Education Commons^™

Post-Trayvon Stress Disorder (Ptsd): A Theoretical Analysis Of The Criminalization Of African American Students In U.S. Schools, Marcia J. Watson-Vandiver

Journal of Educational Controversy

This article examines the historical and contemporary intersections of race in education. Specifically, this article explores the African American schooling experience in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement. Although the Brown vs. Board of Education [1954] decision promised more racial cohesion in public schools, many African American students still experience widespread disparities (Kozol, 2005). With African American students receiving three times the number of suspensions or expulsions (Lewis, Butler, Bonner, & Joubert, 2010), it is imperative to explore the undeniable relationship between public schooling and the criminal justice system. To that end, it is important to consider ways that …

Black Lives Matter And The Education Industrial Complex: A Special Issue Of The Journal Of Educational Controversy, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb, William Lyne

Journal of Educational Controversy

Our volume seeks to illustrate specific classrooms and the larger invisible forces that structure the U.S. education industrial complex.

Magical Black Girls In The Education Industrial Complex: Making Visible The Wounds Of Invisibility, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb

Journal of Educational Controversy

Black girls in public school are constantly exposed to physical violence, racialized gender hostility and harassment, and hate speech. Yet, the national narrative perpetuates the belief that Black boys are the main targets of such behaviors. This narrative renders Black girls invisible, and normalizes their treatment as another beam in the framework of white supremacy. This article addresses Black girls' invisibility first creatively, though the African diasporic rhetorical practice of storytelling. It then turns to an exploration of Fennell v. Marion Independent School District, where three sisters were subjected to a racially hostile educational environment in Marion, TX. The article …

Cocaine And College: How Black Lives Matter In U.S. Public Higher Education, Bill Lyne

Journal of Educational Controversy

Taking the Black Panthers' call for relevant education as its starting point, this article looks at the recent history of race and higher education to put the Back Lives Matter movement into historical perspective and ask whether Black lives can ever really matter in U.S. mainstream education.

About The Authors, Kathryn Merwin

Journal of Educational Controversy

About the Authors

Emergent Student Practices: Unintended Consequences In A Dialogic, Collaborative Classroom, Anne E. Crampton

Journal of Educational Controversy

It’s a commonplace to decry the folly of “best practices” in education. They make many practitioners and researchers twitch, fearing that the good-- or even just decent--practice will soon be setting the tempo in the steady march toward standardization. The argument against best practices, then, is the argument against one-size-fits-all pedagogy. Instructional practices must come with a necessary humility, based on situating students within the picture, with particular attention to with histories of institutional and societal othering and marginalization. Good practices cannot be delivered or imposed, and therefore, if successful, they become suggestions or starting points carried out with greater …

Good Intentions Gone Awry: Education Policy And Paradox Of Consequences In Rural Ethnic China, Jinting Wu

Journal of Educational Controversy

This paper provides a situated critique of how evidence-based, “best practices”-oriented research can result in unanticipated consequences and perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophesy at the expense of deeper understanding of educational problems. I structure the paper along two analytical steps. First, I explore the sociology of unintended consequences through German Sociologist Max Weber and his contemporary critic Mohamed Cherkaoui. Second, I draw from an ethnographic study in rural ethnic communities of Southwest China to illustrate how best intentions at providing free compulsory education go awry, and how the controversial policy both fails and succeeds in fabricating its intended outcome. The ethnographic …

Big Data And Technologies Of Self, Bernadette Baker

Journal of Educational Controversy

The entry of Big Data into the educational field has generated noticeable binary reactions and a recycling of criticisms already directed at the quantification of reality, datafication in the social sciences, standardization in education, and neoliberalism in the West. This paper reapproaches Big Data’s entry into education from a curriculum studies perspective, which deploys interdisciplinary approaches from philosophy, history, sociology and politics of knowledge and wisdom. The analysis of key definitional debates, binary reactions, and systematization are considered from the point of view of historically shifting technologies of self, as core conditions of possibility for the controversies that emerge when …

Introduction To The Special Issue Of The Journal Of Educational Controversy, John G. Richardson

Journal of Educational Controversy

This issue addresses the uneasy relation between 'best practices' in educational research and the consequences that often follow from efforts to implement practices deemed best. This relation is often complicated by the social phenomenon long recognized as "unintended consequences". It is proposed that controversies in education, as well as practices advanced as best, are shaped as the consequences -subsequently revealed as the very product of the good intentions that underlie prevailing theory and methods.

About The Authors

Journal of Educational Controversy

About the Authors

Is “Best Practices” Research In Education Insufficient Or Even Misdirected? An Issue Dedicated To John G. Richardson, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

Editorial and Dedication for Volume 11, Issue 1

Is “Best Practices” Research in Education Insufficient or even Misdirected?

AN ISSUE DEDICATED TO JOHN G. RICHARDSON

A Violence Of “Best Practice” And Unintended Consequences?: Domestic Violence And The Making Of A Disordered Subjectivity, Tracey Pyscher

Journal of Educational Controversy

Often, efforts by schools to standardize marginalized children with histories of domestic violence have alarming effects. More recent efforts of standardization typically find a sustained existence in the discourse of “best” practices predicated upon a religious-like adherence to behavioral data driven frameworks. This article traces how children and youth with histories of domestic violence (or HDV youth) navigate and resist deficit laden school subjectivities shaped by special education discourses of medicalization and pathologization. In one case study, I spell out how an elementary school created and maintained an HDV child’s EBD (emotional behavioral disordered) subjectivity with detrimental effects. The article …

Crowding New Public Management Off The University’S Horizon Of Expectations, Michael Schapira

Journal of Educational Controversy

This article is a response to Asger Sørensen’s vivid example of how neo-liberal university reform has subjected Danish universities to New Public Management. Sørensen effectively shows the noxious effects of NPM by discussing the infamous Koldau case, where newly empowered rectors, who served as centralized arbiters of university affairs, superseded academic decision-making. He concludes that one reason these cases have not been met with resistance by faculty is that they are paralyzed by radically conflicting normative visions of the university. In this article I respond to Sørensen by suggesting that conflicting normative visions need not be a disempowering condition and …

Urban Teachers Engaging In Critical Talk: Navigating Deficit Discourse And Neoliberal Logics, Heidi Pitzer

Journal of Educational Controversy

This article examines urban teachers’ critiques—their critical talk—as moments of agency, and as potential, but tenuous, avenues for transformation. The article draws on data from a qualitative interpretive study examining the complexities of urban teachers’ work. This research begins from a perspective that is attentive to and critical of both (a) the racialized deficit discourse, a predominant framework in urban schools—often taken up by urban teachers—that constructs poor urban youth and youth of color as deficient, as objects in need of control and correction; and (b) neoliberal approaches to education, particularly the market-based, audit culture logics and …

Challenging The Deficit Model And The Pathologizing Of Children: Envisioning Alternative Models, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

This issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy focuses on a theme that has been touched on in some of our earlier issues as well as discussed on our blog. See especially the article by Curt Dudley-Marling, “Return of the Deficit,” in our winter 2007 issue of the journal. Curt later engaged in a conversation on this topic with another author, Paul Thomas, in an exchange on our blog that extended from November 2014 to January 2015. Because we conceive this journal as a conversation over time, we thought that it was time to return to the topic and devote …

To Patricia F. Carini: A Dedication, Susan Donnelly

Journal of Educational Controversy

When I first visited the Prospect Center in North Bennington, Vermont in 1984 and met Pat Carini, there were several things that struck me right away about the setting: The children were active and engaged in making things; the Center was a lively community of thinkers involving children and adults in a variety of ways; and I was welcomed as an active participant from the outset. It was a bustling place in which to observe and listen and contemplate. At that point, Prospect was two decades old; it had already matured into an organization with a recognizable philosophy and outlook; …

Resisting The “Single Story”, Ellen Schwartz

Journal of Educational Controversy

I first came in contact with The Prospect School and Center in 1984. I had just completed my first year of teaching and, at the recommendation of a professor from graduate school, I signed up for a Summer Institute. I had little idea what I was getting into, and when I arrived I discovered that many of the other participants had connections to Prospect’s methodology through participation in local inquiry groups. We read and discussed books like Ernest Schachtel’s Metamorphosis (1959) and Edith Cobb’s The Ecology of the Imagination in Childhood (1977). Though my grasp of this material was tenuous …

Surpassing Sisyphus: The Tenacious And Promising Struggle To Push And Support A Strengths-Based Ideology And Practice In Education, Sara Truebridge

Journal of Educational Controversy

Yes, yes, yes. That is my quick response to the three questions posed by Lorraine Kasprisin, editor of The Journal of Educational Controversy to authors seeking to contribute to the 2014 fall issue embracing the theme, Challenging the Deficit Model and the Pathologizing of Children: Envisioning Alternative Models. “Has this deficit model begun to surreptitiously creep into our educational discourse for all children?” Yes. “Have we become too focused on needs and deficiencies and forgotten that children also have capacities and strengths?” Yes. “Does the current emphasis on accountability and standardized testing contribute to the pathologizing of children?” Yes. Knowing …

How We Are Complicit: Challenging The School Discourse Of Adolescent Reading, Andrea Davis

Journal of Educational Controversy

The call for submissions for this edition of the journal is titled, “Challenging the Deficit Model and the Pathologizing of Children: Envisioning Alternative Models.” In the following essay I will make clear, I hope, how alive and well is the practice of viewing readers, in this case, adolescent readers, through an extremely narrow and inaccurate lens of deficit, explore the why behind the narrow measure and close with some suggestions for expanding our lens for understanding adolescent readers and providing some specific examples of classroom practices that encourage and support such an expanded view.

Against Rubbish Collecting: Educators & Resistively Ambivalent Youth, Tracey Pyscher

Journal of Educational Controversy

As a researcher whose childhood and adolescence were socially and culturally shaped by domestic violence, I am dedicated to challenging the multiple disparities/identities reproduced on the bodies of youth with histories of childhood domestic violence in public schools. This article evokes Bauman (2004), Bakhtian analysis (1984), post-colonial, critical sociocultural, and (dis)ability theory to offer the argument that youth with histories of domestic violence resist violating/violent practices in public schools. Educational practices and discourses that create disordered identities for such youth are re-envisioned in this article.

Bottom-Line Choices: Effects Of Market Ideology In Florida’S Voluntary Preschool Policies, Angela C. Passero, Roderick J. Jones

Journal of Educational Controversy

The purpose of this paper is to uncover systems of reasoning and taken-for-granted assumptions embedded within Florida’s Voluntary Preschool Education Program (VPK) policies and their implications on matters of social justice. Systems of reasoning based upon market ideology and assumptions of good economic actors, resulting from influences of conservative modernism, are identified and found to facilitate policies failing to ensure children’s constitutional right to “high quality pre-kindergarten” (Florida Constitution [Fla. Const.] art. IX, § 1(b), 2002). The authors argue that these policies intensify exclusion through institutionalized problematizing of students and act to perpetuate discriminatory and unjust practices of schooling, in …

Breaking The Mold: Thinking Beyond Deficits, Elyse Hambacher, Winston C. Thompson

Journal of Educational Controversy

In an attempt to understand widespread school failure among children of color and children from low-income backgrounds, dominant discourse points to pervasive deficit ideologies that blame a student’s family structure, cultural and linguistic background, and community (Dudley-Marling, 2007; Valencia, 2010; Weiner, 2006). By accepting such a simplistic explanation of blaming the child for a lack of successⁱ without examining systemic inequities, deficit thinkers ignore real and complex issues of structural inequity. We agree with Pearl (1997) who argues that deficit thinking ignores “external forces— [i.e.], the complex makeup of macro- and micro-level mechanisms that help structure schools as inequitable …

“Everyone Should Feel So Connected And Safe”: Using Parent Action Teams To Reach All Families, John Korsmo, Miguel Camarena, Andrea Clancy, Ann Eco, Bill Nutting, Basilia Quiroz, Azucena Ramirez, Veronica Villa-Mondragon, Stacy Youngquist, Anne Jones

Journal of Educational Controversy

This article discusses efforts underway through a university-community partnership to engage parents in the educational experiences of their children at a rural elementary school in the Pacific Northwest. There is a well-established literature base on the power of engaging parents in the school experience of their children (Chavkin & Williams, 1993; Dunsmore & Fisher, 2010; Henderson & Mapp, 2002; Hong, 2012; Warren, Hong, Leung Rubin & Sychitkokhong Uy, 2009). However, within this literature is rather unsettling insights into the lack of doing so. Study after study points to the relative ease of incorporating middle-class and affluent parents and caregivers into …

Precarity And Pedagogical Responsibility, Ann Chinnery

Journal of Educational Controversy

Despite good intentions, No Child Left Behind (2002) and other initiatives aimed at leveling the playing field in American society have arguably had more harmful than positive effects on children’s learning in schools. According to some critics (e.g., Au, 2004; Glass, 2007; Orfield & Kornhaber, 2001; Wotherspoon & Schissel, 2001), if we scratch beneath the surface of these initiatives, we often find discourses that pathologize certain children or groups of children, and a reluctance to look critically at the social, political, and economic conditions (such as hunger, homelessness, and lack of adequate health care) under which some children struggle to …

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, And The Hidden Power Of Character By Paul Tough, Sarita Y. Shukla

Journal of Educational Controversy

In an effort to help students succeed we steep them in homework, emphasize the importance of grades, and, to some extent, convey that test scores are the only goal that students should aspire for. There is probably an underlying assumption that somehow test scores will translate into an ability to navigate difficult life circumstances and also lead to a happy life. Paul Tough questions these well-intentioned assumptions in his book How Children Succeed. He grapples with questions that we as educators, policymakers and parents constantly struggle with: “Which skills and traits really (italics added) lead to success? How do …

School’S Out: Lessons From A Forest Kindergarten - Directed By Lisa Molomot; Produced By Rona Richter, Rachel Severson

Journal of Educational Controversy

Every day, rain or shine, children in the Forest Kindergarten in the Swiss town of Langnau am Albis tromp into the woods for the school day. The 36-minute documentary, School’s Out: Lessons from a Forest Kindergarten (2013), directed by Lisa Molomot and produced by Rona Richter, chronicles the experiences of these children as the seasons change from autumn to winter to spring. Forest Kindergartens emerged in Sweden in the 1980s and have since spread to many countries, including Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the United States. Outdoor kindergartens provide children with the opportunity for unstructured …

Resilience Begins With Beliefs: Building On Student Strengths For Success In School By Sara Truebridge, Rolla E. Lewis

Journal of Educational Controversy

In her foreword to Resilience Begins with Beliefs, Bonnie Benard passes off the resilience torch for supporting her life work to Sara Truebridge. Now retired, Benard was a key advocate for resilience theory and practice for over two decades (e.g., Benard, 1991, 2004; Benard & Slade, 2009). Benard’s strengths-based, human development, and health promotion perspective framed resilience as a process promoted by three “protective factors” found in family, school, and community environments: 1) caring and supportive relationships, 2) high expectations, and 3) opportunities for meaningful participation and contribution. A treasure trove of wisdom about resilience theory, practices, and the …

Reinventing Schools: It’S Time To Break The Mold By Charles Reigeluth And Jennifer Karnopp, Marilyn Chu

Journal of Educational Controversy

Making the argument for fundamental change in the U.S. educational system due to inadequate preparation of our students in relation to global measures of performance isn’t new. Comparing and contrasting the different assumptions underlying the outdated industrial age model of schooling versus the current information age needs of learners, has also been explored in more depth elsewhere. The contribution of Reinventing Schools to current thinking about educational change efforts begins with a reminder of the obvious core areas that have the possibility of refocusing schools on student learning.

“Multiplication Is For White People” Raising Expectations For Other People’S Children, By Lisa Delpit, Sue-Lin Toussaint

Journal of Educational Controversy

As a senior in college, no other book affirmed my decision to become an urban teacher like Other People’s Children by Lisa Delpit (1995). Delpit gave words to experiences in pre-dominantly Black K-12 schools like my own, where cultural conflict thrived as one of the intangible elements driving underperformance among African American students. In Other People’s Children, Delpit uncovered the reality felt by so many Black students like myself about how they are treated by White teachers. Rather than place blame or evoke guilt, she provided strategies for how to bridge cultural gaps and misunderstanding in classrooms. Not only …

About The Authors

Journal of Educational Controversy

No abstract provided.