Local bookstores and educational capital

I just wrote a post on my personal blog about the sad closing of Shaman Drum, one of the best independent bookstores in the Midwest.

Social scientists use the term "social capital" to describe the strength of social networks in a community. Likewise, we can use the term "educational capital" to describe the educational environment in a community. Strong schools and libraries, a vibrant local arts scene, high-quality local publications, the presence of a college or university - all of these can increase a community's educational capital.

When an excellent bookstore goes out of business, the educational environment of its community is diminished. Just as communities concerned about education issues should approve millages and tax increases to support their local schools, they should also patronize the stores, theaters, museums, and concert halls that contribute to the community's educational capital in important but less obvious ways.

Links and resources for educators and self-educators

Check out the new-and-vastly-improved link list on the sidebar to the right of this blog. I'll continue to add to the list, but this is a pretty good start.

A few things to note:

-I give roughly equal time and space to conservative and liberal writers and education policy sites. I also include plenty of advocates for alternative or radical perspectives on education, including homeschoolers, unschoolers, and Marxists.

-The list of "Education Scholars, Writers, and Practicioners" includes quite a few names you may not have heard of. In addition to historical figures such as John Dewey, the most well-known contemporary educators (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond, for example) are listed alongside less-well-known people such as "unschooling" advocate Grace Llewellyn, liberal education advocate Adam Kissel, and Great Books advocate Mortimer J. Adler.

-I am currently writing a book on self-education, and I've included a small list of self-education resources. You'll find some unexpected links here as well. The movie rental company Netflix and the online radio Pandora, for example, are included because their recommendation systems can introduce users to new media and art that they are likely to enjoy but may not have heard of. This, too, is education.

Please help spread the word about Wide Awake Minds by linking to it and passing it along to others who might find it interesting or useful.

The wallpaper curriculum

How can high-school teachers maximize learning time for students with short attention spans? Here's an idea.

When students drift off and stop paying attention to a lesson, they often look around at other areas of the classroom - anywhere but where the teacher wants them to look. The lawn-mower in the window was a particular favorite of mine in high school: the hypnotic back-and-forth movement and the pleasant drone could keep me occupied during a long hour of history class.

Teachers, when they set up their classroom, should aim to make it utterly impossible for kids to look anywhere in the room without learning something. Fine, don't look at the teacher - look at the maps and timelines on the wall, or the art, or the quotations from famous figures, or the posters depicting famous photographs and historical events. Or the rows of books that cover a wall - some with their spines out, some faced-out. You don't even need to open them to be intrigued by their titles: "The Philosophy of History" by G.W.F. Hegel; "The Open Society" by Karl Popper; "The Educated Imagination" by Northrop Frye; "Tales of Love and Loss" by Knut Hamsun; "Confessions of a Mask" by Yukio Mishima.

What about vocabulary terms in size 100 type? A garden, with the plants and vegetables labeled? An aquarium? Phrase charts in foreign languages?

Managers of retail stores are taught to never show their fixtures - to cover every inch of shelves and pegs with products. Products are for sale; fixtures are not. Showing the customer an empty shelf sells no books.

The same principle applies in the classroom. Empty wall space gives you no educational return-on-investment; in fact, bare walls evoke feelings of confinement and claustrophobia. Fill empty spaces. The classroom is not a modern, minimalist design studio: it is an attic and workshop for independent scholars with crackling, eager minds. A classroom's walls should contribute to students' impression that schooling is not a world unto itself, but rather an introduction and guide to the greater world of ideas, art, and informed action.

Teaching for autonomy: "success" and beyond

Effective teachers and effective schools educate their students to succeed in society and, at the same time, to understand that their personal "success" is not the end of the story.

On one hand, students’ future happiness will be closely related to their ability to succeed economically and socially. One would do students no favors by turning them wholly away from the society in which they are embedded; that is not education for liberation, but education for helplessness and resentment. There is much to be said for preparing students for societal success. The successful adult is more autonomous than the unsuccessful adult; he or she is more likely to have access to desirable societal goods (higher education, the arts, political participation, gainful employment, etc.) and less likely to find him or herself trapped in a demeaning job or family situation, hopeless social or economic straits, and so on.

On the other hand, the autonomy that is born of societal success and its prerequisites is a limited autonomy. True autonomy requires being able to look with clear and critical eyes at one’s own society, understanding its flaws as well as its benefits. Ancient and modern traditions in literature, art, and religion stand ready to correct us if we, standing at the height of privilege in our society, look at our own success and comfort and nothing else – and then decide, with Candide, that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” True autonomy also means seeing through what is superficial in our own success; it means catching ourselves by the scruffs of our own necks when we feel tempted to accept the convenient untruth that our success is wholly or primarily the result of our own effort, and that others’ failure is the just result of their not exercising an equal effort.

The task of the education system, then – and therefore the task of each teacher – is to prepare students to succeed in society while helping them develop the ability to question their own success, their relationship with those considered less-successful, and the society in which these social, political, and economic power relationships exist. The fully-educated person has both the tools and knowledge necessary to succeed in society, and the imagination, empathy, political awareness, and critical literacy necessary to understand the limited character of that success and to criticize and strive to change the very society in which he or she enjoys it.

President Obama's education plan

President Obama has used the economic stimulus bill and the budget to divert historic amounts of money to funding for education, and today he spoke about his plans for reform.  The story is here, commentary from Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times here.  Obama's full remarks can be read here.

Key elements of the plan [with some of my initial thoughts in brackets]:

--Pay successful teachers more, usher unsuccessful teachers out the door.  [no word on how this will be measured, though.  In general, test scores are used as the benchmark - a measure that almost certainly would do more harm than good.]

--More funding for early childhood education.

--Cutting funding for wasteful education programs, i.e. any federally-funded education programs that have not been able to demonstrate that they are working.

--Expanded access to daytime child care for working parents.

--More funding for successful charter schools.  Removal of state-level caps on the number of charter schools allowed as a trade-off for more accountability.

--"Better standards and assessments," i.e. national standards. [yet another set of high-stakes tests?  Or would the implementation of national tests entail doing away with the state-level tests?]

--A fund to invest in innovation at the district level.

--Improved data-sharing to track students' educational progress from childhood through college. [this raises serious privacy concerns]

--Using the stimulus to avoid teacher layoffs.  Improve teacher recruiting and retention.  

--Alternative certification programs.  ("Alternative routes to teaching").

--More time in school through a longer school day and a longer school year. [will teachers be paid more as a result?  How would this affect kids' ability to participate in extracurriculars, athletics, and summer programs?  How will the extra time be used effectively?]

--Extra pay for math and science teachers to make up for shortages.

--New efforts to discourage dropping out.

--Simplify federal financial aid assistance forms to encourage the pursuit of higher education or vocational training.  Increased Pell Grants and Perkins Loans.

--Increased adult education and job training options, especially delivered through community colleges.

Arendt's argument against progressive education

Political philosopher Hannah Arendt was one of the most brilliant and expansive thinkers of the 20th century, and she weighed in on the American educational debate in her Between Past and Future. Randall Curren's collection Philosophy of Education: An Anthology contains selections from that work.

Arendt advances a powerful argument against the ideology of progressive education, the results of which she calls "ruinous." However, she neglects to judge the reforms ushered in by the rise of progressive education against the practices they replaced, many of which were harsh, authoritarian, and uncaring as well as characterized by an emphasis on facts without context, an uncritical continuation of antiquated practices, etc.

Arendt's arguments run as follows:

-The American obsession with the new has led to an obsession with education, which in turn has led to the enshrinement of "pedagogy" or "education" as a subject unique unto itself, and to a conception of teaching as not necessarily connected with any particular subject matter.

-America's educational crisis is "especially acute" because of its zest for equality and the erasure of difference; in the context of education, this takes the form of reducing the teacher's authority (to erase the student/teacher difference) and doing less to cultivate gifted students.

-There are three core, mistaken assumptions at the heart of progressive education:

1. "There exist a child's world and a society formed among children that are autonomous and must insofar as possible be left to them to govern. Adults are only there to help with this government. ...(The adult) can only tell (the child) to do what he likes and then prevent the worst from happening." The result of this is a cutting-off of the child from the world of adults; children are liberated from the authoritative adult and "handed over to the tyranny of their own group," and the child's reaction "tends to be either conformism or juvenile delinquency."

2. As noted above, "pedagogy has developed into a science of teaching in general in such a way as to be wholly emancipated from the actual material to be taught." This has resulted "in a most serious neglect of the training of teachers in their own subjects...." Expert-teachers can derive their authority from their expertise in a subject; teachers without subject-matter expertise must be authoritarian, that is, their authority has nothing to point to besides the fact that it exists (i.e., "might makes right").

3. "You can know and understand only what you have done yourself," and so in education doing is substituted for learning. One result of this is the rise of vocational instruction, which reflects schools' inability to "make the children acquire the normal prerequisites of a standard curriculum." A related, equally mistaken idea is that the difference between play and work should be rejected, and that preference should be given to play rather than work. "This procedure consciously attempts to keep the older child as far as possible at the infant level. The very thing that should prepare the child for the world of adults, the gradually acquired habit of work and of not-playing, is done away with in favor of the autonomy of the world of childhood."

-Together, these ideas constitute an abdication of the responsibility of adults for the "continuance of the world." "The world, too, needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation. ...In education this responsibility for the world takes the form of authority. ...The teacher's qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it, but his authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world. Vis-a-vis the child it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world."

Michelle Rhee and teacher tenure

A story about Michelle Rhee, the reform-minded superintendent of Washington, D.C.'s public school system, made its way onto today's New York Times most-emailed list. It's a fascinating story about Rhee's attempt to do away with the tenure system in her district. Check it out here.

There are strong arguments for and against the tenure system, but I lean strongly toward scrapping the tenure system and replacing it with alternative (but very strong) protections for teachers against arbitrary or political firings.

Educator Profile: Eva S. Moskowitz

Earlier this week, the New York Times profiled Eva S. Moskowitz, the head of the fast-growing Success Charter Network in Harlem.

Check out the profile here.

“It is the accumulation of the hundreds of minute decisions that is the difference between mediocrity and true excellence,” read a recent 14-paragraph Moskowitz message to a senior Education Department employee that began about scheduling difficulties but became broadly philosophical. “We at Harlem Success literally go for perfection.”

This is the woman who, during four years of running the City Council Education Committee, agitated the bureaucracy and the teachers’ union alike with exhaustive hearings on the dearth of science classes, the restrictions of the union contract and, famously, the matter of why so many school bathrooms seemed perpetually to lack toilet paper. Now, with the zeal of a bureaucracy-busting superhero, Ms. Moskowitz has channeled her interests in matters mind-bending and minute into the Success Charter Network, which started in 2006 with Harlem Success Academy 1, added three more schools this summer and plans to expand to 40 over a decade.
...
These are also schools clearly run by a mother. Mindful of the time it takes to tie tiny shoelaces, Ms. Moskowitz mandates Velcro footwear. The fact that her son Culver barely spoke at age 3 but played chess by 4 is behind the school’s policy of teaching chess to every child.

She describes the Harlem Success educational philosophy as a mix of the liberal Bank Street College of Education approach and the traditional Catholic school model. In an age when kindergarten is increasingly academic, and many urban charter schools have taken a militaristic approach to learning, the Harlem Success kindergartens have dress-up corners, water-activity tables and Legos but also use the highly scripted Success for All reading curriculum and embrace standardized tests. Even kindergartners take TerraNova exams in literacy and math, in January and May.

(Hat tip: EduWonk)

Consenting to a challenging curriculum

The biggest problem with school voucher programs and other policy arrangements that call for a greater role for private schools at the K-12 level is that private schools can control who they admit. Entry restrictions through academic testing or high tuition bills allow many private schools to ensure their own success by restricting access to those students most likely to succeed. Such restrictions arguably subvert one of the main roles of education in a democracy - that is, K-12 education is supposed to provide excellent opportunities for all students regardless of the relative wealth and status of their homes and communities.

Of course, no one would argue that American public education, as it is currently organized, even approaches that ideal; but voucher programs that give public funds to schools that can restrict access to incoming students deemed unlikely to succeed cannot be a serious vehicle for reducing inequality of opportunity.

There may, however, be a way to introduce more choice and competition into the K-12 system (a conservative goal) while promoting equal educational opportunity for disadvantaged students (a liberal goal). Voucher and charter policies, where they are introduced, should require schools to accept applicants on the basis of lotteries rather than on the basis of interviews and test scores as a condition for receiving public funds. Differentiation between schools needs to be based on factors other than who gets in; curricula can be different, allocation of resources can be different, teacher pay can be different, and the aims of education (i.e., vocational preparation versus college preparation) can be different. But publicly-financed schools should not differentiate themselves by restricting access.

Over at the Noble Street College Prep network of charter schools in Chicago, students are admitted regardless of their previously demonstrated academic capabilities - just as they are in most public schools. However, students and their parents must consciously choose to attend a Noble Street school, accepting a longer school day, a longer school year, and college-level homework loads as a consequence. Incoming students and their parents must agree to make college admission the overriding goal of their high school years.

The consequence? Over 85% of Noble Street College Prep graduates attend college.

It is remarkable what students can achieve when they are asked to consent to getting a great education as a condition of high school admission. Students' consent to hard work - rather than their scores on a high-stakes test - becomes the method by which students are put on a college-prep track.

Is this the answer to the age-old debate about "tracking" students? Can it be replicated on a larger scale? I wonder whether providing middle-school students and their parents with extensive information about career paths, wage differences between jobs that require a college education and those that do not, and similar data and then asking them to place themselves in a vocational track or college-prep track might improve students' high school experiences and the likelihood that they will reach their educational goals.

Self-education through blogging

Blogging about a topic that interests you can be a useful method of self-education.

-The pressure to post at least a little bit every day or so is useful if you are trying to learn more about the topic of your blog; it's a fun way of imposing some discipline on your studies.

-If one of the purposes of your blog is to share links to articles and websites about your topic, the act of finding articles and websites to link to can serve as a useful reminder to read widely about your topic and keep up with the latest news and opinion about it.

-Becoming a blogger means getting into the habit of writing regularly and articulating your ideas in a compelling way; developing your verbal and writing skills is essential to your self-education regardless of what you study.

-The act of writing (and re-reading what you write) about a topic helps you better retain and recall what you have learned.

The qualities of great teachers

In the introduction to Sonia Nieto's Why We Teach, the author lists the qualities that she believes that highly successful teachers display:

"In general, such teachers:

-Connect learning to students' lives
-Have high expectations for all students, even for those whom others may have given up on
-Stay committed to students in spite of obstacles that get in the way
-Place a high value on students' identities...as a foundation for learning
-View parents and other community members as partners in education
-Create a safe haven for learning
-Dare to challenge the bureaucracy of the school and the district
-Are resilient in the face of difficult situations
-Use active learning strategies
-Are willing and eager to experiment and can 'think on their feet'
-View themselves as lifelong learners
-Care about, respect, and love their students."

Read more about Why We Teach at bn.com and at the Why We Teach website.

Studs Terkel and education via conversations

Studs Terkel, a University of Chicago alum (my alma mater) and one of the best interviewers of the 20th century, passed away today at the age of 96.

His work is an excellent example of one of the major principles of self-education and lifelong learning: you can learn something from everyone if you have the courage and discipline to ask the right questions and listen carefully to the answers.

His New York Times obituary can be read here.

Notable school: Noble Street College Prep

A highly successful Chicago charter network was highlighted on NPR today - check out the story here.

The charter network, Noble Street College Prep, has a website at http://www.goldentigers.org/.

Book review: "Teachers Have It Easy"

Over the past week, I've been reading Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers by Daniel Mouthrop, Ninive Clements Calegari, and Dave Eggers. The book is one of the most powerful arguments for paying teachers more that I've read, but it has the potential side effect of scaring readers away from the profession of K-12 teaching.

The case for paying teachers more is relatively easy to make, and the authors make it very well. However, whether the book overstates the severity of the monetary challenges K-12 teachers face is a debatable question. It is indeed a crime that public school teachers in some districts have starting salaries in the low 30s, but in other metropolitan areas, the median salary for teachers is in the 60-70k range, and that is a different story. The reader is left with the impression that it is nearly impossible to make a decent living as a teacher, and that doesn't seem accurate to me.

According to the U.S. government's Bureau of Labor Statistics' May '07 occupational outlook data for secondary school teachers, the top five metropolitan areas for teacher salary at the secondary level are:

1. Nassau / Suffolk, NY - 78k
2. Ann Arbor, MI - 75k
3. Lake County / Kenosha County, IL/WI - 71k
4. Chicago / Naperville / Joliet, IL - 69k
5. Santa Ana / Anaheim / Irvine, CA - 68k

The top five states for secondary teacher pay are New York, Illinois, Connecticut, California, and New Jersey.

Of course, these numbers mean little without factoring in the cost of living; CNN Money has a useful cost of living comparison calculator here.

With that caveat, I highly recommend Teachers Have It Easy. You can order it online here.

Thinking within and beyond K-16 education

K-16 (K-12 schooling plus higher education) is understandably the core of American educational life and the focus of most educational scholarship. But even as we work to study and improve the quality of K-16 education, it is also important to realize that education is something that occurs outside of schools as well as within them. We need to think about the word "education" in broader terms.

What public policy consequences might a broader definition of "education" lead to?

Perhaps: Policies designed to increase the overall health of communities through improved social capital and social networks (see Charles M. Payne, So Much Reform, So Little Change). This might entail increased funding for museums, libraries, public infrastructure and parks, cultural offerings and the arts, and after-school programs.

What consequences for the profession of "educator" might a broader definition of "education" lead to?

Perhaps: Educators - teachers, administrators, counselors - might come to identify themselves not only as transmitters of knowledge, but as cultivators of the personhood and character of individual students and of the academic and cultural atmosphere of the communities where they teach.

Any thoughts?

Education Week on the Presidential Campaign

Education Week has some great online resources available to help voters learn where the presidential candidates stand on education issues; check out their Campaign '08 page here.