Education Commons^™

An Education For Personal Autonomy In An Era Of Standards-Based Reform, Josh Corngold

Journal of Educational Controversy

In 1983, then-President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education released a report called A Nation at Risk, which as the name would suggest, painted a grim picture of education in America. The report opened ominously: “Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” And the dismal tone only intensified as the report’s authors placed the blame for the nation’s troubles squarely at the foot of its educational institutions:

We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride …

The Hypocrisy Of Racism: Arizona's Movement Towards State-Sanctioned Apartheid, Augustine F. Romero

Journal of Educational Controversy

Recently, my colleagues and I have been called racist because we encourage our students to ask questions about the impact of race and/or racism upon their social condition, their impact on the history of our country, and their potential impact upon our future. The irony and hypocrisy are that our racist state, its racist superintendent of public instruction, its racist attorney general, the racists within its state legislature, and the racist nature of its legal representation are saying that my colleagues and I are racist because we illuminate their acts of white privilege, their acts of oppression, and their acts …

Creating A School Meant For Children: A Multi-Media Presentation, Susan Donnelly

Journal of Educational Controversy

During the past decade, we have been involved in an ongoing process to articulate our beliefs about education, to ground those beliefs in current research about learning, children, and brain development, and to develop a coherent set of practices informed by those beliefs that encompass all aspects of the school program. This has been a very complicated process that has frequently challenged us to uncover and re-examine long-held assumptions, to re-orient our relationships, and to work collaboratively across age levels and disciplines to make changes in the midst of all the activity and busy-ness of a school full of energetic …

Author Paul Shaker Responds To The Video Review Of His Book, Reclaiming Education For Democracy, Paul Shaker

Journal of Educational Controversy

Thank you and specifically the reviewers for your close attention to our book, Reclaiming Education for Democracy: Thinking Beyond No Child Left Behind (RED) (Shaker & Heilman, 2008), and for the fair and sensitive reading that you gave the book. As you can imagine, such academic attention is deeply gratifying. I have been invited to respond to the video review in print and I choose to do so in an informal manner, without footnotes, and by giving my individual reaction. At the same time I wish to acknowledge my co-author, Professor Elizabeth E. Heilman, of Michigan State University.

Literacy With An Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children In Their Own Self-Interest By Patrick J. Finn, Rosalie M. Romano

Journal of Educational Controversy

When Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in their own Self-Interest (1999/2009) was published, Patrick J Finn framed his argument for teaching powerful literacy to poor, working-class children as a matter of justice. Powerful literacy is the education our children deserve because it fosters critical thinking about complex ideas and prepares young people to consider multiple perspectives and their own interests as they make life decisions. Finn exposed disparities in the aims and means of educating students according to their social class. Poor, working-class students received functional literacy that taught compliance, while students from privileged backgrounds were taught powerful …

Original Minds Directed By T. Weidlinger, Tracy Thorndike

Journal of Educational Controversy

Original Minds paints a poignant and thought-provoking portrait of what it’s like to learn and think in ways different from those valued and supported in typical classrooms. The film centers on the stories of five teenagers, all of whom have been classified as learning disabled, as they participate in a semester-long special class designed to teach them how the brain works and help them gain insight into their unique patterns of strengths and weaknesses. Parents, teachers, and other adults weigh in with their own perspectives, but the teens’ own first person accounts of their frustrations with learning and schooling, and …

The Death And Life Of The Great American School System By Diane Ravitch, Chris Ohana

Journal of Educational Controversy

Cleaning your office can be a surprisingly cathartic experience. Diane Ravitch, once a darling in the Bush administrations, was preparing her office to be painted. As she sifted through decades of work, she experienced what she called an intellectual crisis. She began to doubt more than just the impact of various reforms that she had once embraced. She also challenged the very assumptions on which they were based. The result of this cleaning crisis was her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism For The Twenty-First Century By Grace Lee Boggs With Scott Kurashige, Victor Nolet

Journal of Educational Controversy

During her 96 plus years on the planet, Boggs has been an active participant in the most profound social movements of the twentieth century. After earning her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940, she embarked on a career as a social activist that has spanned 70 years. Her lived experiences as a Chinese American woman, philosopher, feminist, environmentalist, civil rights leader, community organizer, and wife to Black labor activist Jimmy Boggs have given her a unique perspective on what it means to be an activist in the twenty-first century. She truly has made her road by walking …

Comparing Special Education: Origins To Contemporary Paradoxes By John G. Richardson And Justin J.W. Powell, Ellen Brantlinger

Journal of Educational Controversy

Comparing Special Education is an exceptionally well-researched and carefully documented tome that should interest both general and regular educators as well as other educational constituencies. The book’s content spans the origins and history of labeling and comparative (special) education services on a global scale. Although centered on the nature of special education, the authors insist that special education is interconnected in that it is always embedded in general public education practices and societal circumstances. Hence, special education cannot be understood without taking into account the total geographical and historical contexts. The authors’ focus is broad. It is also inclusive in …

American Schools: The Art Of Creating A Democratic Learning Community By Sam Chaltain, Alice Ginsberg

Journal of Educational Controversy

There isn’t much room for dissenters in public education today – whether they are respectful or not. Playing and/or living by the rules has become shorthand for a philosophy of school reform that has but one major goal: raising standardized test scores. Embarrassed by what Obama has called in a recent State of the Union Address this “Sputnik moment” (Obama, 2011) -- where American schools and students are ranking far below other countries – the language of school reform has become consistently sterner and less tolerant of contrasting viewpoints. As Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been quoted:

The path to …

The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism For The 21st Century By Grace Lee Boggs With Scott Kurashige, Molly Ware

Journal of Educational Controversy

As I recently delved into Grace Lee Boggs’ new book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21^st Century, I found myself shaken to the core by a much needed inspiration and clarity of conviction. Like the faint beams of Pacific Northwest sunlight pouring through the clouds after days of gray and darkness, Boggs’ work helped to shatter my own feelings of hopelessness and despair. Her words and stories, helped to ground me in a conviction that had been taking form over a lifetime and, especially, over the course of the terrifying, transformative, and exquisitely alive past …

About The Authors

Journal of Educational Controversy

No abstract provided.

The Education And Schools Our Children Deserve, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

This issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy will mark our fifth anniversary. When I first founded the journal in 2006, no one could have imagined its phenomenal growth in just five years. I think it is a testimony to the need for a journal that would bring scholars as public intellectuals into conversation with policymakers, teachers, legislators, and an informed public around the vital educational issues of our time. This issue of the journal will also introduce to our readers the new dean of the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University --- the home of the journal. …

Nurturing The Brilliance In Every Child, Susan Donnelly

Journal of Educational Controversy

When Lorraine asked me to co-edit this issue with her, I thought she was crazy; and when I agreed, I knew I was crazy. However, that is the kind of person she is; she gets things done, and she is always thinking of more interesting ways to get them done. It is no wonder that the Journal has grown as it has under her direction. It has been inspiring to work with her and to help select the thoughtful responses by these authors to the central controversy of this issue; they address different facets of the problem from a range …

The Future Of Colleges Of Education, Francisco Rios

Journal of Educational Controversy

This is a particularly challenging time for public education. There has been a coordinated, incessant attack on public education on just about every front, including challenges to its public purposes. Those who subscribe to neo-liberalism seek purposes associated with free-market reforms, such as viewing students as customers and for-pay educational services. The attacks on public education include a national narrative challenging educational professionalism, creativity, and responsiveness to the tasks educators undertake and issues they address, advocating instead for research-based and scripted curricula and controlled instruction with direction to maintain fidelity to what is prescribed. These attacks also include an over-reliance …

The Schools Our Children Still Deserve, Alfie Kohn

Journal of Educational Controversy

The title I originally had in mind for the 1999 book that became The Schools Our Children Deserve was Better Schools Than We Had. The idea here was that we want our kids’ education to be superior to what most of us received (and I use that last word deliberately, with its implications of passivity). You’d think such a desire would be uncontroversial; after all, parents say they hope their children will be more successful in conventional terms than they, themselves, have been: more years in school, more prestigious careers, and so on. But when it comes to the …

An Endarkened Learning And Transformative Education For Freedom Dreams: The Education Our Children Deserve, Brenda G. Juárez, Cleveland Hayes

Journal of Educational Controversy

What kind of education do our children deserve? Whose vision of education will prevail? Should we provide our children with an education that prepares them to meet the needs of big industry companies, as hinted at in the epigraphs above: Is this the kind of education our children deserve? Or, as the student suggests, by noting the disjuncture between the county’s medium salary and its high school graduation rate, should we provide our children with an education that prepares them to critique and transform the existing and historical dominance of big industry companies: Is this the kind of education our …

Public Speech And Religion In The Public Square: Creating Citizens Who Can Breach The Wall, John F. Covaleskie

Journal of Educational Controversy

One of the problems with treating schools like a market and treating students and parents like customers is that what students might want from schools is not necessarily what they deserve. Preparation for democratic life—learning to give as well as to take in public discourse, learning to hold others as dearly as myself—may not at all be what children want, but it is what they deserve. Further, democracy is both messy and contentious. Religion is one, but hardly the only, fundamental commitment that divides us, and fundamental commitments by their nature are not easily compromised. And when not religion, it …

The Teachers Our Children Deserve, David Carroll, Annie Parker

Journal of Educational Controversy

In describing “the schools our children deserve,” Alfie Kohn focuses on “moving beyond traditional classrooms and tougher standards” (1999) to argue for a progressive re-invention of schools. Kohn’s book also prompts us to think about the teachers our children deserve. By implication, from Kohn’s argument, the teachers who would work in the schools he envisions must be prepared to give learners an active role, honor their thinking, and enable their questions to help shape curriculum. Drawing upon Dewey, Kohn positions teachers as orchestrators of democracy as they negotiate the challenges and interactions of daily classroom life. Such teachers see their …

Is This What Democracy Looks Like? A Personal Retrospective, Deborah Meier

Journal of Educational Controversy

I sometimes feel I’m stuck in an Alice-in-Wonderland world. Other times I feel that someone has created this bewilderment on purpose and I start looking for the Red Queen.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education submitted a report titled, "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform." Since the publication of that report, we have suffered continual attempts at reform, having now arrived at a time when bureaucrats and politicians far removed from local community schools can use standardized test results to establish criteria for disciplining schools, removing principals and teachers, and defining school …

Five Minds Our Children Deserve: Why They’Re Needed, How To Nurture Them, Katie Davis, Howard Gardner

Journal of Educational Controversy

We describe the five minds that should be nurtured in all children to prepare them to become both good workers and good citizens of a complex, every-changing society. In light of the central role that digital media technologies play in such a society, we explore the way in which digital media affect the development and expression of the five minds, as well as the distinct challenges of cultivating each mind in a digital era. We then delineate the types of schools we believe are best suited to meet these challenges. In conclusion, we consider the pedagogical practices required to develop …

Our Children Need . . . “Education For Resistance”, Geneva Gay

Journal of Educational Controversy

Children and youth in the United States are bombarded and besieged with numerous demands, temptations, and enticements on their time, energy, attention, and allegiance. The magnitude and complexity of these are unprecedented. Whether positive or negative, they create a chaotic and confusing society that often sends conflicting and contradictory messages. The severity and complexity of human problems demand from children, youth, and adults “inclinations, dispositions, and knowledge quite different from those that have shaped, and continue to shape, our social identities and ideological outlooks, moral preferences, and attitudinal priorities” (Shapiro, 2009, p. 1). They also require an education different from …

Dewey And An “Organizing Approach To Teaching”, Mary Finn

Journal of Educational Controversy

To move from a “model of scholarship where students are treated as passive vessels to be filled, to a problem-posing, relational, publicly engaged critical pedagogy that connects to public work that they hold to be meaningful…requires an organizing approach to teaching” (Sandro, 2002).

Education organizing has been added to many community organizers’ portfolio in recent years. To sustain, for the long term, the power they gain over social and economic policy and practices that are detrimental to their community, organizers understand it is essential to reduce the educational achievement gap between students of differently resourced families and to assure their …

The Politics Of Arrested Development: Deepening The Purposes Of Education, Paul Shaker

Journal of Educational Controversy

How do you turn the voters of the world’s lighthouse democracy against their elected government? How do you convince the mass of those citizens to deny themselves basic human rights and economic security?

“The Dog Ate My Homework”: Embracing Risk In The Chilling Climate Of No Excuses Schools, Alice E. Ginsberg

Journal of Educational Controversy

I realize that this title is both provocative and potentially very puzzling in the current environment of educational policy and reform. Many would ask: Haven’t we already risked too much? Indeed, haven’t we identified ourselves as an entire Nation at Risk, with an increasing number of students labeled at-risk?

The Arizona State Legislation: Hb 2281

Journal of Educational Controversy

HB 2281 prohibits a school district or charter school from including courses or classes that either promote the overthrow of the United States government or promote resentment toward a race or class of people.

Obama’S School Choice: Shouldn’T The Education That Malia And Sasha Receive Be Available To All?, David Marshak

Journal of Educational Controversy

Our colleague David Marshak has just published this provocative piece for the August 3rd issue of Education Week and has permitted us to reproduce it on our blog. David is professor emeritus at Seattle University and our colleague here at Western Washington University. In his article, he describes the Sidwell Friends School that President Obama's children attend and asks why all children don't have this kind of education available to them. In asking this question, David exposes the wrongheaded direction that the public school is taking today. All children may not be able to attend this kind of elite private …

Universal Public Education—Our (Contradictory) Missions, P. L. Thomas

Journal of Educational Controversy

Thomas Jefferson (1900), in his autobiography from 1821, clarifies for us where our focus must be if we truly value the education of all people born with inalienable right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness:

The less wealthy people. . . , by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government; and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen. (p. 50)

And as he charged many years before, in …