Something to think about...

On our walk, please think about the following line from the video:

"Our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of 'human ecology,' one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity…we have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children."

What would these new principles look like, and how can we educate our children by using them?

Click here for a Related Video

Why Have American Public School Become an Arm of the Economy
Larry Cuban

Preparing all Students for College and High-paying Jobs Narrows Mission of Civic Engagement

The end of the 19th and the end 20th century saw business-led coalitions form political alliances with public officials, union leaders, educators and community activists to see public schools prepare students for skilled jobs. These alliances resulted in curricula that displaced Civics (the stuff of public concern), supported the goals of the business community (the stuff of private concern) at the taxpayer’s expense. The resulting policy ignored a long history of public schools transforming students into civic-minded, socially responsible independent thinkers. In both instances, the fear of foreign competition led to reformers pushing for workforce training in public schools. Further, pressure was applied to see schools modeled after the corporation and marketplace. However, this led to little change in classroom practice. As such, even though the ‘bottom line’ had for a time been better teaching and learning, market-inspired reformers found new hope in test scores. The author uses vocational education in the 19th century and standards-driven testing and accountability of the 20th century to unpack his argument.

Late 19th-Early 20th

Vocational education: He explains that prior to WWI, an alliance formed to bring about new, non-traditional forms of teaching such as student made projects and curricula that included industrial-arts. Ultimately this led to progressive practices in public schools in an effort to end the industrial-skills deficit among American students. The idea was to see the State assume the burden for training workers that would in turn generate private profit and maintain corporate advantages. Additionally, admiration for the efficiency of the business model saw school boards become less political in nature and more businesslike.

1980s-2000

Once again concerns over foreign competition caused an inward look for reasons relating to the poorly performing economy. It was not long before employers blamed public schools for poorly prepared high-school graduates, low test scores, urban school violence, and the flight of white middle-class families to the suburbs. They sought to establish a link between low worker productivity and poor test scores.

A corporate formula for success was established as the result of assuming that bureaucracy undermined teaching. It included beliefs that better management, higher standards and competition would improve teaching and learning. Furthermore, it was thought that test scores were a good measure of teaching and that higher test scores meant better workplace performance.

Issues this model would have difficulty addressing included the fact that the policy was being made in public sessions by lay people, for professionals to implement , and for civic purposes other than profit-taking.

Both major political parties supported a market-based prescription and this has led to private companies now running many public (charter) schools. In effect, corporate style market competition, choice and accountability have become the de facto national policy.

“Missing from this inventory of business influences [including commercialization] is teaching and learning.” Teacher-centered practices at the high-school level persist. In fact, teaching to the test has worked against progressive teaching practices. Student-centred approaches have shrivelled under pressure for test scores and the corporate model is to blame.

“as actual choice of school was broadened, the type of schooling was narrowed”

How has this happened? Why are schools frozen in traditional forms?

1. Business has only limited influence over the political area that educational decisions take place. School boards walk a political tightrope between their views and being responsive to shifts in public opinion.
2. Age graded schools which have been taken for granted since their inception, place a pressure to cover content in a traditional manner. A ‘good’ school is the one that can produce higher test scores, and these rely on traditional teaching methods.

Of note: all along most parents and tax-payers were in agreement with the corporate model and so there was little pressure from anywhere to change these practices.

Ultimately, the author wants us to remember that an appreciation of the importance of productive labour as a goal “and the policies that flow from it are no more, no less, than a value; policies that have made schools an arm of the economy twice have hade little evidence to justify the position other than that particular interest groups fought for the value.” So we can chose to once again change policies to reflect new (or return to old) values.

He adds that turning academics in to virtual vocational subjects (to meet the new needs of the economy) has distorted the historical goals that have driven public schools in the past. The original goal of taxpayer supported public schools was democratic equality. It was to build citizens that could take on the responsibilities of civic affairs and be well equipped to make judgement decisions relating to the public good.

The social-efficiency goal of the 19th century reproduced social stratification and vocational education. The social-mobility goal of the early 20th century turned education into a private rather than public good. The questions now will concern the effects of the new version of social-efficiency goal, the type of citizens that will come out of it and whether or not a democracy that provides tax-supported education will be satisfied with the results.

Click here for Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE (the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning) on how young people learn to become civically engaged and how we can better prepare future generations of citizens to engage with the political process.

Civic Education and Political Participation
William A. Galston

Galston contends that the disengagement of today’s young adults with regard to public affairs is more significant than the traditional gap between parents and their children regarding the affair of the state. Today’s young people are less attached to civic affairs than previous generations at the same age. Furthermore, the volunteerism, tolerance and compassion prevalent with today’s young adults do not lead to a wider civic engagement. In fact, many see volunteering as an alternative to official politics. “They understand why it matters to feed a hungry person at a soup kitchen; they do not understand why it matters where a government sets eligibility levels for food stamps”. Older adults are to blame for this approach. It is up them transmit workable civic norms and contexts that respond to young people’s motivation to take on to concrete challenges and opportunities. He feels this trend can be reversed by effective school-based education.

Why does civic engagement matter?

Political effectiveness goes beyond mere political engagement.

The political discussions are presently skewed towards the concerns of the elder generations. Debates should include the interest of the young as well as the old; education financing policy should be as vigorously discussed as Social Security. Young people need to do more than vote, they need to initiate and engage the system toward their interests.

Moral Responsibility.

Everyone benefits from public institutions; therefore everyone must contribute to them.

Citizenship for self-development.

From engagement in civic affairs “a wider human sympathy, a sense of active responsibility for oneself, the skills needed to work with others toward goods that can only be obtained through collective action…”

Some Observations

-Participation and character development are linked only empirically, but there are no reasons to doubt them.
-The market has become the dominant metaphor for daily experience and as such the opportunities to develop non-market skills has narrowed.
-Because the principle of individual choice has emerged as a central value, citizenship has become optional.

The Current Failure of Civic Education

The traditional way of encouraging political engagement – civic education – is not deemed a core academic subject; testing to a four level rubric occurs only every 10 years or so, rather than every 2.

The level of formal schooling is much higher than in previous generations yet there has been no improvement in civic knowledge.

This is because:
1. Teachers are not required to have training specific to teaching civics
2. The curriculum required 3 civics related courses in the 1960s (civics, democracy and government) but now only requires 1 on government and it treats politics as a distant subject that rarely discusses citizen rights and responsibilities.
3. Teachers, Principals and School Boards fear criticism for broaching controversial or political subjects.
4. Civics is not part of the core subjects that require high-stakes testing (and the time/effort/priority to teach to the test).

Does civic Knowledge Matter?

Yes. Because:
1. The more knowledge we have of the workings of democracy, the more likely we are to support democratic values.
2. The more knowledge people have, the more likely they are to participate in civic and political affairs.
3. It furthers citizens understandings of their interests and how to advocate/defend them.
4. It is easier to integrate new knowledge if there is a core of knowledge with regard to civic affairs.
5. The more knowledge we have of public affairs, the lower the incidence of general mistrust.
6. Citizens come to know their own minds and where their views are situated in broader spectrum. This increases consistency of opinion.
7. Civic knowledge can inform opinion on specific issues such as immigration.

How to do it:

1. Focus on civic outcomes such as voting, following the news, volunteering and problem solving at the local level
2. Explicit advocacy of civic engagement
3. Discussion of real-life, relevant issues
4. Discussion of the founding principle of a Constitutional Democracy
5. Seek the engagement of students that are reluctant
6. Allow students to voice their opinion regarding school governance
7. Collaborate with the community
8. Provide training for teachers
9. Infuse a civic mission throughout the curriculum and put democracy into practice

So What Does It Take to Build A School for Democracy?
Deborah Meier

According to Meier (2003), issues of accountability, standards and a common agenda have shadowed discussions and dialogues in answering the following question: What do we want our schools to accomplish that is of sufficient public value to justify the above issues? The tradition public function of schools, according to Meier, is to pass on the skills, aptitudes, and habits needed for a democratic way of life. Such skills, aptitudes and habits are hard to come by; the ideal of civic virtue is counterintuitive. She offers the following five propositions to guide schools in preparing students to participate equally in a democratic way of life:

1. Schools need focus.
For Meier, this focus should not be on raising test scores, because this will not close or narrow the gaps between rich and poor and black and white. Instead of teaching a little about a lot of topics and focusing on right answers, we need to teach a limited number of essential ideas in greater depth. “Getting to the wrong place faster is not a virtue.”

2. One size does not fit all.
Every region or school should have a different definition of success because every region and school is comprised of a different set of individuals. A formulaic way to put the “public” back in public schooling thus makes little sense.

3. A democratic school culture would have lots of human interaction.
All agents within a school’s culture need to work together and build value from each other’s ideas, to be open to new views, and to be comfortable defending their own. This includes students, teachers, parents, administrators. Students in particular need to take on bigger roles and challenges within a system in order to later function as adults in a mature democracy.

4. Forms of governance would differ, too.
In order to teach democracy in schools, a number of differences are bound to arise (i.e. the subject matter and content of the curriculum), which will be resolved by experience, not debate; in any case, as in society, these disputes are not reasons to despair of democracy.

5. Reform consistent with democracy takes time.

Habits of democracy do not develop naturally. We need to experiment in teaching directly, or by example. Society at large has very little experience with how democracy might work, so students need time to internalize these habits. As the York University motto goes, “tentanda via” – the way must be tried.

Re-Thinking Assessment

There are more serious issues than raising our standardized test scores, such as remedying the gap betweens how many rich as opposed to poor youth or black as opposed to white youths are in jail and for how long. A system devoted to democracy should be committed to equity, which is the crux of the latter gaps.

The Great “Second Silence”

This refers to our pretense that the gaps in the quality of life outside of school are matter of inconvenience or matters of poor parenting skills. Schools must be prepared to accept that students’ home lives differ, but rather than merely accepting this, schools should work with these differences as assets, not as deficits to overcome.

Meier offers five corollary conclusions to her above five propositions:

1. Be clear about the purpose. This includes the visions, missions and methods of assessment. We must agree upon—and clearly explain—how and when students are ready to graduate, while meeting the needs of students in varied ways (according to their differences).

2. Choice is powerful. No school should be generic. Schools can better serve democratic ends if they serve as intentional communities for teachers, parents and students. Choice is an inevitable aspect of acknowledging that there is more than one legitimate way to think about democracy and its implications.

3. Size matters. Smaller school populations and smaller class sizes makes some things possible, but if there is not consistent focus among the agents within a school, it is easy to run a small school as mindlessly as a big one. Smallness is necessary, but only sufficient if the relationships within the school are the basis of the public-building process.

4. Be clear about who’s in charge. Schools need to work out power structures. How much power should be put in the hands of the principal? How much in the teacher? What about the student? Public schools are often bound by contractual agreements and arrangements. How can these be altered to foster democracy?

5. Openness makes us stronger. In all of its work, a school must be open and transparent, the evidence of its strengths and weaknesses accessible to both its immediate community and the larger public.

Education, Business, and the ‘Knowledge Economy’
Alison Taylor

· Organizations such as the Conference Board of Canada (CB), the Canadian Chamber of Commerce (CCC), Business Council on National Issues (BCNI) and the Fraser Institute, construct “education,” through their documents, as a means for developing a highly skilled workforce and thus securing national economic prosperity. They recommend tightening relationships between schools and the workplace. But what happens when there is too much corporate involvement? This article focuses on the interest and impact corporations have on schools in producing a labour force that is functional for the changing workplace.

· The CB, a corporate-sponsored research institution aiming to enhance the performance of Canadian organizations within the global economy, has done the most work in the area of K-12 schooling. In 1992 the CB established a National Council on Education, which oversaw the development of the employability skills profile (ESP). Documents produced by the CB and conferences held by the organization promoted partnerships with business, national standards, increased focus on outcomes and accountability, decentralized decision-making, more attention to problems of drop-outs and illiteracy, increased technology and innovation in schools, and great attention to math and science. http://www.conferenceboard.ca/topics/education/default.aspx

· The Fraser Institute has focused on making schools more efficient and effective by running them more like businesses. This institution has focused on the role of schools in producing a world-class workforce. http://www.fraserinstitute.org/#

· There are some differences among business groups that are related to the different types of companies that they represent. For instance, the CB and the BCNI represent multinational corporations across Canada. The Alberta Chamber of Commerce (ACC) represents companies of varying sizes, reflecting the specific interests of the resource-sector. According to the CCC, there is a great shortage of skilled trades workers. Several business leaders argue that skilled trade workers are knowledge workers in the new economy; this speaks to the surprising degree of corporate consensus that has developed in the 1980s and 1990s around education.

· There is considerable alignment between the visions for education promoted by corporate groups like the CB and governments since the early 1990s. Visions for education expressed by the government in their documents are similar to those found in the business documents. The goal is for a high-skill information economy where the achievement of economic goals brings social benefits.

· In education, efforts to tighten the links between school and work reflect, for the most part, the interests of business leaders. Taking this into strong consideration, Taylor asks two questions: (1) Why has this agenda met with so little resistance from education stakeholders, and, (2) What are the implications for democratic purposes?

· “Education for economic prosperity” has been met with little resistance because the futurist tone of the knowledge economy discourse makes it difficult to challenge, and the promise of jobs in high performing, democratic workplaces is attractive to all stakeholders. Also, the discourse of “progressive vocationalism” is seductive for parents, given high youth unemployment rates. Knowledge economy theory generally assumes that “workers increasingly require more skill, become more involved in planning their own work, and increasingly constitute a professional class” (Livingstone, p. 137, cited in Taylor, p. 177).

· Boutwell (1997, cited in Taylor, p. 176) argues that the requirements of the knowledge economy lead to a confluence between two historically opposing groups: the “utilitarians,” who have attempted to direct education toward specific, pragmatic ends, and the “educationalists,” who are more concerned with the development and growth of individual children without reference to society’s needs.

· A 1992 OECD reports states the following: “Increasingly, the most important skills needed at work, and those that firmst want to encourage schools to teach, are more general. Thinking flexibly, communicating well, working well in teams, using initiative – these and other ‘generic’ skills in the workforce are becoming crucial to firms’ competitiveness.”

· Breaking down academic and vocational barriers and providing a more progressive work education experience is appealing for students who lack the interest or grades required to go to university.

· “In the functionalist view of the school-workplace relation, it is the workplace that takes center-stage. Youth are to be molded by schools to some set of predetermined standards derived from workplace norms. Education is a mean to an end, rather than an end in itself “(Carnoy & Levin, 1985, p. 19, cited in Taylor, p. 179).

· But how much faith should be placed in the hands of business leaders to bring about democratic workplace change, in a workworld where terms like “customers” and “cost competitiveness” prevail over the term “employees”? Should businesses not value human resources by empowering, developing and rewarding employees, rather than focusing on short-term stock price performance?

· Establishing links between schools and the community can be a key part of teaching for democratic citizenship; however, this requires that partnerships be developed with a range of community organizations, not just private sector ones. Furthermore, it is pertinent to develop a democratic culture by involving students in community development projects that enable them to understand local needs and recognize their abilities to have an impact in the community.