5 I’m Reading: Consistency v Innovation; Discipline; College GPA Predictors; MOOCs; Antonio Gramsci
Posted: March 1st, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 2 Comments »
1. Mike Feinberg writes:
Cage-busting for us has been a process of growth and exploration. Over the past 20 years, KIPP has sought out new and better ways to fulfill our promises to students. We still have plenty to learn, and there are many new questions to answer, like:
How do we avoid getting bogged down in bureaucracy as our network grows?
How do we maintain quality across the network while preserving innovation?
We are thrilled with what we’ve accomplished so far, and now we’re raring to go for more.
2. Over at Dropout Nation, Matt Barnum writes:
My last two years teaching in a low-income school were a stunning introduction to the constant discipline issues and the culture that they sow in thousands of schools. During my two years, I was called names that can’t be reprinted and sworn at; yelled at and ignored; given the middle finger and lied to. Desks and textbooks were vandalized; my personal supplies were stolen. A fight once broke out in my classroom; fights constantly happened throughout the school.
I didn’t leave the teaching profession wasn’t because of salaries, or career ladders, or being over-regulated, or “poor working conditions”, or lack of resources. It definitely wasn’t because of testing, or narrowing of curriculum, or because I wasn’t treated like a professional. In short, I didn’t leave for any of the reasons traditionallycited as the causes of teacher attrition.
I left teaching in large part because the requirements of school discipline – the constant exhaustion, the feeling of always being on edge – were too much for me.
3. Dan Willingham writes about a new study:
As they put the data together, the most important predictors of college grade point average are: your grades in high school, your score on the SAT or ACT, the extent to which you plan for and target specific grades, and your ability to persist in challenging academic situations.
There is not much support here for the idea that demographic or psychosocial contextual variables matter much.
Broad personality traits, most motivation factors, and learning strategies matter less than I would have guessed.
4. Dai Ellis directed me towards a student’s review of 2 MOOCS:
Fully and comprehensively evaluating edX (now offering 13 courses) and Coursera (217 courses) would mean taking hundreds of online classes.
Instead, I chose one from each to be examples of the experience: edX’s 6.00x (Introduction to Computer Science and Programming), via MITx, and Coursera’s Machine Learning, via Stanford. It is important to note that, just like traditional college courses, your mileage may vary depending upon your interest in the subject and who’s teaching it.
5. E.D. Hirsch writes:
Gramsci was an astonishingly prescient and penetrating thinker whose work is all the more remarkable since it was written under depressing conditions—in prison, where he languished because his writing and journalistic work in the 1920s were so cogent and influential that Mussolini’s fascistic regime seized him in 1927 with the avowed purpose of silencing him. There he remained for eight years, until his ill health brought him to a sanitarium in 1934, and to a clinic in 1937, where he died.
He was allowed to write, but not, of course, to let anyone see his writing. It’s only because his sister-in-law, visiting his clinic room in 1937, smuggled out his 33 prison notebooks, unpublished until after the war, that we know some of Gramsci’s profound ideas about society, politics, and education.
He rightly predicted that….
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Enjoy!
Matt Barnum (#2: discipline) also just wrote a WaPo blog post arguing that TFA’s usefulness had run its course and the organization should close up shop. He actually made sound arguments there, but this piece makes me reconsider.
What’s clear is he had a poor teaching experience, by no fault of his own. What would have made it better is a hands-on principal, a positive school culture set by all the adults working together, and better training in how to handle discipline problems.
I agree with Barnum that without these, TFA’s novice teachers probably aren’t worth much. I disagree with his assumption that these conditions can’t be changed, and I definitely disagree that the solutions aren’t out there!
Re: #5 – AKA Hirsch’s bizarre reimagination of Gramsci as an advocate for Common Core(!)
The short answer is that Hirsch’s representatin of Gramsci is absurdly devoid of context. Don’t listen to him.
The longer answer is that Gramsci, as a Marxist and advocate for popular revolution against what he viewed as a capitalist hegemony, would be diametrically opposed to something like Common Core standards. For Gramsci, Common Core merely represent the fruit of a capitalist ideology designed to maintain unequal social and prevent communist revolution. This is because capitalism, for Gramsci, isn’t merely about exploitative economic relations, but is also about the production and sustaining of a false consciousness that convinces the working class to toil in exploitative relations with the capitalist. The context of Gramsci’s thinking is appropriate. Writing 50 years after Marx, Gramsci is trying to understand why Marxist thought hadn’t immediately produced successful revolutions around Europe by the beginning of the 20th century. He understood Marxism’s failures as a political philosophy as a result of its being suppressed by the intellectual activities of the state. In fact, he specifically called out teachers as being part of the intellectual body that reproduced false consciousness about economic and social inequalities that masked the inherently unequal relationship between laborers and capitalists.
Gramsci would have argued that “facts,” like those articulated in the Common Core, function as part of the capitalist ideology designed to repress the working class and reproduce unequal economic and social relations. In other words, Gramsci would oppose Common Core because it promotes a political status quo (e.g., if you’re poor, just work harder/better, but don’t critique the system). Gramsci wanted revolution. Gramsci was trying to argue that worker could only end unequal social relations by creating a Communist Party that would produce and sustain its own group of counter-intellectuals who would reveal the false ideology of the capitalists to the people, who would then be able to carry out a successful revolution. Supporting anything like Common Core standards would be antithetical to Gramsci’s larger political goals.
I don’t imagine Hirsch owns any “Che” T-shirts or has any interest in fomenting revolution against the America’s economic system. So why invoke Gramsci as an ahistorical Common Core hero? Hirsch fashions himself as both a historian and an academic, so I can only understand his (mis)reading of Gramsci in a cynical rather than innocent sense. In other words, I think he knows better and is just trying to piss off the academic left and confuse everyone else.
If you want an educational theorist who makes use of Gramscian theory in a substantial way in analyzing current thinking in curriculum and instruction and ed policy reform efforts, I recommend UW-Madison Professor Michael Apple’s work. Several of his books, “Official Knowledge,” “Ideology and Curriculum,” and “Education and Power” all make substantial use of Gramsci (as opposed to Hirsch’s selected quotations) and understand Gramsci in the manner I described above. And Apple, unlike Hirsch, proudly flaunts his pinko credentials.
As for me, I’m neither a Gramscian by trade (I find Foucault more useful in thinking about relationships of power in schools), nor am I a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Michael Apple (he offers strong critiques of neoliberalism in education reform, but is too structuralist). That said, when a conservative culture warrior/academic like Hirsch produces flagrantly misleading commentary, someone needs to call a spade a spade.