Jeff Larsen writes:
Okay, I’ll bite. There are problems with some AP courses, but I think you’re painting with a broad brush here. My story is obviously anecdotal, but here at Lowell HS (just outside Grand Rapids, MI), our AP teachers aren’t focused on the test, nor do they teach “a mile wide and an inch deep” (that will happen, however, with Common Core). We take all students who want to attempt the course; those who succeed (in class and on the exam) find themselves better prepared for their first year of college than the average student. I’d also suggest that a 2002 study of AP course rigor isn’t relevant; there have been many changes to the courses over the past 11 years.
It doesn’t matter if my AP Lit students are Harvard-bound (where AP credits mean zilch) or heading to Grand Rapids Community College, they come back to tell me and my colleagues that what we put them through was more difficult than their first year of college.
We’re proud of our US News & World Report ranking because we aren’t one of those selective schools at the top, but we are keeping up with the more affluent districts in our region. It’s easy to take shots at the College Board, Jay Matthews, and the charter schools at the top. But it’s not fair to lump all AP teachers, courses, and (especially) students, into that group.
Full disclosure: I’ve taught AP Lit for 14 years, AP Language for 5, and have worked as an AP Lit Exam Reader for 7. While I take a week’s pay from CB, I know that the time I spend working with other teachers and professors is the most valuable professional development I’ve had in almost 20 years of teaching.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I taught AP american history in three high schools. At first I would have agreed with Jeff. I brought it to a south bronx high school to prepare kids for more critical thinking and used more critical thinking challenges as well as introducing them to a more boring college type lecture from time to time.
For a long time AP American History was a course in most schools that teachers could teach in a myriad of fashions. Even the college board was proud of that. AP conferences would be led by master AP teachers like Eric Rothschild of Scarsdale who stressed the importance of creativity and real historical investigations in the many simulations he created. I learned from Eric when I was in the Bronx, and eventually taught with him at Scarsdale.
Things changed. For the worse. The course became less about history and all about memorization and spitting out formulaic essays and dissecting multiple choice questions.That is when I stopped teaching it.
What is AP? Why is it no one writes out the ancronym. I am not in education.
Advanced Placement. A course sold by the College Board that is supposed to be akin to a college-level course, with a prescribed curriculum and test.
“Supposed to be” is the key phrase in your thought.
Diane, the Advanced Placement English courses are not prescribed. My school is a member of the College Board, and we pay a yearly fee to do so, but not one course is “sold” as a packaged curriculum. I’ve got more academic freedom than most teachers; I’m in control of which novels, plays, short stories, and poetry my students study.
My class is just as rigorous as a college freshman level course. How do I know? My former students – those who did and did not pass the AP Exam – tell me so. Also, I happen to teach English Composition 101 and 102 as adjunct instructor at Grand Rapids Community College, so I have some experience with creating rigorous college courses.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m terribly concerned about the future of the College Board and AP now that David Coleman is in charge. But please, do the readers of this very important, very influential blog a favor and stop spreading misinformation about what so many AP teachers do year after year to help our students succeed.
Jeff,
Do you have an opinion on the Math AP courses? I ask because so many kids take the Math AP courses, take the test, and then proceed to the next level course in college and are totally unprepared. I have not seen this change between 1983 and 2006 (using Calculus at UofM as my gauge).
I teach AP English Literature. I’ve seen no decline in the quality of the AP Literature test since I started teaching it a while ago.
The College Board’s AP tests are excellent. But despite CB’s push to turn their programs into all-inclusive bastions of meaningful education, that’s all the AP program really is: it’s a sequence of challenging tests that are meaningful indicators of aptitude and achievement for the kids to pass. The tests are excellent culminating assessments and helpful focal points for the class, but it’s up to teachers to make the classes meaningful.
The AP program makes good tests. Don’t let CB, or Newsweek, or anyone else dupe you into thinking the program is anything more than that.
“The College Board’s AP tests are excellent.” HA HA! That’s a good one!
The AP tests are as invalid as any standardized test. See Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 to understand all the errors involved in the making, giving and disseminating of the results that render the whole process invalid. Any conclusions drawn from a process so rife with error are, as Wilson states “vain and illusory”.
Um…you’re evincing a rather dogmatic, either/or attitude that isn’t helpful. I’ve been teaching AP English for years and I can tell you, as somebody who is in a regular public school classroom working with kids and who is not employed by CB, that the tests are challenging and the results are meaningful.
No test is perfect; the results are “snapshots” of performance on a given day and they should be treated as such. That the test isn’t perfect and that the test results have been misused in recent history does not make the test results “invalid.” They are only invalid if they are used for the wrong purpose.
Jim,
I challenge you to read and understand Wilson’s work. For a shorter take on the invalidity of the whole standardized testing regime see his “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review” found at: http://www.edrev.info/essays/v10n5.pdf
“Um…you’re evincing a rather dogmatic, either/or attitude that isn’t helpful.” Yes, it is a “rather dogmatic” attitude because the standardized testing behemoth serves only to sort and separate and rank students in a process that causes harm to many students. Either a test is valid or it is invalid (and all standarized tests are invalid). Once it is proven that it is invalid (and Wilson proves that), any results are chimeras, duendes, worthless.
As someone who has taught in public secondary schools for one shy of twenty years and who has been researching/studying educational standards and standardized testing for over a dozen years I have yet to see a rebuttal to Wilson’s work. Please rebut his work or show me a rebuttal to his work and I will rethink my “dogmatic” ways. In the meantime I continue my Quixotic dogmatic attitude in fighting against the monstrosity that is standardized testing.
You have yet to read a rebuttal of it because reading it is unreadable. Can you provide a summary? I can’t make sense out of this kind of tortured academic prose.
Nice. Seriously, it is some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen. It’s as if it was written by the 1998 model of Xerox’s writing machine.
Sorry, I meant “it is unreadable.” See, it messed with my head. : )
your right Jim… they are just snapshots of performance on a given day and the point is that they are not treated as such….they are regarded by the powers that be as if they were perfect.. your response is a host of contradictions…first you characterize an AP test as a mere snapshot and then you say that the results are meaningful and are being used for the right purpose..Which is it? What should be their purpose?
And secondly your telling me you don’t understand this language from this study…?? I would think that this language would be pretty understandable for a AP English teacher let alone a naive and relatively wet behind the ears undergraduate student like myself. just because something is a little complex doesn’t mean it deserves to be labeled as unreadable and deserving of such scorn…honestly you try writing about this subject of test validity and make it sound simple and entertaining.
“And from the point of view of the test taker, the greatest test irrelevance resides in the very form of the test itself, independent of content. Many test takers simply do not accept that this test performance is related much to what she knows, or can do. Such considerations are essentially excised by the narrowed and controlled definitions in the variables involved, such as construct, test format, and measurement error.
Nearly all tests leave out elements that some potential users believe should be measured and include some elements that some potential users consider inappropriate. This first statement is a statement of fact. Let’s accept it as true. To me it implies that the construct has a variety of interpretations, one of which has been chosen by the test maker, probably because it is amenable to test making.”
What do I take away from this statement by Noel? That knowledge is multidimensional and assumes many forms and that what I learn from a class may be different from what the person sitting next to me learned from the class irrespective of what my teacher was trying to teach us. And perhaps what I learned from the class is more valuable to me than what can be measured on some one-size-fits all standardized AP test. Perhaps I don’t care what is being measured by the test construct..Perhaps I think that the test construct is misguided and based on false assumptions of how humans learn and how we construct knowledge. Does that mean I’m stupid? Does that mean I’m not deserving of college credit while the person who got a “5” is? I think that’s amazingly presumptuous. Standardized tests are just an easy way to sort and label students, to reward some and punish others, to give some students more scholarship money and others less. For god’s sakes all you have to do is pore over a test prep book for a few months to prepare for these tests. You don’t need a teacher. You don’t need a class. Its all pre-packaged. The meaning I make for myself in a classroom in relation to the content and how my professor is teaching it and how my fellow students react to it and how I react to their reactions and the hopefully wonderful and enlightening discussions we engage in together…can not possibly be measured by a standardized test. So which form of learning do you think is more important and integral for a young student’s intellectual development Jim? That which I described or that which can be measured (if you even wanna call what it measures “learning”…..I wouldn’t) by a standardized test?
Consider this quote from the late Joe Kincheloe’s…architect of postformal educational psychology… book, Students as Researchers: Creating Classrooms that Matter,
“There is no doubt that the easiest way to teach is for teachers to give students answers to questions contrived by experts far away from the classroom. Still, at the turn of the twenty-first century this easy form of teaching still dominates schools —public and private. Such teaching fits seamlessly into the dominant epistemology of western science that has fragmented the world to the point that many people are blinded to particular forms of human experience. This fragmentation is the antithesis of our critical notion of student research, as it weakens our ability to see the relationships between our actions and the world. Contemporary schools still emphasize quantities, distance, and locations, not qualities, relationships, or context. These epistemologically guided assumptions about the fragmented nature of knowledge are deeply embedded in various aspects of school life. The exams typically given in North American schools, for example, prepare students to think in terms of linear causality and quantification—the foundation of a scientific modernist epistemology. Such ways of thinking squash efforts to develop a research-oriented curriculum, hidden assumptions in school conventions and everyday life. Though it takes place in the name of scientific neutrality, such teaching promotes a specific ideology, a specific way of looking at knowledge and the world. The epistemology, the way of knowing that underlies mainstream practice is an arrogant point of view. Condescending toward other ways of knowing, mainstream educational apologists contend that students come to school to learn the true nature of reality, a body of knowledge that has been neutrally gathered by objective scientists. Such a perspective is antithetical to our notion of students as researchers.”
You tell me what does America’s obsession with standardized tests teaches students about the value and meaning of knowledge. Does it teach them to view knowledge as empowering and emancipatory? Does it encourage them to be active researchers? Does it teach them to value multiple ways of knowing? Does it teach them to connect their own lived experience with the content at hand and thereby construct new knowledge?
I just got done taking a course called educational assessment techniques. The class was not taught by my professor. She thought she was teaching the course, but in reality it was really being taught by Pearson..Pearson’s textbook and Pearson’s powerpoints. NCLB and RTTT are viewed unproblematically. Hidden assumptions about the value of certain testing forms is not examined in a critical manner. The various controversies surrounding standardized tests is not examined. There is absolutely no use of supplementary materials. Needless to say Pearson’s ideology about testing dominated the course. Now what did I learn from a class like this? Sure I did relatively well on her tests, which fit Kincheloe’s definition of the tests typically given in North American schools and which, no surprise were made by Pearson but is my performance on those tests really indicative of what I learned from being in this class? Absolutely not. I took those tests for a grade…for a carrot…for an extrinsic reward. I won’t go to the trouble of explaining what I really learned from the class. Its on my blog and future posts regarding the subject are forthcoming if you wanna read them..but it just goes to show that knowledge is much more complex than what can be measured by a standardized test. They are not just imperfect measurements. They are not worthwhile measurements at all.
Reflective Thinking,
Does your college test you?
Why aren’t people trying to get colleges to stop giving tests?
Do we really expect kids to go through 12 years of primary and secondary education and be faced with a challenging test for the first time in their Freshman year of college?
All this talk about tests tying teacher’s performance to their students performance. Has anyone here who is a teacher been fired from their job because their students performed poorly on a test? I don’t know any personally who have. Just a lot of “fear-talk” that this is what is going to happen.
Here is where I always get hung up. I have looked at my state’s standards. I have looked at the Common Core standards. I’ve said to myself, “self, these concepts and skills seem to be appropriate for kids to know.” Then I hear that schools are hamstrung to “teach to the test” and this is bad for kids. If the content is what kids “should” know at each grade level, then why is teaching them that “stuff” called “teaching to the test”? Isn’t that what is being taught during the year?
If there is this level of fear and anxiety on the part of teachers, then the answer to that last question must be NO.
I hear a lot of complaining about how much time teachers spend grading papers, but at what grade does that start? I complained to the principal at my daughter’s school that they had no graded work in 2nd grade (i.e., they did all their class work together, corrected it together, and then put it in their take home folder) and was told that graded work didn’t help students or teachers; it was only something parents seemed to want. It didn’t matter, apparently, that kids were taking papers home that clearly indicated they didn’t grasp the concepts being presented (and I say presented and NOT taught, because kids have to demonstrate they have received, retained, and can reproduce the knowledge before you can consider what you’ve done teaching).
This is the problem with some areas of Academia. It teaches to a Utopian ideal which has a hard time being effective in the real world. Yet so much time, effort, and money is spent in promoting the ideal, that there is actually a disincentive to discard parts that are not working.
JIm,
Basically what Wilson is getting at is that the teaching and learning process is not amenable to being quantified. The teaching and learning process lies in the realm of aesthetics, outside and/or even encompassing the realm of measurement. A quality of something cannot be quantified, even though a component of said quality may be a quantity of a part of it. Logically speaking quantity is a sub category of quality. It is logically impossible to use a sub quality of something to describe the quality’s entirety.
“I can’t make sense out of this kind of tortured academic prose.”
Again, I ask that you read both of Wilson’s works that I have referenced. Now I know he is speaking Aussie, but that’s not that far from Colonial English-HA HA (please take this comment with the humor that it is meant to have and not a cut at you, if you have read any of my comments I think you’ll know when I “cut” someone). Reflective Thinking has an excellent response to your comment.
I conclude with the thought: Throw off the ignorance through which you are viewing this problem. Open your mind to other possibilities.
Duane
Reflective Thinking,
Please be sure to thank your teachers as they have done an excellent job. Excellent posts!
Duane
P.S. Have you read any Freire?? Sure seems like it!!
Duane…it was one or two teachers actually out of the many..an ethics course and a philosophy of education course that opened me up to the problems of our educational system…i appreciate it…I have read Freire…Pedagogy of the oppressed is one of my all-time favorites…he was my starting point for exploring further the fields of critical pedagogy and postformal psychology…truly enlightening and amazingly refreshing, I think for any high school or college student who may feel trapped in his or her educational experience.
Cindy,
My sister’s name by the way who retired from teaching a few years back!
“All this talk about tests tying teacher’s performance to their students performance. Has anyone here who is a teacher been fired from their job because their students performed poorly on a test?”
Maybe not here in this forum but, yes, teachers have been let go because of student test scores.
Since you are responding to my post I ask, Have you read any of Wilson? If so your thoughts, please!
Duane
Cindy, (again)
“. . . in the real world.”
What is the “real” world?
Duane
Duane,
If teaching and learning cannot be quantified, can you give me a good way for them to be qualified?
Do you agree that at some point universities are going to have to “quantify” the abilities of university applicants and graduates? Aren’t employers going to have to “quantify” AND “qualify” job applicants?
How do you measure academic success; both the teachers and the students? Clearly, college professors having to give remedial classes to incoming freshmen in writing and math would be some sort of reflection on the “quality” of K-12 education. Aren’t teachers part of the equation? Even if you want to put some blame on parents and the kids themselves, I refuse to believe that these high school graduates receive a stellar education and then just completely lose their minds once they step foot in their first university lecture hall.
Duane, if your students consistently outperformed their peers (within the same school) on standardized tests or in acceptance to college or in their ability to earn a certain level of income so many years after having had you as a teacher, would you not perhaps stick your chest further out? I’m not being flippant here. I’m seeing black and white and no shades of gray in these arguments. I just hear “tests good” or “tests bad”.
Just how do you measure your success as a teacher? And, Reflective Thinking, how do you measure your success as a student? What would have to happen post-college, say 5 to 10 years out, for you to feel like your academic years were a success or a failure?
As I’ve said, I’m not sure how effective AP courses are in preparing kids for the next level college course, but they certainly aren’t without some benefit for preparing kids for college work. Maybe you should not get college credit for the AP classes at all.
I placed out of my freshmen English Comp class, not through an AP course, but because of essays written during orientation. My abilities were quantified (on some level) through the quality of my writing compared to some standard they had at the time for incoming freshmen, not a multiple choice or partial multiple choice test.
However, I did not receive credit for having taken English Comp; just a waiver of the requirement. Perhaps it is the desire to graduate “early” or to take a lighter course load in college that is driving the AP frenzy, and not necessarily to get into “this” or “that” school.
Anyway, I think I have a pretty good idea where elementary education is today, but what do High School teachers expect from their students? What do they actually observe from their students? What do you see your students do that puts a spring in your step and makes you feel successful and leaves you confident that you’ve prepared your students to succeed either in college or going immediately into the workforce?
Duane,
I was originally replying to Reflective Thinking who was, in turn, replying to your comment or someone else’s comment. Unfortunately, the blog format does not always let you reply directly, and by the time you actually post your reply, several others may have posted between your response and the comment that initiated it.
For example, in the time I was typing and posted my last comment, you asked me a direct question. No, I have not read Wilson. Do you think I have to read one person’s work to have an opinion on my daughters’ education or my own? I’m not adverse to reading it, but I bet you that I could, for every source you ask me to read, find another of the opposite viewpoint that you likely would not care to read or would reject.
By the “real” world, I mean the world of education that I have personally come into contact with and the education world that my friends and family have encountered. It does not match, for the most part, what I read on these blogs and in the writings supported by Academia. Notice that I say “for the most part”, because not everything I read is entirely without truth or merit or not worth considering.
I live in Michigan. I have not met one teacher who has been fired because their children perform poorly on a standardized test. I have not heard any of the teachers I know mention a person fired for having performed poorly on a standardized test. I just hear about this in blog posts and on the news and in the comments that it happens or “could” happen. Are there states where this happens more than others?
At the moment, I do not trust the K-12 education system in my area to provide my daughter with the best education. I believe in public education as it worked for me. I am losing faith, though, and fast.
And a lot of what I read on these blog posts does not give me any more hope. I find that a lot of educators will automatically assume that I am a “Tea Party” person because I disagree with them or, at the very least, a Conservative Reformer looking to eliminate public education. My objections to this unfair label fall on deaf ears. I am not accusing you of this, but many of the arguments I read and the pejorative name-calling I hear in many comments sound as nasty as many I read (cringing) on right-wing sites.
Cindy,
“Do you agree that at some point universities are going to have to “quantify” the abilities of university applicants and graduates? Aren’t employers going to have to “quantify” AND “qualify” job applicants?”
No, I don’t agree. And no to the second. I worked in the business sector until I was 38 and talk of quantifying people never came up. But that was over 20 years ago so maybe they do now but that still doesn’t make it a right, logical or ethical thing to do.
“How do you measure academic success; both the teachers and the students? I don’t “measure academic success”-that’s an impossible task as it is logically impossible to quantify a quality, and teaching and learning fall in the aesthetic (quality) realm of human activities.
“if your students consistently outperformed their peers (within the same school) on standardized tests or in acceptance to college or in their ability to earn a certain level of income so many years after having had you as a teacher, would you not perhaps stick your chest further out?” No, I wouldn’t as the things you mention are not a fundamental purpose of public education. They are tertiary at best.
“What do you see your students do that puts a spring in your step and makes you feel successful and leaves you confident that you’ve prepared your students to succeed either in college or going immediately into the workforce?
I really don’t care if my students are “prepared” “to succeed either in college or going immediately into the workforce”. I try my best to teach them a little Spanish. What they learn is up to them. I’m not a saviour. I try to help them open their minds to the ever expanding (for each individual) world of “knowing” and how to “know” (whatever that means) in relation to the Spanish speaking realm. Nuthin more nuthin less.
Cindy,
“If teaching and learning cannot be quantified, can you give me a good way for them to be qualified?”
No, as the assessing of what a person “knows” should/can only be a process in which the learner and teacher discuss/analyze what the learner has learned and each class and each individual learner are distinct.
Duane,
You are clearly a disciple of Wilson. I did as you suggested and went over and skimmed (it is too long to read entirely now) the paper. I notice that it was written in 1998 and in the past 15 years (at the link you provided) has been read 20,539 times or 1,369 times per year.
I am surprised there are not more papers written that would support the “I don’t care whether the children I teach succeed in life or not theory” in the past 15 years.
You worked in the private sector until you were 38 and the idea of quantifying people never came up? What about qualifying? When you were given a stack of applicants, did you use the any, many, miny, mo method? I have hired (and fired) people. You have to make decisions. Those decisions are not arbitrary. They are based on performance. It does not make me immoral or unethical or the process immoral or unethical. I don’t know what else to say because your philosophy is entirely foreign to me, not to mention bizarre.
I will say that I hope my daughter never encounters a teacher who “does not care” whether her education helps her any more than “teaching her a little Spanish”.
Duane,
One more thing. You are not making a case that the AP classes or the exams, specifically, are bad because you’ve actually analyzed them and made that determination. Right? You just think exams or any sort of assessment, either quantitative or qualitative, is unethical. Have I represented your position fairly?
Cindy @ 11:26,
Yes, I have analyzed the Spanish AP as part of a graduate level class on how to teach AP. I found the class to be lacking in that it was basically, a let’s take the test apart and find out how it’s scored and then that’s what you teach. I believe that one doesn’t need the AP to teach a high level of curriculum. My experience is such that many students have contacted me after they graduated and let me know that they felt that my class was harder than a corresponding level of class at college.
All tests, even teacher made ones are just a small sample of what learning any subject is about. And a test is just one component the assessing that I constantly am doing in class. Assessing and working with the students to help them begin to learn Spanish is what I strive to do. I try to get them to “think about their thinking” in learning, what does each student need to do to start to learn Spanish (and learning a second language starting in high school is a long arduous process that would best be served through living in a country where the language is spoken). Teacher made tests are one part of the whole teaching and learning process. No not all tests and assessments are necesarily unethical, much depends on how they are used and the frame of reference of the teacher and student. And, yes, standardized tests are invalid, and therefore any conclusions and life decisions that are based on them is unethical.
Reflective Thinking:
“And perhaps what I learned from the class is more valuable to me than what can be measured on some one-size-fits all standardized AP test. Perhaps I don’t care what is being measured by the test construct..Perhaps I think that the test construct is misguided and based on false assumptions of how humans learn and how we construct knowledge. Does that mean I’m stupid? Does that mean I’m not deserving of college credit while the person who got a “5″ is? I think that’s amazingly presumptuous.”
Look, give me some credit, will you? I’m not Michelle Rhee.
You’re defending an absurd straw man argument. No sensible person believes that tests or grades or any quantifications evaluate people in such a holistic, existential way. No test determines whether you are “smart” or “stupid” or not, nor does the College Board say or imply their tests convey such information. And of course all good teachers, AP or otherwise, know that what a student gains from a class ultimately transcends all quantifications.
A student who earns a 5 on an AP exam has performed on a certain level on the test. A student who earns a 2 has not performed as well on that test on that given day. The student who earned a 2 might be much stronger in different, non-tested respects than the other student, or might have been sick that day, or whatever. That’s a given; tests aren’t perfect; they’re snapshots of performance. I’m not sure why you feel that a test has to have God-like Omniscience about a person’s ultimate value on this planet for it to have any value at all.
….the college board DOES imply that their tests convey such information because they DO hand out financial and other college credit awards to students who do well on their standardized tests. They are placing undue importance on these tests and therefore they are implying that I am stupid because I may not do well on these tests….now your defending the college board? I don’t get it.
“o sensible person believes that tests or grades or any quantifications evaluate people in such a holistic, existential way. No test determines whether you are “smart” or “stupid” or not, nor does the College Board say or imply their tests convey such information. And of course all good teachers, AP or otherwise, know that what a student gains from a class ultimately transcends all quantifications.”
Uh Heeelllo then why in the world are you defending the existence of these tests so vehemently. All your doing here is making my argument for me. I keep asking you what value you think these tests have and you won’t answer me. You keep saying snapshot snapshot….as if snapshot should mean something to me or to anyone…let alone the test taker or their parents or you as a teacher. These tests are functions of the testing event..as Noel’s study says…they can not and should be attached to the individual test taker as a label or as a way to reap some financial or college credit award. So then what in the world is their value? this discussion is related to Noel’s argument which you apparently still haven’t taken the time to read and consider…
“So the invalidity of the testing is due not so much to the inadequacies of the test as such, as to the claims generated by reliability theory about what the test can do. For remember, invalidity is a description of the extent to which the
test cannot do what it purports to do. The greater those claims, the greater necessarily is the invalidity. So, in practice, what does reliability theory purport to do in terms of its own definitions, logic, and fudges?
You’re asking what are the implicit and explicit claims made
through reliability theory?
That’s right. Well, it claims there is a true score for each person who does the
test. A true score of what?
A true score of what the test measures.
And what does it measure?
A single construct or ability or trait.
How do we know that?
Because the test items all relate to that construct.
And?
And because they assert it.
But aren’t most constructs multidimensional?
Almost certainly.
So aren’t the items in this test put together in this now
unitary construct in a very idiosyncratic way?
They probably are.
So what’s special about this particular construction of the
construct?
It’s what the test measures?
You mean it’s the true construct?
That’s a pretty strong implication.
And what’s the name of this
true construct that the test”
measures and that has a true score that is also a trait or
ability of the test taker?
That’s obvious. It has the same name as the name of the construct
that the test was designed to measure and that is the name of the
test.
How do you know?
That’s what the test makers and users claim.
It must be hard to prove that all those claims are valid.
That’s true. Much easier to
prove that they’re not.
I never said a test has to have God-lie omnniscience to be valuable. I don’t know where you got that from. A test can never have God-like omniscience, because human learning will always be so much more complex and multi-dimensional and most of the time even contradictory to anything than can be reflected in the test construct. Your saying that tests are snapshots of performance. Ok…well what’s the value of that performance. As a teacher you should be concerned about a student’s learning…does that test really tell you what the student is learning, and if not why are you attaching any value to it at all. the test is your construct of what you subjectively think the student should be learning….but what if the student simply does not agree with that construct…whether consciously or subconsciously does not conform to that construct….simply does not see the classes value in that manner as I laid out in my personal anecdote…then what use does the test have for anything…this is basically an argument for constructivism and the teacher’s role as a mediator of knowledge…not a giver…not a bestower…not treating a student as a passive receptacle to be filled with unproblematized bodies of knowledge to memorize and then regurgitate back at the professor….as if that somehow constitutes learning. if its an argument for constructivism then its also an argument for assessing for constructivist learning which frankly would not include multiple choice tests, would not include fill in the blanks or matching or short answer re-call or bland and stale essay prompts like is given on these standardized AP tests. these are all surface “learning” assessments. I would love to for once take a history or English class that is not concerned with surface “learning”. I imagine it would go something like this…
Since history is constantly written and re-written by people with different perspectives on the same event, it is important that students are taught to problematize popular accounts of history and analyze them for their purposeful inaccuracies, biases towards and against certain groups of people, and hidden agendas. You can not possibly assess this kind of higher-order thinking with a multiple choice question because it involves the student being able and willing to construct his or her own knowledge. That is what we do. No matter what, we construct knowledge based on our experiences. Human beings do not passively absorb bodies of knowledge, and yet our educational system treats us like that’s all we are good for.
I’ll explain myself further by elaborating more on my personal anecdote with my educational assessment techniques class.
I imagine I will end up with a B or B+ in that class based on my performance on her multiple choice assessments of which we only had two…the midterm and the final. There will probably be others who will get an A or A- or perhaps a similar grade who understood and memorized all the content…all the “truth”, who diligently studied the Pearson textbook and the Pearson powerpoints, who got an A on the mid-term and will get an A on the final, but nonetheless never critically thought about the content as I did. Ultimately, this is the reason why that letter grade means absolutely nothing to me. It does not tell me what I learned from her class, and therefore it certainly does not tell her what I learned. It is just a letter, a number, a means for moving on and being able to graduate with a certain GPA. Your argument is that a test doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. We’re not talking about perfection here, whatever that means I have no idea. My argument is that a test which measures the surface “learning” which I have been referring to is essentially useless because its construct is narrow and one-dimensional and treats human beings, real human beings, like we are just trash cans to be filled and filled and filled with supposedly objective facts and figures and that is somehow the definition of learning which I should conform to just because its the norm in American schools today. Well I’m sorry but I refuse to do that. If a test doesn’t hold value for the person who is taking it then how in the world can you, the teacher…let alone some far off person who is grading a standardized test, assume any authentic learning value from it.
Here in lies the value of treating students as researchers as explorers and creators of knowledge, rather than as passive receptacles. If we as teachers (I do aspire to be a high school history teacher so this conversation is very meaningful to me) start from this point, then that’s where you really develop meaningful assessments that might not be able to be quantitatively measured to a “5” or a “4” or a “3” or a 2400 or a you got 19 out of 20 multiple choice questions correct. They may be in-depth research projects or reflective journals or guided in-class discussions whatever the case may be. But the important thing is that they start from the point of student as researcher and creator of knowledge, not as passive receptacle with the teacher as the all-mighty God of the classroom. This is the kind of teacher I want to be.
Thoughtful comment, Jim.
“I imagine I will end up with a B or B+ in that class based on my performance on her multiple choice assessments of which we only had two…the midterm and the final. There will probably be others who will get an A or A- or perhaps a similar grade who understood and memorized all the content…all the “truth”, who diligently studied the Pearson textbook and the Pearson powerpoints, who got an A on the mid-term and will get an A on the final, but nonetheless never critically thought about the content as I did. Ultimately, this is the reason why that letter grade means absolutely nothing to me.”
No, I think the letter means a great deal to you; otherwise you wouldn’t be making such a big deal about it. If you are authentically concerned about learning for the sake of learning with no concern for the grade, why would you care what your grade is? My experience is that “grades don’t matter” is often code for “Gimme an A.”
You’re making all sorts of assumptions about all sorts of things that I don’t have time to refute here. For a single example, you’re assuming that AP tests merely test surface knowledge. I have no idea where you get that from. Have you looked at them carefully?
The 2010 AP English Lit Open Essay prompt:
“Palestinian American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said has written that “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Yet Said has also said that exile can become “a potent, even enriching” experience.
Select a novel, play, or epic in which a character experiences such a rift and becomes cut off from “home,” whether that home is the character’s birthplace, family, homeland, or other special place. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the character’s experience with exile is both alienating and enriching, and how this experience illuminates the meaning of the work as a whole.”
Does that sound like it tests “surface knowledge” to you?
you clearly didn’t read what I wrote here…because if you did you would realize that I clearly state that I do NOT care about the grade..your argument that just because I am referring to grades as being meaningless for me means that I somehow, in what must be some crazy reverse psychology or something, must care very much about them is the most confusing and utterly wrong thing you’ve said so far….we can discuss ideas…but if you’re gonna start accusing me of lying to you and somehow trying to trick you then I’m not gonna continue this discussion… Kids don’t care about grades in some vacuum. They weren’t born with the ability to care about grades more than learning. Its what our educational system teaches them.
and secondly I agree that question is a nice critical thinking question and it would be a good topic for an essay and also in-class discussion. but again you are ignoring the testing event, which Noel warns against and just focusing in on the question. the idea that some grader in some far-off place can objectively attach a grade to that essay is absurd. also the essay is not viewed as a jumping off point for further exploration of knowledge and lively discussion among the class about the topic at hand but rather just as another means to a grade…so knowledge and learning is not the end…its the means to an end. and lastly the essay is timed…so students are automatically conditioned to write as much as they can, and this inevitably produces lower quality writing than it would be if it was assigned as a take home essay. and correct me if I’m wrong…but if you are in fact training your students to answer these essay prompts on the AP test, you’re not actually valuing their responses in respect to the content of what they put in the essay…your focus is mechanical and instrumental..whether they had a clear topic sentence or three main ideas and similar questions of that nature..whether the student actually answered the question or instead went off on tangents…whether they could write a long enough response in the allotted time….so again knowledge is not made important in and of itself…the student’s experiences or opinions as expressed in an essay of this nature is not valued for further exploration and discussion…its valued only as a means to an end…and the end is conforming to whatever the AP rubric on grading essays happens to be.
of course its important that a student answer the question and be coherent and understandable to the reader but I challenge you to name me an environment outside of testing regimes in school, where a person’s writing is timed.
Journalism? Legal briefs? Speech writing? I think many who write for a living are often writing on a deadline.
I can’t believe I have to say this…but its not a such a restrictive deadline as is imposed on a student in a standardized testing environment… and furthermore there are different kinds of journalism…typically one is given more time for an in-depth research or opinion piece. if you’re just writing a headline, or reporting on a news event, well that’s not the type of writing reflected in this question.
No doubt some journalists never write on a short deadline, but when you make a broad challenge to “name me an environment outside of testing regimes in school, where a person’s writing is timed.”, a daily newspaper certainly seems to fill the requirement. Did you mean to rule out some types of writing? Rule out some time intervals? Rule out some environments?
i meant to rule out the testing environment as equally reflected in the outside world.
Perhaps this quote from the director of the journalism program at Texas AM might be enlightening. He says, in part,
If you’re not going to be a good writer on deadline you’re never going to succeed as a journalist. That is going to be the primary way in which you are judged early in your career; how well do you write on deadline? And so, in class, I’ve had people every semester say, ‘Well what happens if you don’t finish it by the deadline?’ That is not an option; you have to turn in the best job you can do by the deadline. It may not be the best job you can do if you had an extra fifteen minutes, an extra two hours, or extra two days, but if that’s the deadline for the story and it needs to be in the next day’s paper then you have to finish it by that deadline. And so, what you have to do as a deadline writer is say to yourself, ‘What is the best job I can do within that amount of time?’
The interview can be found here:http://writingcenter.tamu.edu/2009/podcasts/write-right/episode-35-the-importance-of-deadline-writing-2/
well would you not agree that mainstream journalism quality is going down the tubes in this country at the expense of the cult of efficiency, hyperbole, sensationalism, and entertainment
and this quote does not answer my point about the false equating of a journalism deadline with the time limit given in a standardized testing environment. and also, unlike in a journalism class in college, your not gonna get any meaningful feedback from your teacher on your AP essay…they don’t even read your tests.
Your challenge was to find an environment where writing must be done in a short, somewhat arbitrarily determined time frame. I think I have meet the challenge.
no my challenge was to find an equally challenging environment as that of a standardized testing time frame which I think is typically around forty-five or fifty minutes from the time the proctor says “GO”
For a journalist it is the editor that says go.
ok but it is not a forty or fifty minute time period which you are allotted. and the pressure is not the same…and neither are the writing tasks. so many factors are different. are you gonna keep arguing on this point?
I imagine the deadline is a function of when the news happened and when the story has to be submitted.
ok..what is your point…maybe if it was an AP journalism class than this form of writing would be valuable but not as something to be arbitrarily graded by some far off person who is being paid to grade a million essays and then the student will never get meaningful feedback on his work..and plus reporting the facts of a given story is relatively easy..the hard part i imagine is getting the facts…that’s why they may have short deadlines…its not arbitrary…its a function of the difficulty and thought that is going into the writing.
My point is a fairly simple one: journalists often write in an environment where their writing is timed. An editor says go and the writer must be done in a specified, sometimes very short, time period.
If one can’t put down the main point(s), in 40 minutes, the writer doesn’t know what s/he is talking about. The situation is not artificial in the least. The time and effort has to go into the preparation, the learning. The essay test is just an answer to a question. Exams used to be oral. The professor asks a question; you answer. The professor can tell if you actually know something. Likewise on an AP test. I do suppose we all believe there is such a thing as “knowledge” don’t we, the antithesis of ignorance? If there is no such thing as knowledge, then testing is moot.
“If one can’t put down the main point(s), in 40 minutes, the writer doesn’t know what she is talking about.”
I don’t know where you get this idea from. Outside of maybe journalism in which you have to write a headline story for your boss reporting on the facts ( as long as you have the right facts) which is relatively easy…there is no writing process out there that follows this restrictive time limit except in the school environment. Therefore it is very artificial to restrict someone to 40 minutes…which includes reading the 4 or 5 sentence question and then thinking about it for 5 or 10 minutes….and then for some odd reason after that they just expect your pen to flow freely without pause. For some reason our educational system is run by a cult of efficiency rather than quality. Everyone writes differently in terms of the time needed to get coherent ideas on paper..Some people take longer to write quality work. Some people don’t….like me. Its not a bad thing. I still consider myself a good writer. However I don’t turn out blog posts so prolifically as other others do. The process of writing is not one size fits all, but standardized tests treat it as such when they set these arbitrary time limits
I get my idea from teaching AP English for 33 years. If a student can’t make sense of a prompt in 40 minutes, then my experience has been that the student hasn’t understood the book or the passage in question, but if she has understood the book or passage, she can give a good account of it in 40 minutes. Thus, I find the test valid. I go even further, and say that if a student knows an answer he can put it into a single sentence. The genius is the one who discovers new sentences. E.g. E=mc^2.
Here’s a question for you. Is HAMLET a tragedy in the classical sense?
Another: What would Wittgenstein’s most likely comment be on Plato’s theory of language?
Another. What was the major influence on the change in English prose style we see appearing about the time of The Restoration?
Another: What is the most probable relationship formally between Keats’s sonnets and his odes?
What is your view of the difference between a truly educated person and one who merely seems to be educated?
Cannot all of these questions be answered in a single sentence by a person who has done the reflective thinking appropriate to it?
One final question. Does Holden fulfill his dream of becoming a CATCHER IN THE RYE?
One final: How can a person best use her twenties to increase her chances of happiness in life?
“Cannot all of these questions be answered in a single sentence by a person who has done the reflective thinking appropriate to it?”
Can’t I do reflective thinking in more than one sentence….or if I was in your class would I be given a lower grade for it? restricting student’s reflective thinking to one sentence is completely arbitrary and nonsensical and you still have not given a clear justification for it.. what if the student has more to say than can possibly be put into a single sentence…again its just the cult of efficiency rearing its ugly head…with no logical justification behind it other than….its just your gut feeling that students absolutely and unequivocally should be able to fit all their ideas about a topic or question into one measly sentence….
‘What is your view of the difference between a truly educated person and one who merely seems to be educated?”
no one can give an answer to such a broad and multi-faceted question like this in just one sentence (and if I tried to it would be the longest run on sentence you’ve ever seen in your life) and its absurd to require a student to do such a thing…if I did leave it to just one sentence I would be leaving out a hell of a lot of content and opinion for no good reason other than you, my teacher, has some gut feeling that it should be done in one sentence or else I’m a failure. for gods sakes people have written entire books on this question and variations of this question….and your gonna restrict your AP English students to one measly sentence….what’s the logic behind it? and please don’t tell me conciseness, because theres a difference between teaching students to be concise and understandable to their reader…and what your talking about here which is way over the top… instead of allowing students own identity as writers to blossom naturally, you, as the teacher, are imposing unnecessarily your own “gut” view of what their identity as writers should be….namely writers obsessed with efficiency and nothing more. this is the same thing that the AP tests do in respect to writing. all the writers out there, all the authors out there, you honestly think when they sit down to write a book…they are saying to themselves….”Ok I have to say all this in less than 100 pages or else I’m a failure as a writer.” give me a break…
It’s not the cult of efficiency at all. I love a beautiful and artfully developed piece of writing as much as anyone. It’s a matter of logic. Aristotle you know. Any conclusion can be reduced to its syllogism, and any syllogism can be expressed in a single sentence. Can be, not must be. But if it can be, then a test limited to 40 minutes can be valid. It’s not a matter of a “gut” feeling on my part that I deploy arbitrarily against students. There is a simple clear answer to the question of educated vs. uneducated. If you have the humility to ask me, I’ll even tell you. I used to feel the same way you do, but that’s when I was ignorant.
so now you’re calling me ignorant…well thank you very much for that un-ending demonstration of your humility
“There is a simple clear answer to the question of educated vs. uneducated.”
If you honestly think there’s a simple answer to this question well then…I really don’t know what to say to this,….it’s pretty scary to me that you think you can have all the truth about an open-ended question such as this one and frankly there’s no justification for it.
your gonna tell me that a kid from a tribe in Papua New Guinea is less educated than a kid who goes to public school in America. the word “education” doesn’t just refer to the actual formal system of education we have here in America or exists in other countries. They are two different cultures. Two different systems of educating…different languages…if you asked either to write an essay in answer to this question both would give different answers. personally i think some of the most important aspects of being educated are being politically aware and active and socially conscious but those terms apply differently within every society.
“Can be, not must be. But if it can be, then a test limited to 40 minutes can be valid.”
If it musn’t be then its incumbent upon the teacher and the AP test makers to examine why in the world then they are limiting their students to 40 minutes. Out in the real world, it just doesn’t happen and it restricts the natural process of writing for no good reason, the formation of a writer’s unique identity for no good reason. In my ed assessment class we were taught that it is important to examine why a particular assessment is being used. What is the justification for it? What is the value of it to the learner, and by god this has no value, and if it has no value then there’s no reason to assess a student on how well he or she can do it. that is a demonstration of logic.
In the jargon there are formative assessmnts and summative assessments. The AP test is a summative assessment, voluntarily undergone for the purpose of gaining a score that might either get one into college or save one some money once you are there. I was posing you some formative assessments, which, by the way, you have failed, but you seem not to want to learn from your failures. You seem to think that my position is emptily idiosyncratic. It isn’t. I’m just telling you about the real world, not about how the world should be. NO ONE does business your way, either here or in Papua New Guinea.
Since you haven’t shown the proper humility, or even asked nicely, you’ll just have to find out the hard way on your own, even as I did. I might have saved you 30 years of confusion. The path down from the mountain is to your left. Go. This Zarathustra is staying up in the cave. Enjoy your journey with Maya, if you can. Remember me in 2053 when this cave will be yours, and some “reflective thinker” wanders by and thinks he already knows all there is to know about thinking and will bore you to tears explaining why his ignorance is knowledge.
The main reason you won’t write short answers is that you don’t know them. I kid you not. I’m not clicking the follow-up comments box.
I still can’t feel comfortable with the fact the same company that writes the AP exams, writes the SAT, and Praxis tests. It feels like a self-perpetuating system that at best tests information regurgitation.
Erin, I agree. Knowing that the architect of the Common Core is now in charge of the College Board has not made being an advocate for AP easy.
Become an advocate for truth and logical thought by rejecting the AP. Turn from the dark side!
Duane, seeking truth via logical thought also requires healthy skepticism, not a blanket statement that AP is “the dark side,” as you suggest. Whatever your experience has been with the program (Have you ever taught an AP course?), I’m sorry it’s been negative. Mine – or should I say, my students’ – has been very enriching.
Jeff,
I agree with your thought that “logical thought requires healthy skepticism”. I ask that you take that healthy skepticism to the whole AP process. Read and understand Wilson’s works and you will realize why I call it the “dark side”.
My experience with AP is having taken a three hour graduate credit class in how to teach AP Spanish and basically it was a class in how to teach to the test. I don’t need the AP to teach to a high level. I already did and do. How do I know? Well students have come back and told me that my expectations and what I taught were above what their college professors were doing.
Duane
By the way, I have resisted and continue to resist teaching AP as I consider it a waste of time, resources and energy.
Duane,
“Well students have come back and told me that my expectations and what I taught were above what their college professors were doing.”
Expectations: noun; a belief that someone will or should achieve something. In other words, a “standard” of some sort.
What did your students think you expected of them? Be specific as you have said you don’t think tests matter. You also don’t care about “success”. How was this different than what their college professors expected of them.
Above: preposition; at a higher level, higher in grade or rank than, higher than. This would appear to be a “measure” of relative “worth”.
How did your students make the assessment that what you taught was above what their college professors taught? How did they reach this conclusion without employing either qualitative or quantitative methodology? How can you be sure they’ve been fair in their assessment? Did they all go to the same college?
We are supposed to believe the anecdotal evidence of your students, but we cannot believe a test that might measure some accepted standard for what someone learning Spanish should know at any given level?
Perhaps you are an exceptional Spanish teacher. Perhaps you do, in fact, expect more than most (all) of your students’ college Spanish professors. But if I had gone back to my high school Spanish teacher and told her that she expected more than my college French professor, I hope she would have known I was just being polite. There was only one other class I took in college that was harder than my French – Organic Chemistry.
Anecdotal evidence is all that I have.
“. . .but we cannot believe a test that might measure some accepted standard for what someone learning Spanish should know at any given level?” The point I am trying to make here (and I haven’t been able to do that as well as Wilson which is why I always refer others to his work) is that learning is not a measurable human activity. Not all that is “human” is measurable and attempts to do so fall apart logically speaking. The teaching and learning process is a far more complex human activity than most realize. And our meager attempts to assess the process fall drastically short. You can believe that “a test might measure some accepted standard. . .” I don’t.
Duane,
I actually don’t have a problem with honest, anecdotal evidence. I find in many cases it is more relevant than “scientific” studies which often have an agenda.
I was just trying to make the point that we cannot get through life, even deciding between chocolate or vanilla, without employing qualitative or quantitative methodologies. Nothing is perfect, but it doesn’t mean we should stop trying to assess altogether. My opinion, of course.
The test for my subject (Latin) is very narrow and amounts to slogging through prescribed lines from selections of two works and two authors, with little time for anything else (unless your district is fortunate enough to have started students with Latin before high school). It is teaching to the test.
The broader syllabus which allowed for more instructional variation and which gave a less narrow and distorted view of Roman literature was eliminated several years ago with veryt little notice or teacher input.
I have a very low opinion of the College Board and its AP Latin exam, and I offer instead concurrent enrollment classes for college credit with a nearby university – where the emphasis is on the experience of the class rather than prepping for a canned test at the end.
Alan, I hope you will say more about concurrent enrollment courses. This also is offered in Minnesota and some other states. I think that AP and IB should be options.
However, I’m more personally supportive of offering classes where whether a student’s college credit is not dependent on how well she/he does on a single end of class exam.
I couldn’t agree more. I have been teaching Ap Language for only two years but my students all learned how to think, write, and read critically. The AP Staff Development I attended was blissfully free of the deadening jargon of most PD, and I was able to modify everything I had learned for non-AP classes. I’m in a high poverty school, and while only 9 out of the 16 who attempted the exam passed with a 3 or above, every student in the class learned to write a research paper and to think critically and deeply. The AP Language is a decent test, and the course did way more than prepare for it.
I sort of feel like I am in the middle of a rebroadcast of the French Revolution with the “revolution eating its own children.” When we start fighting among ourselves, the powerful have won. As an AP teacher for the past six years and a believer in creating a community of learners whether you have 36 or 16 in a classroom, I am saddened that we fall into these traps. I am the daughter of the working poor, factory workers who were under the poverty line. When I attended school in New York state, the fact that they had a Regents exam in 1966 enabled me to win a scholarship and it changed my life, forever. That has been played forward to my own children and to the children I teach. It is interesting to me that many who have dropped out of AP testing have been private schools. Private schools for years used their AP scores to justify admission to Ivy league schools and other top tier programs. When the public schools started to advance, now all of a sudden, they are no good and they insist on “other criteria”. It does make one wonder.
I teach AP (both APUSH and AP Euro) to a very diverse group of students at a public school and use every method and multiple-intelligence technique I can think of to keep the class connected to the children I teach. Yes, my administrators piggyback off my student’s scores and those of other teachers. My classes benefits my students by showing them that they can stick with something over a long period of time that has intellectual value and do it in a public school. When we do reflections at the end of the year, the most profound come from students who are bright but were initailly afraid. They write about their journey in the class and in more cases than not, it is a very emotional read. In the first years I xeroxed these for my administrators because I was so touched. I never received a comment back. Now, I do not bother. (we are also totally open-enrollment for our APs)
Today, in Louisiana, we are bombarded by a triplicate system of private, parochial plus virtual schools. AP courses are helping our school stay afloat and the national score helps us compete in a tough market.
Is it possible that teachers like (or love) the AP program because of the perceived “expectations” for students who take AP courses, and tests? in other words, because “it’s AP” the classroom environment is perhaps more orderly? Or, in a sense, easier for the teacher?
I have taught AP US History for the past fifteen years, and I think the AP test is excellent. By “teaching to the test,” my students learn to read difficult material independently. They also learn study skills, a broad sweep of US History (the survey), how to identify a chapter thesis and differentiate between main ideas and supporting details, and how to dissect complex questions and then incorporate multiple viewpoints into their written responses to those questions. They become better readers, writers, and thinkers.
Students would not learn these skills unless there were a carrot for them at the end of the year, and the AP Test is that carrot. Many of them are admitted to colleges based upon their scores, and they also get thousands of dollars in tuition waived. Students try harder for a national test than any locally produced measure a teacher produces. They know they’re being measured against everybody in the country and that motivates them to take the test seriously.
I had been teaching school for almost ten years before teaching AP. Before, my expectations were too low and unfocused. Most school districts offer generic (almost devoid of specific content) and insultingly low-level professional development for teachers. In fact, teaching AP classes inspired me to go back to school, and I’m now finishing my PhD in US History.
I agree with many of the posters above. I oppose most of what “reformers” are trying to do to American education, but let’s not jump off the deep end. I responded here once before because I also support the Common Core. They are great standards that are helping to get science and social studies back into the curriculum. True, they’re untested, but so what? Let’s test them. The real battle is to make sure that test results based on Common Core standards aren’t used to bludgeon students and teachers.
Just because those of us who read this site disagree with the movement to privatize public education doesn’t mean that everything privately or undemocratically produced is bad. The AP US History test and the social studies standards within Common Core are proof of that.
Leigh,
Your school even recites the nonsense that is the mantra ofthe corporate-style “reformers.”
It states that “students who attend FHS are truly prepared to be highly successful in a globally competitive society.”
The alleged goal of corporate-style education “reform” is “economic competitiveness.” All the supposed “reformers” cite it. But the U.S. already IS internationally competitive. The World Economic Forum ranks nations each year on competitiveness. The U.S. is usually in the top five (if not 1 or 2). When it drops, the WEF doesn’t cite education, but stupid economic decisions and policies.
For example, when the U.S. dropped from 2nd to 4th in 2010-11, four factors were cited by the WEF for the decline: (1) weak corporate auditing and reporting standards, (2) suspect corporate ethics, (3) big deficits (brought on by Wall Street’s financial implosion) and (4) unsustainable levels of debt.
Last year (2011-12), major factors cited by the WEF are a “business community” and business leaders who are “critical toward public and private institutions,” a lack of trust in politicians and the political process with a lack of transparency in policy-making, and “a lack of macroeconomic stability” caused by decades of fiscal deficits, especially deficits and debt accrued over the last decade that “are likely to weigh heavily on the country’s future growth.” The WEF did NOT cite public schools as being problematic to innovation and competitiveness.
And this year (2012-13) the WEF dropped the U.S. to 7th place, citing problems like “increasing inequality and youth unemployment” and, environmentally, “the United States is among the countries that have ratified the fewest environmental treaties.“ The WEF noted that in the U.S.,”the business community continues to be critical toward public and private institutions” and “trust in politicians is not strong.” Political dysfunction has led to “a lack of macroeconomic stability” that “continues to be the country’s greatest area of weakness.”
But the corporate “reformers” point the finger at public schools. If ONLY the schools could do a better job, they say, then the U.S. could be more economically “competitive.”
Thus, the schools must engage in “rigor” to prepare students for success in a “globally competitive society.” Blah, blah, blah.
It’s going to be very difficult to get off this merry-go-round, isn’t it?
Leigh,
Thought you should have at least one person acknowledge that they agree with what you’ve written. I also applaud you for supporting the Common Core. I find it disturbing that many teachers and right-wing, anti-President Obama individuals have joined together in their evisceration of these standards (albeit for different reasons).
What I’ve personally studied seems to be worthy of aspiring to achieve at each grade level (I have not looked at Middle School and High School standards, however).
Cindy, it’s not the Common Core itself but the accompanying assessments that are so offensive to so many people. The standards might be great or they might be terrible, but regardless the narrowing of the curriculum and the waste of time and money to administer the tests will far outweigh any positive the CC will bring. (As a supporter of the AP program I was extremely deflated when Coleman took charge of the College Board. I’m afraid when the CC movement inevitably collapses he’s going to somehow bring AP down with him.)
Jim,
The problem is that no one in my state has seen these CC assessments. In fact, I believe that only a handful of states have taken these tests and only recently. There seems to have been many problems with the administering of the tests, though I’m not sure what the verdict is on the content.
I’m not saying that the CC tests are the way to go. I just don’t know. But I do believe we have arrived at this point partly because many teachers have been so cavalier (and please, this does not mean you or any other teacher on this forum – I don’t know you, personally) toward the very people they are serving. As a parent, I can tell you that I have been met with a brick wall when trying to discuss the actual curriculum being used in the classroom.
And the teachers and administrators I have dealt with are very savvy, politically speaking. They manage to be completely polite, respectful, and caring while totally shooting down your legitimate concerns (whoever teaches teachers how to do this is earning their money). Even if they agree with you, in theory, they cannot say so. They would put their jobs at risk. There is extreme internal pressure to toe-the-line.
It got to the point where I just didn’t want any more part of it; from the car lines, to the PTO, to the curriculum, to the loss of family time after school. I am a product of public school and I adored (and respected) my teachers and had hoped for the same experience for my daughter. But elementary school is totally different today. I know that this thread is focused more on HS/college, but I assume there are changes at the HS level as well. Not all change is bad, but after agonizing over keeping my daughter in PS or homeschooling (and then having the decision kind of forced on me when they eliminated a third grade classroom – going from 3 to 2 – with the same number of kids), I can honestly say, we will not go back (at least not elementary school). I still have the ultimate responsibility (something PS made sure I understood when they were teaching my daughter) for my daughter successfully meeting academic goals, but now I have the power (freedom) to use whatever curriculum or teaching method works best for her.
I think we all want the same thing: Great public schools that serve every child and encourages each one to perform to their highest level. At least that is what I want. Not places to drop off kids that call themselves successful if all (or most) children perform at a mediocre (at best) proficiency level.
A public school system that was responsive to students and their parents would be wonderful. Lacking that, you chose home schooling. Others see charters and vouchers as an additional alternative. THIS blog generally is not in favor of such “freedom.”
Harlan,
I believe that a lot of people who follow this blog probably are not in favor of homeschooling because they think it undermines (or dilutes) public education. In some respects, they are probably right. But I see myself as having no choice but to homeschool if I want my daughter to thrive and learn to her highest potential.
If educators truly honor and respect that as the driving force behind education, in general, then I think they would have to (at least grudgingly) give me their blessing. There are plenty of parents who have no desire to teach their kids at home, so I don’t believe PSs are in danger of shuttering just because a handful of parents choose to homeschool.
I am not looking to tear down public schools. I just want them to be more flexible. I wish there were choices within the schools themselves. I wish teachers had more freedom to teach to their strengths. I wish you could choose a “traditional” class or a “less traditional” class depending on how your child learns best. I wish they could group kids according to their needs, whatever those needs are, so that teachers could be more efficient and the kids were receiving more teacher directed instruction. I wish that at the elementary school level, the curriculum did not require so much parent involvement for it to be successful.
But wishes are just that – wishes. This did not happen at PS, but it has happened at home.
Many of the homeschoolers I know are driven by religious opposition to the endemic atheistic communism in the public schools. That hostility is reason enough to withdraw support from public schools. When education for democracy becomes education for socialism, the public schools betray the promise of America to provide freedom of opportunity.
Harlan,
While many homeschoolers do that, most of those I know who homeschool for that purpose have never stepped foot in a public school. Therefore, they buy into the stereotype you described. I can assure you that in my daughter’s PS, there were no communists (at least not overt – no one can ever truly know someone’s heart).
I have been in many public schools and I have met many thousands of teachers. None was a Communist. Why do people say stupid things?
Diane,
To get a rise. As I have family that does this on a regular basis, I have become adept at pretending not to hear.
The way to tyranny is paved by lack of self knowledge. Diane is an example of that, and I think worse. I really mean what I say. Note that Diane capitalizes “Communist.” I do not. She’s as slippery as Obama on the IRS. First capture the schools. Then the health care system. Has she said she regrets voting for Obama yet? No. Her lame excuse, that there was no difference between the candidates on education policy. True enough, BUT THAT IS NOT THE QUESTION. The question is freedom vs. tyranny, and there was a choice on that basis. The puzzle is why Obama supports the destruction of the public school system. Maybe he’s as incompetent there as elsewhere, or maybe he knows he’s got teachers in his pocket and can focus on taking over health care. It sure beats me.
Public education is a fruit of progressivism. The essence of progressivism is to create a socialist state. The stereotype is all too true. ANYONE teaching in the public schools is thereby supporting a tyrannous vision, whether they acknowledge it or not. One size fits all. Monopoly control. You have experienced it yourself. The IRS is its enforcer. The tax on income should be replaced by a flat tax on consumption.
Harlan,
I dislike picking apart someone’s credibility or intentions based on whether they capitalize a proper noun. I would capitalize Communist but not necessarily communism, because that was what I was taught to do. You are making an argument similar to my atheist acquaintances who chide me for using a capital “G” for my Christian “God”. They make the argument that it offends them because it is discriminatory against other gods, but it makes no difference when I tell them I would capitalize the names of other gods as well. But even if you are right, and Diane keeps a well worn copy of The Communist Manifesto under her pillow, didn’t you mean to infer she was a Communist with a capital “C”?
I read that you teach AP English, and have for 33 years. Have you taught AP English for 33 years at a private school? Is your alternative to public education, privately funded education? By that I mean, not vouchers or charter schools (which are just tax dollars going to for-profit organizations or parochial schools)? I ask these questions for many different reasons.
First, I have not put much credence in the arguments made on these blogs that even the most conservative Republicans, by and large, are looking to eliminate the existing public education system. My very Republican-leaning area of the State of Michigan would rip you from limb-to-limb (even if you are a Republican) if you tried to take away their football or band program. If you think I’m kidding, come look at our football stadium compared to our elementary schools. But, I believe that perhaps YOU are in favor of dismantling public education. And, if a whole lot of other conservatives, whether they are of the Libertarian or Republican variety, believe as you do, then perhaps they have reason to be concerned.
Second, if you do not work for a private school, then it is hard to take seriously your position because you have a salary and benefits and a pension on the taxpayer’s dime. So, I really hope you do have the integrity to actually work outside the tax funded public education system.
Third, if we eliminate the public education system (through attrition), what takes its place? Catholic and other parochial schools? Elite private schools? Work camps? Or do you advocate that we keep our schools, but just put their control solely in the hands of each individual state or municipality?
This last question is of utmost importance to me. If I had not received a good (and note I said good) public education, I very likely could have ended up in one of any number of sad statistical groups. Public education literally saved my life/created a life for me. I am forever in its debt. That does not mean, however, that I am willing to overlook its current negative aspects.
Instead of attacking and name calling, can you please provide several ideas you have for changing the system to make it better? While I don’t agree with every post on this blog, it does allow me to interact with other people who care about education. So far, I have not been kicked off if I have a different opinion. That is not something you would expect from a Communist sponsored information forum.
Finally, as to your comment about a lack of self-awareness leading to tyranny…well, that cuts both ways.
I’ve worked in the private sector of education all my life. I don’t doubt that public education can work in regions of a state where the values of the society are conservative and the local authorities are responsible. It is only with great and grudging reluctance that I have come to see the public education system generally as intrinsically flawed philosophically, along with the income tax. My solution is simple. Charterize each district, or voucherize it. Community schools will stay as they are, locally run and supported, but a state’s school law will no longer provide a base of union political influence on legislatures. Thus my support of privatization, subject though it will be to the normal corruptions and incompetencies of life and businesses.
Name calling is not the issue, in my mind, but whether the name is accurate. I AM ready to see a real difference between Diane’s use of Communist (in the Soviet sense) and communist, which is a philosophy of society based on the utopian hope of equality which intrinsically must lead to tyranny. Perhaps she can say she never met a “Communist” in the many schools she has visited, but that she has never met a “communist” strains credibility. Is she speaking like Obama, not answering the question the reporter asked about whether anyone in the White House know of the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS by saying he didn’t know of the IG report until three weeks ago? We obviously differ on the significance. I’d be happy to receive a restatement by Diane, but she is under no obligation to do so. We are all her guests on her blog. Is it bad manners of me to remain on the blog and still complain that the party is being given by a bootlegger? Yes. But she has her own reasons for tolerating it, which may even be sincere. She says she believes in “free speech.”
Diane’s attack on the AP program recently is an example, however, of her blind dogmatism. It’s a private program. That’s why she hates it (in my estimation). She attacks the reform movement vigorously, but if you were ABLE to press her on what real reform would look like it will always come down to increased tax revenue going to public education exclusively. If you were ABLE to press her, I think you would ultimately discover that she would limit homeschooling by law. She might respond to that point, but I doubt it.
The BEST construction I can put on her position is that she is fundamentally oblivious to the implications of her claims. But she’s the national figure, and I’m just a country school teacher. Nevertheless, ultimately her appeals are not to reason but to emotion. You can listen to any of her YouTube speeches to see this. At bottom is an assumption that the state should be in control of education and is exclusively entitled to tax money to run such a system. It is the modern equivalent of an established church she is promoting. I am a disestablismentarian.
You will discover that NO ONE on this blog has ever openly acknowledged their fundamental assumptions (except for “communist teacher”), but always retreats into contemptuous scorn saying that I am amusing, ridiculous, stupid, greedy, corrupt, or inhumane. Diane herself said I said “stupid things.” If that’s not name calling I don’t know what is.
The question I would pose is: “Should the state government control education?” I say no. The next question is: “Should the state government fund education?” Here I can only say “possibly.” Local public education used to be funded by property taxes. Then came the Robin Hood law in Michigan. What has the effect been? A complicated formula by which districts with high property values can still supplement the basic foundation grant, but low property value districts have only the foundation grant, with which they claim they cannot do the job. So, my analysis is that YOUR public education is not Detroit’s or Pontiac’s public education or Highland Park’s. You are using one name, “public education” for two different things. Diane Ravitch is guilty of the same conflation, in my view, WILLFULLY, because of the previous state monopoly on education of the masses is being challenged. She plays, in my view, fast and loose with the phrase “free” as in “free public education.” We all know that what is “free” for some is ALWAYS paid for by others. Anyone who supports “free” public education MUST also support taking money by the force of law from those who make that money. This question is never debated. Does every citizen have a duty to contribute to the education of other people’s children? We’re not debating whether it’s prudent or pragmatic to do so, but whether a person who cannot pay for his own education has a RIGHT to some of your money to educate himself. Diane thinks that such a right to your work exists. A right, mind you. It may be pragmatically valuable to provide free education to everyone in a society, but I dispute the notion that anyone has such a claim on my work (or my stored up work, called money.)
ok let’s start from the point that you are an ideological conservative which you clearly are…now let’s examine your numerous assumptions about the idea that our entire education system should be privatized, which is purely based on the conservative ideology that the free market exists and works perfectly to create a society which will inevitably have a few winners and whole lot of losers and this system should be applied to all sectors of our society, an ideology which you seem to think is inviolate and perfect for some reason, and can’t be questioned or proven wrong by experience.
“utopian hope of equality which intrinsically must lead to tyranny.”
Why does equality automatically have to lead to tyranny? This is a neoliberal ideological position that has no basis in experience. If your gonna try to use communist Soviet Union as an example, there was plenty of inequality there and there was plenty of tyranny…Karl Marx would have been horrified by the conditions espcially of working class people inside the Soviet Union during Stalin and beyond. We have plenty of inequality in this country that results from plenty of tyranny…the tyranny of corporate welfare….the tyranny of our corrupt campaign finance system…the tyranny of our politicians, both Democrat and Republican, working for the interests of corporate lobbyists over the interests of the American people, the tyranny of a corporatized and privatized mainstream media that willfully kowtows to the absurdities and obsessions of the political duopoly, in fact we’re increasingly becoming a fascist state in which the government, in conjunction with private corporations especially in the defense industry, is perfectly all right with sacrificing civil rights for “national security”…..even though our country already spends so so much money on what is called national defense but in reality is just money used by our government particularly covert aspects like the CIA to wage secret pre-emptive wars abroad. read all the books and writings by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill…..this is money that is used for waging secret wars abroad otherwise known with the euphemism “national defense” that could be used for public services here at home, to reduce the dramatic wealth inequality in this nation which you, just simply based on your neoliberal ideology, view as a terrible sin because somehow equality of opportunity is a bad thing…and then we’re told by the government they have no money to spend on vital public services which is patently untrue…. we are in a new gilded age that is being spurred on by the rapid and insidious privatization of public services including the prison system and the education system and you apparently have no problem with that.
“Thus my support of privatization, subject though it will be to the normal corruptions and incompetencies of life and businesses.”
Education is not a business. Business primary motivation and purpose is profit and therefore cutting costs and most often that means cutting the cost of labor. Education’s primary motivation and purpose is teaching and learning….the pursuit of profit has been shown through the experience of education privatization to interfere dramatically with this process of teaching and learning. I passionate challenge you to deny this fact, as it has been laboriously documented by Diane on this blog and elsewhere with no insidious ideological bias behind it. I will cite the endless number of examples if you so demand it. Why in the world should we accept these “normal corruptions and incompetencies of business” as part and parcel of our educational system? There are perfectly good reasons that are not ideological, to oppose the privatization of education. Your claim that Diane opposes privatization because she is a closet communist demonstrates that you clearly have not read her blog without first imposing your oppressive neoliberal ideology on her and all her commenters first. You believe you are more open-minded then Diane and anyone else who comments on this blog. We say you are not, and for good reason, the obnoxious tone in all your comments constantly proves it. Your constantly accuse everyone on this blog of being so terribly ideological just because they present arguments and facts and contexts which don’t align with your ideology. You claim to be a disestablisment person. You think advocating for the privatization of education is a disestablishment viewpoint? For god sakes, the only forces in this country who advocate for education privatization are establishment free-market neoliberal ideologues and that includes President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee and Chris Christie and Mayor Bloomberg and all the rest of them. You don’t consider them establishment? If they’re not establishment, then I don’t who is establishment in this country. the parents, the students, the teachers…the numerous grassroots organizations and brave and courageous citizen-led organizations…are they the insidious establishment? cause they’re the only ones standing against the privatization movement and even though they have the numbers, they don’t have the power right now that the establishment has. Your views in support of voucherization and the dominance of charters align perfectly with the establishment and you claim to be a disestablismentarian?? This is why no one takes you seriously, because your being openly deceptive and most of what you say is not based in experience or fact…it’s based on your neoliberal ideology and your labeling of everyone else as not only opposed to you but unequivocally wrong about the evils of privatization. If you don’t agree with anyone on this blog, just stop coming here, but I think its patently clear now that you’re not going to convince anyone here to convert to your ideology or what you consider an “enlightened position”, so why keep posting incendiary comments and inciting incendiary comments in return….unless of course you enjoy it which would be the clear definition of a troll….but of course you will never admit to being one.
“Is it bad manners of me to remain on the blog and still complain that the party is being given by a bootlegger?”
Yes it is bad manners so stop doing it.
“We’re not debating whether it’s prudent or pragmatic to do so, but whether a person who cannot pay for his own education has a RIGHT to some of your money to educate himself.”
Based on your neoliberal ideology which promotes a sort of hyperindividuality in which the blame of society and its oppressive stuctures is collapsed to the blame of the individual who can’t pull himself by his bootstraps because of laziness or whatever other false reason you can think up, you automatically believe that taxes which support public services which are essential to the health and well-being of people are equivalent to death and represent an infringement on your rights similar to how right-wing gun nuts believe that the entire meaning of freedom is based on their ability to get a gun without being subject to a simple background check. the fact is freedom means much more than “freedom from”, freedom from taxes or freedom from background checks The fact is Harlan we live in a society. We don’t all live within our own little spheres of influence, however much you may want to believe that is true because it would make your ideology all the more palatable…but the fact it is not true. The fact is we have something called a social contract between the government and the people. Does the government abuse that social contract…absolutely…but is that reason to advocate against taxes or simple background checks on guns…Absolutely not. That abuse directly stems from the corruption of our campaign finance system, from the fact that our politicians are handmaidens of private industry of corporate lobbyists who most often do not care about the health and well-being of the American people but rather the bottom line and nothing more. See that’s where your idea that privatization of education is the solution, runs into a bit of a snag. Because its this corrupt system of campaign finance which in many respects leads directly to the overwhelming privatization of education a la the moneyed influence of organizations like StudentsFirst and standardized testing companies like Pearson and Eduational Testing Service and for profit charter organizations led by CEOS that use public funds to pay themselves huge salaries and bonuses while deskilling and disempowering the teachers who work at their schools…look up their corporate lobbying dollars….our problem is not that we have taxes….the problem is that our taxes are going to fund corporate welfare and mass privatization of all things public. now that hardly comports with your neoliberal ideology that privatization is the solution to our education problem. we already have robinhood….its called the shortchanging of the poor and the middle class…its called corporate welfare….and unfortunately your neoliberal ideology refuses to acknowledge it because ultimately it doesn’t care about the people’s welfare. a neoliberal ideology would make you believe there is a free market in this country..there is no free market and there never has been….our markets are controlled and forced upon the majority of Americans by the minority of the richest people in this country…you call that free? there’s no shortage of money in this country to pay for important services…the problem is the fed keeps printing money to pay the creditors, who are the 1%, while leaving the debtors, all the rest of us, to fend for ourselves….they bail out the banks…they bail out the bondholders…they bail out the corporations…but they won’t bail out the average American. the only austerity going on in this country and in a more extreme way in Europe is for the ordinary American and ordinary European.. these are all characteristics of neoliberalism, market fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism…what we can’t have shared responsiblities and compassion for others without you thinking that America is going to devolve into tyranny….we are already subject to tyranny and it doesn’t derive from the fact that we have taxes or public funding of education or public anything. it ultimately derives from our government not working in the interests of the average American but rather in the interests of the richest among us.
“We all know that what is “free” for some is ALWAYS paid for by others. Anyone who supports “free” public education MUST also support taking money by the force of law from those who make that money. This question is never debated.” It may be pragmatically valuable to provide free education to everyone in a society, but I dispute the notion that anyone has such a claim on my work (or my stored up work, called money.)
Wow I can only respond to this typical, pure neoliberal ideological argument one hears on fox news everyday with this quote from Henry Giroux,
“The war on the social contract, the welfare state, democratic politics, equality and the very idea of justice is an attack not simply on everything from Medicare to Social Security to the Equal Pay Act, it is an assault on “the basic architecture of our collective responsibility to ensure that Americans share in a decent life.”26 It is also an aggressive strike against the formative cultures and modes of individual and collective agency that legitimate a connection between the democratic polis and the possibility of economic, social and political freedom. The new extremism and its authoritarian politics draw attention away from serious social problems and the actual structural and ideological conditions that reproduce them. Underlying the shadow of authoritarianism is a corrosive attempt to “create a loss of conviction, a loss of faith in the culture of open democracy, a sense of skepticism and withdrawal.”27 To the degree that the private sphere becomes the only space in which to imagine any sense of hope, pleasure or possibility, citizenship becomes distorted, removed from issues of equity, social justice and civic responsibility. Tony Judt is right in arguing that we have entered a historical conjuncture in which politics is losing its shape, its power of attraction and its ability to confront the anti-democratic pressures at work in American society today.28
Opposing this contemporary, cruel form of authoritarianism demands a new language for embracing the social, for defining civic engagement, for rethinking the meaning of agency and politics and for talking about social responsibility. Rethinking the social means, in part, embracing the role of the state in providing regulations that limit the power of corporations and the financial service industries. It means reconfiguring the very nature of power in order to subordinate capitalism’s major structuring institutions to the rule of law, democratic values and the precepts of justice and equality. The state is not merely an instrument of governance, it is also a site where organized irresponsibility has to give way to organized responsibility, where ethics cannot be privatized and separated from economic considerations, where the rule of law cannot be used to produce legal illegalities and where politics becomes inseparable from the claims of justice, equality and freedom. This suggests the need for social movements to organize and fight for modes of sovereignty at all levels of government in which people, rather than money and corporations, shape the nature of politics, policies and cultural apparatuses that provide the public values that nourish critical modes of citizenship and democracy itself.”
You want all the fruits of your labor to yourself Harlan…go live as a hermit…you want to completely abandon the notion of the social contract….go live as a hermit….for god sakes man we live in a society…each of us does not live a self-contained bubble where our actions don’t affect each other…this is just a fact of life and if you don’t want to acknowledge it than that’s too bad for you, but it doesn’t mean that any of us have to convert to this insidious hyperindividualist viewpoint which doesn’t comport with the struggles of daily human existence but that you nevertheless hold so near and dear to your heart. I’m sure you’ve heard this before (in fact I think you’ve heard it from me a couple times) and come up with some way to dispute it, but Finland has the best educational system in the world completely publicly funded by the social welfare state and they pay high taxes over there…and ya know why…because they get the damn high quality public services for their taxes…why? because their govenment isn’t nearly as corrupt as ours is. over there they understand the limits of what the market can do for people, they are progressive and there is no one there who will tell you they are sufffering under the thumb of tyranny. they understand the limits of privatization…. Unfortunately, we, as a country, do not. good government is good government…..bad government is bad government…what defines the difference between the two is whether the government is working in the interests of the people, not whether its big or small…
and also just a sidenote on this IRS scandal because clearly you are getting all your information from the mainstream media…..which more often then not tends to be propoganda meant to distract Americans from the real problems facing our country and after all, context is everything and its something the mainstream media never provides. the fact is that after the citizens united supreme court decision the number of groups registering as 501c4s doubled because this decision along with a number of others expanded the political capabilities of 501 c4’s…that timing coincided with the rise of political activism on the right and a lot of the groups attempting to register as 501 c4’s were tea party types…the IRS is SUPPOSED to reject groups that are primarily political from registering as 501 c4’s for obvious reasons…these tea party groups are not social welfare groups and therefore should not be able to register as 501c4’s…they are political organizations…you think they should be tax-exempt? you think that they should be exempt from revealing their donors…because that’s what they would be with 501c4 status. now the problem is not that the IRS focused on tea party groups because they were the ones trying to register as 501 c4’s…but the problem is that they did not also focus on other liberal and conservative groups such as Obama’s Organizing for America, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, Priorities USA, and Heritage Action Fund…all of which are 501c4s and are way more influential and contribute to the corruption of our political system more than any tea party group.
the problem is also with the standard set by the IRS which it uses to diffentiate between social and political organizations for the purposes of granting them 501c4 status, because by law the IRS has to monitor 501 c4s to ensure they remain primarily social and not political organizations. there is no clearly defined line between what constitues social and what constitutes political activity as defined right now by the IRS. in other words the standard sucks as that is the backstory over why there is all this uproar. this can be fixed by a change in the law so that 501 c4s are more clearly defined either to directly exclude or include (I would prefer exclude) primarily political organizations in the tax-exempt and don’t have to reveal donors status. its a serious stuctural problem brought on by citizens united and similar court decisions…and has nothing to do with corruption or evil and politically motivated Obama and co. going after conservative groups….
Reflective Thinking:
I believe your passion for justice is sincere. I will no longer twit you. You say so much, one hardly knows where to start in response. I do note that it is unworthy of your sincerity to tell me to get off the blog. We are all of us in this together. We don’t have any where we can realistically go to escape the corruptions of government or of corporations. We collectively need to try to see what is wrong and consider how to fix it. For that, I concur with Diane that all voices need to be heard in freedom of speech, and do appreciate her graciousness in tolerating my voice along with the others here. You should too, no matter how much I exasperate you.
Now, where to start? With guns or rights or duties or war or political speech or society or a common ground on which we might agree? Do you think we actually have any common assumption on which we might agree? Maybe you’d care to propose one to start us off. Let’s get as existential as we can.
Do you think there’s an afterlife or do you think that when we die all individual consciousness and being ceases?
Harlan you are jekyll and hyde. I think we went through this process once before where you changed your tone, and then you never continued the conversation after that. In fact I think you asked me that same question about individual consciousness, and I answered that yes I do think we each have an individual consciousness and that it dies when our physical bodies die. I don’t know what to say anymore. No one should tolerate purposeful deception especially on the meaning of what it means to be a liberal, conservative, socialist, communist, and that is what I will not tolerate because then it leads to irrational labeling which you frequently do to Diane and otthers on this blog. That is something I will not fall for. Diane chooses not to respond to it because she sees you trying to label her as something she is not and takes offense. I choose to do so because I enjoy discussions about political ideology and I find misrepresentations of someone else poiitics, especially mine, very offensive and I can’t leave it not responded to. These terms often mean different things with different people in different contexts, and some people cherrypick. That’s part of my point in my other comments that knowledge is construction,
Cindy’s comment on what it means to be liberal and conservative is very insightful and is a great response to the irrationality and meanness inherent in your attempts to blanket label everyone all the time. I used the term neoliberal because I see those values expressed in your comments and I detest neoliberalism because it is the ideology that dominates Washington in both parties and gets out into the mainstream media via the corporate complicit talking heads on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN and corporate controlled talk radio and even public radio sometimes when Diane talks about how these philanthropic foundations control the boundaries of the discussion about education privatization on public radio. Am I blanket saying you are a neoliberal…absolutely not. I don’t know you well enough. But, as far as I can glean from your comments, you do buy into some of their talking points and I responded to the underlying beliefs attached to them in my previous comment.
If you want to start a genuine conservation about ideology and justice and education now I am happy to have it, but I’m warning you if the same path is taken again and you start labeling others and using ideological hyperbole and labeling yourself as distant and opposed to everyone else as opposed to “We’re all in this together” on this blog now or at a later time, I’m done. 🙂
“We don’t have any where we can realistically go to escape the corruptions of government or of corporations.” This sentiment I completely understand and maybe it’s my naive idealism as a 21 year old that still makes me believe an empowered minority in this country can change things just as the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and others did in the 1960’s. I think we already have that empowered minority in various social movements across the country. It’s just not banded together. I think I told you this before but once we lose hope it’s all over…that’s when we devolve into ideological arguments against each other which is exactly what the neoliberal ideology wants. Polarization pays in terms of money and it also pays in terms of keeping the American people docile about the corruption that is really going on in our government as opposed to these scandals which they really give celebrity status to in the process of further dividing people along Republican/Democrat lines. I think I told you I belong to the NYC chapter of a relatively new “dirty” money out of politics called Rootstrikers. This has become the outlet for my idealism, and currently I am trying to connect our group with other social movements such as Students United For Public Education. In the end, I believe most of our issues that never get dealt with in this country such as tax reform, immigration reform, education privatization, prison system privatization, big bank reform, real healthcare reform, agricultural reform, unemployment, and various other issues don’t get dealt with because the neoliberals in Washington from both parties don’t want them to get dealt with because they are at the beck and call of corporate lobbyists who profit from the fact that these issues never get dealt with, and if my group can manage to bring many social movements under the wing of getting dirty money out of politics and forcing change in our political system, well then I think its time for the 1960’s all over again cause by god we need it…we need an empowered minority to wake up and band together. I do however, along with some of my NYC chapter colleagues, have some disagreements with the process that Rootstrikers wants to go through to achieve this goal which I think is way too long and way too subservient to the current system, so there is the potential for some internal strife and I don’t know what will come out of that but….we’ll see
Reflective Thinking:
I will try to contain my raucous hyperbole. Such language can be seen by others as lack of seriousness.
You had not mentioned, or rather I had not seen a previous post of yours that mentions Rootstrikers. I googled it and read quickly, but it is an interesting concept. I presume the slow method of reform is a second constitutional convention. You seem to want to move more quickly. What course of action would you prefer?
So did you want to continue our existential conversation?
Yes I also think that constitutional convention is an interesting concept but i also think its way too unrealistic with our country’s current polarization. Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Rootstrikers, has been going around the country for the past two years or so really exhausting himself and speaking to many different groups and varied populations about the need for reform. Unfortunately he believes we need both liberals and conservatives, when I say liberals and conservatives I mean any variation, tea party people all the way to radical progressives way to the left of Barrack Obama who’s really more of a compromising corporate centrist than anything else. (Also Lessig has a deep affinity for Ronald Reagan which I can’t understand…some people tell me he used to be a conservative and longs for the return of real conservatism which is the reason why he wants Rootstrikers to be a bipartisan effort Read here http://www.thenation.com/article/how-get-our-democracy-back#) Not only do I not think we can get massive right-left cooperation on the scale that he”s looking for, but I don’t think that we need it. our organization is fighting for campaign finance reform…we want wholesale change of our political system…this is not a conservative ideal…it is a radical progressive ideal…but we’re trying to masquerade as a nonpartisan, bipartisan organization when everything we’re fighting for is absolutely not so and consequently Lessig is trying to speak to groups that I believe would never join our side in any meaningful way. For example a few weeks ago, he spoke to the Seacoast Republican Woman of New Hampshire, As stated on their website, their goal is to bring unity, focus, and strength to the work of women supporting Republican candidates and Republican causes throughout the NH sea coast. In other words, this is an organization that sees no problem with the duopoly, that will always vote Republican no matter what. They have already been sucked into the corporate ideology of beltway Republicans. On their website they advertise for the NH Republican party’s first ever annual liberty dinner with Reince Priebus and Rand Paul as their special guests of honor. I don’t mean to sound crass, but these are not people we need nor should we desire them in our organization. And furthermore they’re not really what anyone would consider grassroots tea partiers either since they were established way before the tea party. Lessig, often says that he thinks the most interesting fundamental division is not between the left side and the right side but between the inside (inside Washington) and the outside. But what he never addresses with the proper mindset is the fact that many people on the outside have been fooled by the corrupt workings of the inside. I mean he addresses it but he still thinks this outside polarizing politics can be saved by rallying around the issue of corruption. He likes to cite the fact that 3/4 of Americans, based on polling prioritize jobs and corruption as the top issues, while clearly the people inside Washington do not. The problem is Americans, even though they purport to care about jobs and corruption, keep voting back into office corporate democrats and corporate Republicans who will never deal directly with these issues, keep watching the mainstream media for their news, keep this “we have to choose between the lesser of two evils” concept alive that Republicans and Democrats depend on for the dominance of the duopoly. We don’t need to talk to the people who have been fooled by the mainstream and that includes unwavering Obama supporters as well, because when it comes to politics most are unwavering no matter how much reason and logic one can use to try to convince them. I interned on Congressman’s Bill Pascrell’s re-election campaign which was also fighting for Obama’s re-election (
something I will never do again) and I can think of several people who would never be able to see beyond their “We must choose between the lesser of two evils” blinders. We need to speak to the real independents, the people who vote for third-party candidates, radical social movements that do exist in this country but are, as of now, not sufficiently organized under one umbrella. There are enough of these people. They just aren’t organized around one central ideal, they are a minority but they are not yet an empowered minority. I believe Rootstrikers carries that ideal…In other words their issues are the branches which the root of “dirty” money in politics feeds. Lessig often says we need to act with consequence and there is no time for small plans. But while his constitutional convention is not a small plan, I believe it is an ill-conceived plan in terms of acting with any consequence based on our polarized politics. 34 states need to ratify a constitutional convention. And he believes the pressure of getting close to 34 will get the politicians in D.C. to bring about reforms. This is way too slow and it ignores the nature of outside politics. I honestly think we need massive, nonviolent civil disobedience from this empowered minority, but also a disobedience in which we make our demands clear and our solutions even more clear unlike Occupy a few years back where their ideals were clear but their solutions were not and plus there were a lot of other issues which complicated their movement. At this point I can’t give you anything more specific than that, since I just recently came to this realization. But it definitely has to start with a change in political identity for our organization, and if not well then perhaps a breakaway will be formed. I still need to educate myself on the tactics of the all the 1960’s social movements. Perhaps then I will have a better idea.
I’m ready to go in whichever direction you’d prefer. Lessig sounds interesting. I like his nostalgia for Reagan. Civil disobedience interests me. Against what? Segregated lunch counters were tangible. Any kid in the south could do it. The bus boycott was also effective. Where would you sit in so that the message would be clear?
As for the existential question, what is the implication of knowing, believing, that one has only one life, this one? What makes that life worth living? A beer at Applebee’s? A ferris wheel ride? Success in single combat? Sex? Drugs? Rock ‘n Roll? Living a virtuous life? Children? Gold? Power? Elected office? Work? What is means, and what is ends? What would be achieved by campaign finance reform? Is it a means? If so, to what end is it a means? You are 21. I’m 77. When you are my age what do you want to be able to say of your life? More to the point, what do you want to be able to say about your twenties when you are 31?
I’d treat you to dinner and a talk at Applebee’s tomorrow night if you were here. I have about ten days off between semesters at the moment, but work will pick up by May 29th.
I like the idea of a sit-in, although at this point I couldn’t tell you where that would happen.
I appreciate the dinner offer although I also don’t think it’s feasible…a conversation with you would definitely be very interesting….I would say campaign finance reform is definitely a means, a means to a more socially just America…and ultimately then what we all strive for in this world….happiness. A socially just world….not a world where artificial and fake equality is imposed and independence is not respected like I believe would happen in a true communist society….is, I believe, one of the keys for happiness.
In terms of what I want to be able to say of my life when I come to be your age, I’m sure that will change numerous times throughout my life but at this point, first I want to be able to say that I was healthy enough so that once I’m 77 I would be confident I will live at least 20-25 more years. I guess that’s my selfish part. Second I hope I’ll remain as idealistic throughout my life as I am now. I hope I won’t be satisfied with compromising between the better of two evils in any of my choices. I hope I would have been courageous enough to fight for what I believe in, but also open-minded enough have seriously listened to other’s arguments cause I am confident that some knowledge is never certain, although I do believe that if someone is either consciously or unconsciously working to create human suffering then it is quite certain that whatever they are doing is unjustified and indefensible no matter what ideology one may try to invoke to defend it. humans will always be searching for a better way of doing things. And when I say better I mean in the interest of social justice and the alleviation of human suffering. the problem is when some people say “better” they often mean using human beings as means rather than treating them as ends, and these people and their ideas must be challenged. And since I want to be a teacher I hope I would have lived all of what I have said here through my teaching, through my relationship with my future students, future colleagues, future kids and my future wife and my family. I know this all sounds very gooey and goody, goody but it’s what I believe and if that’s how it sounds, so be it. Perhaps I will be hardened by reality. Of course I can’t predict the future. But in my view being hardened by reality can be a show of strength when whatever is hardening you is dealt with directly but I find that more often than not, when one fails to deal with a hardening force for a long time, its a show of being complicit in whatever negative social forces are shaping your life and that brings on stress and uncertainty. The forces that have shaped my life so far have been fairly hardening but what that has meant for me is usually an unhealthy stress for reasons I’m not willing to divulge on this blog. I will admit, despite my lofty and idealistic words in my comments and in my blog, I am a very timid and shy person who is unsure of himself more often than not, and I hope when I’m 77 I would have used my passion for social justice to adopt a more extroverted and confident personality, because really how can you be in the business of nonviolent civil disobedience and passionate activism and teaching for that matter while being an introvert? I don’t think it’s possible. Perhaps you have some insights? when i become 31 years of age, it would be pretty much the same stuff. I could probably write a lot more but that’s the gist of it, plus I would like to keep one of my comments at least relatively short.
What about you? How do you look back on your life and see your life going foward?
Ihaveonly looked at the AP Microeconomics exam. It was close to what I might write for a final in my intro micro class.
Students can also take the Sam without taking the class. It is one way to certify self study.
I could not disagree more with Ms. Campbell. I am fortunate enough to work in a public high school that allows me and my colleagues to teach history courses that emphasize depth over coverage. I could detail the vast and various ways in which this, coupled rigorous inquiry, facilitates the development of each and every one of the skills she mentions. But there is one or two points in particular that I wish to contest — that “students would not learn these skills unless there were a carrot for them at the end of the year.” That is not so. In a classroom where a skilled teacher, practiced in the art of listening and questioning, poses questions that require students to exchange ideas and opinions, support these with evidence, critique opposing ideas on the basis of evidence, and generally maintain an interpretive approach, discussion requires the growth of proficiencies similar to ones needed for the analytical reading and writing work required in college. Grant students the power of their own ideas, help them understand that any meaningful history is itself interpretive and they will tackle challenges one ordinarily associates with higher levels of education. I see this on a daily basis and would not want the impulse to cover an A.P. timeline to inhibit that.
And then there is the utter bastardization of even the flawed existing A.P. history mandates that has emerged at all too many schools seeking to raise standards by teaching A.P. . . .
You can “thank” Jay Mathews and his AP Challenge Index for that….
We didn’t have an IB program when my son was in high school so he took all of the AP classes he could. He certainly didn’t think they were the best thing ever, but the beat the heck out of general education or honors classes per the rigor. I’ll never forget him telling me his freshman year in college that he could tell his fellow students who had taken AP classes from those who had not. The latter were just not prepared.
So you subscribe to your son’s anecdote. Okay.
But a 2006 MIT faculty report noted ““there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard” (Seebach, 2004).
And now Dartmouth finds that high scores on AP psychology tests do NOT translate into college readiness for the next-level course.
Indeed, students admit that ““You’re not trying to get educated; you’re trying to look good;” and, “”The focus is on the test and not necessarily on the fundamental knowledge of the material.” AP is far more about gaming the college acceptance process than it is learning.
Ask your son. Why, exactly, did he take “all the AP classes he could?” Because he was just so eager to learn? Or because he wanted to get nto a certain selective school?
Democracy,
I believe that what you cited is true. HOWEVER, it does not make Terry’s statement any less true.
The problem is that students are told that if they pass the AP exam they are READY for the next class in college. I don’t think they are; especially in math.
However, if they take an AP class and then take the introductory course in college, I can most certainly believe they will be better prepared than someone who has not taken the AP classes.
My biggest problem with AP classes is that they put such stress on HS students and demand so much of their time and energy, yet they do not prepare them for the next highest college level. It can seriously get college freshmen started off on the wrong foot.
If I had my choice, I would send my daughter take a college course while in High School over taking an AP course. I think this would be more effective.
My son took AP courses and AP exams for a variety of reasons, depending on the class and exam. He took AP European history and the exam in tenth because that was the appropriately challenging course and he wanted practice taking extended challenging exams. In eleventh he took The AP chemistry class and the AP Physics B class because those classes were the most challenging available to him in the building. He also took two semesters of calculus at our local university because that was the more appropriate class. He took the AP exams in chemistry, environmental science, computer programming, physics C: mechanics, physics C: optics, and calculus BC primarily to compete for the Siemens AP prize for the state. His senior year he took an AP government class on line from K-12 primarily because it offered him the flexability in scheduling to take three university courses that fall and fulfill a state mandated high school graduation requirement. He took the AP exams in government and microeconomics that spring to become a national AP scholar.
His AP chemistry score allowed him to take a couple of semesters of physical chemistry at the university his senior year in high school. He did not feel underprepared compared to his university classmates, though most of them had taken more chemistry classes. He was in the unusual position of taking the AP calculas exam after taking the university calculus classes. It was his opinion that our local university was probably too generous in giving credit for both semesters of the science and engeneering calculas classes for a 5 on the exam. He thought one semester of credit was more appropriate.
“rigor” as in rigor mortis???
Did it ever occur to you that your supercilious attitude speaks volumes, and not in a good way?
There are thousands of teachers of AP who work with kids every day, who find value in the program based on the growth they have seen in their students over the years. Please try to be more open-minded and not so ideologically driven.
@ Cindy: The research simply does not support the “AP is better” mantra. And I’ve only cited a portoin of it…but what I cited is compelling.
As for Terry’s son knowing that he could tell AP from non-AP students….well, exactly how could he know? Maybe those he perceived as non-APers came from less affluent areas. Maybe they came from lower-income families. Maybe they were students who took AP only to pad their transcripts.
The research suggests that non-AP classes that are challenging – that is, they require students to actually read and discuss and, most importantly, to think – are every bit as good or better than AP.
Adelman’s research found that “Advanced Placement has almost no bearing on entering postsecondary education,” and when examining and statistically quantifying the factors that relate to bachelor’s degree completion, Advanced Placement does NOT “reach the threshold level of significance.”
@ teachingeconomist: your son is certainly the exception, not the rule.
It is important, however, to have a system that accommodates exceptions.
Democracy,
I am not defending AP courses. Neither am I saying they should be eliminated. Where do you get this?
I advised my oldest daughter to not take the option of skipping the first Calculus course at the University of Michigan even though her AP class allowed her to. She didn’t listen (I am only the stepmother, so that may be why). She wasn’t prepared to do the work at the next highest Calculus class level and by the time she transferred back down to the first Calculus course, she was behind and never recovered.
This set into motion a series of events whereby she abandoned her desire to work toward applying to the School of Business. Not applying to the School of Business is fine, you can change your mind any number of times before you graduate, but the decision was in large part based on her belief that she wasn’t cut out for it. And that was because she was fed a line that passing the AP course made you ready to move onto the next level.
However, if she had just used her AP knowledge and taken the first Calculus class she would have likely been very well prepared and by the time the course became challenging would have been very comfortable with the expectations of her professor and the class exams. So, you see, I can have both good things and bad things to say about anything. Just because you want to dwell on the one doesn’t make them all bad and just because someone else wants to dwell on the good doesn’t make them all good. The “bad” comes in what we lead children to expect from taking these classes and passing these exams.
As a side note, I had taken those Calculus classes at the same university 23 years earlier. My roommate, who had scored almost perfectly on her SATs and had passed the AP Calc exam did not take the first Calculus course, but instead took the second one her second term; so, we took it at the same time. She struggled to get a D in that class. It completely shook her confidence despite the fact that she was highly intelligent. AP courses were not offered at my Podunk school, yet I was able to have greater success in the class. Was it because I was smarter? No. It was because I didn’t go into it thinking I had some advantage.
And the research you cited, as I recall, supported just the examples I have given. I do not think it ever addressed if it made you better prepared to take the classes you would have taken anyway had you never taken the AP course.
@ Cindy,
You mut have misread something, because I did not write anything about your wanting Ap course eliminated. Where did YOU get this?
What I HAVE said, and will reiterate once more, is that AP courses do not measure up to the hype. And virtually all the research (except that put out by the College Board) says that….AP is not what it’s cracked up to be. Moreover, most of the other products put out by the College Board (the PSAT, SAT and Accuplacer) are as flawed, or worse.
You rely on anecdote. For instance, you say that had your step-daughter “just used her AP knowledge and taken the first Calculus class she would have likely been very well prepared and by the time the course became challenging would have been very comfortable with the expectations of her professor and the class exams.” But that’s merely conjecture on your part. You have no way of knowing the validity of that statement.
I don’t think the research I cited supports the examples you’ve written about. The research says AP is not so hot. And that’s whether you take an introductory course or the next level course.
@ teachingeconomist: exceptions can be accommodated in many ways…AP might be one, but it certainly doesn’t have to be.
I don’t think AP classes are the only option or even the best, but they are a good option for many students. The AP exams are a way to validate both a class and, in some cases, independent study. Many of the high schools in my state are too small to offer more advanced subjects like calculus, so self study might well be the only option for a gifted student.
Sigh. Most of you may come from places with wealth and prestige and loving family support of students. in my area of the country my students may be poor or rich, but often lack parental support. Without AP, my students might not be ready for the rigors of private university. But because of it, so many are, whether they score a 5 or a 2. Having taught AP 14 years, I can tell you how many kids are appreciative of being ready for undergrad and grad degrees, and from them who advanced to grad and doctoral degrees, they would say AP ( bio, calc, and English) helped them become who they are. And they always appreciate the teachers who helped them compete in ways unimaginable to those from wealth and privilege who take such things for granted.
The key to what you describe is student motivation, not the AP course or tests.
Sheary — I do not teach in a high school where most of the kids come from places with wealth and prestige. Things can be done very differently, and I would argue better, without recourse to A.P. curriculum. It requires dedication, well-trained inquiry teachers and political will, but it can be done.
I took an AP World History course back in junior year of high school. It was 2007. My school had just instituted the stupid policy that everyone who took an AP course had to take the test. This was vehemently opposed by the students although to no avail. My teacher, all year did not teach to the test. I really didn’t realize until the end of the year that he wasn’t teaching for it, cause he never really announced it. He was protesting the test the only way he knew how, and at the end of the year he told us so. At the time, I hated him for it cause I thought he was leaving us out to dry with essentially no recourse Then I took the test, and I realize why he did it and I wasn’t angry anymore. I just wish he would have included us students in his resistance from the beginning. These AP tests…all they test is memorization and linear causality between historical events…essentially useless. And don’t anyone tell me that these tests are for critical thinking….if you think that, you don’t know what real critical thinking is.
Since when is remembering things and understand linear causality between historical events “essentially useless”? Shouldn’t you know what happened in the past, and causal relationship between events? What should you be studying in a history class?
Sorry for grammatical mistakes.
Your last question is a good one. What exactly is “history” (why not “herstory”-ha ha)? John Tosh’s book “The Pursuit of History” is a good start in understanding the problems involved in the study of “history”. I took an undergrad course “The History of Mexico” and right off the bat the professor stated (paraphrased as it was only about 35 years ago) “What your going to learn is that which is filtered through a red headed Jewish 40 year old from New York’s head.” I thought that put it all in perspective.
Its useless because it makes kids believe that memorization is the only important thing and that being tested and doing well on a test which tests for memorization is the pinnacle of being an intelligent person. Let me explain my view further by explaining my view of the value of critical thinking vs. memorization. Most students in my experience even at the college level, even the ones who do well in school, don’t care about learning. They care about the grade. They are the ones who whine about extra credit, who beg the professor not to make the test too hard, the ones who constantly ask “Is this gonna be on test?” “Should I write this down in my notes?” They are the ones who see no problem with the professor curving a test 15-20 points and welcome it with open arms. And frankly I’m sick of this culture. But it’s one that permeates our educational system, and it needs to be dealt with at a systems level.
. “Critical thinking is a learned skill, and currently our educational system is not doing enough to teach and assess it. I do not see how memorization is a learned skill. School does not develop the capacity for memorization. It’s already built into our brains. We are all capable of memorization once our brains become mature enough. What’s the difference between memorizing a shopping list and memorizing the causes and effects of the American Civil War in a history class or the main idea or theme of Little Red Riding Hood? Our educational system can test memorization as much as it wants, but that doesn’t mean it’s learned and that certainly does not mean it’s worth testing. In addition, you can also fashion a more complex multiple choice question to test whether a student is able to remember the causes and effects of the Civil War. That is still memorization. Your teacher can connect a series of concepts together in his lecture and then ask you to regurgitate it in a short answer question on a test. That is still pure memorization. There’s no critical thinking involved in that. Memorization is not a worthwhile end in itself. Neither is critical thinking an end, but it is certainly a worthwhile component for educating our youth to participate in a democracy, to analyze assumptions and problematize theories, to challenging existing balances of power, and work for social justice and the common good, to exercise power and agency. If America only going to measure the success and learning of a school and its students by how well they all do on a standardized test, then obviously there can be no room for educating our youth for these purposes. This is about more than just preparing our students for college. Memorization serves none of those purposes, standardized tests serve none of these purposes, but unfortunately traditional, instrumentalized, lecture style pedagogies indoctrinate our students to become superfical learners and nothing more, always caring more about the grade than about real and authentic learning. I agree that content is important. Historical content is important. Knowing content is necessary if you are going to be able to critically analyze it. . What I don’t agree with is the idea that a teacher has to separate the memorization from the critical thinking, has to assess the memorization in one question and the critical thinking ability in another. Why teach and assess for the memorization if it is already a given that the student has to know the content in order to critically think about it? If you are going to teach and assess for memorization than, in the end, research and practical experience has proven, that even that unworthy goal is not going to be achieved.
Explain to me how a multiple choice question will ever be able to assess a student’s ability to critically analyze a book’s context. Multiple choice tests only assess a particular type of “knowing” which Kincheloe explains here,
I return to Kincheloe to further answer your question,
“While scores of sophisticated, creative teachers introduce elementary and secondary teacher education students to the world of social studies teaching, our explorations have found far too many professors who offer a non-conceptual, technical view of social studies teaching uninformed by a content knowledge of the social sciences. These non-conceptual classes are consistently marked by an absence of analytical questions about the nature of the social studies curriculum or the discourse of the social sciences. Questions concerning the origins of practices, the implicit assumptions underlying certain language used in the discipline, the connections between social studies teaching and larger socio-political issues, and the general purposes of social studies methods classes often dictate the topics covered in these non-conceptual classes. While many of the textbooks may attempt to provide a conceptual context for the topics they cover, this context is often overlooked by the non-conceptual methods professor.”
“The study of evaluation in the non-conceptual methods class often degenerates into a listing of testing methods. An idea common to most methods classrooms involves the recognition that a variety of testing procedures should be used by the teacher. After pencil and paper tests (both objective and subjective), evaluation strategies such as group discussion, observation, checklists, teacher-student conferences, anecdotal records, work samples, and student attitude scales are commonly mentioned. It is extremely important to understand that such evaluation techniques exist— but more understanding is needed. Prospective social studies teachers need to understand the biases and assumptions underlying the use of the various evaluation strategies. Certain evaluation strategies are specifically tied to certain perspectives on the goals and purposes of social studies. John Jarolimek in his popular text, Social Studies in Elementary Education, does a good job of addressing the biases of standardized minimum competency tests used in the social studies. Such tests, he contends, do not encourage a balanced assessment of student skills, knowledge, or abilities. Their use often results in factually based social studies teaching by intimidated instructors who cover themselves by directly teaching the test. Discussions based on the type of information that Jarolimek presents rarely find their way into the non-conceptual methods class. In the race to provide students with so-called ‘practical’ skills, the analysis of the origins, epistemologies, and larger meanings of such evaluative practices as minimum competency testing is sacrificed. The social and political contexts that give birth to such educational strategies are neglected. It is this type of understanding that builds the analytical ability necessary to the professionalization of social studies teachers. Without it social studies teachers are mere technicians condemned to a work life marked by an attempt to survive day to day.
Most non-conceptual classrooms cover the following materials: textbooks, encyclopedias, supplementary books and references, pictures, films, filmstrips, slides, overhead projectors, maps, auditory aids, TV, bulletin boards, and computers. Classroom discussions of such materials offer an excellent opportunity to explore some basic questions about social studies. While most non-conceptual professors make the points that knowledge of a variety of materials is helpful because not all children learn in the same way and that students remember better when more than one sensory system is involved in the learning process, the discussion usually stops there.
Analysis of these materials can help social studies teachers understand the social forces that have shaped social studies. If research indicates that most elementary and secondary social studies teachers rely heavily on the textbook, then textbook content certainly determines much of what goes on in social studies classrooms around the country. We can thus determine what is often taught in social studies via textbook content decisions? On what basis are textbook content decisions made? The attempt to answer such questions opens a new world for the prospective social studies teacher. Literature such as Frances Fitzgerald’s America Revised provides great insight into the process by which social studies texts are produced. Methods students soon learn from Fitzgerald that marketing considerations, pressure from special interest groups and political power groups exert very important influences on textbook writers. Armed with such information social studies teachers approach materials with a greater degree of sophistication.”
The kind of nonconceptual methods class which Kincheloe describes here is exactly the kind of teaching I have received in high school in history and social studies courses…and I was in AP and honors all my four years…in addition to AP electives I took such as AP world history and AP Government. You tell me what the value of this kind of teaching is? Basically if the student just happens to be curious about the complex forces which shape history and how they could impact his outlook on life and his lived experience, then all the outlet for that curiousity and potential learning is not in the classroom…it’s totally outside the classroom. that’s not right.
No, you’re way off base here. American education has been pounding us with the “critical thinking” message for decades now: critical thinking is crucial, students must be able to think, depth is more important than breadth, blah blah blah. Of course it’s important to think critically, but to meaningfully analyze or synthesize you have to have a base of content knowledge. Otherwise an analysis is just a dog and pony show.
I like to call this phenomenon in schools the “race to synthesis.” We only award teachers for helping students with the highest cognitive skills, ignoring the lower fundamental skills upon which those higher skills must be built. So we have kids trying to be historians without knowing any facts about history, to be literary critics without knowing the parts of speech, to be mathematicians without knowing how to multiply and divide.
One of the reasons I like the AP program so much is that the tests strike a good balance between content and process, although it’s always up to the teacher to strike that balance appropriately in the classroom.
“Of course it’s important to think critically, but to meaningfully analyze or synthesize you have to have a base of content knowledge. Otherwise an analysis is just a dog and pony show.” I think I already agreed with you here. what I can’t agree with is the idea that covering all the supposedly “objective” content presented in some history textbook in a surface manner is somehow more important than exploring a section of that content in depth and using supplementary materials and engaging students as researchers. all we did in high school, in my AP and honors history classes…was cover the textbook from one end to the other…1000 damn pages or more of supposed facts to prepare for the AP test… you try to justify the value in that?
OK if you think that our educational system is filled with plenty of students who have the capacity to engage in higher-order critical thinking skills and have the tools to become or desire to be historians then you really must be living in an alternate universe.. just because bureaucrats in Washington and elsewhere give lip service to critical thinking, whatever the heck their definition of critical thinking is, doesn’t mean its actually happening and as far as the value of historical “facts” as you call them….
Since history is constantly written and re-written by people with different perspectives on the same event, it is important that students are taught to problematize popular accounts of history and analyze them for their purposeful inaccuracies, biases towards and against certain groups of people, and hidden agendas. Your claim to an objective base of knowledge is itself baseless especially in regards to history and subjects like political science, where the meaning of terms like liberal and conservative, radical and progressive… have different meanings for different people and are constantly changing.
Jim,
Hope I’m hitting the right reply button. I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment! Trying to be a mathematician without knowing how to multiply and divide 😅. Made me chuckle and yell, “Yes!” At the same time.
I detect some sour grapes and bruised egos regarding tests taken or to be taken in the future in this thread. Better just to say they are useless than perhaps have to admit we are not as good at taking tests as the next person. And maybe, just maybe, that ability is useful all other things being exactly equal.
We would all love to be the “brilliant” ones for our ability to ace tests. It ticks me off that my husband answers the questions faster on Jeopardy than I do. “I’m as smart as him,” my ego cries out! But the fact is he is a better Jeopardy player. C’est la vie.
wow ya know we can at least be respectful on these threads…no reason to call another’s opinion useless. and exactly where do you get the idea that everyone out there would love to be the brilliant one for our ability to ace tests? that seems to a big generalization based on a personal anecdote of wanting to beat your husband at Jeopardy.
Standardized test scores and teacher assigned grades are both attempt to measure student achievement, and I am in favor of multiple ways for students to demonstrate mastery of their subjects. Sometimes the standardized scores present a more accurate picture, sometimes teacher assigned grades will.
Reflective Thinking,
“And secondly your telling me you don’t understand this language from this study…?? I would think that this language would be pretty understandable for a AP English teacher let alone a naive and relatively wet behind the ears undergraduate student like myself. ”
“Uh Heeelllo then why in the world are you defending the existence of these tests so vehemently.”
“They are the ones who whine about extra credit, who beg the professor not to make the test too hard, the ones who constantly ask “Is this gonna be on test?” “Should I write this down in my notes?”
“then you really must be living in an alternate universe.. ”
These are just a few of your quips meant to embarrass or condescend. Further, you go on to lament how others are given A’s while you get B’s or someone gets a 5 while you get a 3, and that equates with someone getting a scholarship over you (?) and that isn’t fair, especially since you don’t place any value on the test anyway. You don’t appear to place value on your classes or your professors, either. You even go as far as to suggest that those “others” getting A’s have not thought about the material in as important a way as you have. The world does not fit into YOUR construct, so it is wrong and bad and you are sick of it. That is your prerogative, but good luck with that.
I never said your argument was useless. I believe, however, that you used that phrase a number of times. I think tests can be useful. You do not. It would have been nice to hear an alternative. You want to totally tear down testing as a valid means to gauge teaching or learning, but you offer no alternative other than “let the student be the teacher” or “let the student be the researcher”.
I made a lighthearted, personal Jeopardy analogy as an attempt to show that no one should judge their intelligence by their ability to perform in any one type of test but at the same time recognizing that some people will be better at it than others. It is all OK. Things tend to even out in the end. You appear to be the one placing the most importance on the grades rather than reveling in the fact that you believe you have understood the material better than most of your peers.
You say you are not bitter. I suppose I have to take your word for it, but your words suggest otherwise. And I would also point out that just because someone studies so that they score well on a multiple choice test does not mean that they do not understand the nuances of the subject as a result.
ok firstly I did mention reflective journals, teacher guided in- class discussion and in depth research projects as alternatives…so that’s that.
“And I would also point out that just because someone studies so that they score well on a multiple choice test does not mean that they do not understand the nuances of the subject as a result.”
I never said this. My argument was against the form of the test and what it tests for.
I also never said “let the student be the teacher”. That would be the opposite extreme which I do not advocate for and is equally misguided.
“They are the ones who whine about extra credit, who beg the professor not to make the test too hard, the ones who constantly ask “Is this gonna be on test?” “Should I write this down in my notes?”
This has been my experience speaking and interacting and watching my fellow students from high school through college. This comment was not meant to be condescending, and I really don’t see how it is. I don’t blame my fellow students for treating knowledge as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. You have to look at it as part of a whole system. Our educational system conditions us students to care more about the grade, more about memorization, than about critical thinking and real authentic learning. I have been able to break free of this construct because of a couple great teachers who made me realize the error of treating education in this manner. And when I become a teacher I am hopeful that I will not conform to this construct that has been the dominant construct ever since public education began with the factory model of learning back at the turn of twentieth century. Do I take pride in it as you seem to assume? No, absolutely not. Do I feel privileged because of it, as you seem to assume? Absolutely not. I realize that without these teachers, I would still be conforming to this dominant educational construct. I am humble. My curiosity about this subject, my concern and deep passion for it did not arise out of a vacuum. There’s plenty of literature out there on the subject. I read that literature and I try to connect it to my own educational experiences and form my own knowledge and opinions as a result My opinions are not exclusively my own and neither are yours or anyone elses. Our subjectivities are shaped by numerous forces and it’s important to remember that. What I can’t criticize our educational system without sounding like I’m above the rest? What is the justification for making that assumption about my character?
i will admit parts of my few other comments you mentioned were slightly condescending and dismissive and I apologize for that, but the person who you praise Jim made equally condescending comments towards Duane and his referencing of the Noel study and I took offense to that because that study really does have some great perspective and information on the topic which we are discussing here and to dismiss it so readily as he did..well that contributes nothing to an intelligent discussion on the topic. However condescension met with condescension is not proper, and I apologize for that.
Reflective Thinking,
This response has a different tone and I appreciate that.
I don’t know you and you don’t know me; that is true. Perhaps I interpreted what you said in a manner you did not mean to imply. That will happen. I certainly do not want to kill your desire to pursue your passions; so don’t let anything I say do harm.
As for Jim. I don’t know him either. So, I was not praising Jim, the man (though he might be a very fine gentleman), but was making a strong connection with what he said. His comments are very, very relevant to me. And in his defense, I DID go and try and read the paper. I would have written it differently with graphs and charts to break up the wall of words. I would have to link to every one of his cited references and read them separately to get much out of his paper. I don’t have time for that now, but I might give it a go at a later date.
I will give you an example of what I connected to in Jim’s comment. My youngest daughter is in the 3rd grade and is being homeschooled this year. Last year, in 2nd grade, I became concerned by the classwork she was bringing home (in public school). Trying to make a long story, short, every day the kids were given half of an 8.5″ x 11″ photocopied sheet with either Language Arts type questions or math type questions. The questions were a smorgasbord (i.e., they did not focus on one particular skill set even within the same academic area). I began to identify this as the “appetizer approach” to teaching/learning.
It became clear to me that my daughter was not actually doing the work herself, and when she was, she was not putting effort into it (or it was not being presented in a manner she understood or there were too many distractions in the classroom). How did I know this? I looked at what she erased, I noticed if she didn’t erase, and I asked questions. Because, you see, the teacher never saw these papers (not until parent/teacher conferences) because they did the work together on the projector and corrected them together (the whole class, I mean) and then the children put them in their take home folders. There were no quizzes, no tests (except for end of semester assessments). Maybe you can see why I think testing is important given what I observed happen without ANY testing – the teacher has no clue what individual children actual know.
Anyway, at the same time this was happening, there was a HUGE focus on writing; and by this I mean creative, persuasive, etc. Every Monday a writing assignment was brought home. There was a space at the bottom for the parents to sign off. The gist of this was that the parents had to put their name to paper that they participated in the process of getting the child from point A to point B. Needless to say, Mondays and Tuesdays (the assignment was due Wednesday) in our house were miserable for the entire year, and I love writing and literature.
These kids were expected to become proficient in writing when they could not spell (an unimportant skill in today’s elementary schools), were not reading good literature (they can’t because good literature doesn’t have pictures), did not know a noun from a verb, had no life experiences to draw from for topics, and had no sense how to organize their thoughts. I rejected this approach then, just like I reject it now. It is putting the cart before the horse; which is what Jim was saying. This approach puts too much emphasis on creating and critical thinking and not enough on the basics required to reach the point of having any meaningful ideas from which to create and critically think.
Look, I had tests in college which were stupid and made me angry. There were professors that would put the most obscure questions on the tests in what seemed like an attempt to show you just how smart they were and how stupid you were. But those are bad tests.
Tests can motivate many children. Setting goals for A’s or B’s can be beneficial for some; it might be the only thing that motivates them. But at the end of the day, regardless of how you feel about testing in general, they are necessary in order to try and figure out whether children/students are absorbing the material and/or a teacher is effectively teaching.
“You appear to be the one placing the most importance on the grades rather than reveling in the fact that you believe you have understood the material better than most of your peers.”
I do not place any importance on grades…I speak about them as a point of my argument that they are not important…I did mention that in my previous comments. And I don’t want to revel? Do you think I should be reveling? Also my understanding..as you put it…was not part of the understanding that I need to pass the course. There are numerous controversies surrounding standardized tests but we were only taught Pearson’s opinion of them… a company that has a vested financial interest in teaching future educators to bow before them?….my concern was with the content of the course and the manner in which it was unproblematized…there is no justification for it being so one-sided and furthermore that the teacher should not encourage us students to question it and present us alternate viewpoints for research and exploration….Am I unjustified in saying that? should I just assume everything I learn in school is correct and objective and the right way or the right fact or the right opinion? When I become a teacher I don’t want my students to think everything that comes out of my mouth will be gospel? I want them to question me, to question their questioning, to question my assumptions, to question their own assumptions. Now I am not saying that our Pearson textbook should not have been used as part of the curriculum….but it should not have been the center and it should not have been presented as an unproblematized body of knowledge which it unfortunately was.
“You don’t appear to place value on your classes or your professors, either.”
I am not going to place value on my classes and professors just because they are my classes and my professors and are in a position of authority. Authority is earned. It is not given. That would be wholly uncritical and rather anti-reflective. For example I had a genetics professor who used a lot of images, diagrams, and concept maps from the textbook in his teaching. Often, rather than making eye contact with his class, he lectures while continually staring at these diagrams. Incredibly enough, he will sometimes teach for long periods of time with his back facing us making it seem like he is talking more to himself than to us. One often gets the sense that he is unprepared for a lesson before he enters class, because, he is constantly trying to negotiate the meaning of these diagrams in the classroom. For example, he will be looking at a diagram and then suddenly say, “This looks wrong” and then stare at it for five or ten minutes trying to figure what he thinks is wrong. I recall one instance where he spent more than half the class period doing this while we all sat in stone cold silence. At times he will even try to enlist our help in trying to understand what he is supposed to be teaching us. Now there would be no problem with this if it was done within the context of a democratic classroom where student voice actually matters and affective learning was taking place, but in this instance it just seems like he was using us to bail him out of an embarrassing situation.
Should I value this teacher? Should I value the college professor who just views his or role as a lecturer and nothing more, which is the great majority of them. Should I value a class where my and my fellow student’s voice is not given a single chance to be heard in the context of the content at hand? Lecturer and teacher are not synonyms, but at least in the college which I attended, this is the underlying assumption of nearly every professor. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t disrespect these professors. I actually make it a point to express my concerns with some of them in casual discussions in their offices especially with those in the biology department since I was am a bio major. Surprisingly most of them share my concerns, and they do happen to be genuinely concerned with the dominance of traditional lecture-style pedagogy and multiple choice testing regimes and marketplace for grades mentality that dominates my particular college…and then when I ask them what is being done to change this culture…they invariably say its a very hard and long process changing culture and pedagogies. Not much more of answer is given than that. But I have my own theories on why things don’t change. Lecturing is easy for the teacher. Adminstering and grading pre-written multiple choice exams is the easiest way for a teacher to conduct his or her class. In addition college professors, are not required to have teacher certification and go through a teacher certification program in order to teach. So they really have no knowledge of educational theory and varying pedagogies and all the knowledge that would come with going through a quality teacher education program. Again, I don’t blame them individually. They’re the product of a larger system that is deeply flawed.
You even go as far as to suggest that those “others” getting A’s have not thought about the material in as important a way as you have.”
Ok why is this such a bad suggestion? I’m not using as a point of trying to explain away my overwhelming smartness that would put me above the rest. That would be arrogant and condescending. Again its all part and parcel of the way students are conditioned in our educational system to view the learning process and value the knowledge they are taught in school. I don’t treat school material as the end all be all. Is that such a bad thing? I talk to these kids about school everyday. I hear what they have to say about their educational lives. For most of them, grades are the primary motivating factor, carrot and stick, whatever is easier is better, if the professor drops our worst exam then he’s the best professor in the world, if the professor curves our test 15 or 20 points, which does happen, then he’s the best professor in the world. And when I try to have discussions with my friends about the value of learning beyond the grade, they won’t hear me. They’re not willing to question their assumptions and go beyond the construct that has been laid out and impressed upon them for a very long time. All these cheating scandals you hear about in the news…they are a direct product of America’s obsession with testing…one can’t just attribute society’s systematic problems to individual blame. And that is not what I am trying to do in this case. It would be naive for me to do so.
“The world does not fit into YOUR construct, so it is wrong and bad and you are sick of it.”
This is a big oversimplification of what I have said in my comments. I don’t know how else to respond to it. And it paints me as a mere crybaby which I am not. I think me and Jim are having a nice and intelligent discussion, and I appreciate it deeply.
“Things tend to even out in the end.” Can you explain what this means? Standardized tests have been demonstrated through extensive research to be biased against minorities. I hardly see standardized tests as an way of evening things out. They are a demonstrated source of inequity and inequality in our educational system, as Diane has cited numerous times in this blog.
Reflective Thinking,
“And I don’t want to revel? Do you think I should be reveling?”
Revel, wallow, bask. Why not? I see knowledge as a warm blanket.
“should I just assume everything I learn in school is correct and objective and the right way or the right fact or the right opinion?”
Emphatically, NO! Question everything, even the stuff you want to agree with upon first blush. I see very little of this today, especially among certain groups of adults who should know better.
“unproblematized”
Out of curiosity, is this an educational buzzword? I like textbooks. I think one of the worst trends in education today is that elementary schools have eliminated them. I think if you have a problem, make it with your teacher, and not the textbook. The textbook is an outline, if you will. You have the freedom to ask the questions that reading the material brings to your mind. Perhaps some teachers are uncomfortable exploring the crevices. Again, that is not the textbook’s fault (although I admit there are probably a lot of crummy textbooks out there).
“Authority is earned. It is not given”
Actually, that is not true. Authority is given, in many cases, whether it is earned or deserved. It is one of life’s lessons. You can either accept it to the extent that it exists or you can let it make you bitter and disrespectful of all authority.
Unfortunately, some of the worst teachers are the brightest minds in their field. If you are at a top university, that Genetics professor is probably one of the top in his field. TA’s, while accessible, could be even worse, in my opinion, because they didn’t have the teacher training either and they were usually overwhelmed with their own studies. However, they were usually pretty bright and could help you if you ran into a problem. I didn’t utilize my professors or my TAs the way I could have while in college. Wish I had handled that differently. BTW, the problem with you Genetic’s professor seems to be common among the biological sciences and math. I had some pretty awesome professors in other areas.
“Should I value this teacher? Should I value the college professor who just views his or role as a lecturer and nothing more”
Should? I don’t know if you “should”, but I “would”. You have to look at the whole package. That professor probably didn’t choose to be a professor to “teach”. It is unfortunate, but that is the way big universities work, possibly many small ones, too. You are there to learn, so it makes you upset that he/she is not a better teacher. But are you receiving any benefit from being in that class or that school? Does getting through that class allow you to take a higher class that has an exceptional teacher? Will graduating from that school benefit you in your pursuit to be a history teacher? If not, then perhaps you are taking the wrong classes and/or you are going to the wrong school – for you.
“Ok why is this such a bad suggestion? ”
Because it can only be done by you making an assumption about your classmates that is based on a personal bias. Based on what I have read, you believe that you cannot both value getting high marks and value “true” learning. And you are then using that core belief to judge everyone who likes to receive high marks as somewhat intellectually shallow. That is how I am interpreting what you’ve said.
“Things tend to even out in the end.” Can you explain what this means?”
Grades, while important when applying for colleges, and if you plan to go immediately into graduate work, are not so important (if at all)
once you are out of school. I may have had one potential employer ask for a copy of my college transcript. My job performance has always determined my advancement (or not) and not where I went to school or what my final GPA was. Perhaps where I went to school opened some doors initially, but that benefit probably wears off within the first five years of graduating.
I have observed graduates of community colleges outpace some of their prestigious college peers. I have seen women with MBAs working as administrative assistants because they live in a good-old-boy location. I have worked with people who were incompetent, but who were paid better because they had connections or were in the right place at the right time. But, that is not stasis. The cream usually does rise to the top.
furthermore all I get from this anecdote is that the course was rigorous because you, Jeff Larsen made it rigorous…not because it was AP. I don’t understand why you have to link the rigor of the course with the AP label or the AP test
Jeff Laren’s testimonial for the Advanced Placement program is purely anecdotal. But almost a decade’s worth of research fails to support his personal belief.
The Advanced Placement program is pushed shamelessly buy the College Board, and by Jay Mathews at The Washington Post (Mathews started the Challenge Index, a ranking of high schools based on the number of AP tests they give).
Here’s a short summary of research on AP:
A 2002 National Research Council study of AP courses and tests found them to be a “mile wide and an inch deep” and inconsistent with research-based principles of learning.
A 2004 study by Geiser and Santelices found that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average, and a high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.”
A 2005 study (Klopfenstein and Thomas) found AP students “…generally no more likely than non-AP students to return to school for a second year or to have higher first semester grades.” Moreover, the authors wrote that “close inspection of the [College Board] studies cited reveals that the existing evidence regarding the benefits of AP experience is questionable,” and “AP courses are not a necessary component of a rigorous curriculum.”
A 2006 MIT faculty report noted ““there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard” (Seebach, 2004). Dartmouth found that high scores on AP psychology tests do NOT translate into college readiness for the next-level course. Indeed, students admit that ““You’re not trying to get educated; you’re trying to look good;” and, “”The focus is on the test and not necessarily on the fundamental knowledge of the material.” Students know that AP is far more about gaming the college acceptance process than it is learning.
In The ToolBox Revisited (2006), Adelman wrote about those who had misstated his original ToolBox (1999) work: “With the exception of Klopfenstein and Thomas (2005), a spate of recent reports and commentaries on the Advanced Placement program claim that the original ToolBox demonstrated the unique power of AP course work in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. To put it gently, this is a misreading.”
Ademan goes on to say that “Advanced Placement has almost no bearing on entering postsecondary education,” and when examining and statistically quantifying the factors that relate to bachelor’s degree completion, Advanced Placement does NOT “reach the threshold level of significance.”
The 2010 book “AP: A Critical Examination” noted that “Students see AP courses on their transcripts as the ticket ensuring entry into the college of their choice,” yet, “there is a shortage of evidence about the efficacy, cost, and value of these programs.” And this: AP has become “the juggernaut of American high school education,” but “ the research evidence on its value is minimal.”
As Geiser (2007) notes, “systematic differences in student motivation, academic preparation, family background and high-school quality account for much of the observed difference in college outcomes between AP and non-AP students.” College Board-funded studies do not control well for these student characteristics (even the College Board concedes that “interest and motivation” are keys to “success in any course”). Klopfenstein and Thomas (2010) find that when these demographic characteristics are controlled for, the claims made for AP disappear.
Yet, the myths about AP endure. Meanwhile, the College Board is promoting the Common Core and says it has “aligned” (wink) its products with it. And people believe it.
What’s even worse is that the College Board touts its other main products – the PSAT and the SAT – as being essential to a “rigorous” high school education and critical for navigating the path toward (and succes in) college. [Psst. They’re not.]
Stopping corporate-style “reform and the Common Core is easier said than done. Parents, students and educators are going to have to stop believing in the College Board-promulgated myths.
For some, abandoning nicotine would be much easier.
oops….pushed BY the College Board….
I am curiouse about the use of unweighted GPA in estimating college performance. In my local high school, about half of the valedictorians do not take the minimum number of academic classes to qualify for admission to any four year state university. The top 10% of the class has a GPA between 3.87 and 4.0. Is that really enough variation to get a good estimate? I assume that the sample does not contain the 4.0 students who are not eligible to attend college. Would the relationship between high school GPA and college success disappear if they were included?
As a former AP US History teacher and exam reader, I continue to support it. Read this letter in the WPost by Mike Henry, who taught AP US History for many years and written several guidebooks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ap-questions-prepare-students-for-college/2013/05/15/cc59f4a4-bc09-11e2-b537-ab47f0325f7c_story.html
I can only speak about AP US History, which I last taught in SY 2009-10 before being punitively transferred by Michelle Rhee and company. If taught as a freshman college level survey course and students in class understand that they are required to work at that level, the course can be very powerful, as attested by many students and by college professors.
The College Board, now led by Coleman, may very well undermine the AP program in order to generate more passing scores. The goal of the Colemans, Rhees, Duncans, et al. is to be able to claim that they closed the achievement gap by a combination of teacher intimidation and lowered standards, which they will call higher standards. Standards will be lowered by shifting emphasis from content mastery to more subjective “skills” as in “21st century skills.”
I have heard criticisms of AP calculus and AP physics by college math professors. Part of the criticism is over-dependance on calculators and the endlessly repeated canard about the evils of rote memory.
It’s interesting to note that the anti-mastery, anti-memorization, anti-content views that have been widely held by many educators for years have been adopted by the edu-reformers with the addition of an endless, deadening focus on and misuse of standardized testing.
Harlan,
What do you mean by “the values of the society are conservative” and “local authorities are responsible”?
I live in an area where the “conservatives” vote to build new locker rooms so that when visiting football teams come we won’t be “embarrassed” rather than put additions on elementary schools so that 30 kids are not crammed into tiny classrooms. I live in an area where you can still hear the “n” word on a regular basis. I live in an area where women with Master’s degrees have worked as administrative assistants at one of the largest appliance manufacturer headquarters in the world. I live in an area where I’ve had a farmer refuse to shake my hand because I am a woman. You act as if “liberal” ideas have given us nothing. I admit, if you are a white man, you’ve had to change the most, but is that a bad thing?
You live in an awesome town (the home of my Alma Mater, by the way) and I imagine being a conservative male there has its challenges. But if you came here, where I am, and looked past the beautiful Lake Michigan beaches and the quaint downtowns and really got to listening to how people “believe”, maybe you would change your opinion about what being a conservative or a liberal means. How about we all just be decent and use common sense?
I do not trust for-profit entities with something as important as education. They have proven time and again that they do not self-regulate well. I give you the West Texas fertilizer plant and the Gosnell abortion clinic as two recent examples. And not everyone can afford $20,000 per year in tuition for private K-12 school, plus an additional $1,000 in fees for books and such. In fact, I couldn’t afford that tuition for my daughter and I would like to think that I am a reasonably successful, productive member of society. But that said, teachers’ unions have not helped a whole lot in recent years either. While unions had a purpose at one time, they have evolved into unreasonable leviathans. If those of you out there think that Michigan is just anti-union for the heck of it, you don’t know much about Michigan history. The unions (which I once supported) almost brought the extinction of the American auto industry whose demise has taken the State of Michigan down with it.
Harlan, you talk about equality as if “liberals” (you call them communists or Communists) want to see everyone wearing the same clothes, live in the same style house, drive the same style car, and have the same amount of money in their bank account. That IS a straw man argument because no liberal or progressive I know wants or expects that. It really isn’t that hard to provide a system where all kids have access to food, clothes, and an education that allows them to achieve their full potential. Your full potential and my full potential are two different things, but it is the access to that potential that progressives like me aspire to. That is not utopian, unless you believe that people just don’t have it in them to care enough. You certainly can’t be saying that the US does not have the resources. Even if we provided all those things, the wealthy would still be really, really wealthy and there would still be a respectable wealth gap for anyone who thinks that is a good thing.
We are living in a time of severe polarity. I have never seen it this bad. I find myself so angry at times that I want to call people stupid and punch them in the nose. They probably want to do the same to me. I don’t want to delve too deeply into political ideology, but I notice that you refer to the president as Obama, rather than President Obama. I try and respect the office and the man whether that is President Obama, President Bush, President Reagan, or President Clinton. Perhaps if we showed some respect, even if we do not agree with everything the individual believes in, we could actually accomplish something. I have noticed that some people on these blogs try and goad you and they do use pejorative language against you and call you amusing; you are right about that. You give as good as you take, though. I do hope, however, that I have succeeded in showing you respect. I have read reviews by your former students describing you as a very kind man, so I know you cannot be all bad. Thusly, I know that Diane, who has devoted her life to the education of kids, cannot be all bad. If we see each other as basically good (I know there are exceptions, so let’s keep Hitler in the grave, shall we), then we will be in a better place to start working together.
I, personally, do not think it is bad manners to remain on a blog where you have a difference of opinion than the majority (unless you are on a rape survivor’s blog and are talking about how good rape is). But I also don’t think free speech necessarily means we should be mean. That’s what some people think and I’d like to sew their mouths shut (or tie their typing hands behind their backs). I like to bounce ideas around, not just score points with pointed barbs.
Harlan, as someone who never took an AP class (they weren’t offered at my HS), I know they aren’t necessary. I have seen them do harm and I have seen them do good (my neighbor’s daughter was able to complete undergraduate studies in 3 years so she could start law school in what would have been her 4th year of undergraduate studies). However, I don’t know why anyone wants to do away with them, as they aren’t mandatory. If colleges are starting to only look at applicants who have taken them, then that is a potential problem.
As for people’s motives and what they are willing to call themselves, I don’t care too much. They can call themselves Elvis or Mickey Mouse as long as they are willing to work toward real solutions to real problems; which, by the way, requires someone to admit there is a problem.
As for Prop A here in Michigan, anti-tax people were all for it as it kept the real estate taxes lower because the school property tax is set at 6 mills. Governor Engler was a Republican. Prop A has had some really bad consequences for some school districts like mine where now we have to pass special taxes to upgrade our buildings instead of collecting school taxes and spending them where they are most needed. Furthermore, people don’t understand that not everything you need to run a school can be paid with what the state redistributes back to us. And if we do pass a special millage, it cannot be used for anything but infrastructure; not money to hire an additional teacher or pay for increased cost of utilities, etc. Our people don’t like taxes, so it is very hard to pass anything that actually would help education. At the same time, some school districts, New Buffalo for example, were able to finagle a higher per pupil expenditure in conjunction with Prop A. I don’t understand it, but it happened. But to blame that on “liberals” would not be fair.
I give of my “work” without malice or resentment because I have some to give and I think it is good to help others and support our communities and our country. Is it too much? Yeah, maybe, for me and possibly for you, but there are plenty of people who could afford to pay a whole lot more who don’t. We don’t all get to where we are in a vacuum. And not everyone can be a rocket scientist or Madonna or Jose Canseco or even a doctor, a lawyer, or a high-powered stock broker. And I don’t mean that we all can’t because we might not have the ability, though that certainly is part of it, but because there are just so many of those jobs to go around. Some of us have to be real estate appraisers (that’s me) and teachers (that’s you) and automobile factory workers (my dad) and plumbers and electricians and nurses and policemen and firemen and…..well, you get the picture. We are all part of this machine and we are all important and we are all responsible to each other. If that belief makes me a sap or a communist or a liberal, then I’ll wear that badge proudly. I’d like to think, however, it makes me a decent, intelligent human being .
Your civilized tone, Cindy0803, is utterly winning. With YOU I think I could work on solving any problem.
Most supporters of public education who post on this blog are not so reasonable. They love sneering, snarking, and contempt for anyone who thinks a case can be made for tax funded charters or for vouchers. I understand the opposition in pragmatic terms: such entities threatens their jobs. But I’m sure there are higher philosophical reasons for wanting to see tax revenues continue to be aggregated and devoted to a public school system which does try to serve every student, even the disabled.
It’s a noble concept, and in general seems to have worked well for the middle class. The rich can afford private schools. But for the less advantaged, it seems not to have worked quite as well overall, but even there a good public school can be a life saver. Why then would anyone admit to supporting charters and vouchers?
There are three answers.
1)PROGRAM AND ETHOS. Public schools do not succeed for every child. Your own experience confirms that, and as a responsible parent, you have taken advantage of the homeschool option. I know two other parents who were dissatisfied by the public schools their children went to, and who searched for and found charter schools with which they are satisfied.
2) COST CUTTING. With the downturn in the economy, public school systems have had to make do with less, and their responses, enlarging classes, and the like, has made those schools less attractive to some families. Did the public schools HAVE to cut classes? I’d have to see specific budgets, but the case is that they made those choices, and parents have wanted options and alternatives. In Ann Arbor, the big brouhaha last year was diminishing the number of bus stops to save money. Better than than increasing class sizes.
3) IDEOLOGICAL INTRANSIGENCE. For whatever reasons, public school systems have not been able to reform themselves in the direction of internal options broad enough to satisfy parents. Yes, there have been magnet schools, and other devices, but in general, the reform has not been rapid enough and wide enough to suit the public, and so legislatures have loosened their state school laws to permit charters, and in a couple of places vouchers. This has been a normal response in the democratic process. Public school teachers don’t like it because such actions DO “drain” resources from the public schools. Yet parents do try to do the best they can, as they see it, for their children. Some parents would even like to have their children in religious schools. The Public Schools are opposed to that for political and philosophical reasons. Yet in a democracy, the interests of those parents should be respected and accommodated in some way. This the public school systems have utterly refused to do. Now MY view is that the public schools are peddling their own kind of quasi-religious dogma, namely secular humanism/socialism/communism. I view the public schools as a system aligned with the political religion that the state should provide everything to everyone, not just regulate the basic interactions between individuals. Parents have their own views on that, and the public schools should at least not be surprised at opposition from parents to a system that is intransigent about its communitarian dogma.
Now the reforms proposed, principally more testing, may be worse than the abuses. Yet to many the presence in the public schools of the punitive testing regimens is yet another reason for parents to want options. They can’t afford a private school, yet they feel they should have one anyway, or at least one that doesn’t teach evolution as dogma in the biology class. So they support tax supported vouchers usable at schools that reflect the particular flavor of religious conviction they favor. The question, I suppose, is how far we are to take religious tolerance. When public school teachers try to capture the souls of their students for the religions of environmentalism, global warming, and they like, they should expect parents to want to take their kids out of such an environment. Parents think that the kids belong to THEM and not to the state.
Fundamentally, I think that is the dispute. Who has a right to educate one’s child? Oneself, the parent, or does some other entity in the society have a moral claim on one’s children’s character and intellect formation? I don’t think that you and I disagree about that, but many here seem to me to think that they have a legitimate claim on my child’s time and thought.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on that ultimate question.
To ask it another way, to what degree are children the property of the parents? When ought that to change? Perhaps we could find some analogies between education and health care. Courts have been confronted with situations where the religious beliefs of parents have caused the parents to deny routine life saving medical care to their children.
@Harlan and Teaching Economist:
First, as I read TE’s comment last, it is the one that is still leaving the brain afterglow. I’ll respond to that first. TE, to the extent that children are the “property” of anyone, they are the property of their parents. But why even use that term? Any parent who chose to be a parent (and most of those who didn’t) would step in front of a bus to save their child; you don’t do that for property. Your comment may have been innocent enough, as I happen to agree with you that parents who withhold medical treatment (of the life-saving variety) are misguided. However, I couldn’t help but read between the lines that you use this example to bridge some unspoken gap that it would apply in the classroom as well. We are talking about education here after all.
I apologize if I am assigning a belief that you didn’t mean to convey, but it strikes a nerve because I had some problems in this direction with my daughter’s kindergarten teacher. And this speaks to one of Harlan’s points; i.e., that the state, via some teachers, often acts as if the children are their responsibility or domain outside of teaching.
My daughter’s Kindergarten teacher was a fairly recent graduate of Michigan State (this will be an important piece of information further along). She is a very competent teacher with excellent classroom management skills. She had no children of her own at that time, but you could tell that she had a heart for kids. However, she made a point to keep parents out of the classroom for the first half of the year. There were several incidents that arose that built up to the point where I had a meeting with the principal. They may not seem very important to anyone here, but it was a “writing on the wall” situation to me.
The first weird thing that happened was that while brushing my daughter’s hair one morning, she started doing some deep breathing exercises and odd hand and arm motions that looked a lot like a pseudo-meditation event. We were in a hurry, so I was not amused, but managed to find out this was something called “elevators” that they practiced in class. When I spoke to the teacher, she explained it was a way for the children to “calm down” when they were overly stimulated. As I am not against anyone using strategies to calm down, I was not outraged, but I did suggest that when you supply children a “tool” it would be nice to also teach them when it is appropriate to use it. I explained what had happened and she counter suggested that maybe I should give my daughter 3 or 4 minutes to do the elevators when I was brushing her hair (insert invisible eye-roll here).
The second thing that happened was related to winter gear; hats, gloves, scarves. I found that we were constantly scrambling around in the morning to find these items only to learn that they had been left in my daughter’s locker. It became such a problem, that I told her that when she got back in from recess to put those items in her backpack immediately. However, the problem persisted. I discovered that this was because her teacher had told her she “couldn’t” put those items in her backpack (despite what Mama had told her) and that she must lay them out to dry on the top shelf of her locker. When I discussed this with her teacher, I was surprised at how hard she pushed back. The discussion culminated in her asking me if I wanted my daughter to wear wet hats, scarves and gloves. Why, yes, that is exactly what I want (insert additional invisible eye-roll here in addition to steam coming out of my ears).
It didn’t matter to her that my daughter was picked up after school making the “wet” issue moot or that the teacher was not the one having to buy extra snow gear. She just wanted to control that situation and felt like she could shut me down by suggesting I wanted to mistreat my daughter.
The third thing that happened, and this was happening from the beginning of school, was that the teacher was having the kids sing the Michigan State fight song on Fridays before Saturday football games. How did I know this? Well, here I am driving along and my daughter is in her seat singing Go Green, Go White! And I’m like, WHAT?! I thought maybe her uncle had put her up to it as a joke. You see, her dad, I, and her older sister are all graduates of the University of Michigan. And while I am not into petty rivalries, U of M IS part of our family tradition and history. I let it slide (grudgingly as even to me it sounded a little petty) until one day my daughter came home upset because she asked to sing the Michigan fight song and her teacher told her “NO” because she did not know that one. Well, she did, in fact, know it because she was in the Michigan State Marching Band while in college where you are required to know all your rivals’ fight songs.
So, here’s the point. If teachers are willing to be so dogmatic about the relatively small stuff, how dogmatic are they willing to be about the more important stuff? Should the teacher be able to teach her college fight song to my daughter who has an allegiance (through her family) to a different school? Now, insert something more important here.
Now, back to what Harlan was saying. You will be hard pressed to argue that Harlan is incorrect in stating that the push for charter and magnet schools has been at the insistence of dissatisfied parents (from both political parties) and not some hidden agenda of Republicans and Tea Party members. This should explain why Democrats are supporting these choices as well. I’ve spoken of the hubris I’ve observed in schools before, and this is an example. The teachers, administrators, and anti-reform educators choose to overlook the parents’ involvement in this process and, instead, choose to present it as some right-wing political conspiracy to take money from public schools and put it in the hands of for-profit corporations. That makes me angry.
I don’t think for-profit entities will ultimately do the best job if the public school system goes away; they only work as an alternative to the “current” public schools. Take away that competition (the need for them in the first place) and they will just become whatever they can get away with. But they are a band-aid for this wound while we get to the doctor for stitches.
As to your question about “Who has a right to educate one’s child? Oneself, the parent, or does some other entity in the society have a moral claim on one’s children’s character and intellect formation?”. I believe parents have the ultimate right and responsibility to educate their children through public schools, parochial schools, private non-parochial schools, charter or magnet schools, or homeschools. As a country, we have decided educating children is important for the individual, for the family, for the community, for the states and for the country (and I would say for humanity overall). Economies of scale make public schools the most efficient way to deliver an education to all children. Now, they just have to work on being the most effective means of delivering it, and I think they could be and should be. In order to do this, they will have to change.
If I were supreme leader in charge of education, I would start with entrance assessments to determine where children are in their knowledge right off the bat with first grade (I think Kindergarten should be for eating paste and learning A,B, Cs and not for writing journals). Children should then be grouped by their knowledge at the start of school with other similar-ability peers (and parents, you are going to have to accept that there are differences). That way, children get what they need together, as a group. You will not have Johnny and Susie over there in the corner playing tiddly winks while the teacher works with other students at a separate table nor will you have any child being held back because they can’t move forward until the whole class is ready to move forward. This is actually how instruction happens in elementary schools today.
Assessments should be made at mid-year, and if a child is ready to move to a different group (either direction), this can occur then. In this way, children are allowed to succeed at their own pace or they are allowed to get extra help in an environment that does not make it obvious they are getting extra help. Assessments should be made at the start of each successive school year throughout elementary school, and possibly into 6th and 7th grade. Whole Language and Everyday Math have to go. If there are any good parts, keep them, but throw the rest in the dust bin. As far as I’m concerned, their only use should be to pull off the shelf and blow the dust off in the event you have tried everything else with a student and are desperate. Whatever curriculum chosen to take the place of these ill-conceived ideas should not require parent involvement to be successful.
Until these things happen, parents have to have more educational choices other than public school and expensive, private schools.
Side bar: Evolution was not an issue up to 2nd grade in our public school. I’m not sure when that gets introduced. I hate all dogma that discourages exploration of the mind and science. The extremes on both sides of this issue are guilty. And that’s as far as I’m willing to go in comments that originated from a discussion on AP classes (smile).
Also, I obviously speak from the perspective of an elementary aged child. I would love to hear what problems (if any) parents of Middle School and High School students have had.
I am trying to learn about your criteria for social intervention into decisions parents make for their children. When you say parents who do not allow their children access to commonly used medical procedures are misguided, do you mean to say that society should intervene in the decision? I would imagine that you would think any student who chose Michigan State over the University of Michigan is misguided as well, but presumably would not sanction state interference in that decision.
TE,
Actually, I think Michigan State is a very fine school and if my daughter decides to go there I will buy some green and white and wear it proudly. We will be a “blended family”.
I think that society should intervene, through the courts, on a case-by-case basis in regards to these medical issues. In that way, everyone’s rights are protected.
But, let me say that if I was a doctor and a child’s life could be save by a simple blood transfusion which the parents refused for religious reasons, I would be tempted to find a way to give the transfusion anyway. I might go to jail, and probably should.
In order for me to get a better idea of how you relate this same principal to education, do you mind explaining to what extent you believe social intervention should play in parents’ educational decisions for their children?
Enough already. Can you three get a room?
David,
I haven’t noticed you say anything relative to this blog post. Read Diane’s tag line of the purpose of her blog. Discussions evolve. Perhaps we could move it to a different “room”, but is it necessary? Go bully someone else already.
You should look more carefully. I did. Earlier. Much earlier. Didn’t need to say more than I said. Go find it and respond if you like.
I did respond to it, David, a long time ago. Guess you missed that, too. Things get moved down the line and we lose track and some things appear non sequitur. Do you disagree that you are trying to bully the discussion?
Yes. I guess i forgot your response. I moved on.
You call that comment bullying? lol.
It was simply a comment that the three of you can should chat more privately. Apparently no one else is involved.
Please.
I don’t see that there is much of a difference between misguided parental decisions about healthcare and misguided parental decisions about education. Both can have important long term impacts on a child’s future.
TE,
Agreed, but so can bad teachers and bad curriculum. Teachers don’t, by-and-large, want to be held accountable for such. I’m just asking (at the risk of further annoying David) what, in your opinion, qualifies as misguided parental decisions related to education?
In a word, helicoptering! In a longer reaction, putting too much pressures on kids to succeed so that they cannot follow their interests and passions.
David,
I agree on the point of following their interests and passions. Through homeschooling, my daughter found she had a keen interest in Anatomy (not a subject taught in 3rd grade in PS). No pressure whatsoever was applied. No grade.
As to helicopter parenting, I find this is a way for teachers to again try and bully parents into just drying up and going away. Too involved in a way teachers don’t agree with and you are a helicopter parent. Not involved in a way they want you to be and you are a “bad” parent.
This is a good article on helicopter parenting.
http://ezinearticles.com/?Helicopter-Parenting—What-is-it-and-Where-Does-it-Come-From?&id=4111170
Clearly you use the word bullying too much in a vain attempt to hid your habit of trying to bull your theories on us all. Mixing animal metaphors, me thinks you cry wolf too often.
There is clearly a distinction between working with parents whichI have always done and still do in my work with schools, and helicoptering, which I have seen bring children to tears.
Please now, do not respond. Thank you.
Sorry, David. You have done it again. Sucker punch and then run. Also bullying. You obviously don’t know what bullying is so you are doomed to continuously engage in it. You jumped into this conversation (which you admitted no one but the the three of us was following – so, who could we be harming?) and attempted to shut us up on your terms.
Bully (v): Use superior strength or influence to intimidate someone, typically to force him or her to do what one wants.
Putting please in front of your request does not change your intention. Diane has published a bunch of new blog posts since this one, which you are free to read and respond to.
Thanks for the compliment. Hate to bully and run but gotta go. Diane knows me well enough to know different. Enjoy the rest of your conversation and please respect my privacy now.
TE,
Agreed, but so can bad teachers and bad curriculum. Teachers don’t, by-and-large, want to be held accountable for such. I’m just asking (at the risk of further annoying David) what, in your opinion, qualifies as misguided parental decisions related to education?
Most directly relevant to our conversation would be to teach children that they should reject modern medical care. Most broadly that children should reject the methodology of modern science.
“When public school teachers try to capture the souls of their students for the religions of environmentalism, global warming, and they like, they should expect parents to want to take their kids out of such an environment. Parents think that the kids belong to THEM and not to the state.”
Harlan, education is always going to be a political act, and you’re never going to be able to avoid that. Imagine if we returned to the primarily instrumentalized and mechanical pedagogies of the back to basics movement. Imagine if history teachers were all instructed by the state to whitewash the history of America and the world and present it as completely benign and as an unproblematized body of knowledge. They would claim that is apolitical. But the truth is that it would be an incredibly neoconservative ideology driving that type of curriculum, a type of curriculum in which America can do wrong and where the purpose of education is to produce students trained to be obedient workers and nothing more. now why should parents be expected to take their kids out of an environment in which global warming is treated as a major global problem, and students are taught to be stewards of the environment….but be expected to passively accept a learning environment like the one I just described? Your answer could only be ideologically driven. Now we are a democracy or at least where supposed to be…Eric Gould argues that a democratic education must do three things:
“First it must be an education for democracy, for the greater good of a just society–but it can not assume that society is, a priori, just. Second, it must argue for its means as well as its ends. It must derive from the history of ideas, from long-standing democratic values and practices which include the ability to argue and critique but also to tolerate ambiguity. And third, it must participate in the democratic social process, displaying not only a moral preference for recognizing the rights of others and accepting them, too, but for encouraging argument and cultural critique. In short, a university education is a democratic education because it mediates liberal democracy and the cultural contradictions of capitalism.”
Gould is talking about higher education but I believe this applies to public education as well. Now I would replace Gould’s last sentence with “should be” rather than “is a” because whether one receives an education for democracy depends on the college and the professor.
Harlan I don’t know if you realize but what you’re advocating for is a neo-conservative parent-led neo-conservative ideological assault on academic freedom which would no doubt be a requirement in maintaining a fascist society. Now this kind of assault on academic freedom has occurred and is even occuring in our society today but it hasn’t been led by conservative parents…its been led by a neo-conservative ideological machine that came into fruition back into the 1970’s with Lewis Powell’s, a man who would later become a Supreme Court Justice, authoring of the Powell Memo. I will let Professor Henry Giroux, one of the victims of this insidious document’s ideological assault, explain the gist of it
In it, “Powell identified the American college campus “as the single most dynamic source” for producing and housing intellectuals “who are unsympathetic to the free enterprise system.” He was particularly concerned about the lack of conservatives on social sciences faculties and urged his supporters to use an appeal to academic freedom as an opportunity to argue for “political balance” on university campuses. Powell insisted that “the basic concepts of balance, fairness, and truth are difficult to resist, if properly presented to boards of trustees, by writing and speaking, and by appeals to alumni associations and groups.” The Powell Memo was designed to develop a broad-based strategy not only to counter dissent but also to develop a material and ideological infrastructure with the capability to transform the American public consciousness through a conservative pedagogical commitment to reproduce the knowledge, values, ideology, and social relations of the corporate state. For Powell, the war against liberalism and a substantive democracy was primarily a pedagogical and political struggle designed both to win the hearts and minds of the general public and to build a power base capable of eliminating those public spaces, spheres, and institutions that nourish and sustain what Samuel Huntington would later call an “excess of democracy.” Now the result of the Powell Memo has been all the inspiration and ideological basis for the….
Heritage Foundation
various other neoconservative foundations including the Olin Foundation, the foundations of Richard Mellon Scaife, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation all associated with Koch Oil Family and other large corporations
all these foundations agreed to finance over 500 neoconservative think tanks over the past thirty years including the AEI institute, the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and David Horowitz’s Center For the Study of Popular Culture…what has this network of think tanks served as?
“An ultra-conservative re-education machine—an apparatus for producing and disseminating a public pedagogy in which everything tainted with the stamp of liberal origin and the word “public” would be contested and destroyed..think about our government today…think about the profit margins of large corporations…think about our wealth inequality…think about the continued legal corruption of our political system and American’s overwhelming feeling of apathy and their feeling that they’re democracy will never be a true democracy that serves the interests of the people….would you say these think tanks and the foundations that fund them have largely succeeded in their re-education? I would.
Consider what happened after 9/11 with regards to this neoconservative re-education machine and anti-intellectual assault on academic freedom
the proliferation of right wing groups such as Campus Watch, ACTA, Target of Opportunity, and discover the networks.org whose purpose was to out and shame supposedly radical professors who were supposedly “giving aid and comfort to the enemy because of their refusal to provide unqualified support of the Bush Administration” in its War Against Terror
any criticism of Israeli government policy regarding Palestinians is labeled as anti-Semetic by groups like AIPAC and the like
the withdrawal of federal funding for projects “whose content the Bush administration found substantively offensive or was unrelated to the war on terrorism”
“the Bush Administration’s efforts to obstruct foreign students, scholars, and citizens critical of American foreign policy from obtaining visas to teach, work, study, lecture, or travel in the U.S.” Using the “war on terrorism” as a pretext for labeling all noncitizens as potential “enemy combatants” who might threaten national security, the Bush administration revoked the visas of a number of foreign intellectuals who were critical of U.S. foreign policy or who allegedly posed a risk to the country according to the Department of Homeland Security. Mind you these people were not terrorists and could never possibly be tied to terrorism except by fabrication driven by ideological hyperbole and intense paranoia. Who is included in this group? Professor Tariq Ramadan, Professor Waskar Ari, Professor John Milios and these guys are only the beginning of the list.
Not only were left academics and intellectuals outside the country prevented from coming in but those within the U.S. were the victims of serious intimidation and politically motivated harassment. The case of Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University is particularly scary and saddening and I urge you to read it if you don’t already know about it. But others including Hamid Dabashi, George Saliba, and Rashid Khalidi were also victims.
Now I know a this sort of assault on intellectuals and fascism blanketed in a neo-conservative ideology is not what you meant to advocate for in your comments but it is the only logical end result of what you describe here,
“When public school teachers try to capture the souls of their students for the religions of environmentalism, global warming, and they like, they should expect parents to want to take their kids out of such an environment. Parents think that the kids belong to THEM and not to the state.”
“Fundamentally, I think that is the dispute. Who has a right to educate one’s child? Oneself, the parent, or does some other entity in the society have a moral claim on one’s children’s character and intellect formation? I don’t think that you and I disagree about that, but many here seem to me to think that they have a legitimate claim on my child’s time and thought.”
As far as this quote, I give you another one from Joel Beinin who wrote this in response to the Columbia University’s misguided investigation of Joseph Massad
“It is unclear why students’ emotional reaction to information or analysis presented in a classroom has any bearing on its factual accuracy or intellectual legitimacy. Undoubtedly many white student supporters of Jim Crow practices at universities throughout the American South in the 1960’s were distressed to learn that these practices were illegal and despised by many Americans. This did not make them any less so….Politically motivated groups, using evidence that was not made available to the public, pressured a major university into investigating its faculty based on criteria completely alien to academic procedures. Most of those who complained about professors were not students in their classes (and some were not students at all). As the Ad Hoc Report notes, some faculty members apparently recruited students to spy on their colleagues. But this was of less concern to the New York media than Columbia’s failure to prevent the teaching of courses critical of Israel, irrespective of the scholarly validity of the course’s content.”
Now this quote is talking about protecting academic freedom against student’s emotional reaction. The same case can be made for protecting academic freedom from neo-conservative parent’s ideologically driven emotional reactions. This I think could be referred to as helicoptering parents Now I am not classifying Cindy’s beef with that Kindergarten teacher as similar to what I am talking about here. I would be angry at that Kindergarten teacher’s practices as well.
I will leave you with this quote by Juan Cole on concepts of “political balance and fairness” and their relation to pedagogy.
“The fact is that you will never get agreement on such matters of opinion, and no university teacher I know seeks such agreement. The point of teaching a course is to expose students to ideas and arguments that are new to them and to help them critically think about controversial issues. Nothing pleases teachers more than to see students craft their own original arguments, based on solid evidence, that dispute the point of view presented in class lectures…..University teaching is not about fairness, and there is nobody capable of imposing “fair” views on teachers. It is about provoking students to think analytically and synthetically, and to reason on their own. In the assigned texts, in class discussion, and in lectures the students are exposed to a wide range of views, whether fair or unfair.”
This concept of fairness and balance never being able to be applied to pedagogy applies to public school teaching as well as university teaching….
The real goal of the neoconservative and neoliberal ideology, very similar, is to prevent students from thinking analytically and synthetically because of course then students would feel compelled to challenge the power structures that define their existence and perpetuate injustice while making the rich richer and the polticians more corrupt. It’s an insidious ideological project that is driving this…not a desire for balance or fairness. Those words are only a facade.
Reflective Thinking: Correct me if I am wrong. I read you as saying that you do not make a distinction between elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, and university undergraduate classrooms with respect to a teacher’s responsibility toward encouraging “critical thinking,” that is, investigation of the inner contradictions of capitalism. Is that your position, that such scrutiny of capitalism is appropriate and “fitting” at all levels? Assuming that “fitting” is a viable philosophical criterion.
high school certainly one could investigate the contradictions of capitalism, and in a history or political science class I believe it should be investigated…..middle school- stewardship of the environment could be explored in numerous ways in a life science class or any science class for that matter and even in a social studies class…and certainly that would constitute bringing politics into the classroom, but as long as it fits within the purpose of teaching for democracy than I wouldn’t see what the problem would be…and to say that by doing this you’re creating a bunch of little marxists…well I mean come on that’s absurd…..of course critical thinking doesn’t just involve investigating the inner contradictions of capitalism…all ideologies, theories must be looked at with skepticism and for their contradictions including liberalism and socialism….elementary school I am more unsure about all though I have been reading about a lot of programs that incorporate critical thinking into these early years so certainly it is possible …kids as young as 5 or 6 year olds having teacher directed discussions about philosophical and existential matters relating to their lives happens……but not something as complex as the inner contradictions of capitalism… I would suggest you look up Philosophy For Children (P4C) at Montclair State University. Criticisms of Piaget’s universal stages of child development is demonstrated in the advent of postformal psychology. even Piaget criticized them himself saying that the stages could not be so easily separated. also generally I think American society underestimates the ability of young children to critically think about the world around them. next to learning to read and write and do arithmetic, critical thinking needs to be incorporated and certainly that can easily be done through these three subjects. i’m not saying that middle school child is on par with a university student…in that a teacher should be presenting material of equal complexity to both populations. that would be a mistake.
Thanks for your response. I’m interested in two phrases, neither of which I fully understand. One is “education for democracy,” and the other is “environmental stewardship.” I don’t think it is absurd that the kiddies could emerge as fully indoctrinated little Marxists from the classrooms of some teachers, and possibly even from your classroom, and thus I pursue clarification. So,
1) what are the tenets of “education for democracy”? You say that that is the context in which “critical thinking” might well be taught. But I wonder what the phrase means to you. And by the by, why do YOU want to enter teaching as a career, and at what level?
2) second does “environmental stewardship” include the often disputed claim of man-made global warming? I can easily imagine a responsible elementary school teacher, convinced that industrial activity and the burning of fossil fuels is putting an excess of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which must naturally increase the greenhouse effect and result in man-made global warming and that she or he might with the best will in the world teach from a “save the planet” perspective and try to get kids to “use less energy,” “bike instead of drive,” “support solar and wind energy,” and so forth. Would that sort of teaching seem desirable to you and would it seem—not fair and balanced—I know you think it is not possible to be fair and balanced, but would such an approach seem “scientific” to you rather than ideological?
(I am wondering whether you would be willing to put your real name on your posts. Diane asked me to do so some months ago and I did. You can google me to find out more about me.)
with respect to my name, it’s Ephraim…you can find it on the about page on my blog too. the title of my wordpress blog is the name that shows itself on my comments. so if I can somehow change the name that comes up on my comments without changing the name of my blog I suppose I could do it. but I’m not sure how.
ok Harlan, first I want to pose the question what is your definition of a Marxist and after answering that, if it does seem to comport with what I am talking about, which I gather you think it does, I would ask why are you so afraid of that definition? I wouldn’t classify what I am talking about here as an “education for creating little Marxists” as I see Marxism defined on wikipedia, but I want to know why you would think that, so I could address it.
1) On the question of environmental stewardship, suppose I intended to do a unit on global warming for a high school biology class. Something I would absolutely not do is start preaching about the evils of global warming to my students and imposing my viewpoint on them, ya know giving them facts and figures on global warming and then testing on them on their memorization…or giving them one man’s opinion on global warming and then asking them to reiterate in a short answer question. that sort of teaching, I believe, teaches students, not to take ownership of the learning process…in my classroom it would be imperative to teach students to be researchers on whatever unit we may be studying, in this case global warming, and thereby take ownership of their own learning. now you say global warming is controversial. indeed it is….but the question to pose to students is why is it controversial? whose interests would a real and serious acknowledgement of global warming by our government work against and whose interests would it work for…? is the controversy legitimate or is it fabricated? I would not answer these questions for the students in a lecture. We would do some kind of research project in which they would go out find the answers to these questions themselves, then present to the class, and then have a teacher-guided discussion in which we discuss then implications of our findings. Perhaps another question to ask as a point of research would be how does the mainstream media cover global warming as opposed to the alternative media and why? And then of course, what is the scientific research on global warming…what are its flaws, if there are any, and what are its strengths? How valid is it? and if it is indeed valid, then why are there still so many forces working to discredit it? Students would be instructed to go out and find primary and secondary sources, news articles etc. Now this type of project will inevitably also be a lesson in trust, because different opinions will be brought to the table, it will be a lesson in raising political awareness of students because obviously global warming is a political as well as a scientific issue and students would be instructed to analyze the politics of global warming as well as the science and how the two intertwine. Now the purpose of a teacher in the series of class discussions that would be incorporated throughout this unit is key. this can’t just be a random discussion where students talk over other students and try to impose the will of their findings or their opinions on their classmates. that kind of discussion would be wholly unproductive and would be similar to the kind of talk you hear from mainstream media talking heads like Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly , Sean hannity, etc..who believe that just by virtue of them being able to shout louder over people they disagree with, that means they must be correct. furthermore, this might just be my own little pet peeve, but I think it’s fundamentally important to the kind of discussion I want my students to engage in and the kind of discussions I intend to mediate…I hate it when people say “I’m entitled to my opinion and your entitled to yours.” what in the world does that mean? opinions are an entitilement like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? It’s a wholly irrational statement. Like I said in my other comment our opinions are shaped by numerous social forces and we pick and choose which voices we want to hear based on which ones align with our previous opinions, attitudes, etc. now is that process rational….it tends to be mostly emotional…because in the end most people, who come out of an educational system like ours today, want to believe that they are right and whoever is opposed is wrong. can an opinion based on pure emotion and identification with a previous way of looking at the world, be characterized as entitled? logically, it can not. When people say “I’m entitled to my opinion”, it just means they no longer wanna have a discussion with you and have foregone any possiblity of learning something new or perhaps changing their opinion. I don’t want students who come out my class to think like that, because, in the end, that kind of attitude is conducive for producing people like Bill O’Reilly, like Ann Coulter who writes a book with a title “Why if liberals had any brains, they would be conservatives”, like Chris Matthews ,like Rush Limbaugh, like even President Obama the ways he’s been conducting his presidency lately. Now does this mean I want my students to passively absorb every and all opinions and give each equal weight and equal regard..no absolutely not…that would be foolish as well. In the end I want my students to be able to be politically aware in the sense that they ask the questions, I iterated above in my discussion of a unit on global warming, but which really could be applied to any issue. Different people have different agendas, and its important for students not to just passively absorb the first thing they hear out of people and institutions who really may not have their best interests and the best interests of the society at heart. If a neo-conservative says global warming doesn’t exist and its just an evil plot of liberals and marxists, well then I want my students to analyze the agenda and determine whether that person is trustworthy or not. If President Obama says that that targeted drone killings are the only way to fight terrorism and constitute a strategy that is respectful of human rights and is way better than the Bush strategy, well then I want my students to analyze the agenda and determine whether he is completely trustworthy. In the end, it’s really about teaching students to have a wise and intellectual skepticism which is critical for a population that is going to fight for a better democracy and ultimately the betterment of the human condition. i won’t withhold opposing view points from students. But I will instruct and teach them to analyze opposing viewpoints in the manner I have just described. And the biggest thing to remember is that sometimes knowledge is never certain, it can be characterized as tenuous and that’s all right. the purpose of the discussion is not to come to an absolute conclusion on whatever topic is being discussed..the purpose of the discussion is to examine contradictions and inconsistencies and agendas. then students construct their own knowledge about global warming out of this process, and they might determine from all that analysis and all that research, that global warming is a serious problem and be concerned about it, but it’s not up to the teacher to impose that viewpoint on the student, because then the student is not as likely to care and certainly if there’s anything we don’t want students to be it is uncaring and disinterested individuals with respect to knowledge and learning, in other words students who only view education as a means to a profit end, although of course gaining employment is very important but it’s not the only thing that’s important.i think what I have answered here also answers your question on my definition of critical thinking and teaching for democracy. And in the end, what I have said here also answers why I want to enter the teaching profession…I honestly believe that the institution of education is the greatest vehicle we have for bettering the human condition..because what is life if not an education…what is life if not a conglomeration of social forces, including formal education, that affect the individual and society as a whole either negatively or positively? I want to be part of that formal apparatus. But teachers should strive not only to be a part of the apparatus that is already there, but to be directors of the apparatus that they believe should be there in respect to the goal of bettering the human condition.
RT, could you please say a little about the work you currently are doing? I’m interested in how you are applying your ideas. (Not a criticism, a question). Thanks
Hey Joe….I’m not really doing any work on this subject. I just read about it.
Ok – just wondering if you are working in a school – or if you took AP or other “Dual Credit” courses while you were in high school.
I took AP world history, AP U.S. history and AP Gov, but my interest in the subjects I am talking about here only came up within the last year and a half.
What did you think were the strengths & shortcomings of those courses?
Oh wow…that’s a big question…and its been such a long time…well I remember doing a big project in AP Gov where over the course of a marking period, we re-enacted a session of Congress, and debated over a particular topic we were instructed to research…I recall debating about tax reform. after the project was over I recall having to write some sort of reflection on what I learned. that was insightful, but that was the teacher’s own creation, and really had nothing to do with the “AP” label or preparing us for the AP test. i just remember learning about how American democracy is supposed to work from a textbook, rather than how it actually worked in practice…this was a weakness, and would require a lot of other course material and presenting the students with different accounts of our political system and allowing them to do research into the contradictions and construct their own knowledge from that research. indeed I took that class in the heat of the 2008 presidential primaries and I remember my teacher incorporating that into the curriculum, although I don’t quite remember how. I also remember that my teacher tried his hardest to remain very apolitical, which I think is impossible and also misguided to do in a government & politics class and any classroom for that matter, and in fact the very action of doing so, is a political act. onetheless you could tell he leaned democrat and was excited about Obama just in conversation with him, although his awareness and anger at the corruption of politicians was clear….but all this was kept out of the official classroom teaching and learning process. . the standard multiplce choice assessments were common..and don’t wanna reiterate here what I’ve said about multiple choice…it’s in my previous comments.
my AP history class was taught by the same teacher, but this class was much less projects and more focus on memorizing the history presented in the one textbook…American Pagaent I believe is the one. American Pagaent did provide supplemtary primary and secondary document materials in a separate book, and those were assigned readings every week as well. All I remember is that the experiences of the marginalized people’s of American history was never a focus. the primary imperative was to get through as much material as possible to prepare for the test and in fact I recall my professor saying maybe a week or two weeks before the AP tests, “I didn’t have time to get to this part, so just read it in the textbook and you should be fine for the test.” Plus another weakness is that the student has to go back and review everything he learned in U.S. history I in order to take the test. This kind of studying is merely for memorization and treats as an unproblematized body of knowledge for the student to uncritically absorb. This is the main reason I would eliminate the test all together. history was always taught as a certainity, like this is how it happened, why it happened, and the results of what happened. the weakness is purposeful omission. and the assumption by the student, whether conscious or subconscious, is that there’s no other view of history than what is presented in this textbook. all in all, the student is not encouraged to look at history with a critical eye, with an eye for inconsistencies and the biases of whoever is presenting that particular version…i mean I know Chris Columbus is more a subject of earlier years, but why in the world do we celebrate a man who committed mass genocide against the Native American people? I don’t remember ever being asked that question at any level of my schooling. the fight between the values of the gilded age, the robber barons, and the Populists, the labor movement was not examined in any critical and exploratory fashion..and furthermore this section would be a perfect opportunity to examine our own gilded age in 2013 and the parallels one could draw as well as the differences……and this goes for every period of history. I mean the possiblities were endless and continue to be endless, but they are rarely taken advantage of. all in all I believe the purpose of a social studies class whether history or political science or sociology should be to instill in the student a heightened political awareness and sense of social responsiblity. And certainly those goals are very political, and I say why is that a negative thing? Were these goals achieved in the AP classes I took with the teachers I had. Absolutely not. Do I really blame them individually? Not really. Its all part and parcel of the unstated and unwritten goals set by the larger American education system.
The main reason I argue against the AP test, especially in a history class, is it unnecessarily presents a goal for the teacher that I believe is contradictory to the goal I stated above. Get through as much material as fast as I can in a cursory manner so that students will have all that is necessary to have the potential to do well on this standardized test. Or teach for all that I said above. If you fully commit to one, you really can’t fully commit to the other, and even if you partially commit to both, well then you will be compromising a lot of what I said above, and that, to me, is unacceptable and does a deep disservice to our students. I don’t know whether all students are now required to take the AP test, but I know the Superintendent started that policy in my high school back in 2007 in my junior year. It was met with resistance by students and certain teachers, but in the end it was grudgingly accepted. There’s a lot more organized resistance to standardized testing now then there was back then. I also remember hearing a lot about middle states accreditation back then and I believe it might have something to do with the new AP policy. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know.
Reflective Thinking:
I do believe the mandate that a student enrolled in a designated AP class must take the test is related to your regional accrediting agency. It is certainly related to the Jay Matthews national rankings.
I am interested again in phrase you use, which you put forth as the goal of teaching in social studies, namely waking up a student to his or her “social responsibility.” As you put it: “instill in the student a heightened political awareness and sense of social responsiblity.” This might naturally lead to this question: What do you conceive of as every adult citizen’s “social responsibility”?
well the answer to your question would not really be my own subjective definition of what social responsibility is. the broad definition is generally agreed upon. according to wikipedia, “student social responsibility is the responsibility of every student for his/her actions…really you could just replace “student” with person. it is a commitment everyone has towards the society—contributing towards social, cultural, and ecological causes.” I believe everyone has their own spheres of influence. obviously one person can’t have every job in the world, commit to fighting for every cause in the world…but in whatever you do or whoever you affect, we should teach students to not see people as a means to an end…whether the end be profit or something else. Cause when you start seeing people as a means, well then that’s when people become expendable costs of doing business, or doing whatever else. and that’s wrong. What else should a good and quality education be but one which works for the betterment of the human condition, and if your educational system is gonna do that, well instilling in the students a sense of social responsibility has to be one of the objectives. I honestly don’t think the American educational system has ever had a clear goal, goal meaning what kind of society is this educational system working for which inevitably leads to the question what kind of students does this educational system desire to produce which inevitably leads to the next question, how will we design our educational system so that we will graduate these kinds of students…i did a paper in a philosophy of education course which asked these questions in terms of goals, objectives, and then methods…ya know your methods must inform your objectives and your objectives must inform your goals. i mean college-ready? is that the highest goal we really wanna work for? cause certainly you could go through harvard’s business progam, and pardon my language, but not give two s***ts about people and then go work on Wall Street treating people as means to an enormously profitable end….nonetheless by the current definition, you could definitely call that kid once he left high school, college ready…one has to recognize the formal educational system, higher and public/private education, as an institution that informs how a society will turn out. in addition to other social forces, formal education in any country is a powerful social force that shapes the attitudes, dispositions, attributes etc….of the society, obviously..because the future movers and shakers of that society graduated from that educational system…. in the end, it hurts our society to not acknowledge that fact and then write off everything i’m saying here as an insidious form of social control which will make our society “soft” or “too caring”…cause honestly I could imagine a lot of people saying that. well, then I would ask what’s their alternative? and would they not agree that their alternative would inevitably also be a form of social control? if they said no, well then they would be lying to themselves. the question is not whether something will “seem” too much like social control, cause in the end we’re all shaped by social forces…we’d like to believe that all our opinions, dispositions, atttitudes etc are exclusively our own, but they’re not…we are all socially controlled and that includes the people who rail against social control…so the real question is social control to what end? the neo-conservative parent who pulls her kid out of your class because your teaching evolution is socially controlled just as much as she thinks what you’re doing in the classroom is social control….and she would be right.. the question is was she justified in doing what she did? was it in the best interests of her child? would it be in the best interests of society if every parent did that….even though she’s obviously not thinking about societal implications of her actions at the time….what kind of education did she receive that compelled her to yank her child out of your class, because obviously its a different education from the one your trying to give her child? is it right and beneficial for society as a whole to provide alternatives for what she would call a bad education based on her subjective ideological bend? Is it the purpose of education in a democratic society to satisfy the ideological bend of the parents? see these are the questions that are never answered in a society that does not have a clear goal set out for it’s educational system, and, in the end, I believe that’s harmful to society as a whole.
I agree that we should make explicit what the society’s vision is as a way of deciding means. What would your social vision be?
J. H. Underhill
also I think the social control I am talking advocating for is not really “social control” per se even though it obviously can’t just happen a vacuum and if a teacher wants to develop that in his or her students, then their has to be a concerted effort to do so. I would call it intellectual liberation or emancipation…the ability and indeed the willingness to step into another’s shoes, to be able to analyze the inconsistences, the agendas, the contradictions of not only another’s position but also one’s own position so as to develop a greater awareness of where one is coming from. this is something I’m pretty confident that the talking heads in mainstream media are incapable of doing, so that is indeed proof that this must be learned…it can not just be assumed that this will naturally develop like a kid’s abillity to memorize information is pretty much built into the brain already. this is what mean when I say that a student needs to be able and willing to take ownership of his or her subjectivity and understand the forces that shape it, and then step back and look critically at that subjectivity. of course even one’s own thinking about thinking is in reality controlled by social forces, but intellectual emancipation might mean that one starts to actively take control of the way in which he or she responds to those forces, instead of just from the time they are 20 years old all the way till 80, defining their subjectivity as monolithic….like when one says I’ll be democrat for life or I’ll be a strict believer in Piaget’s stages of child development all my life.
Your view of social control of thought seems a bit like an infinite regression, yet the goal you state makes good sense, to emancipate oneself from that slavery, to choose one’s own goals. Is that emancipated choice, then, the sufficient goal? Something like self-awareness of one’s motives and pleasures, like self-knowledge? Is that enough in itself? Or is there a further goal, mountain peak, wisdom? Have you emancipated yourself?
J. H. Underhill
no I would say the largest overarching social goal which would encompass every other goal should be the betterment of the human condition…no I certainly have not emancipated myself…I don’t think anyone can ever be fully emancipated…that would imply no social control whatsoever which is impossible since social forces are always affecting all of us.
I agree with you about the difficulty of fully freeing oneself from one’s social conditioning. I feel it in myself as an irrational prejudice in favor of Protestant forms of Christianity rather than the older, more liturgically centered forms. I compromised and became an Anglican.
But to your overarching goal: “the betterment of the human condition.” I feel I want to ask betterment of the human condition for whom and by whom? But I’m not sure that’s the best question. Some thinkers would not exclude animals from the “human condition.” The question of how this betterment is to be carried out also suggests itself. Do you have a systematic approach worked out? Is it a parallel to Maslow’s hierarchy? And where in “betterment” does “freedom” fit, whatever “freedom” means. Many interesting questions arise from your phrase. And just epistemologically, how do we differentiate between a worser condition and a better condition? From a subjective point of view? Do you better the condition of a man begging on the street by giving him a dollar? IF he goes and buys rotgut with it, am I not therefore worsening his “condition”? I wish I had philosophical training.
I gather that for you, improving education is your attempt to better the human condition. And that an education pervaded by authority imposed tests is one which could be bettered by eliminating the tests?
Would you agree to that?