Deducation US

In many schools, the Humanities (including my own field of English) is undergoing quite a change. And here I’ll take a break from laying it at the feet of the right wing: in many cases is my own extended family of humanists, my world-wide colleagues, who are killing the humanities.

In this day, it’s useful to ask, what good are English studies? It’s so often taken for granted. But in many upper grades and especially in college, “English” is a kind of code for “Literature.” Oh sure, we have Freshman English, usually but not always a writing course (sometimes it’s grammar drills, sometimes it’s–yes–literature). But for most in academia, English=Literary Study. And this, I suggest, is going to be the death of English, that branch of the Humanities concerned with literacy, rhetoric, and all uses of language.

English-as-Literature is being supplanted by other programs of studies–media studies and the like–that are doing what English has neglected to do. At my school, for example, we have a program called “Communications,” who seceded from the English Department a few years ago to become its own department with practical and world-wise aspirations like training its students to contribute gainfully to American society.

Our English Department insists that it’s above that fray. I don’t want to be alarmist here, but the alarum has been raised and it’s convincing. I could say to my colleagues if we don’t get our act together and start pulling our weight as a department, we will start seeing mandates from above. We may have bought an extra year because our new Dean is an English specialist, but that’s just another year. The provost will say, fix that English Department. And he will have to. And it won’t be pretty. Or I could say, echoing the words of one especially perspicacious colleague, that the Communications Department is eating our lunch–they are doing with contemporary means of expression what we should have been doing but considered beneath us. We left a vacuum, and they filled it. They are awash in majors and good will from the administration. I could say we need to get more practical and pragmatic and, dare I say it, more vocational in our approach to education. When we talk about what students can do with a degree in English, we have to mean it; we have to show it. I could say that to my colleagues.

But I won’t. Instead I’ll say that we are failing our students–majors, minors, non-majors–by providing a curriculum that focuses narrowly and exclusively on the study of literature. We are denying them the tools they need to participate in the intellectual, rhetorical, linguistic and communicative life of the 21st century. Every age and culture uses what Walter Ong calls “the available means of communication” to both express itself and to mediate its thought (you don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool Whorfian to accept this). The available means of communication of the early 21st century is more than ever non-print: visual, graphical, audio, video, as well as linguistic. “We no longer are grounded in the printing press,” says Richard Miller, chair of the English Department at Rutgers.

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The colleague I alluded to above, a professional writer, has said that if Addison and Steele were alive today, they’d be bloggers. Students need to compose using all these media and to study and understand how others are composing in them. This is English: rhetoric, composition (understood broadly as using all available media to create), and language study (of which the study of literature, the close reading of imaginative texts, is one part). Every major, every minor, and in fact every Salem State student has the right to expect this of us.

See what Rutgers is doing: . Then look at what we are doing.

“Birthers” are the right wingers who are trying to prod the faithful into more irrational hatred of President Obama by trying to deny he was born in the U.S. They claim that he was born in Kenya and therefore is not an American citizen. The proof that they are wrong is there of course—Obama’s birth certificate is on file, birth announcements exist in Hawaii newspapers. But proof and evidence are irrelevant to haters. Supposedly 58% of respondents to an AOL survey believe that Obama was not born in the U.S.

Now, this is being pointed to as a failure of American education, and I think there’s some merit to that charge. People who continue to believe lies when the lies are unambiguously pointed out to them simply can’t think, can’t reason, can’t understand the role of fact and evidence in forming conclusions. And this is what American education is supposed to teach.

But the reason for this failure is not what a number of people have posited. Many say that education is too soft, teachers allow their students to drift along without being forced to think clearly. But this is just NCLB by a different name. The birthers are not young enough to have been educated (or miseducated) under NCLB, but the impulse that drives these accusations of softness is the same as the one that drive NCLB: education is not mean and nasty and tough enough. And the new generation of mindless robots the conservatives and NCLB are creating will be even less able to think clearly in the future.

Others say it’s the Internet—it encourages sloppy thought or even non-thought. But “The Internet” is not a thing that has a life of its own. It’s what we call our huge collection of computers that have wires connecting each other (virtual wire, more likely today, of course). When we connected our computers together and became able to communicate instantly with each other rather than waiting for letters to be delivered or even for Walter Cronkite and the six o’clock news to come on, we enabled human beings to do whatever it is they do much more quickly and selectively.

For those who want to hate and destroy, it’s easy to find others just like you and only talk to and listen to each other. And it doesn’t dignify this hatred when you attempt to justify it as “faith.” Faith is just the belief in something—anything—when there’s simply no good reason to do so and all evidence disproves it. I believe it and that’s that. Islamic jihadists believe that Islam is superior to Christianity and Judaism and it’s therefore OK to kill Christians and Jews and other non-believers; Christian fundamentalists believe that Christianity is superior to Islam and Judaism and therefore it’s OK to kill Muslims and Jews and other non-beleivers. No proof or evidence will dissuade them. I believe that evolution is a lie, I believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, I believe that there is no global warming, I believe that the world’s supply of oil is endless, I believe that President Obama was born in Kenya, I believe, I believe, I believe.

It’s instructive that there’s nothing in the NCLB about testing for thinking, for logic, for rationality. And in a world where the faithful can congregate electronically and never see nor listen to anyone else, that’s the one thing we should be teaching.

With NCLB flying under the radar at the moment, and the current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan not making too much noise about testing and merit pay at the moment, it may be time to talk about some non-NCLB related issues in education.

I have always felt professionally compromised when other people–especially but not exclusively know-nothing politicians–presume to tell me my job of teaching writing. I have devoted my adult life to studying how to best teach writing, and most of the “advice” I get is worthless. Even people who work in higher education–colleagues whom I genuinely respect–come to me and complain that their students “can’t even write an English sentence” (when of course they can) and “can’t spell” (when they mix up its and it’s). What am I doing doing, my colleagues ask.

I kept my digital mouth closed when the teaching of geometry in high schools shifted away from proofs and deductive reasoning to more conceptual approaches to geometry. I felt that perhaps this would make better geometricians in the long run, but the cost to the American public in the inability of high school graduates to reason deductively from premises using evidence would be damaging. So it’s with a certain amount of trepidation that I presume to tell math teachers around the country how to do their jobs. But this TED talk by Arthur Benjamin has made me speak up.

One of the problems I see now in much of the American public is an inability to understand probability and statistics. When someone makes a statement about Muslims or illegal immigrants or offshore outsourcing of jobs or the war in Iraq or English as the official language, ask them “why”? And what will be your response?

An example. A single incident that is presumed to stand for the larger ill the person is complaining about. Sometimes it’s not even based on faulty information. (Sometimes it is–the most recent poll of American who support the war in Iraq believe the Bush administration propaganda that we have to stop Iraq’s deployment of weapons of mass destruction.)

But mostly it’s the misunderstanding of statistics, what logicians call “reasoning from inadequate evidence” or statisticians call “an inadequate sample.” You take one or two or three cases and then generalize from them. You make a leap from “he did this” to “they all do this.” You can’t draw a conclusion about a large number of cases (or “all cases”) by looking at a handful of specially-chosen specific cases.

I think that teaching probability and statistics in elementary and middle and high schools nationwide would help eliminate a lot of this. If you have a thorough grounding, a gut-level feel for probability and statistics and random sampling, it’s harder to get worked up when your favorite newscaster points out the latest isolated case of man bites dog and tries to incite you to outrage over an isolated anomaly.

Make no mistake: the election of Barack Obama is a glorious day for the United States. When Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were killed in 1968, I despaired about the future of this country. And, as it turned out, I was pretty much right: Reagan, Bush I, and the coup de grace Bush II have looted and pillaged this country in the name of the wealthy and powerful and left the country in shambles. But I have hope again.

Barack Obama was not the strongest anti-NCLB candidate. That honor went to Bill Richardson, with Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards running a close second.

But he has said a lot of good things, and the most important development has been his use of Linda Darling-Hammond as a chief adviser on education for his campaign.

Now, according to a number of sources, including Time and EdWeek, Darling-Hammond is on the not-so-short list of possible Secretaries of Education. If it should come to pass, I can think of no stronger candidate. An outspoken critic of NCLB, she would begin the dismantling of the Bush-Spellings setbacks and the restoration of sane and effective policies of teaching, funding, and evaluation.

She has written “…fixing No Child Left Behind will require a new approach to measuring and supporting school success.” And NCLB, with its return to 19th century views of education and pedagogy, is as far from a new approach as one can get. I urge President-elect Obama (how wonderful that phrase sounds!) to appoint Linda Darling-Hammond to be his Secretary of Education.

I see that, according to USA Today, the First Lady is running around the country trying to repair the damage done by NCLB, attempting to justify the testing provisions. She says that testing is “the most important piece” of the law.

With remarkable disingenuousness, she is claiming, again in USA Today’s words, “the 2002 education law, championed by President Bush, will be a lasting part of her husband’s legacy.” Well, at least she got one thing right. If, after Bush’s rich-man’s oil war in Iraq and the disastrous NCLB there even is a U. S. to remember a President’s legacy (which is 50-50 at this point), Bush will no doubt be remembered as the President who knocked American education back into the 19th century which took a decade or more to repair.

With the kind of phony aw-shucks analogies popularized by the Rove team, she asserts, “We would never go to a doctor and say, ‘I’m sick, you can’t try to diagnose me … you can’t use any kind of test.’”

This is classic false analogy. Note how cleverly “diagnosis” becomes equated with “testing.” That’s not what educators who oppose the NCLB are saying. The real doctor-analogy to what the NCLB does would be more like, “Doctor, I’m not interested in your expertise and experience and diagnostic abilities. I’m sick–give me one test and do whatever it says without questioning it.”

I’ve never heard anyone opposed to the NCLB say “you can’t use any kind of test.” This is just typical Bushy logic. Use appropriate tests when you have them and combine that with all the other diagnostic tools you have at your disposal to determine what each child is learning or not learning, and then use those results to help each child, not to punish the school. Remember, the soul of the NCLB is nastiness and punishment. It is not designed to help schools.

Effective assessment, i.e., assessment that uses more than simple minded high-stakes multiple choice tests, is expensive, really expensive, labor-intensive. Bottom-line: it costs too much to really fix America’s school, so the right wing solution is to give invalid tests and then stop funding the schools that do the worst on the invalid tests. More money for the oil barons and their war on Iraq.

One of the many devastations caused by NCLB is the elbowing out of arts and humanities and anything that can’t be tested mindlessly. Listen to this great song and video (”Not on the Test“) by Tom Chapin.

Jonathan Alter, an unlikely candidate for enshrinement in the right-wing Hall of Fame, seems to be buying into the anti-labor, anti-education, anti-humanistic rhetoric of the far right with his latest editorial in Newsweek. , entitled “Obama’s No-Brainer on Education.”

He should know better. A regular contributor to the Huffington Post, a sometimes guest of Al Franken, the journalist who broke the “chads” story in the 2000 Florida Presidential election, the blogger who wisely counsels that the way out of the mess W. has led this country into is to “Listen to Gore,” Alter adopts a disconcerting display of “no brains” by parroting right-wing lies and drivel about the NCLB. “Blah blah blah accountability blah blah teachers unions blah blah blah liberal blah blah blah outcomes blah blah blah assessment blah blah blah.”

His reasoning would provide a course in logical fallacies and unexamined premises for any college freshman. Maybe we can even get a question on it on some state’s NCLB test: In Jonathan Alter’s piece “”Obama’s No-Brainer on Education,” how many logical fallacies does he commit? A. 5 B. 10 C. 15 D. More than 15

Let’s take a couple. First, the famous sports analogy, much prized by conservatives. Quoting Bob Wise, president of an organization disingenuously calling itself the “Alliance for Excellent Education” which believes that the NCLB is not mean enough because it’s only authorized to withhold federal funds form high schools that don’t get its students to do well enough on the multiple-choice tests (”it lacks teeth at the high school level“).

But I digress. According to Alter (the quotation is uncited, i.e., plagiarized), Wise says, “If I told you your basketball team finished in 25th place, you’d be outraged.” Well, no, I wouldn’t. Winning large numbers of basketball games just isn’t that important in the larger scheme of things. Education is not a competition for first place, a basketball game writ large; it’s a process that ensures all our citizens will be able to think and communicate effectively. Basketball isn’t life; basketball isn’t even very much like life. Many sports have a clear winner and a clear loser, no ambiguity, either-or, black and white. How is that like real life? Faulty analogy–one of the prime abuses of logic.

Another one: According to Alter (again, an uncited source), teachers unions should listen to one Andy Stern. Well, why should we listen to Andy Stern? Maybe we should, maybe we shouldn’t, but Alter doesn’t really give us any reasons. We apparently should take Alter’s word for it–listen to Andy Stern because he agrees with me on this.

Andy Stern, according to Alter, has said “Education is like any business. You need a return on investment. Outcomes do matter….” Well, no, education is not like a business, nor should it be. ExxonMobil is a business, Halliburton is a business, FreddieMac is a business, Enron was a business. Education is not a business. False analogy again, but even worse, it’s another logical fallacy as well: the unproven minor premise. It’s like saying “All white-tailed deer must die; Socrates is a white-tailed deer; therefore, Socrates must die.” The goal of education is not to increase its shareholders’ profits at all cost.

The conclusion Alter and Stern try to lead us to–teachers unions are bad–thus falls apart. But let’s examine it even more closely. Union-busting is the oldest pastime for profit-hungry corporations. Unions fight to maintain civilized treatment for workers, a work environment where workers are free to contribute to the best of their abilities, receive a decent wage for their efforts, and remain relatively free of harassment and exploitation. Now more than ever a strong teachers union is crucial for this nation–they seem to be the only ones willing to stand up to a Congress and a President and a Secretary of Education who know nothing about education yet are more than willing to mindlessly impose their benighted ideologies on this nation’s schools.

I have a challenge for Alter and Stern and Bush and Spellings and all the union-busters in Congress. Find an incompetent teacher and name him or her; lay out explicitly your criteria for the judgement of “incompetent” so we can see exactly where you’re coming from and we can examine your criteria. Let’s see who, according to you, deserves to be fired, and why. No generalizations, no abstractions, no easy pandering characterizations of “incompetent teachers.” Name one.

After a long hiatus, in which the NCLB has not been re-funded and I have taken the time to redesign the site using Wordpress, Deducation.US has returned. I’m back with weekly news and interpretation of forces destructive of American education. I’ll try to keep up with my original pace of a new posting every week.

The fact that NCLB is temporarily unfunded should not lull us into sleep over it. It will return, perhaps in a slightly improved form, perhaps in a more dangerous form. But it too will be back.

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In preparation for seeing Jonathan Kozol and hearing him speak in a couple of days in New York, I’m re-reading Shame of the Nation, a dangerous thing to do as it never fails to make my blood boil. Just in passing, I’d like to know how many of the Presidential candidates have actually read it themselves (not just send a campaign aide to read it and prepare an executive summary). I suspect not one, surely not one of the Republican candidates, all of whom seem not to get it when it comes to education. But how interesting would it be to make them all read it and then respond in detail, in depth. How can anyone read this book and not immediately want to go out and dismantle NCLB? I’d be interested–really!–to see how supporters of the NCLB would respond. What kinds of arguments would they offer up in the face of this powerful book?

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. In the Introduction to the book, describing the elementary school where he had his first full-time teaching job, Kozol writes, “Children who misbehaved were taken to the basement of the school where whippings were administered by an older teacher who employed a rattan whip which he first dipped in vinegar in order to intensify the pain….” (page 3). Now it’s no surprise that corporal punishment has been used extensively throughout history, but, thankfully, more enlightened times have seen the almost total abandonment of the practice in this country. Even though “Every industrialized country in the world now prohibits school corporal punishment, except the U.S. and Australia” and nearly half of all American states still technically allow corporal punishment, a 2003 Position Paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine notes “… during the past 30 years … a growing outcry [has] emerged condemning such practices [i.e., corporal punishment] with school children as well.” Reports of corporal punishment in our schools have declined.

Specific child abuse definitions vary by state, but certain federal guidelines overarch state policies: the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act defines Child Abuse and Neglect as “[a]ny recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation.” It should be clear that schools qualify as “caretakers,” so the only point of dispute would seem to be the “emotional harm” specification. While the theme of Shame of the Nation is not specifically that the NCLB is responsible for all bad things in education today but that for a variety of reasons current educational conditions for minorities have regressed to pre Brown v. Board of Education levels, the NCLB can be seen lurking behind much of the “restoration of apartheid schooling.” And its results–tiny children reduced to to tears, forced extra drills in dumbed-down test exercises taking the place of elementary school recesses, a seething rage against the system or in some cases a complete numbness to the injustices, children taught to hate school, children deprived of the joy and light of the humanities and art and music–seem to me to qualify as “serious emotional harm.” You could make a strong case that the NCLB meets the federal criteria for child abuse.

So, in the face of societal pressures not to beat children any longer, I just wonder if, given the mean-spiritedness of the conservative world-view in general that I’ve noted earlier and its highly visible instantiation in the NCLB, beating children into submission is being sublimated and resurfacing as testing and humiliating them into submission. The NCLB is the new vinegar-dipped whipping cane.