More on Portraits of Thinking, Education Miracles, and the Power of Discussion – Plus a Postscript on New Books and Blogs

It’s been several months since I’ve commented on readers’ posts. During that time, we’ve watched the display of intelligence by a common laborer, a general surgeon, and a middle-school student in a special ed class. We’ve also sat in on a primary-grade classroom and a twelfth-grade Advanced Placement seminar, watching good teachers at work and their students responding. And I posted a commentary on the search for the miracle cure in education, the single magic bullet that various reformers offer up as the solution to our educational problems.

The five portraits of thinking – the laborer, surgeon, etc. – sparked a lot of response, much of it on learning and on teaching itself. There was more than a little lamenting about the way schools can miss opportunities for students to think fully – with particular concern about the way current educational policy might squelch such thinking.

The portrait of the student composing a poem in special ed sparked particularly strong response, celebrating both the intelligence and poetic sensibility of the student writer and, through her, reflecting on the power of curiosity, intellectual spontaneity, and just the pure cognitive force and plasticity of the developing mind. Many of the comments were from teachers, and I’d recommend them to other teachers visiting this blog.

“Of Classrooms and Miracles” also drew a lot of response, elaborating the argument or, in several cases, qualifying it with additional or alternative perspectives. I recommend reading them as well. (By the way, that essay just got picked up by the online magazine Truthdig.)

I want to comment further on several posts to my most recent entry, the portrait of an Advanced Placement English teacher and his wonderful students. The writer of one of the comments offered a memory of her own AP English class in which Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude sparked a vibrant discussion among all the members of the class, “from the overachiever to the quiet group in the back of the class.” (It’s fascinating how often these portraits of thinking triggered memories that readers offered up in rich detail. Our personal history of cognitive growth is thick with memories of family, teachers, objects, and events.)

Another reader, Brian, and I would probably differ about the value – and maybe even the definition – of discussion. He’s right to want evidence that education is occurring as a result of discussion, that, let’s say, Steve’s students are learning something about how Modernist experimental fiction works. I see some evidence for that learning in the excerpt, for example, the students’ observations about narrative structure. But, I’ll admit, I also value the other things occurring here, for example the push to articulate difficult ideas and the attempt to do that with other people. Brian raises a concern about an “anything goes” mode of discussion, but I don’t think that’s going on here. Steve keeps nudging and cajoling his students toward precision with a novel where precision is elusive. I believe there’s something intellectually powerful in trying to be as exact as you can in the midst of ambiguity.

This discussion of discussion takes us to a post by ChicanoAnthro in which he writes about a book he’s reading: The Decent Society by Israeli political philosopher Avishai Margalit. I will try to summarize ChicanoAnthro’s summary. Margalit is interested in identifying the criteria by which a society can call itself “decent,” and one of those is that the decent society’s institutions do not humiliate its citizens. ChicanoAnthro goes on to connect Margalit to a “paraphrase [of] Frederick Douglass: learning ‘unfits’ a person for second-class citizenship.” ChicanoAnthro sees the exchange in Steve Gilbert’s class – the collaborative struggle to interpret Faulkner’s novel – as a quintessentially democratic event: “the assumptions people hold about each other as they interact,” “the questions people ask of each other (in certain contexts, we only ask difficult questions of people we respect),” and so on.

It is interesting to think that the kind of discussion Steve Gilbert fosters – in addition to what it does for understanding literature, for critical and interpretative thinking, etc. – also has a civic function. Isn’t this finally one of the things we want from education in a democracy: people experience what it’s like to be a thinking, active, engaged human being, willing to deliberate with others and venture into the uncertain, speaking as clearly as possible along the way.

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Postscript: Four New Books

Over the last few months, some new books have come my way, and each of them demonstrates, in quite different manner, the complex but achievable thought and effort that make good education possible.

W. Norton Grubb in The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity calls for a multi-dimensional definition of resources that include not only money but less tangible things like leadership, effective instruction, and a school’s structure and vision. Money matters, but it’s the use of the money in the service of these less tangible factors that contribute most to effective schooling.

Karin Chenowith’s How It’s Being Done (a follow-up to her It’s Being Done) provides case studies of high-poverty schools that do well by their students.

The Herb Kohl Reader: Awakening the Heart of Teaching is an anthology of Kohl’s writing over the last forty years. Of special interest given the discussion here is his detailed portrait of teaching as highly skilled cognitive and moral pursuit.

Daniel Wolff’s How Lincoln Learned to Read is as much about learning in school as out of school. Wolff presents portraits of 12 Americans (Ben Franklin, WEB DuBois, Rachel Carson, among them) to demonstrate the many and varied factors – from the classroom to the apprentice shop to the pine forest – that contribute to the education of these influential people.

And Two New Blogs from Readers

LarryTash.blogspot.com. Larry writes as a long-time teacher and administrator in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Sara Goldrick-Rab is on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin and studies higher education policy. Among other topics, she writes on the community college and on remediation. Her blog is "The Education Optimists." She also contributes to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s "Brainstorm" blog.

Sitting at the Kitchen Table: One More Round on “Why Go to School”

Again, I have to say that I’m humbled by the thoughtfulness of the readers’ responses.

In writing about the impediments to robust, humane schooling, readers mention the ill-effects of high-stakes assessment and narrow notions of achievement; centralized, top-down administrative control; the size of schools; and a hyper-competitive culture that turns education into a mad scramble for advantage. Though alluded to in several posts, I would add and underscore the continued presence of discrimination (often evidenced in beliefs about the ability of children from particular backgrounds) and the effects of poverty and intensified economic inequality.

Most of these issues are addressed in an important new report from The Forum for Education and Democracy entitled “Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Policy in Education”. (The title plays off the earlier report “A Nation at Risk” published twenty-five years ago.) I highly recommend it, and maybe in future posts we can discuss it.

(By the way, “Ms.” asks about school size, and I’d recommend reading Deborah Meier– one of the contributors to the “Democracy at Risk” report–on that topic, if you haven’t encountered her yet. You’ll find a kindred spirit.)

One thing that a position paper like “Democracy at Risk” can’t do, or can’t do well, given the nature of the format, is provide the lived particulars of experience, the deeply felt reasons people have for sending their kids to school, what they want for their children. What I appreciate about so many of my readers’ posts over the past few months is the fact that they draw on those particulars, drawn from a parent’s desire or a teacher’s life in the classroom.

At the beginning of The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama describes traveling house to house, county to county as he was running for office in Illinois. Whether or not you support Obama, the description rings true, and, I think, is familiar to any politician of any persuasion who willingly or not has to spend time at kitchen tables, at local diners, at small churches, at civic clubs, at school boards. This is where, over time, you hear what’s on people’s minds, their fears and hopes. I had my own version of this experience as I traveled across the country to write Possible Lives, and it was unforgettable.

In my case, we spoke mostly about education, for that was the purpose of my journey. But, of course, all the things that affect schooling–from local economy to local youth culture–came into the mix as well.

Parents and teachers time after time, community after community wanted young people to be prepared for work, and usually work that was more secure and less physically demanding than the work of their parents. This goal is in line with current policy discourse about preparing a better educated work-force. But parents wanted so much more: for their children to be valued, their talents encouraged, their limitations addressed. Parents wanted their children to learn how to get along, how to be fair and respectful of others. Parents wanted their kids to know things, to get involved in subjects and learn how to learn. Parents wanted their children to apply what they learn, make good judgments. And so it went.

All this was specific, grounded, referring to an individual child in an individual place. It was real and immediate. But when I heard it in home after home, town after town, I couldn’t miss how widespread it was. Measurable achievement and economic security are absolutely at the center of parents’ concerns. But there is much more that they want from school or, maybe a better way to say it is that economics and accountability are webbed in a number of other deeply felt concerns.

The politician who can understand and express in policy those concerns will tap into something powerful in the country. I hope that such talk emerges as we move further down this year’s campaign trail.


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A personal note and tribute. We write a lot in this blog about promise and possibility. I’d like to raise an imaginary glass in memory of a friend whose promise was cut terribly short in an automobile accident two weeks shy of her 34th birthday. Here’s to Polly Mae Tolonen, a sharp, sassy woman with a big laugh and a good heart.

Democratic Education, the Election, and No Child Left Behind

I am taken by Deb’s post about influencing the political discourse in this terribly important election year. Her call resonates with other recent posts (for example, Jessica’s). There are people in education who have been talking to key political players–often concerning NCLB–but many more of us need to e-mail our politicians, write letters to the editor, write first-person opinion pieces for our local newspapers, and so on.

As I wrote in my previous two posts, a huge problem that faces us is that the national conversation about education has become so narrow–and has been that way for so long–that it’s hard to find the space to talk about issues other than test scores and economic competitiveness. NCLB, for example, is not only the 800-pound beast in the classroom, but in the media as well. I think of something a seasoned education reporter told me: he could not recall another topic in all his experience that so dominated news about schools.

It’s clear that NCLB is going to continue to hit tough political waters, and in a recent article in The American Prospect, Richard Rothstein predicts its demise. My guess is that NCLB will be maintained in some revised form, but even if it isn’t, the emphasis on high-stakes accountability mechanisms will continue to dominate political discourse on education, along with talk of economic competitiveness. Our challenge in this election year is to insist on holding schools accountable and to affirm the goal of preparing young people to make their way economically, but to do this in a way that opens up the discussion of what schooling is for in a democracy.

If readers are interested, I wrote a short essay on NCLB for Education Week (11/7/07) that is pertinent to this discussion. There is a link to it under the “News” section of my web page.

I excerpt a few paragraphs below:

A score on a standardized test seems like a straightforward indicator of achievement. The score goes up, goes down, or remains the same. But there are, in fact, a host of procedural and technical problems in developing, administering, scoring, and interpreting such tests. (And there are also concerns about how schools and districts can manipulate them.) “In most cases,” writes measurement specialist Robert Linn, “the instruments and technology have not been up to the demands placed on them by high-stakes accountability.” No wonder, then, that there is a robust debate among testing experts about what, finally, can be deduced from the scores about a student’s or a schools’ achievement?...

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A teacher I know tells this story. In response to the NCLB mandate to focus on all children, this teacher’s district has issued a page-long checklist on each student to be used in each class the student takes. Every teacher is to mark every time he or she assists a child, asks if the child understands, notes a behavior problem, and so on. This requirement applies to all students, every class–though principals, in an attempt to keep instruction from collapsing under the regulation, tell teachers to pay special attention to their students who are most at-risk. The intention here is a good one, but the means by which it is accomplished is so formulaic and cumbersome that it devastates teaching. Care becomes codified, legalistic, lost in reductive compliance. This kind of thing is not unusual today. It can be ridiculed as a thoughtless local response to good legislation, but the pressure to comply is great and when there are no funds available to mount professional development or changes in the size and organization of schools, or other means to foster attentive and cognitively rich instruction, then districts–in the context of a high-stakes, under-resourced environment–will resort to all sorts of draconian and, ultimately, counterproductive solutions....

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I think that one indication of the value of a piece of social policy is the public conversations it sparks, the issues it gets us to ponder. Civil Rights legislation, for example, gave rise to a moral debate in the nation, a self-examination of our history and first principles. NCLB does raise important questions about equity and expectation. But unless the testing program is part of a larger effort that includes other student compensatory and professional development efforts and social programs aimed at vulnerable populations, we get, instead, a focus on scores, rankings, and an elaborate technology of calibration and compliance. More sustained consideration of equality of opportunity, of the meaning of public schooling, of the nature of learning in a democracy–this all gets lost in the machinery of testing....