I'm OK--You Have Self-Esteem

Remember transactional analysis?

I'm OK--You're OK (or not, as the case may be)?

In an excellent post at Public School Insights, Claus von Zastrow recycles the evergreen debate on self-esteem, which is harder to come by these days, when even sterling academic achievement is no guarantee of employment, let alone robust self-confidence. He points to the fact that our culture provides all the wrong incentives--fame, greed, selfishness, braggadocio and other wrong-headed ideas about success.

I was reminded of a research project (conducted by Geoffrey Cohen of University of Colorado-Boulder) which dared to suggest that kids perform better when given the simple assignment of writing for fifteen minutes about their strengths, to re-affirm their competence.

Cohen: If a student starts off the year feeling more stress due to negative stereotypes, and then performs poorly during the first few weeks of school, this can establish a downward cycle of increasing stress and poor performance that is hard to break. The self-affirmation exercise, by reminding students about what is really important to them, could help reduce that stress.

Like TA, Values Clarification and polyester Saturday shirts, self-esteem as a workable premise for improving student learning is seriously out of fashion these days. Mostly, we see articles like "Are We Good-Jobbing Our Kids to Pieces?"--followed by 186 comments from people who are convinced that while they're OK, other people's children have been given way too much empty praise, causing their egos to blow up like fraudulent balloons. Use the word "self-esteem" in any educational context, and you're likely to be hit with a barrage of platitudes about grade inflation, college admissions based on the wrong stuff, and our miserable international test-score standings.

The concept of self-esteem is, as von Zastrow notes, squishy, involving considerable latitude of opinion around ego health and evaluating achievement, when you deconstruct it through an epistemological lens. Policymakers who believe that American kids are wallowing in unsubstantiated self-esteem often paradoxically believe it's a good idea to reward them for grades and test scores (because those are tangible things, presumably, rather than feelings). Coaches who declare that it's good for kids to lose occasionally still schedule extra practices on Sunday mornings to prevent that from happening. We idolize Susan Boyle, the mousy Scottish lady who apparently kept her singing talents hidden for 50 years--but we don't want our children to be silenced by their own personal Simon Cowell when they subject their early work products to scrutiny. That's why refrigerator magnets were invented.

Every first-rate classroom teacher understands the paradox here: you have to have a base of self-esteem to withstand and benefit from honest and productive criticism of your own work. And sometimes, kids come to school with very little sense of their own worth. The research on self-esteem and social learning is pretty consistent: you need to feel OK in order to learn effectively.

There is also plenty of research showing that people running successful drug rings and beating up their spouses have high self-esteem. Teachers don't want to be nurturing the next generation of narcissists.

Self-esteem in isolation can become a psychological defense for anti-community behaviors. One of the most chilling and sordid examples of this was the HS athletes in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, who raped a mildly retarded 8-year old girl with a baseball bat, detailed in Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz. Plenty of self-esteem there--plus a healthy dose of entitlement, nurtured by a community obsessed with high school sports.

Most of the people railing against the excess of self-esteem in American schools aren't thinking about our national adulation of sports heroes or entertainers. They're pushing to keep "standards" in place--to hold teachers and students accountable, to increase rigor, to raise the bar--plus a half-dozen other academic clichés. If students feel too good about themselves and their work, the reasoning goes, they will not see a need to try harder to beat our economic competitors. The problem with this get-tough rhetoric is that students won't produce more if they feel bad about themselves, either. It's a balancing act between sincere encouragement and honest critique. And it happens in the classroom, not in Policy World.

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Rethinking Economics (and Education) with Samuel Bowles (of Bowles and Gintis Fame)

In . . . a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.

Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods. . . .

“Being willing to sit in a boring classroom for 12 years, and then sign up for four more years and then sign up for three or more years after that—well, that’s a pretty good measure of your willingness to essentially do what you’re told,” Bowles says. . . .

Three more numbers, none of them lucky:

42

38.8

46.4

The first is how many years have passed since Bowles was inspired by King to “put his heart and his head together” and study economic inequality.

The second is the Gini measure of inequality for the US back then, a level comparable to other wealthy nations like Japan or Israel today.

The third is the most recent US Gini, as calculated by the Census Bureau. It’s at a level comparable to the Philippines, a former colony of islands where every other person lives on less than $2 a day, or Rwanda, an even poorer country in Central Africa that was home to a genocide 16 years ago—a country whose name is often synonymous with hopelessness.

Schooling in Capitalist America, Bowles and Gintis, 1976

"Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited," Bowled and Gintis, 2001

Website at Santa Fe Institute with CV etc.

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students should graduate with a résumé, not a transcript

Consider that title for a moment, at least one moment.

The words are from Arnold Packer, principal author of what is know as the SCANS report, (SCANS = Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, and the Secretary was of the Dept. of Labor). I encountered that phrase in a recent piece by Grant Wiggins, writing for The Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development's new EDge professional social network project in piece titled Abolish the Diploma.

There is an important message, contrary to most of our discussions about educational policy. What if we totally abandoned the idea of a high school diploma meeting certain common standards, what might that mean for education, for the money we spend on standardized tests? Can we consider the implications, at least for a moment? If you are interested in the idea, please keep reading.

Wiggins is one of the great advocates of Authentic Learning and Authentic Education (you can read about his ideas here, with an undergraduate degree from St. John's Annapolis and an Ed. D. from Harvard. But he is not afraid of challenging conventional thinking about education. Consider how his blog post starts:

Imagine the following HS requirements being recommend to the School Board:
• 3 years of economics and business
• 2 courses in philosophy – one in logic, the other in ethics
• 2 years of psychology, with special emphasis on child development and family relations
• 2 years of mathematics, focusing on probability and statistics
• 4 years of Language Arts, but with a major focus on semiotics and oral proficiency
• US and World history, taught as Current Events - backwards from the present
• 1 Year of Graphics Design, Desktop Publishing, and Multimedia presentation

Outrageous? Hardly – if we do an analysis of what most graduates actually need and will use in professional, civic, and personal life. How odd it is that we do not require oral proficiency when every graduate will need the ability. How absurd it is in this day and age that students aren’t required to understand the capitalist system. How sad it is that physics is viewed as more important than psychology, as parents struggle to raise children wisely and families work hard to understand one another. Requirements based on pre-modern academic priorities and schooling predicated on the old view that few people would graduate and fewer still would go on to college make no sense. Ask any adult: how much algebra did you use this past week?

Keep in mind these phrases pre-modern academic priorities and few people would graduate and fewer still would go on to college because I will revisit them.

Or consider another paragraph:

We are once again confusing standards with standardization in education. Our misguided quest for a set of one-size-fits-all requirements shows that we do not yet know how to make education modern – i.e. client-centered; adapted to an era where the future, not the past, properly determines curricula; and where the future is re-invented regularly, and far more personalizable than our forebears dreamed possible.

Let me offer a few shorter quotes from the piece before I begin to offer some thoughts of my own:

We badly need a Hippocratic Oath for schooling: Above All Else, Do No Harm.

It is absurd to mandate standardized prescriptions in a pluralistic democracy. Enforced uniformity, whether required in school or a country, has no place in a modern world.

About the last of these, I am immediately reminded of two lines from magnificent opinion, the famous Pledge of Allegiance case, where in opposing mandatory participation in the Pledge Ceremony he writes

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

For me, a compulsory and uniform approach to education is parallel to the coercive elimination of dissent to which Jackson objected. It denies our students their individuality, their right to explore their own gifts, subordinating them to different priorities - the presumed economic needs of large corporations or national policy, for example. And I think it ultimately robs us of the riches our students could produce if allowed greater freedom to explore more broadly. Increasingly we are locking them into ever more rigid academic programs. In the process, we produce high school graduates who are not used to taking intellectual risks, who have not learned that one can try and fail and perhaps learn even greater lessons than those who never encounter any academic difficulty, who stay on the approved paths to academic "success." We have forgotten about play, although I assure you that given a chance many of our students can quickly rediscover it.

Let me return to Wiggins. One size fits all - standardized assessment driving standardized instruction to the detriment of real learning. Allow me to point at another recent offering, by UVa Psychology Professor Daniel Willingham, in a Boston Globe op ed, Turning schools into Registry of Motor Vehicles. Consider this, written in opposition to evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students:

We do not have good tools to measure teachers, and when you hold people accountable with poor measures, things don’t just fail to improve. They get worse.

The reason is simple: Accountability changes workers’ focus from “do a good job" to “do a job that looks good according to the measure."

There is much more in Willingham's piece, and he is not opposed to accountability per se. As he concludes:

Advocates of teacher accountability often acknowledge these problems, yet insist it’s better than nothing. Not true. A poor system could make teaching worse and a failed attempt will allow opponents to dismiss accountability as a failed policy. Accountability is a good idea, but we have to get the measures right.

What Willingham writes about accountability for teachers connects with my concerns about what we are doing to our students in our approach to education, and I would argue is essential to the points Wiggins is making. We set a standard for high school graduation, we tie everything to that, we are in theory gearing that towards having all student ready for college upon high school graduation even though many will never attend, still more will not attend immediately, and in the process we are pushing kids out of school because they cannot fit into that narrow model. Are our schools serving those kids? If not, is not our entire approach to schooling flawed?

Wiggins puts it bluntly, that we are confusing standards with standardization in education. I do not oppose the idea of having some criteria in various domains that students should strive to meet. But in the process of attempting to agree to common standards we seem to fall into one or several traps. Either in our attempt to agree we create standards that are very narrow, that is, they only concern a few of the many domains of learning. And/or to get concurrence we begin to throw in so many criteria to be met that the standards become little more than check lists. We have seen both occur in the various iterations of standards movement, including the current effort to define common corp standards among the states in English Language Arts and Math, an effort that has largely excluded the voices of classroom educators, the professional organizations of educators in English and Mathematics, or even the voices of relatively recent graduates of our high schools who might be able to offer some meaningful insight as to what was effective and what was not in their own experience. Instead we have people from think tanks, testing companies, and the like. And in the entire process we begin to find ourselves standardizing for its own sake rather than really understanding what it is our students really need to know AND WHY, because we do not step back and ask a basic question - how does this serve the real interests of our students? Why is it that we presume that a common high school diploma necessarily serves to prepare our students for life, or even for college? Is not that the challenge with which Wiggins presents us? And if we are bothered by that challenge, do we not step back and reexamine our entire approach to education, rather than doing we we now see happening:

... the Common Core Standards

... the insistence on ever increasing "rigor" as if "raising the bar" will somehow magically lead to better performance

... shaping educational policy on the failed framework of NCLB, even as we may drop the idiotic demand that all students be "proficient" in 2014 ( which no one ever really thought was achievable, which is why ever increasing numbers of schools fail to make AYP)

... assuming the best way to serve our children is to make states compete, when our obligation should be to serve ALL our children, not just those whose states are willing to conform to ever narrow visions of education such as those required by the criteria of Race to the Top

We ignore the advice of real experts. W. James Popham is a retired professor from UCLA and a past president of the American Educational Research Association, and his area of expertise is testing and assessment. Like Willingham, he is opposed to tying teacher compensation to test scores. In Test scores and teacher competency, which appeared on Thursday, he warns

many of the items on state accountability tests end up being linked to students' inherited academic aptitudes, such as a child's innate quantitative potential, or to the socioeconomic status of a student's family. Because inherited aptitudes and family status are nicely distributed variables, test items influenced by these factors tend to create the needed spread in students' test scores. Yet, inherited academic aptitudes and family status reflect what students bring to school, not what they are taught once they get there. Many of today's accountability tests are laden with items tending to make them instructionally insensitive.

It is not that Popham is opposed to testing, any more than Willingham is opposed to evaluating teachers. Both raise real issues about how our current methods of assessment are flawed, and how conceivable using the results on student tests will definitely drive the instructional process. Some might argue that is a good thing. I think given the current tests - and standards - driving our educational process, both of these gentlemen would object.

Wiggins certainly would object. Because he would argue that the issue is far greater than the sensitivity of the test and their ability to control for non instructional factors such as family wealth and education, or the tendency of many in any domain - not just teaching - to distort what they do to achieve better performance on measures that affect their income and position. Consider that if police are given awards on how many tickets they issue or arrests they make, our courts will be clogged with cases that may not lead to convictions. If instead you give awards on the percentage of cases that lead to convictions, then police may be inclined only to arrest those whose cases appear to be slam dunks for conviction. In either case what should be the real goal - of ensuring public safety - takes a back seat to meeting the standard of measurement, and yet again demonstrates the wisdom of Donald Campbell's famous law, The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

All of this is important to understand, but mainly so that it enables us to break free of our conventional patterns of thinking about education and step back.

And when we step back, perhaps we need to ask questions that should be more basic, such as why do we have schools, what is the purpose of an education, what does it mean to be educated, why do we think students need to learn certain things, what do we really need to know about students, how can we best fulfill the various and sometimes conflicting goals we have . . .

Should not one goal be that we can know what a student can do, what passions s/he has, what turns that young mind on? Can we really judge that by a transcript that indicates how many credits, at what level of class (basic, honors, AP/IB), even when accompanied by various test scores, sometimes with reports of performance on subdomains? Is everything important quantifiable, or is it that we focus on those things we think we can quantify because we are lazy, because we want to resort to a single number?

When I was growing up, one quarterback with a very high completion rate was Milt Plum of the Cleveland Browns. He had few interceptions. He also often hung on to the ball too long getting sacked, or took a safe pass for a completion that did not keep a drive alive. He was not that effective a quarterback, although if we only examined his completion percentage he was at or near the top. Does a transcript necessarily tell us all we really want to know about a student? Might not a narrative, with products (eg, a portfolio) that demonstrates in real world situations what a student has done not give us better, more meaningful information? Yes, we can find correlations between SATs and first year college performance, or between the "rigor" of the high school transcript in terms of challenging courses undertaken and so-called college readiness. Yet I teach AP. And the requirements of preparing students for the AP test restricts my ability even as a skilled teacher to fully give my students the opportunity to explore topics in depth, to follow their passions, because there is so much material that I must "cover." I would think if you ask my students why they take my AP government class, for some it is for the weighted GPA, for others it is for the hope of college credit, but for many it is the chance to experience a teacher who will challenge them, who will provoke them, who wants them to challenge him, to develop their own ideas. I care more about their developing as caring persons who use their intellect positively than how well they do in my class or on the AP exam, and perhaps it is that care that is part of the reason so many do so well, because they begin to understand that learning is more than the score on a test or the grade on a transcript.

I used Wiggins as a starting point. I used his quote from Packer. Let me repeat that quote: students should graduate with a résumé, not a transcript If, like me, you thing that has some relevance. . . if, like Wiggins, you then raise real questions about the increasing standardization of our schooling . . . then why are you not letting your policy makers know of your concern?

I began with computers in the Marines, in the mid-1960s. I spent 20+ years of my life working in that field, but I keep clearly in my mind what was regularly printed on the punch cards that were the primary means of transmitting data when I began: "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate." Should not how we do our education at least treat our students with the same respect with demanded for punch cards? Are not we, in our insistence on standardization, folding, spindling, and mutilating the dreams and personas of our young people?

students should graduate with a résumé, not a transcript or at least, not JUST a transcript.

Thoughts from a certifiable teacher on a snowy day in Northern Virginia.

Peace.

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Account. Ability.

There's nothing I hate more than a semantic argument between educators. I invested way too many excruciating hours in ed school in the 1970s listening to people argue about whether some bit of knowledge was a goal or an objective, only to go forth, fully trained, into a real school and discover that nobody there had either goals or objectives. Nor did they have standards, targets or grade level benchmarks. What they had were textbooks. Which were synonymous with "the curriculum," pretty much. You taught the stuff in the books, and kids learned it (or not).

Things have changed since then--and  language does matter. The whole "21st century learning" concept has been framed as a compelling set of messages, an exciting vision replete with exciting prose--but some people think it's short on content-based specifics. Almost every educational policy idea or instructional practice, from "back to basics" to "sage on the stage" to "core knowledge" has been shaped by a slogan or catch phrase, pushing us toward a conviction or conclusion.

Take "accountability," a word freighted with liability, in various definitions: obligation to bear consequences, being called to account, culpability. "Responsibility" is usually listed as a synonym of accountability, but it's word with a different flavor and different outcomes: reliability, dependability, being answerable. One takes responsibility--but one is held accountable. A commitment to respond--or the acceptance of blame? There are similarities, but the two concepts ultimately diverge, suggesting different human motivations and goals.

When it comes to our children's schools and teachers, do went want them to acknowledge responsibility for meeting our children's needs? Or do we want them to be held accountable for specific, measurable outcomes?  

Well, both, of course. The question is whether we can have it both ways. Can we put first priority on producing  gains in standardized indicators, while simultaneously demanding that teachers to be responsive to individual children, their diverse needs, aspirations and goals? (Or objectives, as the case may be?)

Richard Rothstein (Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right) says that accountability should be re-defined, toward measuring a set of "broad outcomes"--beyond stripped-down literacy and numeracy basics. We're wasting our time on pointless arguments over statistical growth models, confidence intervals and standardizing everything in sight, he says--let's get busy on what really matters.

Just when you expect him to hammer home the classic Rothstein argument that schools cannot be held accountable for things utterly out of their control, the book takes a fascinating historical detour, back to the 1960s, when the NAEP assessments were first developed. Early incarnations of the NAEP measured things like civic awareness, ability to consider and analyze alternative viewpoints, the skills needed for working productively in groups--and personal responsibility for making decisions.  Amazing. Who knew?

Rothstein succinctly points out that policy incentives and teaching practice would certainly be different if we were carefully measuring those early NAEP goals today. He calls this "getting accountability right"--a willingness to take responsibility for a more comprehensive array of essential competencies, weaving in content knowledge. The NAEP assessment models still exist, and could be used to collect data.

There is often a difference between what we want and value for our own children, and our beliefs about what schools should be able to accomplish with all children. Speaking personally, I wanted my children's teachers to be fully responsible for engaging them, challenging them, and teaching them persistently. But I put accountability for learning results on my children themselves.

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Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality

When teachers are forced, against their better judgment, to focus on teaching test content to the exclusion of almost everything else, I can only conclude that the high-stakes testing movement nourishes totalitarian regimes.

If the title did not grab you, I suspect that if you really care about what is happening to American public schools, that quote should get your attention. It is from the introduction to the final book by the late Gerald W. Bracey, taken from us too soon this past October.

This is a book that will give you all the ammunition you need to oppose the so-called reformers who, despite their professed best intentions, are destroying American public education.

The book has an additional subtitle, Transforming the Fire Consuming America's Schools, which makes clear Bracey's opposition to much of what has been happening in the past decade or more. I invite to you come with me on a further exploration of the book, and of Bracey.

This will not be a conventional review. Susan Ohanian has penned a superb review for Education Reviews, which you can read here. Rather, this will be an appreciation by me of Bracey as embodied in this final work.

Jerry was brilliant and acerbic. Let's start with the brilliance. He was first in his class at William & Mary. And you can get a sense of how much of a force of nature he was in this Washington Post obituary by Jay Mathews, for whom Bracey was an ongoing critic, regularly firing off criticisms and corrections of things Jay had published.

I first got to know Jerry online before I decided to become a teacher, when I encountered some of his writing in Phi Delta Kappan, a professional educational journal for whom he wrote a research column for years. One of the highlights would be his annual report on the state of education, which came to be known for its Golden (good) and Rotten (bad) Apple awards in education. Unfortunately, the editors decided the Rotten Apples caused them too much grief, so Jerry had to publish them separately.

He also ran a list serv known as EDDRA, for the Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency, through which Bracey and his followers would take apart sloppy education research and reporting. I can guarantee that Jay Mathews was not the only education reporter on the receiving end of a burning email from Jerry pointing out any errors or misinterpretations. Those of us who participated learned that despite what we had in common with Jerry we could also be on the receiving end of his acidic observations should we misinterpret or misrepresent something.

I never met Gerald Bracey face to face. We talked on the phone several times, but although until recently we only lived about 10 miles apart somehow we never found the time to get together. Besides EDDRA, my electronic communications with him were fairly extensive, as he sometimes pointed me at things I needed to learn and understand.

I received Education Hell as soon as it was in print, devoured it, and was so impressed called the publisher to buy several copies to give to members of the House Committee on Education and Labor that I know. Several have told me how impressed they were with what they read, one recently telling me he had found it invaluable.

Somehow as much as I appreciated the book, which was one of the most important things on education I had read in recent years, the press of school and other activities meant that I never got around to properly reviewing it before Jerry passed, and since October I have been regretting that I could not email him to discuss further some of the things in the book.

It is important to know that Bracey directed educational testing efforts at various times in his career, for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and for the Cherry Creek CO school district. He had worked for Educational Testing Service as well. His doctorate was in Developmental Psychology from Stanford, but his interests were extensive, including food and wine - as Mathews notes, Jerry had served as a restaurant reviewer along side his work in education.

It was from Bracey that I learned about Simpson's paradox, a basic problem in statistics, which shows up as we increase the percentage of groups who score lower into test pools. Each sub group can increase its scores, but the overall average drops because more of the testees are from lower scoring groups. He would constantly criticize writers who would lament things like drops in SAT scores caused by the changing makeup of the universe being tested.

I came to Education Hell predisposed to like it, because of my great respect for Jerry. I was blown away. As I look at my copy, there are so many stickies to indicate passages I have marked that it looks like a hedgehog, or an armadillo whose plates have suddenly pivoted at 90 degrees from the skin. His knowledge of the data and the relevant research is mindboggling. And his ability to cut to the heart of the issue is critical. Consider how often we hear lamentations about how our students are not proficient enough in reading. After quoting Bill Clinton's former Chief of Staff and head of the Center for American Progress (CAP) John Podesta lamenting the proficiency of our 4th and 8th graders, Bracey responds like this on pp. 64-65:

While Podesta was finding this situation unconscionable, Richard Rothstein and his colleagues at Columbia Unibversity were releasing a study showing that there is no country in the world that has a majority of its students proficient in reading(Rothstein,Jacbosen & Wilder, 2006). And at the American Institutes for research, former acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, Gary Phillips, was releasing a more extensive tusyd finding that only 5 nations have a majority proficient in math (Singapore, 75%; Korea, 65%; Hong Kong, 64%, Japan, 61%; and Taiwan, 61%). In reading, no country comes close to having a majority proficient. Sweden is tops with 33% (U. S> about 31%; Finland did not take part in this particular study). A mere two nations had a majority of their students proficient in science (Taiwan, 51%; Singapore, 51%) (Phillipa, 2007).

As for proficiency on our own National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), Bracey was long critical of how artificial the levels were. After noting that it is NAEP proficiencies to which Americans most often refer when using the term, Bracey is characteristically blunt:

But the NAEP achievement levles, as we shall see in chapter 3, are essentially meaningless and set a totally unrealistic level. They were Designed by Chester Finn, at the time president of the National Assessment Governing Board, to sustain the sense of crisis established first by Sputnik and more recently by ANAR

(in case you do not recognize ANAR, that is Bracey's abbreviation for A Nation At Risk, the incredibly flawed "report" released early in the Reagan administration alarming American that our economy would crumple before certain Asian nations because our -economy- educational system was so bad. If you think you hear echoes of that kind of rhetoric in much of the current bloviation about our schools, Bracey would rightly be satisfied to remind you that he had criticized the reasoning in the 80s and continued to criticize it to the end of his life.

The book is divided into two sections, with a total of 11 chapters. Part I has four chapters:

1. Pre-Sputnik: No-Test-Based Criticism of Schools

2. Post-Sputnik: Criticisms and the Descent Into Test Mania

3. Tests: Descriptions and Trends - How Do We Measure Up?

4. NO Child Left Behind: "The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves"


Part II has the remaining 7 chapters:

5. Science, Engineering, and Economic Competitiveness

6. The Real Meaning of Competition

7. "Poverty is Poison"

8. A Few Words About Learning - Eureka!

9. The Goals of Public Education

10. The Lost Lessons of the Eight-Year Study

11. Democracy and Education

The final chapter features selections by Richard Gibboney, who served at one point as Vermont's Commissioner of Education; Nel Noddings, now retired from Stanford and whose ethic of caring was the theoretical framework of my now abandoned dissertation; and MacArthur genius winner Deborah Meier.

For those who do not know about it, the Eight Year Study, which ended in 1942, was an effort by the Progressive Education Association, which got 30 schools and systems and several hundred colleges to allow the high schools to certify their students' readiness without requiring them to take admissions examinations. sometimes while having them follow a very non-traditional course of studies. The students were tracked through their collegiate careers, and they did no worse, and usually better, than their collegiate peers who came from more conventional education settings. You can get a sense of the project here

Bracey's presentation of the study, and of the lessons learned, is accessible, and his book earns its value just in this chapter. I have read all 5 volumes of the study, and Bracey's summary and presentation are more than fair. Allow me to offer just a few snips to illustrate some of what can be learned.

Ralph Tyler headed the evaluation staff for the study.

Tyler insisted that teachers be intimately involved in all aspects of developing assessment instruments . . . He called his approach to evaluation "comprehensive appraisal" where instruments were designed to ascertain student development and merely to determine the acquisition of knowledge and factual learning. For him, evaluation should being with teachers discussing "what kinds of changes in its pupils the new educational program was expected to facilitate" (Kridel & Bullough, 2007).

Tyler also did not believe it appropriate to use one instrument to measure all thirty participating schools.

As a classroom teacher, and a strong critic of our current approach to assessment, I feel the material above presents a strong counterweight to the absurdity of our current test-manic approach.

One lesson from the study was that students needed to take some responsibility for what they learn. Consider

The idea that schools should be democratic communities meant that students would need to end their usual roles as passive recipients of instruction. This shift in which students would plan some of their course of study and develop curriculum stunned them.

As it would stun most of our students today! And yet, if our intent is to help them develop the ability to learn independently, why are we not involving them with designing the course of instruction to which we submit them?

Let me offer one more sentence from this chapter that struck me:

Here;s why education can never be a science: education deals with sentient beings and each is different.

Any teacher who is being honest recognizes the wisdom of that sentence, and yet we find ourselves increasingly forced to ignore those differences in the mad rush to cram more and more information (not even knowledge, which would imply some comprehension and ability to apply it in new and previously unknown situations) in order to demonstrate the "rigor" of our course of studies, such rigor being measured by tests that too rarely require higher level thinking.

Bracey is quite willing to give credit to other thinkers. I have already noted that his final chapter, with its focus on Democracy in education, relies on the work of Gibboney, Noddings and Meier. Chapter 9, The Goals of Public Education, introduces to readers to the work of John Goodlad, with the 12 goals he declaimed in his great book, What Schools Re for. Bracey goes through the 12 goals, and offers commentary on each, sometimes with pointed criticism, even as overall he approves of Goodlad's efforts. Let me list the 12 goals (with some ongoing comments by me) and then offer Bracey's brief final commentary at the end of the chapter.

1. Mastery of Basic Skills or Fundamental Processes

2. Career Education-Vocational Education (which I note is disappearing in our mad insistence that every child be prepared for college upon graduation from high school)

3. Intellectual Development

4. Enculturation - Bracey notes that this could be considered simple-minded, except that it becomes broadened in the next goal

5. Interpersonal Relations - yet, in schools with high poverty, such as that written about by Linda Perlstein, students arriving lacking basic skills in this area, and are given no time to work on them because raising test scores - always difficult for poor kids - takes over everything else

6. Autonomy - on this Bracey considers our insisting that all students take Algebra in 8th grade serves either to dumb down algebra, increase the dropout rate, or both. It does little to develop a positive attitude towards learning, which should be an essential building block of developing autonomy

7. Citizenship - here I note, as a teacher of Government to 10th graders, that students now arrive in high school with ever decreasing background in history and related subjects, because they are not tested for Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB. Goodlad already saw the problem developing in 1979.

8. Creativity and Aesthetic Appreciation

9. Self-Concept

10. Emotional and Physical Well-Being

11. Moral and Ethical Character Bracey is critical of the list of items Goodlad offers under this goal, because he does not see the word Democracy.

Let me offer the complete list of bullet points in the final goal
12. Self-Realization
- Develop an appreciation of the idea that there are many ways to be a good human being
- develop a better self
- Contribute to the development of a better society

And Bracey's final commentary:

Again, this is a list that, while missing some key constructs, stands in stark contrast to the debased "conversation" about the nature of public schooling today.

I hope by now you have a sense of the book, of Bracey's thinking.

Let me end by returning to the beginning, to the introduction. Bracey refers to Fareed Zakharia, who asked the Singapore Minister of Education why the test aces in that small nation faded as they moved into real life while the Americans who trailed them badly outperformed them in almost all aspects of life.

The Singapore Minister of Education responded that there are some parts of the intellect that you cannot test very well. This is where America excels, said the minister. Most of all, he said, American students are willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. . .

Bracey goes on to quote psychologist and psychometrician Robert Sternberg as noting how our wide-spread use of standardized test

is one of the most effective, if unintentional vehicles this country has created for suppressing creativity

As Bracey points out,

We measure what we can and come to value what is measured over what is not. In doing so we throw away most of education.

He then offers a list of things - "hardly exhaustive" - of personal qualities that we either don't use test to measure or that, for the most part, we can't use tests to measure" and it is with that list I wish to end, hoping that I have convinced you that this final book by Gerald Bracey is more than worthy of your attention, of the money and time to obtain and devour - not just read - it.

Peace

Creativity

Critical thinking

Resilience

Motivation

Persistence

Curiosity

Inquisitiveness

Endurance

Reliability

Enthusiasm

Civic-mindedness

Self-Awareness

Self-discipline

Leadership

Compassion

Empathy

Courage

Imagination

Sense of Humor

Resourcefulness

Humility

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An important book about educational equity and our national future

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.

The words were penned by John Dewey for his 1900 work The School and Society. You will encounter them as a epigraph to the 9th and final chapter of an important new work on education. The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future is a comprehensive work by Linda Darling-Hammond that examines a wide range of materials that will help the reader understand the real issues in education in an America that is increasingly diverse in its student population. As James Banks notes in his introduction, we face a crisis, one which Darling-Hammond documents while telling us what will happen if we fail to act and the specific actions we can take to achieve educational equity and create "a more democratic and just society."

This is an extremely comprehensive book, as can be seen by the titles of the 9 chapters (each of which begins with two appropriate epigraphs like that with which the review began):

1. The Flat World, Educational Inequality, and America's Future
2. The Anatomy of Inequality: How the Opportunity Gap is Constructed
3. New Standards and Old Inequalities: How Testing Narrows and expands t5he Opportunity Gap
4. Inequality on Trial: Does Money Make a Difference?
5. A Tale of Three States: What Happens When States Invest Strategically (or Don't)
6. Steady Work: How Countries Build Successful Systems
7. Doing What Matters Most: Developing Competent Teaching
8. Organizing for Success: Form Inequality to Quality
9. Policy for Quality and Equality: Toward Genuine School Reform.

There are not many in America who could hope to address such a wide array of topics competently and tie them together into one thread. Darling-Hammond can, in part because she has studied all of them over a career that includes having taught in inner-city schools, received a doctorate (with distinction) in Urban Education (which is often the focus of our greatest concern about our schools and students); held endowed chairs at Teachers College, Columbia and Stanford; directed the Education and Human Resources Program of Rand Institute (where she also served as a senior social scientist); served as Co-Director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching at Teachers College; and served as Executive Director, National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. She is the author of more than 300 publications, many of which are considered exceedingly important. She has worked with several important educational initiatives: The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards; the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC); and The Forum for Education and Democracy (of which she is one of the Conveners). As she herself notes in the beginning of her acknowledgments,

This book has, in a manner of speaking, been a lifetime in the making . . .

Some might be put off by the title with its use of Thomas Friedman's image of the Flat World. That inevitably brings up concerns about the international comparisons of schools with which we are constantly bombarded. Yet Darling-Hammond, while she uses the comparisons, does so to make a very different set of points than those who use them to simply bash public schools and unionized teachers. She notes that our schools are still largely structured on the factory model established in the early 20th century, which uses a transmission-oriented curriculum as its primary means of instruction, with

accrual of knowledge to be evaluated with multiple-choice tests that could be scored exclusively by machine, without the involvement of teachers or the complications of asking students to produce and defend their own ideas.

She compares this with nations against whom we fair poorly in many measurements, which are redesigning their schools' curriculum, instruction, training of teachers, and assessment

to support the more complex knowledge and skills needed in the 21st century. Starting in the 1980s, for example, Finland dismantled the rigid tracking system that had allocated differential access to knowledge to its young people and eliminated the state-mandated testing system that was used for this purpose, replacing them with highly trained teachers and curriculum and assessments focused on problem solving, creativity, independent learning, and student reflection. These changes have propelled achievement to the top of the international rankings and closed what was once a large, intractable achievement gap.

No reasonable observer will deny that many of America's schools are in crisis. And our students are suffering as a result. Part of this is our general approach, which - as Darling-Hammond rightly notes - needs radical redesign. There is also a real question of equity. This show ups clearly when scores on international tests are disaggregated by "race" -

Indeed, White and Asian students in the United States score above the OECD average in each subject area, but African American and Hispanic students score so much lower that the national average plummets to the bottom tier of rankings.

One reason for this is obvious to anyone who pays attention:

International studies continue to confirm that the U. S. education system is also one of the most unequal in terms of inputs. In contrast to European and Asian nations that fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest school districts in the United States spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest, and spending ratios of 3 to 1 are common within states. These disparities reinforce the wide inequalities in income among families, with the greatest resources being spent on children from the wealthiest communities and the fewest on the children of the poor, especially in high-minority communities. This creates huge inequalities in educational outcomes that ultimately weaken the very fabric of the nation.

If we are concerned with equity, we also need to bear in mind what Banks notes in his preface, that from 1973 to 2004 the percentage of our public school students who were of color increased from 22% to 43 percent, and in states like California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas they already exceed the number of White students.

When I read that, I could not help but also remark that California has, since Proposition 13, dismantled what was once the best public school system in the United States, Louisiana has been ground zero (in New Orleans since Katrina) for the experiment of gutting public schools and replacing them with charters, and Texas is the source of our failed educational policy known as No Child Left Behind. Issue of equity are certainly issues of class, but we cannot ignore that issues of color also play a significant role.

I have not yet, other than the opening epigraph, gotten beyond part of the first chapter - that is how rich, and thought-provoking, this book is. My review copy is heavily marked up with things I want to pursue in more depth. I cannot in one review explore them all.

Darling-Hammond not only analyzes what is wrong in the U.S., she also looks at examples of successes in individual states that have attempted reform. She also provides useful information about what nations to whom we seem to compare very unfavorably do differently to achieve their success. Thus she will provide examples of a state in trouble - California - as well as two states that have made major commitments to better use of their resources - North Carolina and Connecticut. She provides detailed analyses of three successful national approaches, those of Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. From her explorations of different settings, here and abroad, and also from her deep and extensive knowledge of relevant professional literature, Darling-Hammond offers a series of suggestions of what we can do differently, those things on which we should focus.

For example, in Chapter 8 she explores the kinds of changes necessary in a major redesign of our approach to education. On p. 239 she tells us about 820 schools studied in the National Longitudinal Study, which

found that schools that had restructured to personalize education and develop collaborative learning structures produced significantly higher achievement canes that were also more equitably distributed.

Darling-Hammond then gives a summary list of some of the practices:

.. Creating small units within schools
.. Keeping students together over multiple years
.. Forming teaching teams that share students and plan together
.. Ensuring common planning time for teachers
.. Involving staff in schoolwide problem solving
.. Involving parents in their children's education
.. Fostering cooperative learning

This is but one example of how, after analyzing the data and providing a clear understand of some aspect of the subject at hand, Darling-Hammond provides a useful summary of the key points.

As a teacher I would be remiss were I to end this review without examining what is key to success in educational reform, and that is the most important education resource - access to quality and professional teachers. It is a key with many dimensions, among which are selection of teachers, training, induction, support, retention, ongoing professional development, working conditions and the economics of teaching. Darling-Hammond explores all of these, both by examining how nations like Finland produce and retain a high-quality teaching staff, and what we do wrong.

Let's focus on the economics. We often hear about teacher salaries. As Darling-Hammond shows, there are other economic issues of greater importance. Most teachers in the United States pay for their own training, often incurring substantial debts that are difficult to retire on a teacher's salary. At the same time we have a very high turnover among our early career teachers. Bringing in those with less training and mentoring does little to solve the problem, because there is a strong correlation between leaving teaching quickly and lack of training. Without even considering the instructional impact of such turnover - which is quite severe - it is very expensive: it can cost well in excess of $20,000 to replace one teacher, and that is money that is not going to improving instruction.

Finland, as Darling-Hammond notes, takes a very different approach to providing and retaining teachers than does the US. It starts with recruitment:

Prospective teachers are competitively selected from the pool of college graduates - only 15% of those who apply are admitted - and receive a 3-year graduate-level teacher preparation program, entirely free of charge and with a living stipend.

They not only get extensive course work, but "at least a full year of clinical experience in a school associated with the university." They are provided time for regular collaboration with other teachers.

But salaries can make a difference as well. In Korea, to cite another high scoring nation, teachers' salaries

rank right behind those of Korean doctors and above those of engineers, and which yield purchasing power within the local economy nearly 250% higher than those of U. S. teachers.

The pay is higher because teachers are more highly respected, the work is more professional, and the country has made a more meaningful - and effective - commitment to education.

In the United States, up to 80% of teachers' time is spent in instruction, and we do almost all our planning and grading outside of the school day. That is not true in high-scoring nations such as those examined by Darling-Hammond. I teach in a typical American high school. We have 8 45-minute periods per day. The state requires 180 "instructional" days, which of course includes mandatory testing,assemblies, and administrative time. Sometimes days are shortened because of inclement weather or for other non-academic reasons. Let's presume the equivalent of 160 instructional days. At 6 hours per day, that is 960 instructional hours. That puts us in the middle of the 900-1,080 range common in the US. Korea currently requires 1,202 but is transitioning from a 6 day week to a 5-day week, and lowering to 963. That puts them at the top of high scoring nations: Japan and Finland have students in their seats for only a bit more than 700 hours. Yet many in the U.S. think the solution to our educational problems is more seat time, even as nations who are more successful have taken exactly the opposite approach. And by allowing more time for collaboration among teachers, and not shifting much of the teacher workload to uncompensated time outside the school day, they avoid burning out teachers the way we do in the US: many of the better teachers in my building work in excess of 60 hours a week when all time for planning, grading, and the like are included.

I hope I have given you some sense of the richness of this book. I realize this review is lengthy, but I have barely scratched the surface of what you can derive from reading it. This is a work I wish would be read and absorbed by all who are attempting to "reform" our schools, in the hope that the misguided and ultimately destructive choices they seem to be making can be avoided, that they can learn the current lessons from our failures and the successes of other nations.

Let me end as does Linda Darling-Hammond, with her final two paragraphs. These will encapsulate much of the value we could gain - economically and otherwise - from considering better ways of redesigning our educational system for the needs of the present and the future.

Now more than ever, high-quality education for all is a public good that is essential for the good of the public. Smart, equitable investments will, in the long run, save far more than they cost. The savings will include the more than $200 billion we now lose in wages, taxes, and social costs annually due to dropouts; the $50 billion we pay for lost wages and prison costs for incarceration tied to illiteracy and school failure; and the many tens of billions wasted each year on reforms that fail, fads that don't stick, unnecessary teacher turnover, avoidable special education placements, remedial education, grade retention, summer school, lost productivity, and jobs that move overseas.
As the fate of individuals and nations is increasingly interdependent, the quest for access to an equitable, empowering education for all people has become a critical issue for the American nation as a whole. As a country,we can and must enter a new era. No society can thrive in a technological, knowledge-based economy by depriving large segments of its population of learning. The path to our mutual well-being is built on educational opportunity. Central to our collective future is the recognition that our capacity to survive and thrive ultimately depends on ensuring to all of our people what should be an unquestionable entitlement - a rich and unalienable right to learn.

Peace.

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How to Spark a Social Movement: Thinking Outside the Box

Some "blue sky" thinking about how we could move from where we are after Craig's uplifting review of Arnie Duncan's career. Crossposted from Open Left.

What Would a Movement Organization Look Like?

Let's imagine, as concretely and pragmatically as possible, what a movement-sparking organization would look like in America. Despite its limitations, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee provides at least a starting place. SNCC had a central hub, but it looked across the South for locations where their cadre of organizers might be able to spark resistance. Like SNCC, then, our movement organization would have a central location, led by someone with a broad vision of possibilities for social change in America. Note, however, that most of what I describe could be mounted by a local organization as well.

I am assuming, as I did in Part I, that social movements are almost always sparked by local efforts. The success and vision of local efforts provide models for replication in other areas. When one local area makes the impossible possible--as King and SNCC did in Montgomery and Birmingham, or as the sit-in students did in North Carolina--leaders elsewhere begin to think differently. In a world of limited resources, a focus on the nation all at once seems unlikely to be effective. Another "March on Washington"? This wouldn't provide the kind of social disruption that Piven and Cloward argue is necessary to bring the system to the breaking point, to the point where some kind of change on the part of the establishment is unavoidable.

The paid staff of this organization would consist of a few--perhaps only one or two--creative and visionary organizers, an overall director, and perhaps one support staff person. These would be people with long experience in neighborhood organizing who have not become locked into the pre-set, narrow approaches of current organizing groups. They might include, for example, an experienced ACORN organizer who has become disillusioned and feels constricted by the standardized ACORN model. These people would be educators as much as actors, people with the capacity to inspire and connect deeply with individuals from many different walks of life. People like Ella Baker --likely less impressive, but also less ideological, less committed, for example, to enforcing their own vision of "real" democracy.

Sauron's All-Seeing Eye

The attention of central staff would sweep out across the nation, seeking out indications of cities where the beginnings of a movement might be sparked. When they found likely locations, they would do some initial investigation, seeing if there was enough support to provide a realistic toe-hold for a movement-sparking effort. Only cities where sufficient local organizational sponsorship and enough of a financial commitment to show that these organizations were willing to share in the risk (but not fully pay for it) would be on the final list.

Once one or more locations were chosen, this organization would begin to recruit widely for young volunteers (in their early 20s). It would ask for at least a year-long commitment and hope for two, offering only a small monthly stipend and room and board. Recruitment might include outreach to organizations like the Lutheran Volunteers . The recent national DART recruitment of new organizers also provides a useful model.

Staff would sift through applications looking for people who seem like they have the "fire in the belly" to work 14 hour days, packed four to a room in a communal apartment and the humility to listen instead of tell. Those with potential would be brought together at national training sessions and their numbers winnowed. Efforts would be made to balance middle-class and working-class youth, and of course diversity would be a key goal.

Then, for chosen city, a lead organizer and 10-15 volunteers (assuming some will drop out) would move into a large apartment together.

How to Start Organizing?

Teams of two or three students would each be given a particular low-income area to focus on. Instead of trying to recreate the wheel, these teams would each be based out of a community organizing group or church or other relevant organization in their area. At least part of their time would be spent serving the specific needs of that organization, although there would need to be clarity about exactly how much time they would be expected to give (this would create tensions, but that may be inevitable).

My own pastor, who co-chairs the jobs committee of our local congregational group, suggested an addition to this model: finding a young pastor--hopefully, in my opinion, from a charismatic tradition--to add to the mix. This person would recruit in the low-income pentecostal and holiness churches that, because of their focus on "faith not works," are left out of traditional progressive congregational organizing (which, for reasons I discuss here , focuses almost entirely on mainline middle-class churches). The goal of this pastor would be to find, if not pastors, at least congregation members willing to join the organization and spread the message among their members.

More generally, the job of volunteer organizers would be both simple and difficult. Their task would be to get to "know" that neighborhood better than the people who live there. They would go from door to door, barbershop to storefront church, speaking with people, developing relationships, sussing out local leaders. They would read old newspapers about the area and learn about the local elected officials and trace out local tensions and concerns.

They would seek to recruit people to join a local organization, and they would seek out local issues around which they could mobilize action and resistance. But they would not make the hard, quick sell of an ACORN organizer. (It would be helpful, here, to distinguish more carefully what I am doing from the ACORN model , but that must wait.) I could also imagine book clubs, video screenings and discussions, weekly dinners for talk and companionship, and more. Creative uses of new social technology would be part of this. In different ways organizers would seek to fan the flames of discontent at the same time as they fostered webs of interconnection. A core aspect of these efforts would include training in nonviolent action. And the volunteers would be given extensive freedom to experiment and make mistakes.

The aim would be to form long-term commitments, not short-term actions. The aim would be to foster local leadership and community.

Most importantly, the organizers would seek out those in the city who would be willing to put their lives on the line for their families and communities. While the volunteers would talk to many, they would aim to fine a cadre of, say, 50 individuals that could provide an example of a different way to assert their humanity in the face of a state that has lost any interest in their futures. Again, this is fundamentally different from the community organizing approach, which focuses on mobilizing large numbers and partly as a result is unable to engage in truly disruptive actions given the level of commitment they can generate in such groups.

The volunteers would also participate in weekly meetings with their peers to share experiences and ideas in addition to the natural sharing that would happen as a result of living together, planning meals, etc. And they would participate in reading groups to give them more depth in the ways people have thought about organizing, power, and social action.

In addition to walking the streets with the volunteers, the lead organizer would be meeting with established local leaders and leaders uncovered by the volunteers, seeking to map out possible movement issues and actions.

Sparking a Movement

Cadres should keep testing for disruptive protest possibilities. Watch for indications that people are ready for defiant challenges . . . . Adopt a stance that points toward political possibilities, that gives hope, and that encourages people to act on their grievances. . . .

Cadres should use mobilizing tactics to expand disruptive dissensus during times of turmoil. . . . Organizers should scour social contexts for unnotices opportunities for disruptive action. . . .

[And cadres] should lead. They should engage in "exemplary" actions (e.g., leading mass arrests) in order to exacerbate institutional disruptions.

--Piven and Cloward, 1993

At some point, the lead organizer, key local leaders, and the volunteers would decide it was time to take a risk. While they would have likely already engaged in more standard organizing efforts, they would move to more serious disruptive actions, drawing together the most committed members they had located. In contrast with the community organizing approach, these movement organizers may need to be willing to lead as well as facilitate. They will need to be at least willing to put their own bodies on the line and model the risk they want others to take. They must be ready to be arrested or teargassed or threatened.

The general aim with these actions would be to throw a (nonviolent) wrench into the status quo operation of oppressive organizations. The organization's leaders would keep a close eye on the wider response of less committed members of their organization and the wider public. They would seek to extend on efforts that successfully attracted outside participants. The goal would not be to simply get their own people to actions, but to change the tenor of life in the city, to wake some portion of the larger population up to new possibilities for social transformation.

And that's as far as I can go in terms of describing the organization.

But before I conclude, let me take a moment to say something more generally about the kinds of issues that are likely to spark a movement and the kind of work necessary to surface these issues.

Political Education: Need vs. Dignity and Justice as a Motivation for Action

You control our lives and so far you’ve treated us like slaves. You’re responsible for the health and welfare of our children but you’re not interested in how we live. . . . It’s time to treat us like human beings.

--Etta Horn, National Welfare Rights Organization , testimony before Congress, 1969

Belief in one’s dignity as a man or a woman is one of the strongest motivating factors; from it comes the refusal to be used or abused, the assertion that "I been pushed around too long, and I ain’t gonna be pushed around no more."

--Si Kahn, How People Get Power

Union organizers will tell you that strikes are much more likely to be sparked by an assault on workers' dignity than by cuts in pay. Rick Fantasia found, for example, that this kind of mistreatment is what produces the majority of wildcat strikes. Similarly, the nationwide struggle of the National Welfare Rights Organization in the 1970s was driven as much, if not more, by the the degrading treatment poor women experienced at welfare offices as by the needs of their families. In fact, when welfare shifted to standard cash awards, eliminating the humiliating discretion of social workers, mobilization fell even though this came at a time when cuts were made in the actual amounts poor women on welfare were getting.

People are not usually mobilized in large numbers for the long haul by abstractions of inequality, nor even around a sense of their own desperate need. People are mobilized by a sense of injustice, by a sense that they have been treated badly, that their core dignity has been tarnished by someone or some institution. They are also mobilized by a commitment to broader visions of justice, often arising out of religious convictions.

The jobs education issue, then, must become transformed from a question of need to a question of rights and injustice, to a refusal of the larger society to treat the unemployed like human beings. Perhaps most importantly, the jobless must be given opportunities to stop blaming themselves for their inability to find work.

Some of this learning would take place in the context of action. But it also seems to me that, as in the South during the civil rights movement, a movement-sparking effort would necessarily involve some level of ongoing political education. Hopelessness must become transformed into righteous anger for a movement to emerge. And this would be part of the task of the volunteers.

Of course, experienced adults don't want kids telling them what to think. Instead, in the tradition of Ella Baker and Myles Horton and Paulo Freire , the volunteers would need to create contexts in which people could discuss and read and watch and come to new understandings of themselves and the structure of the world around them.

(By the way, one of the limits of Baker and Horton's approach was their aversion to mass action and leader-driven organizing. Education cannot simply be in service of more education or individual action or small group engagement. Only a leader-based mass action led by a cadre of committed militants rooted in and driven by a vibrant grassroots constituency has much hope of sparking a social movement. And, in fact, there is extensive evidence that SNCC was hamstrung in many ways by its commitment to what I have argued elsewhere was Baker's essentially middle-class vision of collaboration and leaderless social action.)

Summing Up

I said at the start that I would try to envision a pragmatic approach to sparking a movement in this country. What I have written is meant as a contribution to a discussion, and I am not under the illusion that I have found "the answer" or even necessarily a particularly good answer.

However, I do believe the model I have described above has some pragmatic potential, at least as a discussion starter.

It would not, for example, require enormous amounts of funding. It would work just fine with only a couple of paid staff and a few "angel" donors. There simply isn't and likely will never be the kind of funding necessary to hire a large number of paid movement organizers.

In fact, the limits on paid staff might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. For a movement effort, you want organizers who are there because of the work, not the pay. And a paid staff creates a gulf between the organizers and the often (but not always) quite poor people they are trying to organize.

(Organizer positions, by the way, have generally been taken by the middle class. Ironically, those who get the "jobs" out of organizing the poor are usually not from poor backgrounds themselves. Perhaps we should not try to provide more than a small number of the most creative and effective organizers "real" jobs. The middle class is perfectly capable of getting good jobs elsewhere. If they want to organize in poor communities, maybe they need to "volunteer". See some initial thoughts about this tension here .)

By focusing on youth as organizers (although some older adults might also be volunteers), the model is less likely to get trapped in old ways of thinking about how organizing "should" be done. At the same time, the guidance of a lead organizer and other local organizers, can prevent them from going too far "off the rails."

This brings the challenge of turnover--but I'm willing to bet that enough of a core group would be willing to stay for two years to maintain continuity. And we are talking about sparking a movement, not building a long-term organization (although that would likely also be the result locally). If they can't pull it off in two years, they probably can't do it period. Maybe even a year is enough time to know.

Of course this raises important issues about how others will view the commitment of organizers, and about how to transition out in a productive manner that does not lead to the disollution of what the organizers have nurtured. I don't have a clear answer to this.

The model also brings with it the problem of "outsider" vs "insider" organizers and volunteers. Again, I'm don't really have a clear answer. Should the volunteers all be local? Should they all be from outside? I've framed my argument around "outsiders" but I'm actually inclined to argue for some combination.

In the end, however, the "who" is probably more important than the "where from." People who are willing to listen, who are willing to check their arrogance at the door and walk with humility can likely find acceptance over time. And in our disorganized, shifting poor urban communities, it is not clear to me how "insider" the insiders will likely be. Just because you grow up someplace doesn't mean you understand it. Even the insiders will need, in anthropological terms, to "make the familiar strange" if they are to revision what is possible in their cities and neighborhoods.

So that's my thought experiment.

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