The six of us who are involved in the ELC Tech Retreat at Pinehurst are having a great learning experience in a wonderful learning environment at Pinehurst. Justin Bathon from CASTLE at the University of Kentucky is our learning leader. Justin writes a blog called EdJurist. Right now,we are talking about humanity's organizational structures and how information influences their formation, maintenance, and change.
More as we go along.
Posted at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
The great debate about the value of professional doctoral degrees has flared up again because Harvard announced that it is phasing out its century old EdD in Education in favor of a new interfaculty PhD in Education. The Harvard EdD was known for its academic rigor and its research preparation. EdD programs have become popular, and they vary in their foci--from "practitioners' degrees" to programs that in every way resemble PhDs. Often, the EdD is tied to some licensure pattern required by state certification regulators.
I am sure most of us would agree that the rigor of a doctoral program is what matters most rather than the name of the degree. However, EdD degrees have been thought of as less rigorous and designed for professional preparation instead of the research preparation focus favored in PhD programs. The conventional wisdom is that EdD programs prepare students to be professional practitioners while a PhD prepares students for entry into the professoriate.
Recently, EdD programs have drawn fire because institutions of higher education have begun to offer "executive" programs that are intended to move students quickly through a program that is conveniently scheduled to accommodate the working professional. In some cases, the dissertation has been replaced by a capstone or action research prohect that addresses a particuilar problem of practice of interest to the student. These structural differences offend the academic and intellectual sensibilities of PhD program faculty who argue graduate study should be a full-time academic experience that stresses intellectual depth.
While there are probably PhD programs whose standards, rigor, and research can be called into question, some of the concerns raised about Executive EdD programs are troubling even among faculty who work in EdD programs. However, the privilege of attending graduate school full-time to pursue a PhD is out of reach for many practitioners who need to make a living, plan for the future, and serve their communities. The questions become 1) what should advanced graduate preparation of educators look like, 2) what constitutes rigor in those programs, and 3) what social good is served by providing accessible, affordable advanced graduate prerparation for educational practitioners?
As a graduate of the research-rigorous EdD program at Indiana University. I tend to support EdD programs generally. I currently work in an EdD program that has been very active working with students who are full-time practitioners. Our state requires the EdD for licensure. So a switch to a PhD in Ed Leadership has a lot of practical and political considerations for us. However, the major factor I see is that practitioners need to have the opportunity to pursue more education and more cedentialing. Our program is making a difference by teaching practicing school leaders about justice, equity, and caring as foundational functions of educational leadership. Whatever its initials, that is a job that needs to be done in a nation that still has a long way to go to fulfill its promise of equal opportunity. Until it's clear what the real advantages are of a PhD program over a professional degree, I am for sticking with what we have that delivers quality in ngraduate preparation and making sure propsective students and the public understand what quality in graduate education means.
Posted at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
On Sunday, I attended the first Board of Trustees meeting of the North Carolina Leadership Academy, a group that is seeking a charter from the state of North Carolina to operate a school in the Piedmont Triad area beginning in Fall 2013. Application preparation is underway, and we expect to submit it to Office of Charter Schools on April 13, 2012. If we are granted a charter, we will spend 2012-2013 organizing the school, finding a site, designing the curriculum, and employing a principal and teachers. NCLA's program will prepare K-12 students in a college preparatory curriculum that stresses leadership, community engagement, service learning, and technology.
Some of my friends and colleagues may be asking how and why I got involved in a charter school start-up. The "how" involved absolute caprice. An email circulated through a listserv I belong to seeking people interested in a leadership, college prep oriented charter school, and on a whim I responded. That led to a lunch conversation with Chip Cook, who is a lecturer at UNCG and the local person behind the scenes putting this all together. I also had a long phone conversation with Fred Kennedy, a retired Army colonel who was formerly President of Oak Ridge Military Academy. I learned that about five of the prospective Trustees had some connection to Oak Ridge, which raised my antennae, since I did not want anything to do with the stereotypical military school. However, I soon learned that those involved in this project were of like mind. Our idea is that NCLA will attract a diverse student body who want to pursue academic excellence, develop their leadership capabilities, and serve their communities.
I am the only Board member who is a career educator, and as those who know me will recall I have a very strong commitment to the public school system. I have been a critic of charters, particularly when they extend segregation and when they merely replicate what is already happening in the public school down the street. My experience with a charter school and a research project on charters and students with disabilities further solidified my abiding concern about the movement. It has always seemed to me that something like a charter would be a good opportunity for innovation--a place where thoughful educators working together could do good things for kids. However, I haven't seen much evidence that charters really think differently about kids, parents, communities, and schooling.
Unfortunately, I have also become increasingly disillusioned about the prospects for change in public schools. Schools have become test-driven, curriculum-crusty, low energy institutions where good people are beat down by a system that values data (and not very good data at that) over children. A graduate of our MSA program recently reported that 40 of the 49 remaining school days in her school will be devoted to testing. A colleague heard at ASCD that 140 of 180 days in one school district's calendar is inside a testing window. If I hear "next year with the Common Core" one more time, my head will explode. Some schools are using technology, but many others are working as hard as they can to restrict access and discourage students' use of high tech equipment, social networking, and online resources.
I have decided to take up this opportunity because I am enthusiastic about working with the other Trustees who I believe are committed to educational ideas I support. The possibility of putting our ideas into practice is very challenging and exciting. Occasionally a chance to make a real difference in the lives of kids and the community comes along that just feels right. Also, sometimes a chance to match your work with your pronouncements comes along. NCLA brings those opportunities together, and I am very pleased to be on board. I'll keep you posted about how it goes.
Posted at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
What follows is a section for a paper I am writing. The purpose of the paper is to deconstruct the policy narratives in No Child Left Behind (2001) and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (2004) to reveal their foundations in a human capital agenda that drives schooling. In the human capital agenda, persons are valued for the contributions they make to economic productivity in a society (Postman, 1995; Tyack & Hansot, 1992; Smith & Scoll, 1995). Education then becomes a process of preparing children to take their places in the workforce. An alternative notion, a human capabilities agenda, should replace the current agenda for schooling so that society strengthens as each individual lives out possibilities that s/he values (Sen, 1992; Alkire & Deneukin, 2009; Nussbaum, 2006). Education becomes an opportunity to explore, nurture, and discover what those possibilities are. Through a human capabilities agenda, the social fabric is woven from the interests of those who value citizenship, economic productivity, personal freedom, individual growth, and community.
At least since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, and quite probably since the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, the United States has cultivated an educational system and a public impression that are rooted in a belief that the quality of a student's education is best indicated by the results of standardized tests. This may not be 100% of the way parents think about their schools when their children go to schools where students score pretty well on standardized tests. However, in schools where students do not score at acceptable levels on average, parents, students, educators, and the public are regularly reminded that these students are not learning because they do not score well on achievement tests.
Exacerbating the problem is the fact that many of these failing schools serve students from racially and ethnically minority families who live below the poverty line. NCLB purports to address the inequities in American education. It has shined a light on the gaps in achievement that exist among groups of students. However, it has come up short in closing those gaps, and the strides that have been made have come at the price of a narrowed curriculum that hones in on back-to-basics reading and math skills and punishes schools where students do not achieve at required levels of proficiencies. In addition, the NCLB target of 100% proficiency by 2014 has resulted in many more schools coming close to being labeled failing, because the target represents a very simplistic view of what it takes to teach the children of the 21st Century.
As a result of the structures and pressures built into NCLB, schools have increasingly become institutions that are focused on standardization and testing. In all schools, the centrality of testing and proficient test scores has resulted in
The over-emphasis on standardized testing and test scores has come about because of concerns that we need a measurable means by which we can determine whether American students will be prepared to compete economically in a global society. Our students' educational performance is constantly compared to that of students in other countries. We as Americans take umbrage at the possibility that we might not be first in the world on a particular measure of student achievement. We extrapolate that concern into threats to our economic stability, leadership, and growth and then further to our prominence in a world that is increasingly more closely connected, more dangerous, and more interdependent.
In addition to the economic consequences and concerns about our once unassailable position as a world power, poorly performing schools also remind us that today's youth live in a different world than the rest of us. They are growing up with more social and cultural instability, less certainty about their economic future, waves and waves of consumerism, new technologies that have and will change how we conduct our lives and business, new norms and mores that create tensions between and among all sorts of social groups and generations, increasing sociological and interpersonal diversity, and the availability of vast funds of knowledge at a cost rapidly approaching zero. Children have before them tremendous opportunity, tremendous risk, chaotic uncertainty, and continuous rapid change.
As with past generations, we current adults wonder what will become of these children and young people. And they wonder what we expect of them. Many are confident they will work it out--that their educational preparation, good nature, and common sense will see them through. Increasingly however, many of today's children and youth do not have that confidence. They have experienced an educational system that has neither prepared them for thinking, adapting, and acting on information nor has it given them a solid sense of possibility. The impoverished school curriculum they have experienced has deprived them of their capacity to continue to learn, and the punitive, high stress, confidence-depleting system of test preparation as curriculum and test results as learning has stripped them of their capacity to be curious.
Burrello, Kleinhammer-Tramill, and Sailor (20xx, forthcoming) argue that the economically driven theories, policies, and practices that undergird NCLB and current educational thinking stem from an agenda of human capital development that gauges the merit and worth of a person by his/her capacity to contribute to economic productivity. Schools then become instruments of the economy. Since the 1980s when the human capital development/economic discourse began to dominate education, the selfsame theories that have driven the business sector have been adopted by those who are interested in school change, resulting in promoting high standards, continuous assessment, curriculum and assessment alignment, work teams, and the like. Ultimately, business's notion of "the bottom line" took over as a best practice to be used to determine whether schools were performing to standards. Hence, standards driven curriculum aligned with statewide assessments was hatched. In addition, business thinking resulted in ideas about what to do with schools that are low-performing, and from that logic came school transformation or reconstitution in which employees were fired, bosses were transferred, new employees were brought onboard, and in some cases, schools were "sold off" to charter school providers much like an underperforming division would be in industry.
Burrello, Kleinhammer-Tramill, and Sailor (20xx, forthcoming) suggest that we need a radical overhaul of educational policy and practice that rests on a foundation of human capabilities. There have always been narratives of schooling that competed with the economic productivity narrative. Schooling to create a citizenry, schooling for personal development, schooling as socialization, just to name a few. The current overwhelming dominance of the economic narrative puts the state of opur schools and our nation into sharp relief, and it quickly becomes apparent that we need to change our national narrative if we hope to survive into the next century. A human capabilities agenda help us to do so by emphasizing that our social institutions should support a person's interests as s/he pursue the possibilities of life that s/he values.
Our question then as stewards of education who hope to leave a legacy of hope for our children and those who arrive hereafter is to radically and dramatically turn public education on its proverbial ear by looking at its foundational assumptions and its core mission. In the essays and blog entries that follow, we will first look at No Child Left Behind (2002) and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (2004) to deconstruct the policy narratives that are embedded in them. From those analyses, we will proceed to offer policy alternatives that have a human capabilities agenda at their foundation.
Posted at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
The first full week of school has ended, and it's time to survey the educational law and policy landscape to find out what the hot topics are these days. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll take a look at these in more detail, but for now let's get the list out there for your consideration.
Probably the most surprising and difficult trend for me to deal with has been the avalanche of teacher bashing that began last Spring during state budget season. The volume and virulence with which teachers were attacked as incompetent, over-protected, and under-worked was startling to the profession and to many in the public. The Save Our Schools rally in Washington in May was supposed to begin a counter-offensive, but so far we haven't seen much in the way of progress.
The long-expected reauthorization of No Child Left Behind still awaits us, probably stuck in the eternal log-jam that is inside the beltway politics. There appears to be some interest in changing testing programs and giving states a break on accountability measures. Secretary Duncan's proclamation that he would change the direction of the school failure provisions attracted a lot of attention, and states are concerned that they could not deal with a failure rate as high as the 82% Duncan has predicted.
As more schools utilize educational technology, issues about teachers' relationships with students, changing instructional practice, and a curriculum that meets the needs of today's students have taken a technological twist. Many districts have enacted policies that prohibit teachers interactions with students on Facebook and other social networks, raising free speech and privacy issues. Whether today's teaching corps is ready to teach today's students with technologies students understand is an issue that has students and parents concerned and administrators scrambling to find professional development approaches that reach teachers in ways that actually improve performance. The Common Core standards and 21st Century Skills projects are the most recent efforts to improve what students learn, but whether either is really workable or an improvement remains an open question.
Students with disabilities and second language learners have gotten a lot of attention lately because these students are less likely to do well on standardized tests and therefore their schools do not make AYP. Exactly what to do about that is controversial. On one hand, AYP draws attention to the performance of these students, thus making it easier to argue for resources to met their needs. On the other, students who are identified in these categories got there because of their achievement problems in the first place.
Also from special education we hear a lot about the marked increase in the number of students with autism or autism spectrum disorder as it is now called. The implications of the rapid increase are still unknown for this condition that some estimate affects 1 in 90 children.
That's about it for the Flashpoints48 list. Stay tuned for more on these stories in the next couple of weeks.
Posted at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I am attending the Social, Behavioral, and Educational Research Conference sponsored by PRIM&R in Boston. They keynote session this morning was by Dr. Scott Brown from Physicians for Human Rights who discussed the US's institution of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques after 9/11. EIT is the post-Rumsfeld/Bush name for what everyone else calls torture.
Dr. Brown discussed whether the information collected during sessions at Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib constitutes research and whether the health professionals involved committed legal or ethical violations. According to the US government, especially the CIA and DOD, they did not, but there is a lot of room for discussion and debate. This extreme example brought into focus a number of issues related to things like the purpose of research, the stances of researchers, and the values embedded in methodology. Most telling were the rationalizations used by health professionals to excuse their complicity--"it's for the greater good," ""I was there to keep it safe," or "what was done was legal."
More on this and other interesting issues as the day goes by.
Posted at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
A recent news story has received a lot of attention from teachers and the public alike. It seems English teacher Natalie Munroe took it upon herself to call her students out in profanity-filled blog postings in which she called the "out-of-control," disobedient, disrespectful oafs," and "disengaged, lazy whiners." Ms. Munroe's blog has since been taken down, but the story has had broad coverage. A Google search for "teacher, blog, Pennsylvania" yielded more than enough fodder for this Flashpoints48 posting. Ms. Munroe was suspended with pay after some students discovered the blog on-line and made its contents known to school officials.
Ms. Munroe argues that the blog was intended for her friends and family and that on occasion she did use it to vent her frustration about students and teaching. She claims to have made positive comments in addition to the negative ones that have gotten all of the attention, and she did not mention specific students by name nor use her own full name. Subsequently, Ms. Munroe released a video in which she and her attorney defended her and asserted her right to freedom of speech.
Natalie Munroe is currently suspended with pay for her blogging, and the school board will at some point decide on whether she will return to her teaching position. Whether her First Amendment rights are in danger of being violated will be the subject of considerable debate, I am sure. However, a little bit of explanation about how a court might rule might be helpful as we warm up for what promises to be a contentious public conversation.
In Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a public employee's expressions can be sanctioned if they are made pursuant to his/her duties. The question in Ms. Munroe's case then will be whether her blogging comments were made as part of her duties as a teacher. If so, her suspension and any subsequent sanction could be upheld. When she is doing her job, her constitutional right to free speech does not come into play. On one hand, her blog was about her work as a teacher; the students were her students; and she was writing about the travails she encountered on the job. On the other hand, her comments were not intended to be public; she didn't mention any names; and as far as we can tell, no decisions were made about students on the basis of her blogging.
Another consideration is whether teachers' First Amendment rights apply to their expressions when they speak out on matters that are important to the public. In Pickering v. Board of Education (1968), the Supreme Court ruled that teachers could speak out on matters of public concern without fear of sanction. In Connick v. Myers (1983), the Court ruled further that content, form, and context of the employee's expression can be considered when determining whether the matter is of public concern. This gives employers a wide berth, since not only what an employee says but how and where s/he says it can be taken into account. In the Munroe situation, not only what she said but the forum that she used would need to be considered. While it may be true that the motivations and attitude of high school students is a matter of public concern, were Ms. Munroe's comments expressed in a manner and setting appropriate to the concern? That she was writing semi-anonymously in a blog intended to be read only by a small number of friends might indicate that she was merely blowing off steam about personal gripes--and for that she can be sanctioned. If her motive was to inform the public about high school students, then her blog is protected free expression and she cannot be sanctioned.
And we have to consider one thing more. Even if Ms. Munroe was within her rights to write a blog lambasting her students (and their parents) for their lack of motivation, attitude, and appearance, should she have done so? Is it appropriate for a teacher to express her sentiments in the form Ms. Munroe used? Is this the kind of behavior in which a responsible professional would engage? While she may have had the right to express herself in this way, shouldn't she be using her time and creativity more productively to seek out ways to teach students that are more motivating, more engaging, and more positive?
Natalie Munroe is giving us all a chance to learn a thing or two about what freedom of expression means for teachers and how to deal ethically with the problems of schools and the profession. I'll leave it to you, the Central Bucks school board, and probably a judge to decide whether Ms. Munroe was within her rights or whether she missed a good opportunity to keep her opinions to herself. Here's hoping this incident sparks some discussion about students, schooling, and what our soiety teaches when it considers issues such as this one.
Posted at 11:52 PM in Education Law | Permalink | Comments (0)
