Education

I read the other day that a recent Gallup poll found that about 83 percent of Americans felt interracial dating was OK, and I believe this was a new high-water mark for this view. There was a degree of understandable concern about the remaining 17 percent, but (some people said) it’s only been forty years since _Loving vs Virginia_. And, as it turns out, it could be worse. The idea that the Earth orbits the Sun has had rather longer to catch on, but my colleague Omar Lizardo over at OrgTheory brings us new data from this year’s General Social Survey on the popularity of _that_ idea. It turns out that almost three quarters of Americans now subscribe to the Galilean view. Click through to Omar’s post for data on the percentage of Heliocentric-Positive Americans who think the Earth takes a year to orbit the sun, as opposed to a day, a month, or some other time period.

Last weekend I read Prophet of Innovation, Thomas McGraw’s biography of Joseph Schumpeter. Maybe more on that later: I need to write something about it before I forget the content. Somewhere in there McGraw quotes Schumpeter’s line that “the budget is the skeleton of the state, stripped of all misleading ideologies.” With that in mind, here’s a kind of X-ray of California’s state budget, via “Chris Uggen”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2007/05/san-francisco-chronicle-offers-well.html.

This is from a “SF Chronicle”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/21/MNG4KPUKV51.DTL article on these trends, which look set to continue.

Over the past few years, sociologists “Bruce Western”:http://www.princeton.edu/~western and “Becky Pettit”:http://faculty.washington.edu/~bpettit/ have shown that incarceration has become a standard feature of the life-course for certain segments of society, especially young, unskilled black men. A “paper by Pettit and Western”:http://www.princeton.edu/~western/ASRv69n2p.pdf provides some estimates, notably the astonishing finding that in the cohort born between 1965 and 1969, thirty percent of black men without a college education — and _sixty_ percent of black men without a high school degree — had been incarcerated by 1999. Recent cohorts of black men “are more likely to have prison records (22.4 percent) than military records (17.4 percent) or bachelor’s degrees (12.5 percent).” Western develops the argument at greater length in a recent book, Punishment And Inequality in America, which you should really go and buy. As these shifts show up in the social patterning of individual biographies, so too will they be reflected in the Schumpeterian skeleton of the state budget.

Thanks (if that’s the right word) to Dan Hardie for sending me to this dispiriting item on a new City Academy in Peterborough:

Britain’s most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time.
The authorities at the £46.4m Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, due to open this autumn, also believe that the absence of a playground will avoid the risk of “uncontrollable” numbers of children running around in breaks at the 2,200-pupil school.

If you think children don’t need unstructured playtime you need to get out of the business of schooling. If your school is so big that the numbers of children would be uncontrollable when they are in unstructured play then your school is too big! (Long promised post on school size in works, honest).

However:

[Pupils] will be able to hydrate during the learning experience

What a relief.

Americans: don’t gloat, it’s happening here too.

I’ve never shared a platform with my dad, but we have, a couple of times in recent years, been keynote speakers at the same conferences. He preceded me both times, and because he’s about the best public speaker I’ve seen it is impossible to upstage him. The more recent conference was in October in Chicago, and both of us were a bit nervous that he wouldn’t do as well as usual with an audience that is more academic than his normal audience, and almost entirely American. No need to worry — as the audience was rivetted after about 5 minutes — at several tables there were intense sub-conversations as people absorbed the message. But his performance damaged mine. Someone who had never seen him before, but knows me well, said afterward his talk: “it was just like watching you”, by which she did not mean that I’m as good a speaker (I’m not) but that we share many mannerisms. So in my talk, the next day, I was deeply inhibited, stopping myself whenever I found myself mimicking him (about once every 2 or 3 minutes).

Anyway, that’s all just an introduction to an invitation to watch him on Teachers TV in conversation with Estelle Morris reflecting on his 45 year long career, the education reforms of the past 20 years, and today’s challenges. They’re both very good, and especially at the end they are both quite good about how difficult it is for central government to handle the schools well. Americans, especially, if you have 30 minutes to spare, you can see a smart and thoughtful person talking about the evolution of a set of reforms rather like those you are now embarked upon. Me, I think he’s the ideal reflective practitioner. But I may be biased.
(Explanation of my title, if needed, here, here, and here).

Update: Thanks to Tom Hurka for pointing me to this lovely piece by Peter Wilby in the Guardian. My colleagues and students, note: “I am eyeing the cheerful chaos of his Oxford home, where even the rooms seem laid out haphazardly, so that the kitchen is where the garage ought to be”. The nicest compliment of the lot: ‘whose appearance is so dishevelled that his arrival on school premises has sometimes led caretakers to report “a dodgy character”‘

I never really think of myself as operating under the protection of academic freedom, even though I believe that it is an important value. This is probably because by the time I became a teacher with genuine autonomy I’d already heard the idea invoked so many times in defense of so many bad practices that I couldn’t take it seriously. Anything I do in the classroom or in my research has to be justified on its merits; I think of academic freedom as the instrument which protects those activities of mine that are independently justified from interference from others who have no business interfering. Academic freedom is valuable for that purpose, and it makes sense for everyone, even those who are offended by some of what I and other scholars do, to want to protect our freedom to do that, even though some bad and malicious things will be done as a result of the freedom that grants us. But it is not possible to specify the parameters of academic freedom independently of what society has a reason to expect of scholars.

Here are some examples of practices that some claim to merit the protection of academic freedom:

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Blackwell has just published the latest of the Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies: Philosophy of Education: An Anthology (UK) edited by (almost full disclosure) my friend and collaborator Randall Curren. I was approached about editing an anthology myself a few years ago, and thought about it but, mainly out of laziness, never got around to it. Curren’s anthology is so good that it makes me cringe at the thought of how any volume I might have edited would have compared with it. I suppose that from outside the field it just looks like a good anthology, but from inside it reveals a wonderfully broad conception of the field, and it’s clear that an enormous amount of work must have gone into constructing it.

Philosophy of education suffers from being somewhat marginal within Education, and not well respected within Philosophy (for example, I’ve never seen an advertisement in Jobs for Philosophers with Philosophy of Education as an AOS, nor do I know of a Philosophy PhD program in the US which regularly, if ever, offers Philosophy of Education graduate seminars. I don’t offer them, and nor do the other philosophers of education I know within philosophy departments).I doubt many philosophers know much of the field beyond Plato’s, Aristotle’s and Rousseau’s contributions, and knowledge that Locke said something relevant but no idea what it was. (Anyone who does know that much knows more than I did when I started working in the field).

If you wanted to know more, Curren’s Anthology would be the perfect place to start.

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Randy Cohen has caught up with CT, and is looking at the issue of whether it is ok to use online information to make judgments about applicants to college (not grad school, as we did). He says it is not. Not to be mean, but his judgement includes an extraordinarily bad analogy:

You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly.

Here I am, writing on a blog, using my own name, hoping that somebody might be stimulated or entertained, or best of all influenced, by what I write, and Randy Cohen thinks that nobody should be reading. The analogy is, in fact, with a diary that I publish and give away for free. I can see there might be a problem with selective reading of blogs (trying to find dirt on someone one wants to reject anyway) and certainly admissions officials should have some sort of protocol for this, but people who make embarrassing comments on their own blog under their own name in public should expect that other people might read and be influenced by them. Writing a diary which one keeps under lock and key seems sufficiently different that anyone who gave a moment’s thought would get it.

Jo Wolff’s “Guardian column today”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,2027064,00.html is all about the limitations and dangers of using Powerpoint (a subject “I’ve discussed before”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/21/powerpoint/ ). In a spasm of anti-Microsoftness, I used “S5”:http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ in my lectures this year but eventually gave up because of the sheer hassle of doing anything other than bullet points with it – Powerpoint just worked better (as does Impress, btw). Jo’s key complaint, though, is about what PP does for spontaneity:

bq. For those who prefer to project the idea that a talk is a unique event, a voyage of discovery that could go in any one of a number of directions, and may well go in all of them, PowerPoint gives the game away. As someone once said: “The art is hiding the art.” With PowerPoint, everything is on display. Elegantly effortless performance is hard enough as it is. PowerPoint makes it impossible.

I don’t know how Jo does his lectures, but one thing it is pretty hard to get away without (given student expectations and all that) is the _handout_ . And once you’ve given them a handout then they either know where you’re going or you’ll confuse the hell out of them if you go somewhere else. How does Powerpoint make things any worse in this respect?

Two sensible pieces, one by the BBC’s peerless Mike Baker (can we have an education journalist like him in the US, please?) and another by Fiona Millar on school places lottery flap. A very peculiar piece at the BBC site reporting on research that, as far as I can tell from the report, has nothing to do with the lotteries. The researcher is quoted as saying that:

Our research suggests that lotteries of over-subscribed school places would produce the worst of both worlds – greater educational polarisation and longer, more environmentally damaging car journeys to distant schools by middle-class parents. She said it was interesting that Labour-controlled Brighton was proposing it on the grounds of fairness and equality of opportunity, when this research suggested it might have exactly the opposite result.

I gather that this claim has gotten some play in the debate, so it’s worth refuting it. (As a bonus for my New Labour friends I include a criticism of David Willetts below the fold).

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UNICEF has released “a study”:http://www.unicef-icdc.org/presscentre/presskit/reportcard7/rc7_eng.pdf on the well-being of children in 21 OECD countries. The countries are ranked according to their average child well-being. The top four are the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, and the bottom two are the United States and the United Kingdom. Ranking countries always attracts the attention of the media, with the Dutch media proudly announcing that “children are nowhere as happy as in the Netherlands”:http://www.volkskrant.nl/buitenland/article397676.ece/Kinderen_nergens_zo_gelukkig_als_in_Nederland, and the “BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6359363.stm reporting on reactions in the UK.

Here are some thoughts about this report from a Dutch perspective — I’ll leave it to others to comment on the problems the UK, USA or other countries are facing. What follows are just some thoughts for discussion and not a full explanation of why the Dutch are so high in this ranking (for other discussions of the report, see “here”:http://www.peaktalk.com/archives/002597.php, “here”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2013309,00.html and “here”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Child-Welfare.html) [click to continue…]

The Dutch educational and academic system is in crisis. In the last couple of years, media coverage on schools and universities has been rather alarming, with reports on high drop out rates, 18 year olds who can’t decently write and who think opinions are factual knowledge, primary schools teachers who don’t sufficiently master mathematics, the brain drain of the best university students, overworked university staff, cutting of budgets and so on and so forth.

But now there is hope. Today, the media reported that the new minister for education, research and culture will be Ronald Plasterk, a highly succesful biologist who is a “Professor of developmental genetics”:http://www.niob.knaw.nl/researchpages/plasterk/groupleader.html at Utrecht University. He has also been a columnist for the daily newspaper “De Volkskrant“:http://www.volkskrant.nl/ and has criticised the previous educational policies in his column for that newspaper. He is also known to be an atheist, which, in my view, is a good thing given that the coalition contains, next to Plaskerk’s social-democratic labour party “PVDA”:http://www.pvda.nl, two Christian parties (the center-right Christian Democratic Party “CDA”:http://www.cda.nl/ and the left-bending “ChristianUnion”:http://www.christenunie.nl/en/).

I very much hope that Plasterk will be as strong in politics as he has been succesful in the sciences, so that he can fix our educational and academic system….

I’ve got a busy week ahead, at two public events to which everyone around Madison is welcome, if they can bring themselves to leave their homes. The first is Tuesday night, at the Madison Public Library. UW Madison’s Center for the Humanities is sponsoring a 2-part forum on the topic of The Good Childhood (cool poster here). The speakers tomorrow are myself and Sally Schrag (an expert on child ddevelopment and educator of child-care workers); next Tuesday (the 13th) we’ll have Anne Lundin (of our SLIS department) and Carole Trone, who is a historian of childhood. Several respondents will also be at one event or another, including a newly minted member of the Wisconsin House of Representatives, and an excellent local elementary school principal.

On Wednesday and Thursday our Educational Policy Studies department is hosting its annual conference. This year the topic is “Education and Educational Research in an Era of Accountability: Insights and Blindspots“. The Keynote Speaker on Wednesday night is Richard Elmore. I’m speaking on Thursday at 9 am on the topic “Values in Evaluation: Why Empirical Evidence is Never Enough”. I’m currently trying to figure out how many nice things to say abut NCLB. This will be followed by excellent sessions looking at empirical evidence and the problems of gathering it. The past few conferences have been great, and the only thing that threatens this one is the weather.

My friend Dennis Gaffney, a freelance writer, has a story in today’s NY Times about the return of “Postcards from Buster.” (He tells me that he has another piece on the same subject forthcoming in The Nation.) The PBS children’s show, you may remember, lost its funding after the animated title character, who interacts with real children, visited a girl from Vermont to learn about maple syrup. The child casually mentioned that she has two mothers – the implication, not stated explicitly, was that they are gay – and Buster replied with the unforgettable line: “Wow – that’s a lot of moms.”

In one of her first official acts, just before being sworn in as Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings wrote to the head of PBS threatening to cut its funding because “Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in this episode.” The “exposure”, of course, was simply portraying the existence of gay parents. The real sin was clearly the casual manner of presentation – like it was no big deal. PBS refused to distribute the episode and didn’t renew the show. Here’s a 2005 Washington Post piece about the cancellation, and here’s a Boston Globe story quoting the mom involved.

But now Buster is back with a new (albeit small) commitment from PBS and a variety of non-traditional funding sources. This season he’s visiting a family living on an Army base, and he is returning to visit some kids that he met in Louisiana during the first season who survived Katrina. Even when dealing with these tough issues, I’m sure the episodes will be presented with the same fun and matter-of-fact attitude that makes the show so enjoyable.

I’ll be at the MLA this year – will I see you there? – delivering a paper that is basically a major rewrite of my inaugural Valve post about the crisis in humanities publishing. (Other bloggers you know are on the same panel.) Here’s a bit from the old post: [click to continue…]