A Response to LT's "Movies and Education II" Post

I agree with LT that we're likely to end up in the same place, though I feel like I've been a bit misunderstood. So, some clarifications.

1. LT says:

RW takes issue with our statement that we should push our students to achieve as much as possible to get as much education as possible.

RW wants to take the view that students should be free to decide whether they want to learn or not, whether they want to go to college or not, whether they want a particular kind of job.

Yes... with qualifications. While I do think that it's a good idea for people to achieve as much as possible and get as much education (defining 'education' as something almost completely different than 'schooling'), I don't think simply telling people - students - that's what they should do is a good idea, for the simple reason that telling people what to do, even with the best of intentions, is not as good as encouraging people to discover for themselves what to do.

It might seem like a small distinction, but I think it has substantial ramifications. I always react far better when given an option as to what to do (thus retaining my sense of agency, my ability to control my own life) than simply being told exactly what I should do. I have noticed that the students I worked with are much the same way - suggesting that much of their resistance to schoolwork is not the work per se, but the lack of control they have over their own lives.

A compromise, given the nature of the education system: That students are free to have substantial choice over their own learning within some broad parameters (language arts has to stay language arts, etc). Yes, I know this runs up against state and federal standards. The standards suck.

2. Anyway, LT says this:

We do believe, however, that there is some level of reading, writing, math, and reasoning skills that all adults should obtain if they are able because these are gateway skills to virtually all jobs that produce a living wage. We think that RW probably would agree on that point as well.

And LT is right. I agree.

3. LT says:

Unlike RW, we do not think that there are students who voluntarily choose not to be educated. Instead, we think that unsuccessful students see the value of education, want to be educated, but do not believe that they can be successful in education. Given that we view this as the cause of failure, we advocate for pushing students, not letting them to choose to fail.

Maybe this is a quibble, but I want to raise that distinction again between education and schooling. I think schools - especially high schools - are not set up to deal with the whole range of people they are responsible for. As a result, lots of students don't get much in the way of education while in school. The two - the school and the student - do not see eye to eye, sometimes in some very fundamental ways (and we can debate why this is, where it comes from, and how to deal with it, but that's another post).

I guess I say the above because I see this: That students (most of them, anyway; some of them actually seem to think that learning and intelligence are bad things) want to learn and want to be learned human beings, but do not understand school as a place where that's possible.

Yeah.. LT and I are ending up in the same place, all right; we're just using different words to get there.

Though I do think there are many students who do not see the value of education - and in fact do not see the value of being in school at all. This was a huge shock to me, and I tended to respond by asking students to tell me what the point of school was as far as they knew. Some of them claimed there was no point - which is different than not knowing the point. They actively claimed that education - not school, education - was a bad thing. That was hard to swallow.

So on that point I suspect LT and I differ. I think those students have internalized a very anti-intellectual message that is floating around America (and has been for a long time, really).

Anyway, this post feels too long, so I'm stopping here. Plus, I am unhappy with the writing and revising it doesn't seem to be getting me anywhere.

Can Small Schools Be Succesful in Lebanon?

I had the chance to talk to a former teacher today (former to me, former to Lebanon, or former to teaching, you say? Sorry - not telling).

He had a lot to say about the academy system, but he made one point that stuck with me and I thought I'd share:

Small schools work best (and only, perhaps?) where students, teachers, and parents have a choice whether or not to use them. In a place like Lebanon, where there is only one high school, where students are forced to attend a school that utilizes a particular model of learning, there will be rebellion... and failure.

Look at it this way: Just as students have different learning styles (and parents have different preferences for their children; lord, even I am intimately familiar with this one in some painful ways), different school models work better for different students.

I have to admit that this feels incredibly obvious in hindsight, which makes me feel dumb as a rock.

Oh well.

In any case, I asked if he thought an academy system could ever work in Lebanon. He was skeptical, and suggested that the only possibility would be to build the schools separately - to create one from scratch, in other words, which would allow the most possible choice (he also suggested that adding multiple charter schools would be beneficial or perhaps simply inevitable), not to convert and have a mixed campus.

Maybe pessimistic would be a better word than skeptical.

Interestingly, he framed his argument within the discourse of "differentiated learning" and "school choice," both of which seem to be big buzzwords in education in the last decade.

Do I agree with this argument? Well..... at the moment, I'm feeling like it's particularly compelling. Certainly the point about needing even more buy-in when creating a single, closed system seems right. But I want to resist buying into the whole argument, because doing so requires.... what, exactly?

I think it requires that I stop believing in the current academy system, and I think I'm resisting that.

Hm.

You can tell this is a free-form stream of (barely coherent) consciousness, but that's how it goes, I suppose.

Thoughts?

Civic Journalism

I knew this would come up sooner or later in the context of both the Lebanon situation and the Daily Barometer, so I want to take a second and introduce the idea of civic journalism, also known as public journalism.

Specifically, I was prompted by this comment at LT's blog by Express reporter Larry Coonrod, speaking for himself about the role of journalists:

Our job is to fairly and accurately report the facts surrounding the issue and let our readers make up their own minds.

This is, in a sense, absolutely uncontroversial. It is orthodox to journalism. It's an idea that has, in no small amount, defined an era of journalism, from roughly WWII onward. Implicit in this comment is a belief in the ability of journalists to be neutral.

That idea also happens to be problematic. The world has changed significantly in that time, as has humankind's understanding of ourselves and our societies. That idea, however, has not changed.

I am thinking of Howard Zinn's book (and DVD) You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

The world today is a moving train. No question about that.

As I wrote about the Barometer situation:

Journalists, like everyone else, bring to work with them the sum of their experiences and their values – and are therefore not the neutral or objective actors that ancient media theory hold them to be.

This, of course, holds just as true for the Lebanon Express and Albany Democrat-Herald as it does for the Barometer.

No one can completely remove themselves and their values from their work. Every decision made about what to cover, and how, and who to ask for quotes, and where to do research - all of those reflect in some sense both professional values and personal values.

If journalists are no longer the neutral, objective actors they used to be, if they must take a position, then what position should they take?

Enter Civic Journalism:

The civic journalism movement (also known as public journalism) is, according to professor David K. Perry of the University of Alabama, an attempt to abandon the notion that journalists and their audiences are spectators in political and social processes. In its place, the civic journalism movement seeks to treat readers and community members as participants. With a small, but growing following, civic journalism has become as much of an ideology as it is a practice.

I actually think that the DH and also the Corvallis Gazette-Times are doing a good job of opening themselves up to the public in some ways (see the community forums of the DH and the 10-part series on Corvallis at the GT). It's harder for a smaller paper like the Lebanon Express to do so, but I'd like to see it nonetheless.

Then there is the Daily Barometer. Of all of the aforementioned newspapers, the Baro needs to be the most responsive to the community, and needs to allow for the most engagement on the part of its readers.

Needless to say, it is not. In fact, I would go so far as to say the Baro is digging its own grave in the long term if it refuses to acknowledge the nature of its own existence and instead pretend it's somehow removed from the community. That position is increasingly untenable.

I understand the desire for editorial independence (though the Barometer does not have it even by their own definition). But opening up the paper's internal workings/production process to readers (and staff!) and increasing community participation does not have to undermine that independence - as long as the integrity of the editorial staff is solid. Right now, of course, the integrity of the editorial staff is under question.

What is the Barometer going to do to (re)gain credibility among its audience?

How is the Express going to envision its own role in the slow-motion meltdown of the Lebanon School Board? How is the community going to view the Express?

Civic Journalism provides good answers to those questions.

Thoughts on Subbing, Part III

(Note: I suck at HTML and formatting in general, even with a WYSIWYG setup like blogger uses. I am sorry. I might edit the formatting of this piece in the future, but that might just make it worse.)

In the first two posts, I talked a bit about the character of the high school I subbed at - small town, small schools/academy setup, etc. In this post, somewhat inspired by recent events in the district, I want to comment on the academy system more generally.

Specifically, I have been thinking about the fact that the district superintendent just got placed on indefinite paid administrative leave by folks who have spent a lot of time either bashing the academy system or getting their support from folks who bash the academy system. While those folks who voted to send the Superintendent to mow his lawn did not say it was because of the academy system directly, it is hard to believe that the biggest controversy of the last several years has nothing to do with it.

From the setup, it appears I am about to defend said system, but I'm not sure. I want to lay out the pros and cons as I see them, and see what happens.

*Puts on policy wonk hat.*

Pros (and these are the pros as I see them, not as how they are touted by supporters of the idea; the same goes for the cons):

• Increased attendance, decreased tardies - or at least the potential for this. In some parts of the school, it appeared that tardies and unexcused absences were down; in others, they had stayed the same or risen. From what I saw, the biggest gains were made due to the diligence of one person, not the academy system; even given that, I think the academy system helps here, since it allowed the person in question to be responsible for 300-400 students instead of 1400, which allowed her to be much more effective. The fact that she was extremely thorough and diligent also helped - I saw staff in other parts of the school who were much more lax about following the rule of law, and the result, based on what I was told by one teacher, was that those areas of the school that didn't enforce the rules so tightly had absence and tardy rates that weren't going down.

• Staff get to know students better, since they are more-or-less reduced to dealing with a small portion of the overall student body rather than the full 1400 people. This allows for more personalized attention with a decreased chance for students to fall through the proverbial cracks. Anecdotally, this was backed up - several teachers I talked to said that the number of students dropping out in their academy had decreased since the previous year. Furthermore, these teachers implicitly credited the fact that they were all working as a team more than they had before the implementation of the academy system, and could therefore more easily track students who were in trouble.

• Location - physically placing each academy in a separate part of the school allows for decreased time between classes, which has a myriad of social consequences, but also affects tardies and presumably skipping, even if to a small degree. It also, theoretically, allows for greater cohesion among students who share an academy. I am not sure if I saw this, or if I saw cohesion based on shared interests or previously formed friendships or social groups.

• Greater opportunities for a cohesive curriculum across departments and/or opportunities for team teaching. I saw the former in spades in at least one academy, and in another there was an amazing team-taught class. The possibility to make the curriculum comprehensive and coherent at the academy level is, for me, one of the biggest selling points of this system. I never experienced anything like that until college, when I would end with classes that complimented each other. While I think it's less obvious to students in high school, I certainly think the ability to coordinate is greater - and the fact that it can be conscious coordination, even to the point of telling students what's happening, is very useful.

• Greater diversity of class offerings. This is pretty interesting, since it also relies on the fact that the academy system requires more teachers - meaning that it's not really the academy part that results in more classes but the increased number of classes being taught. So I'd call it a semi-pro. One thing, though - it is certainly true; word has it there is going to be Sociology and Anthropology/Archeology taught there next year, two things I'd never expect to see...now if only they could add a Critical Thinking/Philosophy class...
  

So those are a few pros. I am sure there are more, but given my limited experience, that's probably enough. So, on to the negatives.

Cons

• Gender. This is the big one for me. I know that high school can be a harsh and dangerous place, one where gender roles are enforced with such ruthless efficiency as to give the Mafia or the military pause, but still. I think the academy system really exacerbated the way students experienced gender, especially when it came to the different ways that people presented masculinity and femininity. For instance, one academy was very male-dominated (85-90% male); are those students going to leave high school with the same ideas about gender, sexuality, and women that they would have in a school that didn't have this kind of artificial segregation? I doubt it. Furthermore, I got the sense that life for women in that system was pretty difficult. Many of them showed signs of having adapted to being more masculine, and while some of them seemed to relish in their newfound freedom, for others it came across as a nasty set of behavior guidelines.

In another academy, women were pretty dominant, and I noticed that the males were far more flexible in their presentation of gender, i.e. suggestions that they were anything but hypermasculine weren't met with grunts and raised fists. My point is actually one I can crib from a teacher at the school who tried to talk to their students about where they learn about things like love and relationships: Look who they are learning these things from. It's not anything like a representative sample of their peers - heck, it's not even as representative as it was pre-academy.

And this has larger ramifications than gender; many of these students are going to graduate with much narrower view of the possibility of human personalities than they should. Students seem to have developed a dominant view for what people should be like based on what academy they are in; I think this sort of stereotyping is a very bad thing, as it actually reinforces larger stereotypes (in this case nerd, hick, 'emo fag', etc.) by not placing students face-to-face with people who can shatter those stereotypes.

• Class Stratification - Part of the stereotyping is, of course, stereotyping people's intelligence. This, too, has negative consequences, especially for those students who start believing they are dumber than they are. Also, if I remember correctly there was an incredibly large difference across academies in rates of college attendance; it seemed to track almost perfectly with the presence of females in the academy (more females, more college-bound students).
  

One of my pet peeves about this kind of system is that it essentially asks 14-year-olds to pick a career path, something that I think is the worst kind of stupid (it reinforces existing class inequality and stratification - how many people just want to do what their parents do or only have exposure to what their parents do at that age, especially males?). Most people don't know what they want to do for their entire life at that age, and as far as I know, most people change professional careers multiple times (to say nothing of college majors). Therefore, asking students to pick something like this so early is criminal in my mind. I know my own experience with electives - Journalism & Newspaper, Chemistry up through the AP class, the entire Electronics series, and four years of German - could not have taken place today, as three of those series are in different academies and German has been eliminated entirely. Put frankly, high school is not a time to pick a career. It is a time to learn, grow, experiment, and dabble (just like college, I might add). Life skills are far more important than career skills at this point.

This is one objection I've never heard proponents of an academy system really respond to; sure, the goal is to get college attendance rates and academic difficulty equal across all academies, but there are larger structural forces working against that, and there is a giant disparity present at the moment in this area, especially where I was.

• Increased Anonymity Outside Your Academy - a teacher pointed out to me that there are now hundreds of students who can waltz into his area of the school, wreak havoc, and leave, and he would have no idea who they were. The point, of course, is that with increased awareness of and time spent with those students in your academy come less knowledge of the student body as a whole. Relatively minor, maybe, but still worth noting.

• Increased resource requirements - all of a sudden there are multiple offices with multiple policies, not to mention three of almost every department. From an NEA article:

But like most good education reforms, this one can be done well or badly. “Small schools can be great, but they do take more resources,” says Oakland, California, math teacher Jack Gerson. His big high school was chopped into three small ones. “Now we have three principals, three attendance clerks, three offices,” says Gerson, and yet Oakland is slashing its school budget.

Like giving schools more resources is a bad thing. I understand that it's not likely to happen, not even under a Democratic Administration, but let's be clear: School funding needs to be increased by at least 100%, regardless of policy. Nevertheless, I am counting it as con since it's likely to force districts to stretch their resources even thinner.

Honestly? On the whole, I'm not a fan of the academy system, at least no in its current iteration. I also ran across something that I think could easily happen where I worked, and maybe already is (it would especially true if resource allocation is unequal for any length of time):

Valerie Lee, a University of Michigan professor and co-author of a new book about five big-school conversions, cautions that the phenomenon is still so new it's hard to draw hard conclusions about its value.

One troubling finding, Lee said, was that social stratification at all five schools increased, with the motivated students with good grades gravitating toward one or two of the smaller units, and unmotivated students to others.

"The students and teachers all recognized that there was one subunit where all the loser kids were," Lee said. "We had kids say: 'We know we're losers, and here we are all together in the loser academy.' "

That is a big deal.

More from the NEA article:

Many cities are imposing small schools from the top down, but success depends on giving teachers a leading role, says journalism teacher Stan Karp, who led a small school in Patterson, New Jersey, and now works on a state taskforce writing guidelines for small, urban high schools. “Where the rubber meets the road is in the teacher teams. They’re on the front lines,” he says. “They need support and autonomy.” [emphasis mine]

That’s why it’s important for Association members to be proactive when a small school conversion is in the works, says Smith. “The union needs to call people together and move out front. Have a discussion with members and talk about the pros and the potential challenges. This needs to be done with us, not to us.”

If they are not talking about the LCSD, they should be. I'm getting hints that part of the problem was in fact the top-down administering of this shift, and that the resentment it caused has never been dealt with. Do you hear that?

“They need support and autonomy.”

That is perhaps the single most important thing that I can say about teachers and teaching in the short term. Yes, there are horrible teachers out there, but everyone suffers when the hammer comes down on innovation. Heck, everyone suffers when the hammers comes down and there's a memo attached to it that results in massive changes to the school. Changes of this magnitude are very, very hard, if not impossible, to do from above, and it takes an extremely delicate touch and, ultimately, the support of teachers. From what I hear, Jim Robinson had - and has - neither.

Conclusion

One reason I wrote this post is to reiterate larger point about the ongoing disaster that is the LCSD. I have tried to provide, as substantially as possible, some of the ups and downs of the current system.

I have never seen anyone else do this, either in the paper or at a school board meeting. I am positive the district personnel are talking about the pros and results of the system, since they implemented it. However, I would expect the system's detractors to have SOME sort of evidence (after four years) to support their claims. I have seen or heard none, so I think it's out up or shut up time - and it should be clear by now that I think there is plenty of evidenced that academy system is far from perfect. It's just that the detractors don't seem to be even trying to make legitimate arguments in support of their points. (Yes, I am aware that my insistence on things like 'evidence' and 'coherent arguments' provide proof of my pretentiousness.)

Along those same lines, I went to the effort to try and organize my observations because I think it's something that both proponents of the small schools system and perhaps more importantly, the teachers and staff who work within the system, need to do. If there was one overriding thing I heard about the academy system, it was that it wasn't perfect - and therefore needed tweaking. I believe the people best suited to do that tweaking are, at least in part, the teachers on the ground. (Along with that, of course, I believe the students who are affected need to have a very big and very meaningful part in any sort of discussion.) I wasn't aware of any organized effort to initiate the sort of bottom-up, informal evaluation I am thinking about. For that matter, I didn't see any evidence of any sort of evaluation, though I am sure there is SOME kind of evaluation process in place. What I did hear was a lot of very information and anecdotal information, most of it pretty insightful and very relevant. I just didn't see it going anywhere.

(Note: Whether or not any of my comments and observations are worth anything is for the reader to decide. I will only say that I feel very strongly about the gendered aspects of the academy system, and indeed high school in general. The policy wonk/numbers game stuff is probably best left to people who believe in it more strongly than I do, but since it is a common metric for measuring this sort of thing, it's included.)