Community Organizing and Urban Education VI: Education is a Tough Nut to Crack

[To read the entire series, go here.]

"Although public education activism is hardly new in this country . . . , community organizing as a strategy for school improvement is barely a decade old."
--Kavitha Mediratta, NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy

“Organizing groups argue that education is more difficult to navigate than any other neighborhood issue because school systems are harder to penetrate and school leadership often is more insulated and unresponsive than the leadership of other public institutions.”
--Mediratta, et. al.

Since so much of the social action in the 1960s involved education, especially protests against segregation after Brown, it may seem like education is a common arena for social action. However, the fact is that community organizing groups around the United States in the last few decades have mostly stayed out of educational reform until quite recently. Why?

Organizing works best when groups’ demands are simple and clear. This is relatively easy to accomplish in areas like housing, or jobs, or health care, or wages, because one can define in fairly basic terms what it would mean to “win.” X number of houses, or X amount of loan $$ for a particular area, or a specific wage increase, or a new health center for a defined area. In education, the issues are often more complex.

Often in education, the problem is one of quality of instruction. But it is very difficult to define exactly what a “good” education looks like, and difficult (for specialists or everyday citizens) to monitor instruction from the outside. For example, even if you win something as seemingly simple as a “small schools” effort, how small is small enough? What counts as adequate support for these schools? Whose fault is it when some of them fail?

Monitoring is key for any organizing effort. Just because someone *says* they will do something doesn’t mean anything. Unless you can keep track of what they are doing over time, chances are they will find a way to weasel out of what they agreed to.

Questions about educational policy can get complicated and political very quickly. Think of the conflict around educational choice, for example. And, as noted in the quotes, above, public schools are especially difficult institutions to get access to.

Nonetheless, a range of organizing groups are increasingly engaging with the public schools. Often in collaboration with educational scholars (see Oakes & Rogers for an interesting example), they are developing tools like school “report cards” to help them keep schools accountable. They are developing strategies for collaborating with school staff, as in the Alliance Schools effort described by Dennis Shirley. And some groups, like ACORN, are even opening and/or supporting their own schools.

Other groups, like the one I work with in Milwaukee, are developing avenues for supporting school change that can be framed in relatively simple terms, as they always have, like class size, increasing the availability of school nurses, or guaranteeing nutritious school breakfasts.

I have only scraped the suface of the challenges specific to school reform organizing, here, and will return to these issues in later posts. A good source for information about these challenges is the Mediratta et. al. paper I quoted from above.

Danziger, Constructing the Subject, and accountability

Thanks to a trail of other readings, two of the last books I read in revising Accountability Frankenstein were Theodore Potter's Trust in Numbers (1995) and Kurt Danziger's Constructing the Subject (1990), both relatively dense books discussing topics on the edges of my concerns with testing and professional expertise. While reading the page proofs of a book that will be coming out in just a few months, I've already had one basic assumption rattled. Then I picked up Stephen Turner's Liberal Democracy 3.0 (2003), about whose provocative arguments about expertise and democratic political theory I've written before.

So in this trail of expertise, professional history, and our social trust in test scores, I've come to two very different chunks of the literature. Theodore Potter has written two books on the social history of statistics, one on The Rise in Statistical Thinking (1988) in the 19th century and a second one (Trust in Numbers), which is a little more broad and ambitious in its argument. I left that fairly early to tackle the Danziger book, which is a brilliant little book that rocks you with a gem of insight every chapter. Danziger argues that Wundt's laboratory circle in Leipzig both established the concept of subject and also became an alternative view of subject (where the experimenter and observer frequently exchanged roles) to the later, more common notion of subject as of a different social status and knowledge position than the experimenter (and report author).

One point that is both suggestive and devastating is Danziger's suggestion that schools may have influenced the path of psychology as much as the other way around, for three reasons: first, schools created a huge resource of subjects once those became defined as a separate social group from experimenters; second, schools became a target of marketing of applied research; and third, in their dramatic expansion in the late 19th century and the organization around bureaucratic forms (graded multi-classroom schools, for example), the new bureaucratic school systems both produced and consumed huge numbers of the type of population statistics that are akin to censuses, creating the idea that one could capture the sense of schools and children with a sort of social census. That statistical consumption may have shaped psychology's turn from reporting the introspective observations of individuals to the reporting of aggregate statistics, what Danziger calls a "psychological census."

In turn, this broad (and ironic) argument brings me to two other authors: John Dewey and Daniel Calhoun. Most people in education describe Dewey as a sort of demi-god, creating a humane vision of education. What my colleague Erwin Johanningmeier argues is that Dewey used schools as a way to inform his writings on pragmatism more than attempting to define what schools should do. I suspect this may be a matter of different perspectives on the same writings, but Johanningmeier's argument parallels Danziger's.

The second is that Danziger cites Calhoun's The Intelligence of a People (1973), of which Dorothy Ross aptly said, "Any reader who spends a few minutes with Calhoun's ... book will learn that it is infuriatingly difficult of access." She also noted, again accurately, "But it will repay the reader's persistence." Ross should know, having written G. Stanley Hall's biography and must have had plenty of "infuriatingly difficult" times with the material.

But back to Calhoun: one of his points early in the book is much like the point that Robert Dreeben made in On What Is Learned in School (1968), that testing and assessment in general displaces responsibility onto students. And, in what perhaps should be no surprise, Dreeben's book is not only as impenetrable as Calhoun's, but it is so difficult to read that we talk about his broader argument by using the words of another 1968 book, Philip Jackson's Life in Classrooms, where he coined the phrase "hidden curriculum."

But if the hidden curriculum of assessment has historically been to shift responsibility, then that continues with the modern version of accountability, which usually displaces responsibility away from the center, even as education policy becomes more centralized.

(Another version of this appeared on my professional blog, and A. G. Rud asked me to write about it here, so I have.)

Top 10 education stories in 2007

My idiosyncratic list, previously posted on my professional blog.

USA Today and Eduwonk Andy Rotherham have done year-end reviewlets, it's my turn...

1. The dog that hasn't barked: Has anyone tracked what happened to the Katrina victims who are minors? Yes, it's a serious problem that this isn't an active news story, except for the reopening of colleges in New Orleans. One might even say it's highly disturbing that no one has focused much either on the breaking up of the New Orleans public schools (to be replaced by... I'm not sure what) or on the children who are part of the Katrina Diaspora. (The Census Bureau special split of the 2005 American Community Survey is probably the best place for researchers to start, if you're quantitatively minded.)
   
2. NCLB breaking up? The loss of the Republican majority in the November elections threatens to further fragment the coalition that led to the passage of NCLB in late 2001. As Paul Manna's astute book School's In (2006) points out, AYP was known to be a mess during the legislative process, and the sausage still has visible carcass bits. (What is it about the Bush White House that they can't admit when they were completely wrong on factual matters?) I stand by my earlier prediction that the law is most likely to be extended through appropriations and that the insider game will be over the 20% set-aside provision. Flexibility in return for accountability, right ...
   
3. Qualified qualifications: Right on schedule, all of the nation's teachers are now 100% highly qualified. ;-) The biggest empirical squabble on that front right now is over the role of collective bargaining agreements in the distribution of qualified teachers (F. Howard Nelson's study is but the latest salvo, and you can expect the ordnance to continue to fly from various camps), but that begs the question of why worry about that instead of making sure that all teachers have skills.
   
4. Kids walk: The spring walkouts of students across the country to join immigration rallies is not really related to education policy (except in a minor way: efforts to dissuade the students often failed), but it is amazing and historic. There have been K-12 student walkouts before—Chicano students who boycotted schools in the late 60s, as my colleague Barbara Cruz reminded me—but not on a national scale before or as part of a national political event, as far as I'm aware. That's an amazing bit of social history, even if transient.
   
5. Stupid phoenixes: Risky schemes such as the 65% "Solution" and the Taxpayer Bill of Rights went down to flaming defeat in 2006, though they may continue to rise from the ashes. If my memory is correct, only Georgia and Texas are under 65% strictures as a goal, the first by law and the second by executive order. I suspect they'll eventually be repealed.
   
6. No obvious compromise on charter schools: There are several substantive problems with charter-school policies in many states:
   
   • The funding structure is generally not rational by any stretch of the imagination.
     
   • There remain serious questions about the accountability for charter schools.
     
   • There are still massive fraud scandals on occasion (this year, in Ohio).
     
   • There are all-too-evident problems with anti-union suppression when charter-school teachers try to organize.
   
   It seems to me to be obvious how to solve all of these problems at one swoop: weighted student funding for local public and charter schools; card-check union recognition; charter schools and local public school authorities work for general increases in student funding; a limit of 5 charter schools that an EMO can manage in any state; the accountability provisions of local public schools apply to charter schools (with some adjustments for school size). One wee problem: weighted student funding would prompt resistance from states such as Illinois that have horrific inequities.
   
7. A small voucher program dies: The Florida Supreme Court struck down the failing-schools voucher program that was Governor Jeb Bush's pride. The vast majority of students in voucher programs were and remain in the program for students with disabilities and the corporate tax-credit voucher program. The fate of those programs is still unknown, and no lawsuit has been filed (as of yet).
   
8. Commissions fizzle, don't sizzle: The final report of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education had recommendations that are largely doomed, which is still better than the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce debacle, which wasn't helped by their trying to sell it instead of distribute it online.
   
9. Pick your cause: Locally, Florida's test-score statistics on its own state exams rose this year, which wouldn't be news except that they rose in middle school for the first time this year. Governor Bush of course said that it was his accountability reform. Others said it might have had something to do with the reading coaches that were finally provided as instructional supports in middle schools. Skeptics such as Walt Haney might suggest that this is the first cohort that experienced dramatic retention in third grade, artificially boosting test scores as the proportion of overage students bumps up and the bulge ages into middle schools and soon high schools. Friends of the late Governor Lawton Chiles might instead point to Chiles's Healthy Start program, which kicked in starting in 1992 and 1993 (so the first babies served would have been in 7th and 8th grade last year). I would point out that my daughter was in 8th grade last year, but no one credits my wife and me for boosting Florida's test scores.
   
10. Memory of a non-veto: The death of former President Ford is education news. While recollections of the man focus on his demeanor in office after Nixon's resignation and his pardoning of Nixon, few are remembering his 66 vetoes, a rate of 26.4 vetoes per year. That's right behind Truman's 31.3 vetoes per year, but Truman still had a lower veto rate than FDR at a little under 53 vetoes per year, and that rate is still less than the all-time veto champ, Grover Cleveland (first term), whose 304 vetoes averaged out to one veto every 4.8 days in his first term. A quarter of Ford's regular vetoes were overridden (second in the 20th century behind Nixon), which may have been a factor in why he signed Public Law 94-142 despite his misgivings about federal mandates. We now know P.L. 94-142 as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the basic special-education law in the country. IDEA will be 31 on November 29, and everyone currently receiving services under it was born after the Board v. Rowley decision in 1982 that gave the central interpretation of what a free, appropriate public education is.

I'm sure that there are other highlights you could have, either nationally or locally, but those are my picks.