as a “liberal” discipline, and, unfortu-nately, such knowledge is seen as separate from technique, proponents ofteacher development models, such as reflective practice and teacher-ledchange, have failed to see history as part of a knowledge base that can sup-port teachers’ inquiry.10 In general, teacher education tends to leave teach-ers ill equipped for what education scholar Donald Warren and others argueis one of their most challenging responsibilities, “to analyze and conceptu-alize disparate educational and policy phenomena that often stretch beyondwhat might appear to be root causes and effects.”11

HISTORICAL INQUIRY AND THE USES OF HISTORY

History at its best remains not simply a collection of facts, not a politically sanc-tioned listing of indisputable ‘truths,’ but an ongoing mode of collective self-discovery about the nature of our society.

—Eric Foner12

Historical inquiry involves action, the application of information alongwith the development and engagement of certain habits of thought (or mind)to a problem in the past or present.13 Historical information, knowing whathappened when and to whom, is central to the practice of historical inquiry.While historical content consists of details and descriptions, historical inquiryis a process by which content is applied.

History has been a part of teacher education since its inception, but thatfact alone does not explain why it is an important aspect of teacher knowl-edge. Paul Violas has argued for a prominent role for history in the educa-tion of teachers because it can offer at least two primary understandings: (1)history can substitute for experience (we can share in the experiences of oth-ers), and (2) history offers a perspective on how things developed, therebyallowing us to dialogue with our current reality.14 Violas believed that his-tory can “stand in” for and enlarge our experience and thus can contributeto the inquiry of teachers as they work in a school context.

Violas’ examination of what history can “do” (in his case, in thinkingabout schools and schooling) is part of a long tradition that has dominateddiscussions about the nature of history and the historical profession.15 Nu-merous analogies have been used to describe the usefulness of history. Somewriters, such as the novelist Henry James and the historian Henry Adams,conceived of history as a mirror, “the mirror in which society looks at it-


self.”16 Others have referred to history as a “compass,” as “analogy,” and a“way of knowing.”17

The historian Stephen Vaugh put much faith in what he believed to bethe multitudinous uses of history. History could expand experience, increasethe likelihood that we will act wisely, make us less egocentric, and help inthe development of values as well as self-knowledge and a sense of identity.Also, history can expand our reservoir of experience, enhance freedom,stimulate creative imagination, lift bonds of time and place, suggest largerpossibilities for action, and assist us to become more effective participantsin the surrounding world by enabling us to escape short-range perspectivesand to understand better the origins of the present.18 John Dewey offeredhis own interpretation of the utility of history, one that could help in thecreation of an improved society: “Piety to the past is not for its own sakenor for the sake of the past, but for the sake of a present so secure and en-riched, that it will create a better future.”19

History can serve as what Philip Phenix called “synoptics.” According toPhenix, history, religion, and philosophy are the chief synoptic disciplinesbecause these fields share the fundamental purpose of synoptic or integra-tive understanding. He perceived of history as utilitarian: “History may thenbe defined as that imaginative re-creating of past human events that bestaccords with the evidence of the present, or more briefly, as the best pos-sible explanation of the present in terms of the past.”20

THE HISTORY OF HISTORY IN TEACHER EDUCATION

Since the rise of normal school education in the first part of the nineteenthcentury, the history of education was among the subjects deemed importantfor teachers in training. The view that good professional education requiredexposure to a liberal education was held by many professors and professionaleducators at the inception of American teacher education and continuedthrough the end of the nineteenth century.21

In the early stages of teacher education, history courses often exploredEuropean contributions and models of education and focused on major his-torical and philosophical texts, including St. Thomas Aquinas, Rousseau, andPestalozzi. When teacher education gradually shifted from normal schoolsto university settings between the late nineteenth century and the 1920s, thehistory of education was often considered an integral part of teacher educa-tion, for secondary and elementary teachers alike. Over the course of thetwentieth century, though, the role of history in teacher education graduallymoved from a position of significance to the margins in most programs.

The story of the role that history played within teacher education curricu-lum can serve as a window on the ongoing struggle for determining what isaxial teacher knowledge, a quest that began in the United States at the incep-tion of formal teacher education in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts.


Teachers at this time were primarily trained to teach young children, but ashigh schools expanded in the later part of the nineteenth century to serve moreand more youth, teacher education gradually included the training of bothelementary and high school teachers. In the early 1860s at Illinois State Nor-mal University, the training of high school teachers was supported by the ad-dition of high school grades to the university’s model school. According tothe historian Jurgen Herbst, the growth of the high school occurred despitethe normal university’s primary commitment to the training of teachers forthe elementary schools.22

The shift from normal education to university-based teacher educationoccurred around the same time as the expansion of the high school, and thedesire among many professional educators to “thicken up” the field helpedcontribute to the development of education as a field of study. Around theturn of the century, leading contributors to the teacher education curricu-lum included Edward L. Thorndike and Paul Monroe of Teachers College,Paul Hanus of Harvard, and Stanford’s Ellwood P. Cubberley, among oth-ers.

As the nineteenth century came to a close, scholars were making contri-butions to a field that was very much in development. The rise of the socialsciences at the university and the growth of fields such as sociology and psy-chology brought to teacher education new disciplines for the interpretationof educational problems. History and philosophy, the older disciplines thatremained a part of the new field, continued to be developed by scholarswithin those fields and were shaped and changed by the intellectual trendsof the time.

The social science disciplines were perceived as interpretive studies inteacher education, fields that would offer social and psychological contextto the work that teachers were to do in schools. Along with the interpretiveofferings were pedagogical studies and courses that had as their focus thecontent of the subjects that teachers would teach, as well as a practical ap-plication within an actual school setting. Teacher education curriculum withthe four areas of study—interpretive, social science courses (today most of-ten referred to as foundations courses), pedagogical courses, teaching con-tent, and a practicum in a school—has basically remained the same since theend of the nineteenth century.

The segment of the curriculum that concentrated on contextual or foun-dational studies tended to be organized around distinct disciplines and wastaught by scholars in the separate fields of study. At Teachers College,Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and other early university-based models, courses in the history of education, the philosophy of educa-tion, and the psychology of education were offered as distinct areas of study,and this was true for most programs through the 1920s.23 During the 1920s,though, emphasis on history and philosophy was replaced by a stress on psy-


chology, measurement, and administration in the vast majority of teachereducation programs.24

In the 1930s at Teachers College, a course was developed that challengedprevious conceptions of single-discipline courses in that it brought togetherunder one syllabus the major social science disciplines.25 In the texts createdfor the course, historical essays were placed alongside essays written by so-ciologists, psychologists, economists, and political scientists. Because itsfounders were members of the Social Frontier group and believed teachershad the capacity to serve as agents of social change, a theory of social re-construction informed the content of the curriculum. Although the Teach-ers College course was not replicated at most schools of education, manyfoundations scholars today cite Foundations I and II as critical models thatinfluenced their work.26

It is important to note that the integrated foundations model developedat Teachers College was replaced in the 1960s by discipline-based studies.This occurred when the majority of the faculty at Teachers College beganto stress the scholarly disciplines rather than the professional actions, researchrather than service, and training the specialist in foundations rather than thegeneralist.27 According to Cremin, Shannon, and Towsend, Teachers Col-lege students were allowed to take more specialized courses, such as the his-tory of education, as early as 1946–1947.28 Losing its once influentialposition in teacher education, history’s very existence in programs becamedue primarily to doctoral student research and was never regained.

JOHN DEWEY, REFLECTIVE THINKING, ANDTEACHER DECISION MAKING

The strongest argument for history as a necessary part of teacher knowl-edge pertains to history’s role in helping teachers think. John Dewey, con-sidered to be among the most influential American philosophers who everlived and who was deeply concerned with educational questions, wrote about“reflective thinking” in How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation ofReflective Thinking to the Educative Process. And it is not surprising that oneof the most important contributors to the study of American education ex-plored the question of problem solving in the context of reflection. Publishedfor the first time in 1933, Dewey’s description of reflective thinking is con-sistent with how reflective practice and professional practice are portrayedin this chapter. For example, Dewey’s portrayal of reflective thinking includedprobing into the past. “Examination of the past,” Dewey wrote, “may bethe chief decisive factor in thought.”29

Dewey’s notion of freedom, what he referred to as “genuine freedom,”got at the heart of what are potentially the fruits of reflective thinking. Aphilosopher of education and democracy, Dewey gave prominence to the


power of the mind in all things related to personal and social change. Re-flective thinking was a way to maximize the capacity of the mind, to trainthe mind to be “intellectual.” Dewey wrote: “Genuine freedom, in short, isintellectual; it rests in the trained power of thought, in ability to ‘turn thingsover,’ to look at matters deliberately, to judge whether the amount and kindof evidence requisite for decision is at hand, and if not, to tell where andhow to seek such evidence.” He continued, ”If a man’s actions are notguided by thoughtful conclusions, then they are guided by inconsiderateimpulse, unbalanced appetite, caprice, or the circumstances of the mo-ment.”30

Specifying the properties of reflective thinking, Dewey made possibleopportunities for the consideration of historical inquiry as part of reflection.As already indicated, historical inquiry can offer powerful support to thedeliberation process, not only through knowledge of specific historical phe-nomena but also by way of processes historians employ. Dewey’s stated goalfor reflective thinking was “the formation of disciplined logical ability tothink.”31 Such approaches to problem solving can aid in bringing to frui-tion Dewey’s goals for reflective thinking and have the capacity to make suchthinking enhanced and refined.

ATTITUDE AND THOUGHT

It may seem tangential to discuss attitude in relation to professional prac-tice but, if understood in the Deweyian sense, attitude can mean what wetake to be true, what we like to be so.32 Because of personal attitudes, weall have a tendency to jump to conclusions and fail to examine and test ourideas. We tend to make sweeping generalizations and assertions, often basedon a few facts, which is usually not sufficient enough information.

Dewey’s conception of a positive attitude included “open-mindedness.”He believed open-mindedness entailed freedom from prejudice, partisanship,and such other habits as close the mind and make it unwilling to considernew problems and entertain new ideas. It also included an active desire tolisten to more sides than one, to give heed to facts from whatever sourcethey come, to give full attention to alternative possibilities, and to recog-nize the possibility of error even in the beliefs that are dearest to us.33 Butopen-mindedness could not be a passive state of mind, according to Dewey.“The mind that is open merely in the sense that it passively permits thingsto trickle in and through,” he wrote, “will not be able to resist the factorsthat make for mental closure.”34

There are significant commonalities between the qualities Dewey attrib-uted to open-mindedness and the capacities scholars Stephen Vaugh andPhilip Phenix and others argued historical inquiry develops. As already in-dicated, Vaugh believed history could expand experience, increase the like-


lihood that we will act wisely, make us less egocentric, and help in the de-velopment of values as well as self-knowledge and a sense of identity. Also,history can expand our reservoir of experience, enhance freedom, stimulatecreative imagination, lift bonds of time and place, suggest larger possibili-ties for action, and assist us to become more effective participants in thesurrounding world by enabling us to escape short-range perspectives and tounderstand better the origins of the present.35 The above illustrations of theusefulness of history correspond to Dewey’s notion of open-mindedness, aquality he believed was intrinsic to reflective thinking.

A READY MIND

Preparedness to contemplate certain problems or questions, what Deweycalled “readiness, “ is integral to effective professional practice. We cannotthink about anything “without experience and information about it.”36

Readiness in mind can mean that one is prepared to access various modesof inquiry in ways that can enhance professional practice.

Readiness to contemplate the challenges inherent in schooling, whetherthey are problems in the classroom related to tracking or curriculum orproblems outside the classroom, such as school governance, can mean thata teacher has the capacity to move between multiple modes of inquiry.Because they support varied approaches to the posing of questions andprovide a range of skills that can be advantageous to the deliberationprocess, multiple modes of inquiry are instructive at different momentsin time. Modes of inquiry can be used in tandem so as to broaden ateacher’s vision and make available options that may not have otherwisebeen known.

In Experience and Education, Dewey captured this process in relation tohis principles of continuity and interaction.37

As an individual passes from one situation to another, his world, his environ-ment, expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another worldbut in a different part and aspect of one and the same world. What he haslearned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instru-ment of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow.The process goes on as long as life and learning continue.38

Dewey did not differentiate between school experience, organized andstructured lessons in the context of a preplanned curriculum, and life ex-perience, situations not planned and facilitated by a teacher. But the no-tion that what we learn from the past has the capacity to provide one withan “instrument of understanding” has important implications for the edu-cation of teachers.


HISTORY AND EDUCATION: IMPLICATIONS FORTEACHER EDUCATION

In my own teacher education courses, I have witnessed history’s capacityto support teachers’ thinking in important ways, including helping themunderstand power and motive in the context of schooling. For example, whenmy education students realize battles over reading method have occurredthroughout American history, they eventually seek answers to questions aboutthe underlying reasons behind the “reading wars.” As George W. Bush gavepreference to phonics instruction in his education platform during the 2000presidential campaign, the Boston schoolmasters rose up in protest againstHorace Mann’s preference for whole-word approaches in Massachusetts’schools in the 1840s. My education students are able to observe in these twoexamples that reading instruction is in many ways a political issue, illumi-nating questions about the role of the teacher in the classroom, text selec-tion, and other controversial issues that pertain to power and motive.39

In another example from my teaching, I have found that exposure tohistory provides education students with a greater capacity to envisionmulticultural education broadly, rather than defining it exclusively by raceand ethnicity. When my education students learn that there are previous (andstriking) examples of schools’ intersections with multiculturalism, such asoutcries by Catholics over the use of the King James Bible in the commonschools in the mid-1800s or the preponderance of German language in theschools of Buffalo and St. Louis during the same period and into the early1900s, they begin to view multicultural education as theory and practicemore broadly. Thus, exposure to history enables my education students torecognize multiple categories—those of race, class, ethnicity, gender, religion,language, and sexual orientation—when pondering how multicultural edu-cation is both defined and enacted. In this case, historical examples helpeducation students bring nuance and complexity to their initial impressionsand understandings of multicultural education, having the potential to en-hance teaching practice, including the presentation of multiple perspectivesand experiences across subject areas.

CONCLUSION: TEACHERS’ ROLES IN SCHOOLCHANGE

Dewey’s work on reflective thinking and experience appear to center onthe learning and growth of the individual. However, Dewey was ultimatelyinterested in improvements in society that could transform social life. In hiswritings about individual growth, he was also concerned with the transfor-mation of the public and its problems.

Social Reconstructionists have always concentrated on the link betweeneducation and social change. Dewey, George Counts, Charles Rugg, and their


fellow members of the Social Frontier, and Kenneth Zeichner, Henry Giroux,Maxine Greene, and other scholars writing today have made individualgrowth and its role in the larger social life central to their work and con-tributed to discussions about teacher efficacy, school renewal, and social trans-formation.

Carefully planned teacher education curriculum can contribute to a betterunderstanding of power and motive in relation to specific social phenom-ena, and this knowledge can help one to conceive of how to make improve-ments in society. In this context, teacher education can provide teachers witha strong capacity for thoughtful and well-informed participation in the pro-cesses required for reform.

There must be a clear relationship between the changes we expect to takeplace in the education of children and what needs to be accomplished in theeducation of the nation’s teachers. School reformers, including TheodoreSizer and James P. Comer, have concentrated on how schools might be trans-formed so that they can produce students who are well-educated and well-adjusted citizens with options in the future. Since 1986, there have been anumber of policy statements and calls for action by groups, including theCarnegie Forum on Education and the Economy (1986), the Holmes Group(1986), and the National Education Goals Panel (1992) that support higherstandards for public education. A view of schooling for the future shared bythese groups is one in which all students are helped to achieve higher stan-dards, a deeper knowledge and understanding of school subjects, and theability to use knowledge effectively, not to just recall information.40 Moti-vated by concern for American economic strength or motivated by a beliefin the importance of equity and/or excellence, such ideas are mobilizingefforts to restructure schooling, teaching, and learning across the UnitedStates.

Calls for school change have been ignited by social and economic de-mands, hardly new to the educational landscape, and developments in cog-nition, roughly a thirty-year-old endeavor. These three factors—economics,social concerns, and advances in the study of cognition—have shaped manyrecent developments in school restructuring and reform. In this context,teachers’ roles have been greatly expanded to include participation in schoolleadership, extensive curriculum and assessment development, and work withparent and other community groups.

With exceedingly demanding expectations placed on all teachers, revisionof teacher education is more imperative than ever. To this end, it is the re-sponsibility of teacher educators, in collaboration with teacher leaders, toaddress seriously the challenges confronting them, a provocation that has thecapacity to transform teacher education and the professional practice of teach-ers as we enter the twenty-first century. As argued in this chapter, historicalknowledge and inquiry can provide teachers with essential tools in order tomore deeply understand daily professional challenges, as well as allow them


to consider reform possibilities vital to the improvement of our nation’sschools. A teacher education devoid of history is one that is shortsighted,limiting teachers’ capacities to see how school practices developed andchanged over time. Arguably better than other disciplinary lenses, historycan demonstrate that schools are social institutions created by human be-ings, with the potential to be re-created by them as well.

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— 4 —

Standards, Testing, andTeacher Quality: Common

Sense vs. Authority inEducational Reform

PAUL SHAKER

The desire for high teacher quality raises the question of how to evaluateteachers and schools. Consistent with the worldview of our times, many inand outside government display an exclusionary preference for quantitative,test-driven evaluation that tends to delineate teaching and learning in a nar-row and simplistic manner. Evaluation methods, it should be recognized,tend to define what they set out to evaluate. This dynamic poses the issueof whether we can afford to define teaching and the institution of our pub-lic schools through the testing model. Education’s impact is broader thanthe outcomes that standardized tests measure. Furthermore, more authen-tic evaluation can be comprehensively defined to judge school effectivenessfairly.To pick up this contemporary debate, let us ask, “What counts as ahighly qualified teacher?” In our considerations, should we emphasize teacherIQ? Grade point average? High SAT scores? Meeting or exceeding a scoreon a standardized teacher test? Completion of an arts and sciences major?Possession of an official credential? Accomplishment judged by performanceassessment? Achievement of board certification? Or should we focus on cri-teria emerging from the profession itself? For example, completion of anaccredited teacher education program, letters of reference from qualifiededucators, evaluations from students and supervisors, or the testimonials ofpeers. Some vocal politicians, officials, and media voices tend toward anemphasis on scores, grades, and evidence reducible to numbers. Their em-phasis is on a binary and quantified view of teaching that measures success“by the numbers” and places teachers in two camps: the qualified and the


unqualified. Among educators, a more subjective and multivalent view gen-erally prevails: All teachers have strengths and weaknesses; as individuals theymatch with some classroom situations better than others; their performancemay be best judged not individually but as members of a team or faculty.

Then, again, perhaps the quality of teachers is not ultimately demonstratedby evaluating the teachers themselves but in their effects on students. Thequestion of teacher qualification then becomes “Should we judge the qual-ity of teachers through the outcomes of their professional work, that is, thelearning that takes place in their students?” In this event, it is not the teach-ers’ scores and grades that matter but those of their students. Possible cri-teria include students’ test performances, their retention in school andgraduation rates, their college grades, and their eventual income levels. Oris student success better seen in more subjective terms? For example, thedevelopment of personality, good health, committed citizenship, enlightenedpersonal values, creativity, and so on. Of course, criteria such as these do notreduce to a summative score or a competitive ranking.

As we seek to examine the issue of qualification and quality in teachersand teaching, we are thus drawn to questions about our own worldview andthe values implicit therein. This is a journey worth taking and one that is atthe heart of education. Additionally, we can never go down this path with-out finding new insights about the nature of human experience and, in sucha way, enriching ourselves intellectually.

ADVOCACY VS. AUTHORITY

A number of commentators, including some influential politicians, tendto see teaching as primarily the transmission of information. This deep-seatedcliché view of education is ancient, persistent, and has broad “common sense”appeal. Historically, or in traditional cultures today, we can think of memo-rizing the saga of our clan and of being able to perfectly repeat such an oralhistory, as an example. Learning the catechism by heart is a medieval butfamiliar version of this notion of curriculum. By these measures, teaching isa relatively simple pursuit characterized by rote and drill in an environmentof discipline. This long-lasting stereotype is a foundation of U.S. society’simplicit concept of education—one that includes desks in rows and a teacherin front of a chalkboard, lecturing. In their recent book, The Teaching Gap1,James Hiebert and James Stigler articulate the notion that societies have suchfixed images of education that are highly resistant to change. Recent mani-festations of this view in the United States include the contemporary cur-riculum standards and high-stakes testing movements. The typical contentof state standards and the form of the articulated high-stakes standardizedtests reinforce this static definition of education. Standards and tests are notby their nature so limited, but the official manifestations we see in the UnitedStates, at least, rarely rise above this level.

Standards, Testing, and Teacher Quality 45

All this having been said, there is, in fact, an important place in educa-tion for the mastery of facts, and professional societies in education have donea better job than government at creating such guidelines. Ultimately, how-ever, in the creation of curriculum standards, such professional influence hasbeen marginalized by politicians and their appointees in favor of “content”disciplinary specialists and special interest groups. The authority of profes-sional expertise in education has a difficult time competing politically withthe public’s commonsense views of the field. For example, in the popularmind, science educators and their societies are deemed less competent to setscience standards than research scientists. The resulting documents, as inCalifornia’s science and social studies standards, document the hazards ofthis approach. Standards created in this way tend to be extensive laundry listsof data from the field with little recognition of the realities of time and rea-sonable retention, with a chronic avoidance of normative and foundationalcontent, and with a lack of integrative and transdisciplinary views of learn-ing.

Focusing on the California History/Social Science Content Standards,Grades K–12, for example, it is evident that the document does honor tothe discipline of history. The standards are a comfort to those who find his-tory to be a synoptic discipline, in Philip Phenix’s2 words, and a path to lib-eral education. The term social studies, however, was coined to demonstratethe difference between a family of disciplines, their structures and conven-tions, and the curricular needs of schoolchildren. The California Standardsserve the discipline, not the educational needs of students or society at large.This lack of relevance is manifested in an approach to history teaching thatdoes not create an enlarged cadre of informed, motivated citizens, ready tovote and participate widely in the political system. Ironically, this omissionoccurs in a nation that gave power and dignity to the common person in arevolutionary fashion, one that largely removed religion from the publicdebate so that faith would not divide its citizens. The United States estab-lished a new standard for free speech, allowing controversy to be assimilatedthrough open expression instead of violence. But, today, the United Stateshas many unmet challenges and a need for engaged, knowledgeable citizens.The nation is racially divided. America’s sense of community and commonpurpose is fragile and imperfect. Voting rates keep trending downward. Os-cillating tendencies between isolationism and unilateralism lure the UnitedStates into foreign policy quagmires. Unemployment, federal debt, and thelack of universal health care do not assume appropriate urgency in the hallsof government. Wealth inequities have expanded beyond those of the otherdeveloped countries. There is denial regarding the class divisions that increas-ingly characterize society. Social Studies curriculum standards should, there-fore, address such social realities and instill a commitment to participationin the democratic process. Laundry lists of data are valuable only insofar asthey contribute to achieving such larger goals. Standards that make room


for rote trivia at the expense of critical reflection on issues and process inAmerican political life undermine the democratic project. Standards that donot integrate the disciplines, showing, for example, the need for sound sci-ence in creating environmental policy, similarly detract from the citizenry’sability to adapt to changing times and participate in wise decision making.

This tendency toward political micromanagement of the curriculum bynoneducators is compounded when advocates for testing, textbooks, andstandards also have profits at stake. Reforms that educators might favor, suchas reducing class size, increasing teacher compensation, or buying teachertime for curriculum development, methodological renewal, and so on, bringno education dollars to corporations who are, in turn, campaign donors. Theadvocacy of for-profit entities for particular school reforms is typically trace-able to corporate economic interests, as would be expected in the market-place. Their powerful lobbyists will only argue for policies that feed thecorporate profit/political contribution cycle. The 1960s-era language labsand microcomputer labs, as well as expensive reading programs in recent days,are other manifestations of profit-driven education reforms that may well havecommanded more than their fair share of education funding due to the pushof lobbying interests.

ALTERNATE VISIONS

These tensions over education and the curriculum have deep roots in so-ciety and are much more than simple disagreements about what children andyouth will study in school. The ongoing debate is one more expression ofcompeting value orientations that vie for dominance in postmodern society.The standards and testing movement as conceived by the No Child LeftBehind Act is a manifestation of the view that the purpose of education isthe transmission of facts and skills that prepare the next generation to main-tain and extend the economic success of the United States. Arguments forschool reform—such as those in A Nation At Risk—are framed in terms ofeconomic competitiveness. Progressive educators and their organizations seta high value on the transformative and humanistic goals of education. Thistypically is interpreted as education that includes questioning of establishedmores and ways of knowing, and a view of students that emphasizes self-re-alization and holistic development. Economic productivity, social conscience,and good citizenship are seen as flowing organically from such a focus. Inthis view, an individual’s economic and civic participation occur in a con-text of choice and reflection—not automatically or as obligations. Individu-als grow into citizenship with an attitude of reform and renewal toward theirinstitutions. Such an attitude underlies the expansion of civil rights, for ex-ample.

In the tradition of John Dewey and his peers, Progressive Education isderived from the philosophical perspective of American Pragmatism, that is,


a view that sought to consolidate both the significance of ideas and theachievements of modern science and technology for larger purposes.Progressives acknowledged the value of material success but saw this in acontext of values that were not exclusively material. Quality of life issues, suchas social justice and the long-term sustainability of economic models, werealso a consideration. Standard of living is merely one dimension of qualityof life. So just as the Progressive movement in politics reined in piraticalcapitalism—as manifested by low standards in food and drug processing ormonopolistic corporate practices—in education the Progressives opposedschools becoming only machines for sorting winners and losers in the eco-nomic system. Schools became an agency for social reform and for broad-ening the franchise of success. Educators attempted to compensate forlimitations in home background or aptitude and to elevate students univer-sally.

Progressives are blamed by revisionists, such as Diane Ravitch3, for aninvidious propagation of social efficiency and social Darwinist schemes ineducation. Lawrence Cremin4 is one of a number of historians, however, whosee the Progressive use of testing, Carnegie units, junior high schools, track-ing, and so forth, as different in pervasiveness and purpose from the man-ner in which such “modern” techniques have been abused by others incontemporary education. As stated earlier, standards and tests are not by theirnature illegitimate in education. They can, however, be easily misdesignedand overemphasized.

In economic terms, for today’s Progressives, educated individuals seek notonly to participate in wealth generation, but also to raise questions aboutquality–of-life issues and to introduce the merits of aesthetic, social justice,and environmental arguments in making judgments about the ways in whichbusiness and industry operate. Respected voices for such perspectives includephilosophers Richard Rorty, John Rawls, Charles Taylor, and MarthaNussbaum; and educators such as Jonathan Kozol, Joel Spring, NelNoddings, Elliot Eisner, and Michael Apple. Teachers, other educators, andtheir organizations have become leading societal advocates for this latter andalternative point of view. Unsurprisingly, this posture has contributed to anadversarial relationship between those who advocate the mainstream, nar-rowly economic view of American values and the “education establishment,”whose values vary from this focus and act to compromise the unbridled,short-term pursuit of profit. Teachers’ unions in particular have been demon-ized by right-wing commentators.

The commonsense view characterizes Progressive educators as romanticextremists who are child-centered at the expense of standards, discipline, andeconomic realism. An alternative interpretation is that socially Progressiveeducators take seriously the democratic vision of American society in whicha full effort is made to provide equal opportunity for all. Equally important,Progressives support material achievement but see it, first, in a context of


sustainability, both socially and environmentally. Secondly, they recognize thatstandard of living involves not only material acquisition but also quality oflife issues such as social tranquility, clean air and water, and the opportunityfor the development of personality and family relations. Progressives also havean eye for the role of creativity in sustaining economic success. Transforma-tive ideas, such as the microcomputer and Internet, which are of the great-est economic value, seem more likely to manifest in open educative settings,rather than those characterized by rote, drill, and orthodoxy.

The highest reaches of American graduate education have earned globalrespect because of their ability to blend an appreciation for the value of tra-ditional learning with openness to creativity and transformation. This samespirit is widely valued by teachers at primary and secondary levels. Those greatuniversities and graduate programs did not emerge in a vacuum or in oppo-sition to the larger values of American education. On the contrary, they arepart of a continuum that begins early in the lives of students when they areasked as well as told; when the unknown is as important as the known; whenjudgments of quality compete with those of quantity; and when the hori-zon is extended indefinitely, across all members of society and humanity, aswell as into the future, indefinitely.

THE COMMON GOOD, A PUBLIC TRUST

Perhaps society’s success inevitably breeds a kind of complacency andoverconfidence. One consequence of this tendency is a loss of culturalmemory regarding the factors that led to great achievement and a consequentlack of regard for those institutions and values. Mass public education grewup in the United States in a deliberate fashion out of the need for informedcitizens in this secular democracy and as a way to assimilate a constant flowof diverse immigrants from the world’s many traditions. The franchise of theschools expanded as modern society displaced other methods of buildingcommunity and raising children. The schools also became a vehicle for car-ing for those with special needs and as a way to compensate for society’sintransigence regarding racial prejudice.

As the United States became more ethnically diverse and (for much ofits history) more secular, the schools grew to be a protected zone wheresociety attempted to manifest its better inclinations—that is, a place wherethe myth of American democracy could be felt more deeply than in themarketplace or in more segregated institutions such as churches, unions, andneighborhoods. In their human and imperfect way, the schools have con-tributed to this struggle, have helped to “Americanize” generations of im-migrants, and have opened opportunity to countless individuals. As aninstitution, elementary and secondary education have been at the founda-tion of a college and university system that has set the highest standard glo-bally.


The schools were a public trust, a nonpartisan institution established forthe common good. Although human visions such as these are always imper-fectly realized, the vision certainly did exist and widely enough that a zoneof protection surrounded the schools and insulated them to a meaningfuldegree from the harsher aspects of politics and the marketplace. Gradually,this vision of the schools has been eroded, in part by complacency, in partby a desire to reform this institution after the model of “free enterprise,”and in part from a desire to exploit a “market” that has been insulated fromfull participation by business. The assertion that any endeavor of governmentcan be done in a superior way by the private, for-profit model has gainedascendance in many quarters, and the schools have very much been caughtup in this movement. The commonsense logic is that, since the free marketof capitalism has come to dominate the world generally, it provides a modelfor all the varied institutions within society, including health, education, utili-ties, and so on.

A competing hypothesis would be that it is the balance and integrationof profit and non-profit institutions that has led to the United States’ eco-nomic success and that to impose the rules of the marketplace on institu-tions such as schools is to undermine this system. Just as governmentdomination of the economy undermined this balance and failed in SovietCommunism—or Enron, in a converse manner, upset such a balance anddisserved California—so might free market domination of education fail inthe United States. We see early intimations of why the profit model is prob-lematic in schools. The massive economic failure of Edison Schools, for ex-ample, as documented by the New York Times and other popular media5,speaks eloquently to the limitations of business intervention in school ad-ministration. School budgets could not sustain the overhead to which cor-porations are accustomed, and the economies Edison felt could be broughtto a human service endeavor, such as school administration, were illusory.Spending more per student than their public counterparts, Edison at bestwas able to maintain pace with them while losing to date $400 million and95 percent of its market value. Edison’s backers seemed confident that highlypaid, bright (business) executives could redesign schools quickly and effec-tively. Instead, what seems evident is that Edison had little in the way of trans-formative ideas to bring to bear, and instead of finding a profit by professionalbusiness management and the elimination of waste, the executives found theschools to be underfunded. The conventional business assumption thatschool personnel could not be highly qualified because they worked for un-impressive salaries did not account for the nonmaterial value human serviceprofessionals derive from their work and the value of their vocational zeal.The competence of persons is not necessarily reflected in the size of theirpaychecks. Other motivations exist.

The emerging debate about childhood obesity and the place of unhealthyfood and soft drinks in schools is also informative. Schools can be a place


where good health practices are modeled and discussed, or they can be de-fined as a place where many young people gather with money to spend andhabits of consumption to be shaped. The latter definition has allowed softdrink companies, among others, to increasingly enter into arrangements withschools so that their profits provide discretionary funds for the institution.As childhood obesity begins to compete with smoking as a societal hazard,some are now questioning the functionality, if not the morality, of this policy.Unlike the food court at the local mall, the school cafeteria in prior timeshas been seen as part of a zone of protection for children. In more recentdays, the notion that nutritional habits were a part of the school missioncompeted unsuccessfully with the opportunity to bring in a few thousanddiscretionary dollars per school. Gradually, children are losing one of the fewpowerful environments in which they can build better eating habits. With ahealth crisis looming, particularly for the poorest of children, policies maychange.

Again the issue arises of whether society is better served by the introduc-tion of the profit motive and the characteristics of the marketplace into theschool. Might it be possible that some institutions or functions of govern-ment are not suited to privatization and the attitude of caveat emptor? Mightthe success of the American economy and political system be derived fromits balance and integration of profit and non-profit or governmental orga-nizations?

STAGES AND AGES OF EDUCATION

If we are to evaluate teaching and teachers, we must consider the com-plexity and competing demands of the field. Alfred North Whitehead in TheAims of Education6 provides a comprehensive view of the educative processin a three-stage framework. He wrote, for example, of a Stage of Precisionduring which students are steeped in the fundamentals of a field and takecommand of the data and technique vital to a course of learning. From en-gineering and accounting to the fine and performing arts, each discipline hasits craft knowledge, whether it be characterized by theory, data, or technique.Lost in the public’s simple and popularized view of education, however, areWhitehead’s other two stages—ones that are at least of equal significance andthat in combination with the Stage of Precision comprise the whole of learn-ing.

To illustrate, let us reflect on the many contemporary settings in whichkindergarten has been co-opted into a kind of “Grade Zero.” Experts inefficiency and others in media and politics asserted during the past two de-cades that kindergarten could be revised and made, in their view, more ef-fective by setting aside the traditional goals of Friedrich Froebel and othermainstream early childhood educators. The established norms of kindergar-ten could be replaced with a more structured, content-oriented curriculum.


There was, they in effect asserted, untapped opportunity for instruction inPrecision at Grade Zero.

But for Whitehead, the Stage of Precision is preceded by the Stage ofRomance, and it is in such a spirit that kindergarten was conceived. Prior tothe discipline of drill and rote, Froebel and his peers asserted there is a needfor establishing motivation in the learner—a strong intrinsic desire to learn.A desire that is profound enough to sustain one through long periods of verydisciplined work in mastering the data and technique of which we have spo-ken. In a vital way, early childhood education sets the stage for more tradi-tional schooling, and it is particularly important for children who have nototherwise had such values and dispositions surface through their home ex-periences. We may be born with a disposition to learn, curiosity may be hard-wired into our DNA, but clearly this inclination can be turned away fromschooling or lost entirely. If our ongoing childhood experiences are notemotionally supportive, motivation to learn may be damaged or destroyed.

We see enough wasted potential or misdirected energy in youth and adultsto know that passage through the developmental stages of life and learningdoes not happen automatically. There is a tendency in the popular mind toact as though children can be flogged through school as if they were a herdof cattle and arrive at adulthood successfully, just as steers reach the railhead.This view grossly underestimates both the intelligence and perversity ofhuman nature. A better analog may be that we resemble those animals thatcan never be domesticated, those that die in captivity or become hopelesslylanguid or enraged. The relationship between established society and its suc-cessor generation is better characterized by persuasion and insight than bythe use of brute force.

Erik Erikson was one of the preeminent stage theorists who explained (inChildhood and Society)7 that the passage to maturity is not a regular andconstant path. Development is better characterized by a series of distinctintegrative realizations that transcend their predecessors. To put it anotherway, the accomplishments of one “age” are surrendered in order to meet thechallenges of the next. The independent, ego-oriented personality, for ex-ample, is displaced by the bond with a partner. That binary union is, in turn,followed later in life by the introduction of children and the experience ofthe nuclear family that typically is succeeded by the “empty nest.” All this iscompatible with Whitehead’s dynamics in that mastering Precision entails aloss of Romantic freedom and ecstasy, while, eventually, the Stage of Gen-eralization will likewise demand a “letting go” of the strictures of Precision.

EVALUATING EXPERIENCE

Kindergarten and other manifestations of the Stage of Romance have beenlittle valued in the recent era of U. S. school reform. Universal Head Start,for example, remains a distant dream, while punitive high-stakes testing for


all at multiple grade levels is very much a reality. There are competing as-sumptions about the nature of children and youth that underlie this courseof events, specifically whether punishment and negative reinforcement shouldbe dominant in directing students in school or whether nurturing environ-ments and appeals to their better instincts prevail in motivating young people.A school environment is not likely to exclusively reflect one or the other ofthese visions, but it seems safe to say that the No Child Left Behind Act putsits emphasis on the punitive. Given the long-established and well-knownconsequences for failure in school and dropping out, it is difficult to imag-ine that more of this treatment is likely to cure. Preliminary reports indi-cate that dropout rates are now increasing in an unprecedented manner as aresult of high school exit examinations.

Ultimately, to evaluate quality in teaching and learning, one must take intoaccount the sweep of life and how individuals contribute to society and de-rive satisfaction in their own lives. Whitehead speaks to this criterion in hisStage of Generalization. Motivated by Romantic visions and equipped withPrecise tools, the learner eventually becomes a creator by Generalizing in hisor her preferred field of expertise. The learning process is not complete un-til the bearers of culture are empowered to reconstruct it to their own in-spired standards. This consummate type of educative experience tends to gobeyond the realm of tests and standards since, by its nature, it involves tran-scending established norms. Generalizing or creating is as effective a moti-vator of youth as the enthusiasm bred by Romance. Since apprentices admirethe accomplishments and style of masters and intuit that there is satisfaction,indeed pleasure, in such levels of performance, they have ready models todrive their aspirations.

If our system of evaluation does not account for the passage of learnersthrough the other stages and into Generalization, we are judging perfor-mance imperfectly. We may well, in such a case, overvalue those who mas-ter routine but have no glimmer of creativity and innovation. Such is oneof the great dangers of examination systems, because in the pursuit of speed,low cost, and apparent reliability, they may foster performativity rather thanperformance. That is to say, such techniques reward the masters of test tak-ing rather than the future masters of arts, sciences, and the professions. “Youteach what you test,” goes the old educational proverb. And in response,perhaps this modification is therefore in order: “Be careful what you testfor . . .”

This is not to say that evaluation, or even testing, has no place in theeducational enterprise. First, it is useful to employ a broad concept of evalu-ation, one that includes performance assessment as well as testing or stan-dardized testing. Some varieties of achievement lend themselves to evaluationby quantitative and positivistic tools, such as objective tests, while others donot. The appraisal tool needs to be fitted to the task at hand rather thanimposed on the situation because it is a cheap or easy technique or because


it confers an aura of accuracy, however misbegotten. The monochromatic,commonsense view of evaluation is that it is best done via testing, particu-larly objective testing. Once again, however, conventional and popularizedviews are not necessarily accurate and often have a reactionary flavor.

Although too little used, we have techniques that can assess a child’s readi-ness for formal schooling, that is, entry to kindergarten. We can make similarjudgments later about whether we have established an attitude of eagernessto learn informed by the goals of the Stage of Romance. Just as a more flex-ible entry to school should be implemented, so should the exit from kinder-garten to the grades. We seem captive to calendar age determining thesematters although we know better, including the existence of characteristicvariances in readiness by gender. With some children, we need more or lessthan a year of days or half-days to inculcate a positive attitude toward school-ing. One can justify such student-centeredness on efficiency grounds asreadily as humane ones. The rigid calendar and narrow cognitive approachhas left too many students behind, like babies born too soon and unable tosustain life independently.

A THIRD AXIS

The previous sections suggest that, as we evaluate education, we shouldaccount for two axes of performance. One is that of quality vs. quantity, ornarrative vs. numerical. Second is the transformational staircase of stage andage development in which criteria for success change in a fundamental way.Finally, a third axis is reflected in theories of psychological type, such as thoseof C. G. Jung and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator of Kathryn Briggs andIsabel Briggs Myers8. Type thinking is also evident in Howard Gardner’stheory of multiple intelligences9. MBTI, reflecting Jung’s PsychologicalTypes10, categorizes personality in sixteen characteristic patterns and illustratesa set of varying styles, values, and modes of interaction among learners orother groups. The Indicator, like Jung’s underlying theory, has served as abreakthrough in systematically sorting through a standardized instrument andthen promoting respect for the differences among individuals. With millionsof data sets available for research, highly convincing correlations have beenarrived at. One example is the characteristic personality types for whom stan-dardized testing is most compatible, as well as those who underachieve onsuch measures. Dropping out of school highly correlates with other catego-ries of type. Entry into certain professions, including teaching, is yet anotherarea of consistent results. There are interactive patterns such as the domi-nance in elementary education of personalities who perform poorly on stan-dardized tests while being favorably disposed toward performance assessment.Evaluation processes are not type-neutral. In the grading of a single course,or more global appraisals of school achievement, multiple measures are nec-essary to balance the inherent bias of each type of evaluation tool.


Gardner makes a similar point through a different rubric, that of eight“multiple intelligences”—that is, linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spa-tial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist.These preferences suggest differing teaching modalities, respectively, words,numbers or logic, pictures, physical experience, music, social experience, self-reflection, and experience in the natural world. Teaching methods are simi-larly diverse, ranging from cooperative learning to journaling and role-playingto creation in the arts. If they are to be comprehensive and effective, cur-riculum standards and testing techniques must likewise reflect the range ofintelligences. To focus exclusively on the linguistic and logical-mathemati-cal is to perpetuate an unfair hierarchy and deprive individuals and societyof the full value of our diverse talent pool. Clearly, in society the range ofabilities is valued and rewarded. If an artificial and narrow grid is imposedon life in schools, this influential institution is turned against society’s largerpurpose of gaining full inclusion of the talents and abilities of its citizens.The simplistic and narrow philosophy undergirding most standards and test-ing regimes is a prime example of such counterproductive educational policy.

Again, it is clear how commonsense initiatives by noneducators intervenein the practice of a complex and subtle field to defeat the best insights ofprofessionals to the detriment of all concerned. In the governance of medi-cine and other professions, society labors to establish a line between lay po-litical control and the ethical zone of licensed specialists. In education, lackinga creed as lucid as the Hippocratic oath, there is little acceptance that sucha line should be drawn. On the contrary, there is widespread consensus thateducators have no special knowledge or principles, such as “do no harm.”In such an environment, teachers are increasingly forced to deliver curricu-lum and testing that contravenes their professional knowledge and ethicalsensibilities. We have parallels in medicine when, for example, physicians areforbidden by government to inform their patients of a full range of treat-ment options. Compare this with teachers who in California have been, atrisk to their tenure, obliged to administer standardized tests in English toyoung children who have little or no knowledge of the language. There isno stage-awareness in such an imposition on primary children. Similarly inMassachusetts, the state recognizes children’s reactions to high-stakes testsby packaging the tests with latex gloves and zip-lock bags so that the instru-ments can be returned after students become sick on them. Examples suchas these illustrate lines educators would not cross if they were in control oftheir own profession. They, too, would “do no harm.”

IN CLOSING

The most recent federal bureaucratic intervention into education, whichbegan with A Nation At Risk in 1983 and has been abetted by most state


legislatures, may be winding down at the same time as it spins off its lastfew dubious initiatives. Currently emerging is the American Board for Cer-tification of Teaching Excellence’s major effort to provide teaching certifi-cation to those who have a baccalaureate degree, satisfy a background check,and pass standardized, objective, paper and pencil tests. (So much formentoring, moral inculcation, and professional consciousness.) Secretary ofEducation Rod Paige has dedicated more than $35 million to this effort toprovide “highly qualified teachers” for all American children. This is the sameRod Paige, of course, whose reputation is based on the quantitative data ofthe “Houston Education Miracle,” a test-driven program of reform that isnow known to have been based on false and manipulated data and is, there-fore, devoid of credibility. The revelations about Houston, as well as theunderfunding and unpopular impact of the No Child Left Behind Act, maybe ushering out this era of bureaucratic education “reform.” Simplistic, pu-nitive, and top/down education policy is meeting another frustrating de-nouement. Just as Edison Schools has illustrated the bankruptcy of its designthrough accumulating $400 million in debt and colossal stock market losses,so has the Nation At Risk/NCLB family of initiatives repeatedly created arecord of unmet expectations, cost overruns, and backtracking governmentofficials. All this is documented in the research of educators such as DavidBerliner, Gerald Bracey, Susan Ohanian, Linda McNeil, Angela Valenzuela,Alex Molnar, and Jeannie Oakes, among others.

Our public schools remain in the front lines of society’s efforts to con-tinue and renew itself through the rising generations, and every day severalmillion teachers engage those children and youth to the best of their abili-ties in what are often highly unfavorable circumstances. All this is compli-cated by a political and media environment that oversimplifies the nature ofeducation, strips it from its community context, and scapegoats its practi-tioners. Despite attempts to control them from Washington and statehouses,the schools remain profound reflections of the communities they serve. Theschools are circumscribed in their impact by a family of factors affecting thelives of children in each neighborhood. The effect on schooling of commu-nity health factors and poverty in general is still stubbornly unrecognized,and the interprofessional nature of rearing and educating youth remains hid-den from popular understanding. Magical thinking prevails as manifest in thenotion that testing and laundry lists of curriculum standards can overturnthe impact of hunger, poor health and prenatal care, banal early childhoodexperience, and the other myriad problems associated with poverty.

The process of education, wrongly associated in the popular mind withfactory and production metaphors, is one of humanity’s most subtle andprofound endeavors. A wise and just society must find means to effectivelydraw the line between political control and professional practice in educationif it is to prosper in both material and spiritual terms. This popular transfor-


mation is not simple, linear, or definitive. It involves an acceptance of theidea that education and the growth of personality it fosters are continuallyemergent. John Dewey’s enigmatic statement is as good a summary as weare likely to see, “. . . the educative process is a continuous process of growth,having as its aim at every stage an added capacity of growth.”11

— II —

The Labor of Teaching

— 5 —

A Dangerous, Lucid Hour:Compliance, Alienation,and the Restructuring of

New York City High SchoolsPAULA M. SALVIO

INTRODUCTION

Despite the enduring descriptive background against which sociologists, fromWillard Waller to Dan Lortie, have described the classroom as the specificdomain of the teachers’ influence and control, teachers throughout theUnited States continue to feel that they live in a reactive state devoid of in-fluence and stripped of power.1 This is particularly the case given the nationaland state government moves to implement high-stakes testing, exemplified,for example, in the No Child Left Behind Act. The disturbing irony is thatthe No Child Left Behind Act has been passed at a moment in history whenstudents are facing one of the most profound betrayals of our time—theresegregation of schools.

In this chapter, I consider the specific ways in which the professional la-bor of New York City literacy teachers is in the process of being redefinedby the Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein administration, particularly withinthe context of school resegregation, high-stakes testing, and the move to“ramp students up” to grade level. Drawing on interviews with teachers,students, administrators, classroom observations, and interactive video clipstaken by high school students, I consider the extent to which the “RampUp to Literacy” program teaches students and teachers compliance withauthority and inadvertently distorts memories of our past history of schoolsegregation. I turn to the humanism of Karl Marx, specifically to his ethicaltheory of secular humanism, to present a critique of the common levels


system of behavior management embodied in the “Ramp Up” program,while questioning the extent to which this program contributes to estrang-ing high school teachers from their students and from their academicinterests, and, in turn, creating a strange lack of coherence in their pro-fessional lives. Furthermore, I explore the extent to which this approachto literacy contributes to generating a sense of professional melancholiaamong teachers.

Rather than cure the professional melancholia of educators, I suggest wetreat melancholia as a lyric lament through which we can protest our culture’snarrow prohibitions on who can rightfully claim loss and which losses areworthy of attention.2 I would like to suggest that the expression of melan-cholia could be used as a resource for teaching. Because melancholia is struc-tured in ambivalence, it has the paradoxical capacity both to incorporate andto challenge that which it criticizes. Freud’s portrait of melancholia offersus an important position from which to take some direction. The plaints andendless lyric laments of the melancholic proceed, according to Freud, froman attitude of revolt, a mental constellation by which a certain process hasbecome transformed into melancholic contrition.3 I want to proceed fromthe position of revolt and lyric lament that characterizes much of the teacher’sdiscussions about “ramp up training” to the classrooms where they teach.As I do so, I want us to keep in mind that, while the melancholic may infact be overpowered, she refuses to be tamed or domesticated.4

There is a paradox inherent in each of what I will refer to as the “incor-porative tactics” of the teachers I present in this essay.5 They simultaneouslyincorporate the loss or lack of professional integrity in their bodies and dis-incorporate the authority of the central administration. Since the issuanceof Joel Klein’s 2003 summer memo to literacy teachers throughout New YorkCity, the group of eight teachers I work with in the Kingsbridge section ofthe Bronx continually reframes the Ramp Up program, perhaps most im-portantly by reassembling a sense of community in their school that enablesthem to rearticulate and avow academic kinships, tastes, professional affilia-tions, identifications, and passions.

II

In a recent essay in Educational Theory entitled “Love and Despair inTeaching,” Dan Liston eloquently describes “a growing and enveloping dark-ness” in many teachers’ hearts.6 Although this darkness may not be as pro-found and wrought with despair as, notes Liston, the clinical depressionexperienced by William Styron in Darkness Made Visible or the anguish ofmanic depressive illness that Anne Sexton or Kay Redfield Jamison lived withdaily, the sense of despair felt by many educators amounts to a devastatingsense that the teaching life we have hoped for or once loved and known hasbeen foreclosed upon. Distinguishing between despair and disillusionment,

A Dangerous, Lucid Hour 61

Liston notes that despair requires a radical personal or contextual transfor-mation that does not include an adjustment to that situation but rather adeep sense of loss and sadness. Disillusionment, on the other hand, impliesthat one may in fact come to terms with a difficult situation, make reason-able adjustments, and move on. What are the social and historical conditionsupon which teachers’ sense of despair and loss take hold? Can attention toloss open up conversations about teaching in a postindustrial economy thatmay otherwise be foreclosed upon? Can such conversations lift the weightof sadness and restore a degree of integrity to the professional labor of edu-cators and, in doing so, perhaps ease the sense of estrangement they feel fromtheir academic interests and their students?

III

The lure of reform—the baffling, seductive hook—is that it promises torecast the past, to make amends, to evoke a reckoning. But the promise tomake amends is easily thwarted when reform efforts ignore history and failto cultivate a substantive knowledge of the past. What happens when wemistake repetition for reform? What impact does the refusal of history haveon the professional lives of educators? Michael Bloomberg’s move to cen-tralize education resonates, as I will discuss later in this chapter, with the earlytwentieth-century reform efforts that David Tyack referred to as the “onebest system.”7 The reappearance of a centralized educational administrationin New York City during the summer of 2003 reflects a failure to regardhistory as a source of critical reference. Among the most serious failures ofaddress made by the Bloomberg administration pertains to the resegregationof schools. The impact of this phenomenon on students, communities, andeducators is virtually absent in the discourse of reform. Yet this is the his-torical background upon which Bloomberg’s new initiatives unfold.

In fact, in January 2003, five months before Joel Klein issued a memo tohigh school principals to “round teachers up” for literacy training, GaryOrfield and his colleagues at Harvard University published a report docu-menting the extensive move to resegregate schools in this country.8 BeforeI formally begin my essay, I want to take a moment to summarize sectionsof Orfield’s report on the current status of school segregation, for it is theground upon which my account of Bloomberg’s literacy reform efforts istold.

In a study conducted by the Harvard Civil Rights Project in January oflast year (2003), entitled “A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: AreWe Losing the Dream?” the report’s authors, Erica Frankenberg, ChungmeiLee, and Gary Orfield find that in the last seven years, in the wake of U.S.Supreme Court rulings that make it easier for school districts to declare them-selves “unified” or desegregated, nearly fifty districts across the country havehad their court-ordered desegregation plans abolished. Moreover, the authors


document a significant racial transformation of U.S. schools. Since 1968,black student enrollment in public schools has increased nearly 30 percentand Latino student enrollment is up 283 percent. This contrasts starkly withthe public school enrollment of whites—which is down 17 percent. In ev-ery region of the country, the public school population has become lesswhite. In fact, the Harvard study reports that, on average, whites are nowthe most segregated group in public schools—attending schools that onaverage are 80 percent white—and this statistic is even more searing if youplace it alongside the fact that minority students make up nearly one-half ofthe public school enrollment.

What does it mean to reckon not only with the singular issue of re-segregation but also with the emotional impact that this inevitable repeti-tion and betrayal has on teachers and students working in schools that lackresources and are cast as “in need of improvement”? There are clashes ofloyalty bonds in resegregation narratives, in part, I think because the emo-tions associated with this national betrayal hold the shock of old histories.The fears and betrayals that collect around the resegregation of schools sug-gest that we have not, in the words of Toni Morrison, worked through thehistory of slavery, the legacy of exploiting immigrants, and our anxieties overthe ownership of property.9

One lesson that Freud offers us in his 1917 essay “Mourning andMelancholia” is that melancholia is a kind of perversion or distortion ofmemory—a refusal of a salutary remembrance of a loss, a refusal to mourn,that condemns the subject to a futile “acting out.”10 Melancholia, as definedby Freud, is identified as an inability to recover from a loss, thereby thrust-ing a person into a profound state of despair. The melancholic/depressiveis dominated by sadness; in fact, sadness becomes one of the most promi-nent objects of attention in one’s life. What is particularly difficult, I believe,is that in the context of professional loss, there is no actual object for themelancholic, and this is often evident in teachers’ discussions of reform. Whatis evident in discussions is an attachment to a sense of sadness and loss—whatJulia Kristeva refers to as an “ersatz object.” There is a vague, indetermi-nate something that causes the melancholic to experience a loss of words, aloss of meaning, and a loss of desire in one full swoop.11 Melancholia canbe brought about through the loss of a loved one, a home, an ideal, a senseof purpose, or the lost fulfillment that Marx characterizes in his descriptionof alienation. For Marx, alienation is accompanied by feelings of misery,exhaustion, and lost creativity. In one interview, New York City high schoolteacher Geoff Simpson describes this feeling as “ennui.” “I feel,” saysSampson, “I think many of us feel, that there is little meaning we can giveto the initiatives coming in from the Regional offices—meaning is assignedfor us—our job is to deliver the goods. This makes some of us feel lousy mostof the time, pretty much at a loss—as if our professional insights are insig-nificant, as if we’re not trustworthy.” Sitting in the teacher’s lounge one


winter morning discussing a set of recent literacy initiatives, Sandra Reid, ateacher who moved from Jamaica to New York in 1990 and has been teach-ing at this high school for ten years, describes her sense of lost fulfillmentwith a gust of passion: “They are taking our professional status and judg-ment away from us while we sit before them with our eyes wide open!”

As much as Bloomberg seeks to break with the past, to create a new kindof educational system that will prepare students for future socioeconomicrealities and rigorous college courses, there exists a melancholic compulsionto keep the past history of segregation, as it were, encrypted withineducation’s own anticipation of the future, as is made evident in the poli-cies that make it easier for schools to resegregate students and communitiesand allows minorities to become ever more isolated in separate schools. Inan earlier 2002 paper published by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard Uni-versity, Erika Frankenberg and Chungmei Lee report that Latino studentshave been experiencing a steady rise in segregation since the 1960s, and therehave been no significant desegregation efforts passed outside of a handfulof large districts.12 The pattern of resegregation unfolds within the contextof an increasingly diverse public school enrollment, particularly with respectto the Latino population in the past decade, which as of 2002 had risen tomore than 7 million. Additionally, the pattern of segregation is stronglylinked to segregation by poverty, and, as Frankenberg goes on to explain,poverty concentrations are strongly linked to unequal opportunities andunequal outcomes. How can Bloomberg and his administration claim tocreate a common preparation for citizens in an increasingly multiracial soci-ety if there is such limited attention paid to the inequalities that impact thehigh schools in New York City?

When Bloomberg’s reform efforts are read against Tyack’s description ofearly twentieth-century reforms, the melancholic strain in education can befelt as more salient—one can sense the strain of a futile “acting out.” In waysakin (but not identical) to the earlier period of reform, we have today stu-dents attending schools who are largely poor, children of color, recentlyimmigrated, highly mobile, and learning to speak English. While this standsin contrast to the large Catholic, Irish, and southern European immigrantsof the last century, in both instances, students are perceived as “half-bro-ken” and in need of cure from the ignorance they carry with them from theirhomes. Bloomberg’s new corporate structure has rearranged the manage-ment of schools into a unified, streamlined system that includes a standard-ized curriculum and a set of promises that bespeak a desire to rid the NewYork City schools of poor teaching, thereby restoring health to the economy,for Bloomberg too believes in a functional view of education and ignoresthe economic and social realities of the majority of students and teachersworking in public education. In short, Bloomberg’s administration assumesthat if students are more functionally literate, they will be more capable ofobtaining and holding down jobs. According to this logic, the decline of


American industrial productivity is linked to a perceived decline in literacyskills among American workers. The “correspondence principle” that linksthe organization of work in schools with the workforce is overly simplisticand mechanistic. Moreover, this principle works to eclipse the phenomenonof resegregation by focusing on test scores and pedagogical methods. “Therelationship among literacy, work and education,” argues Alan Luke, “is farmore complex than commonsense correlations between rates of literacy, ratesof employment and economic competitiveness would indicate. The causesfor employment, structural changes in labor markets, national debts, eco-nomic and technological expansion and exploitation, and so forth, lie else-where in economies and societies—not in their literacy rates, and certainlynot in the methods of teachers.”13 In a 2001 lecture Luke gave in Australiaentitled “Making Literacy Policy Differently,” he goes on to argue that edu-cators should be

addressing the changing places and contexts where students are using literacyfor their communities’ cultural interests and capital gains, where people arebeing ripped off with and through literacy, where people are constructing, hy-bridizing and using traditional and emergent texts, where people are engagingwith new technologies with mixes of print and non-print and so forth. Howcould you drive a whole state policy simply on the basis of some belief in aparticular method or spreadsheets of benchmark test scores? To do so wouldbe naïve.

In fact, the initiatives set forth by the Bloomberg administration can bedescribed as a kind of “commodity purchase” that subscribes to a singlemethod of teaching literacy and would most likely be assessed by Luke andhis colleagues as naïve and actively forgetful of our nation’s past. This “ac-tive forgetfulness” is made manifest in progressive projects that slip into whatCleo Cherryholmes terms a “vulgar pragmatism.”14 This form of pragma-tism gets caught in the nips and snares of the postindustrial demand for back-to-basics curriculum and outcomes-based assessment as made evident in theRamp Up to Literacy program. For example, one claim by the authors ofthe Ramp Up program holds that because it is keyed to international stan-dards, it prepares students to enter the international marketplace at an ad-vantage. Cherryholmes cautions against this form of pragmatism, referringto it as “vulgar” precisely because it takes, as Dennis Carlson notes in a glossof Cherryholmes’s text, “a means-ends perspective on the curriculum,” serv-ing to elaborate on and build a corporate and bureaucratic state project ofrestructuring education that in fact undermines the principles of a partici-patory democracy. Vulgar pragmatism is most often associated, as Carlsongoes on to explain, with basic skills and state-mandated minimum compe-tency testing, each of which holds stated intentions to ensure that studentsdisadvantaged by class and race will leave school with the skills they need to


succeed in life. Yet, after decades of basic skill reform efforts in urban schools,the school’s role in reproducing and maintaining socioeconomic inequali-ties has been further accentuated, setting students up, primarily male Latinoyouth, to enter the military and to take up entry-level positions in the ser-vice economy.15

To be fully emancipated, work must hold meaning; it must afford per-sons the opportunity to engage with what is necessary as well as with whatis fulfilling. Alienation is the manifestation of a person’s loss of freedom; itis that condition under which, notes Marx, “the object produced by labor,its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, a power indepen-dent of the producer.”16 Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein’s ninth-grade Ramp Up to Literacy program stands in as just this sort of object—analien curriculum, created by a power—America’s Choice Corporation—thatindeed is designed independent of New York City high school teachers.

IV

It is June 2003. High school principals throughout New York City arefaxed a memo from Chancellor Klein’s office informing them of a summerprogram that will be made available for all high school teachers. Principalsare strongly encouraged to “round up” as many literacy teachers as possibleto participate in what is termed “ramp-up training.” It is a tough call. Mostteachers have already made plans for the summer, but, nonetheless, princi-pals do what they can to encourage literacy teachers to attend, particularlybecause the subtext of this memo reads: “Ramp-up training will eventuallybe mandated for all ninth-grade students reading at least two grades belowgrade level.”

The ninth-grade “ramp-up curriculum,” designed by the National Cen-ter on Education and the Economy, an organization established in 1989 andbased in Washington, D.C., and founded and directed by Marc Tucker, isnot confined to New York City reform efforts. It has been purchased andimplemented in school districts such as Plainfield, New Jersey; Duval County,Florida; and Rochester, New York. Among the schools currently using thiscurriculum are Sheldon Clark High School in Inez, Kentucky; J. E. B. StuartMiddle School in Jacksonville, Florida; and Evans Middle School in Wash-ington, D.C. (see www.nwrel.org). As noted earlier, the stated primary goalof the America’s Choice Curriculum is to prepare students to reach inter-nationally benchmarked standards through the implementation of what isdescribed as an innovative and highly supportive curriculum.

The Ramp Up to Literacy program combines a balanced literacy approachto reading with select principles from reading recovery. Both reading recoveryand balanced literacy are rooted in a progressive tradition that is intent onteachers nurturing a particular kind of reader and a specific type of reason-able subject. Based on studies that have explored what “good readers do”


when they read, both programs emphasize the importance of making rea-sonable connections between literature, self, and world as one reads or, toput this another way, “to activate schemata” as students engage texts. Ad-ditionally, students are taught to navigate through the syntactic, grapho, andpragmatic structures of text while at the same time learning to “attack” theproblems they encounter with unfamiliar vocabulary and difficult conceptsand ideas that interfere with reading comprehension. In sum, the Ramp Upto Literacy curriculum works toward cultivating what are described as theseven habits of good reading. If you were to walk into a ramp-up classroom,you can expect to see the following habits displayed on poster paper on thewall:

THE SEVEN HABITS OF A GOOD READER:1. Monitors for Meaning2. Determines Importance3. Makes Inferences4. Creates Mental Imagery5. Questions the Text6. Activates Schemata7. Synthesizes Information

A typical ramp-up lesson begins with Independent Reading, followed bythe mnemonic Ra-Ta-Ta, which stands for Read-Aloud, Think-Aloud, Talk-Aloud. For example, during the first part of September, all high school ramp-up classes were required to read Monster by Walter Dean Meyers. Lessonsare structured according to this sequence: Students enter the classroom andbegin reading books of their choice that they have selected from the class-room library, with some initial guidance from the teacher. This part of theprogram is described as Independent Reading. The practice of IndependentReading is distinct from the less structured practice of Sustained Silent Read-ing in a very specific way. During Independent Reading, students read witha purpose, whereas Sustained Silent Reading offers students opportunitiesto read for pure pleasure. Moreover, Independent Reading requires that stu-dents read books that are challenging yet can be read on their own. Whilestudents are reading independently, teachers are expected to conference withselect students about their books and to conduct informal reading assess-ments.

During the Read-Aloud, Think-Aloud, teachers read aloud from a bookchosen as a key part of the ramp-up program, books such as The Red ScarfGirl by Ji Li Jiang or Living Up The Street by Gary Soto. Students are in-structed to follow along during this time in their copies of the same book,but they do not attempt to ask questions or make comments during thistime—they are instructed to attend to the teacher who is demonstrating one“habit” that “good readers” engage in, for example, making inferences. Now,teachers are told not to emphasize more than one habit during this time—


one habit alone will do.In this brief description, you may have noted that literature is used in the

classroom rather than textbooks. Multicultural literature is in many ways astaple of the curriculum; students are provided with time, not only to makechoices about the books they will read but also to respond to literature inways that are personally and socially meaningful to them. In fact, the ramp-up component of America’s Choice Curriculum draws deliberately from theprogressive practices of process pedagogy. In a mission statement presentedby Tucker, the literacy component of the America Choice School Design isstructured around the Readers and Writers Workshop. The reading and writ-ing workshop is an approach to literacy that is associated with a whole-lan-guage philosophy and a strong progressive tradition rooted in the socialreconstructionist and child-centered movement.17 To be a bit more specific,it would be fair to say that the ramp- up program is founded on a set ofprinciples of learning that are associated with a tradition of student-centeredpedagogy rooted in cognitive psychology (and hence, a strand of scientifichumanism). Among the goals embodied in the cognitive principles under-scoring the work of Lauren Resnick (one educator who has worked veryclosely with Tucker over the years) is the ideal of production of student con-trol through self-control and self-regulation within social settings.18

The overt design of ramp-up assumes that the workshop setting will trans-form classrooms into active sites of learning. Teachers are expected to groupdesks into tables, not rows; individual assignments and textbooks are replacedwith classroom libraries and shared literature. Mayor Bloomberg has assuredall teachers that they will be provided with a classroom library. True to hisword, all classrooms are now equipped with a collection of books, althoughcontinual problems arise with respect to providing teachers with the adequatenumber of books they need for their students. Most teachers have approxi-mately thirty students in a class—ramp-up appears to have planned for smallclasses of fifteen. From the perspective of the New York City Board of Edu-cation, all teachers at the high school level have been offered the opportu-nity to receive “ramp-up training.” From the vantage point of teachers,however, many of their opportunities have been limited, consisting of dis-parate arrays of workshops, many of which do not address what they see asthe most important facts needed to get a program underway—adequatebooks, ramp-up manuals, assessment tools, and a recommended pacing thatmakes sense within the time structure of school. Jake Fitzgerald, a highschool teacher who is participating in the ramp-up program, wrote a memoin early October to his colleagues outlining his concerns about what he de-scribes as a most “inconsiderate curriculum”:

Assessment is not addressed fully. The classroom library does not have all textsneeded. Monster paperback falls apart. Paperback books do not last long. Theprogram was based on 15–20 students per class. When class size reaches 30–35,


taking a “status of the class” becomes too time consuming when performingthis assessment requires 1–2 minutes per student: 60–70 minutes of a 90-minuteperiod. Missing procedural lesson for Appropriate Behaviors During A WholeClass Meeting. Also, they allude to the “five finger rule” but they do not ex-plain it anywhere in the books. The program is not considerate of practical timeschedule for student centered learning. . . . Because of the practical applicationof time instructing student-centered classroom is not taken into consideration,lessons frequently take up two to three days to complete causing conflicts withsequences of instruction. . . . No consideration of classrooms being shared bymore than one class and multiple teachers. The artifacts created by each classare supposed to be displayed on walls to give each class a chance to think, cre-ate and feel invested in the class. When a classroom is shared by more than oneclass and by multiple teachers, this practice becomes time consuming and im-practical, as there is not enough wall space to hang all the documents; in orderfor each class of students to be allowed the chance to create these documents,the other classes’ documents must be taken down, and then replaced when theyenter the room.

As an experienced teacher who has taught at the college and high schoollevel, Mr. Fitzgerald brings substantial experience to the ramp-up program.He participated in the summer workshops offered by Region I, and he hasbeen asked by colleagues in his school to lead the team of eight teachers whoare putting the principles of ramp-up into practice. “Initially, I think ramp-up worked to create a sense of collegiality among the teachers participatingin the program—a kind of ‘we’re all in this together’ mentality—but now,as we’re moving closer to the Regents exams, teachers are pressed for time,short with one another and they want to use their prep periods to catch up—not to talk about planning lessons and so forth, as we did in September andOctober.”

One of the harsh realities Fitzgerald and his assistant principal of English,Sara Maar, face as teachers teaching in what has been designated a “low per-forming school” in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx is that if they andtheir colleagues cannot master the ramp-up protocols by the end of the year;their school, already designated as “in need of improvement,” will becomeeven more vulnerable to either being closed down or restructured into a setof “small learning communities.”

Teachers in Mr. Fitzgerald and Ms. Maar’s school continue to have seri-ous reservations about the academic content of this program. They suspectthat it focuses more on managing students’ reading behaviors than on en-gaging students in substantive discussions and analyses of literature, socialissues, and their lives. One January afternoon, as Ms. Maar was preparingspreadsheets and schedules for students and faculty for the Regents exam thefollowing week, she looked up for a moment, her eyes brimming with tears.“The ramp-up program has taken up most of my time—I realize that I


haven’t had the time I need to work with faculty and students to preparethem for the Regents exam—and there are dire consequences for studentsif they fail to pass.”

The principal at this high school, Ms. Enberg, holds reservations aboutramp-up as well. She is not convinced that ramp-up will prepare studentsfor the Regents exam. The Regents exam is of particular concern given that,despite students’ academic histories, desires for the future, or language back-grounds, they must pass the Regents to obtain a high school diploma. Thisexample of “high-stakes testing” offers yet more evidence of the meansthrough which the discourse of “high standards” inadvertently disguises themechanisms used to urge low-income, immigrant youth to drop out of highschool.

V

Given the high stakes faced by teachers and students to pass national andstate exams, it would be unreasonable to criticize any program that madeclassroom libraries available to students and teachers or that required stu-dents to engage in reading and writing practices that created opportunitiesfor exploration, discovery, and expression within a wide range of genres. Yet,over the past three years that I have consulted in middle schools and highschools in Region I, where Mr. Fitzgerald, Ms. Reid, and Ms. Maar teach, Iam haunted by questions that make me feel unreasonable. I cannot help butfeel that, despite the apparently reasonable assumptions underlying theseinitiatives, something is amiss. As I drive home in the evenings, I wonderwhat makes me feel so uneasy. What makes me feel as if a dangerous hour isupon us? That in fact, ramp-up training is one manifestation of what Marxhas described as “alienation in action,” a painful and incoherent processthrough which a person experiences a profound sense of estrangement dur-ing the activity of production.19 In other words, the activity of producing“curriculum,” of “teaching,” fails to accrue significance, in part because thelabor of “ramping students up to literacy” is assigned meaning by agenciesand constituencies that are external to the professional lives of the teacherswho are responsible for putting the curriculum in place and who live with itdaily. Marx provides some very specific guidelines when he speaks of alien-ation in action. For one, he emphasizes that such labor is coerced, forced,and results in what he believes to be a labor of self-sacrifice. This labor, asMarx goes on to explain, belongs not to oneself, but to another, resultingin a loss of self. Inevitably, by the time I turn left onto Fordham Road, Ireturn to the same questions: What does the project of accounting for ramp-ing students up to literacy exclude? What tastes does it seek to cultivateamong teachers and at what cost? What is left beyond the pale of discussionsabout the reform of high schools in New York City literacy classrooms?


VI

If asked, Tucker and his colleagues, Bloomberg and Klein, would arguethat the workforce of teachers currently teaching in New York City schoolsstands as “under review” because it is performing below the standard ex-pectations set by the state. Consequently, teachers are being “trained” (theword educated is rarely used) to teach poor youth so they may become ac-tive and engaged citizens, productive workers, and advance themselves so-cially. There is a high turnover rate of teachers in poor schools, and thereare many new teachers who are either working without credentials or par-ticipating in the New York City Fellows Program. The Bloombergadministration’s project of standardizing the curriculum, as made evident inthe Ramp Up to Literacy program and his move to centralize administra-tion, is designed with the intent to solve these problems.

Among the most important criteria used to determine how well a highschool performs in New York City are Regents English cohort pass rates;Regents Math cohort pass rates; Cohort graduation rates; Cohort dropoutrates; and Cohort Regents diploma rates. In other words, the board of edu-cation in New York City takes into account standardized test scores, drop-out rates, and attendance records. Despite the knowledge that the tests usedby New York City are badly written and biased against race and class, ad-ministrators continue to use the English Language Arts Exam and the NewYork English as a Second Language Achievement Test as indicators of howwell a school is “performing.” Teachers are expected to pitch their curricu-lum to these tests, and there are implicit and explicit expectations that teach-ers whose students do not do well on these tests will themselves be placedunder severe scrutiny by their administrators. However, the Bloomberg ad-ministration, like administrations throughout the country, has traded in thediscourse of testing for the discourse of accountability.

In a 1965 essay, Max Horkheimer expressed concern that education wasbecoming far too schematized. He notes: “In a given historical situationregulation, however clearly reasonable, can turn into an obstacle and be asymptom of regression. . . . It is true enough, of course, that social freedomis never achieved without force. Numerous unsavory activities are requiredif society is to be held together, including the maintenance of prisons andthe production of murderous weapons.”20 What is it about the language ofaccountability that generates cynicism among the high school teachers I workwith? In proponents’ accounts about the value of the ramp-up program,specifically the progressive principles of choice and “freedom” are mentioned,thus echoing Horkheimer’s claim that “social freedom is never achievedwithout force.” Apparently, centralized systems must be put in place to en-sure a more democratic, just education for students. Placing the writing andreading workshop at the heart of the curriculum—particularly for studentswho are struggling readers—offers students choices and the potential to


experience engagement in what they read that they certainly did not expe-rience in conventional remedial programs. Nonetheless, as I pass by the Searsbuilding on Fordham Road, across from which are housed the regional of-fices, I continue to feel ambivalent about these practices, anxious, controlled.

In Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy, David Gabbard astutelypoints out that the language of accountability not only implies a hierarchi-cal institutional structure, but it also presumes a specific economy of powerthat is essential to the maintenance and vitality of its operations.21 Gabbardemphasizes that what strengthens and sustains this economy of power is ra-tionality itself. I find it difficult to argue against the principles embodied inwriting process pedagogy when I see students engaged in writing projectsthat excite them and that generate interest and commitment. And it appearsunreasonable to criticize any curriculum that requires students to readmulticultural literature or to engage in reading and writing practices thatcreate opportunities for exploration, discovery, and expression within a widerange of genres. In fact, during my discussions with students, I find that theyactually enjoy reading and discussing Meyers’s multigenre novel, Monster,and they enjoy reading books of their choice during the Independent Read-ing sequence of the ninth-grade literacy block.

Yet, at the same time, I struggle with the idea that any one program bemandated by a central administration. I am suspicious of any progressiveproject that becomes a universal mission. And despite how unreasonable Isound each week as I work alongside teachers and students in classrooms,questioning the value of independent reading, “accountable talk,” and thewriters workshop, I remain suspicious of discourses that ask professionaleducators to be held “accountable” when they are rarely included in thecentral discussions about what constitutes an “educative experience” for theirstudents. Who determines what students and their teachers should be heldaccountable for? In what ways do the limited standards that our nation hasfor equal access to education, equal distribution of resources, and a com-mitment to desegregate schools get taken into account when the practiceof accountability gets underway? How can we account for the slow erosionof public education? What indeed stands as reasonable to me is that we some-how hold contemporary reform efforts accountable for their participationin one of the most profound betrayals of our time: the resegregation ofschools. As Kathleen Kesson reminds us—it is an old lesson taught to us byMarx—such liberal reform efforts, while cloaked in the language of liberty,equity, and excellence, are in fact designed to consolidate state power andperpetuate the inequitable status quo.22

The act of resegregation that our nation is currently undergoing indeedraises questions about accountability. Who is accountable for these shifts inpolicy? What specific policies are instituted to set segregation in motion yetagain? And why is the process of resegregation being left out of the discus-sion of the New York City reform efforts?


VII

In the context of a reform movement where curriculum is centralized,“progressive education” can only flourish if teachers defer their subjectivity.While the strain of progressive education underscoring the Ramp Up to Lit-eracy program defines “good teaching” as an activity that stands opposedto “authoritarianism,” it creates, as Doris Santoro describes in her essay “TheSpace of Good Teaching,” an unnecessary and debilitating dichotomy thatassumes there are only two positions possible for teachers—student-centeredand teacher-directed.23 The notions of good teaching that inform the RampUp to Literacy program are apparently infused with rational, enlightenedthinking about how students learn, what best practices engage students sothat learning is enjoyable, and how students are engaged in active inquiryand discovery on a daily basis.

What strikes me as absent from the ramp-up program is the subjectivityof the teacher—her intellectual interests, desires, and attachments. Through-out this program, teachers are instructed to “observe” student learning. Infact, no student has been so carefully observed so that they can be set alongthe right path. The irony, as Valerie Walkerdine points out, is that, in suchprogressive classrooms, there is no discipline of the overt kind. Interferenceis limited and surveillance is everywhere. Walkerdine continues: “The ulti-mate irony is that the student [child] supposedly freed by this process todevelop according to its nature was the most classified, cataloged, watchedand monitored in history. Freed from coercion, the child was much moresubtly regulated into normality.”24 Given Walkerdine’s observations, I wouldlike to return, for a moment, to Mr. Fitzgerald’s memo to his colleagues.Note his concerns about the call to observe student learning in a class ofthirty students:

The program was based on 15–20 students per class. When class size reaches30–35, taking a “status of the class” becomes too time consuming when per-forming this assessment requires 1–2 minutes per student: 60–70 minutes of a90-minute period. . . . The program is not considerate of practical time sched-ule for student centered learning . . . lessons frequently take up two to threedays to complete causing conflicts with sequences of instruction.

Teachers are not, as educators such as John Darling points out, expectedto be knowledgeable about their subjects or various pedagogical approaches,but rather, they are expected to be learners of child behavior. What is lostto the teacher in this scenario of good teaching is intellectual life, intellec-tual companionship, and the potential for cultivating teaching selves otherthan those prescribed by central administration. Drawing on Dewey, Dar-ling further notes, “the teacher becomes a co-planner of work, whose ex-pertise is based less on academic knowledge—though a broad general


knowledge will be necessary—than on an understanding of children andgroups.”25 The discourse of good teaching in student-centered pedagogyeclipses the academic interests and desires of the teacher, rendering her, asit were, a passive participant in classroom life. This image of the teacher asa passive participant resonates too much, I’m afraid, with the image of fe-male passivity and eventual invisibility and silence that characterizes the goodteacher—ever nurturing and prepared to care for her students—an image thatis strongly associated with education’s past. Let us take a moment to lookat a snapshot of a New York City classroom in 1924. In this scene, a youngfemale teacher is being observed by her supervisor:

Here, the teacher, worried nervously, checks her watch as she listens to stu-dents apathetically recite from their readers. The observer of this teacher grimlynotes that the problem in this classroom is far larger than the teacher. Theteacher herself was “as aware as anyone else of the futility of the performance.Still, was she not as trapped as the children? Her timetable called for so manyminutes of reading daily and the course of study prescribed this particular reader.She must drive relentlessly ahead, in appearance only more free than thedriven.”26

Although this scene may appear to stand apart from what unfolds in a ramp-up classroom, as Mr. Fitzgerald notes, teachers involved in the ramp-up cur-riculum continue to feel as trapped by timetables and prescriptions forteaching reading as this teacher did in 1924. Despite the apparent “teacher-directed” ethos fused in this scene, the teacher here is bound to the initia-tives of central administration. She is compelled, as her supervisor notes, to“drive relentlessly ahead, in appearance only more free than the driven.” Shefinds herself smack in the middle of Marx’s depiction of alienation in action.Like teachers in more student-directed classrooms, she too practices an idealof self-negation and dependence on authority that is defined, as Walkerdineso eloquently argues, in terms of a fictional, invisible, masculine norm.

Indeed, teachers working with the ramp-up program feel dependent onthe region’s initiatives before they can make long-term decisions about theircurriculum. They are, for example, continually waiting for more “ramp-uptraining” and inevitably, after they return from training, they feel disap-pointed and let down by the lack of content addressed. Additionally, teach-ers are continually working to locate adequate numbers of books for theirstudents, they await decisions from the regional office about how formal theirassessment of students should be, and how best to prepare for the impend-ing visits by the “team of experts” coming from the regional offices. Thisposition of “waiting to be notified” marks a position not only of passivitybut also of containing—containing the investments and initiatives of other,more powerful figures—thereby being stripped of authority and professionaljudgment.


But there is more. Because working-class and immigrant children, chil-dren of color, and girls rarely conform to the ideal student, they present aproblem for the teacher. These students seem to demonstrate either deviantbehavior or passivity, which means, observes Walkerdine, that they must belacking in reason and, in turn, they must be compensated for this lack. Theteacher’s responsibility is then to contain this lack and to transform it intoreason, thereby turning the physical violence and deviance presented by thesestudents into symbolic violence—mastery of language and the law. Reasonenters our discussion yet again, setting off a chain of associations for me:Rousseau’s reasoning woman as a monster who must be domesticated. En-ter Sophia, who, in contrast to Emile’s education, which took the route ofdiscovery, learned the art of being subservient and pleasing to men. WhileEmile could pursue his attraction to ideas, Sophia was forbidden such pur-suits and was taught to confine her attraction to men.27 Throughout history,women and minority men and women have played Other to rationality. Theyhave been excluded from this discourse and deemed incapable of sufficientlymastering the intricate moves necessary to act reasonably. The odd irony hereis that the passivity that is feared in students, particularly because it is imag-ined to undermine notions of democracy and freedom, is the very qualitybeing asked of teachers. Teachers are tacitly required to forsake not only theiracademic passions but also their sense of agency and professional judgment.

Given these details, why, you might ask, should we complicate a discus-sion of literacy and the alienation of teachers from their professional liveswith the weighty terminology of melancholia? Marx and Freud not only di-rected their attention to the phenomenon of loss, but both turn their at-tention to the potential that work—cultural work—has for easing the anguishof loss. In fact, Freud believed that work was one viable cure for melancho-lia. In Marxist terms, persons can only overcome the condition of alienationby means of “self-activity, labor and industry” the cornerstone to Marx’sethical philosophy and secular humanist project. While work can functionas an apparent “cure” for a strong sense of estrangement, work that gener-ates a sense of estrangement can also function to disavow the despair a per-son feels over a lost ideal, a lost sense of purpose, or the loss of dignity. Todraw on melancholia as a resource for pedagogy does not call upon educa-tors to aggressively repudiate or separate from unjust mandates, howeverstrongly motivated. A melancholic pedagogy poses the question of reformdifferently and responds to the loss and betrayal of resegregation with imagi-nation, speculation, and a repertoire of “tactics” that cultural historian Michelde Certeau described as constantly manipulating events in order to turn theminto opportunities and counter conformity. Opportunity is “seized on thewing” and, it depends on timing and repartee.28 Let me provide you with abrief example.


A SMALL LYRIC LAMENT

In Mr. Rae’s and Ms. Meryl’s ninth-grade classroom, students began oneindependent reading lesson with a brief demonstration presented by Ms.Meryl on attending to the images that are generated during reading—a pro-cess referred to as “visualization.” This lesson was brief and included a dis-cussion led by Ms. Meryl of the images that came to her as she read LivingUp The Street by Gary Soto. In this brief demonstration, however, Ms. Meryldeparts in subtle ways from the ramp-up protocol. She is meant to ask stu-dents what they visualize when they read a particular passage, and she ismeant to model this for them. Instead, she picks a set of passages that shefinds difficult to visualize, a series of images that she can barely hold in herimagination given their horror:

MS. MERYL: Well, in the book I’m reading, Living Up The Street, which isa book we will be reading together soon, the kids were so bored on this streetthat they liked to fight. Well, Soto talks in this one story about one after-noon when they took cats and they put them in a knapsack. They decidedto take the cats in the knapsack and beat people up. I can’t even imagine,I’m trying to visualize and I can’t even imagine that scene—I had to putthe book down. So that was my visualization. This image makes me thinkabout the images that come up in our reading that are too terrible to visu-alize, too painful.

TIARA: Well, I’m reading Annie’s Baby—I’m reading about it. I can visual-ize her going to the park and I can visualize her getting ready to have sex. Ican visualize her being scared and she’s nervous, she doesn’t know what’sgoing to happen to her.

MS. MERYL: It sounds like a good book. What is it that happens in thebooks with language when you can visualize? What kind of language doesthe author use?

TIARA: It’s not really about cursing. This is a diary that she wrote, abouther own life—there are not really too many curses.

MR. RAE: How is the scene described?

TIARA: As that, like, she’s uncomfortable. She doesn’t want to be at thatplace. But also, she loves this boy—she’s scared because he was rough anddrunk.

MR. RAE: So she’s describing the feelings she has.

MS. MERYL: Ok, I think that Shadina, Natasha, Lenin, and Jose all read AChild Called It. How did you feel when you visualized poor David when


his mother made him eat his own poop? What makes you visualize. . . . Whatwords does the author use?

MR. RAE: What craft does the author use to convey these images?

SHADINA: I can visualize them fighting and him pushing her out of thecar. She screamed and she felt as if she had been raped.

MS. MERYL: To scream, she felt as if she had been raped.

Ms. Meryl and Mr. Rae’s questions exemplify an appeal to the progressiveprinciples embodied in the Ramp Up to Literacy program—generating ac-countable talk, independent reading, and making text–self connections. Atthe same time, however, their questions and Ms. Meryl’s “modeling” ap-peals to an emotional register that alters the timescape of ramp-up by intro-ducing awe, fear, and confusion. This emotional register drives a wedge, asit were, into the reasonable, smooth, controlled practices that constituteAmerica’s Choice Curriculum and that would confine “accountable talk” tofive minutes or so. The visual images of terror, confusion, and violence thatcome to Tiara as she reads Annie’s Baby and to Ms. Meryl as she reads Liv-ing Up The Street possess the generative, evocative energy of a kind of mel-ancholic protest precisely because their acts of reading are both a repetitionof the ramp-up protocol as well as a new iteration of it. Or, to put this an-other way, Ms. Meryl, Mr. Rae, and their students perform a kind of repeti-tion with a difference—to put on the demands of ramp-up with a vengeancesuggests the power of taking it off. The readers in this classroom are involved,not as the objects of persuasion— demonstrate to me how you visualize—but as co-readers of a particular sort. In this classroom, teachers and studentsuse reading as an uncertain, provisional practice of engaging material thatcalls upon them to perform in at least three worlds: the world they live in,the world they share in the classroom, and the world defined by the demandsof Bloomberg’s reform efforts.

As the effect of a social relation and as a mode of cultural and historicalaction, the melancholic revolt of the two teachers in this small scene throwsoff the norms promoted by the ramp-up program for an explicit, alterna-tive pedagogy that simultaneously incorporates the ramp-up protocol andchallenges it: Do not tell me about your visualizations, but tell me what youfind so horrifying you cannot visualize it, or let’s explore the half-spokenimages in these stories we have been asked to read about—fascism, racism,loss, violence, and betrayals. Such questions enable teachers to work withina tension of opposites that, if sustained, neither capitulates to the demandsoutlined by America’s Choice Curriculum nor succumbs to a state of despairand loss that renders one silent, isolated, or forgetful of one’s own academicpassions or national histories. Teachers like Ms. Meryl, Mr. Rae, Mr.Fitzgerald, Mr. Sampson, and Ms. Maar are not seduced by romantic fanta-


sies that render their students half-broken, in need of cure, and themselvesas heroes who will single-handedly rescue public education from increasedprivatization. Rather, they stipulate their own ethical agency, in part becausein their school, their colleagues, and the regional administrators they workwith continually appeal to one another to raise questions about how theyfeel about ramp-up. Does it in fact make sense to them and to their students?What is left out of this curriculum? Do they find meaning in the work theyare taking up together?

If we hope to be less vulnerable to feeling despair in the face of the cur-rent reform efforts, perhaps we must first recognize that reasonable timescall for a particular kind of lyric action. To be more to the point, our“reasonable” times call for a chorus of lyric laments. They require us to criti-cally and imaginatively respond to the initiatives imposed by central admin-istrations that have set up house, not only in New York City but alsothroughout the country.

— 6 —

Pursuing Authentic Teaching inan Age of Standardization1

KEVIN D. VINSON, RICH GIBSON,AND E. WAYNE ROSS

The recent movement toward high-stakes standardized testing as a meansof school reform has captured the support of many local, state, and nationaleducational “leaders,” including Presidents Clinton and Bush, members ofCongress, and a majority of governors, state legislatures, and boards of edu-cation. What most clearly defines these groups and individuals is their pur-suit of mandated content and testing regimes as a simplistic cure-all—anabsolute panacea—for the variously perceived ills that “threaten” the fun-damental “effectiveness” of contemporary American public education. Andyet, as can be demonstrated, a great deal is known about the weaknesses anddangers, both implicit and explicit, of such standardization efforts.

Against this perspective, the focus of our work here is fourfold. First, bydrawing on the work of John Dewey, we argue that testing—especially high-stakes, mandated, standardized testing—represents little more than poor, andabsurdly disconnected and uninspired, pedagogy. For instead of consideringthose conditions that we know contribute to ineffectual and unjust school-ing—inequity in funding, lack of teacher planning time, large class sizes, afocus on facts over meaning—it seeks instead to lay blame on teachers andstudents, to reward policy leaders for “action,” and to redefine learning asscoring well on externally produced and graded evaluations. Second, by aim-ing to standardize and normalize knowledge, such tests work to promoteconformity and oppression, claiming as they and their advocates do that “le-gitimate” and “real” learning necessarily “shows up” in the scores. Unques-tionably, such thinking denies and/or ignores key differences in meaningful


and experiential knowledge as well as in access to formalized academic andeconomic resources. Third, we argue that the current “liberal-conservativealliance” in favor of such testing ultimately works against vigorous strugglesfor profound and substantive school change, both politically and pedagogi-cally. We do, however, take seriously and support the often courageous workof teachers, students, parents, and others involved in various grassroots un-dertakings (such as those in Michigan, Illinois, California, and New York,some of our country’s largest school systems) as critical to the countermove-ment away from the economics of standards and toward the democratic tasksof justice, equality, fairness, and antioppression. Fourth, and moreover, wechallenge the extent to which testing meets the needs of all students, par-ticularly those who speak English as a second language and others existingin traditionally marginalized settings.

In sum, as we hope to show, high-stakes standardized tests and test scoresundermine high-quality education, genuine student/teacher motivation, andthe benefits of diversity and inclusion. They simplify schooling to the pointthat it becomes nothing more than a capitalistic and competitive chase foracceptable numbers, a dedicated means by which to exclude—to rank andsort—the less powerful. Within such a system schooling itself, we believe,becomes merely an alienating and undemocratic threat to educational au-thenticity.

CONCEPTUALIZING AUTHENTIC(AND DEMOCRATIC) PEDAGOGY

John Dewey long ago recognized the imperatives connecting a democraticsociety to a democratic system of schooling. In fact, he considered their re-lationships not only mutual but also necessary to virtually every aspect of ahealthy and vital democracy.2 Throughout his work, he consistently identi-fied and presented the underlying principles that even today orient and definethe characteristics of a meaningful and authentic pedagogy, one groundedin and consonant with the demands, values, and directions of an open, dy-namic, and inclusive society. For by challenging the dominance of “tradi-tional” schooling, Dewey established the foundations for an instructioncommitted to reflective inquiry, cooperation, growth, association, andmulticulturalism.3

The current expansion of standardized testing fails pedagogically on anumber of levels, including, perhaps most importantly, on several criteriainitially proposed by Dewey himself. In The Child and the Curriculum, forexample, Dewey argued that education and educators must “get rid of theprejudicial notion that there is some gap in kind . . . between the child’sexperience and the various forms of subject-matter that make up the courseof study.”4 This, for Dewey, was the “problem” with traditional and domi-nant viewpoints. Moreover, it was a problem defined by two principal “sides”:

Pursuing Authentic Teaching in an Age of Standardization 81

From the side of the child, it [was] a question of seeing how his [or her] expe-rience already contains within itself elements—facts and truths—of just the samesort as those entering into the formulated study; and, what is more important,of how it contains within itself the attitudes, the motives, and the interests whichhave operated in developing and organizing the subject-matter to the planewhich it now occupies. From the side of the studies, it is a question of inter-preting them as outgrowths of forces operating in the child’s life, and of dis-covering the steps that intervene between the child’s present experience andtheir richer maturity.5

As he continued:

Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made initself, outside the child’s experience; cease thinking of the child’s experienceas also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital;and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which de-fine a single process [italics added]. Just as two points define a straight line, sothe present standpoint of the child and the facts and truths of studies defineinstruction. It is continuous reconstruction, moving from the child’s presentexperience out into that represented by the organized bodies of truth that wecall studies.6

In terms of standardized testing, Dewey’s understanding implies at leastthree significant points. First, it suggests an instructional state of affairs inwhich all important knowledge—even so-called “academic” or “disciplinary”knowledge—grows out of the multiple and experienced lives of the learnersthemselves. Second, it indicates an instruction that is fluid and dynamic, onein which neither the perceived and actualized experiences of the child northe subject matter itself is constant or set in stone, that is, “fixed and ready-made.” Third, it maintains and asserts a certain and clear connectedness, oneinherent in the act of instruction that represents the motion and instabilityof the learner’s association with a given mode of content. In sum, it chal-lenges the extent to which content can be predetermined, objectified, es-tablished as permanent, legitimately cut-off from experience, and measuredor moderated externally. And yet, these indeed are the conditions that at leastpartially describe the present commitment to standardized and high-stakestesting.

Accordingly, “It is the failure to keep in mind the double aspect of sub-ject-matter which causes the curriculum and child to be set over against eachother . . .” such that “[t]he [instructional] material is not translated into life-terms, but is directly offered as a substitute [italics added] for, or an exter-nal annex to, the child’s present life.”7 In fact, because of this failure, “[t]hreetypical evils result: In the first place, the lack of any organic connection withwhat the child has already seen and felt and loved makes the material purelyformal and symbolic.” The material becomes, in effect, “not a reality, but


just the sign of a reality which might be experienced if certain conditions werefulfilled . . .” The “realities” of classroom life, therefore, are replaced by the“symbols” of standardization. The fact that a school or school district has asystem for delivering mandated tests and reporting their scores, and that ithas in place therefore a means by which to control and dictate content andteaching method in a publicly visible way, replaces the realities of classroomlife, substituting in their place an “image” or “mere representation” by whichto judge and presume—to imagine or create—the supposed“(in)effectiveness” of teachers and schools.8

“The second evil in this external presentation is lack of motivation. Thereare not only no facts or truths which have been previously felt as such withwhich to appropriate and assimilate the new, but there is no craving, no need,no demand.”9 Content, within a technology of standardized testing, one thatinevitably leads to standardized curriculum and instruction, disconnectsschooling from the child’s innate curiosity; it turns the learner off, so thatclassroom life becomes phony, senseless, and trivial within the bigger lifepicture. Speculatively, one cause for what those who support standardizationsee as a lack of knowledge on the part of today’s young people might besimply that, through schooling, children are taught not to enjoy or long foror value learning for its own inherent consequences. Instead, students—chil-dren—learn because they are made to and are scared into achieving vis-à-visthe perils of the threatened and threatening alternative consequences. Sub-sequently, they develop a viewpoint toward schooling as something nega-tive and of little internal or substantive value, as something one does purelyto pass and to succeed within the system; preparing for tests becomes equatedwith “real” work; passing tests becomes the indicator of success and the onlylegitimate definition of learning. As one Chicago sixth grader recently stated,“Normally I wouldn’t pay much attention because I’d know I could passwithout doing much work. . . . It’s not like that now. I know I’ve got to studyharder and learn so that I can go on to the seventh grade—and life.”10 (Note,though, that some Chicago students—the Organized Students of Chicago[OSC] have indeed had some success in challenging Chicago’s Tests of Aca-demic Proficiency [TAP].)11 As Dewey noted, even “Unpleasant, becausemeaningless, activities may get agreeable if long enough persisted in. It ispossible for the mind to develop interest in a routine or mechanical procedureif conditions are continually supplied which demand that mode of operation andpreclude any other sort.”12

“The third evil is that even the most scientific matter, arranged in mostlogical fashion, loses this quality, when presented in external, ready-madefashion, by the time it gets to the child.” That is

It has to undergo some modification in order to shut out some phases too hardto grasp, and to reduce some of the attendant difficulties. What happens? Thosethings that are most significant to the scientific man [sic], and most valuable


in the logic of actual inquiry and classification, drop out. The really thought-provoking character is obscured, and the organizing functiondisappears . . . [content] is presented as stuff only for “memory.” This is thecontradiction: the child gets the advantage neither of the adult logical formu-lation, nor of his [or her] own native competencies of apprehension and re-sponse.13

In effect, subject matter, in order to meet such demands as those presentedby standardized testing—for example, “efficiency,” “effectiveness,” “objec-tivity,” “validity,” “reliability”—becomes hypersimplified, denatured to thepoint that it exists only as a collection of mere facts or rote ideas useful onlyfor mechanized storage and retrieval, information to remain unproblematic/unproblematized and unassailable/unassailed, virtual data set to portray andsymbolize an essentialized and absolute Truth.

Dewey’s answer—his solution—dwells within his notion of“psychologization,” a process grounded in “the need of reinstating intoexperience the subject-matter of the studies, or branches of learning.” Herecontent “must be restored to the experience from which it has been ab-stracted. It must be psychologized; turned over, translated into the immedi-ate and individual experience within which it has its origin and significance.”14

As against the “evils” associated with disconnecting subject matter from thelived experiences of the learner, Dewey argued that

The legitimate way out is to transform the material; to psychologize it—thatis, once more, to take it and to develop it within the range and scope of thechild’s life. But it is easier and simpler to leave it as it is, and then by trick ofmethod to arouse interest, to make it interesting; to cover it with sugar-coat-ing; to conceal its barrenness by intermediate and unrelated material; and fi-nally, as it were, to get the child to swallow and digest the unpalatable morselwhile he is enjoying tasting something quite different.15

But in terms of high-stakes standardized testing, what does all this mean?Of what relevance is a concept such as psychologization? Dewey’s assertionwas that educators first must realize that subject matter itself must be ab-stracted fundamentally from the experiences of the child. It must, moreover,be reinternalized—worked over—not left hanging lifelessly before the learneras a disconnected and externally created and determined intelligence. It mustnot be forced on students as something inherently worthwhile, regardlessof its meaning. In the case of standardized testing, though, the oppositecondition occurs. Content is selected with indifference to the multitude oflearner experiences. It is, further, produced externally in an identical way foreveryone (dismissing, therefore, the potential importance of diversity ofexperiences). Meaning indeed is irrelevant and understanding unimportant.Acquire the content for its own sake, and reproduce it on command, that isthe “secret” message of mandated testing. Induce “achievement” by


deceiving students (and parents and teachers?) into accepting the essentialgravity and false attractiveness of the subject matter. Or, better yet, convincethe public that meaning and motivation donot matter. Defraud them into“seeing” that individual effort rules and that it can overcome even the mostridiculous of content selection approaches.

An alternative yet critical perspective, albeit one inextricably associatedwith the pedagogical implications explored above, rests on a mode of inter-pretation constructed directly out of and upon Dewey’s famed delineationof democracy and of democratic education. From this viewpoint, high-stakesstandardized testing represents not only an inadequate method of pedagogyper se, but also a threat to democratic society—that is, a contradiction, anun- or antidemocratic means of preparing children for an engaged demo-cratic social and political life.

In his monumental work Democracy and Education: An Introduction tothe Philosophy of Education, Dewey, in some of the best known words in theentire history of Western educational philosophy, presented his constructionof democracy. In pursuing “the democratic ideal,” he wrote that:

The two elements in our criterion both point to democracy. The first signifiesnot only more numerous and more varied points of shared common interest,but greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in so-cial control. The second means not only freer interaction between social groups(once isolated so far as intention could keep up a separation) but change insocial habit—its continuous readjustment through meeting the new situationsproduced by varied intercourse. And these two traits are precisely what char-acterize the democratically constituted society.16

And, most critically (here, Dewey is worth quoting at length):

Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form of sociallife in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where progress, orreadjustment, is an important consideration, makes a democratic communitymore interested than other communities have cause to be in deliberate andsystematic education. The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact.The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffragecannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors areeducated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external author-ity, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can becreated only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy ismore than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, ofconjoint communicated experience [italics added]. The extension in space of thenumber of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to referhis [or her] own action to that of others, and to consider the action of othersto give point and direction to his [or her] own, is equivalent to the breakingdown of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men [sic]from perceiving the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more


varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an indi-vidual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his [orher] action [italics added]. They secure a liberation of powers that remain sup-pressed as long as incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a groupthat in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.17

With respect to mandated standardized testing, Dewey’s understandingsyield several critical insights. Whereas Dewey’s democracy called for “morenumerous and more varied points of shared common interest,” mandatedstandardized testing in fact reduces and limits them, creating a system of“interests” organized around exclusion and not inclusion. Our potentiallyreal, shared interests become artificial, determined by powerful and periph-eral forces, with their interests established as “our” interests. What countsas shared and mutual extends no farther than that which is consistent with,or deemed proper within the context of, the normalized and dominant con-tent.

Further, standardized testing (and educational standardization, period)contradicts the democratic ideals of “freer interaction” and “varied inter-course.” Standardized testing confines legitimate “interaction” to test-driventeaching and learning. It reduces meaningful “intercourse” to that which isofficially and formally sanctioned.

Lastly, standardization directly challenges the principles of “greater diver-sity of stimuli” and “variation in action.” Such dynamism and difference aredestroyed as teachers are forced to follow scripts and teach to the test andas students acquire the notion that learning means nothing more than achiev-ing “desirable” scores. In effect, the stimuli are identical, and the actionsstrikingly the same. For in effect, the conditions and characteristics of stan-dardized testing contradict those of democracy, leaving instead—indemocracy’s wake—an institutionalized mechanism of authoritarian—exter-nally produced—social and intellectual conformity, a regime of “top-down”pedagogical control. They ignore or dismiss, moreover, the imperatives ofsuch critical and limiting factors as time, money, and class size, promotingin the end a privileged individualism over a commitment to collectivity, com-munity, and care.

Dewey’s concerns with connectivity and meaning, his emphasis on expe-rience and fluidity, his fundamental motivation vis-à-vis a strong and vibrantdemocratic society, echo throughout the writings of such well known andrespected, yet divergent, contemporary educational thinkers as Alfie Kohn,Neil Postman, and Theodore Sizer. Their calls for deeper and more com-plex assessments, as well as their criticisms of national and standardized test-ing schemes, seek to refocus education and schooling toward that which isunrelentingly authentic and meaningful and away from that which is sim-plistic and robotic. As each implies, such a reorientation moves U.S. publicschooling closer to that which might legitimately be considered significant


educational goals; that is, reconsidering standardized testing opens up thepossibilities for a profound, rich, and reform-minded countermovementaimed at a more genuine and holistic, democratic and community-based,truly public education. As Kohn summarizes:

. . . I do know this: the issue of standardized testing is not reserved for bureau-crats and specialists. All of us with children need to make it our business tounderstand just how much harm these tests are doing. They are not an inevi-table part of “life” or even a necessary part of school; they are a relatively re-cent invention that gets in the way of our kids’ learning. Their impact is deep,direct, and personal. Every time we judge a school on the basis of a standard-ized test score—indeed, every time we permit our children to participate in thesemass testing programs—we unwittingly help to make our schools just a littlebit worse.18

JUSTICE, EQUALITY, AND TEACHING

A second concern—in addition to the potential threat posed to demo-cratic and authentic pedagogy—emanates from the extent to which high-stakes standardized testing promotes a set of conditions that are at onceunjust, unequal, and conforming. For by insisting that legitimate learningnecessarily presents itself in and on the basis of test scores, such testingrefuses to admit and accept differences (individual as well as cultural) inknowledges, values, experiences, learning styles, economic resources, andaccess to those dominant academic artifacts that ultimately contribute toboth the appearance of achievement and the status of cultural hegemonyupon which standards-based reforms depend. In effect, standardized test-ing encourages a singular and homogeneous public schooling—one anti-thetical to such contemporary ideals as diversity, multiculturalism,difference, and liberation—vis-à-vis an underlying and insidious mechanismor technology of oppression, one in which the interests of society’s mostpowerful (the minority) are privileged at the expense of those of the lesspowerful (the majority).

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, radical Brazilian educator and activist PauloFreire referred memorably to such standardization schemes as “banking”education. Here, schooling

turns [students] into “containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by theteacher. . . .The more completely [the teacher] fills the receptacles, the bettera teacher she [or he] is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves tobe filled, the better students they are. . . . Education [thus] becomes an act ofdepositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is thedepositor . . . the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far asreceiving, filing, and storing the deposits.19


Moreover, Freire identified such banking approaches with the fundamentalconditions of oppression. As he wrote:

One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressedis prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual’schoice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribedto into one that conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness. Thus, the be-havior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guide-lines of the oppressor.20

Freire’s critique applies neatly to the climate and functionality of currentstandardization-based pedagogies. With respect to banking, under such pro-grams students and teachers are held “accountable” only to the extent thatthey conform to the dictates of high-stakes mandated tests, which, in turn,work to drive (if not outright determine) classroom behavior relative to aimor purpose, content, and teaching method.

Even more clearly, perhaps, is the degree to which standards and stan-dards-based reforms represent a case of prescription. In fact, such systemsmirror Freire’s insights almost to the letter. Within any complex of educa-tional standards (including standardized tests), some individual or group’sdecisions are imposed externally on the actual classroom lives of teachers andstudents. Over time, the “consciousness of the person prescribed to” mergesor “conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness” such that “the behaviorof the oppressed is a prescribed behavior” indeed. The prescriber(s) choose/s for others, convinces them that the decision is consistent with the totalityof all their interests, and then works to ensure (here, via testing) the strictcompliance of the prescribed-to’s behavior with the initial, test-regulateddecision.

A more recent yet equally significant framework was established by IrisMarion Young in her work on “The Five Faces of Oppression.” Within thisview, oppression moves beyond its

traditional [grounding] in the exercise of tyranny by a ruling group [so as toinclude also its] new left . . . designat[ion of] the disadvantage and injustice somepeople suffer not because a tyrannical power intends to keep them down, butbecause of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society. . . . [It]refers to systemic and structural phenomena that are not necessarily the resultof the intentions of a tyrant [but are in fact] part of the basic fabric of a soci-ety, not a function of a few people’s choices or policies. . . . Oppression refersto structural phenomena that immobilize or reduce a group. . . . To be ina . . . group is to share with others a way of life that defines a person’s identityand by which other people identify him or her.21

For Young, oppression is more subtle yet actually no less dangerous than inthe settings identified by Freire. What is oppressive from this perspective are


the everyday workings of “the system,” the structure of public educationitself, that which lies in the tendency of standards-based formats to developor evolve a life of their own. Once in place, that is, such an organized ar-rangement, well-intentioned though it might be, works automatically if notabsolutely to control the lives of the oppressed (e.g., groups such as teach-ers, students, and classroom communities), a state of affairs that yields amarginalization effect, a condition of injustice and disadvantage.

Young identifies five “faces” or “types” of oppression, recognizing that“each presents its own unique mode or class of oppression whether in thepresence or absence of the others.”22 Specifically, these types or faces include:(1) exploitation, (2) marginalization, (3) powerlessness, (4) cultural impe-rialism, and (5) violence. To the extent that standardization and standard-ized-testing schemes rely on the use of classroom labor to benefit the(external) powerful (i.e., working teachers and students so that they take theblame for “failure” and various educational “leaders” claim the praise for“success”), there is exploitation. To the extent that test scores privilege someat the expense of others (e.g., based on relationships of power, race, ethnicity,language, gender, class, and so on), there is marginalization. To the extentthat a majority of teachers and students (not to mention parents) play littleif any genuine role in making decisions that significantly affect their lives,there is (undemocratic) powerlessness. To the extent that standardization fixesknowledge and represents the experience of dominant groups as “normal”and/or “true,” there is cultural imperialism. And, lastly, to the extent thattesting and its media portrayals result in the reduction of freedom, the ex-pansion of conformity, and the “unprovoked” or unwarranted attack on, orhumiliation of, some (less powerful) individuals and groups (e.g., teachers,students, parents, members of less wealthy communities) at the hands ofother (more powerful) individuals and groups (e.g., politicians, corporations,the media), there is, in effect, a well-entrenched order of violence. All in all,whether from a Freirean or a Youngian perspective, standardization and stan-dardized testing are oppressive and so must at once and forcefully be chal-lenged.

THE STANDARDIZATION OF TEACHING

What makes the contemporary conditions favoring standardization andhigh-stakes testing so powerful and, therefore, what makes them so difficultto counteract is the existence of a dominating “liberal-conservative” allianceor consensus advocating vigorously on their behalf (e.g., the No Child LeftBehind Act of 2001).23 More precisely, the actuality is one in which wide-spread agreement among political and pedagogical “liberals” and “conser-vatives” sustains the extreme yet external authority of the standardsmovement. In fact, too, there is fundamental support for standardized tests


within the official bureaucracy of the federal government and among manyindividuals within the general “public,” although one must certainly take intoaccount the near absolute and immediate one-sided access to the media heldby those powerful voices speaking in favor of standardized tests (e.g., poli-ticians, state superintendents, corporate leaders, and others).

On the one hand, political and pedagogical conservatives (i.e.,“neoliberals” and “neoconservatives,” including, among educators, perhapsmost famously E. D. Hirsch, Jr. and Diane Ravitch) back standardization asa means by which to link the control of “American culture” with the ever-increasing domination of the global economy by U.S.-based multinationalcorporations. Ostensibly, though, conservative standards supporters groundtheir views within the context of “efficient,” “effective,” and “necessary”school “reform.” As indicated by Ravitch, for example, the conservativeagenda argues that:

1. Standards can improve achievement by clearly defining what is to be taught andwhat kind of performance is expected;

2. Standards (national, state, and local) are necessary for equality of opportunity;3. National standards provide a valuable coordinating function [by providing co-

herence with respect to the various aspects of education];4. There is no reason to have different standards in different states, especially in

mathematics and science, when well-developed international standards have al-ready been developed;

5. Standards and assessments provide consumer protection by supplying accurateinformation to students and parents; [and]

6. Standards and assessments serve as an important signaling device to students,parents, teachers, employers, and colleges.24

On the other hand, the liberal perspective, quite publicly presented in thedebates over national history standards, argues simply that standards them-selves can assure equal opportunity, diversity, and progressive modes of cur-ricular and instructional practice.25 In addition, the effort among liberaleducators to “stay ahead of the curve” seeks to preclude noneducators (e.g.,politicians, corporate leaders) from taking control of U.S. schooling. It is,from the liberal view, an opportunity to ward off right-wing ideologies andanachronistic pedagogies. As Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn suggest in their his-tory of the national history standards project (in a quote representative ofliberal initiatives):

. . . the simple fact [was] that the train was leaving the station. History stan-dards were clearly on the country’s agenda.... The matter boiled down to whowould write them. Those who were at first reluctant about the wisdom of thisenterprise soon decided that they might compromise their own best interestsif they failed to join in. If the cards were being dealt, why would historians orsocial studies educators not want seats around the big table?26


All in all, the consensus pro-standards position is that:

standards . . . [are] necessary for productive public school reform. They [liber-als and conservatives] agree that today’s students do not “know enough,” thatthey possess too little knowledge (whether defined as facts, skills, understand-ings, or something else), and that curriculum [and instruction and testing] stan-dards can promote wider and deeper levels of achievement and performance.Further, they concur that without such a system of standards American studentsand their schools will continue to “lag behind” those of other industrializedcountries. Liberals and conservatives each envision a (potentially voluntary)structure built upon proactive federal leadership and guidance (and perhapsfunding) but under the ultimate control of states and communities. Lastly, bothchampion . . . standards as conducive to and consistent with the advancementof equal educational opportunity.27

Of course, the pro-standards alliance has received a good bit of criticism,both from the political and pedagogical left and the political and pedagogi-cal right. Among more radical educators, such criticism has argued that bydefinition standardization systems are antidemocratic, oppressive, and disci-plinary. Yet significant criticism has come also from more mainstream andwell-known educators. As conservative standards supporter Diane Ravitchsummarizes things, at least at the national level, these criticisms have includedarguments such as:

1. National standards will be minimal, reduced to the lowest common denomina-tor, especially if they are controlled by a federal agency;

2. The government might impose controversial values and opinions;3. National standards based on traditional subject matter disciplines such as math-

ematics, science, and history will narrow the curriculum;4. National testing will harm children and will distort priorities in the classroom;5. National standards and national tests will do nothing to help poor inner-city

schools;6. National standards and assessments will not expand equality of opportunity;7. National standards and assessments will not improve achievement because most

teachers will ignore them and do what they have always done;8. The failure of national standards and testing will undermine faith in public edu-

cation and pave the way for privatization of education; [and]9. National standards and assessments will accomplish little by themselves. . . .28

Gittell, a cautious liberal advocate of standards, writes that substantive criti-cism has indeed come from within the entire range of relevant political andpedagogical perspectives. As she notes, it has been offered by, among oth-ers, individuals who:

1. honor and cherish the tradition of local control of education, particularly at theschool district level;


2. give priority to equity and equitable financing of education;3. focus on the role of the states;4. see American federalism as the most effective means of retaining a decentralized

and democratic political system;5. value and encourage diversity in all aspects of American society;6. question the value of the extensive testing in American schools;7. lead [local] school reform efforts;8. do not think that foreign school systems are exemplary models of education; and/

or9. worked on the national history curriculum or the New York social studies pro-

posal, and have faced the wrath of colleagues who disagree with their suggestedstandards.29

Overall, though, most existing mainstream critiques lack any commitmentto challenging standards and standardization themselves. According toVinson:

What these viewpoints share are the understandings that opposition positions(1) represent the entire range of political and pedagogical perspectives (i.e., fromthe far Left to the far Right), (2) are at least somewhat legitimate and thusdeserve to be taken seriously, and (3) can be addressed to their proponents’satisfaction. Both Ravitch and Gittell believe that these questions, doubts, andchallenges can be worked out within the consensus framework. Neither indi-cates a real willingness to reconsider the essential position of . . . standards them-selves.30

What both supporters and critics agree on is the “fundamental” need for astandards-based system of school reform in which high-stakes testing influ-ences the construction of classroom content and teaching method. Withinsuch a system, critique is limited only to curriculum and instruction such thatthe “inherent correctness” of evaluation schemes cannot be challenged. Criti-cism focuses on teachers, students, and curriculum workers and what theyare doing “wrong”; no thought is given to any possible weaknesses in thetesting or to potential flaws in the design and implementation of policy. (Butwhen things go well, however—when test scores rise—praise is heaped bypoliticians, policymakers, and the media on politicians, policymakers, and themedia for their “dedication” and “hard work”—what they are doing “right.”)

More significant, though, are the effects these mechanisms have on al-ternative, perhaps more promising, means of school reform. Since the teststhemselves can’t be criticized, they can’t be “reformed.” If “poor perfor-mance” rests in the hands of teachers, students, and parents, then why takethe conditions of class size, planning time, funding, and so forth more seri-ously? If “strong performance” resides in policy and policymakers, then whyreform policy, or moreover, why pay attention to anything else? In essence,the liberal-conservative alliance solidifies its own powerful position by limiting


meaningful access on the part of opposed-minded critics. By reducing theavenues of reform, they reduce the possibility that their own privilegedpositionalities can be challenged.

EDUCATIONAL NEEDS AND INCLUSION

By formalizing and fixing curriculum and instruction, high-stakes stan-dardized testing dismisses several significant points of individual and culturaldifference—privileging some yet punishing others. First, standards and stan-dardized testing favor a proficiency in English over linguistic diversity evenwhen scores are ostensibly based on “knowledge” of some subject matterdiscipline (e.g., math, history, and so on). Second, following Gardner, theyreward the “linguistic” and “logico-mathematical” capacities or “intelli-gences” at the expense of the other intelligences such as “musical” and“intrapersonal.”31 Third, they ignore differences in background and livedexperiences. Last, and perhaps most damagingly, they maltreat and injure—quite disproportionately—U.S. schoolchildren of color. As Kohn argues (re-sponding to the comments of a certain school administrator whose childrenattended private schools):

. . . he seemed to think the traditional approach to education, including a heavydiet of standardized testing, is for other people’s children—and, as it turns out,particularly children of color. Even apart from charges that some standardizedtests are biased against minorities because of the content, such tests—with allthe implications for teaching they carry—are more likely to be used and em-phasized in schools with higher percentages of minority students. The result isthat even people who are understandably desperate to improve inner-city schoolswind up making the problem worse when they cause reform efforts to be framedin terms of improving standardized test scores.32

When utilized within increasingly racist, anti-immigrant, and nationally chau-vinistic settings, such conditions become even more terribly unjust, if notpathetically tragic.33

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS: RESISTANCE ANDAUTHENTICITY

As we have argued, the current movement toward high-stakes, mandated,and standardized testing fails on a number of levels. Such testing, for ex-ample, implicates U.S. schools in a system of antidemocratic and inauthenticpedagogy. It promotes a schematics of injustice, oppression, and inequality,privileging hyperindividualization at the expense of the community good.It impedes real reform and ultimately pleases but the powerful few, layingblame on teachers and students (as well as parents), and praising the “dedi-cation” of elites. At heart, in Kohn’s memorable words, the widespread use


of standardized tests “make[s] our schools just a little bit worse.”34 And so,we must face the question of what to do. From our perspective, the demandsof a genuinely public education necessitate a renewed resistance to standard-ization and a drive for the more authentic.

In “Resisting Test Mania,” E. Wayne Ross indicates several modes andmechanisms by which such a revitalized resistance to standardization mightwork. As a starting point, or building block, he takes the position that stan-dardization—“tougher” academic standards and formalized testing—“getsa number of things wrong.” As he states:

[First], it gets student motivation wrong. The emphasis on testing in schoolspromotes anxiety and a preoccupation with test scores that often underminesstudents’ interest in learning and desire to be challenged.

Second, tests drive curriculum and instruction in ways that harm children.Time spent on test preparation and administration cuts into time for teachingand learning; and children internalize judgments as if tests were the final arbi-ter of one’s potential or worth. On the basis of test scores, children are deniedaccess to learning opportunities through tracking, retained in grade, and maybe denied a diploma, regardless of what they know or can do in authentic lifesituations

Third, standardized tests demand more standardization of curriculum—tighter control of what goes on in the classroom by people who are not there.Standards and tests are designed to promote a particular and singular view oftruth, knowledge, and learning.

The bottom line is that high-stakes testing is not effective in increasing achieve-ment, and higher test scores do not necessarily mean better schools [italics added].35

And yet, as Ross continues, in a number of states and local school dis-tricts standardization regimes have been successfully challenged or turnedback by the efforts of engaged and concerned parents, students, educators,and community activists. But how?

Ross demonstrates the potential of an array of organized protests anddemonstrations to counter the “successes” of standardization. These include:

• “opting out” (a legal right in some states), a process by which, for example, chil-dren have refused participation in the Ohio Proficiency Tests;

• political and legal action (e.g., letter-writing campaigns aimed at public officials,petitions, lawsuits, etc.);

• student-led boycotts, as . . . occurred among some high school students in re-sponse to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests; [and]

• student walk-outs and leafleting, engaged in, for example, by students protest-ing California’s “STAR” exams.36

As Ross concludes, however, such resistance is not without risks. It re-quires both courage and support, as often participating teachers face threatsof dismissal or lawsuit, students, the pressures of failing grades, retention,


and/or withheld diplomas, and community members, the fear of harassmentand/or costly legal action.

In addition to organized resistance, though, anti- or counter-standardization demands making a commitment to an education that takesseriously the conditions of authenticity as well as the problematics of high-stakes testing. In the words of Sandra Mathison, we must move away from“tests and measurements” and toward “assessment.” For, as she suggests,“Tests and measurements are created outside schools, edicts to be adoptedby teachers and schools, an idea out of synch with the contemporary viewsof teaching as a profession, one which should rightly be controlled by teach-ers, not psychometricians.” According to Mathison, “Assessment . . . is anactivity that may use tests and measurement, but relies more on the idea oftests as a means of trying out, and it demands less faith in the exactitude ofthe measurement resulting from that test. . . . These qualifications suggestthat assessments involve an inexact measurement, but also includenonnumerical qualitative indicators.” Further, “Assessment . . . implies a re-lationship between the assessor and the assessed . . . involve[s] the studentin substantive ways, and [is] not [a] solitary act[ ] performed by them.” Cit-ing Wiggins, Mathison argues that assessment “is something we do ‘with’and ‘for’ the student, not something we do ‘to’ the student.” 37

For Mathison, “authenticity” provides an important goal of meaningfulassessment. Here authentic assessments are those that are based on “perfor-mances” and have both “meaning in school contexts [and] more generalmeaning or value, especially in lived experience contexts.” Standardized test-ing, for example, displays what little meaning or value it may have only withinthe contexts of schooling itself. And yet, as Mathison notes, changing thedominant modes and mechanisms of evaluation in U.S. schooling is not easy,and it requires that educators and interested community members face arange of serious dilemmas, including:

1. State/national versus local control;2. Adding on versus reformulation;3. Limited resources versus accomplishing the ideal;4. Disciplines/activities versus goals/objectives; [and]5. Political versus technical solution[s].38

Mathison’s critique, of course, applies and must be extended beyond sim-ply a renunciation of “objective,” forced-response (e.g., multiple choice) testitems, and as she implies, must be understood within the current contex-tual emphasis on “performance-based assessments” and the rather behavior-istic effort on the part of many educational leaders to standardize those aswell (see, for example, the standards-based reform/performance-based sys-tem established vis-à-vis the Maryland School Performance Assessment Pro-gram, or MSPAP).


In many ways, the story of testing is still evolving and remains, in fact,incomplete. A lot has been said recently about the potential promises andproblematics of both standardized testing and more meaningful modes ofassessment. While educators such as Monty Neill have warned against themisuse of tests, still others (e.g., Alleman and Brophy) have pointed out the“changing nature” of assessment and sought to explore its possible and na-scent good.39 We applaud this renewed interest yet recognize the need forfurther reflection and action. One starting point exists in the work of thosewho, like the members of the Whole Schooling Consortium, have promoteda more holistic and community-based reform that challenges the very heartof widespread efforts to standardize. In brief, the exemplar principles ofwhole-schooling, those upon which a counterstandardization movementmight progress, aim to:

• Empower citizens in a democracy• Include all• Teach and adapt for diversity• Build community and support learning [and]• [Induce] partnering.40

In the end, it comes down to a question about the purposes of publicschooling and its role in a democratic society, about what we want for ourchildren and their futures. Do we as citizens, as educators, parents, and car-ing members of society, value a strict and disciplinary conformity—an ex-ternal control of knowledge—or do we instead accept the imperatives offreedom, equality, diversity, opportunity, and justice—do we take progressand difference seriously? Within the context of an evolving U.S. society andsystem of public schools, we must come down on the side of authenticityand in favor of a resistance to the domination of our children, and the con-trol of what counts as truth, by external wielders of cultural, economic, so-cial, and political power. Do we, in the end, reinforce and reproduce theconditions of the status quo—hierarchical conditions of power and inequal-ity—or do we seek to change them in a way consistent with the democraticideals of justice, opportunity, and caring? Shall our children remain simplypawns in a game of coercion or should they be treated as persons, learningto assume the rights and responsibilities of collective and broad-based de-mocracy? The forces of standardization reign yet are not the inevitable vic-tors. For, in many ways, they stand poised in an ever-weakening and defensiveposition. We seek only to build on that snippet of possibility, on the hopeand optimism that must in the end ground any effort toward a meaningfulschool reform, including the evolution of a truly public system of democraticand inclusive schools.

— 7 —

An “Inhuman Power”:Alientated Labor in Low-

Performing SchoolsKATHLEEN R. KESSON

Educators at the public school levels are under massive assault in this country.Not only are they increasingly losing their autonomy and capacity for imagi-native teaching, they increasingly bear the burden, especially in the urbancenters, of overcrowded classes, limited resources, and hostile legislators.1

INTRODUCTION

I am a teacher educator in an urban teacher education program in Brook-lyn, New York. Our students mostly live and teach in the surrounding neigh-borhoods of Fort Greene, Bushwick, Flatbush, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East NewYork, Crown Heights, Sunset Park, and Brighton Beach. Eighty percent ofthe students in our program are people of color, 51 percent of African de-scent, 82 percent are women, virtually all are working class, and many arerecent immigrants from the Caribbean, Russia, China, Korea, South America,and elsewhere, who speak English as a second language. Eighty-five percentof the program’s graduate students are uncertified teachers working in cityschools. Many of them teach in “high need” or “low-performing” schools,or “schools under review,” signifiers for poor schools, with mostly minoritystudents, in rough neighborhoods. The program has been carefully designedto capitalize on the cultural and linguistic strengths the students bring withthem to the task of teaching in urban environments.

In our program, students are encouraged to be systematically reflectiveabout their teaching, to innovate in their classrooms based on ideas of best


practice and student and teacher interests, and to carefully document stu-dent work and their own teaching practice. Our graduate students take threecourses in teacher research throughout their master’s program, completingboth a Child Study and a Descriptive Review of some aspect of their teach-ing practice. In addition to this inquiry focus, there are strong threads ofcritical pedagogy, social justice, the valuing of difference, and educating fordemocracy throughout the curriculum.

In New York City, public school reforms are taking place that will effec-tively centralize administrative control over city education and standardizemuch of the curriculum, especially in reading, writing, and mathematics.Possibly not since the unification of all New York City schools under oneadministrative roof in the early years of the twentieth century, resulting inwhat Tyack called “the one best system,”2 has such a massive restructuringtaken place. The issues today are very similar to the issues of that time: Cityschools are filled with large numbers of poor children, immigrant children,children who do not yet speak English, and, now, children of color, in con-trast to the largely Catholic Irish and southern European immigrants of thelast century. Policy changes include the reorganization of the Departmentof Education’s management structure into a unified, streamlined system; theadoption of a single, coherent system-wide approach for instruction in read-ing, writing, and math; and the creation of appointed “parent engagementboards” to replace democratically elected community school boards. Twohundred top scoring schools have been exempted from the standardizedcurriculum. Reasons given for the changes are the continued low perfor-mance of city schoolchildren on standardized tests and, related to this, theproblem of high mobility of children who live in poverty, including close to17,000 homeless children in New York City. There is a high turnover rateof teachers in low-performing schools, as well as many new teachers work-ing without credentials or teaching out of their area of certification. Morerigorous top-down controls on curriculum and teaching are intended to solvethese problems.

In this current iteration of school reform, in New York City as elsewhere,the principle of “accountability” is the preferred weapon in the arsenal ofthe conservative educational restoration. Testing, particularly, is the mecha-nism of accountability; it is the means by which we ensure that teachers areperforming their teaching function properly, that administrators are perform-ing their supervisory functions properly, and that students are complying withthe curricular expectations of the state. Surveillance also plays a significantrole in the new apparatus of accountability. Teachers in urban schools canexpect unannounced supervisory visits at any time; coaches and managersbarge into their classrooms, check to see that they are on the correct pageof the teaching script, and write them up if they appear to be deviating fromthe prescribed regimen. Many of our teacher education students suffer tre-mendous internal and external conflict between the values of a teacher prepa-

An “Inhuman Power” 99

ration program dedicated to the development of wise judgment, reflection,and autonomy, and working conditions in which they are expected to re-frain from exercising judgment, in which they have virtually no time for re-flection, and in which they seemingly are expected to function as automatons.

Our students are uniquely qualified to teach in these urban schools. Manyof them are bilingual or multilingual and, given their local roots, most ofthem have a deep understanding of the communities in which they teach.It was in listening to their stories, and in struggling with the contradictionsbetween what we were presenting them with in their graduate studies andwhat their actual working conditions were like, that I began to revisit thenotion of alienated labor, a philosophical concept with its roots in Hegel’sphilosophy of alienation and its culmination in Marx’s theory of alienatedlabor.

Marxist and neo-Marxist theorizing have provided scholars with a com-pelling theoretical framework with which to analyze the interrelationshipsof schooling and the political economy. Educational theorists working un-der the rubric of critical pedagogy have applied this analysis to a number ofeducational problems, including textbooks,3 curriculum,4 literacy,5,and teach-ing.6 In this chapter, I highlight six concepts—deskilling, proletarianization,objectification, intensification, reification, and resistance—drawn from myunderstanding of Marx’s theory of alienated labor and from neo-Marxistwork that emerged from the theory that seem linked to how teachers talkabout their labor in interviews and in their reading journals and critical pa-pers written for graduate classes. Although this inquiry is about “alienatedlabor,” I have not attempted to define some authentic state of “being” fromwhich teachers feel universally alienated. This is a philosophical problem ofsome magnitude that thinkers have wrestled with for centuries (re: Rousseau’seffort to describe a “natural man” in an unalienated state7). The more prac-tical problem is that low income and minority children are being taught byteachers who work under oppressive conditions and are subject to a tyran-nical management paradigm that stifles their professional growth and thusundermines genuine and long-lasting improvement of their schools.8 For thepurposes of this argument, I conceptualize “de-alienation,” or authenticity,as a moving horizon defined by continuous intellectual growth, the refine-ment of craft, the integration of conception and execution, enhanced cre-ativity, and consistent use of and improvement in the quality of professionaljudgments.

MARX’S THEORY OF ALIENATED LABOR

Work, in Marx’s view, is the essence of human life, the process by whichhumans create the world and thus create themselves. But when one’s “labor”is owned by others or not self-directed, work loses the characteristic of beingexpressive of humans’ unique powers and assumes “an existence separate


from man, his will and his planning.”9 Alienation thus becomes estrangementwhen people cease to exercise direction over their own productive activity.The object produced under coercion (for under the system of capitalist re-lations, most people have no choice but to “work for a living”) becomes “analien being, a power independent of the producer.”10 Labor becomes em-bodied in an object, a physical thing, and this product thus becomes an ob-jectification of labor. Marx believed that human beings diminish in relationto the life they pour into the creation of such objects:

The alienation of the worker in his object is expressed as follows in the laws ofpolitical economy: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume;the more value he creates, the more worthless he becomes; the more refinedhis product, the more crude and misshapen the worker; the more civilized theproduct, the more barbarous the worker; the more powerful the work the, morefeeble the worker; the more the work manifests intelligence, the more theworker declines in intelligence and becomes a slave of nature.11

Thus, work becomes extraneous to the worker’s true desires and does notfulfill but denies her innermost needs. In this way, people are prevented fromfully developing their mental and physical powers, and the relations betweena worker’s activity and her powers remain at a low level of achievement. Whenpeople create objects under conditions of estranged labor, objects take on acertain power by distorting the normal relations between a person and hisor her objects: the worker must adjust to the demands of the product andthe mode of production (re: the need to match the worker’s rhythm to thatof the machine in factory work, or the need for the teacher to stick to thescript). The worker no longer employs the means of production but viceversa: products precede and create need (DVD players create a need for DVDdisks), and products create the mode of living (witness, for example, themodern slavery to the automobile and the way it has restructured time, space,and community).

So, the concept of alienated labor has two main components: the rela-tion of the worker to the activity itself and the relation to the object created,or the product. Alienation to the activity occurs because of the contradic-tion between a person’s free, reflective, autonomous nature and the exploi-tation of her labor and powers by an alien force outside herself:

Alienation is apparent not only in the fact that my means of life belong to some-one else, that my desires are the unattainable possession of someone else, butthat everything is something different from itself, that my activity is somethingelse, and finally (and this is also the case for the capitalist) that an inhumanpower (emphasis mine) rules over everything.12

>Labor—life activity—now becomes only a means for a satisfaction of a need,the need to maintain physical existence, not the central meaning-making


activity of life. Marx considered it an essential aspect of human nature toreproduce itself by appropriating external nature and expressing itself in thecreation of real, sensuous objects. This “objectification” is a preconditionfor the self-conscious development of people. The conflict occurs whenpeople relinquish the object as part of their essence, allow it to become in-dependent and overpowering, a possibility that becomes a reality under con-ditions of estranged labor and private property.13

Although Marx’s theory of alienated labor was conceived at a time when“labor” was analogous to “factory work,” contemporary critical educationscholars have applied the major concepts to aspects of the work of teaching.In this section, I note some of the major themes in this work by highlight-ing the voices of the teachers in our urban teacher preparation graduate pro-gram, focusing specifically on the contradiction presented by policies allegedlydesigned to promote social equity for students, but which have, in effect,produced a condition of alienated labor for the teachers who work with themdaily.

DESKILLING

Deskilling is, in simple terms, the separation of conception from execu-tion and is closely related to the other concepts in this chapter. “Skilled” laboris analogous to the work of the preindustrial craftsperson, who creativelyconceived of the design and form of his or her work and carried out theproject from start to finish. This contrasts with the modern mass produc-tion laborer, who neither conceives of nor designs the product that he orshe labors to produce and who only performs a fragment of the productionprocess. Although teachers are not factory workers, some scholars have drawnanalogies between the “techné” of the artisan, the factory worker, and theteacher, pointing out the ways that the work of teaching, as it becomes lessan art and more a technical process, comes to resemble mass production.Michael Apple has written extensively about the deskilling of teachers, not-ing that teachers have been

more and more faced with the prospect of being deskilled because of the en-croachment of technical control procedures into the curriculum in schools. Theintegration together of management systems, reductive behaviorally based cur-ricula, pre-specified teaching “competencies” and procedures and student re-sponses, and pre- and post-testing, was leading to a loss of control and a sepa-ration of conception from execution.14

Patrick Shannon has applied this analysis to reading programs through-out the United States, demonstrating the ways in which reading “experts”and basal textbook publishers have assumed the function of the conceptionof reading instruction, while instructional guidebooks, with their prepared


scripts, worksheets, and tests, have “stripped teachers of the skills of theircraft.”15 And this “legislated learning makes teachers more accountable to thestate than ever before,” (emphasis mine) as “new state initiatives attempt tostandardize the goals, monitor student progress closely, and regulate teach-ing methods.”16

N. is a new kindergarten teacher who did her student teaching with anexperienced teacher/researcher and is in our literacy graduate program. Shedescribes her work in terms of this deskilling:

. . . the superintendent of my district took the reading curriculum that we use,and she devised her own lesson plans on the ways we should teach, what weshould say, how we should have our charts printed, how they should be hang-ing in the room, and what the children should know if she should come andquestion them. The superintendent . . . said we must do it the way she scriptedit in two folders that she gave us. They go right down to what we should sayto introduce the follow up, what the follow up should be, and what the chil-dren should be assessed on once it’s the end of the week.

Requirements to have the charts in the right place and to use the correctcolor of markers highlighting the “To Do” for the day are pervasive, indi-cating the degree to which teachers are not even trusted to perform the mostmundane classroom tasks without specific guidelines. Teachers can no longereven exercise the “skill” of deciding how to make educational charts.Deskilling, says Barry Kanpol,

is at its peak when teachers are denied or have much less autonomy and lesscontrol over the teaching process than they think they have. By making teach-ers accountable for state-mandated curriculum (such as basal reading materi-als) and by promoting competency-based education, system management, andemploying rigid and dehumanizing forms of evaluation along with numericalrating scales, teachers are controlled and simply march to the tune of the state.17

Deskilling is not merely a professional issue, then, it is a political issue, as itis employed not just to control the labor of teachers, but also to ensure con-formity of student thinking. In scripted teaching, there is one correct stu-dent response, and few opportunities are provided for divergent, lateral,connected, or critical thinking.

PROLETARIANIZATION

Proletarianization is the movement of sections of the middle-class laborforce into the working class by nature of the character of their labor. If classis defined by one’s relation to the processes of production, then teachersoccupy a somewhat ambiguous class position. Most consider themselves pro-


fessionals, and indeed their level of schooling signifies professional status. Atthe same time, they are supervised by managers, suggesting that their laborbelongs more in the “working-class” category. I suggest here that the classstatus of teachers cannot be generalized, depending as it does on variablessuch as the state in which they teach, the leadership in their district andschool, their experience, and their credentials. However, for the teachers Iwork with, most of whom are teachers of color in low-performing cityschools, hierarchically structured command and control systems character-ize their labor, and their working conditions are characterized by increasingloss of control over the labor process and a extraordinary lack of autonomy.A distinct class of managers, including supervisors, superintendents, princi-pals, staff developers, and trainers, oversees a class of teacher/workers, cre-ating a sort of class warfare involving surveillance, threat, punishment, andpublic shaming:

. . . we are told time and time again you must be doing this, you must be do-ing it. And I don’t know of anyone who’s experienced the consequences, butthey say you get a letter in your file. They just simply say, you must be doingit . . . so, to some degree, you get singled out in staff development when youare not doing it correctly. Where you could almost tell which teacher they aretalking about. Like they’ll say “well I went in this second grade teacher’s room.”They’ll make it where you could pretty much decide as professionals who theyare talking about. So you get called out in professional development if you arenot doing it, and you get threatened that you will get a letter in your file ifyou vary from the curriculum (Interview with E., fourth grade teacher in EastHarlem).

Shannon notes the ways in which administrators “seem content to let thebasal publishers choose the goals, methods, and assessment for reading in-struction, focusing their efforts on managing teachers’ use of the chosenmaterials in order to render it more effective and efficient in raising students’test scores.”18 In this way, the managerial/supervisory class becomes enforc-ers, ensuring that teachers stick to the script and march in tune to the cur-riculum drum. From the perspective of estranged labor, teachers workingunder conditions of surveillance and threat are prevented from fully devel-oping their mental and physical powers, and the relations between a worker’sactivity and her powers remain at a low level of achievement.

OBJECTIFICATION

Objectification is the idea that, under conditions of alienated labor, thereis estrangement from the object created, or the product. The notion of stu-dents as products has a long and unsavory history in education, dating backat least to the oft-cited words of Elwood Cubberly:


Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw materials are to be shapedand fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifi-cations for manufacturing come from the demands of the twentieth centurycivilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the speci-fications laid down. This demands good tools, specialized machinery, continu-ous measurement of production . . ..19

What is the product in the teaching/learning relationship? The student?Knowledge? Student products—writing, artwork, worksheets, tests? Underconditions of alienated labor, the “product” is a constellation of all of thesethings, but most important now is the ubiquitous test score. Teachers andschools increasingly are expected to produce ever higher test scores, and theirlabor in this regard is reminiscent of the assembly line (ask any fourth gradeteacher preparing students for the ELA20). When test scores are the primaryindicator of successful teaching, as is true now for many city teachers, stu-dents become objects to be manipulated within a narrow set of regulatoryprocesses. Teachers are prohibited from responding authentically to the fullhumanness of their students. Student work becomes an “alien object” pro-duced under coercion; unconnected to desire or genuine need, it is “an alienbeing, a power independent of the producer.”21 One teacher (L.) writes inher reading journal:

We are considered a low performing school because our children don’t reachthe standards that were written for them by people outside theclassroom . . . people who do not know our children write these standards; theydo not know their needs . . . we, as teachers, are handed a list of things thatwe have to teach to children and time limits to teach it. They give us this in-formation without even taking into consideration what prior knowledge thestudents have or what topics they are interested in—something needs to changeto help these children succeed.

L. clearly understands that if “work” is not related to what students alreadyknow or to topics that they have some interest in, teaching and learning willnot be effective—and these students will not succeed. Teaching is, at its mostbasic level, about relationship. Warmth, connection, and caring are essen-tial to the endeavor. When teachers are under duress to make their students“perform,” when one’s career is on the line with student test scores the de-ciding factor of success, the teaching and learning relationship is reduced toone of coercion. Students and their thinking become objects to be manipu-lated toward predetermined ends.

INTENSIFICATION

Intensification occurs when the pace and timing of labor processes arespeeded up to accommodate new production demands. Because schools are


not factories, nor are they profit-making enterprises with balance sheets ofgain and loss, one would think, as Shannon suggests, that they “should haveescaped the logic of production which seeks to increase profit margins bymanipulating variables in the productive process . . . to keep expenses at aminimum and productivity high.”22 But schools are dependent upon taxpay-ers for their operating funds, and these taxpayers, living as they do in anincreasingly commodified society, expect a reasonable return on their invest-ment. Because test scores are an efficient, if not particularly meaningful,measure of student learning, “these scores become the equivalent of theprofit and loss statements in business ledgers.”23 In this way, pressure flowsdownward in the educational hierarchy, subjecting instruction to the samelogic of production as the assembly line. The intensification of labor orientedtoward increased production (higher test scores) is even felt in the early el-ementary grades. In E.’s first grade classroom in East Harlem, there is nomore “constructive playtime,” no blocks, no clay, no music, no painting, andno recess:

They go to lunch then they get to go outside and run around for 15 minutesand that is it. And they are lucky if they get that. And they just run . . . there’sno supervised play, no equipment, there’s nothing, it’s just a big asphalt yardthat they run around in . . . they work really hard during the day. It just feelslike they are in the military sometimes, it’s one thing after the other and it’sjust work, work, work.

One must ask, what is the cost of this intensification? Perhaps test scores willrise. Or perhaps this is a vivid example of Jean Anyon’s thesis concerningthe social stratification of school experience.24 Are these children being pre-pared, even in the first grade, for a life of mundane, repetitious labor or forservice on the front lines of the military, like so many of their brothers, sis-ters, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles and cousins? This denial of the most basicneeds of young children, for music, art, play, hands-on experiences, and freshair, would certainly not be tolerated just a few blocks south in Manhattan.Even in N.’s kindergarten classroom, the mode of production (instructionaimed at higher test scores) is shaping the consciousness of very young chil-dren:

Friday is test day for kindergartners though fifth grade . . . we are told that theproblem in the school is that they don’t test well, they need to get used to beingtimed, so we were told to start timing these tests we give to kindergartners onFridays. Well for a long time I disagreed, I didn’t buy the timer. I was doingthe test but I didn’t buy the timer. The teacher trainer noticed that I neverbought the timer, and she told me you have to buy the timer, and I must starttiming my children on Friday test day.

I just want to go back to what’s becoming of them from all this testing. . . they are becoming very competitive at the age of five. My children understand


the difference between getting seventy and one hundred on a test, to the pointwhere they are laughing at the kids who get sixty and seventy. They already havethe mindset that “that’s bad, you got a seventy and I got a hundred.” Gettingcompetitive is not where I think kindergarten learning should be.

A memo was recently circulated to this teacher, suggesting that she devisetests for her kindergartners in which they would fill in the bubbles in amultiple-choice format. Schooling in capitalist America, at least in capitalistinner-city New York, appears designed to cultivate cutthroat competition atthe tender age of five and to foster competitive individualism as opposed tosocial solidarity. And though teachers may resist in small ways (not buyingthe timer on time), they face retribution for not following orders.

REIFICATION

Reification is a special form of alienation, signifying the process by whichhuman relations, actions, and characteristics take on the characteristics ofthings, which then become independent and come to govern human life.Curriculum is a profoundly human endeavor—it is the deeply felt transac-tion between, as Dewey put it, the knower and the known. The teacher, inthe school setting, acts as mediator in this transaction, as she (under idealconditions) comes to know the child, discerns his or her interests and needs,critically assesses the state of the world to decide what’s worth knowing, andthen guides the child toward more complex thinking and organized formsof knowledge. When the curriculum comes from outside the learning ex-change in the form of textbooks or scripts, essential characteristics of thetransaction are eliminated. The curriculum is not connected to student needsor interests and therefore lacks meaning; it is only “developmentally appro-priate” in the most rudimentary and universal terms. What’s worth know-ing is decided by bureaucrats or textbook editors, none of whom have anyknowledge of the specific circumstances of the students’ lives, and perhapsmost egregious, the curriculum lacks internal coherence, so that nothing inthe script connects to anything else, but rather presents information in a frag-mented, reductive way.

Under such conditions, the curriculum becomes a thing, it behaves ac-cording to the logic of the thing-world, and most important, it transformsboth teacher and student into beings who behave in accordance with the logicof the thing-world. How many teachers, when they do present new and wor-thy knowledge, are asked “Will this be on the test?” What about N.s kin-dergartners, who already judge the worth of their classmates by their Fridaytest scores? These students have become governed by the logic of the deadcurriculum—the curriculum that is devoid of life energy—and they know,in the end, what must be done to survive in their Darwinian world (a world


that is itself a reification of our relations with technology). It is a painful andtroubling example of successful adaptation.

RESISTANCE

Resistance theory, developed most explicitly by Paul Willis in his study ofwhite working class youth,25 is a neo-Marxist theory that challenges thedeterminism of the base/superstructure model in Marxist reproductiontheory. Resistance, according to Kanpol,

involves the conscious and unconscious attempt by anyone (but for our case,particularly teachers and students) to challenge the dominant and/or hegemonicvalues in our society . . . critical theorists look at resistance as possible acts ofsocial and cultural transformation . . . resistance entails acts that counter theoppressive race, class, and gender stereotypes as well as challenges to otherdominant structural values such as individualism, rampant competition, success-only orientations, and authoritarianism.26

Thankfully, I could cite numerous instances of resistance as the teachersin our program attempt, against the odds, to work in ways that are car-ing, critical, and just. From these, I chose the following, because I particu-larly liked the embedded metaphor of the “black skydiver.” Z., a sixth-gradeteacher who claims multiple identities (Puerto Rican of African descent,religious Muslim), who has been teaching for four years in a low-perform-ing school in Harlem, works within a strictly articulated set of guidelinesand under pressure to raise test scores. She talks, in an interview, aboutthe ways that she subverts the system when she feels that her (predomi-nantly African American) students would benefit more from diverging fromthe script:

We were reading about a woman who ran away from her husband because hewas beating her and we were doing what’s called a “Touchstones” discussionand a student said “the woman had to be white” and I said “why would yousay that?” And she said “well, because she kept going towards the danger asopposed to . . . like throughout her trials while she was running away she raninto these different obstacles and as opposed to just fleeing from them she triedto stay and resolve them.” Well, the child took that and not fully understand-ing what the moral of the story was, which was perseverance; she said “when-ever I watch scary movies, the white woman is always staying to see what’shappening instead of running away.” This turned into a little bit of a discus-sion about what white people do versus what black people do. And I said“There’s nothing that a white person can do that a black person can’t do.” Shesaid “of course . . . black people don’t skydive.” Everyone was like “yeh, blackpeople don’t skydive” . . . as though it were a FACT . . . as though everyoneknows that (emphasis hers).


Z. made a point of seeking out someone in her community who had beenskydiving. Fortunately, the custodian had been skydiving recently and hadvideotaped it, which Z. was able to bring into her class and show her stu-dents. She felt that it was important enough, in working with these children,to transform their sense of possibilities, even if it meant sacrificing drill timefor the upcoming tests:

A lot of times, I feel like those things are so important that I’d rather just getin trouble about being off schedule than not provide them with the experience.It’s unfortunate that that’s the choice I have to make.

This was a small act of resistance, an act that challenged the internalized racestereotypes of a group of children. It is acts like these, however, multipliedby thousands in classrooms across the country, that could inhibit the total-izing effect of capitalist (and racist) hegemonic structures and consciousness.

I want to close this section by highlighting one other important themethat keeps surfacing in the experiences of these teachers, which is related tothe Marxist concept of bureaucratism, or bureaucratization, and that is thetheme of compliance. In many cases, supervisors and managers exhibit muchless concern about the actual content of what is going on in classrooms thanthey do about whether procedures are being followed. One teacher noted thatthe supervisors check to see that the charts are hanging in the right placebut do not take note of whether they had been changed from Septemberthrough March. S. discusses what the role of teacher feels like and what shesenses is valued by her managers:

I often feel that they think if your classroom is quiet the children are learning.If they stand in line and they can’t be heard in the hallway, then you’re a won-derful teacher. Classroom management is key—it’s a statement I’ve heard overand over again. Because of that, what happens is, as long as your class is wellbehaved and your room is pretty and you have all the rubrics up and every-thing that is supposed to be up is up, they really don’t bother you as much.Because of that, you will be able to have more freedom.

Play by the bureaucratic rules, don’t make waves, make sure the rubrics areposted. Then perhaps, just perhaps, you can close the door and teach in ac-cordance with your principles.

CONCLUSION

Marxist theories of education took shape in the United States with thepublication of Bowles and Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America,27 whichdeveloped the argument that schools in a capitalist society reproduced theskills, forms of knowledge, and differentiated status necessary to sustain the


existing labor hierarchy in the society. Critical of the determinism of thiswork, scholars such as Michael Apple, Paul Willis, Henry Giroux, and PeterMcLaren developed the ideas of human agency (the idea that a simplisticbase/superstructure model failed to account for human will and desire) andresistance (the idea that teachers and students, working critically together,could resist oppressive educational and social policies and practices), success-fully demonstrating that the reproductive tendencies in education are nevercomplete and are subject to conflict and transformation. Unfortunately,Marxist and neo-Marxist theorizing has had relatively little impact on thenature of contemporary schooling due to a number of factors: the inacces-sible language of the major theorists, the primary location of the organiz-ing ideas in universities and academic journals (with notable exceptions, suchas the work of the Rouge Forum28 and journals such as Radical Teacher andRethinking Schools), the increasing bureaucratization and standardization ofthe curriculum through the standards and high-stakes testing initiatives, theinherent conservatism of the institution of schooling, and perhaps mostimportant, the totalizing effects of capitalist mentality, which permeates thevarious structures and institutions of society.

In the university teacher preparation program highlighted in this article,students are supported in the development of conscientization,29 defined inthis context as the awareness of oppressive relations of domination and a senseof the possibilities for overcoming, or transcending, those relationships.Conscientization requires a dialectal pedagogy, which must start with givenconditions, a clear understanding of one’s alienation—a thesis. Then it mustpresent a vision of possibility—the possibility that education does not needto be oppressive, stifling, competitive, and demoralizing for both teachersand students. Teachers and students need to understand that education couldbe (indeed, has been, at moments) dedicated to and characterized by cre-ativity, care, social justice, equity, and critical awareness of the world—anantithesis. A dialectical form of teacher education, based on Marx’s ideas,would be dedicated to the development of human powers, creative expres-sion, and authenticity—a synthesis. While Hegel assigned this reflective ac-tivity to an Absolute Spirit, operating in and through human beings, Marxassigns the development of human creative powers to humans themselves,fulfilling their needs through their labor processes. Reflective teaching, in-formed by critique generated by a Marxist analysis of the conditions of alien-ation, could form the basis of such a dialectical form of practice. Throughthe development of sophisticated forms of inquiry, teachers can develop theircapacities for informed judgments in the context of the uncertain and com-plex environments of classrooms. With the confidence of judgment thatcomes with the ability to gather data through careful observation, assess theconsequences of their actions, and make decisions based on evidence, insight,and the research literature, teachers can assume the moral authority to


challenge and resist what is not in the best interest of their students.30 Oneteacher, writing in her reading journal, expresses such emergent critical con-sciousness about scripted teaching:

I have heard many inexperienced teachers express gratitude for the structureprovided by these carefully scripted lessons, finding them time savers, usefuland supportive. The sad reality, however, is that these materials are often notused as guides or suggestions, but as gospel, to be followed by rote and with-out deviation. Under such a system, both the teacher and the child becomeobjects upon which the “system” works its magic . . . such an approach servesto clearly mark the lines of authority . . . such an approach discourages studentsfrom developing and exercising the critical skills needed to participate fully ina democratic society . . . students participated more, and more energetically,when their views and answers were validated and discussed, even when (per-haps especially when) those views are “against the grain.” The central issue,though, then becomes how do we, as teachers, work effectively within “thesystem” when it appears that the system’s goals and purposes are diametricallyopposed to enabling the students to develop those essential “critical skills?”

The problems of city schools are enormous. Given such conditions as highpoverty, mobility of students, underprepared teachers, and high teacher turn-over, the efforts to standardize, centralize, and supervise the curriculum areunderstandable (if misguided). Test scores are not the only important out-comes of schooling, however. Teachers are primary role models for children,and the working conditions and social relations of the school constitute animportant part of the hidden curriculum. If the intention is to relegate poorstudents of color to the margins of the economy, in which they will be ex-pected to carry out menial, low-skilled, alienated labor, then their teachersare performing important roles as models of such labor. If, however, thedesired outcome is really to close the achievement gap and educate all stu-dents for active participation in a democracy, as well as for meaningful rolesin the workforce, then it is counterproductive to create conditions of alien-ated labor for their teachers. What would be more fruitful, if real equity isthe desired goal, would be for teachers to be genuinely freethinking intel-lectuals, models of critical thought, creatively engaged and caring individu-als who are responsive to student interests and whose full cognitive andaffective powers were evident in the quality of their professional judgments.Then, perhaps, just perhaps, we could find other jobs for the curriculumpolice.

— 8 —

Gender and the Constructionof Teaching

SUSAN LAIRD

Among my students who teach young people and lead schools, I daily con-front deep despair over situations wrought by the No Child Left Behind Act,a melancholia1 that only deepens their sense of paralysis before culturalmiseducation2 that this policy worsens, cultural miseducation that has plaguedtheir school systems chronically despite their own good intentions: racism,classism, sexism, heterosexism, and the like. Many feel so trapped they fo-cus obsessively on their own reasons for despair, until exercising their edu-cational imaginations sometimes seems like a frivolous and impracticalexercise whose fruits they can never enjoy. They suffer moral paralysis.3

Concerned about the moral paralysis that can overwhelm us when weconfront problems of social injustice in all their immensity, multiplicity, andcomplexity, Barbara Houston’s presidential address to the Philosophy ofEducation Society in 2002 critically analyzed a variety of ways in which in-ner resistances can paralyze us and constructively argued that

rather than getting stuck in the paralysis and resistance to blame, rather thanbecoming fixated on ourselves and our justifications for what we have done ornot done, we can adopt a forward-looking perspective on taking responsibil-ity. We can acknowledge the problems and ask ourselves the question: whatwill I undertake? Such a perspective . . . can be liberating for at least some ofus, and perhaps for our students.4


If then one feels paralyzed by the notion of identifying with others thatone doesn’t want to feel identified with or by a sense of one’s own dimin-ished agency and powerlessness before a chronic and over-determined situ-ation, she suggests further that

The legacy of harm is that we are alienated from our understanding of ourselvesas moral beings, and from each other. Taking responsibility for oneself can helpus to overcome the sense of alienation from ourselves. The best possibility, theone I hope for, is that it might free us also to reach for a different relationshipwith the other.5

This chapter narrates and theorizes such a practice of taking responsibil-ity for overcoming moral paralysis before intransigent problems harm youngpeople in schools and, at the same time, presents a means for teachers to takeresponsibility for their own characters, lest they become burned-out cynicsincapable of self-respect in the face of public blame and bureaucratic dys-function. Moreover, the practice requires taking responsibility for both theproblems and ourselves by making different and new relationships with oth-ers. Let me explain.

TALES OUT OF SCHOOLS

The “Bible Belt” used to be identified almost exclusively with Tennesseeand other Southern states but now actually has no clear geographic bound-aries, encompassing perhaps the whole U.S. rural “heartland.” There, pub-lic schools face a profoundly difficult, complex issue that most teachers andteacher educators would rather avoid. But many students and parents expe-rience this issue as a life-or-death challenge, even a cause for melancholia,as do the precious few teachers and teacher educators who choose the hardlabor of taking responsibility for this issue, perhaps even at the cost of theirjobs. Without doubt, such labor is at best unpaid and at worst sacrificial, giftlabor.6

What is this issue, and why is it so difficult? A story from this heartlandsetting is perhaps the best way to explain it7: a story about a devout, funda-mentalist Christian white schoolgirl, a strong but anguished survivor of bothsevere poverty and domestic violence, whom I will call Terry.8 She wishedthat her after-school girls’ program met everyday. Since it did not, she clev-erly sought daily sanctuary at the public library, even though at sixteen, likeher mother, she could not yet read. Terry found no sanctuary at school,where she was dismayed to find that her teachers and schoolmates oftenmistook her for a boy. One teacher even tried to help her by advising her towear a scarf or jewelry for “a little feminine touch,” which only made Terryfeel worse—that teacher just did not understand Terry! Terry liked to do wildstunts on her bike, fix cars, and pal around with guys who liked to do these

Gender and the Construction of Teaching 113

things too, but she was terrified of grown men; nonetheless, even when in-formed of Terry’s fear, the school insisted upon assigning her to a male coun-selor. Eventually almost suicidal, she stopped going to school rather thancontinue to face harassing taunts and violent attacks targeting her“transgender” looks, manners, interests, attitudes, and style—a term not yetin either her school’s vocabulary or her own.9 Now she is too old for herafter-school girls’ program, has dropped out of school, has also left home,and after an uncertain period in the streets when she was courted and hurtby a violent girl gang as well as by a young man with whom she lived for awhile, Terry has finally found love and friendship that feels true and goodfor her. Her spirits thus renewed, she has also begun going to a night schoolGED program to learn how to read, found a minimum-wage job preparingfast food, helped care for an invalid grandmother, and come out as a lesbianwho wishes to marry her girlfriend in a church, if only that were possible.

Before this only tentatively happy outcome, a student teacher, whom Iwill call Denise, worked in the girls’ after-school program that was the onlyplace where Terry felt any sense of belonging. Having particular concern forTerry and all that she was going through, Denise was also at the same timepainfully aware of her own education classmates’ intense resistance againstlaboring over any critical thought about the heterosexist attitudes that fu-eled school violence against students like Terry.10 She repeatedly asked her-self what she should do, just as Houston has argued she should: “What willI undertake?” The answer did not come right away. But on the invitationof a gay friend with whom Denise had shared all these concerns and whomshe occasionally dated to help him safely “cover,” she went with him to achapter meeting of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG).

There Denise found a thriving, friendly multicultural, intergenerational,economically diverse community organized largely through the inexhaust-ibly smart, generous, and cordial energies of a recently retired elementaryschool teacher, who also served her Southern Baptist church as a Sundayschool teacher, and whose beloved grown son is gay and happily ensconcedin a stable home life with his committed life-partner. This PFLAG commu-nity included an adult-counseled friendship group of sexually diverse teen-agers and another new group then in formation, called the Safe SchoolsInitiative, in addition to the core group of this PFLAG chapter. That coregroup gathered monthly to welcome and help—just as their name indicates—distraught, concerned parents and friends of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, andsexually questioning and transgender youth (for whom collectively I will usethe shorthand LGBQT). This PFLAG chapter’s Safe Schools Initiative de-liberately brought together schoolteachers and board members, administra-tors, counselors, librarians, police, professors, religious and other communityleaders, students, and parents to learn from one another about the violentsituation of LGBQT school youth and deliberate from their various positionsabout what they might collaboratively do to end such violence. Now, several


years later, through this friendly and variegated collective effort, their localhigh school has a Gay Straight Alliance; Denise has found effectively instruc-tive films and guest speakers to recommend to her education professors, sothat the Safe Schools Initiative has now actually recruited some other ener-getic student-teacher members from her college’s “School and Society” class;a college of education, school of social work, and several churches haveclaimed partnership with the Safe Schools Initiative; and a superintendentof schools has engaged in public dialogues with members of this PFLAG’svarious groups, who have politely but directly challenged him to addressbullying of LGBQT in their district’s schools. One year arbitrarily denied theopportunity to participate in a state-level Safe Schools Forum, organized afterthe tragedy at Columbine, PFLAG’s Safe Schools Initiative gained access tothe statewide Safe Schools Forum a few years later. For this PFLAG chapteris persevering in a long-term kind of “forward-looking”11 community actionthat I have named educative befriending.12

The issue motivating such educative befriending need not always beheterosexism, as it was for Denise. In the early 1980s, long before the Ameri-can Association of University Women’s Educational Foundation had begunproducing research reports like How Schools Shortchange Girls in 1992 by theWellesley Center for Research on Women, Hostile Hallways in 1993 by LouisHarris and Associates, and many others since then,13 undocumented sexismin public schools motivated a similar project of educative befriending. Sim-ply by gathering for tea and cookies at my apartment on Mondays afterschool to air our grievances with one another, one teachers’ aide, three otherteachers, and I began describing, naming, and analyzing the sexism we wit-nessed and experienced, and brainstormed possible effective strategies toaddress it. Soon we called ourselves the Ithaca Feminist Education Coali-tion (IFEC), for our first strategy was to turn toward befriending parents,board members, administrators, counselors, librarians, booksellers, educationand women’s studies professors from nearby colleges and universities, com-munity leaders, and students who shared our concerns and might bear wit-ness to their validity. Having established this broad-reaching network ofdeveloping friendships around common concerns, IFEC founded an activeschool district Title IX Committee, offered a Women’s Studies Day with aprogram of films and guest speakers at the high school, sponsored an after-school support group for LGBQT students, wrote a Women’s EducationalEquity Act Program curriculum development grant, organized an in-serviceconference day on multicultural education that was open to the public, sup-ported black parents’ challenge to the school district’s tracking practices,featured library exhibits for Women’s History Month, challenged high schooldepartments to revamp their curricula and hire staff who might ensure girls’access to school computers, and went to national and state women’s studiesconferences to share our challenges and successes with others elsewhere fromwhom we might learn more.14


These two case narratives may illustrate some of the help and hope forpublic schools to be generated by the gift labors of those concerned teach-ers who undertake educative befriending, but they omit details that mightdemonstrate exactly what the practice of educative befriending is. Here I willexplain why I call its practice among teachers and students a gift labor forpractical wisdom in schools.

THE GIFT LABOR OF BEFRIENDING

Befriending can be, as it was for the retired teacher who organizedPFLAG’s Safe Schools Initiative and for the teachers and mainstreaming aidewho founded IFEC, an educational “life-practice.”15 Although people whohave practiced it with educative purposes are likely to have done so deliber-ately, I have never before heard anyone name it, much less construct a con-cept of it so that others might understand it. Moreover, professional schoolpeople have often been taught that education and friendship should standworlds apart.16 Yet many popular contemporary writings, not to mention anancient classic (Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, V), evidence some recogni-tion of friendship’s possible educative value. Befriending can be an individualor collective practice, a private or public practice, or both simultaneously, asit was in my two cases of PFLAG and IFEC, and thus the practice blursconventionally drawn boundaries between “professional” and “nonprofes-sional” labor. Having named the practice educative befriending, I will heregloss its meaning so that both professional and nonprofessional educatorsmight acknowledge, understand, value, learn, teach, critique, and practiceit—and so that their efforts to practice it with such intelligent care mightget more generous material support.

Tests, textbooks, grades, credits, competencies, rankings, certificates, di-plomas, and other credentials saturate schooling with a market-economynotion of commodity exchange, whereas poet-anthropologist Lewis Hydemight call the educational life-practice of befriending a “gift labor.”17 As a“transformative gift” that circulates,18 educative befriending within andaround schools may deliberately develop teachers’ and students’ friendshipcommunities outside or despite the dehumanizing commodity exchange thatdominates schooling, especially under the No Child Left Behind Act. Like“othermothering” by both “bloodmothers” and “fictive kin” within AfricanAmerican “women-centered networks of community-based childcare,”19 sucheducative befriending by, of, and among teachers and students occurs pre-cisely as Hyde theorizes “gift exchange” does, tending to enact “an economyof small groups, of extended families, small villages, close-knit communities,brotherhoods and, of course, of tribes.”20 Thus, educative befriending—by,of, and among teachers and students—initiates “the give-and-take that en-sures the livelihood of their spirit”21—whether their spirit be embattled bycultural blame, heterosexism or sexism, or some other difficulty. Distinct from


seeking or holding onto friendship for oneself as a possession, befriendingin my view refers instead to giving friendship freely to those who witness withconcern or are afflicted by injustice or other harm—a gift offered to or byteachers or students as neither reward nor bribe, but as “a companion totransformation, . . . the actual agent of change, the bearer of new life”22 anyteacher or student may accept or leave. That freedom to accept or leave it iscrucial, for Hyde observes that “a gift makes a connection,” that “Gifts be-speak relationship,” and that “gift exchange must . . . be refused when thereis a real threat in the connections that it offers,”23 an ethical principle appli-cable to educative befriending. At the same time, within the gift-exchangeeconomy, notes eco-feminist educator Ruthanne Kurth-Schai, “special needsor areas of disadvantage are compensated for rather than used as justifica-tion for limiting participation.”24 Thus, as illustrated by both PFLAG’s SafeSchools Initiative and IFEC, teachers and students as subjects and objectsof deliberate educative befriending are valued as having special gifts to offerone another voluntarily, rather than merely as docile or dependent recipi-ents of administrative management or didactic direction whose repeatableresults must be quantified and commodified.

The gift of friendship may be direct, a gift of one’s own friendship, suchas Denise, in my opening anecdote, offered Terry, or such as my IFEC col-leagues and I offered one another over tea in my apartment after school.Especially when direct and personal, the gift may in some sense be spiritual,if artfully given: Terry was so moved to gratitude by Denise’s generous friend-ship through her hard times that she drew some pictures for her as a gift inreturn.25 But befriending may also be indirect, a gift of others’ possible (nevercertain) friendship, as when members of IFEC befriended a gay student withdisabilities by quietly organizing a small unofficial after-school friendshipgroup of LGBQT and sympathetic straight schoolmates that met regularlywith a lesbian teacher for mutual support. Optimally, teachers and studentsshould be beneficiaries of both sorts of befriending, direct and indirect, al-though too often they are not. The gift of such befriending may be, espe-cially when indirect or impersonal, a material gift—cultural, institutional, oreconomic help toward the end of fostering direct friendships that have edu-cative value. A practitioner of educative befriending par excellence, JulietteGordon Low founded the Girl Scout movement with such diverse sorts ofbefriending gifts, for example.

But a caveat is necessary here. For, whenever such gifts, direct and indi-rect, personal and impersonal, are unevenly and unreflectively bestowed uponteachers or students, especially within commodity-exchange settings likeschools, befriending teachers or students can become a miseducative dispens-ing of favoritism and privilege to some at others’ expense. For example, BoyScout troops render such favoritism and privilege to heterosexual boys whomthey befriend at gay, bisexual, and transgender boys’ expense—and histori-cally at all girls’ expense also, at least until Girl Guides and Girl Scouts were


founded specifically to correct that sexist slight.26 Educative opportunitiesget lost when befriending takes such an exclusive turn, as Terry and Denise’sstory may further illustrate. For Denise found that every African Americangirl in Terry’s after-school program had to learn effective strategies of non-violent resistance against white girls’ racist name-calling and violence atschool in order to survive with dignity and complete high school. She alsosaw that Terry, witnessing the African American girls’ unjust suffering somuch like her own and experiencing their compassionate friendship throughher similar struggles, found her own racism effectively challenged, so thatTerry began to change her racist attitudes. Knowing some members of theSafe Schools Initiative to be antiracist professors and teachers, Denise won-dered whether they would similarly address such racist violence in schools,especially as they sought multicultural participation in their strongly focusedefforts to address heterosexist violence of the sort that plagued Terry.27

True befriending grounded in genuinely affectionate concern for oneanother as friends would entail that expansive, rather than restrictive, kindof concern. In this respect, educative befriending differs markedly from in-stitutionalized advocacy for an impersonally defined “cause,” which inevita-bly risks making an “invisible man” or woman whose human wholeness getslost in the midst of expressing concern about one particular issue.28 Educa-tive befriending may not always be perfect in practice, because people whobefriend one another are inevitably imperfect; nonetheless my concept ofeducative befriending does by definition aim to give the gift of friendshipgenerously; and real friends strive to comprehend and preserve one another’shuman wholeness, no matter what common interest or curious differenceinitially brings them together, so that other closely related concerns inevita-bly arise and are taken up as friends’ compassion requires.

PRACTICAL WISDOM THROUGH“MULTIPLE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY”29

PFLAG and IFEC exemplify cases of educative befriending, but educa-tive befriending of those sorts would never have been necessary in the ab-sence of miseducation that transmitted hidden curricula in heterosexism andsexism. Befriending as an educational practice takes as its starting premiseJane Roland Martin’s philosophical recognition in Cultural Miseducation,that the commonsense equation between schooling and education is not onlyessentialist but also misleading, that school professionals and parents at homeare not the only important educators of young people. In Taking Back Con-trol, African Canadian sociologist of education Annette Henry argues fromthis same premise as well, that educators should “investigate alternative strat-egies deemed liberatory taking place in schools, in community programs, andin other places, such as churches, or more “informal’ settings”—here exem-plified by PFLAG and IFEC, in her own study exemplified by teachers who


acted as “othermothers” to re-create antiracist communities of caring andresistance.30 As such an alternative strategy, educative befriending can occurwithin settings as various as street life, athletics, fine arts, employment, healthcare, travel, community and outdoor activities, religious life, extended-fam-ily or home-neighborhood life, and even the World Wide Web. Why not thenalso within the setting of school life? What Martin calls “multiple educationalagency”31 inevitably transmits hidden curricula but also may actively resisthidden curricula,32 for befriending can itself become a means of acknowl-edging and activating multiple educational agency. Educative befriendinginvokes a multiple educational agency that is decentralized and reflects anecological perspective on teachers’ and students’ living and learning akin tothat which John Dewey took in Art as Experience:

The first great consideration is that life goes on in an environment; not merelyin it but because of it, through interaction with it. . . . At every moment, theliving creature is exposed to dangers from its surroundings to satisfy its needs.The career and destiny of a living being are bound up with its inter-changeswith its environment, not externally but in the most intimate way.33

In PFLAG and IFEC, this ecological perspective came alive as multipleeducational agency when students, teachers, parents, police, counselors andsocial workers, clergy, librarians and booksellers, and school and communityleaders all reached out to one another in friendship over common concerns,consequently learning much from one another and together developing muchdeeper practical understanding of the complexities of heterosexism and sex-ism and ways of responding to them than any individual could ever have donealone.

PFLAG and IFEC were both founded through generous and hopeful actsof befriending, through countless and freely circulating gifts of friendship,and both exemplify educative befriending insofar as both groups’ participantstaught and learned, from whomever they befriended, certain kinds of Prac-tical Wisdom about living and schooling in a particular context of genderoppression. Though closely related to African American othermothering,befriending is not mothering, which itself may nonetheless become one con-text and source of insight for befriending, as evidenced by the mothers whobecame active in both PFLAG and IFEC on account of their concerns abouttheir LGBQT children or about their daughters. In its educative sense, be-friending teachers and students entails active pursuit of a specific educationalachievement akin to that which the late poet Audre Lorde described in herautobiographical account of black lesbian-feminist mothering. Culturallydiverse girls’ books authored by women depict fictional cases of childrearingthat clearly aim for this same educational achievement: young people’s grow-ing capacities and responsibility for learning to love themselves and diverse oth-ers, including the nonhuman natural world, to survive and thrive despite their


troubles.34 You might call this educational achievement Practical Wisdom. Ido. A kind of Practical Wisdom that may involve resistance against oppres-sion but involves much more than that, since teachers’ and students’ troublesencountered in living and schooling are not all instances of oppression. I leaveopen for now the question of whether this educational achievement requiresteaching to be an integral phase of befriending teachers and students, al-though philosopher of education Ann Diller has helpfully explained howbefriending students may become an integral phase of teaching.35

Whatever the verdict on that conceptual question may turn out to be,educative befriending implies a morally strong sense of friendship as bothmeans and end to its educational achievement, reflecting feminist philoso-pher Marilyn Friedman’s insight into how friendship’s dynamics can fosterPractical Wisdom:

The needs, wants, fears, experiences, projects, and dreams of our friends canframe for us new standpoints from which we can explore the significance andworth of moral values and standards. In friendship, our commitments to ourfriends, as such, afford us access to a whole range of experiences beyond ourown.36

And beyond our own families’ experiences, as well, offering inspirationand support for “personally as well as socially transformative possibilitiesusually lacking in other important tradition-based close relationships, suchas family ties.”37 Friedman draws an important conceptual distinction be-tween “found” communities of origin (such as home, school, and religion)and “communities of choice,”38 friendships—mutually trusting and inspir-ing relationships with others who share our interests and concerns, relation-ships within which we can learn openness of heart and mind to differencesfrom ourselves that we may fear until we encounter them in those we havecome to like or love. Such was certainly the case for my teaching colleaguesand me in IFEC, for Denise and the people she met at PFLAG, for Terryand the African American girls she came to know through her after-schoolprogram.

Although heterosexism and sexism may not motivate all instances of edu-cative befriending, the clear cases of that practice that I have cited here dodocument gender oppression’s presence in U.S. public schools as well assome serious, even life-threatening consequences it can have for students whofail to learn Practical Wisdom about it. Therefore, in order to become edu-cative rather than miseducative, befriending must foster an attitude akin towhat Martin has named “gender-sensitivity”39 no matter what sort of injus-tice, hatred, or harm has motivated it. As a specialized kind of Practical Wis-dom, gender sensitivity resists both gender bias and the alleged genderblindness that fosters oppressive blindness to heterosexism and sexism; gendersensitivity aims for gender freedom that respects people’s individuality.40


Houston has characterized this complex attitude as “self-correcting,” inso-far as it entails a habit of asking constantly, “Is gender operative here? Howis gender operative? What other effects do our strategies for eliminating gen-der bias have?”41 Imagine how different Terry’s experience of high schoolmight have been if her teachers had had the Practical Wisdom to ask them-selves such questions, as the IFEC teachers did!

Beyond mere quantifiable or legalistic “sex equity” within schooling’srealm of commodity exchange, gender sensitivity in educative befriendingmust be a generous “wide-awakeness,”42 an educated alertness to gender’sdynamic contingencies, complexities, contradictions, and consequences,coupled with “the loving eye” that sensitivity itself requires, a disciplinedresistance against what lesbian-feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye calls “thearrogant eye.”43 As Terry’s story illustrates, such sensitivity requires an alert-ness to gender as Collins has distinctively conceived it, noting gender’s com-plicated “intersectionality” with race, class, sexuality, and nation as well asthe “matrix of domination” that organizes such gendered intersections intodiverse forms of gender oppression.44

In befriending teachers, such an intersectional notion of gender becomesparticularly significant insofar as the predominantly white, working-classschool teaching profession in the United States has itself historically laboredunder the nineteenth-century slogan “woman’s true profession” coined byCatharine Beecher.45 Thus, paradoxically, men in the profession have expe-rienced oppressive effects of this sexist categorization, as well, even if manyof them have had options for resisting such oppressive effects that were notopen to women until recently, such as improving their prestige and economicsituation by coaching school athletic teams or moving into the administra-tive or academic ranks that serve and govern schools.

But, focusing attention upon culturally and sexually diverse teachers andstudents of both sexes and “the great surprising variety” of the worlds theyinhabit,46 gender-sensitive befriending need (and should) neither ignore waysin which the political economy of schooling structures sometimes rather rigidgender roles, nor be premised upon some fantastic fixed identity that“women” and “girls” represent in opposition to “men” and “boys.” Mynotion of educative befriending as gender sensitive entails refusing any nor-mative concept of girlhood or womanhood, or of boyhood or manhood,47

defined by particular stereotypes, fantasies, or ideals of what girls or women(or boys or men) “naturally” are or by “divine” order should be,48 but atthe same time refusing to deny or ignore that “girls” and “women,” “boys”and “men” are ordinary language usages freighted with such various assump-tions that have serious consequences for all teaching professionals and allyoung people engaged in self-definition.

As my opening anecdotes illustrate, those consequences may even be vio-lent or life-threatening, necessitating what the late British moral philosopherIris Murdoch called “the realism of compassion”49 most likely to flourish in


the context of genuine friendship. Thus, educative befriending with gendersensitivity, as I somewhat idiosyncratically conceive it, is inherently paradoxi-cal: It means forgetting what sex a teacher or student is and at the same timenever forgetting. Obviously, teachers’ and students’ Practical Wisdom shouldnever be reduced to gender sensitivity, but still their Practical Wisdom mustinevitably prove inadequate without it. Befriending teachers and studentswithout gender sensitivity is miseducative.

A NONVIOLENT PRACTICE, NOT A REFORM

Befriending could exemplify the means that Virginia Woolf in Three Guin-eas never specified for what she conceived as “unpaid-for education” by andfor “Outsiders.”50 On her account, the daughters of educated men, deniedformal education, got unpaid-for education from “four great teachers” thattogether cultivated their habit of abstention from war-making: poverty, chas-tity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties. Much like her contempo-rary Mohandas Gandhi in British-colonized India, Woolf in England, on theeve of World War II, argued that Outsiders—by whom she meant daugh-ters of educated men as well as Jews, people of color, and democrats51—would accept a modified poverty, defined as just enough income to live upon,a mental chastity defined by refusal to commit “adultery of the brain” sell-ing one’s intellectual labors without regard to conscience, the muted deri-sion of obscurity rather than prestige and rank, and real rather than unrealloyalties. Exercising both their critical and their creative faculties from sucha position, they might, like the educated women at Jane Addams’s HullHouse in Chicago at the turn of the last century,52 form a variously andloosely organized “Society of Outsiders” devoted to the nurture of “cultureand intellectual liberty” under fascism’s threat rather than the grandeur oftradition, property, empire, and war.53

Educative befriending is the generous cultivation of real loyalties amongteachers and students, with lean means in obscurity, for no personal profit,as witnesses to or survivors of oppressive human circumstances, to help oneanother get out from under them. Teachers and students thus offering oneanother gifts of friendship may claim multiple educational agency in pursuitof Practical Wisdom within and around schools and perhaps also reclaim somecultural freedom now eclipsed by the No Child Left Behind Act and otherkinds of violence and hatred of myriad sorts. In this way, implicitly at least,befriending can give teachers and students some experience within whatWoolf called a society of outsiders. Typically undertaken outside the insti-tutional restrictions, even if still within the “found” community-of-originsettings of family, school, worship, or workplace, educative befriending mayinvolve creation and sustenance of intentional and purposeful, but looselystructured, pluralistic communities of choice. Therefore, educative befriend-ing may invite popular derision, a real possibility that should not surprise


teachers and students. Recall that PFLAG’s Safe Schools Initiative was de-nied admission to a statewide Safe Schools Forum, for example, but wereadmitted a few years later. Some board members similarly did not want toapprove a WEEAP grant application that the IFEC teachers wrote becauseit was “not their job” to be defining school district priorities, but eventu-ally did approve it; and at a national conference we even overheard a women’sstudies professor refer to us as “those little schoolteachers.” So ever-belea-guered teachers should be cautioned that educative befriending may not endtheir popular belittlement and blame in the near future, but such a strategyof taking responsibility for themselves, their students, and their schools canat least become a rich source of thoughtfulness, worldliness, and life-gladness54 vital to their perseverance in the face of such seemingly endlessderision.

Likewise, educative befriending cannot end gender oppression entirely, orany kind of oppression, probably. It cannot alter the total environment ofschooling. It is not a policy, nor is it a reform strategy in the same sense that“professional development schools” and “school choice,” or even“mentoring” programs, have been purported to be. Institutionalized withinthe market-economy of commodity exchange that schooling has become,educative befriending would lose its spiritual power as gift labor. It is not astrategy for massive, total social change but can take various forms that to-gether may haphazardly constitute a kind of radical social formation withinand around schools that resists oppression here and there, now and then,although it will always be vulnerable to co-optation, backlash, and otherreactionary subversions and contestations. There is no grand narrative here.However, befriending teachers and befriending students can be a micro-political strategy for what Houston has called “taking responsibility,” forchanging some societies closest to them and making material, cultural, so-cial, and spiritual resources available to them so that they can learn to love,survive, and thrive despite their difficulties within a gender-oppressive andotherwise-oppressive public schooling system in countless ways hostile totheir authentic flourishing.

— 9 —

Another Brick in the Wall:High-Stakes Testing in Teacher

Education—The CaliforniaTeacher Performance

AssessmentPERRY M. MARKER

In today’s world, blaming teachers and professors for the education’s per-ceived “failures” is part of the conservative culture of criticism that has madeteachers the culprit in every imaginable aspect of education decline.

We blame P–12 teachers and university professors for the “failure” of theschools. We blame them on a lot of levels. We blame their professional teachereducation; we blame what they teach; we blame how they teach. The sim-plistic and punitive reform efforts that have resulted in the creation of stan-dards and the development of high-stakes testing reflect the fact that, forover twenty years, teachers in public schools and institutions of higher edu-cation have been blamed for all that is wrong with education.

This chapter will briefly explore the context for standards in public schoolsand universities in California, beginning with Proposition 13, and the rela-tionship between standards and the latest volley in the quest for standard-ization of the curriculum aimed at teacher education—the California“Teacher Performance Assessment.”

THE INITIATIVE PROCESS: A NONDELIBERATIVEDEMOCRACY

The passage of Proposition 13 in 1975 (Jarvis-Gann) is a good milestoneby which to examine post–World War II California.1 In California, an inter-esting dichotomy was created in the 1970s. First, the postwar exhilarationspurred a huge investment in public infrastructure and a strong commitment


to the development of quality education systems and other services. Second,as the economy faltered, it began to create a generation of declining confi-dence in government and shrinking public services.2 This dichotomy betweena value in huge investment in the public sector and the squeeze on publicservices that Proposition 13 brought about came at the time California wasexperiencing significant demographic change—moving from a society thatthought of itself mostly as white and middle class, to one in which whitesbecame another minority.3 Latinos, Asians, and African Americans now con-stituted a sizable majority of school enrollment and as users of public ser-vices.

The revolt against government taxation that Proposition 13 set in mo-tion in California resulted in the increased use of the initiative process. Ini-tiatives—once a bastion of “the people” and their power to influence publicpolicy—were now most often used by well-organized political and economicentities on the Left and the Right, and by incumbent politicians from thegovernment on down. It is those interest groups, backed by media consult-ants, direct mail specialists, pollsters, and others, that usually finance the sig-nature drives that cost millions of dollars to get measures on the ballot. Andit is the advertising campaigns that drive the support for the initiative, oreffectively block, through the influx of millions of advertising dollars, themeasures of its opponents.4

It is interesting to note that the further the initiative process proceeds,the more problematic effective citizenship becomes. Each initiative movescontrol further from the public and the legislature, and closer to the specialinterests. This nondeliberative democracy, as found in the California-styleinitiative process, has no public hearings, no rules of procedure, no formaldebates, and no informed voice. Nondeliberative democracy fails to presentdownside arguments, to outline implications, to control the cost, or, mostsignificantly, to speak for minorities. On the national scene, some twenty-four states have some form of initiative or referendum in their constitutions.And there is increasing pressure to use it as an agent of political reform.Nondeliberative democracy, based on the initiative process, is underminingthe people’s faith in our democratic processes.

During the period since Proposition 13, initiatives have been passed thatimposed specific spending formulas on schools, abolished affirmative actionin public education, denied public schooling and public services to illegalimmigrants, and eliminated bilingual education. California’s schools, whichthirty years ago had been among the best funded on the planet, are now inthe bottom quartile among states in virtually every major indicator of edu-cational progress and success. California has an average class size of overthirty-two, and in many cases, especially in poor white and minority areas,there are over forty students in classrooms designed for twenty-five. To com-pound the problem, a vast majority of California’s educational facilities areat least thirty years old, and many are over forty years of age, and are in vari-

Another Brick in the Wall 125

ous and dangerous states of disrepair. In California, we have chosen to spendless on education and more on prisons.5 California is currently forty-first outof fifty states in per capita educational spending. The fact is, that during thepast twenty-five years, the best educational system in the world has beenfundamentally and systematically dismantled.

Lost in this plethora of initiatives and budget cuts is the fact that, despitewhat politicians and the popular press would like us to believe, during thelast decade standardized scores have been holding relatively steady, withmodest increases in both math and reading scores.6 In an international com-parison, United States nine-year-olds were second only to Finland’s nine-year-olds, and United States’ fourteen-year-olds finished ninth, well above average,and a few points from the top.7 This, despite the fact that more students aretaking the tests than ever before whose first language is not English. Ber-liner and Biddle conclude that there is no support for the myth that Ameri-can students fail in reading achievement or any other subject. Simply put,schools are in better shape than we are led to believe. Teachers have doneincredible work despite that fact that the educational system in Californiahas been crumbling around them.

STANDARDS AND HIGH-STAKES TESTING:NO RICH KIDS LEFT BEHIND

As teachers have become convenient scapegoats for all that is wrong witheducation, “education reform” has turned its attention to students and pun-ished them by the introduction of a blizzard of standards and high-stakestesting proposals. Abraham McLaughlin in a recent Christian Science Moni-tor article states that critics of high-stakes testing in Massachusetts say thatthe exams “punish kids—not schools—for the [education] system’s failings.”8

Standards and high-stakes tests have used concepts such as “world class,” “accountability,” “competitive,” and “standards” that are taken directly fromthe corporate world. Alfie Kohn makes the argument that “anyone whosegoal was to serve-up our schools to the market-place could hardly find ashrewder strategy than to hold schools ‘accountable’ through wave after waveof standardized tests.”9

All too often, these proposals result in a racist, one-size-fits-all approachto education that is designed to present a singular and simplistic view ofknowledge, truth, and learning that ignores the diverse needs of our chil-dren of color and those who live in poverty. These so-called “reform” ef-forts are intended to blame teachers and punish students for the problemsof education by mandating a focus on drill and practice, and “teaching tothe test,” instead of fostering students’ critical thinking skills. As a result ofthese efforts to blame teachers and punish students, teachers are relinquish-ing control of the classroom and curriculum solely to those who constructthe tests.


Martha Rapp Ruddell reminds us that standards in education are not new;“they are in fact a “recapitulation” of behavioral objectives that so preoccu-pied us in the 1960s and actually grew from the “efficiency” movement ineducation from 1913 to1930 that was based on an industrial model of highproductivity.” Ruddell further quotes Eisner:

Uniformity in curriculum content is a virtue if one’s aim is to be able to com-pare students in one part of the country with students in others. Uniformity isa virtue when the aspiration is to compare the performance of American stu-dents with students in Korea, Japan, and Germany. But why should we wishto make such comparisons?10

Educational critic and reformer Susan Ohanian notes that framers of stan-dards regularly ignore the developmental reality of adolescence. She says:

Now you and I know that anyone who says high-schoolers should read MobyDick (1) doesn’t know any fifteen year olds; (2) has never read Moby Dick or(3) has read Moby Dick, has a fifteen-year-old in the house, and wants to geteven.11

Perhaps the most astounding thing about standards and high-stakes testsis that there is no research evidence whatsoever that their use enhances stu-dent achievement and learning.12 Still, tests have become so all consum-ing that more than 20 million school days were devoted to them in oneyear. The case for high-stakes testing and standards is based on simplis-tic solutions designed to raise the self-esteem of politicians,businesspersons, and policymakers. High-stakes tests, coupled with stan-dards, sustain and maintain a classist and corporate system of educationwhere a small and select number of schools receive an embarrassment ofriches.

Our fixation on standards and high-stakes testing was demonstrated when,the day after the tragic killings in Littleton, Colorado, high schools contin-ued their scheduled standardized tests rather than postpone them and discussthe incomprehensible events that shocked students and adults throughoutthe country and world. One is left to wonder how high the scores were onthat day of testing? Will teachers be blamed, yet again, if student scores arelow?

Things are bound to only get worse with standards and high-stakes test-ing. Schools will lose funding or may even be closed if their test scores donot improve. The test scores of schools will be compared with others as tohow well they do on the tests. Teachers in “low performing” schools maybe subjected to disciplinary pressures and even firing if their students do notscore well on one test. And “low performing” schools may be taken overby the state and/or assigned to for-profit corporate entities.


Standards and high-stakes testing determine the form of most teachingsince, for any given exam, there is a “best way” to prepare for it. Repeti-tion, forced memorization, rote learning, and frequent quizzes leave preciouslittle time for more creative approaches which allow students to convey, ex-change, and question facts and ideas. With standards and high-stakes test-ing, course content is determined by the exam, leaving little time for anymaterials not on the exam, such as student reactions, reflection on main is-sues of the day, alternative points of view, or anything else that is likely topromote creative, cooperative, or critical thinking .

High-stakes tests have proved to be very reliable predictors offactors related to socioeconomic class and poverty. Standardized testing is astrong indicator of where the wealthiest schools are and where children ofpoverty go to school. Students of color, second language learners, and chil-dren in poverty consistently score lower on all standardized tests. High-stakestests are strong indicators that children of poverty get an education that doesnot compare with that received by wealthier, white students. With their enor-mously high price tags, what these tests do predict and ensure is that no richkids will be left behind. The National Commission on Testing and PublicPolicy says that, as early as 1990, standardized testing in America consumedmore than $900 million in one year. A decade later, the price tag is much,much higher.13

Alfie Kohn argues that standardized testing promotes the presence ofcorporations, and a corporate ethos, in public schools. Kohn states thattesting promotes a corporate mentality that does four things very effectively:

1. Testing brings in hundreds of millions of dollars to the handful of corporationsthat produce the tests;

2. Testing serves as a sorter and screener of students for the convenience of indus-try;

3. Testing fosters a corporate ideology where assessment is used to compare andevaluate people in uniform ways; and

4. Testing shocks the public into a need to “improve” education through vouch-ers, and for-profit schools.14

In addition to Kohn’s critique of the corporate influence on education,former Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) has issued this blisteringanalysis of the “the bottom line” agenda that businesses have when it comesto education:

In speech after speech, it is our corporate CEOs who state that an educated,literate work force is the key to American competitiveness. They pontificate onthe importance of education. They point out their magnanimous corporatecontributions to education in one breath, and then they pull the tax base outfrom under the local schools in the next. Business criticizes the job our local


schools are doing and then proceeds to nail down every tax break they can get,further eroding the school’s ability to do the job.15

What testing and the corporate influenced “educational reform” move-ment reveal—more than any other factor—is the absolute certainty that test-ing does not serve the needs of all students in a democratic society and thedemocratic goal to help all students become enthusiastic learners.

A NATION AT RISK?

One can pinpoint in time when the clarion call for accountability began.In 1983, the Reagan administration, amid much fanfare, released the incen-diary report on the state of American education entitled A Nation At Risk,prepared by a prestigious committee under the direction of then Secretaryof Education Terrell Bell. A Nation At Risk made sweeping claims attack-ing the conduct and achievement of America’s public schools and docu-mented these claims by “evidence.”16

The “evidence” provided in A Nation At Risk made the case that thefailures of the public schools were damaging the nation and, if not addressed,stood to weaken our democratic future. Though some of the claims hadvalidity and were made to genuinely improve public education, a dispropor-tionate number of these claims can be construed as blatant attacks that werecontradicted by sound research-based evidence and were outright hostile oruntrue. As more and more of the attacks denouncing public education madethe front pages of the news media and the six o’clock news, business per-sons and governmental leaders were endlessly repeating the attacks and giv-ing life to these distortions and falsehoods. Ironically, many prominentmembers of the educational establishment often supported the attacks thatwere endlessly reported by an unquestioning press. David C. Berliner andBruce J. Biddle in their examination17 of the rise of the standards and ac-countability movement argue that:

It is small wonder that many Americans have come to believe that educationin our country is now in a deplorable state. Indeed, how could they have con-cluded anything else, given such an energetic and widely reported campaignof criticism, from such prestigious resources, attacking America’s public schools?To the best of our knowledge, no campaign of this sort has ever before ap-peared in American history. Never before had an American government beenso critical of the public schools, and never had so many false claims been madeabout education in the name of “evidence.” We shall refer to this campaign ofcriticism as the Manufactured Crisis.18

The results of the thirty–fourth Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll ofthe Public’s Attitudes Toward Public Schools support the idea that there isa slowly forming disconnect between the public’s attitudes toward educa-


tion and the critics’ unfounded attacks on education. The poll reported thatnational public support for, and reliance on, public schools is strong andincreases as people have more contact with schools. This trend for publicsupport of schools has been steadily rising since 1992.19

Regarding testing, the public attitude toward testing remains remarkablystable over time. Even when the call for testing is increasing, 47 percent ofthose polled indicated that the amount of testing is about right, down from48 percent in 1997. Thirty-one percent think there is too much testing, upfrom 27 percent in 1997. When asked which is the best way to measure stu-dent achievement–by means of test scores or by classroom work and home-work—53 percent support classroom work and homework over test scores,while only 23 percent think test scores areis the best way to measure stu-dent achievement. When asked how they would grade schools in their owncommunity, 47 percent give schools an “A” or “B.” Interestingly, 24 per-cent think the schools in the nation deserve an “A” or “B.” When asked tograde the school their oldest child attends, a stunning 71 percent give thatschool either an “A” or “B.” Finally, 69 percent of those polled supportreforming the existing system while only 27 percent think we should findan alternative to a “failing” system of schooling.

Seldom do we see these kinds of results that support the work of schoolsreported in the popular media. What seems to be the case is that the publicis not inclined to believe negative and unfounded media reports when itcomes to schools they know about and trust to educate their children—evenwhen they are being deluged with daily negative attacks in the media. In spiteof a continued avalanche of unsupported attacks on public schools, the publicremains, as it has for the past decade, unconvinced that schools are as ter-rible as their conservative critics suggest.

THE CALIFORNIA TEACHER PERFORMANCEASSESSMENT

In the wake of the testing mania that swept through P–12 education likea firestorm, the hegemony of accountability and standardization of the cur-riculum has finally arrived at the doorstep of teacher education in the formof the California Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA). Senate Bill 2042,signed into law by the governor in 1998, requires all preliminary credentialcandidates to pass a high-stakes teaching performance assessment, the TPA.The law provides that professional teacher preparation programs may use theTPA or they may develop their own assessment.20

Prototypes of the TPA were developed and piloted to measure thirteenTeacher Performance Expectations (TPE) or standards. The TPEs purport-edly describe and measure on a singular exam “what California teachers needto know and be able to do” before receiving a preliminary credential. Thereare four performance tasks that collectively measure the TPEs in the following


areas (adapted from the California Department of Education Pilot Draft ofthe TPA):

Task I: Principles of Content-Specific and Developmentally Appropriate Peda-gogy—students are asked to demonstrate knowledge of principles of develop-mentally appropriate pedagogy and current specific pedagogy from four spe-cific prompts.

Task II: Connecting Student Characteristics to Instructional Planning—stu-dents demonstrate their ability to learn important details about a small groupof learners and to plan instruction that is shaped by those student characteris-tics.

Task III: Classroom Assessment of Academic Learning Goals—students dem-onstrate their ability to use standards-based, developmentally appropriate stu-dent assessment activities with a group pf students. Students will demonstratetheir ability to assess student learning and diagnose student needs based on theirresponses to the assessment activity.

Task IV: Academic Lesson Design, Implementation and Reflection after In-struction—students demonstrate their ability to design a standards-based les-son, via a 20-minute video tape, for a particular group of students, implementingthat lesson while making appropriate use of class time and instructional re-sources. They also show their ability to meet differing needs of individuals withinthe class, manage instruction and student interaction, assess student learning,and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson.

Currently, many “early adopter” credential programs are engaged in pi-loting the TPA and its four tasks. These “early adopters” have been giventhe task of trying to determine how best to administer and field test the TPA.To date, little information is known regarding the success of the state’s pi-lot program. It is clear that the TPAs are being developed with little assis-tance from professors in teacher education programs. The state is offering aseries of information only, technical assistance “training” workshops, offeredso as to bring teacher education programs “up to speed” regarding the TPA.However, a closer examination of the TPA raises some interesting issues,questions, and concerns.

At first glance, the TPA is a somewhat innocuous measure of teachingeffectiveness. It is based upon Teacher Performance Standards (TPE)—stan-dards that, for the most part, remain unquestioned by most teacher educa-tors. The four tasks that comprise the TPA assessment are based upon ideasin performance-based assessment that have been used widely by teacher edu-cators across the country. Many educators believe the concept of examina-tion to determine teacher readiness is not a bad idea. Witness efforts by theUniversity of California and Stanford Universities to develop their own high-stakes examinations as substitutes for the state developed and administeredexamination. These efforts to test remain unquestioned by even the mostradical opponents of curricular standardization and the TPA.21


However, many teacher educators object to the top-down nature of theTPA process. Not only does it ignore the knowledge and professional com-mitment professors have toward building effective teacher education pro-grams, the TPA also moves the State of California’s historical responsibilityfor teacher education from accrediting teacher education programs to exter-nally controlling and effectively mandating what should be taught and howit should be delivered in universities. This is a major and historic change inpolicy. This change is viewed as political and driven by a genuine mistrustof teacher educators—led by policymakers and large corporations.22 Moreimportantly, this top-down regulation undermines the ability of teacher edu-cators to prepare highly qualified and effective teachers.

Bertell Ollman in “Why So Many Exams?” details eight myths that sur-round exams and testing in our society.23 Among these is the largely unques-tioned belief that exams are unbiased and that it is possible to produce an examthat is “culture free.” It is this largely unchallenged assertion that drives theexamination mania that grips our culture. The fact remains that there is nosingular high-stakes examination that has been proved to be totally unbiased.

More important, this myth of unbiased testing supports the assumptionthat a complex set of concepts and behaviors embedded in a yearlong teachereducation curriculum can and should be measured in a singular examination.Teaching is an ever-changing enterprise. It has been estimated that, in thecourse of a single day, teachers makes thousands of decisions that impact thequality of education for their students and ultimately how well they performthe complex tasks of teaching.

In teaching, the ambiguity of not knowing what can and will happen frommoment to moment is as frightening as it is challenging. To consider thatthe task of teaching should and can be measured by a singular high-stakesexamination reduces the complex act of teaching to a fragmented, de-contextualized set of unrelated exercises that have no real meaning. Thefundamental assumption that teaching can be simplistically measured by asingle examination is folly and not supported by research. Our views abouttesting in teacher education need serious reexamination.

Rather than testing prospective teachers, we need to be working with ourfuture teachers to expand the idea of assessment to provide multiple, yet rig-orous, ways for students to demonstrate what they know. We cannot expectprospective teachers in the twenty-first century to adopt new means of as-sessment in their curriculum and for their students if their future careers arebased upon a hackneyed, high-stakes testing ideology rooted in nineteenth-century beliefs about testing. Among these beliefs is the timeworn notionthat students learn best when performing short, segmented tasks—stressingspeed and neatness—to the ticking of a clock. This ideology is embeddedin the work culture of late nineteenth-century America where students werebeing prepared to work mindless, low skill, repetitive jobs in factories. Mostwould agree that the world of the twenty-first-century teacher has changed


inestimably since the late nineteenth century. So why haven’t our notionsabout assessment and testing?

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC COSTS OF HIGH-STAKESTESTING

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the TPA is the fact that itsexistence increases the likelihood that the scores it generates will be used forpolitical purposes to compare students, institutions, and, ultimately, profes-sors. The TPA will serve as a bellwether—as has been done with most stan-dardized tests—for the public as to the institutions that are “best” doing theirjob of educating teachers. The scores of students will most likely be reportedto the public, with rewards and punishments being distributed accordingly.In response to this kind of application of standardized test scores, NancyKober reported that high-stakes test scores do not seem to generalize to anyother index of achievement other than their own.24 In fact, Berliner andAmrein discovered that, in states where high-stakes testing scores were onthe rise, math scores on the NAEP, ACT, and SAT fell.25 Put simply, thescores of high-stakes tests do not transfer to learning in other areas. Highereducation may wish to enter this highly questionable area of test score in-terpretation and application with some degree of trepidation.

There is also some discussion that individual TPA scores would be releasedto schools that are hiring new teachers for the purpose of screenings andevaluation. With the meaning of these test scores under question, such adevelopment could possibly prevent hundreds of potential teachers frombecoming employed based upon a singular score on the TPA.26

In an era of declining educational budgets, the economic costs of the TPAhave yet to be resolved. However, the main accrediting body of teacher edu-cation, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CCTC) hasentered into a $3.7 million contract with the Educational Testing Service todevelop a prototype TPA examination. No exact figures have been agreedupon regarding the direct costs the TPA will have for Schools ofEducation, but it is clear that issues such as administering the testand “training” teachers to score the TPA exams will place additional bur-dens on already overwhelmed and undersupported schools of education. Oneeducator stated that archiving the twenty- minute video tapes (each tape mustbe kept for five years) and the voluminous supporting documents that arerequired of the TPA’s four tasks will require the California State Universityto “buy a barge and park it in the San Francisco Bay for the purpose of stor-ing the tapes and documents that the TPA will generate.”

Ultimately, some believe that the TPA may actually be part of a maneu-ver to discredit and weaken schools of education, and open the door to theidea that teacher education be disseminated by districts and private corpo-


rations, leaving schools of education out of the process. In the short run,the creation of the TPA will certainly seek to standardize the curriculumamong Schools of Education and provide faculty with less of a voice in thedevelopment of a sound teacher education curriculum. In fact, curricula willbe compromised and eliminated in order to fit the rigors of the TPA intocurrent teacher education programs. The development and implementationof the TPA is an effort for California not only to accredit teachers but alsoto dictate, in a top-down manner, how it should best educate teachers.

THE HIGH STAKES OF HIGH-STAKES TESTING

The TPA is the first volley for standardizing the curriculum of highereducation. The TPA is a high-stakes process that holds severe consequencesfor students, professors, and the university. Its ultimate success will deter-mine how much teacher education and the university will succumb to evenmore demands of the standardization movement. Teacher educators, notstate bureaucrats or professional testmakers, are best equipped to developdemanding, yet inclusive, proficiency exit standards that combine studentportfolios and performance-based projects—not just one high-stakes stan-dardized test—to credential teachers.

Robert Ahlquist suggests that teacher educators should ask themselvessome serious questions about their work: What kind of vision do we holdfor teacher education? What kind of citizens do we hope to “grow” withinthe context of the American public school system? Do we want a school sys-tem that teaches people how to critically think and act from multiple per-spectives on the world in which we live?27 In the twenty-first century, teachereducators need to involve parents, prospective and practicing teachers, com-munity leaders, and legislators in seeking answers to these fundamental ques-tions regarding education in our twenty-first century democratic society.

If we are to move toward a new age of assessment that rejects timewornnineteenth-century idea ideas and practices, then multiple assessments mustbe adopted to determine the success of a program, provide information tostudents regarding their achievement, and hold schools responsible for howwell taxpayers’ money is being spent to prepare high-quality and effectiveteachers. It is time to demand that our nation, our state, and our schoolsstop relying on a single, corporate-influenced, standardized, and racist mea-sure of student achievement, and adopt a variety of student assessments thatallow a variety of measures that focus on individual student learning and donot limit the curriculum to a singular, standardized assessment based on ahigh-stakes approach.

University and teacher educators nationwide need to be reminded of thetruly high stakes involved in the high-stakes examinations like the TPA. Thecontrol of the curriculum and its assessment by teacher educators is at risk.


A closer look at this latest initiative to standardize the teacher educationcurriculum by all who are interested in high-quality teacher education iswarranted.

In a significant study of sixteen states that have implemented high-stakes,high school graduation examinations, Amrein and Berliner reported, amongother things, that high-stakes tests are associated with (1) higher numbersof low performing students being retained in grade before pivotal testingyears to ensure that students are properly prepared to take high-stakes tests;(2) higher numbers of low performing students being suspended before test-ing days, expelled from school before tests, or being reclassified as exemptbecause they are Special Education or Limited English Proficient (LEP)—strategies that prevent low-scoring students from taking high-stakes tests;(3) higher numbers of urban school teachers, in particular, are “teaching tothe test,” limiting instruction to only those things sure to be tested, requir-ing students to spend hours memorizing facts, and drilling students on test-taking strategies; and (4) because the subjects of art, music, science, socialstudies, and physical education are often not tested, teachers and adminis-trators focus less on these subjects as high-stakes testing dates approach.28

These results reflect the ademocratic nature of high-stakes examinations;this may soon be the plight of higher education as high-stakes exams likethe TPA are implemented. High-stakes exams are shaking the very founda-tions of a democratic education in a free society; this is yet another brick inthe wall in the struggle for the control of the curriculum that is the stan-dards-based/high-stakes/accountability movement.

If allowed to become part of teacher education, the high-stakes testingcould result in a loss of control over the teacher education curriculum anda devalidation of the professional responsibilities of teacher educators. Butmost ominously, our future teachers may become deskilled, degraded, anddriven by the prescribed methods of a state-driven, high-stakes curriculum,rather than becoming the critically aware, intelligent, well-informed profes-sionals who are so desperately needed to maintain a healthy and productivedemocratic society.

— III —

Teaching for Social Justice

— 10 —

Care-Centered MulticulturalEducation: Addressing the

Academic and Writing Needsof English Learners

VALERIE OOKA PANG AND

EVANGELINA BUSTAMANTE JONES

Schools today are dealing with ever-increasing numbers of students whoselinguistic and cultural diversity challenges teachers, school administrators, andteacher educators to address their needs in equitable and inclusive ways. Forexample, in California, one out of every four students arrives at school witha first language other than English; students may speak Spanish, Vietnamese,Tagalog, Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic, or Russian at home. English learners canbe found in schools all around the country from St. Paul, Minnesota, to LosAngeles, California.

Within this vital diverse context, caring-centered multicultural educationis a philosophy that calls for total school reform and is based on the beliefthat education is an intellectual and ethical endeavor.1 Caring-centeredmulticultural education brings together three important theories: care theoryas defined by Noddings;2 sociocultural theory of learning as developed byVygotsky,3 Cole,4 and Moll;5 and education for democracy established byDewey.6

These three theories form a strong framework and hold vital common-alities. First, the three theories are built upon the integrity of the individual.Teachers make ethical commitments to themselves and their students to dotheir best. They also see their interdependence with others; they believe incompassion and social justice. Educators understand that they must be cau-tious and not push students toward extreme cultural assimilation; instead,teachers work to build upon their students’ cultures and the prior knowl-edge students bring to their classroom. For example, when teaching English


learners, teachers must be careful not to value the dominant language overthe home language. This can be a difficult balance to achieve, because manyof the practices and policies in schools encourage students to assimilate intothe mainstream.

The second commonality of the three theories is the importance of teach-ing the whole student. Teaching is about the development of the entire per-son. Teachers do not teach just mathematics or music; they consider thewhole student in planning the curriculum and instructional strategies inteaching their subject area content. They are concerned with student emo-tional, social, physical, and academic growth and, to be able to attend tothese, teachers must understand the cultural and linguistic backgrounds stu-dents bring to school. Teachers often have learned about students’ goals anddreams and their fears too. Third, the three theories focus on the importanceof building trust and respect among teachers and students. Trusting relation-ships form the foundation for learning. When students and teachers developreciprocal relationships of respect and compassion, they work collaborativelyto learn and to build a community of learners. They are interested in learn-ing about each other’s lives and seek out diverse perspectives. This extendsto the building of community. When relationships are reciprocal and respect-ful, students and teachers learn from each other and create common, inter-dependent goals. They are members of a community that fosters equality,fairness, diversity, and personal growth. Teachers and students understandthat they learn by interacting and sharing with each other in a compassion-ate and collaborative environment. In summary, the three theories hold thefollowing common themes: (1) emphasis on a strong sense of personal in-tegrity, (2) education of the whole child, and (3) building of a communityof learners through relationships of trust. Teachers in many of today’s schoolsare committed to these principles of education.

SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS IN A CARING-CENTERED MULTICULTURAL SCHOOL

Teachers have found it is sometimes difficult to determine the Englishlanguage skills of an individual. Have you ever talked with a student wholearned English as a second language and could carry on a great conversa-tion? Didn’t she seem ready to take on anything in school? Teachers oftenmistake conversational skills with academic language skills. It often takes aperson approximately two years to develop conversational language. How-ever, as linguist Jim Cummins has written, there is a great difference in lan-guage levels between conversational English and the academic Englishneeded to perform in content areas.7

Cummins8 developed a theory that centers upon two concepts, CALP(Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency) and BICS (Basic InterpersonalCommunicative Skills). BICS is what we use in everyday conversation. It is

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informal language people use that includes gestures, tone of voice, and face-to-face social context. CALP, in contrast, is academic English, or higher-levelscholarly language. It takes students from five to seven years to develop thesemore abstract and conceptual skills. The language of business, schools, andpolitics is often more complex than everyday conversational English. In ad-dition, disciplines such as social studies, mathematics, literature, and phys-ics contain high-level abstract concepts that are also a part of academicEnglish. This is where an English learner will have more challenges.

Academic English is a broad category that includes many language skills.It is the ability to use English on an abstract level, as in writing, or in oralpresentations about important content knowledge. Several skills that havebeen identified in academic English are listed by Fillmore and Snow. Someof the more familiar competencies are listed:

• Summarize texts, using linguistic cues to interpret and infer the writer’s inten-tions and messages;

• Analyze texts, assessing the writer’s use of language for rhetorical and aestheticpurposes and to express perspective and mood;

• Extract meaning from texts and relate it to other ideas and information;• Evaluate evidence and arguments presented in texts and critique the logic of ar-

guments made in them;• Use grammatical devices for combining sentences into concise and more effec-

tive new ones, and use various devices to combine sentences into coherent andcohesive texts.9

The skills listed above identify high-level language abilities. Not only are theseskills often difficult for English Language Learners (ELL), but they are alsochallenging for many native speakers and must be taught in school.10 Stu-dents need to be taught academic English in order to demonstrate the skillslisted because the skills involve a complicated and sophisticated use of thelanguage.

Learning academic English often poses difficult barriers, especially forELL, who come to school with languages that have different structures andlanguage features. A second language learner may not have a “broad knowl-edge of words, phraseology, grammar, and pragmatic conventions for expres-sion, understanding, and interpretation.”11 Another potential barrier derivesfrom the fact that language is a reflection of culture and way of thinking.For example, some languages, such as English, teach a linear manner of ex-pression, and their writings reflect that orientation, while other languagesmay support a more descriptive or circular way of expressing ideas, so indi-viduals may not understand the manner in which English writing is orga-nized. Thus, a student’s first language may not support the use of topicsentences but in fact consider such explicit writing to be rude.

Educators can learn from the research of second language experts. Forexample, Scarcella12 has identified common grammatical errors that she finds


in writings of Asian English learners. A consistent error deals with verb form.It can be difficult for Asian students to understand the difference in timereference. Here are two illustrations she provided:

“I always remembered when my friend died.“I study English since 1986.”13

Another common error is the incorrect use or lack of prepositions. Sincesome Asian languages do not use prepositions in the same way as in English,and students may find them difficult to use.

“The nucleus is on the cell.”“He discriminate me”.14

“The nucleus is on the cell.He discriminate me”.15

Students also make errors based on not knowing English vocabulary, andwhen verbal statements are made, they may not understand the conceptsbeing conveyed. The following is an example of a student who misinterpreteda title of a book because she did not understand the vocabulary.

“The book I read for my book report was Catch Her In the Right.”16

When educators understand that students make consistent errors basedupon the structure of their home languages, teachers are more able to assistlearners in understanding the mistakes they make. This aids students in morefully understanding their errors and how to eliminate them.

Researchers like Garcia17 and Scarcella18 believe that academic English andbasic conversational skills are not separate language skills. In fact, they con-sider the two to be highly linked and to work collaboratively in communi-cation. In addition, they view academic English more narrowly thanCummins in that this level of language competence means students will beable to do the following: analyze, compare, contrast, classify, hypothesize,persuade, evaluate, predict, generalize, infer, and communicate.19 These arethe higher level thinking skills. Cummins has acknowledged the continuumbetween BICS and CALP and that there is overlap between the skill areas.

CONTENT AREA INSTRUCTION: SHELTEREDENGLISH, SDAIE, AND CALLA

As most teachers have found, it is easier to teach everyday English orBICS, than academic English or CALP. This leads us to the question, “Howdo I teach in the content areas?” Let’s say English learners in your tenth-grade writing class can speak fluently but are having trouble following a se-quence of directions that you verbally give. This might be due to your useof specific terms in the discipline such as “metaphor” and “irony,” which they


know in Spanish. Or perhaps your students have not learned these conceptsin their prior school experiences, and they will need to learn them beforethey can understand the task at hand.

An effective strategy teachers use is called sheltered English. In this con-text, sheltered means supportive. Sheltered English or the Specially DesignedAcademic Instruction in English (SDAIE) approach to teaching is a methodthat teaches both subject area content and language skills to ELL who arein the advanced intermediate or advanced stages of English Language De-velopment (ELD). Sheltered and SDAIE methods are not for students at thebeginning stages of ELD.

SDAIE, pronounced “sud-EYE,” and other content-centered approachesto instruction are based on the theory that second language is best learnedwhen the material has meaning for students.20 Language skills are taughtwhile students focus on academic content from basic disciplines like geog-raphy, mathematics, science, and social studies. There are three major goalsin these classrooms. First, ELL need to be taught the same subject area con-tent as their native English-speaking peers are learning. Second, ELL needto continue working on their general English language skills as well as theiruse of academic content in their writing and verbal communication. Third,students must learn the behaviors that are expected in the classroom, suchas responding appropriately when a teacher calls on them. Crandall21 sug-gests that the following conditions must be present for effective shelteredlearning to occur:

1. Learning focuses on “meaning rather than on form”;2. Language is at or a little above the expertise of learners;3. Creation of a stress-free classroom; and4. Creation of many opportunities to use language in ways that are relevant and

understandable to learners.

In addition to these components, the SDAIE model is most effective whenteachers bring to the classroom positive beliefs about the ability of theirEnglish language learners.22 Some of the strategies that SDAIE teachers useare as follows:

• Link new concepts to ones already learned;• Utilize many visuals (pictures, maps, graphs, charts, diagrams, photos) or dem-

onstrations (role playing, gestures, dramatizations, dance, singing) in teaching;• Use student experiences in lessons to build concepts;• Speak clearly and simply;• Structure frequent checking for understanding throughout the lesson; and• Use many visual organizers (like concept mapping, data retrieval charts).

Another content-based approach, for those students who are intermediateor advanced English learners, is the Cognitive Academic Language Learning


Approach or CALLA.23 This approach focuses on higher level thinking skills.Students are involved in inquiry, questioning, and many hands-on activities.They provide sample lessons for teachers in disciplines such as science, math,language arts, social studies, and literature and omposition. In addition,English language learners develop metacognitive strategies. These strategiesare skills students can use in various subject areas, such as vocabulary strat-egies for new or confusing words, finding the key ideas in the text, and fig-uring out what information is most important to remember.24 Though someresearchers believe CALLA and SDAIE are to be used only when studentsare at the intermediate fluency and advanced levels of English language de-velopment, Chamot and O’Malley25 believe it is important to use content-based CALLA approaches even with early language learners because thesestrategies can make content concepts more understandable.

Here is an example of a student who is in a social studies class and study-ing the issues brought up by the September 11, 2001, terrorists attack onthe United States. The class is focusing on the issues of terrorism for theweek. Students have tackled questions like, What is terrorism? Who is a ter-rorist? Why do terrorists commit acts of violence against innocent people?What civil liberties, if any, are we willing to give up for greater security? Thestudents wrote definitions for terms like terrorism, providing important char-acteristics. They consulted the Internet for information about other coun-tries that were dealing with terrorism. They used atlases to find where variouscountries were located on the globe. In addition, students were asked to writean essay describing their feelings about the day.

Rosa, a native Spanish-speaking high school students wrote: “I have mixedfeelings about this day. I feel depress when I think about all the people thatdie that day.”

The two sentences above contained consistent errors that Rosa made overthe week in her papers. The teacher noted that the student did not under-stand the proper use of the past tense. So the word depress should have beendepressed, and the term, die should have been died. The teacher gave thisstudent a lesson about rules regarding the past tense verb form. In addition,Rosa needed to think about the use of pronouns in her writing. The wordthat in the second sentence referred back to the word people. So Rosa neededto think about using the pronoun who. Though Rosa was able to write abouta more abstract concept like “Call to Duty,” because she was extremely in-terested in the work of fire fighters, she was not aware of grammatical mis-takes in her writing. The teacher noted that her errors were consistent andsuggested that Rosa read her written work aloud. This might help her hearsome of the mistakes she was making. So in the social studies lessons, theteacher was not only able to teach about various issues related to Septem-ber 11, but also focused on English language skills. Language was a vehiclefor Rosa to learn about her world and to understand the complexities in it.


STUDENTS ACQUIRE ENGLISH:THE PROCESS TAKES TIME

The time it takes to acquire English, especially academic English, varieswith each individual, depending on many factors: the extent of instructionthe student has had in her first language; if the student was schooled beforein the home country, and the quality and extent of schooling; the socioeco-nomic status of the family; the amount of English heard in the family andneighborhood; and, the individual’s age.26 So for instance, Thomas andCollier27 found that students who were in bilingual programs and doing wellin their native language (L1), performed at the fiftieth percentile in Englishstandardized achievement tests after approximately four to seven years ofschooling. However, in the same study the researchers found that it may takeseven to ten years for students who have little instruction in their native lan-guage (L1), if most of their years of schooling are in English (L2).

What can explain this difference in achievement? Garcia28 explained thatwhen students have gone to school and are allowed to develop their languageand cognitive skills in their first language, they acquire important languagecompetencies in syntax, vocabulary, discourse, and pragmatics; these are fea-tures of language that students can use to learn English. Therefore, Tho-mas and Collier suggest that each English language learner be enrolled in abilingual program for at least the first several years of school.

Another element that influences the ability of students to acquire Englishis the attitude of teachers. Castañeda and Ríos29 found that some teachersresisted learning about second language and culture. In fact, some teacherswere hostile to language acquisition staff development. Here is a commentof one of the teachers Castañeda and Ríos found in their class: “I don’t likeit [diversity], really, because it seems to pose more problems than we previ-ously had. We all wish for students who speak our language, are part ofAmerican culture, and don’t require special provisions. It makes our jobeasier.”30 Castañeda and Ríos recommended that teachers be guided throughmuch self-reflection about their own values and biases. It is imperative thatteachers do have knowledge of the power of culture and language in learn-ing; otherwise, they may not be able to provide nurturing and effective in-struction. Learning English may take longer in classrooms where studentsface negative attitudes about their home languages or schools where theyare isolated and marginalized and therefore not learning much content orlanguage.

Another difficult challenge is teaching English learners how to write.Krashen31 has cautioned teachers not to be too critical and mark up the pa-pers of their students. This could discourage students to a point that theydo not want to learn English language skills. However, Jones learned fromher college students what type of criticism they wanted from her. These


young people were in their late teens and early twenties. They were attempt-ing to pass the college writing exit exam and sought feedback from theircollege professors. Here is her story:

SPANISH BILINGUAL COLLEGE STUDENTS:TEACHING WRITING

Some years ago, Jones taught developmental writing classes at a univer-sity extension campus located on the border of California and Mexico. TheMexican-born students had immigrated to this border area as young chil-dren or adolescents, while the Mexican American students were born toimmigrant parents. All of them spoke and wrote Spanish, and had, at theleast, an average English vocabulary, but English academic writing was animpossible barrier to all of them. As a bilingual Mexican American, Jonesrecognized that much of her students’ writing problems stemmed from us-ing linguistic features such as rhetorical style, sentence syntax, verb forms,and prepositions from the Spanish language when speaking or writing En-glish. Thus, writing “errors” had logical and systematic bases; they wereneither careless nor random mistakes, although they might appear so tosomeone who had no knowledge of Spanish. Regardless of the reasons fortheir poor writing, her students had to pass the gatekeeper writing exam bythe end of the semester or they would lose the privilege of continued atten-dance at the university and, thus, their college career.

Jones vividly remembered the morning she skimmed through a stack ofEnglish essays on her desk and suddenly realized how fruitless her attemptsto teach writing skills to university-level bilingual students had been. Adher-ing to widely held beliefs of writing instructors, her approach was to care-fully examine the kinds of errors they consistently made and focus on just afew at a time so as not to overwhelm them with too much “red ink” bleed-ing all over their essays. These students had already experienced years of frus-tration with writing; they feared it, loathed it, avoided it. Mike Rose, in hisbook Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achieve-ments of America’s Educational Underclass,32 described a Latina student inhis writing class at UCLA who reminded Jones of her students. Immigratedat an early age from a poor section of Tijuana, Laura and her working-classparents were now U.S. citizens. Though bright, she had trouble with writ-ing and with going to writing class:

I get in there, and everything seems okay. But as soon as we start writing, Ifreeze up. I’m a crummy writer, I know it. I know I’m going to make a lot ofmistakes and look stupid. I panic. I stop coming.33

Jones’s students often reacted to writing class in the same way. She sawhow they might remain at the margins, perhaps forever, if she didn’t do


something drastic, and soon. Teaching writing by dribs and drabs was likebailing out a seriously leaking rowboat with a teaspoon— time was runningout for them, and, so far, Jones and her students had little to show for theirefforts.

Jones decided to level with them by marking everything—all at once—rather than in small pieces as she had been doing. She hoped that since theyhad come to class for six weeks, they now trusted her enough to accept feed-back, painful as it might be. Before handing back their papers, she asked stu-dents not to freak out when they saw all the marks. Jones apologized inadvance for any hurt her advice might give and assured them they were in-telligent and potentially strong writers. She said that the content of theirpapers was strong, but the form and syntax needed a lot of work.

Jones passed their essays back. The room was absolutely silent for severalminutes. Nobody spoke. She heard only the rustling of pages, which toldher that the students were looking at each and every mark and comment.Finally, Carmen, usually bubbly and animated, raised her hand; a profoundlysad look on her face gave way to an angry one as she said, “Mrs. Jones, allthese years—since high school, teachers tell me, ‘You are a poor writer.’ Well,I already knew that. But nobody ever showed me what I was doing that mademy writing so bad. I could never figure it out. Like a mystery. You are thefirst teacher that showed me what I am doing—everything. I’m doing a lotof things wrong. Now I can change. Thank you.”

The rest of the class agreed with Carmen. Facing all their writing issuesat once was a shock, yet they understood why Jones had made extensivecomments on their papers. She worked with the students and convinced themthat they could trust her. They knew she marked up their papers to help themrecognize the huge task before them, not to humiliate them. After the stu-dents saw the errors she had marked on their papers, they were extremelymotivated to learn because they felt “cheated” by their previous education.The experiences of Jones’s students illustrate how important it is not to passstudents on to the next level without identifying and teaching them theEnglish skills they will need.

Prior to giving students their marked up paper, Professor Jones had al-ready created and shared a sheet listing the common errors that the studentswere making in her class. In addition, she had provided excellent correctexamples from which her students could draw. The following week, the stu-dents came up with the idea of using this “keystone” paper to check everynew essay against it for the kinds of errors they were likely to make; Jonesdidn’t have to mark up their papers so extensively after that class session.Now, the students had individualized roadmaps that were cocreated, mean-ingful, and focused. Because they took control of their own writing goals,they developed a sense of self-efficacy as they addressed their writing. Andall but two students passed the writing exam that semester.


Jones’s story illustrates the power that trust, honesty, and care wield inthe relationships between students and teachers. It was extremely crucial thatProfessor Jones had developed trusting and caring relationships with herstudents. They knew she really believed in them and was there to help them.She also provided detailed recommendations so that students learned. Inaddition, it is important to recognize that the instructor’s knowledge of bi-lingual writing issues gave her the ability to help students understand thelinguistic differences between Spanish and English well enough to write ata native English-speaker level. It is of utmost importance that teachers whowork with second language learners have specific knowledge about particu-lar features of the native languages their students speak, not only to recog-nize why certain “errors” are made, but also to give students explicit guidanceon how to express themselves using correct English structure and usage.

Two small examples will illustrate this point: A Spanish speaker who thinksof the verb bajar—to descend, or to get off—when composing in English,can write sentences like these: “I got off of the car” or “ I got off the car”because in Spanish one says, “Me bajé del auto,” in which the appropriateuse of the verb bajar for this particular meaning includes the preposition“off.” However, in English, we say, “I got out of the car,” not off of it. Ateacher who recognizes that words don’t always translate perfectly from onelanguage to another can understand how the wrong preposition comes tobe used and can inform the writer about this particular detail. The writerbecomes conscious of it and then self-corrects.

Other languages pose even more challenges because of something, suchas prepositions, for instance, that exists in English but may not be part ofthe student’s primary language. This difference can be very difficult for stu-dents to understand. The Vietnamese language does not use singular or pluralforms of nouns because the meaning is established through the context ofthe sentence. Thus, a native speaker of Vietnamese might use mostly singu-lar forms of nouns because these seem to parallel the pure form of nouns inVietnamese. Seeing such a pattern, teachers can help students recognize theneed to clarify meaning by using correct forms of words. But imagine howmuch more complex writing can be for ELL when they attempt to composein English using features from their primary language that are at the stylis-tic and rhetorical pattern level, rather than at the word level like the twoexamples above. The stylistic and rhetorical patterns affect the academicgenres students must use in school, especially after the middle grades.

We cannot emphasize too much how important it is for teachers to un-dertake a sincere study of their students’ home languages.34 With even amodest level of linguistic knowledge, we can diagnose and then give feed-back that is more precise and more constructive than the teachers who didnothing but say to Carmen, Jones’s student, “You are a poor writer.”

As Jones explained to her students, many of their errors were errors intransfer. This means students were transferring features of one language to


another, which is known as cross-linguistic influence. Here is an example.In English, it is often a common rule to add an “s” to a noun to mean morethan one. So the word cookie becomes cookies or friend becomes friends.But what if you went to study in Vietnam? In all of your essays, the teachercrossed out the s from your plural words. You couldn’t understand why,because in English, this was a common rule of practice. However, in Viet-namese, ban means friend and several friends would be vài ban because vàiis a plural marker for several.35 So let’s say you wrote the word bans forfriends. In this case, you were demonstrating the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence. You took a rule that works in English and applied it toVietnamese. It wasn’t correct, but it made sense to you! Many errors Englishlearners make are not errors, but rules or practices from the first language.Just like many of the students in Professor Jones’s class, you were makingregular and logical mistakes. When a teacher can explain the difference be-tween the two languages within a context that you already understand, youwill be able to learn new language skills.

SUMMARY

One of the most important goals of caring-centered multicultural educa-tion is to provide an equitable education. Educators who hold this philoso-phy believe that teaching is relationship-centered and consider it is importantto respect and build upon students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds.Teachers also understand it is vital to teach specific skills using carefully de-veloped Sheltered English, SDAIE, and CALLA strategies in their curricu-lum and instruction. In addition, teachers who are caring-centered providefeedback within a trusting environment. In this way, students and teacherscan work together to ensure academic success. If teachers do not have astrong relationship with their students, criticism can be extremely challeng-ing for English learners and other students to cope with, and it will be moredifficult for learning to occur. Caring-centered teachers understand that itis critical for educators to adopt a philosophical framework that is built uponequity, culture, and community.

— 11 —

The Role of Race in TeacherEducation: Using Critical Race

Theory to Develop RacialConsciousness and Competence

TYRONE C. HOWARD AND GLENDA R. ALEMAN

The changing ethnic and racial texture of today’s society has led to anincreasing number of non-white populations living in the United States. Inthe year 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that people of color, namelyAfrican American, Latino, Asian American, and Native Americans, made upapproximately 28 percent of the nation’s population. The 2000 census alsoprojected that people of color will make up close to 38 percent of the nation’spopulation in 2025, and 47 percent by the year 2050. Coinciding with theincreasing racial diversity in the United States has been an increase in thenumber of students from culturally diverse backgrounds in our nation’sschools. The U.S. Department of Education stated that, in 2002, 40 per-cent of the nation’s students enrolled in K–12 schools were students of color.Moreover, in large urban areas, such as Los Angeles, New York, Miami, andChicago, students of color comprised even larger percentages of the overallstudent populations.1

Along with the increasing student diversity in our nation’s schools havebeen a decrease in the numbers of teachers of color and an increase in thenumber of white teachers, primarily female and middle-class, most of whomare monolingual. According to the U.S. Department of Education, approxi-mately 91 percent of the nation’s public school teachers are white, and nearlythree-quarters of them are women. While issues such as culture, class, andgender continue to be major issues influencing the teaching and learning oftoday’s student body, race remains arguably the most difficult issue for class-room teachers to understand.2 The persistent underachievement of racially


diverse students only underscores what is obvious to many, yet oblivious toothers, that race still matters in U.S. society.3

Given the fact that students from racially diverse backgrounds will con-tinue to make up the majority of schools in large urban centers, teacher edu-cation programs have a huge responsibility to adequately prepare raciallyconscious and competent teachers. We maintain that teacher education pro-grams can do a much better job in preparing teachers to teach in raciallydiverse classroom settings. Moreover, we believe that many teacher educa-tion programs pay little attention to the role that race and racism plays inschools and, ultimately, do a major disservice to classroom teachers who willbe teaching in racially diverse schools. Furthermore, we contend that manyteacher education programs that do attempt to introduce discussion of therole that race plays in education fail to engage preservice teachers in criticaland thoughtful dialogues and analysis about race and racism, and all theirimplications. Some may argue that caring and competent teachers are ableto supersede issues that pertain to race in their attempt to effectively teachstudents. We are firm in our belief that racial politics are played out in count-less school policies, practices, and programs on a regular basis in many ofour nation’s schools. As a result, race cannot be ignored within schools andin the way we prepare teachers to teach in schools. Refusing to acknowledgethe ever-present effect of race only exacerbates a problem that has longplagued U.S. history and society, an unwillingness to talk openly and hon-estly about race and racism in a racially polarized society.

This chapter examines teacher education using critical race theory as itstheoretical framework. Critical race theory will be used as a conceptual lensbecause it recognizes the salience of race and racism in schools and society,and calls for transformative ways to dismantle racism in all facets of educa-tion.4 A critical race theory examination in teacher education is most war-ranted given the manner in which many teachers are not given the necessaryskills and knowledge to effectively teach across racial differences. This chapterwill have three primary objectives. We will examine teacher education pro-grams and elaborate on how and where many of them fall short in adequatelyaddressing issues that pertain to race. We will then present critical race theoryas an emerging theoretical framework in education that may provide newdirections and insights into how race and racism can be examined in teachereducation programs. Finally, we will provide strategies and interventions toassist teacher education programs in addressing a pressing need in today’sracially diverse society.

THE STATE OF TEACHER EDUCATION

There are currently more than 1,300 teacher education programs acrossthe country. These programs have the task of providing prospective teach-ers with adequate knowledge and skills to effectively teach in an increasingly

The Role of Race in Teacher Education 151

diverse society. The very notion of preparing teachers has become an increas-ingly difficult task. Teaching, unbeknownst to many outside the field, hasbecome an endeavor that requires its occupants to be well versed in morethan their students’ academic development. Today’s teachers must also havea working understanding of the various social, emotional, psychological, andcultural issues that students are dealing with on a daily basis in an attemptto become academically successful. The manner in which teachers need tobe prepared to teach today’s student body defies traditional methods thatwere once common for the field of teacher education. Gone are the dayswhen subject matter methods courses, along with a course in human devel-opment and educational psychology, were the norm for preservice teachers.The demands on teacher educators today requires them to provide preserviceteachers with a more complex and in-depth knowledge of schools and soci-ety, and the multitude of variables that influence students’ experiences.5

Hence, understanding race and all the complexities associated with it areessential, especially when educating racially diverse students. The failure ofteachers to be aware of the complicated social context of education onlycontributes to the increasing numbers of high teacher turnover, which hasbecome a persistent problem, particularly in hard-to-staff schools, many ofwhich are located in urban and rural areas.6

Teacher education programs must be diligent in preparing teachers toaddress the huge achievement disparities that exist for many low-income andculturally diverse students. Furthermore, teacher education programs mustremain aware of the increasing school dropout rates of students from raciallydiverse backgrounds and the creation of school climates that could be con-sidered hostile to racially diverse students. Thus, the one-size-fits-all approachto preparing teachers has little use in today’s social context. Teacher educa-tion programs must be explicit about the fact that preparing teachers to teachin large, urban school settings requires a different type of preparation thanit does for preparing teachers to enter small, suburban, or predominatelywhite school settings.7

WHO DO WE LET IN? TEACHER EDUCATION ANDTHE SCREENING PROCESS

Recognizing the increasing complexity of preparing teachers to teach inracially diverse settings is an important first step for teacher education pro-grams to consider; however, other areas require equal examination. For ex-ample, the screening process is an important area to examine who enters thefield of teaching. Because of current teacher shortages in hard-to-staffschools, many teacher education programs feel a pressing need to help ad-dress the shortages and frequently admit larger numbers of students intoprograms in an attempt to certify more teachers. Many of these students areadmitted into teacher education programs based on grade point averages,


standardized test scores, autobiographical essays, or various types of educa-tional volunteering or the ambiguous “community service” requirements.What is frequently overlooked in the admittance process for many teachereducation programs is that many preservice teachers enter teacher educationprograms with little or no desire to teach in low-income or culturally diverseschool settings.8 It has been our experience that many preservice teachers’desires to teach are stimulated by their own schooling experiences, many ofwhich have occurred in suburban, middle-class, predominately white, mostlymonolingual neighborhoods. Therefore, urban schools represent the antith-esis of what “good” schools are “supposed to be like.” To the chagrin ofmany preservice teachers, they soon find that most suburban schools have agreater supply of teachers wanting to teach in their schools than their de-mand necessitates. Thus, the supply and demand of teachers in suburbanschools significantly hampers new teachers’ prospects of landing teaching jobsin suburban school settings. As a result, many preservice teachers are left withthe option of either not teaching at all, which many choose, or teaching inurban schools, where there is typically a greater need for classroom teach-ers. Thus, the epiphany occurs of having new classroom teachers (primarilywhite females) who reluctantly enter urban schools, having given littlethought to the possibility that they would end up teaching in an urban class-room with large numbers of racially diverse and low-income students.

It has also been our experience that many preservice teaching candidatesmay profess a desire to teach in urban schools but are advised by parents,friends, husbands, or significant others that it would not be “safe to teachin those types of schools.” Frequently, these types of statements are loadedwith negative racial and social class assumptions and implications. In manyinstances, the recommendation to not teach in “those types of schools,” isa euphemism for not wanting to teach “those types of children,” which isusually a reference to non-white, poor, or non-English-speaking students.There is also the very real possibility that many preservice teachers prepareto enter urban schools without having spent any significant time around non-white populations. Thus, their initial foray into teaching is not only an in-troduction to the world of teaching, but it also is an introduction to a newand different racial and cultural context that many teachers have difficultynavigating.

While some preservice teachers choose to stay completely away from ur-ban schools, others take a position that they want to teach in urban schoolsbecause they have a desire to ‘help” or “save” low-income or racially diversestudents. We believe that this type of “missionary mind-set” presents moreproblems than solutions when it comes to teaching racially diverse students.Frequently, teachers of this mind-set have lowered expectations for their stu-dents and use many benign, yet destructive, approaches to the classroom.We believe that urban schools in particular, but schools in general, are muchbetter off without such teachers who bring deficit-oriented mind-sets to their


classrooms, which typically cause students’ racial, cultural, and social capitalto become barriers to their learning and not assets that allow their culturalcapital to be used as strengths and conduits for their learning and overallschool success. Therefore, it is crucial for teacher education programs to seeksome type of racial awareness, sensitivity, or consciousness when screeningpotential candidates. Many programs incorporate interviews into the processwith a more detailed probing about how potential preservice teachers thinkand feel about issues of diversity. However, many programs rely on students’responses to questionnaires, which rarely delve into deeper examinations ofindividuals’ beliefs about race, class, or gender. We propose having candi-dates respond to how they would deal with certain classroom scenarios in-volving students or more critical examinations of candidates’ desires to teachstudents from racial backgrounds other than their own.

Lastly, although our primary focus has been on white preservice teachersand how they deal with racial matters, we are also mindful of the fact thatpreservice teachers of color can possess similar types of negative attitudestoward educating low-income and racially diverse students. Many teachereducators become excited by seeing African American, Latino, Asian, orNative American teaching candidates and automatically assume that they “getit” when it comes to racial awareness and consciousness. We contend thatthis is not always the case and that people of color can be just as raciallyencapsulated, wherein they subscribe to negative mainstream conceptions ofvarious racial groups, as whites can. Therefore, addressing issues of raceshould not be exclusively directed toward white preservice teachers. How-ever, given the fact that the overwhelming majority of preservice teachersare white, they are usually the focus for addressing race-related topics.

THE ROLE OF RACE IN EDUCATION

A number of scholars have written about the role that race continues toplay in our society.9 Additional scholars have elaborated on the role that raceplays in K–12 schools.10 We take a position of acknowledging the importanceof these scholars as they have problematized a topic that frequently finds fewreceptive audiences in the field of teacher education. In this work, we ex-amine race within teacher education and, more specifically, critical race theory.However, what needs clarification in this discussion are the “loaded assump-tions” that individuals typically have about racial “others.” We remain clearin our contention that race matters. Yet, we posit that, in many ways, it isculture and all of its manifestations, such as social class, religion, language,and geographical location, that becomes the conduit that many people useto identify or make meaning about certain racial groups. So in many ways,race in and of itself as a social construct used to classify individuals basedon phenotype becomes insignificant. The problem becomes the assumedbehaviors that are ascribed to certain racial groups based on race, ethnicity,


or social class. For example, seeing an Asian American student may conjureup mainstream depictions of how Asian Americans are viewed. Therefore,one could assume that the student is highly intelligent, quiet, a hard worker,and will cause few problems in class. Thus, the conception of the hard-work-ing Asian American student is based on a typical, middle-class behavioralpattern.11 Lee found that lower-income “ethnic” Chinese, Vietnamese, andCambodian students challenged the “model minority” myth and did notalways act in ways consistent with the Asian American depiction. Conversely,seeing an African American or Latino student on the surface (or racially)means little, yet it is the mainstream depiction of these groups that mightconvey the sense that they are unmotivated, underachievers, with no respectfor authority and noncaring parents that can influence teachers’ perceptionsof such students.12 Such perceptions are also class-based since African Ameri-can and Latino students are presumed to be low-income. In short, it is thecultural baggage that constructs how racial groups are seen that must bedisrupted. Moreover, we also believe that social class intersects with race inmany of these arrangements as well. These stereotypical portrayals of racialgroups remain an area where teacher education programs must be dedicatedto eradicating negative constructions of certain groups and must be replacedwith more dynamic and balanced portrayals of all ethnic and racial groups.

What we have found in both of our teacher education program coursesis a conflation of important, yet critical, variables such as race, culture, andethnicity, as if they all have the same meaning. It has been our experiencethat, when discussing issues of race, many students claim ignorance aboutthese topics.13 Or when issues of race are discussed, they are typically ad-dressed in a manner that makes it synonymous with culture and ethnicity.This static approach to understanding culture is problematic because it di-minishes the importance of culture and fails to recognize the dynamic com-plexity of race, ethnicity, and culture. Hence, racially, two individuals maylook “black” yet, ethnically, one may be African American and the otherCuban American. Ethnically, two individuals may be Japanese American, butdue to social class background, generations in the United States or ances-tral regional difference may be very different culturally. These nuances holdimportant insight into each individual. It is important to acknowledge theseracial, cultural, and ethnicity differences, because it helps teachers to avoidessentializing students who look of a particular racial or ethnic background.

Many teacher education programs offer “diversity” or “multicultural”courses as a way to address all the many types of diversity-related issues. Thesecourses usually are centered on superficial discussions about culture, ethnicity,gender, and language and take more of a celebratory approach to living in aculturally pluralistic society. It is rare for these courses to examine the dis-tribution of power and wealth in the United States, the effects of institu-tionalized discrimination and racism in the nation’s schools, or a criticalinvestigation into how equity and access are played out.14 As the nation’s


schools become increasingly racially diverse and with disproportionate num-bers of racially diverse students underachieving and dropping out of schools,it is essential that preservice teachers be provided a platform to think about,discuss, and offer potential interventions on these issues.

CRITICAL RACE THEORY

Critical race theory within the field of education seeks to give muchneeded attention to the role that race and racism plays in educational re-search, scholarship, and practice.15 The use of a critical race framework iswarranted in education when one considers the perennial underachievementof African American, Latino/Latina, Native American, and certain AsianAmerican students in U.S. schools.16 We use critical race theory in our ex-amination of teacher education because it recognizes the permanence andpervasiveness of race and racism in U.S. society in general. Thus, racism isnot reduced to isolated events and instances that can be described as abnor-mal circumstances or aberrations. Critical race theory recognizes racism asa normative phenomenon that is deeply rooted in U.S. life, law, and culture.Ladson-Billings argues the permanence of racism by stating that it is “soenmeshed in the fabric or our social order, it appears both normal and naturalto people in this culture.”17 Thus, given the salience that racism has in thelarger society, critical race theorists in education posit that it would be im-possible for education, much like any other subject matter, to be unaffectedby the remnants and manifestations of race and racism.

Delgado and Stefanic use critical race theory to critique the limitationsof more accepted equity models. They state that, “formal conceptions ofequality, expressed in rules that insist only on treatment that is the sameacross the board, can thus remedy only the most blatant forms of discrimi-nation.”18 Thus, reforms based on the equity model can help, but will theyguarantee acceptance? Can people be forced to abandon their prejudice andaccept historically marginalized people? Critical race theorists maintain thatprejudice merely goes underground and then arises in small, covert acts ofdiscrimination. Termed “microaggressions,” these daily unnamed interactionsbetween whites and people of color (it can also be between people of color)“are subtle, stunning, often automatic, and non-verbal exchanges which are‘put-downs’ of blacks by offenders.”19 Again, the problem with the equitymodels is that the underlying prejudice is not eradicated by policy and re-form; it merely manages to produce change on the surface level.

However, even the surface-level discrimination, such as violence, harass-ment, and blatant racist comments, has not ended in our nation or in ourschools. Any elementary, middle school, or high school teacher can attestto racial conflicts that occur almost daily on our campuses. Teachers mustunderstand that such violence is not merely due to ignorance and individualprejudice but is socially legitimized by schools.20 Violence in schools is not,


of course, limited to racial conflict. In speaking of violence done to LGBTstudents in schools, Herr reminds us that “individual acts of aggression com-mitted by students are intricately related to institutional practices and socio-cultural beliefs and values; thus, making the case that our institutions, suchas schools, and the value systems contained in them are, in reality, fertilegrounds for the cultivation of individual acts of violence.”21 Thus, the per-petuation of violence against marginalized groups is due to failure of theequity framework to transform institutional racism and other forms of op-pression. In particular, the ideological structure of institutional hegemonyis left intact, and social prejudice is allowed to flourish uncontested. Schoolsare spaces where social hierarchies and social practices are reified throughcurriculum, policy, pedagogy, daily interactions, discipline, among others.Because all school practices are embedded in these larger institutional socialstructures, many critical theorists frame educational institutions as primecontributors to “ideological hegemony.”22 “It is the latent function of theeducational system to maintain the status quo, including existing social in-equalities.”23

Critical race theory within education is an evolving methodological, con-ceptual, and theoretical construct that attempts to disrupt race and racismin education by explicitly examining the role that race and racism play outin beliefs, behaviors, practices, and policies. It enables scholars to ask theimportant question of what racism has to do with inequities in education inunique ways. Critical race theory examines racial inequities in educationalachievement in a more critical manner than multicultural education, criticaltheory, or achievement gap theorists by centering the discussion of inequal-ity within the context of racism.24 Critical race theory within education alsoserves as a framework to challenge and dismantle prevailing notions of fair-ness, meritocracy, colorblindness, and neutrality.25 Critical race theory rep-resents an idea for teacher education because it could interrogate the racialdisparities in individuals admitted into teacher education programs; it couldaddress the ways that programs address race and racism, and it could exam-ine the appropriateness of school placement, curriculum, pedagogy, and as-sessment.

Critical race theorists in education anchor their interrogation of racismin four primary ways: (1) by theorizing about race along with other formsof subordination and the intersectionality of racism, classism, sexism, andother forms of oppression in school curriculum; (2) by challenging domi-nant ideologies that call for objectivity and neutrality in educational research;(3) by offering counterstorytelling as a liberatory and credible methodo-logical tool in examining racial oppression; and (4) by incorporating trans-disciplinary knowledge from women’s studies and ethnic studies to betterunderstand various manifestations of discrimination.26 A critical race theoryframework would appear to be ideal for examining teacher education becauseit theorizes race in concrete ways. What is most essential for teacher educa-


tion programs is to understand how critical race theory manifests itself inpractical and tangible ways. In the following section, we will highlightstorytelling and counterstorytelling as two examples that could use a criti-cal race theory framework in helping preservice teachers.

NEW DIRECTION FOR TEACHER EDUCATION IN THETWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

We contend that teacher education programs must use the above fouraspects of critical race theory to bring about systemic change. It is with theunderstanding that racism and discrimination are institutional forces thatteachers can begin to fight against such practices in their classrooms. Al-though, understanding of other people’s lives is important for those teach-ers who have never been exposed to other cultures—and does not happensystematically enough in teacher education projects—we believe that learn-ing about and understanding people who are different from mainstream U.S.culture is only a building block for a much more critical analysis of race inthis country. Critical race theory surpasses cursory understandings of equal-ity, discrimination, and prejudice, and advocates an understanding of hege-monic practices. Critical race theorists warn of the “neo-liberal project,”where the “sympathetic recognition of the lives, experiences and practicesof many of those individuals and groups that do indeed constitute the popularnational culture” are used as a veil to hide a political project that is indeedhegemonic.27

How do we begin to explain racist institutional practices to student teach-ers? Complex understandings of racism must begin with exposure. Manystudent teachers come from middle-class suburban homes, which are moreoften than not located in racially segregated areas. Thus, many student teach-ers have had limited exposures to people of other ethnicities, and oftentimesthose interactions have been limited to the workplace, and/or daily cursoryinteractions, such as buying food at the grocery store. Storytelling is a pow-erful bridge, and it is of utmost importance in teacher education courses.For whites, listening to experiences of people color helps them to understandwhat it is like to be non-white in this country. Delgado, Stefanic, and Har-ris confirm “engaging stories can help us understand what life is like for oth-ers, and invite readers into a new and unfamiliar world.”28 Certainly, thebenefits of storytelling are not limited to whites understanding non-whites,it also helps men understand women, middle-class people understand work-ing-class people, heterosexuals understand homosexuals, and so on. Listen-ing to and engaging in different people’s stories is a transformative processfor everyone, because it gives voice to people who have traditionally beensilenced in our country, and often it allows people from minority groups tolearn about and validate their own culture. Teacher education programsshould have student teachers read the various different racial and cultural


narratives available for the ethnic groups present in their school districts.Likewise, student teachers of various racial backgrounds should be encour-aged to tell their stories in their university classrooms, and perhaps invitedstorytellers can speak to various groups of student teachers. Jackson statesthat

autobiography is a medium through which individuals speak as subjects, in theirown voices, represent themselves, and their stories from their ownperspectives . . . through studying autobiography in this manner, pre-serviceteachers experience an approach to teaching which they themselves can prac-tice and model.29

As stated before, the practice of hearing different voices is not limited onlyto racial understanding and should not be restricted to only the universityclassroom—storytelling is a wonderful teaching tool in K–12 classrooms aswell, where it is crucial for students to understand other cultures.

Stories are enlightening and informative, but we want to caution that sto-ries about and contact with people of different racial backgrounds alone donot change people’s prejudices. The failure occurs for two main reasons: (1)Individualized contact is “blind to the wider social influences that affect in-tergroup contact.”30 Individual contact can be shortsighted because the sto-ryteller, who may be a member of a marginalized group, may be unawareof the wider social influences that shape oppression and subsequently his orher experiences. (2) When an individual person has a negative interactionwith a person of a different racial background, the individual will most likelyuse mainstream racist ideology to make sense of the experience.31 As an ex-ample, if a white person were burglarized by an African American male inone of his or her few contacts with an African American male, there is anincreased chance that the individual will hold on to that negative encounterto the point where it may influence future encounters with African Ameri-can men. From that point forward, every African American is a potentialthief, and this belief is legitimized by both her negative experiences andmainstream portrayals of the criminality of the African American commu-nity and people within it. Thus, having her dialogue with African Americanpeople, or having her read any African American narratives alone cannotdismantle the person’s racism. The individual has to dismantle and under-stand how racist ideology and hegemony operates in this country. This is oneof the critiques that critical race theorists give against mainstream multi-cultural programs present in teacher education programs and in our nationsschools. In many teacher education programs, multicultural education hasbecome synonymous with foods and festivals, heroes and holidays, and lacksrigor and critical analysis in complex understandings of race.

Narratives voiced by marginalized persons can, however, help to dismantlethe dominant discourses surrounding discrimination and prejudice present


within every racial/cultural group if they provide a critique of mainstreamculture. Counterstorytelling not only helps the reader understand the dailylives, values, and celebratory customs of other groups, but it also representsother truths and other experiences that directly refute hegemony. “Storiestold by those on the bottom, told from the ‘subversive-subaltern’ perspec-tive, challenge and expose the hierarchical and patriarchal order that existswithin the legal academy [any institution] and pervades the larger society.”32

These stories are much more critical, and they allow the anger and pain ofthe oppressed storyteller to emerge. In the last few decades, a plethora ofpersonal narratives, which are then woven with critical analysis, are available.Such works are available in a large range of fields, such as Chicano Studies,Women’s Studies, African American Studies, anthropology, and so forth, andincludes writings, film, and art.

One example of a critical narrative is the documentary The Color of Fear.Seven men of Asian American, Latino, African American, and white ances-try engage in a transformative discussion where the invisibility of the livesof men of color become revealed and the white privilege of one white manbecomes challenged. It was the naïveté of the white man who resisted theconcept of racism and advocated a colorblind philosophy, one African Ameri-can man’s extremely angry response to him, and the white man’s subsequentbreakdown of resistance to the voices of men of color that was perhaps themost powerful of all. The second half of the film dealt with the intraracismof men of color and documented how it had divided the men and had sup-pressed dialogue and solidarity. The documentary is extremely emotionallycharged and can be very difficult to watch, yet it is in the discomfort of hav-ing our ideologies shifted and perhaps acknowledging our own prejudice thatsystemic change can occur. This is the type of counterstorytelling presenta-tion that teacher educators can incorporate into their programs. However,an analysis of these narratives must follow with a thorough debriefing. It isessential to gauge how student teachers make meaning of these narrativesand the implication it has in their teaching.

Engaging counterstorytelling as a pedagogical tool should not end inteacher education programs. Teachers should be given adequate tools toimplement such critical engagements with issues of race, class, and genderin their K–12 classrooms. It is not enough to assume that the student teach-ers’ newly acquired analytical tools will automatically permeate their teach-ing. It is our experience that many student teachers feel frustrated withtheoretical understandings of the social foundations of our schools when theyare not given concrete strategies and lesson plan ideas to use. The questionof how they will teach subject matter to students who are below grade level,have discipline problems, and have a host of other challenges, and also en-gage those students in meaningful discussions, which the student teachersare not properly trained to do, is a deterring issue. Teachers, however, mustunderstand that teaching children an antiracist, antihierarchical curriculum


is a basic education and, as such, should not be placed as the curriculum onegets to once the three Rs have been mastered. In fact, it is most likely manyof those students who are considered “at-risk” who need an antiracist peda-gogy and curriculum the most.33

FINAL WORD

The premise of this book, “Defending Public Schools,” makes a call forreexamining schools as institutions concerned with the public good, schoolsas socializing mechanisms dedicated toward creating a civic democracy. Theo-retically, schools seek to provide those on the societal fringes with an op-portunity to acquire the necessary skills, knowledge, and access to competeeconomically, politically, and socially in a technically advanced and cultur-ally pluralistic society. Although strides have been made within schools andsociety over the last decade, it goes without saying that much work remainsto be done. We believe that schools can become the impetus behind thechange that our society desperately deserves and needs. However, in orderto reach this space, we must come to grips with the marginalization andoppression of certain groups and understand the historical contexts in whichthese tragedies have occurred. More important, we must strive to createsolutions that stand to correct injustices of the past to create a truly demo-cratic society and world. Not only is it imperative for us a nation to workcollectively toward establishing a peaceful nation, but our survival is depen-dent upon it.

— 12 —

Thinking Inclusively aboutInclusive Education

MARA SAPON-SHEVIN

The increasing heterogeneity of today’s classrooms, schools, and communi-ties demands a strong commitment to teaching for diversity as a purpose-ful, intentional set of beliefs, attitudes, and skills. One in every three studentscurrently enrolled in elementary or secondary school is of a racial or ethnicminority, enough to make the word minority a term with diminishing util-ity. Demographers predict that students of color will make up nearly half ofthe U.S. school-age population by 2020. Children of immigrants make upapproximately 20 percent of the children in the United States, bringing lin-guistic and cultural differences to many classrooms. Added to this are 2.4million children who speak a language other than English at home, one infive children who live in poverty, and children who come from a huge vari-ety of different types of families.

We can no longer teach to a hypothetical norm (not that it ever existed),nor can we treat difference as something unexpected, undesirable, or unno-ticeable in the classroom. We cannot refer to the majority of our classroomsas “typical,” reserving the title of “inclusive classroom” for a small numberof classrooms that contain a few more obviously disabled students who arereferred to as “the inclusion students.”

Rather, we must come to view inclusive classrooms (those that intention-ally and purposively include and acknowledge a wide range of learners) asthe “new norm.” We must closely interrogate the language of “difference,”if only because it implies that most children are “the same” while a few are“different.” Rather, we must acknowledge that all students come to the


educational process with a long list of racial, cultural, gender, familial, lin-guistic, religious, ability, sexual orientation, and physical characteristics, eachof which affects their needs and their learning; we must either describe allstudents as different or none of them. We must move beyond discussionsof diversity as a problem in classrooms to a conception of differences as natu-ral, inevitable, and desirable, enriching teaching and learning experiences forteachers and students alike. Furthermore, we must truly believe that a strongdemocratic society demands that all its citizens are well educated and that agood education is based on being able to interact successfully and comfort-ably with all members of the immediate community and with increasingcircles of larger and larger communities throughout the country and theworld.

In order to make inclusive education “normative” and to link educationto broader visions of democracy and a democratic society, we must under-stand two complementary principles: First, we must recognize the ways inwhich what happens in the greater society affects students in schools. TheSpanish-speaking child whose bilingual program is canceled, who is testedfor underachievement by an English-only speaking psychologist, and whomust suffer through a program of teaching and assessment that bears littleor no relevance to his life is not simply having “a bad year.” Rather, we cansee these events as being directly linked to governmental practices and pri-orities that are a product of corporate globalization, reactionary social poli-cies, and increasing institutionalized racism and poverty. To paraphrase oneof the catch phrases of the 1960s, in order to “act locally” to improve edu-cation, we must be able to “think globally” about the ways in which thelarger social, economic, and political worlds impact schools and childrendirectly.

Second,, we must also realize the power of schools to impact the largerworld. While everyone talks about training “tomorrow’s citizens” or makescompelling arguments for the necessity for an informed and competentworkforce, what happens in school has a direct impact on the kind of worldthose citizens will create. A student who has experienced a two-way bilin-gual curriculum and is a fluent Spanish and English speaker can take leader-ship in progressive employment practices when she joins the workforce.Students who have experienced deep and meaningful relationships with class-mates and teachers with disabilities will become architects, parents, teach-ers, physicians, city planners, and employers within small and large business,bringing their understanding and advocacy experiences to the wider worldin transformative ways. Teachers who implement dynamic antiracism curriculaknow that they are affecting not only the race relations in their own class-rooms but in many larger spheres as well. It is hard to envision hopeful, in-clusive futures if all we have experienced is segregation, tracking, isolation,and marginalization. And we cannot create a world that we cannot envision.Schools have always been and will continue to be powerful socializing agents;

Thinking Inclusively about Inclusive Education 163

democratic, inclusive schools make democratic, inclusive societies more pos-sible.

This chapter examines the implications of inclusive education for fourareas: curriculum, pedagogy, classroom and social climate, and teacher edu-cation. For each of these, I will describe the vision, the challenges, and someof our next steps in making all aspects of schooling and education inclusive.

CURRICULUM

What would an inclusive curriculum look like and how would we knowone when we saw it? The first questions we might ask are, “Whose voice isheard in the curriculum and whose voice is absent? What story is told andwho decides?”

To begin with, the curriculum must acknowledge student and family di-versity. The books in the book corner, the music and dances taught, theposters on the wall, the websites that students use, and the class videos shouldall reflect diversity. One of my students returned recently from her field place-ment reporting that in her classroom, which was 95 percent students of color,there was not one non-white face in a wall decoration, in the book corner,or in any of the textbooks. She wondered how and what students would learnif they never saw themselves reflected in the content of the lessons or theclassroom environment.

When students discuss families, or when parents and guardians participatein the life of the school community, how is family diversity represented? Doesthe unit on careers take into account that some students have parents whoare unemployed, in jail, deceased, or employed in activities that students maynot be comfortable sharing? Does the class field trip make financial demandsthat some families will find embarrassing or impossible? When holidays arecelebrated, whose holidays are they? One local school continues to focusexclusively on Christmas holidays, arguing that because all of the studentsin the class are Christian, this isn’t a problem. Even if all students are froma particular religious, social, cultural, or racial group, is lack of diversity inthe curriculum actually acceptable or desirable?

After the attack on the World Trade Centers on September 11, 2001,many teachers have incorporated mention of this event into their curricu-lum, as they will no doubt continue to do at least on the yearly anniversa-ries of what is now referred to as “9/11.” In some classrooms, the focushas been on patriotism and heroes, with a focus on bravery, courage, andthe role of the firefighters. In other classrooms, however, the discussion hasbeen broadened to include discussions of prejudice and discrimination, par-ticularly the targeting of Arab Americans after the attack, and on subsequentchallenges to civil liberties. In one mathematics classroom, a teacher hadstudents study the demographics of who was killed in the attacks, includinghow those figures were arrived at, what meaning those statistics had for


different groups, and the “politics of counting,” including why some felt thenumbers should be inflated to represent the magnitude of the event whileothers recognized that large numbers of undocumented illegal aliens wereneither counted among the dead nor their survivors entitled to benefits. Sim-ply stating that the “class studied the events of September 11, 2001” doesnot tell us enough about the specific curriculum nor about the meaning stu-dents make of it.

The recent focus on high-stakes testing has severely challenged the abil-ity and willingness of many teachers to expand their curriculum. The age-old question “Will that be on the test?” now, sadly, defines teacher behavioras much as student concern. In Massachusetts, teachers constructed a grave-yard of lost educational opportunities— things they used to include in theircurriculum but had to eliminate because of the current focus on standard-ized testing. The teacher who used to take students on extensive field tripsto museums and art galleries, the teacher who created a yearly Shakespearefestival with all students, and the teacher who had her class collect watersamples from a nearby pond to study water pollution and state ecologicalpolicies all shared their dismay and distress. It was clear to them and to manyparents that the new testing policies and practices directly affected the qualityof their work and their relationships with students as well as keeping themfrom teaching what they believed really mattered to their students.

The use of integrated curriculum projects, learning centers, and the cre-ation of multilevel curriculum units is critical to responding to student di-versity and to teaching all students that the world doesn’t work just “oneway.” When students study slavery, for example, what they learn may reifyoppressive understandings of the role of blacks in the United States, or theunit can be expanded to include a study of the Reparations Movement andthe importance of concrete ways of making amends for past injustices. Link-ing this study to the Truth and Reconciliation committees in South Africa,the reparations made to the Japanese after World War II, and current landclaim disputes involving Native Americans will help students to see historyand social change from a far broader context. Asking students to respondto questions such as “Did anyone ever apologize to you for something they’ddone that shifted your relationship with them?” or “Should you ever apolo-gize for something that wasn’t directly your fault?” will move that under-standing to a very human and individual level.

What we teach affects not only what students learn but how they see oneanother as well. When Hue’s language is included in the classroom curricu-lum, then children understand China differently; when students brainstormways to raise money for the field trip so that no child will be excluded, thenissues of poverty, classism, and dignity are understood differently as well.When modifications are made in classroom assignments so that the child whouses an electronic touch-talker to communicate is fully included in lessons,


students understand principles of equal access and full participation, essen-tial democratic principles.

Every aspect of the curriculum must be interrogated with these questions:How will this learning affect the ability of students to function well in a di-verse, inclusive, democratic society? Will this learning facilitate understand-ing, acceptance, and positive interaction with a wide range of communitymembers, or will it narrow students’ views and make them complacent withlimited perspectives and glib generalizations? Perhaps the best student evalu-ation I ever received (although it was framed as a criticism) read: “This courseraised more questions than it answered.” Perhaps we could make this ourgold standard for curriculum—recognizing that there is always more to learn,always another “side” to the story, and always a deeper more contextualizedunderstanding.

PEDAGOGY

A commitment to democratic schooling requires both a broad curricu-lum that acknowledges and honors student diversity and teaching strategiesthat are responsive to a wide range of learners. Modifying the physical de-mands of the Christmas craft activity in which children make jewelry boxesfor their mothers, to accommodate Tashara, who has cerebral palsy, is of lim-ited value when Tashara is Muslim, doesn’t celebrate Christmas, and liveswith her single, adoptive father. Pedagogy and curriculum must be comple-mentary, reinforcing student diversity and the need for community in whatwe teach and how we teach it.1

We must ask critical questions of our pedagogical choices just as we didabout the curriculum: What are the impacts of various teaching strategiesor pedagogical styles on a range of student learners? How does the way theteacher teaches affect not only individual learning but also classroom climateand the ways students understand and treat one another? Who is advantagedand who is disadvantaged by various teaching strategies or pedagogical de-cisions?

Cooperative learning has been acknowledged as an optimal way of teach-ing students with different abilities, skills, and interests in the same class-room.2 One of the key principles of cooperative learning is the use ofheterogeneous groups. But rather than understanding heterogeneity alonga single continuum (high, medium, and low achievers), we must considerdifferences in race, class, gender, ethnicity, language, disability and ability,religion, sexual orientation, family background, and more when we teachacross differences and to differences. Educators now use the phrase “uni-versal design” to refer to teaching and learning strategies that are enhancedby the use of electronic and information technologies that allow all studentsto access and engage with a demanding curriculum.3 Universal design


principles encourage teachers to think about teaching all students as part ofthe original lesson plan rather than designing a template that must then bemodified with multiple adaptations and alterations in order for it to “fit”students whose learning needs differ from the more typical members of theclass. When diversity becomes the norm, then inclusive teaching strategiesalso become more normalized.

It is important, however, to be critical of pedagogical modifications thatcan reconstitute tracking and lowered expectations in the name of beingresponsive to individual differences. If an activity is modified for a particu-lar student, we need to ask whether the curriculum this student is accessinghas been limited or compromised in ways that were unnecessarily restrictiveor based on stereotypical preconceptions about “what children like X canlearn.” Although much has been written about multiple intelligences and theneed to provide instruction that crosses intelligences that are verbal, physi-cal, creative, and mathematical, we must also ask whether all forms of intel-ligence are equally valued in our current society and how our decisions tohonor students’ particular strengths may seriously compromise their long-term success or their abilities to access higher education or engaging workopportunities. Even though the creative arts are valued within our culture,the child who always draws the poster for his group because he is a talentedartist but who does not learn to read well because that isn’t his “strength”may be decidedly disadvantaged in the broader work community. When chil-dren who don’t achieve well in particular areas are allowed to limit theirparticipation to less valued arenas, and when those children are members ofracial, ethnic, or language groups that are traditionally oppressed or targetedfor discrimination, then a curriculum of multiple intelligences can becomean enactment of racism, classism, ableism, and other discriminations.

Our pedagogical choices affect not only who learns what and how wellbut also how students learn to treat one another and how they learn to con-ceptualize and understand differences.4 When classrooms are organized com-petitively, for example, with daily enactments of who is the “smartest” or the“highest achieving” through star charts on the wall, competitive rankings,and verbal or public comparisons of student performance, then students learnto scorn those who are less skilled and often to isolate high achievers as well.When teachers limit their teaching to whole-class, large-group instruction,then students who are less verbal or less able to contribute in large groupsare also disadvantaged, compromising not only their own educations but alsothose of their classmates. When learning is structured so that there are mul-tiple points of entry, multiple ways of participating, and multiple forms ofassessment, then all students’ learning is increased.

Peer tutoring can also provide another important way to address differ-ent skill levels and respect individual differences while maintaining feelingsof community and connection. Teachers must be careful, however, that allstudents get the opportunity to be the teacher or the leader rather than rel-


egating some children to the permanent position of “one who gets help.”In inclusive, heterogeneous classrooms where student diversity is large, it isparticularly important that relationships are reciprocal;5 it’s fine for studentsto help Juanita with her English, but there should also be opportunities forJuanita to teach Spanish to her classmates as a valued activity that enrichesthe classroom culture and community.

Being able to make appropriate accommodations for students that enablethem to access high-level material while not limiting students’ options ornarrowing their learning in the name of differentiation is a critical and chal-lenging balance for teachers. Self-interrogation about race, disability, class,and gender are essential components of this decision-making process; wemust constantly ask ourselves why we are teaching certain children differ-ently and what the consequences of that differentiation are likely to be.

CLASSROOM CLIMATE/SOCIAL JUSTICE

Thinking of public schools as places that both model democracy and pre-pare students for living in democratic, participatory, just communitiesrequires that we think carefully about the lessons students learn about com-munity and diversity. In previous generations, people took a course entitled“Civics,” which related to learning to be a good citizen. Few schools teach“civics” these days, and for some, the word evokes negative connotations—an indoctrination into unquestioning obedience or mindless parroting ofofficial rules and regulations. For some, “civics” may have come to mean thesame as “patriotism”—a belief in one’s country and its supremacy to theexclusion of other people or other claims on justice. But the actual defini-tion of civics can be those skills, attitudes, and beliefs needed to be a mem-ber of a community, not simply a member of a particular nation-state. Mynotion of civics is grounded on this question: What beliefs, attitudes, dailypractices, and habits of the heart would help people to create and be mem-bers of a just, equitable society?6

Civics, rather than focusing on laws, governmental structures, and regu-lations could be founded on values of social justice that could inform ourcurriculum, our teaching, and our daily interactions with others. These cen-tral organizing values would be apparent throughout the entire school com-munity and beyond, guiding the behaviors of students, parents, teachers,administrators, and community members. Many are rightfully suspicious ofthe notion of values-based education and, in fact, we must critically inter-rogate any proposal for “character education” to ask about the underlyingvalues and beliefs and the manifestation of those values with relation to jus-tice, equity, power, domination, and control. But not all values are the samenor do they lead us in similar directions. Although the idea of teaching val-ues is hotly debated terrain, the reality is that teachers teach values all thetime by everything they do. When a boy calls another boy a “faggot” in the


hallway and slams him against a locker, and the teachers say or do nothing,they are already teaching powerful lessons about values. The relevant dis-cussion is not about whether to teach values but about which values to teachand how these should be chosen and operationalized. It is possible to de-scribe values and principles that are consistent with democratic education.

I propose a new CIVICS curriculum based on the following as key orga-nizing principles:

1. Courage: the ability to take a stand in the face of injustice, the capacity to changedirections and do things differently, and the willingness to leave behind the fa-miliar and the predictable in order to move toward a more just society.

2. Inclusion: the belief that all people have an inherent right to be part of schooland neighborhood communities, that they do not have to earn the “privilege”of belonging and that debates about who belongs and who will be excluded areantidemocratic and ill-suited to a democratic society.

3. Value: a belief in the worth of every individual and in his or her right to be vis-ible and valued as a multidimensional person regardless of any particular charac-teristic or lack thereof.

4. Integrity: the right of every person to be honored for their complex, multipleidentities of race, class, gender, language, sexual orientation, ability, religion (andon and on), without needing to submerge or hide any of these in order to besafe or accepted.

5. Cooperation: the belief that working together toward a common goal withmutual support and shared accountability helps all people to grow and that com-petitive (me against you) or individualistic (it’s about me!) ideologies are a seri-ous impediment to community, the acceptance of diversity, and an agenda ofsocial justice.

6. Safety: the right of every individual to be physically and emotionally safe withintheir communities and to count on the vigilance and support of others to main-tain that security.

Inclusive schooling can teach students important lessons thatoperationalize these values. These might include the following:

Challenging Exclusion

Inclusive classrooms can help us to explicitly challenge ideologies andpractices of exclusion. In an extensive research project, classroom teachersimplemented Paley’s inclusive rule from her book You Can’t Say You Can’tPlay,7 and documented the findings.8 Not only did students learn active waysto include other students in games and activities but also, more importantly,issues of inclusion and exclusion became topics for explicit discussion. “Let’stalk about what happened on the playground today when someone said Craigcouldn’t play football because he was a ‘faggot’; how did that feel and whatdo we need to do about it?” “Should the girls be allowed to keep boys outof the housekeeping corner during free play time?”; “Are there ever times


when it’s okay to tell someone you don’t want to play with them? How dowe decide when or if this rule can ever be waived?”

Dealing with Teasing and Bullying

Teasing and harassment issues have become major topics of discussion inthe face of accelerating school violence and intergroup hostilities in schools.We need not wait for our schools to experience shootings and murders, suchas those at Columbine, to respond seriously to the ways in which studentsare harassed, marginalized, and excluded.

Many teachers are hesitant and ill-prepared to deal with such social cli-mate issues in their classrooms. Among the explanations often heard are thefollowing:

• I just don’t have time to deal with these issues; I have to cover the curriculum.• If I talk about these things, I may make them worse. If I ignore the social cli-

mate disruptions, maybe they’ll go away.• I wasn’t trained to deal with these issues—I teach biology.• It’s a tough world out there; kids just need to be thick-skinned and get over ill

treatment.

Regardless of the rationales or excuses, however, the truth is that theseissues don’t simply go away and that failure to respond constructively oftenleads to an escalation of poor interactions into more overt violence. Evenwithout devastating disruption, however, students who do not feel safe orcomfortable at school are hardly well positioned as academic learners.

Much has been written in this area recently, and curricula on bullying andpositive school culture proliferate. One important issue in dealing with teas-ing and harassment concerns the appropriateness of making a public or pri-vate response to harassment or bullying. The Gay, Lesbian, and StraightEducation Network of Colorado9 argues, I believe convincingly, that priva-tizing responses to overt discrimination fails to teach all students that thebehavior is unacceptable and will not be allowed to continue. Rather thanthe punitive language of “zero tolerance,” I am more comfortable with theformulation of “zero indifference,” which means that injustice and poor treat-ment or targeting of others based on their identity will not be ignored butwill be responded to, both reactively and proactively, through formal andinformal strategies and policies.

Perspective Taking

In the children’s book Hey, Little Ant by Phil and Hannah Hoose,10 aboy threatens to squish an ant flat. The ant responds, pointing out similari-ties between her and the boy, and asking him to think carefully about his


decision. The ant asks, “If you were me and I were you, what would youwant me to do?” The illustration shows an enormous ant and a very smalland vulnerable little boy.

The story can be used to spark classroom discussions about perspectivetaking, decision making, peer pressure (the boy’s friends urge him to squishthe ant), as well as issues of other forms of mistreatment based on percep-tions and assumptions of inequality and lack of comparable worth. The boy’sline “I’m so big and you’re so small, I don’t think it will hurt at all” allowsan excellent entrée into discussions of the ways violence and oppression of-ten depend on the marginalization and devaluation of another group. Dis-cussing the book can lead to a critical examination of policy debates duringwhich Americans talk freely about how “those people don’t value human lifethe way we do.” Recent world events provide opportunities to discuss newperspectives. What makes someone our “enemy”? What makes someone“dangerous”? What can we tell by looking at someone? What can’t we tell?What happens when we act from a very limited perspective? What can welearn by reaching across perceived or putative borders of difference? Whatother sources of information might help us to understand multiple perspec-tives? Who controls access to information and whose interests are served bycensorship and limited access to broader views?11

Fostering Courage and Challenging Oppression

In order to work for social justice, everyone (students and adults alike)needs strategies for responding with courage to oppressive language andbehavior. Although some equate courage solely with rushing into a burn-ing building to rescue people, there are many courageous acts that are avail-able to us on a daily basis. The seven-year-old girl who tells the other childrenon the bus to stop teasing a classmate, the high school student who stepsforward to object to the ways in which the honor roll policy results in dis-crimination against particular students, the teacher who challenges a colleaguein the teachers’ lounge who is telling a racist joke—these are all vital examplesof courage.

Within inclusive classrooms where students have been sensitized to overtand subtle forms of oppression and discrimination, there are many oppor-tunities to discuss strategies and tactics for standing up for others and againstinjustice. Together we can explore these questions:

• When have you interrupted or challenged oppressive language or behavior aboutrace, gender, or disability?

• What are some circumstances in which you didn’t say or do anything?• What made you able to challenge the behavior? What stood in your way?• What can you do when you see someone excluded or targeted?12

• When you hear others speaking from a limited perspective, do you have strate-gies for broadening the discussion?


• What more would you need to know to recognize different forms of oppressionand to be an effective ally to someone experiencing racism? Homophobia? Anti-Semitism? Ableism? Classism?

Students in inclusive classrooms can learn to interrogate all aspects ofschool policy, curriculum, and teaching in order to make them fair, equitable,and accessible to all students. They might ask, for example, “What do weneed to do about our field trip tomorrow so that it’s physically accessible toall the kids in our class and so that money issues don’t keep anyone fromgoing?” Or they might ask, “How come we’re only learning about Chris-tian holidays when there are lots of other religions that we never hear aboutor celebrate?” Students can become both knowledgeable and skilled at chal-lenging oppression based on race, class, gender, ethnicity, language, sexualorientation, ability, size, and religion.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION

What would schools look like if there were state standards for socially justbehavior?

• All fourth graders will learn and display at least two strategies for interruptingoppressive humor and educating the joke teller about the issue in question (cour-age).

• All ninth graders will be able to explain multiple perspectives on Columbus Day,including explaining why the holiday is considered a day of mourning to manyNative Americans (perspective taking).

If our state standards included the above objectives, then the preparationof teachers would have to change as well. What would it mean for teachereducation to be conceptualized as preparing teachers for intentionally hetero-geneous classrooms? What skills, knowledge, and attitudes would educationneed to commit to this project?

Teachers would have to be explicitly taught strategies for includingmarginalized students, modifying instruction to include all students, andaccessing multiple sources of information in order to construct lessons thatincluded balanced perspectives. The social climate of the classroom—the waysstudents treat one another—would not be seen as an “add-on” to attend toif there is extra time, but rather as the key to successful pedagogy and re-sponsible education. If teachers were evaluated based on their students’ per-formance on different standards—standards of social justice—then perhapsteachers would be considered ill-prepared if they couldn’t actively addressracism, exclusion, and discrimination in their classrooms.

Inclusive thinking about inclusive schools means that we must describeand implement solutions that don’t further divide and separate us. Whenschools try to implement an antibullying program, a bilingual education


program, disability awareness, a multicultural education program, and a no-name-calling program without connecting these in integrated and coherentways, then both teachers and students feel fragmented and overburdened.We must reach for common solutions that address broad issues of diversity,school climate, culturally responsive pedagogy, and differentiated instructionso that those solutions cross categories and individuals.

In times of challenge to democratic structures as described in this bookand this chapter, the need for vigilance and commitment to inclusive school-ing has never been greater. We must create a world that is fit for us all andin which we all fit; to do any less is an assault on our spirits and our future.

— 13 —

Things to Come: Teachers’Work and the Broken Promisesof Urban School Reform in an

Age of High-Stakes TestingDENNIS CARLSON

H. G. Wells’s 1935 science fiction novel Things to Come is a story about theefforts by a group of managers, engineers, and scientists in the year 2059to usher in an age of progress through the application of scientific knowl-edge to every public problem—from sending a rocket to the moon to orga-nizing and running public institutions. While Wells was one of the greatchampions of the modernist vision of progress through science and engineer-ing, he also recognized the problems inherent in applying scientific manage-ment to the affairs of humans. Most people in the future have to work muchharder than they did before, and they have to give up their freedoms andsubmit to the authority of the managerial plan, like cogs in a wheel. As work-ers rise up against the management plan for progress, an anonymous workercries out: “What is all this progress? What is the good of progress? . . . Wemust measure and compute, we must collect and sort and count, we mustsacrifice ourselves. . . . What is it, this progress?”1 I think those are very goodquestions to ask, particularly about educational reform agendas that prom-ise progress in the “war” against chronic underachievement in urban schoolsserving youth marginalized by class and race or ethnicity. Too often,“progress” is brought about by more standardized testing, by reducing thecurriculum to a series of reified and fetishized “outcomes,” and by makingteachers conform to the managerial plan for school “productivity.” Further-more, it is largely false progress, progress in raising test scores through anaggressive policy of teaching to the test, progress that does not translate intomeaningful learning, progress that hides the fact that an increasing number


of urban youth are being disempowered and disenfranchised or, at best, pre-pared with the “basic skills” they need to enter the lower rungs of a grow-ing service sector economy.

A good example of the kind of progress offered by dominant reform dis-courses is the much-touted “Texas miracle.” As governor of Texas, GeorgeW. Bush contended that Texas’s methods of holding schools accountable forstudent performance had resulted in huge gains in passing rates on the TexasAssessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test and that the state was makingremarkable strides in eliminating the gap between white and minority chil-dren on the exam. When Bush became president, he brought with him toWashington as his new education secretary Houston’s superintendent, RodPaige. The No Child Left Behind Act, signed by President Bush in January2002, gives public schools twelve years to match Houston’s success in bring-ing virtually all young people to high levels of achievement. Now we arebeginning to learn more about how the Texas miracle was produced and,presumably, how it is to be replicated across the nation. A recent investiga-tion of Houston schools by The New York Times revealed a “rampant under-counting of school dropouts,” along with an overreporting of how manyhigh school graduates were college bound.2 Although 88 percent ofHouston’s student body is black and Latino/Latina, only a few hundredminority students leave high school “college ready,” that is, having the col-lege preparatory courses colleges are looking for in applicants. The Timesinvestigation also found that gains on the state’s high school proficiency examwere not transferable to other standardized exams of academic achievement.What this suggests is that teaching to the test in Houston has not producedmeaningful gains in achievement, only the illusion of progress. The Texasmiracle has been produced through a series of reforms that emphasize fre-quent rounds of student assessment, remediation, and retesting; a curricu-lum “aligned” with a particular standardized test; and assessment of teachersand principals on the basis of how effective they are in raising test scores.As any urban school teacher can attest, if it’s higher test scores they want,then it’s higher test scores they’ll get, even if it is through “drill ’em andskill ’em” approaches that are part of why there is a crisis of underachieve-ment in urban schools to begin with. If this is the kind of progress we canexpect elsewhere in America in the age of No Child Left Behind, it is clearthat progress has become part of the problem rather than the solution. Fi-nally, the Times investigation pointed to the fact that, whereas the state hasbilled its high school proficiency exam as setting high standards for students,it was widely acknowledged in the state that it was a “minimum skills” testthat was a ticket for minimum skills job.

It is my belief that those who remain committed to the democratic prom-ise of what public education could be will need to resist as much as possiblethe kinds of reforms associated with the Texas miracle. It is also my beliefthat teachers will be at the front lines in this resistance. In making the case

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that teachers’ interests lead them to resist the current waves of reform wash-ing over urban schools and, thus, to affirm (if only implicitly) a democraticvision of what public education could be, I realize that I am challengingmuch conventional wisdom in education. That conventional wisdom, evenamong many progressives, is that teachers’ self-interests stand in the way ofneeded change in education. From such a perspective, teachers’ self-inter-ests are positioned against public interests, student interests, communityinterests, and parent interests. Supposedly, teachers must put their own in-terests aside, or at least subordinate them, to make a principled commitmentto social justice for urban youth and to an education that empowers thosewho have been disempowered and silenced. While I do not mean to entirelyabandon the binary that positions self-interested action against principledactions, I do want to question and trouble it. For it may well be the casethat, in pursuing their own self-interests as educational workers in publicschools, teachers also work for social justice.3 By resisting reform agendasthat further rationalize their work, subordinate them to an elite managerialplan for educational productivity, and make them “teach to the test,” urbanschoolteachers also act in the interests of urban youth. Of course, teachers’critics do have a point. As long as teachers do not make the connection be-tween their own interests as educational workers and broader movements forthe democratization of public education and public life, that is, as long asthey adopt a “narrow” attitude toward their interests, they may not get farin effectively advancing those interests. For teachers to be cultural workers“siding” with marginalized youth, they will need to politicize their interestsmore than most currently do. That is to say, they will need to link their owninterests with the transformation of urban schooling as part of a broad-basedmovement for social and economic justice, and for the democratic renewalof public life and public education in America.

I want to contribute to such a politicization of teachers’ interests in whatfollows by exploring some of the ways they, along with their students, areadversely affected by a new wave of reform that is washing over the nation’surban schools. I organize my comments around a discussion of several in-fluential reports published in the 1990s that point in the direction of a newwave of urban school reform. These include two reports from the BrookingsInstitute, Making Schools Work (1994) and Fixing Urban Schools (1998), aswell as a report by the National Education Commission on Time and Learn-ing, Prisoners of Time (1994). The first two reports point in the directionof what I call the cost-effective school, while the latter points in the direc-tion of what I call the time-disciplined school. As I use them, the metaphorsof the cost-effective school and the time-disciplined school are primarilymeant to be overlapping categories of analysis, two aspects of a commonreform discourse that has some rather far-reaching implications for urbanschoolteachers and their students. The cost-effective school is guided by theprinciple of making do with less. In an age of a continuing and currently


exacerbated, fiscal crisis of the state, in which public institutions and servicesare being chronically underfunded, urban school leaders are under a gooddeal of pressure to adopt one variation or another of the cost-effective schoolmodel. The time-disciplined school is guided by the principle of effective timemanagement. Time wastage, along with insufficient time in the regular schoolday, is represented as the major impediment to raising achievement levels inurban schools.

CONSTRUCTING THE COST-EFFECTIVE SCHOOL

The fiscal crisis of the state, while hardly new, has entered a new and deep-ening phase over the past decade or so, and the effect has been a sustained,chronic underfunding of public education (in general) and a defunding ofmany programs targeted to the needs of socioeconomically marginalizedyouth—the legacy of the 1960s “War on Poverty.” In the early 1970s, JamesO’Connor, in his influential book The Fiscal Crisis of the State, argued thatthe modern state, heavily indebted to elite economic interests, is torn be-tween competing claims that it cannot effectively resolve.4 On the one hand,the state must provide essential social and health services, and educate fu-ture workers and citizens—all of which capitalism depends upon to estab-lish the conditions for higher worker productivity and increased profitmargins. On the other hand, the state is under pressure from elite economicinterests not to draw too much money out of circulation within the “free”market and not to waste money on “unproductive” expenditures that do notdirectly produce profit. The result is a tendency for state expenditures to risemore rapidly than the means of financing them. Powerful economic inter-ests pressure the state to cut taxes and further reduce state spending on es-sential social and educational services, and to make do with less. The fiscalcrisis of the state, O’Connor argued, is also fueled by middle- and working-class cynicism and distrust of government, because they believe it does notrepresent their interests or that public money gets wasted on special inter-est contracts and “boondoggle” projects. From such a perspective, votingagainst school levies or resisting increases in the state education budget is apolitical act. Indeed it is, although it is also a deeply contradictory politicalact of resistance by disgruntled American taxpayers that ends up hurting themin the long run.

In responding to the fiscal crisis of the state, policymakers are always look-ing for new “quick fixes,” new reform initiatives designed to paper-over theunderlying problem. Thus, the idea of the cost-effective school as a responseto fiscal crisis has evolved over the course of the past several decades. In the1980s, cost-effectiveness in education was linked to the privatization of publiceducation, bringing public schools under direct market controls and mak-ing them directly accountable to individual consumer parents through avoucher plan of some sort. This is the course laid out for school restructur-

Things to Come 177

ing in the 1990 Brookings Institute study by John Chubb and Terry Moe,Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. All voucher proposals to this datehave been based on a common underlying premise: With the privatizationof public education through vouchers, state support of public educationcould be cut rather dramatically. Parents would be expected to pick up muchof the direct cost of their children’s education, with state vouchers payingonly part of the cost, or the cost of an entry-level education with no frills.This approach to managing the fiscal crisis of the state, and making publicschools “productive” in the sense of generating a profit, is still very much apossibility in the years just ahead, and already public education is moving inthe direction of privatization. In a number of American cities, public char-ter schools are now run by businesses, for a profit, including most notablythe Edison School Company. But conservatives have faced roadblocks in theirefforts to privatize the schools, with teacher resistance perhaps the numberone roadblock. The National Education Association (NEA) in particular hasmade it a priority to block voucher plans wherever they crop up, and it hasbeen quite effective in this regard. Courts have also begun to put roadblocksin the path of privatization.

By the mid-1990s, a subtle shift was occurring in the conservative dis-course on school restructuring toward an acceptance of the fact that publicschools may be here for some time. The shift was toward a more pragmaticstance, finding ways to make public schools more cost-effective in an age ofdeclining state aid. This is the tone set by the 1994 Brookings Institute re-port Making Schools Work: Improving Performance and Controlling Costs,authored by Eric Hanushek and a team of economists at the Institute. Thereport begins with the assertion that “a fiscal crisis looms for America’sschools.” As student populations are on the rise, and as per-pupil spendingis not keeping pace with this rise, the public is becoming more disappointedin their schools. Consequently, “taxpayers may well resist future expenditureincreases with unprecedented insistence” in the years just ahead.5 This means,according to the report, that the efficient use of resources needs to receivemore attention as an indicator of whether a school is “working.”

This is where teachers come in. A major recommendation of the reportis that ways be found of lowering the labor costs in public education. Thelargest single component of the educational budget is teacher salaries, thereport notes, so this is the logical place to cut costs. For this reason, callsfor “smaller classes and commensurately more teachers” must be rejected,for they would raise labor costs dramatically when labor costs need to be cutfurther.6 But how can labor costs be cut further? The report suggests thatthe best way to tackle labor costs in education is to introduce some versionof a two-tier teaching system, with a relatively small group of teachers at thetop overseeing or working with a large group of paraprofessionals and teacherassistants. Class sizes could be increased because “studies show that reduc-ing class size usually has no general effect on student performance.”7 Larger


classes, in turn, are to be made possible through more use of new computertechnologies. The report notes: “Computers can replace teachers in certaintasks, such as drill-and-practice activities.” Furthermore, “television and ra-dio broadcasts, combined with correspondence materials, can provide high-quality education at relatively low costs.”8 The clear implication here is thata “virtual school” could even be established, with students communicatingwith teachers via class websites and chat rooms, and with instructional vid-eos downloaded for personal viewing. This is very close to becoming a real-ity. In Cincinnati, Ohio, for example, the school district has recentlyestablished a virtual high school in which students can do almost everythingonline, either from home computers or in school district computer centers.Because the curriculum is primarily a series of self-guiding instructional pro-grams, it requires little direct interaction between students and teachers.Correspondingly, more use can be made of part-time teacher aides and in-structional assistants.

The other major recommendation of the report that speaks directly toteachers’ work has to do with the concepts of “performance measurement”and “value added.” In effect, this means evaluating and rewarding teachers(along with principals) according to how much they can raise student testscores over the course of a term or a year, given the group of students theyare assigned. “Schools and teachers,” the report recommends, “should beheld responsible only for factors under their control and rewarded for whatthey contribute to the educational process, that is, the value they add to stu-dent performance.”9 This translates into keeping meticulous and detailedrecords on student skill levels and rewarding or punishing teachers accord-ing to an individual value-added index. All of this requires, the report con-cludes, a sophisticated management information system (MIS) that is ableto “identity the sources of poor performance.”10 In many states and urbanschool districts across America, such systems have been constructed veryrapidly over the past decade. For example, in Ohio, the Department of Edu-cation website recently included an article on “Improving Education withBusiness Intelligence,” which noted that a parent could have one-click ac-cess to how much each school district in the state spends per pupil each year,student attendance rates, enrollment figures, graduation rates, and proficiencytest results. Another click gives the parent access to individual school data.The MIS is represented in the essay as a “tool” for parents that can be usedin holding local school officials accountable and as a tool school adminis-trators can use to make important decisions and answer important questions,such as: “Why do students read better at this school? Why do they keep drop-ping out at that school?” Quick and easy access to MIS information prom-ises to let us “get to the bottom” of such troubling questions. Withinindividual school districts, MIS systems are now being used to compare in-dividual teachers and administrators as well on a value-added criterion, and

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in some charter schools, teacher pay is already directly linked to a value-addedcalculus.

All of this, the report concludes, will mean taking on the power of teacherunions to block change. Among other things, the union movement will needto endorse more performance incentives and merit pay systems and largelyabandon the idea of tenure for teachers entering the system. According tothe report, it is important that teachers already in the system who have beenteaching for some time are not held to the same expectations as enteringteachers “to avoid alienating them and losing the enthusiastic participationthat is crucial to success in incentive-based systems.”11 New teachers are likelyto be more receptive to these changes because they will not regard the newpolicies as “violations of past understandings or intrusions on their accus-tomed routine.”12 This is another way of saying that if teachers do not getused to certain contract rights and the academic freedom and security af-forded by tenure, they will not miss them. It also suggests a pragmatic strat-egy of winning the support of senior teachers currently in the system byexempting them, at least partially, from the new rules of the game. This alsomakes it easier for teacher union leadership to endorse merit pay systems.

The heading charted-out in Making Schools Work was extended and ap-plied more particularly to schools serving socioeconomically disadvantagedstudents in the 1998 Brookings Institute report Fixing Urban Schools. Thereport argued that the crisis of underachievement in urban schools could bestbe addressed by “an imposition of standards” that would “establish clearexpectations about what students are to be taught and learn, setting hightargets for student performance.” The establishment of such standards wouldallow for the construction of an aligned system of tests, curricula, teachertraining, and teaching materials that, in turn, “would attach real conse-quences to test results for schools, students, and individual teachers alike.”13

What is advocated here is an even more central role for state proficiency test-ing in determining every aspect of what goes on in urban schools. All of thiswill require, the report argues, relying more on “experts” to make impor-tant decisions in education, an expertise urban principals and teachers on theirown supposedly lack, particularly in the realm of “devising improvementplans and assessing their own progress.”14 As for school principals, their roleis to exert “strong and authoritative leadership” in support of school plansfor increased productivity and avoid anything that compromises or divertsresources from the school plan.”15 This smacks very much of a new versionof scientific management in the public schools, tied (as scientific manage-ment was in the early twentieth century) to “the bottom line.” What is newis that scientific management and the “cult of efficiency” in education (asRaymond Callahan described it) now have far more sophisticated “machines”at their disposal—foremost among them standardized testing and manage-ment information systems.16 The result is still the same, however. That is,


the reduction of public education to the cost-effective production of eco-nomically utilitarian, standardized learning outcomes, and the treatment ofprincipals, teachers, and students as workers subordinated to the “plan.”

That management plan, the report indicates, might best be developed aspart of a school reorganization model adopted and implemented in eachschool. This is what the report calls “design-based” reform, based on thepresumption that when a school uses a defined and consistent approach toinstruction, teachers, parents, and students “will fully understand what theschool promises and what is required of them.”17 While the report empha-sizes the importance of each school choosing its own reorganization model,it is quite clear that only models that reduce learning to standardized andobjectified learning outcomes, and more particularly those standardized andobjectified learning outcomes identified on state proficiency tests, stand muchof a chance of competing for state funds to support reorganization. Further-more, once teachers (often under pressure) vote to “buy into” a school re-organization model (to take “ownership,” to use the language of reformers),they also buy into extra meetings and committees, more teacher and studentassessment, and other extra responsibilities that would under normal condi-tions represent a violation of the teacher union contract. So school reorga-nization models are, from a managerial standpoint, a way of getting moreout of teachers and for moving around contract language that protects teach-ers.

One such “design-based” school reorganization model increasingly influ-ential in urban school districts in America is sponsored by the Baldrige Foun-dation, established by Malcolm Baldrige, to promote increased productivityin American industry and public health, education, and welfare institutions.18

Note, first of all, that the Baldrige Foundation proposes that the same basicmodel of reorganization that works in industry can work in public educa-tion. Indeed, under the current Bush administration, the Baldrige plan forreorganization has been promoted by both the Department of Commerceand the Department of Education (DOE). Currently, the DOE is oversee-ing a $15 million pilot project in public schools in six states to see whetherthe “Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence” can be used to raiseachievement levels in schools with chronically low aggregate achievementlevels, which translate into primarily urban but also some rural schools. TheBill Gates Foundation also has put money into this project. The bottom linein Baldrige schools is “progress,” defined as rising test scores. Thefoundation’s website asks interested educational leaders to ask themselves:“Do you believe you have been making progress but want to accelerate orbetter focus your efforts? Try using our simple questionnaire Are We Mak-ing Progress?”

Progress is something that supposedly can be graphed, as a steady lineleading upward, toward higher and higher test scores. Not surprisingly, per-haps, the Baldrige plan involves much use of computer-generated graphs,

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graphs that plot individual teachers’ performance over the course of a yearor a term, graphs that compare teachers with other teachers (and thus en-courage competition among teachers for the highest gains), and graphs thatplot each individual child’s progress in designated skill levels, based on vari-ous cycles of standardized testing. The plan involves more work on the partof teachers, because they had to put much more data into computers, runanalyses on data, and print-out graphs both for students and to documenttheir own effectiveness in raising test scores. Interestingly, the NEA has en-dorsed this pilot project in school reorganization because it does “protect”teachers in a strange way. As long as teachers keep meticulous computerrecords on every child’s skill levels at the beginning of the year, and thenengage in “short cycle assessment,” that is, testing again and again at regu-lar intervals and again keeping records of each child’s progress in each skillarea, they are supposedly protected from the capricious judgments of admin-istrators. The data “speaks for itself,” and as long as teachers can prove that,given the students they were assigned, they were able to significantly raiseachievement levels, then it is difficult for an administrator to act capriciouslyand negatively evaluate teachers they do not like for one reason or another.If teachers are being protected through such a management informationsystem, however, it is a protection that comes at a substantial cost of increasedwork load, and, more importantly perhaps, it comes at the cost of reducingone’s craft, one’s profession, one’s calling to that of a technically proficientmanager of an instructional process.

THE TIME-DISCIPLINED SCHOOL

One of the cornerstones in constructing the cost-effective school is thedevelopment of more cost-effective approaches to time management, withtime understood as one variable influencing educational productivity. Thus,in education, there is a long tradition of research based on the premise thatthe best way to raise student achievement levels is to increase “time on task.”Time in this sense is made productive, and its organization and disciplinedscheduling impacts on teachers’ work in a number of ways.19 Like the ideaof the cost-effective school, the idea of the time-disciplined school also hasa long history. E. P. Thompson, the British historian of the working class,in a now-classic essay on “time discipline and industrial capitalism,” docu-mented how schools for working class youth during the industrial revolu-tion in England were designed to teach them time discipline, the kind of timediscipline that prevailed in the factories.20 In factories, all the machines werestarted up at the same time each morning, and they all stopped at the sametime to allow workers breaks and to change shifts. Everything was depen-dent upon a minute-by-minute scheduling of production, including the syn-chronization of different chains of production so that everything cametogether at the right time. If workers were not at their stations on time, the


entire production process often had to be shut down and then restarted. Yetearly workers, raised according to a more cyclical and agrarian conceptionof time, were resistant to becoming slaves to the clock. Consequently, tar-diness among workers was common, as was skipping entire days of work ata whim. Early schools thus, at least partially, were institutions designed tosocialize young people into dominant regimes of time management and dis-cipline, and this continues to be the case.

But time management and time discipline in education extends far beyondthis “hidden curriculum” of schooling. It impinges, as I have already said,into the realm of deciding how time in the school day can be more effec-tively managed to increase achievement levels. As Andy Hargreaves has ob-served, within a technical-rational discourse, “time . . . is an objective variable,an instrumental, organizational condition that can be managerially manipu-lated in order to foster the implementation of educational change.”21 In the1990s, the most important and influential commission report to explicitlyadvance a time-disciplined reform agenda in public education was Prisonersof Time, the 1994 report of the National Education Commission on Timeand Learning. That commission, established under the first Bush adminis-tration in 1991, was composed of a select group of school board members,superintendents, and principals, along with representatives of The BusinessRoundtable and the Hudson Institute—both major neoconservative thinktanks in education. According to the report, a major reason for the failureof school reforms to effectively raise achievement levels is that public schoolsare currently “prisoners” of an obsolete and outmoded conception of timetied to a fixed and rigidly scheduled school day of approximately 6 hoursand a school year of approximately 180 days, more appropriate for an in-dustrial than a postindustrial age. This helps explain the phenomenon ofteachers, as time runs out on then, “cramming large portions of requiredmaterial into a fraction of the time intended for it.”22 The clock rules in theschool, yet, according to the report, the typical school clock divides up timewith little attention paid to what subject areas or curricular topics are of mostworth—the so-called “core academic subjects” of math, science, social stud-ies, and literacy that are assessed on state proficiency tests. In effect, the re-port suggests that existing time in the school day is not organized in acost-effective manner. Finally, the report notes that all students are differ-ent, and some need longer to master the basic skills assessed on state tests.The existing schedule fails to acknowledge this different time needs of stu-dents.

Many progressives, I suspect, might agree with much of this assessmentof the situation in public schools, that “time is learning’s warden” and thatpublic educators have allowed themselves to become prisoners of time. Butthe response suggested here is not consistent with the liberation of those whohave been kept prisoners of time in public schools, including in particularteachers and students. Such a liberation would return control of time to

Things to Come 183

teachers and students, within certain broad parameters. The response sug-gested here is rather consistent with a new managerial discourse. It calls forthe replacement of an “outmoded” industrial conception of time with a moreflexible, individualized, focused use of time as a resource in educational pro-ductivity, a use of time more consistent with postindustrial organizations andbusinesses. And just what does the new corporate discourse on time man-agement imply for the restructuring of public schools, and particularly ur-ban schools?—for once again, these cost-effective reform discourses arehaving the greatest impact there.

The report’s first recommendation is that schools eliminate the use of“academic time” (regular school hours time) for “non-academic” purposesduring the regular school day. According to the report, non-academic pur-poses are all activities and classes not directly related to the “common coreall students should master,” which includes English and language arts, math-ematics, science, civics, history, geography, the arts, and foreign language.Everything else is to be relegated to the realm of the extracurricular, some-thing that can be offered through school clubs and activities after the regu-lar school day. This includes physical education, family life education, bandand orchestra, yearbook and school newspaper classes, classes and programsfor unwed teenage mothers, and driver’s education. It also means the pos-sible elimination of music, art, and physical education teachers (the so-called“specials”) at the elementary level. There certainly is some good sense tothe idea that the school day should not be cluttered with a lot of classes andprograms in which students are not learning much and in which the curricu-lum is not challenging. On the other hand, many of these “non-academic”classes play an important role in motivating young people, in helping themcontribute to their communities and engage in dialogue and common ac-tivity with other young people. Many of these “non-academic” classes are“safe spaces” where youth marginalized by class, race, and other markers ofdifference can engage in the kind of work that leads to self-affirming iden-tities.23 So the piece-by-piece elimination of such spaces over the past de-cade is a serious cause for alarm and one that impacts dramatically on urbanschools.

What else constitutes “non-academic” purposes that need to be eliminatedfrom the school day? According to the report, core academic learning is beingsacrificed to make room for “education about personal safely, consumer af-fairs, AIDS, conservation and energy, family life, [and] driver’s training”24

Now, this is an interesting grouping of topics, and to relegate them to therealm of the “non-academic,” as if they were not central to the school’smission of teaching core academic subjects, is political. What gets valued as“academic” is instruction that is directly related to the skill needs of a “worldclass” work force that can compete with Japan and Germany, skill needs thatsupposedly can be and should be measured by more standardized testing ona more regular basis. Everything else is jettisoned from the schedule. In


response to such reform agendas, which are being pushed with increasingregularity by state officials these days, I think progressives will need to rup-ture or “trouble” the borders that separate the academic from the non-aca-demic more than erect them ever higher. Popular culture, for example, playsan increasingly central role in youth identity formation, and discussion oruse of popular culture—for example, hip hop culture and rap music—needsto be part of the curriculum. Yet, efforts to do so are currently stymied byreform efforts designed to erect more rigid borders between the academicand the non-academic.

A second major recommendation of Prisoners of Time has to do with ex-panding the role of the public school as a site for the supervision and sur-veillance of youth. The report observes that in many communities,particularly in “troubled” urban environments, children are growing up“without the family and community support” they need to do well in school.The crisis of childcare, the report says, “can no longer be ignored.” Finally,schools in high-poverty urban communities are increasingly being called uponto offer a wide variety of services—“immunizations, health screening, nu-trition, and mental health, among other things”—and unless they stay openlonger, and on a year-round basis, they cannot meet these needs.25 This toomakes some sense from a progressive standpoint. Rather than assuming a lessimportant role, public schools need to assume a more important role as com-munity centers, as sites in which a wide array of services and activities aregoing on, year-round and all day. School needs to be a much more “open”institution in this regard. But when this recommendation to expand the roleof public schools in “troubled” urban neighborhoods is articulated within aconservative reform discourse, as it is in Prisoners of Time, it becomes partof a movement to bring the growing urban underclass under a more com-plete, around-the-clock surveillance.

A third set of recommendations in Prisoners of Time has to do specificallywith the inefficient use of teachers’ time. According to the report, too muchof teachers’ time is spent actually in front of classes, teaching. Teachers’ timeis also needed to devise individualized instructional plans, assess and reas-sess students, and generally plan and monitor the instructional process. Theyneed time to meet with other teachers on committees, time to meet withparents, and time for professional development. Teachers need to be treatedlike professionals, the report concludes, and this means making a more effi-cient use of their time and talents. The report points to Germany and Japanas examples of nations that make more efficient use of teachers’ time. Teacherpreparation takes up to six years in these nations, and there are rigorousexaminations prior to certification. Furthermore, Japanese teachers may havelarger classes (thirty-five to forty students, compared with an average oftwenty-three in the United States), but they typically are only in front of theclass in an instructional role only four hours per day. Time spent outside theclassroom involves meetings to plan and evaluate students along with staff

Things to Come 185

development. Similarly, in Germany, teachers are in front of classes only abouttwenty-one hours a week.26 All of this sounds very appealing and consistentwith what progressives have been calling for. But there is a catch. Like Mak-ing Schools Work, Prisoners of Time endorses the idea of a two-tiered teach-ing force, with a top tier professionalized, and a large pool of full-time,permanent substitute teachers to fill in where and when needed. Teacherprofessionalism thus remains a contradictory goal, particularly given thecontinuation of currently dominant reform agendas. Progressives, in orderto advance a more democratic and empowering discourse of teacher profes-sionalism, will need to ensure that the professionalism of some teachers isnot build on the deprofessionalization of others.

CONCLUSION

In the discourse on school reform, it is often said that reform has comein waves. Thus, a first wave of reform is associated with top-down modelsof accountability and higher standards, a second wave is associated with site-based management and free market models, and now a third wave is linkedto cost-effective school reorganization models and “high-stakes” testing.Implicitly or explicitly, the metaphor of reform as a wave washing over pub-lic schools conjures up images of a hurricane, or even a tsunami, sweepingover a landscape and clearing everything in its path. In this case, urbanschools, and the teachers, students, and administrators working in urbanschools serving the socioeconomically marginalized, have been hardest hitby dominant discourses of reform and restructuring. The sad truth is thatas long as reforms continue to be framed within a corporate managerial andbureaucratic state discourse of cost-effectiveness, they will not serve to em-power urban teachers or transform urban schools to make them serve demo-cratic, social justice projects. They may not even be very effective in raisingachievement levels on standardized tests, for they further alienate teachersand students.

Consequently, the point is not merely to defend public schools as theycurrently exist, or even as they supposedly existed in some romanticized pro-gressive past. Public schools have been heavily influenced throughout the pasthundred years by elite bureaucratic and corporate management discoursesof reform, and they have been heavily involved (often against the best in-tentions of teachers and other public educators) in the reproduction of class,race, gender, and other inequalities. It is the idea and the promise of demo-cratic public education rather than the dominant practice of public educa-tion that is worth defending and preserving. In fact, in order to effectivelyrespond to the crisis of underachievement and high dropout rates in urbanschools, along with teacher burn-out and alienation, progressives will haveto unmake much of the “progress” that has been made over the past twodecades in the way of transforming urban schools into cost-effective, “skill


’em and drill ’em” factories. At the same time, progressive teachers and othereducators will need to do more than resist current reform models, or evenundo the damage they have done. They must ultimately affirm a differentvision of progress in public education and public life.

Let me conclude by pointing toward that vision, and toward various ele-ments of a possible democratic counterdiscourse of reform in urban educa-tion. The most immediate and pragmatic response among progressives maywell be a politics of individual and collective resistance to cost-effective formsof school restructuring. This already is taking the form of efforts by teacherunions to “hold the line” on the intensification of teachers’ working day. Forexample, teacher unions may resist extra before- and after-school meetings,and they may demand that teachers be given time in their work day to com-plete all the new forms, process all the data on student skill levels, and as-sess individual student skill levels. This kind of labor union resistance is thefrontline of defense at this point in defending public schools against addi-tional waves of corporate state reform. This kind of pragmatic labor contractresistance needs to be augmented by a more proactive and politicized resis-tance to high-stakes testing, bringing together teachers, parents, and otherconcerned citizens, along with civil rights groups, in statewide and nationalmovements. Such movements are beginning to coalesce in many states, andthey have been associated with some organized refusals to take state-man-dated proficiency tests. Teachers have an important role to play in suchmovements, as interested “insiders” aligned in solidarity with those studentsdisempowered and effectively disenfranchised by high-stakes testing.

Beyond a politics of resistance and opposition, teachers will need to beinvolved in helping forge a progressive counterdiscourse of democratic edu-cational renewal. Teachers have, since the 1970s, been effective through theirPolitical Action Committees (PACs) in advancing a political agenda of sorts,and one decidedly progressive. Teachers have worked for a more multiculturaland inclusive curriculum, for more programs to help those young peoplestruggling with the effects of poverty and discrimination, for the rights ofteachers to academic freedom, for the rights of gay and lesbian teachers andstudents, and so on. They have been among the most active fighters for theidea of public education in the face of a conservative discourse of privatizationand the market. Teachers are on record, on most social issues, in ways thatalign their interests with a progressive cultural politics in America and withsocial justice concerns. At the same time, it must be noted that a coherentalternative to existing educational policy has to this point not emerged, atleast not in any forceful or coherent manner. This is a testimony to just howhegemonic the current reform discourse is in public education. By hege-monic, I mean so taken for granted, so much part of people’s commonsenseunderstanding of things, so pervasive, and so powerful that it is difficult to“unthink.” Both Republican and Democratic administrations over the pasttwo decades have “thought” educational policy and constructed responses

Things to Come 187

to the crisis of underachievement in urban schools according to the common-sense metaphors of cost-effectiveness, standards, accountability, educationalproductivity, excellence, time on task, and the “bottom line.” As long as thesemetaphors and constructs continue to govern the production of truth aboutthe nation’s schools, it makes relatively little difference whether schools areprivatized or run by a cost-effective state. Furthermore, as long as the fiscalcrisis of the modern state is not addressed, within the context of a recom-mitment to supporting democratic public education and public life, thenpublic education cannot begin to fulfill its democratic promise.

What is needed, then, is a new discourse of educational renewal that isbased on a commitment to keep the promises of public education.27 Thepromise of democratic education and public life in America has been sub-verted over the past century and continues to be. But it nevertheless pro-vides some scaffolding for constructing a new democratic discourse ofeducational renewal. That promise, projected upon a new cultural landscape,is about bringing people together across their differences in ways that do noterase difference but that engage them in a collective dialogue. It is aboutproviding opportunities for individuals and groups to engage in the creativeproduction of meaning and to contribute in diverse ways to public life. Andit is also about freeing and, thus, also empowering individuals to develop theirfuller potentials as human beings, regardless of their class, race and ethnicity,gender, sexual orientation, religion, language, or other markers of difference.This multifaceted promise should apply to teachers as much as it does to theirstudents. For the fates of both urban schoolteachers and their students his-torically have been closely intertwined. As both have been made victims ofrecent waves of state-sponsored reform, both must be empowered in orderto effectively respond to the “crisis of underachievement.”

Notes

GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

1. Portions of this section draw upon E. Wayne Ross, “Remaking the Social StudiesCurriculum,” in The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities,rev. ed., ed. E. Wayne Ross (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).

2. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 873. Robert W. McChesney, introduction to Profit over People: Neoliberalism and

Global Order, by Noam Chomsky (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1988).4. Madison quoted in Chomsky, Profits over People, p. 47.5. For an explication of these issues see Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky,

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pan-theon, 1988).

6. Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda(New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997).

7. A. A. Lispcom and A. Ellery, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 16(Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903), p. 96.

8. Dewey quoted in Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare (Vancouver: New Star Books,1997).

INTRODUCTION

1. Elizabeth K. Minnich, “The American Tradition of Aspirational Democracy,”in Education and Democracy: Reimagining Liberal Learning in America (New York:College Entrance Examination Board, 1997), pp. 175–205.

2. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1916).

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190 Notes

3. Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 87.4. Kerry T. Burch, Eros as the Educational Principle of Democracy (New York:

Peter Lang, 2000), p. 182.5. Jim Garrison, Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching (New

York: Teachers College Press, 1997), pp. 14–15.6. Judith M. Green, Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transforma-

tion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. ix.7. Green, Deep Democracy, p. vi.8. James G. Henderson and Kathleen R. Kesson, Curriculum Wisdom: Educa-

tional Decisions in Democratic Societies (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice-Hall, 2004).

9. Quoted in Green, Deep Democracy, p. 198.10. See Benjamin Barber’s A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democ-

racy Strong (New York, Hill and Wang, 1998), for a discussion of “weak” and“strong” democracy.

11. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, andSteven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in Ameri-can Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).

12. Green, Deep Democracy, p. 199.13. Ibid., p. 93.14. Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons from America from a Small

School in Harlem (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), p. 4.15. Herbert Kohl, I Won’t Learn From You and Other Thoughts on Creative Mal-

adjustment (New York: The Free Press, 1994), p. 145.16. David T. Hansen,The Call to Teach (New York: Teachers College Press,

1995), p. 140.17. Ibid.18. Green, Deep Democracy, p. 77.19. Hansen, The Call to Teach, p. 133.20. Green, Deep Democracy, pp. 140–41.21. Ibid., p. xiv.22. George S. Counts, Dare the School Build a New Social Order? (New York:

The John Day Co., 1932).

CHAPTER 1

1. Maxine Greene, “Learning to Come Alive,” in Letters to the Next President:What We Can Do about the Real Crisis in Public Education, ed. Carl Glickman (NewYork, Teachers College Press, 2004), p. 230.

2. Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire, Candide (London: Penguin Press, 1990).3. Samuel Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1999), p. 243.4. Andrew A. Abbott, “The Zen of Education,” University of Chicago Maga-

zine 96, no.1 (2003), pp. 52–58.5. Joseph J. Schwab, Science, Curriculum, and Liberal Education: Selected Es-

says, ed. I. Westbury and N. J. Wilkof (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,1978).

Notes 191

6. Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. M. Chase (Cambridge, MA:The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002).

7. Cleo Cherryholmes, Reading Pragmatism (New York: Teachers College Press,1999).

8. John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (1939; reprint, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus,1989).

9. Jim G. Henderson and Kathleen R. Kesson, Curriculum Wisdom: EducationalDecisions in Democratic Societies (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/Prentice Hall,2004).

10. Schwab, Science, Curriculum, and Liberal Education, p. 323.

CHAPTER 2

1. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Beyond the ‘Real’ World or Why Black Radicals Needto Wake Up and Start Dreaming,” Souls 4, no. 2 (2002), pp. 51–64.

2. Lillian Weber, “Reexaminations: What Is the Teacher and What Is Teaching?”in To Become a Teacher, ed. William Ayers (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995),p. 133.

3. The faculty in School of Education at Long Island University, Brooklyn, hasdeveloped teacher education programs that focus on the attitudes and skills neededin urban classrooms. One of the major threads in those programs is inquiry/teacherresearch. In the undergraduate program, this thread consists of one specific course,Observing and Describing Children, and opportunities threaded through the restof the program to use the skills learned in this class. In the graduate programs, theinquiry thread consists of at least two courses, Classroom Inquiry I and ClassroomInquiry II. In the first course, students learn the basics of observing and describingusing the format of the Descriptive Review (described later in the chapter). In thesecond course, students use observing and describing to inquire into an aspect oftheir teaching practice. In some of our programs, students take a final inquiry classin which they continue their classroom inquiry and publish it informally.

4. Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle, Inside Outside: Teacher Research andKnowledge (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), p. 30.

5. Descriptive Inquiry is a set of processes that has its roots in phenomenologyand the work of Patricia Carini and the Prospect Center in North Bennington, Ver-mont. Two references are From another Angle: Children’s Strengths and School Stan-dards, ed. Margaret Himley and Patricia Carini (New York: Teachers College Press,2000) and Prospect Center, Prospect Descriptive Processes (North Bennington, VT:The Prospect Center and Archive, 2002).

6. Cochran-Smith and Lytle, Inside Outside, p. 23.7. These points are described in an unpublished essay by Cecelia Traugh, “Liv-

ing the Questions.”8. Several of these points were generated at the fall 2002 meeting of the Teacher

Educators’ Forum on Descriptive Inquiry.9. Jeannette was in our first cadre of students in our new undergraduate pro-

gram. She is of Puerto Rican descent, bilingual, and a mother of two in her forties.10. The Descriptive Review of the Child is a format that includes five headings:

Physical Presence and Gesture, Disposition and Temperament, Relationships with

192 Notes

Others, Abiding Interests, and Modes of Thinking and Learning. The process andthe philosophy and assumptions underlying it are fully described in From anotherAngle.

11. Journal entry, September 11, 2000.12. Descriptive Review, December 2000.13. Ibid., April 15, 2002.14. Ibid., April 15, 2002.15. Terri is an African American special education teacher who works in a pre-K

through eighth grade school in Brooklyn. She has ten students in her class, a 12:1:1class of children between the ages of five and eight.

16. Classroom Study, December 2003.17. The Classroom Study was written in December 2002.18. Kathleen Kesson, “Alienated Labor and the Quality of Teacher’s Lives: How

Teachers in Low-Performing Schools Experience Their Work” (paper presented atthe annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, April2003).

19. Kelley, “Beyond the ‘Real’ World,” p. 62.20. Ibid., p. 63.

CHAPTER 3

1. John Dewey, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of ReflectiveThinking to the Educative Process (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1933), p. 76.

2. See Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot,The Good High School: Portraits of Characterand Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Richard Elmore and Milbrey W.McLaughlin, Steady Work: Policy, Practice and the Reform of American Education(Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1988). See also National Commission on Teach-ing and America’s Future. What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future. Re-port of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (New York,NY: 1996), p. 76–7.

3. James Calderhead, “Teaching as a ‘Professional’, Thinking Activity,” in Ex-ploring Teachers’ Thinking, ed. James Calderhead (London: Cassell Educational Lim-ited, 1987), pp. 17–19.

4. Lee S. Shulman, “Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching,”Educational Research 15 (February 1986), pp. 4–14. See also R. Freeman Butts, “ARejoinder to Tozer’s Draft Position Paper,” Educational Foundations (fall 1993),p. 30.

5. Maxine Greene, “The Professional Significance of History of Education,” inFoundation Studies in Education: Justifications and New Directions, ed. MargaretGillett and John A. Laska (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1973), p. 184.See also Paul C. Violas, “The Role of History in the Education of Teachers,” TeachersCollege Record 91, no. 3 (spring 1990), p. 379.

6. Sonia E. Murrow, “Learning from Recurring Debates in Education: TeacherEducation Students Explore Historical Case Studies,” forthcoming in EducationalStudies.

7. Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action(New York: Basic Books, 1983).

8. Ibid., 17.

Notes 193

9. Violas, “The Role of History in the Education of Teachers,” p. 379.10. Merle L. Borrowman,The Liberal and the Technical in Teacher Education: A

Historical Survey of American Thought (New York: Teachers College, ColumbiaUniversity, 1956).

11. Donald Warren, “Learning from Experience: History and Teacher Education,”Educational Researcher 14, no. 10 (December 1985), p. 11.

12. Eric Foner, The New American History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,1990), p. xi.

13. Samuel Wineburg, “Historical Problem Solving: A Study of the CognitiveProcesses Used in the Evaluation of Documentary and Pictorial Evidence,” Journalof Educational Psychology 83, no. 1 (1991), pp. 73–87.

14. Violas, “The Role of History in the Education of Teachers,” pp. 370–81.15. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the Ameri-

can Historical Profession (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Seealso Stephen Vaugh, ed., The Vital Past: Writings on the Uses of History (Athens, GA:The University of Georgia Press, 1985).

16. From Thomas Bender, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in Ameri-can History,” Journal of American History 73, no. 1 (1986/87), p.122. The quoteis from Alfred Kazin’s An American Procession (New York: Random House, 1984),p. 281.

17. Vaugh, ed., The Vital Past, p. 8. See also Peter Seixas, “Students’ Understand-ings of Historical Significance,” Theory and Research in Social Education 23, no.3, (1994), p. 293; and Suzanne M. Wilson and Samuel Wineburg, “Peering at His-tory through Different Lenses: The Role of Disciplinary Perspectives in TeachingHistory,” Teachers College Record 89, no. 4 (summer 1988), p. 557.

18. Vaugh, ed., The Vital Past, p. 5.19. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychol-

ogy (New York: Holt, 1922), p. 21.20. Philip H. Phenix, Realms of Meaning: A Philosophy of the Curriculum for

General Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 235–40.21. Jergen Herbst, And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization

in American Culture (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1989), p. 144.22. Herbst, And Sadly Teach, p. 113.23. Arthur G. Powell, The Uncertain Profession: Harvard and the Search for Edu-

cational Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 99; andGeraldine Joncich Clifford and James W. Gutherie, Ed School: A Brief for ProfessionalEducation (Chicago: Universitiy of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 75.

24. Katz, “From Theory to Survey in Graduate Schools of Education,” p. 328.25. Lawrence Cremin, David Shannon, and Mary Towsend, A History of Teach-

ers College Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), p.151.

26. See Steve Tozer and Stuart McAninch, “Social Foundations of Education inHistorical Perspective,” Educational Foundations I (1986), p. 17; and Archibald W.Anderson, Kenneth D. Benne. B. Othanel Smith, and William O. Stanley, eds., So-cial Foundations of Education (New York: The Dryden Press, Inc., 1956); and S.Tozer and S. A. McAninch, “Social Foundations of Education in Historical Perspec-tive,” Educational Foundations I (1986), pp. 8–32; and Steve Tozer, “Toward a New

194 Notes

Consensus among Social Foundations Educators: Draft Position Paper of the Ameri-can Education Studies Committee on Academic Standards and Accreditation,”Educational Foundations 7 (1993), pp. 5–21.

27. R. Freeman Butts, In the First Person Singular: The Foundations of Educa-tion (San Francisco: Caddo Gap Press, 1993), p. 23.

28. See also Cremin, Shannon, and Towsend, A History of Teachers College Co-lumbia University, p. 217.

29. Ibid., p. 118.30. Ibid., p. 90.31. Ibid., p. 91.32. Ibid., p. 28.33. Ibid., p. 30.34. Ibid., p. 31.35. Vaugh, ed., The Vital Past, p. 5.36. Ibid., p. 34.37. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1938).38. Ibid., p. 44.39. Murrow, “Learning from Recurring Debates in Education.”40. Marsha Levine, “Educating Teachers for Restructured Schools,” in The

Teacher Educator’s Handbook: Building a Knowledge Base for the Preparation ofTeachers, ed. Frank B. Murray (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), p. 620.

CHAPTER 4

1. J. Hiebert & J. Stigler, The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World’s Teach-ers for Improving Education in the Classroom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).

2. P. Phenix, Realms of Meaning: A Philosophy of the Curriculum for GeneralEducation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

3. D. Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform (New York: Simon& Schuster, 2000).

4. L. A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in AmericanEducation 1876-1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).

5. D. Henriques, “A Learning Curve for Whittle Venture,” New York Times, May25, 2002, sec. C, p. 1. P. Schrag, “Edison’s Red Ink Schoolhouse,” The Nation 273,June 25, 2001, p. 20-24. H. Steffens & P. Cookson, “Limitations of the MarketModel,” Education Week 21, no. 43, p. 48, 51, August 7, 2002,

6. A. N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1929).7. E. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1963 [1950]).8. I. B. Myers & M. McCaulley, Manual: A Guide to the Development and Use

of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1998).9. H. Gardner, Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York:

Basic Books, 1983).10. C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (Princeton: Princeton Bollingen Press, 1976).11. J. Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of

Education (New York: Free Press, 1997 [1916]) Ch. 5.

Notes 195

CHAPTER 5

1. Willard Waller, The Sociology of Teaching (New York: Russell and Russell,1961); Dan C. Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1977).

2. For an extensive discussion of melancholia, see, for example, Jacques Hassoun,The Cruelty of Depression: On Melancholy (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997);Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” trans. Joan Riviere, General Psycho-logical Theory (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 164–79; Sigmund Freud, Be-yond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,1961).

3. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford Uni-versity Press, 1997).

4. Again, see “Mourning and Melancholia,” pp. 169–70.5. For a more detailed discussion about the position of revolt taken up by the

melancholic, see Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967);Reprint of Peau noire, Masque Blanc ( Paris, 1952).

6. Dan Liston, “Love and Despair in Teaching,” Educational Theory 50, no. 1(winter 2000), pp. 81–102.

7. David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).

8. Erica Frankenberg, Chungmei Lee, and Gary Orfield, “A Multi-Racial Soci-ety with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?” (Harvard Civil RightsProject, January 2003).

9. Tony Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination(New York: Vintage Books, 1992).

10. Here, once again, I turn to Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.”11. John Lechte, “Art, Love, and Melancholy in the Work of Julia Kristeva,” in

Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. J. Fletcher and A.Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 24–41.

12. Erica Frankenberg and Chungmei Lee, Race in American Public Schools:Rapidly Resegregated School Districts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Civil Rights Project,2002). Available online: http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/deseg/reseg_schools02.php

13. Allan Luke , “How to Make Literacy Policy Differently: Generational Change,Professionalization and Literature Futures,” Paper presented at the Australian As-sociation of Teachers of English, Hobart ( 2001). Available online: http://www.cdesign.com.au/aate/

14. Dennis Carlson, “Literacy and Urban School Reform: Beyond Vulgar Prag-matism,” in Critical Literacy Politics, Praxis and the Postmodern, ed. Colin Lankshear,Peter L. McLaren, and Maxine Greene (Albany, NY: State University of New YorkPress, 1993), pp. 217–69.

15. Ibid.16. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House,

1954), p. 25. Also see Irving M. Zeitlin, Marxism: A Re-Examination (New York:Litton Educational Publishing Inc., 1967).

196 Notes

17. Patrick Shannon, The Struggle To Continue (Portsmouth: Heinemann Pub-lishers, 1990).

18. For one example of Resnick’s work in the study of cognition, see, J. A. Singerand Lauren Resnick, “Representation of Propositional Relations: Are Children Part-Part or Part-Whole Reasoners?” in Educational Studies in Mathematics (1992), pp.23, 231–46. For an insightful critique of the place of cognition in education, seeDoug Noble’s The Classroom Arsenal (New York: Falmer Press, 1991).

19. For a discussion of Marx’s concept of “alienation in action,” see Judy Cox,“An Introduction to Marx’s Theory of Alienation,” in International Socialist Quar-terly, 79 (July 1998). Available online: http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj79/cox.htm.

20. Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason (New York: The Con-tinuum Publishing Corporation, 1974), pp. 144–45.

21. David Gabbard, Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy (Mahwah, NJ:Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000).

22. Kathleen Kesson.23. Doris Santoro, “The Space of Good Teaching,” (proposal for doctoral dis-

sertation, Columbia University Teachers College, 2003).24. See Valerie Walkerdine, School Girl Fictions (London: Verso Press, 1990), p.

21 for an incisive critique of progressive education and the call for a child-centeredcurriculum.

25. John Darling, Child-Centered Education and Its Critics (London: PaulChapman Educational Publishers), p. 27.

26. See Kate Rousmaniere, City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in HistoricalPerspective (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), p. 111.

27. See Jean Rousseau, Emile, trans. B. Foxley (London: J. M. Dent and Son,1911).

28. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Cali-fornia: University of California Press, 1984).

CHAPTER 6

1. This chapter is a slighted revised version of “High-Stakes Testing and Stan-dardization: The Treat to Authenticity” originally published in Progressive Perspec-tives 3, no. 2 (winter 2001), John Dewey Project on Progressive Education, Uni-versity of Vermont. ,

2. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1966/1916).3. John Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum/The School and Society (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1956/1902).4. Ibid., p. 11.5. Ibid., p. 11.6. Ibid., p. 11.7. Ibid., pp. 23–24.8. Ibid., pp. 24–25.9. Ibid., p. 25.10. J. Steinberg, “Teachers in Chicago Schools Follow Script from Day 001,”

The New York Times, 1999 November 26, secs. A1, A25.

Notes 197

11. FairTest/The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, “Students Stop TestMisuse,” Examiner 13, no. 3 (1999), p. 7.

12. Dewey, Child and Curriculum, p. 28.13. Ibid., p. 26.14. Ibid., p. 22.15. Ibid., p. 30.16. Ibid., pp. 86–7.17. Ibid., p. 86.18. Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional

Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 76.19. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970), p. 53.20. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pp. 27–28.21. Iris Marion Young, “Five Faces of Oppression,” in Rethinking Power, ed. T.

E. Wartenberg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 175–77.22. Kevin D. Vinson, “Oppression, Anti-Oppression, and Citizenship Education,”

in The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities, 2nd ed., ed.E. Wayne Ross (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

23. Kevin D. Vinson, “National Curriculum Standards and Social Studies Edu-cation: Dewey, Freire, Foucault, and the Construction of a Radical Critique,” Theoryand Research in Social Education 27 (1999), pp. 296–328.

24. Diane Ravitch, National Standards in American Education: A Citizen’s Guide(Washington, DC: Brookings, 1995), pp. 25–27.

25. Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and R. E. Dunn, History on Trial: Cul-ture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1997).

26. Nash, Crabtree and Dunn, History on Trial, p. 158.27. Vinson, “National Curriculum Standards,” pp. 304–5.28. Ravitch, National Standards, pp. 18–25.29. M. Gittell, “National Standards Threaten Local Vitality,” in Perspectives: Edu-

cation, ed. A. Digby (Boulder, CO: Coursewise Publishing, 1998), pp. 143–44.30. Vinson, “National Curriculum Standards,” p. 306.31. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New

York: Basic Books, 1983).32. Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve, p. 92.33. E. Wayne Ross, “What Is to be Done in the Aftermath of Proposition 187?”

Theory and Research in Social Education 27 (1999), pp. 292–95.34. Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve, p. 73.35. E. Wayne Ross, “Resisting Test Mania,” Theory and Research in Social Edu-

cation 27 (1999), p. 126.36. Ross, “Resisting Test Mania,” p. 127.37. Sandra Mathison, “Assessment in Social Studies: Moving Toward Authentic-

ity,” in The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities, ed. E.Wayne Ross (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), pp. 214–15.

38. Ibid., p. 224.39. Monty Neill, “Stop Misusing Tests To Evaluate Teachers,” Social Educa-

tion 63 (1999), pp. 330–2; Janet Alleman and Jere Brophy, “The Changing Na-ture and Purpose of Assessment in the Social Studies,” Social Education 63 (1999),pp. 334–7.

198 Notes

40. Michael Peterson, Kim Beloin, and Rich Gibson, Whole Schooling: Educationfor a Democratic Society (Detroit: Whole Schooling Consortium, 1998), http://www.uwsp.edu/acad/educ/wholeschooling/eds/index.htm.

CHAPTER 7

1. Henry Giroux, “The Business of Public Education,” http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/girouxjulyaug98.htm.

2. David Tyack, The One Best System (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1974).

3. Michael Apple, Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and GenderRelations in Education (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

4. William B. Stanley, Curriculum for Utopia: Social Reconstructionism andCritical Pedagogy in the Modern Era (New York: State University of New York Press,1992).

5. Patrick Shannon, Broken Promises: Reading Instruction in Twentieth-CenturyAmerica (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1989).

6. Barry Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction (Westport, CT: Bergin &Garvey, 1994).

7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education (New York: Basic Books,1979).

8. Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan, What’s Worth Fighting For in YourSchool? (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996). Hargreaves and Fullan argue thatlasting and meaningful school reform needs to be aligned with approaches to pro-fessional development that build upon teachers’ capacity to make informed judg-ments.

9. Karl Marx, quoted in Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York:Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1961), p. 47.

10. Karl Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1961), p. 95.11. Ibid., p. 97.12. Ibid., p. 151.13. Herbert Marcuse, Studies in Critical Philosophy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,

1972).14. Apple, Teachers and Texts, p. 32.15. Shannon, Broken Promises, p. 84.16. Ibid., p. 85.17. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy, p. 38.18. Shannon, Broken Promises, p. 87.19. Elwood Cubberly, Public Education in the United States (Boston, MA:

Houghton Mifflin Co., 1919), p. 503.20. The New York State English Language Arts test.21. Marx, Capital, p. 95.22. Shannon, Broken Promises, p. 76.23. Ibid., p. 77.24. Jean Anyon, “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work,” Journal of

Education 162, no. 1 (winter 1980), pp. 67–92.25. Paul Willis, Learning to Labour (Farnborough, England: Saxon House, 1977).26. Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy, p. 37.

Notes 199

27. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educa-tional Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books,1976).

28. Rouge Forum, http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/rouge_forum/.29. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, Continuum, 2000). Freire

used the term conscientization to signify the development of consciousness with thepower to transform reality.

30. James G. Henderson and Kathleen R. Kesson, Curriculum Wisdom: Educa-tional Decisions in Democratic Societies (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice-Hall, 2004).

CHAPTER 8

1. On educators’ “melancholia,” see chapter 5 in this volume by Paula Salvio.2. I borrow the term “cultural miseducation” from Jane Roland Martin, for

whom it connotes violence and hatred, in her Cultural Miseducation: In Search of aDemocratic Solution (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University,2002), p. 1.

3. A philosopher of adult education, Susan Birden, has written a cogent essayon this phenomenon, as applicable to schoolteachers attending graduate school asto other adults, “Pedagogically-Induced Cynicism: Critical Interventions for Edu-cators in a Postmodern World,” Adult Education Research Conference Proceedings,2003.

4. Barbara Houston, “Taking Responsibility,” Presidential Essay, Philosophy ofEducation 2002, ed. Scott Fletcher (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society,2003), p. 7.

5. Ibid., p. 11.6. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York:

Vintage, 1983), p. 106ff: “there are gift labors that cannot, by their nature, be un-dertaken in the willed, time-conscious, quantitative style of the market . . . what wetake to be the female professions—child care, social work, nursing, the creation andcare of culture, the ministry, teaching (these last, when done by men, being doneby effete men, as Vice-President Spiro Agnew told us)—all contain a greater admix-ture of gift labor than male professions—banking, law, management, sales, and soon. . . . But if we could factor out the exploitation, something else would still re-main: there are labors that do not pay because they or the ends to which they aredirected require built-in constraints on profiteering, exploitation, and—more sub-tly—the application of comparative value with which the market is by nature at ease.. . .We must therefore distinguish the necessary feminist demand for ‘equal pay forequal work’ from the equally important need to keep some parts of our social, cul-tural, and spiritual life out of the marketplace. We must not convert all gift laborsinto market work lest we wake one day to see that universal market in which all ouractions earn a wage and all our goods and services bear a price.”

7. For a theoretical look at the issue, see Susan Birden, Linda L. Gaither, SusanLaird, “The Struggle Over the Text: Compulsory Heterosexuality and EducationalPolicy,” Educational Policy 14, no. 5 (November 2000), pp. 638–63.

8. Other names and some small details in the anecdotes surrounding Terry arefictionalized,as well, to protect her anonymity.

200 Notes

9. For definition, see http://www.pflag.org: “A transgendered person is some-one whose gender identity or expression differs from conventional expectations fortheir physical sex. The term transgender is used to describe several distinct but re-lated groups of people who use a variety of other terms to self-identify.Transgendered people can include transsexuals (not all transsexual people need orwant sex reassignment surgery), masculine women, feminine men, drag queens/kings, cross-dressers, gender queers, two-spirit, butches, transmen, transwomen, etc.Like other people, transgender people can be straight, gay, lesbian, or bisexual.”

10. For a helpful response to this situation, see Susan Birden, “Teaching with‘Attitude’: Coming to Grips with the Truths and Consequences of Ignoring SexualDiversity in Schools,” Educational Foundation 16 (2002), p. 4.

11. This is Barbara Houston’s term for one way of “taking responsibility,”in“Taking Responsibility,” p. 7

12. I first named this concept in “Befriending Girls as an Educational Life-Prac-tice,” featured essay in Philosophy of Education 2002, ed. Scott Fletcher (Urbana, IL:Philosophy of Education Society, 2003), pp. 73–81, from which I have borrowedoccasional wording in this essay.

13. For a full listing of AAUW’s many research reports on girls’ and women’seducation since then, see http://www.aauw.org.

14. Ithaca Feminist Education Coalition, “Making Our Way Up Another DownStaircase,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 12 (spring 1984), pp. 14–15.

15. For this term I am indebted to Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy(New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 4.

16. Ann Diller cites R. S. Peters to make this point in her “On Befriending andEducating,” Philosophy of Education 2002, pp. 82–83.

17. See note 6.18. Ibid., chapter 3.19. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and

the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 178ff.20. Hyde, The Gift, p. xvi. See also p. 92: “There are many connections between

anarchist theory and gift exchange as an economy—both assume that man is gener-ous, or at least cooperative, ‘in nature’; both shun centralized power, both are bestfitted to small groups and loose federations; both rely on contracts of the heart overcodified contract, and so on. But above all, it seems correct to speak of the gift asanarchist property because both anarchism and gift exchange share the assumptionthat it is not when a part of the self is inhibited and restrained, but when a part ofthe self is given away, that community appears.”

21. Ibid., pp. xvi, 106.22. Ibid., p. 45.23. Ibid., pp. 56, 69, 72.24. Ruthanne Kurth-Schai, “Ecofeminism and Children,” in Ecofeminism: Women,

Nature, Culture, ed. Karen J. Warren (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,1997), pp. 202, 203.

25. Cf. Hyde, chapter 3.26. These exclusions have led, respectively, to the founding of Scouting for All

and of Girl Guides (in England and other countries) and Girl Scouts (in the UnitedStates and other countries). About these see, http://www.scoutingforall.org,www.wagggsworld.org and http://www.girlscouts.org.

Notes 201

27. http://www.pflag.org reports: “In late 1999, PFLAG worked with activiststo form the Families of Color Network, which works with people of color to ad-dress GLBT issues in the context of their African American, Arab-American, Asian/Pacific Islander-American, Latino/a and Native American/American Indian com-munities. Across the country, PFLAG chapters are also working to meet the needsof communities of color. For example, in Washington, DC, For Those We Love, asupport group for families of color was established, and in Detroit, MI, a new PFLAGchapter for African American families is forming.”

28. To borrow an apt phrase from Ralph Ellison that Anita Hill also found ap-plicable to herself: Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1951); AnitaHill, Speaking Truth to Power (New York: Anchor, 1997), p. 249.

29. Martin, Cultural Miseducation, chapter 2.30. Annette Henry, Taking Back Control: African Canadian Women Teachers’

Lives and Practice (Albany: SUNY, 1998), p. 55.31. Jane Roland Martin first coined this term in “The Wealth of Cultures and

the Problem of Generations,” in Philosophy of Education 1998, ed. Steven Tozer(Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 1999), especially pp. 28–31.

32. Like Martin, I assume that hidden curricula may be educative or miseducativeand may occur inside or outside schools; see her “What Shall We Do With a Hid-den Curriculum When We Find One?” in Changing the Educational Landscape:Women, Philosophy, and Curriculum (New York: Routledge, 1994).

33. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Continuum, 1934), p. 13.34. Audre Lorde, “Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response,” in Sister

Outsider (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), p. 74; Susan Laird, “The Con-cept of Teaching,” in Philosophy of Education 1988, ed. James Giarelli (Normal, IL:Philosophy of Education Society, 1989), pp. 32–45; Laird, “Learning from Marmee’sTeaching,” in Little Women and the Feminist Imagination, ed. Jan Alberghene andBeverly Lyon Clark (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 285–321; Laird, MaternalTeaching and Maternal Teachings: Philosophic and Literary Case Studies of Educat-ing (Cornell University, dissertation, 1988).

35. Diller, “On Befriending and Educating.”36. Marilyn Friedman, What Are Friends For? (Ithaca: Cornell, 1993), p. 197.37. Ibid., p. 207.38. Ibid., pp. 244–45.39. Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated

Woman (New Haven: Yale, 1985), chapter 5.40. On these conceptual definitions and distinctions, see Jane Roland Martin, The

Schoolhome: Rethinking Schools for Changing Families (Cambridge: Harvard, 1992),chapter 3; Ann Diller, Barbara Houston, Kathryn Pauly Morgan, Maryann Ayim, TheGender Question in Education: Theory, Pedagogy, and Politics (Boulder: Westview,1996), part I.

41. Barbara Houston, “Gender-Freedom and the Subtleties of Sexist Education,”in The Gender Question in Education, p. 61.

42. Maxine Greene, Landscapes of Learning (New York: Teachers College Press,Columbia University, 1976), chapter 3.

43. Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1983), pp. 66–76.

44. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 18.

202 Notes

45. Susan Laird, “Teaching and Educational Theory: Can (And Should) ThisMarriage Be Saved?” Educational Studies 29, no. 2 (summer 1998), p. 138.

46. Iris Murdoch, “Of ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Pe-ter Conradi (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 354.

47. My theorizing of this point, merely glossed here, is indebted to feminist po-litical philosopher Iris Marion Young, “Gender as Seriality,” in Intersecting Voices(Princeton: Princeton, 1997), which borrows from Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of a“series” to construct a pragmatic notion of gender irreducible to identity but none-theless amenable to political collectivity that resists gender oppression.

48. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. viii.49. Murdoch, “Of ‘God’ and ‘Good.’”50. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (San Francisco: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,

1938), pp. 78, 106.51. Note that Susan Birden has co-opted Woolf’s term Outsiders to coin her own

“Out-Siders,” meaning those who side with the “out” LGBQT. Thus, members ofPFLAG and IFEC would both be Out-Siders in her formulation. See Susan Birden,Rethinking Sexual Identity, Toward an “Out-Siders’ Praxis”: A Re-Vision of VirginiaWoolf’s Three Guineas in Response to Miseducation as Compulsory Heterosexuality(University of Oklahoma, doctoral dissertation, 2001).

52. Eleanor J. Stebner, The Women of Hull House: A Study in Spirituality, Voca-tion, and Friendship (New York: SUNY, 1995), pp. 118–32.

53. Woolf, p. 110.54. Lesbian-feminist philosopher Janice G. Raymond theorizes that these three

qualities are the distinctive fruits of female friendship as “two sights-seeing,” andthat dissociation from the world, assimilation to the world, and victimization in theworld are parallel obstacles to female friendship, in A Passion for Friends (Boston:Beacon, 1986), chapters 4, 5; I derive from Raymond’s theoretical constructionspecific markers of “educative” and “miseducative” befriending, in “Befriending Girlsas an Educational Life-Practice.”

CHAPTER 9

1. In the face of soaring property taxes, Proposition 13, passed in 1978, rolledback property values to 1975 levels and could be raised no more than 2 percent ayear for inflation until the property was sold and transferred , at which point it couldbe reassessed at the purchase price. The tax rate was limited to 1 percent on the valueof each parcel, with the legislature determining how that 1 percent apportionedamong the various local agencies that had previously set their own tax rates. Hence-forth, local agencies, including schools, would be effectively prohibited from issu-ing any new bonds. (This was mended in 1986 when school districts were givenauthority to issue construction bonds if they were approved by a two thirds vote ofthe electorate) Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, sponsors of Proposition 13, believedthat schools should not be funded by property taxes.

2. Peter Schrag, Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future (NewYork: The New Press, 1998), pp 10–11.

3. The California Department of Public finance reports that the population ofCalifornia in the year 2000 is 49% white, 35% Latino, 12% African American.

Notes 203

4. Schrag, Paradise Lost, p. 11.5. This comes as a direct result of the three strikes initiative, Proposition 184.

The California Legislative Analyst predicts that prison costs will be $3 billion by 2003and $6 billion by 2020.

6. David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Frauds andthe Attack on America’s Public Schools. New York: Longman, 1997).

7. Gerald W. Bracey, “International Comparisons and the Condition of Ameri-can Education,” Educational Researcher 25 no. 1(1992): 5–11.

8. Abraham McLaughlin, “One cautionary tale about school reform,” ChristianScience Monitor (January 13, 2003), p. 2. Available online: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0113/p03s01-uspo.html

9. Alfie Kohn, “The Gorilla in the classroom,” Phi Delta Kappan 84, no. 2(2002): 117. Available online: http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/500pound.htm

10. Martha Rapp Ruddell, Teaching Content Reading and Writing, 3rd edition(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2001), pp. 11.

11. Ruddell, Teaching Content Reading, p. 12.12. Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, “Inside the black box: raising standards through

classroom assessment,” Phi Delta Kappan 80, no. 2 (1998). Available online http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kbla9810.htm

13. National Commission on Testing and Public Policy. From Gatekeeper to Gate-way: Transforming Testing in America (Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College, 1990).

14. Kohn, “The Gorilla,” p. 116.15. Gerald W. Bracey, “The 12th Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Edu-

cation,” Phi Delta Kappan 84, no. 2 (2002): 135–50.16. A Nation At Risk makes for interesting reading as a historical document. It

leads the way in to what resulted in endless legislation, and standards that led tothe present day accountability educational reform movement. In it, many claims weremade regarding the “failures” of the public schools and how these “failures” wereconfirmed by “evidence.” None of the supporting “ evidence” actually appeared inthe document nor did the manuscript provide citations to inform the reader wherethe “evidence” might be found.

17. Berliner and Biddle counter the myths and lies of the attack on America’spublic schools by discussing and displaying evidence that has so often been misrep-resented by critics. Some myths they counter are: 1) student achievement in Ameri-can primary schools has recently declined; 2) American spends money on its schoolsthan other nations; 3) The productivity of American workers is deficient, and thisreflects the inadequate training they receive in American schools; 4) Recent increasesin expenditures for education have been wasted or have merely gone into unneededraises for teachers and administrators. Berliner and Biddle persuasively argue thatnone of the attacks on public education have merit and cannot be supported by thedata.

18. Berliner and Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis, p. 4.19. Phi Delta Kappan, “34th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of Public’s

Attitudes Toward Public Schools,” Phi Delta Kappan 84, no. 1 (2002). Availableonline: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0209pol.htm

20. To date, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University arein the process of developing their own, alternative, assessments. Undoubtedly, more

204 Notes

institutions will follow this expensive lead or perhaps purchase the exams created byteacher educations specialists rather than state department bureaucrats.

21. On September 10 2002 the Social Justice Cluster in the School of Educa-tion at San Diego State University following considerable deliberation, passed thismotion which is now being circulated among Schools of Education throughoutCalifornia:

“We reject the TPA process for which we initially volunteered, in good faith. Ourexperience with the process leads us to conclude, furthermore, that we must rejectthe standards that give the process motion, and the law that gives it force. We be-lieve this is not a process to improve teacher education, but to regulate and stan-dardize knowledge, not only in colleges of education, but throughout the univer-sity system, in a manner which is not in the best interest of our students nor ourselves.We believe the standards are partisan standards, the tests that will follow will bepartisan tests, with profound problems of class, race, linguistic, and disability bias.Therefore, we call upon all college of education faculty in the CSU system to fol-low our lead, so say no to this intrusion. Moreover, we will inform our students andthe community of our action in hopes that we will be able to spark additional resis-tance to the one-size-fits-all high-stakes testing movement that we believe will notimprove assessment, but deepen segregation and promote the irrational worship ofexam scores—scores which measure, above all, inherited capital. We believe that whilewe are indeed working within a state teacher credential program, we have rights ofacademic freedom which not only make it possible for individuals to reject this pro-posed regulation, but which exist as a treasure to the community, reflecting the vi-tal role of a university where people can gain and test knowledge in a reasonablyfree atmosphere, and to offer that society criticism which may not be possible else-where.”

22. Kohn, “The Gorilla.”23. Bertell Ollman, “Why So Many Exams: A Marxist Response.” Z Magazine

15, no. 11 (2002, October). Available online: http://www.zmag.org/zmagsite/oct2002/feature/ollman1002.htm

24. Nancy Kober, “Teaching to the test,” in TestTalk for Leaders (Washington,DC: Center on Educational Policy, 2002).

25. Audrey L. Amrein and David C. Berliner, “High-Stakes Testing, Uncertainly,and Student Learning,” Educational Policy Analysis Archives 10, no. 18 (2002, March28). Available online: http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n18/

26. Responding to the above proposal, the literacy faculty in the School of Edu-cation at San Diego State University proposed an alternate resolution:

“Today, the School of Teacher Education elected not to proceed with the fieldtesting of the TPA, for many valid pedagogical and timing reasons. We also askedour Dean to pursue the collaborative effort being undertaken by the UCs andStanford to arrive at an assessment that is more relevant and meaningful. While wedeplore the ill-considered policy decisions, we do not reject SB2042 or the TeacherPerformance Expectations. “

27. Roberta Ahlquist, “Challenges to Academic Freedom: California TeacherEducators Mobilize to Resist State-Mandated Control of the Curriculum,” TeacherEducation Quarterly 30, no 1 (2003):

28. Amrein and Berliner, “High-Stakes Testing.”

Notes 205

CHAPTER 10

1. Valerie Ooka Pang, Multicultural Education: A Caring-Centered, ReflectiveApproach (Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2005).

2. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984); Nel Noddings, The ChallengeTo Care In Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992).

3. Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1978).

4. Michael Cole, Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline (Cambridge,MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1996).

5. Luis Moll, Vygotsky and Education: Instructional Implications and Applica-tions of Sociohistorical Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

6. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916).7. Jim Cummins, Language, Power, and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the

Crossfire (California: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 2000).8. Jim Cummins, Negotiating Identities: Education for Empowerment in a Di-

verse Society (Sacramento, CA: California Association for Bilingual Education, 1996).9. Lilly Wong Fillmore and Catherine Snow, What Teachers Need to Know about

Language (U.S. Department of Education: Office of Educational Research and Im-provement, 2000), p. 21. Available from ERIC, ED 99-CO-0008.

10. Ibid.11. Fillmore and Snow, What Teachers Need to Know about Language, p. 20.12. Robin Scarcella, Effective Writing Instruction for English Learners (Confer-

ence on English Learners, Sacramento, CA, 2000).13. Ibid., p. 2.14. Ibid., p. 3.15. Ibid., p. 3.16. Eugene Garcia, Student Cultural Diversity: Understanding and Meeting the

Challenge, 3rd ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002).17. Robin Scarcella, Academic English: A Conceptual Framework (Santa Barbara,

CA: University of California Language Minority Institute, 1999).18. Garcia, Student Cultural Diversity.19. Joann Crandall, “Content-centered Language Learning,” ERIC Digest (Janu-

ary 1994), pp. 1–5.20. Ibid., p. 1.21. Lynne T. Díaz-Rico and Kathryn Z. Weed, The Crosscultural, Language, and

Academic Development Handbook, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2002).22. Anna Uhl Chamot and J. O’Mally, The CALLA Handbook: Implementing the

Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,1994).

23. Ana Uhl Chamot, “Implementing the Cognitive Academic Language Learn-ing Approach: CALLA,” The Bilingual Research Journal 19 (1995), pp. 379–94.

24. Díaz-Rico and Weed, The Crosscultural, Language, and Academic Develop-ment Handbook.

25. Chamot and O’Mally, The CALLA Handbook.26. Garcia, Student Cultural Diversity.27. Thomas Collier and Virginia Collier, “School Effectiveness for Language

206 Notes

Minority Students,” NCBE Resource Collection Series, no. 9, (Washington, DC:National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education, 1997).

28. Garcia, Student Cultural Diversity.29. Lillian Vega Castañeda and Francisco Ríos. Teachers as students: Resistance

to diversity in Examining Practices In Multicultural Education edited by P. Larkeand N. Carter (College Station, TX: JOY Publishing, 2002), pp. 1–16.

30. Ibid., p. 10.31. Stephen Krashen, Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition

(Oxford, England: Pergammon, 1982).32. Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and

Achievements of America’s Educational Underclass (New York, Penguin Books,1989).

33. Ibid., p. 1.34. Evangelina Bustamante Jones, Valerie Ooka Pang, and James Rodriquez,

“Culturally Relevant Social Studies: Culture Matters,” Theory Into Practice 40, no.1 (2001), pp. 35–41.

35. Sally Davies, Vietnamese: A Rough Guide Phrasebook (London, Lexus, 1996).

CHAPTER 11

1. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 120th ed. (Wash-ington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2000).

2. Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Just What Is Critical Race Theory and What’s ItDoing in a Nice Field Like Education? International Journal of Qualitative Studiesin Education 11, no. 1 (1998), pp. 7–24.

3. Cornell West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994).4. D. G. Solorzano, “Critical Race Theory, Race and Gender Microaggressions,

and the Experience of Chicana and Chicano Scholars,” International Journal ofQualitative Studies in Education 11, no. 1 (1998), pp. 121–36.

5. Pedro Antonio Noguera, City Schools and the American Dream (New York:Teachers College Press, 2003).

6. Tyrone C. Howard, “Who Receives the Short End of the Shortage? America’sTeacher Shortage and Implications for Urban Schools,” Journal of Curriculum andSupervision 18, no. 2 (2003), pp. 142–60.

7. Lois Weiner, Urban Teaching: The Essentials (New York: Teachers CollegePress, 1999).

8. Sonia Nieto, Affirming Diversity, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 2000).9. Derrick A. Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (New York: Basic Books, 1992);

Derrick A. Bell, “Racial Realism—After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations onAmerica in Post Racial Epoch,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, ed. R.Delgado (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), pp. 2–8; Nieto, AffirmingDiversity; West, Race Matters.

10. Gloria Ladson-Billings and W. F. Tate, “Toward a Critical Race Theory,”Teachers College Record 97, no. 1 (1995), pp. 47–68; Gloria Ladson-Billings,“Racialized Discourses and Ethnic Epistemologies,” in Handbook of QualitativeResearch, 2nd ed., ed. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA:Sage Publications, 2000), pp. 257–77; Ladson-Billings, “Just What Is Critical RaceTheory?”

Notes 207

11. Nieto, Affirming Diversity.12. Stacy J. Lee, Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian-

American Youth (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996).13. Geneva Gay and K. Kirkland, “Developing Cultural Critical Consciousness

and Self-Reflection in Pre-Service Teacher Education,” Theory into Practice 42, no.3 (2003), pp. 181–87.

14. Christine E. Sleeter, “An Analysis of the Critiques of Multicultural Educa-tion,” in Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, ed. James A. Banks andCherry A. M. Banks (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995), pp. 81–96.

15. Ladson-Billings, “Just What Is Critical Race Theory”; Ladson-Billings andTate, “Toward a Critical Race Theory”; D. Solorzano and T. Yosso, “Critical Raceand Latcrit Theory and Method: Counterstorytelling, Chicana and Chicano Gradu-ate School Experiences,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education14, no. 4 (2001), pp. 471–95; D. Solorzano and T. Yosso, “Critical Race Method-ology: Counterstorytelling as an Analytical Framework for Educational Research,”Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 1 (2002), pp. 23–44.

16. National Assessment of Educational Progress, Reading Report Card for theNation and States, Office Of Educational Research And Improvement (Washing-

ton, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 1996); National Assessment of EducationalProgress, Reading Report Card for the Nation and States (Washington, DC: U.S.Department of Education, 1998); National Assessment of Educational Progress,Reading Report Card for the Nation and States (Washington, DC: U.S. Departmentof Education, 2000).

17. Ladson-Billings, “Just What Is Critical Race Theory,” p. 11.18. Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, and Angela Harris, Critical Race Theory

(New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 7.19. Pierce, et al., supra note 4, at 66. Quoted in P. Davis “Law as

Microaggression,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Delgado(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), pp. 529–39.

20. Jean Anyon, “Schools as Agencies of Social Legitimation,” in ContemporaryCurriculum Discourses, ed. William Pinar (Phoenix, AZ: Gorsuch Scarisbrick Pub-lishers), pp. 175–200.

21. K. Herr, “Institutional Violence in the Everyday Practices of School: TheNarrative of a Young Lesbian,” Journal for Just and Caring Educational 5, no. 3(1999), p. 67.

22. Anyon, “Schools as Agencies”; Michael Apple and Nancy King, “What doschools teach?” in Curriculum Theory, ed. Alex Molnar and J. Zahorik (Washing-ton, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1977); HenryA. Giroux, “Border Pedagogy in the Age Of Postmodernism,” Journal of Educa-tion 170, no. 3 (1988), pp. 162–81; Donaldo Macedo, Chomsky on Miseducation(Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2000); Peter McLaren, Life InSchools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (NewYork: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998).

23. Anyon, “Schools as Agencies,” p. 153.24. Christine E. Sleeter and Delgado D. Bernal, “Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race

Theory, and Antiracist Education: Implications for Multicultural Education,” inHandbook of Research on Multicultural Education, 2nd ed., ed. James A. Banks andCherry A. M. Banks (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).

208 Notes

25. Laurence Parker, Donna Deyhle, and Sofia A. Villenas, eds, Race Is…RaceIsn’t: Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Studies In Education (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 1999).

26. R. Smith-Maddox and D. G. Solorzano, “Using Critical Race Theory, PauloFreire’s Problem-Posing Method, and Case Study Research to Confront Race AndRacism In Education,” Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 1 (2002), pp. 66–84; D. Solorzano,and T. Yosso, “Critical Race Methodology: Counterstorytelling as an AnalyticalFramework for Educational Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 1 (2002), pp. 23–44.

27. Svi Shapiro, “Education and Democracy: Constituting a Counter-HegemonicDiscourse on Educational Change” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 8, no. 3(1988), p. 101.

28. Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic and Angela Harris, Critical Race Theory (NewYork: New York University Press, 2001), p. 41.

29. S. Jackson, “Autobiography: Pivot Points for the Study and Practice ofMulticulturalism in Teacher Education,” (paper presented at the annual meeting ofthe American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, 1992), p. 3.

30. R. Hatcher and B. Troyna, “Racialization and Children,” in Race Identity andRepresentation in Education, ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Chrichlow (NewYork: Routledge, 1993), pp. 109–25.

31. Ibid.32. M. Montoya, “Mascaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/masking the Self While Un/

braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse,” in Critical Race Theory: The CuttingEdge, ed. Richard Delgado (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), pp. 529–39.

33. Louise Derman-Sparks and Carol Brunson-Phillips, Teaching/Learning Anti-Racism (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997).

CHAPTER 12

1. Mara Sapon-Shevin, Because We Can Change the World: A Practical Guideto Building Cooperative, Inclusive Classroom Communities (Boston: Allyn and Ba-con, 1999).

2. Elizabeth Cohen, Designing Groupwork: Strategies for Heterogeneous Class-rooms, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994).

3. Cynthia Curry, “Universal Design: Accessibility for All Learners,” EducationalLeadership 61, no. 2 (2003), pp. 55–60.

4. Sapon-Shevin, Because We Can Change the World, pp. 114–55.5. Emma Van der Klift and Norman Kunc, “Beyond Benevolence: Friendship

and the Politics of Help,” in Creativity and Collaborative Learning: A PracticalGuide to Empowering Students and Teachers, ed. Jacqueline Thousand, Richard Villa,and Ann Nevin (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 1994), pp. 391–401.

6. Sapon-Shevin, Because We Can Change the World, pp. 1–14.7. Vivian Paley, You Can’t Say You Can’t Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1992).8. Mara Sapon-Shevin, Anne Dobblelaere, Cathleen Corrigan, Kathy Goodman,

and Mary Mastin, “Promoting Inclusive Behavior in Inclusive Classrooms: ‘You Can’t

Notes 209

Say You Can’t Play,’” in Making Friends: The Influences of Culture and Development,ed. Luanna Meyer, Hyun-Sook Park, Marquite Grenot-Scheyer, Eliene S. Schwartz,and Beth Harry (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 1998), pp. 105–32.

9. The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, http://www.glsenco.org(click Resources, then Educators).

10. Phil and Hannah Hoose, Hey, Little Ant (Berkeley, CA: Tricycle Press, 1998).11. Mara Sapon-Shevin, “Inclusion: A Matter of Social Justice,” Educational

Leadership 61, no. 2 (2003), pp. 25–29.12. Bob Blue, “Courage” on Starting Small (cassette) (Evanston, IL: Children’s

Music Network, 1990),http:// www.the-spa.com/bobblue1.

CHAPTER 13

1. H. G. Wells, Things to Come (Boston: Gregg Press), p. 118.2. Diana Schemo and Ford Fessenden, “Gains in Houston Schools: How Real

Are They?” New York Times, 3 December 2003, sec. A, p.1, 27.3. I develop this idea in Dennis Carlson, Teachers and Crisis: Urban School Re-

form and Teachers’ Work Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992).4. James O’Conner, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press,

1973).5. Eric A. Hanushek, Making Schools Work: Improving Performance and Con-

trolling Costs (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994), p. xix.6. Ibid., p. xx.7. Ibid., p. 113.8. Ibid., p. 113.9. Ibid., p. 89.

10. Ibid., p. 89.11. Ibid., p. 118.12. Ibid., p. 7.13. Paul T. Hill and Mary B. Celio, Fixing Urban Schools (Washington, DC:

Brookings Institution, 1998), p. 6.14. Hill and Celio, Fixing Urban Schools, p. 76.15. Ibid., p. 73.16. Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 1962).17. Hill and Celio, Fixing Urban Schools, p. 7.18. See Baldrige National Quality Program, Education Criteria for Performance

Excellence (Washington, DC: Baldrige Foundation, 2003).19. See Andy Hargreaves, Changing Teachers, Changing Times (New York: Teach-

ers College Press, 1994), particularly Section II: “Time and Work,” pp. 95–162.20. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.”21. Hargreaves, Changing Teachers, Changing Times, p. 96.22. National Education Commission on Time and Learning, Prisoners of Time

(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994), p. 8.23. See Lois Weis and Michelle Fine, eds., Construction Sites: Excavating Race,

Class, and Gender among Urban Youth (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000).

210 Notes

24. National Education Commission on Time and Learning, Prisoners of Time,p. 15.

25. Ibid., p. 34.26. Ibid., p. 27.27. See Greg Dimitriadis and Dennis Carlson, eds., Promises to Keep: Cultural

Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).

Index

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Defending Public Schools: Teaching for a democratic society

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