Charter schools have become such a flash point in the U.S. Educational debate and a real red flag of sorts for a lot of progressive folks who see the “charter school movement” (as some supporters frame it) as forwarding a more conservative anti-union, pro-privatization agenda. I, as a progressive (I’m calling myself “left-libertarian” these days) and advocate for “many educational paths”, am drawn to charter schools as the “only game in town” when it comes to trying to (take baby steps at least to) move away from an OSFA (one size fits all) public school system.
As a parent (and not a teacher) I am sympathetic to the union issue in particular, not because I think that adult school staff should be divided into “labor versus management” but because I think teaching is a very important profession and that teachers need to create professional associations so that they are seen as such and have the appropriate clout in school governance and larger societal questions. I think most charter schools, like conventional public schools, are better served if teachers play a significant (if not the primary) role in school governance.
Though people sometimes joke, “Don’t confuse the issue with the facts!”, I did some research on any statistics I could find on charter schools, to get a better sense from the data available of the scope of the charter school “movement” or “infection” or however you might characterize it.
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The Internet and My Tale of Two Crises
The Internet is our most dynamic new societal institution, developing quickly over the past 25 years from “Web 1.0” (providing static web pages with existing content) to “Web 2.0” (providing interactive environments for building connections between people, facilitating other societal institutions, and the “marketplace of ideas”). I think this is a good example, a good metaphor, for the direction we are moving (and should continue to move) in our entire society and its institutions, from top-down dissemination and control, to a more egalitarian exchange between a circle of equals.
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Educating for Human Greatness
The title of this piece is the goal of my friend Lynn Stoddard, who has worked for over 50 years as an elementary school teacher, principal and consultant. His goal is to elevate the profession of teaching and inspire teachers to truly facilitate the development of a young human being rather than merely instruct them on standardized curriculum so they can pass the tests. I am aware of no greater contemporary champion for a holistic approach to teaching and education consistent with the great education innovators of the 20th Century like John Dewey, Waldorf founder Rudolph Steiner, and Maria Montessori.
From chapter 1 page 1 of his book Educating for Human Greatness, Lynn frames the challenges for the profession of teaching in the current US educational context…
In 1983 a National Commission on Excellence in Education issued a “Nation at Risk Report” and set in motion a series of government imposed reforms, all based on a false goal: student achievement in curriculum. One of these reforms, “No Child Left Behind,” put extra pressure on teachers to ignore the diverse needs of students and, instead, standardize students in reading, writing and math. More recently the U.S. Department of Education has installed a set of national standards for student uniformity. Subject matter specialists, along with major influence from business and industry, have decided what all students should know and be able to do at each grade level. Tests are administered to assess student learning of the prescribed material. In some cases the tests are used as an assessment of the quality of teaching. This top-down, misguided pressure is evidence that public school teaching is not regarded as a profession in our society.
Beyond Shop til’ we Drop
I’m thinking about the sluggish US economy and trying to do the math. Seventy percent of our economy is based on consumer spending… rich seem to be getting richer and more of everyone else are falling into economic distress. Do all of us with disposable income need to go back to “shopping til’ we drop” and buying stuff we don’t need to make our economy grow again and move people out of that economic distress? There’s got to be a different path forward that leverages some sort of “less is more” principles. Can we somehow shift our economy from being based on private overconsumption and perhaps redirect it more towards building say more shared public infrastructure?
Dispatch from the Corporate Egalitarian Team Trenches
One of the key themes woven through my writing is our societal transition from hierarchical to more egalitarian institutions. I’m talking about the transition from leaders giving explicit marching orders to subordinates in an obvious “pecking order”, to something more akin to a “circle of equals”, where all members of the team are expected to make important decisions, and their managers play much more of a facilitative (how can I help you be successful) than directive role.
I have witnessed this sort of transition in family life (among the other families I interact with) and religious life (in the Unitarian-Universalist religious organizations I participate in). But what I have been most focused on lately is this transition in the work world, particularly my own place of work. I work as a business analyst for a large corporation in the insurance industry, not what you might think as the leading edge of social change. But I am pleased to report that in my team of some 20 people (and other internal teams that are our “customers”) the transition from “pecking order” to “circle of equals” is alive and well!
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Social Engineering and Facilitating an Enriched Environment
My first reaction to Newt Gingrich’s statement opposing both “left-wing and right-wing social engineering” was that I agree completely, but I need to be careful what I wish for here and think about what is negative “social engineering” versus what is a societal consensus on an “enriched environment” that facilitates moving our larger community forward.
My own awareness of the dark side of social engineering was catalyzed by reading radical educator John Taylor Gatto’s book, The Underground History of American Education, where he at times bluntly challenges the institutions in our society (including our public education system) dedicated to improving our behavior, for our own good whether we like it or not. Says Gatto in the book’s prologue…
The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.
Ending Mandatory Education?
I would like to see everyone finally acknowledge that the United States, though into the second decade of the 21st Century, still has basically a 19th Century education system. Alternative educators have been saying this for years, but now national Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said as much in his open letter to America’s teachers…
Working together, we can transform teaching from the factory model designed over a century ago to one built for the information age.
Issues with Educating Everybody
He sets the context in his opening paragraph…
The time has come to change the way we educate children in our public schools. There are signs that a vast majority of students are not even coming close to achieving their potential. A 27 percent national dropout rate may be but the tip of an iceberg of students whose potential for success are not being met. Many students never get an A or a B on a report card. Most students are educated at a low, C or D level of understanding. This is disastrous for those who drop out of school and too often enter the prison population. It is equally tragic for those who stay in school to acquire knowledge at a low level. Even those who get high grades may be deficient in understanding the real life application of subject matter content. They often aim for high grades rather than genuine learning and soon forget the material after the tests are given. The sad fact is that we do not have a public education system that aims to help all students master the knowledge they will need to fulfill their lives.
Mud Wrestling with McLuhan Part 3 – Youth and Education
In my previous pieces based on Playboy magazine’s extensive 1969 interview with Marshall McLuhan, I looked first at McLuhan’s ideas on how revolutions in our communication technology – particularly the inventions of phonetic literacy, later printing, and most recently electronic media – have fundamentally changed how we perceive the world and thus organize our society. Second, I focused on his idea that people who have grown up in an age using electronic media – radio, movies, television, computers and now the Internet – are becoming in his words “post-literate” and “retribalizing”, which involves moving away from individualism and back to a more collective experience of the world.
For my fellow Baby-boomers, this post-literate retribalization would be most stereotypically seen in the whole hippie subculture with its at times paradoxical conformist non-conformity, including the whole sex, drugs, rock and roll, long hair, bell-bottoms and tie dye thing, the collective focus on “peace, love, joy” and sense of solidarity, as the band The Who sang, “talkin bout my g-g-g-generation”. Think thousands of young people at an anti-war rally holding hands and singing in unison, “All we are saying is give peace a chance”.
For my kids in the Millennial generation, with their developmental milieu of computers, cell phones and the Internet, their “hive mind” of connections with each other through their ubiquitous electronic devices would seem the most obvious evidence of perhaps an even higher level of the same retribalization. A blank stare at times to their parents or other adults, masking a complicated web of virtual “kinship” with each other.
So in this third installment of my messy tussle with the ideas of this “metaphysician of media”, I want to look at the issues he raises regarding the development of retribalized youth in a culture that still has not come to grips with its post-literate zeitgeist. My fellow Baby-boomers these days cavalierly throw around the term “gone viral” like we’re still hip and all, but I don’t think we fully understand what it means when our entire culture is in the grips of such virtual infections spread by our ubiquitous electronic media.
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Mud Wrestling with McLuhan Part 2 – Retribalization
So following up on my first piece on the subject, I continue my metaphorical mud wrestle with the outside the box ideas of the coiner of the term “Global Village”, Marshall McLuhan. I almost had the occasion to meet the man in Toronto in 1970, since he was a collaborator and friend of my mom’s best friend Mary Jane Shoultz, one of my “Feminist Aunts”. Though I missed that opportunity, Mary Jane regaled me with his ideas over the years of my older youth, and I must say they resonated with my own emerging view of the world as a kid growing up in the age of electronic media.
What recently rekindled my intimate tangle with McLuhan’s ideas was a link shared with me to his extensive 1969 interview in Playboy Magazine, which I had never read, probably focused at that age on the magazine’s other featured content! In my first piece on the interview, I focused on his ideas on how revolutions in communication technology – particularly, phonetic literacy, printing and now electronic media – have successively transformed human culture.