I had to take a break from my Christmas blogging to post this funny article on the Washington Post entitled "Let us eat s'mores! Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, and desserts." It's a great illustration of the conservative/liberal divide I discussed on my post Do We Need to Be More Conservative in Our Teaching?
OK, back to our our holiday merriment...
Showing posts with label liberal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liberal. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
Public Education in California: The Good, the Bad, and the Intriguing
As we debate what to do about the public school, either here in North Carolina or where ever it may be that you live, it can be instructive to keep an eye on what is going on in California. Not only is that the most populated US state, but it has a history of innovation and experimentation that has swung between the left/liberal and right/conservative perspectives from not quite year to year, but certainly decade to decade.
Let's start with the Bad (I always like to get that out of the way): California, strapped for revenue due to the bust in the real estate market and the infamous Proposition 13 that limits their ability to tax, needs to cut $25 BILLION from its state budget. So Governor-elect Jerry Brown warned the schools that they should expect a reduction of 20-25% in next year's funds. This year, California spent $49.6 billion on K-12 schools and community colleges, so that could mean a cut of over $12 billion--and that is on top of the $7 billion less they spent this year compared to three years ago.
Problems of that scale help us keep our $3 billion deficit in North Carolina, and warnings of a 5-10% cut in education funds, in perspective. California's reductions in education spending could amount to more money then North Carolina spent in FY 2009-2010 on NC public K-12 schools, community colleges, and the state university system combined.
So that is a major amount of money to have to cut from the education budget.
But now for the Good: the incoming Governor, Jerry Brown (yes, the same one who served as Governor in 1975-1983, when he dated Linda Ronstadt and opposed the passage of Proposition 13), seems to have a good head on his shoulders when it comes to education (translation: it looks like he agrees with me!). In general, he seems to impose the national trend towards standardization, an emphasis on test scores, and the liberal bias I discussed in yesterday's post towards systematic solutions that derive from data instead of human flexibility, creativity, and differentiation. Let me quote just a bit from comments he sent to US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:
I read his comments, and just thought, "You go, Jerry!" To see his complete statement, read this blog post from Teacher Magazine.
And finally, the Intriguing: one of the things that outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar touts as a major achievement in improving public education is the passage of the so-called "parent trigger" law, which allows a majority of parents in the district of a "failing school" (once again, as determined by test scores) to demand changes in that school. The parental options include firing the principal and top administrators, converting to a charter school, or even shutting the school down.
On December 7, 2010, the first group of parents activated this new law. Petitions signed by 62% of parents requested that McKinley Elementary School be converted to a charter school that will be run by Celerity Educational Group, a private company that is running three other schools in California. As can be expected, there is a lot of controversy about this event. The state is investigating charges of harassment and misrepresentation on the part of the petition organizers, the state educators are protesting uninformed intrusion into their long-range plans, and liberals see this as another conservative ploy to turn public schools over to private management. But Schwarzeneggar and other proponents argue that legislation like this is the only way to address the problems of "drop out factories" and a lack of educational alternatives for the urban poor as demonstrated in documentaries such as "Waiting for Superman" (see my blog post for a review of that movie, or read this blog post from The Huffington Post for more info on the parent trigger law).
I have mixed feeling about this law. I think I need to see how it plays out before I can decide if I think it is a good idea or not. But I do believe it is something worth keeping our eyes on as our national debates about what to do with public education continue to dominate much of our civic discussions.
Let's start with the Bad (I always like to get that out of the way): California, strapped for revenue due to the bust in the real estate market and the infamous Proposition 13 that limits their ability to tax, needs to cut $25 BILLION from its state budget. So Governor-elect Jerry Brown warned the schools that they should expect a reduction of 20-25% in next year's funds. This year, California spent $49.6 billion on K-12 schools and community colleges, so that could mean a cut of over $12 billion--and that is on top of the $7 billion less they spent this year compared to three years ago.
Problems of that scale help us keep our $3 billion deficit in North Carolina, and warnings of a 5-10% cut in education funds, in perspective. California's reductions in education spending could amount to more money then North Carolina spent in FY 2009-2010 on NC public K-12 schools, community colleges, and the state university system combined.
So that is a major amount of money to have to cut from the education budget.
But now for the Good: the incoming Governor, Jerry Brown (yes, the same one who served as Governor in 1975-1983, when he dated Linda Ronstadt and opposed the passage of Proposition 13), seems to have a good head on his shoulders when it comes to education (translation: it looks like he agrees with me!). In general, he seems to impose the national trend towards standardization, an emphasis on test scores, and the liberal bias I discussed in yesterday's post towards systematic solutions that derive from data instead of human flexibility, creativity, and differentiation. Let me quote just a bit from comments he sent to US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:
What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive member of society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.
I read his comments, and just thought, "You go, Jerry!" To see his complete statement, read this blog post from Teacher Magazine.
And finally, the Intriguing: one of the things that outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar touts as a major achievement in improving public education is the passage of the so-called "parent trigger" law, which allows a majority of parents in the district of a "failing school" (once again, as determined by test scores) to demand changes in that school. The parental options include firing the principal and top administrators, converting to a charter school, or even shutting the school down.
On December 7, 2010, the first group of parents activated this new law. Petitions signed by 62% of parents requested that McKinley Elementary School be converted to a charter school that will be run by Celerity Educational Group, a private company that is running three other schools in California. As can be expected, there is a lot of controversy about this event. The state is investigating charges of harassment and misrepresentation on the part of the petition organizers, the state educators are protesting uninformed intrusion into their long-range plans, and liberals see this as another conservative ploy to turn public schools over to private management. But Schwarzeneggar and other proponents argue that legislation like this is the only way to address the problems of "drop out factories" and a lack of educational alternatives for the urban poor as demonstrated in documentaries such as "Waiting for Superman" (see my blog post for a review of that movie, or read this blog post from The Huffington Post for more info on the parent trigger law).
I have mixed feeling about this law. I think I need to see how it plays out before I can decide if I think it is a good idea or not. But I do believe it is something worth keeping our eyes on as our national debates about what to do with public education continue to dominate much of our civic discussions.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Do We Need to Be More Conservative in Our Teaching?
I'm always on the look-out for ideas about how we can improve teaching (rather than test scores). A new idea has popped up for me about incorporating more conservative techniques in teaching, sparked by an intriguing new book by David M. Ricci, a professor of politics and American studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However, before this becomes a political debate, let me say I'm not talking about incorporating more conservative beliefs in teaching; I'm talking about including more of the conservative reliance on selling ideas through great stories.
Ricci's book is entitled Why Conservatives Tell Stories and Liberals Don't: Rhetoric, Faith, and Vision on the American Right. This book answers the puzzle posed by New York Times colonist and author of The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman, who stated just before the recent elections "The thing that baffles me about Mr. Obama is how a politician who speaks so well, and is trying to do so many worthy things, can't come up with a clear, simple, repeatable narrative to explain his politics." It also explains why conservative leaders whom those with left-wing leanings find to be, at best, simple, and at worse, let's call it "intellectually challenged," keep winning elections. These Conservatives may not have the Ivy League degree or the facts and figures at their fingertips. But they tell a great tale about America's glorious possibilities, and sometimes those stories triumph--even if they turn out to be fantasies, or even worse, lies.
Ricci argues that it is in the very nature of liberalism to eschew storytelling over data. He traces the liberal movement from the Enlightenment, and shows how they have consistently relied on science, theories, and facts to convince the population to abandon long-held policies or behaviors. Conservatives, on the other hand, promote traditional values, conveyed through uplifting stories about such qualities as courage, decency, authenticity, and the democratic virtues of freedom and justice. So you have President Obama trying to teach people about his national health care legislation, which was more than 2,300 pages long, while Sarah Palin talks about her mama grizzlies and tea parties. And we all saw which approach tended to be most convincing to voters in the 2010 elections.
But leaving politics aside--I think this is a valuable insight for us to consider in education. How many of us are liberal thinkers, and so think the most important thing is to teach our students the facts and figures of what ever subject we are teaching? If we are, how powerful would it be NOT to abandon facts, but to combine it with the more conservative bent towards storytelling? Because when I think back to the best teachers I've ever had, they weren't the ones who necessarily fed me the most theories and data. The best ones, for me at least, were those who brought the subject alive through their passion for and, yes, stories about their subject matter.
Of course, it may seem that storytelling lends itself more to some disciplines than others. Literature, of course, is all about stories, and history can easily be taught (although, unfortunately, too often is not) as a series of narratives about historical dates, facts, and figures--tales of the who and why that enliven the when and what. But how about math? For many of us, that is one of the most fixed, inflexible, and uninteresting (and, unfortunately, for some incomprehensible) subjects. However, you only need to meet a master math teacher like my friend, Maria Droujkova of Natural Math, to learn otherwise. No matter what topic she is teaching, Maria is always conveying a story of math as a fun, creative, flexible, beautiful, and personal medium through which each student can express him- or herself and make life better. Maria changes people's stories about math, and that can make all the difference in their ability to learn math.
Or how about science? There has been an intense discussion lately on the Natural Math e-loop on how science differs from math in regards to storytelling (which, unfortunately, has gone over my head, or at least over my ability to devote the time and attention to comprehend all the posts and links that have been exchanged by people with much more specialized knowledge in those fields). But I still believe that there is a place for storytelling in science and that science, too, in the end tells different stories about the world. If you have read Thomas Kuhn's classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, major shifts in the fundamental theories in science, like moving from the Ptolemy to the Copernican astronomy or from mechanical to quantum physics, also change our story of who we are and how our worlds operate.
Once again, I haven't actually read the book, so I'm not sure that I completely buy Ricci's argument. But I think he raises a fascinating point to consider, and shines a light on something that may be a bit of a blind spot for some of us.
Ricci's book is entitled Why Conservatives Tell Stories and Liberals Don't: Rhetoric, Faith, and Vision on the American Right. This book answers the puzzle posed by New York Times colonist and author of The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman, who stated just before the recent elections "The thing that baffles me about Mr. Obama is how a politician who speaks so well, and is trying to do so many worthy things, can't come up with a clear, simple, repeatable narrative to explain his politics." It also explains why conservative leaders whom those with left-wing leanings find to be, at best, simple, and at worse, let's call it "intellectually challenged," keep winning elections. These Conservatives may not have the Ivy League degree or the facts and figures at their fingertips. But they tell a great tale about America's glorious possibilities, and sometimes those stories triumph--even if they turn out to be fantasies, or even worse, lies.
Ricci argues that it is in the very nature of liberalism to eschew storytelling over data. He traces the liberal movement from the Enlightenment, and shows how they have consistently relied on science, theories, and facts to convince the population to abandon long-held policies or behaviors. Conservatives, on the other hand, promote traditional values, conveyed through uplifting stories about such qualities as courage, decency, authenticity, and the democratic virtues of freedom and justice. So you have President Obama trying to teach people about his national health care legislation, which was more than 2,300 pages long, while Sarah Palin talks about her mama grizzlies and tea parties. And we all saw which approach tended to be most convincing to voters in the 2010 elections.
But leaving politics aside--I think this is a valuable insight for us to consider in education. How many of us are liberal thinkers, and so think the most important thing is to teach our students the facts and figures of what ever subject we are teaching? If we are, how powerful would it be NOT to abandon facts, but to combine it with the more conservative bent towards storytelling? Because when I think back to the best teachers I've ever had, they weren't the ones who necessarily fed me the most theories and data. The best ones, for me at least, were those who brought the subject alive through their passion for and, yes, stories about their subject matter.
Of course, it may seem that storytelling lends itself more to some disciplines than others. Literature, of course, is all about stories, and history can easily be taught (although, unfortunately, too often is not) as a series of narratives about historical dates, facts, and figures--tales of the who and why that enliven the when and what. But how about math? For many of us, that is one of the most fixed, inflexible, and uninteresting (and, unfortunately, for some incomprehensible) subjects. However, you only need to meet a master math teacher like my friend, Maria Droujkova of Natural Math, to learn otherwise. No matter what topic she is teaching, Maria is always conveying a story of math as a fun, creative, flexible, beautiful, and personal medium through which each student can express him- or herself and make life better. Maria changes people's stories about math, and that can make all the difference in their ability to learn math.
Or how about science? There has been an intense discussion lately on the Natural Math e-loop on how science differs from math in regards to storytelling (which, unfortunately, has gone over my head, or at least over my ability to devote the time and attention to comprehend all the posts and links that have been exchanged by people with much more specialized knowledge in those fields). But I still believe that there is a place for storytelling in science and that science, too, in the end tells different stories about the world. If you have read Thomas Kuhn's classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, major shifts in the fundamental theories in science, like moving from the Ptolemy to the Copernican astronomy or from mechanical to quantum physics, also change our story of who we are and how our worlds operate.
Once again, I haven't actually read the book, so I'm not sure that I completely buy Ricci's argument. But I think he raises a fascinating point to consider, and shines a light on something that may be a bit of a blind spot for some of us.
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