Democracy and Education in an Election Year

This is an election year, a crucial one for public education. Republican control of Congress and in many state legislatures has advanced a longstanding assault on democracy, only partially enacted—though devastatingly for our nation’s young people—through a comprehensive war on the public schools. The war began in the Reagan era of the 1980s and despite intervening Democratic administrations has continued largely without significant interruption to the present. The objectives of this war are privatization and corporatization of education, objectives that have nothing to do with the common good.

In their weakened state, in classrooms underfunded and overburdened, in an era when testing is valued more than teaching, the public schools will be hard pressed to teach children, and perhaps through them, their parents, about the electoral processes that are fundamental to life in a free society. Perhaps it is the pessimist in me, but I fear that teaching about American democracy may become history instead of current events unless public school educators take up this challenge. And the rest of us must support them, especially at the ballot box.

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, a revolutionary period in American history that saw major cultural strides in civil rights and public education. Those strides did not come easily, and the backlash was deadly. We remember the martyrs: John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and many more. President Lyndon Johnson persevered, however, and oversaw two vital pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Both have been attacked over the decades, most vigorously in recent years. 

The Bush era No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law was a reauthorization of ESEA that perverted many of the positive intentions of the original act and promulgated the current era of test mania that is damaging learning for all children and undermining American democracy. The latest reauthorization, Obama's Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), offers little improvement over NCLB, because it is a watered-down piece of legislation passed by a largely do-nothing Republican Congress.

It is clear that the United States desperately needs a new revolution to move forward a progressive agenda on education and civil rights to counter decades of regression on these issues. Free and fair public education, the only sure guarantor of American democracy, is not a topic that springs to the lips of most candidates, whether at the presidential level or lesser offices, and that is unfortunate. But it is an issue embedded in the very ground of all of today’s candidates’ positions. The choice is clear: a hoped for return to social and cultural progress, a movement we envisioned sixty years ago and only partially realized, or a continuation of the current path toward final destruction of the American experiment in democracy.

It is possible that a populist revolution is brewing in this election year. As a child of the Sixties I can only hope that is the case. It will take nothing less to reclaim America for us, its people, and to save American democracy from the destructive corporatist forces led by the monied elites, who form a burgeoning and unwelcome aristocracy in this land of, admittedly fraught, equality.

Postscript: This is my final post on this blog. Many others write on similar topics with eloquence, and I have decided that I must devote my efforts to other matters at this point in my life. Readers may be interested in two other blogs that I will continue to write: Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com/) and Living With...A Cancer Journal (http://livingwithcancerjournal.blogspot.com/). During the writing of this blog I have appreciated the support and comments from readers both in the United States and abroad. For this I am truly grateful.

Free-Range Childhood

A number of forces have converged to make us, as a national community, fearful and distrustful. The consequences have negatively affected on our children, both socially and educationally. We now make them fearful in our own image, and that degrades their learning.

In the aftermath of 9/11 the Bush administration ramped up national fears, which gave the federal government relatively free reign to suppress citizens’ rights to privacy and to engage in two costly, as yet unpaid for, and unnecessary wars, which in turn fomented an uptick in the opposition’s virulent radicalism. Conservative state governments have followed suit. Our national culture of fear serves radical conservative interests and helps keep them in power. We have not heeded FDR’s timeless warning that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear suppresses our humanity.

But fear has been abetted by loss of trustful community through other means, such as the absence of parental adults at home. As the income/wealth gap has widened, more families require income generated by all adults to sustain themselves, leaving neighborhoods empty and unsafe for children on their own. Neighbors often no longer know one another, and the notion of a “parental village,” in which all parents look out for all children, has fallen away with the decline of a meaningful, universal sense of community.

Finally, another key factor has been the push to “improve” education by ever-earlier emphasis on “academics,” a failure to recognize that play, for the young, is real learning. In a Scholastic Instructor article titled “What Happened to Kindergarten?” the author quotes a kindergarten teacher who says, “While young students’ reading and math scores are soaring, there is little assessment of the effect of the intensified academic focus on kids’ motivation to learn, creativity, motor skills, social skills, or self-esteem. The risk is children who are already burned out on school by the time they reach third grade,” says Stoudt, the kindergarten teacher. “Play is how children learn. There should be more of it in the upper grades, not less in the lower.”

I was fortunate to grow up in the 1950s and 1960s at a time when childhood could best be characterized as free-range. As a sixth-grader living in a U.S. military community in Germany, I was fortunate to live near a forest that offered unlimited possibilities. It was crisscrossed with paths and traversed by a raised Roman road that passed near the ruins of a small Roman bath and a wooden Roman watchtower recreated by the local residents. One memorable day some of my fellow sixth-graders and I set out to explore these woods. Our method of navigation was to pause whenever paths crossed. One of us would then take out a pocket knife (something no sixth-grade boy would be without), open it, and toss it into the air. Whichever way it pointed on landing was the direction we took.

Hours later we emerged from the woods near another village, from whence we made our way back home using the German road signs to guide us. Incidentally, none of us spoke German, but it didn’t matter. We were adventurous kids, confident in ourselves and our burgeoning ability to navigate the world and have fun doing so. Our parents supported this freedom. On such adventures we discovered things about the world around us but also about ourselves. We were learning free-range, gaining independence that would make us socially and intellectually strong.

Today, we rob our children of these kinds of learning adventures. Sixth-graders with knives? What if they cut themselves or stabbed another person? And bringing a pocket knife to school? Out of the question! Fear. Four or five twelve-year-old boys roaming unfamiliar woods in a foreign country? What if they get lost? What if someone takes them or hurts them? Fear. Sixth-graders walking from one foreign village to another, not even knowing the language? And out of touch? No cell phones? No way to check in for hours at a time? What if…? Fear.

I am reminded of a character in Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune, who says, “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.” So long as we allow ourselves to operate as a society based in a culture of fear, that fear will obliterate childhood learning that is natural, open, and leads to fulfillment in adulthood. We desperately need to recreate the free-range childhood—for the sake of our children, for the sake of our national future.

Common Core: 4. Aren't We Already "Globally Competitive"?

CCSS leaders want a national curriculum so that all students in the future “will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.” The underlying message is that students—and, by extension, the United States—are not able to do so now, a conclusion that has little foundation. Let’s look at this conclusion from two perspectives.

First, critics of education often point to disparities between the performance of U.S. students and their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere on international achievement tests, such as PISA, which is administered in more than fifty countries. The lower U.S. ranking, say critics, is evidence that American students are not “globally competitive.”

However, there is a strong correlation between student achievement and family background, with socioeconomic status being a key factor in student achievement as measured by standardized tests of all sorts. Students disadvantaged by poverty do predictably poorer, as a group, on measures of academic achievement. Schools universally, not only in the United States, are relatively powerless to change this fundamental dynamic. When PISA results are controlled for SES, the ranking of U.S. students is considerably higher.

Finland, for example, is often cited for ranking far above the United States in student achievement as measured by PISA. However, in Finland only 1 in 25 students lives in poverty compared to 1 in 5 in the United States, according to Duke University professor Helen F. Ladd (in Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence, Working Paper Series SAN11-01, November 4, 2011).

The Common Core standards do not take into account the effects of SES on teaching and learning. CCSS is top-down policy, and as Ladd points out, “while education policy makers have direct control over school quality, they have less control over educational outcomes because of the role that context—and particularly the family background of the students—plays in shaping educational outcomes.” Adopting the Common Core is likely not to make any difference in American students’ ability to be “globally competitive” for this reason.

Second, there is little evidence that America is not already globally competitive. Put aside the rhetoric of politicians, pundits, and policy wonks who decry our so-called failing schools, and the cold evidence is that the goal of becoming globally competitive by promoting a top-down, “rigorous” curriculum is largely disingenuous. By the numbers the United States is far from being a poor global competitor. Internationally known scholar Yong Zhou (http://zhaolearning.com) runs the numbers this way, drawing on a variety of authoritative sources:

• Japan, which was expected to overtake the U.S. because of its superior education in the 1980s, has lost its #2 status in terms of size of economy. Its GDP is about 1/3 of America’s. Its per capita GDP is about $10,000 less than that in the U.S.

• The U.S. is the 6th wealthiest country in the world in 2011 in terms of per capita GDP. It is still the largest economy in the world.

• The U.S. ranked 5th out of 142 countries in Global Competitiveness in 2012 and 4th in 2011.

• The U.S. ranked 2nd out 82 countries in Global Creativity, behind only Sweden in 2011.

• The U.S. ranked 1st in the number of patents filed or granted by major international patent offices in 2008, with 14,399 filings, compared to 473 filings from China, which supposedly has a superior education.

Comments Zhao, “Obviously America’s poor education told by the numbers has not ruined its national security and economy.”

The key factor that the Common Core leaders have failed to take into account is poverty and how SES affects teaching and learning. Ladd, cited earlier, suggests that “strategies designed to address the educational needs of low income children will cost money, could be complex and undoubtedly will need to differ from place to place depending on the local context.”

The Common Core State Standards contain no provision for responding to “local context.” Such rigidity will ill serve students everywhere.

Common Core A-Comin'

On the heels of the Republican National Convention comes an interesting perspective on the Common Core State Standards, courtesy of Education Week. In an article dated August 30 and titled, "Common Core State Standards Dividing GOP," author Alyson Klein opines that conservatives are divided broadly into two camps. One camp embraces the Common Core Standards, as evidenced by a majority of Republican governors whose states have signed on to the standards among the total of 46 states—including Indiana—and the District of Columbia.

However, another camp sees too much of a federal stamp on the Common Core State Standards, with some members deriding them as "Obamacore." The standards, developed jointly by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association, get a mixed review even among the inner circle. Writes Klein, "Tom Luna, the Idaho superintendent of public instruction, and the president of CCSSO, rejected the idea that the standards were cooked up by the feds, saying he was part of the state-level conversations at their inception." On the other hand, Klein quotes Luna as saying, "If it [the standards] ever becomes a mandate, Idaho would be the first state to get out."

The GOP platform generically embraces "high standards" in education but is silent on the Common Core. "Still," writes Klein, "some state lawmakers—including Sen. Mike Fair of South Carolina, an attendee here—are trying to get their states to dump the standards, or at least delay their implementation."


Readers who have not already done so might want to explore the official Common Core website at http://www.corestandards.org.

Sensible Teacher Evaluation

In recent years many legislative initiatives taken up under the rubric of "school improvement" actually have diminished the quality of teaching and learning in the nation's public schools. From the earliest days of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to today's vast overuse and misuse of standardized tests, ideologically driven education mandates have systematically eroded both depth and breadth—real rigor—in the curriculum. Movement is now advancing on teacher evaluation, over-complicating and over-legislating a process that ought to be grounded in solid education principles, rather than political ideology.

Recently Mike Schmoker contributed a Commentary piece to Education Week that gives some perspective to the teacher evaluation issue. During my time in education publishing I had a couple of opportunities to work with Mike's manuscripts. He is a thoughtful contributor to the education conversation. His Commentary, titled "Why Complex Teacher Evaluations Don't Work," is clear and cogent. Please click the title link and read it.

Why This Blog?

The purpose of this blog is to provide online visitors with my perspectives on teaching and learning, in particular, during the run-up to the November election, in which I am a school board candidate for District 4 in the Monroe County Community School Corporation. If elected, I plan to continue this blog as a way to share ideas with constituents and other readers.

Central to my philosophy of education is a simple equation. It appears under the blog title: Teachers + Students = Learning. It should be borne in mind that "teachers" and "students" are broad designations. Parents, of course, are their children's first and lifelong teachers. And at whatever age, I hope, we can all be students, whether in the formal sense of attending classes or merely through self-study. The result in any case is learning.

My own perspectives on learning are informed, first, by being a parent. My partner and I have a blended family of six (now adult) children and four grandchildren (to date). Several years ago we hosted a foreign student from Germany, who spent his junior year of high school studying here in Bloomington. This year we are hosting another German teenager, who is spending his junior year here.

The earliest segment of my career was spent as a classroom teacher at the junior high school level of the public schools in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. After eleven years I took a two-year leave to teach for the Department of Defense in an American high school on a U.S. Airbase in Germany. When I returned to Wisconsin, I taught at the high school level for three years before moving into the district office to coordinate the school system's language-based programs: English language arts, reading, foreign languages, English-as-a-second-language, and bilingual education.

I moved to Indiana in 1991 to accept the position of director of instructional services in the public schools of Carmel. And in 1993 I took the opportunity to move into education publishing, becoming director of publications for the international education association, Phi Delta Kappa, here in Bloomington.

Throughout my career I have been a writer and, more recently, an editor of education materials. My list of publications includes some fifteen books that I've either written or developed as anthologies for educators. I've also written articles, monographs, encyclopedia entries, and instructional materials, among other things.

I maintain a lively interest in education, am active in education-related endeavors both locally and elsewhere, for example, continuing to serve as a senior consultant for the Center on Civic Education. My independent work now centers on freelance writing and editing, mainly in education contexts. And since 2008 I have served as an assessment administrator for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).