Monthly Archives: October 2011

Transforming Undergraduate Education: Theory that Compels and Practices that Succeed

Donald Harward, former president of Bates College and now director of Bringing Theory to Practice (BTtoP), has edited a newly released book about undergraduate education. The 41 authors tackle the interrelated problems that students often disengage from learning, professors are alienated from teaching, and students are disconnected from communities in ways that harm them psychologically.

University of Michigan Professor Barry Checkoway, Wagner College President Richard Guarasci, and I contribute a chapter on “Renewing the Civic Purposes of Liberal Education.”

In his introduction, Don Harward cites four major themes that run through the volume. In my paraphrase, these are:

  1. Campus cultures can be changed.
  2. Liberal education has epistemological, psychosocial, and civic aspects. The three must be considered together.
  3. Certain troubling behaviors of students can be ameliorated by engaging them better academically.
  4. We have a base of effective programs and centers, but we must move toward deeper and more systematic change.

species of educational reformer

(Washington, DC). Whom have I forgotten or mischaracterized?

The Testing Liberal: Argues that we have failed to educate our least advantaged children because we haven’t believed they can succeed, haven’t cared about them, and haven’t dedicated valuable resources–such as the best teachers–to them. Wants to monitor every child’s progress with standardized tests and respond rapidly to signs of failure.

The Crunchy Liberal: Believes that the most important and effective aspects of education include play, the arts, service, and open discussion. These cannot be measured and are being lost because of testing pressures. May or may not see small schools and charter schools as helpful.

The Social Context Liberal: Presumes that schools have only a small impact on educational outcomes. More important are external factors, ranging from nutrition and racism to crime and parenting styles. May want to devote much more money to schools serving poor children to compensate for their social contexts. May also want to defend the performance of schools as they are.

The Resource Equalizer: Like the Social Context Liberal, primarily concerned that we don’t spend enough money on the children who need it most. May be primarily concerned with funding formulas and mechanisms.

The Modernizer: Cannot believe that we still educate kids in classrooms with fraying textbooks and black- (or white-) boards. Wants everyone playing digital games and creating digital media, possibly from home instead of school. Some in this group are less interested in technology than in teaching 21st century skills or applying recent research on brain science to improve pedagogy.

The Efficiency-through-Consistency Maven: Cannot believe that 98,706 schools, 14,841 school districts, and 50 states are all separately developing curricula, lesson plans, professional development programs, manuals, and reading lists. Sees the potential for huge economies of scale and improvements in quality if teaching is standardized.

The School Choice Libertarian: Favors either charter schools or vouchers to break monopolies seen as inefficient, corrupt, static, and unresponsive to families–especially poor families. Some in this group are more concerned about the education schools’ monopoly on teacher certification than the schools’ monopoly on kids.

The Traditionalist: Admires and would like to return to the neighborhood school of 50 years ago, with prayer, corporal punishment, and high respect for teachers. Is more concerned about perceived declines in mores than about preparation for the 21st century labor market.

The Teacher Organizer: Believes that teachers have been downtrodden by most of the other reformers and wants to empower them collectively to reform schools or systems from the bottom up. May or may not see the teachers’ unions as helpful agents.

The Community Organizer: Emphasizes the importance of social capital, parental engagement, and cooperation between schools and neighborhood associations–including religious congregations. Wants to get the community involved in educating kids, and may distrust external forces (such as markets, state and federal mandates, and textbook companies). Should be concerned that we have only 14,000 school districts, sharply down from 119,001 districts in 1937, when the country was much smaller–because that is a sign of consolidation.

in 1900, they were so twenty-first century

If you heard about the following case studies, when would you guess that they happened?

  • An East Harlem principal decides that he can’t educate his extraordinarily diverse students effectively unless someone addresses out-of-school issues, including drugs, ethnic conflict, and gangs. To address these issues, he needs data and analysis. He enlists teachers, local adults, and students as community researchers; they also undertake service projects to work on the problems they uncover. He focuses the whole curriculum on community problems. He also establishes store-front extensions for adults to drop in.
  • A state decides that reversing serious social problems, such as its poor and shrinking rural communities, will require “social capital” (using that phrase). Recognizing that people are not meeting and talking socially, the state turns its schools into “social centers” and funds evening programs that will bring in adults. At the same time, it creates the first statewide standardized tests and begins disclosing school data to the parents.
  • A superintendent of a mid-sized industrial city worries that education will fail if the city cannot address municipal problems, from corruption to poverty and pollution. To address these problems requires public deliberation. So he turns all the schools into “social centers,” which emphasize public discussions of public issues.

These examples are vividly described by Michael C. Johanek in his paper “Preparing Pluribus for Unum: Historical Perspectives on Civic Education” (PDF). As you might have guessed, they took place between 1890 and 1925. Ideas that we imagine are cutting-edge today–participatory action research, service-learning, deliberation, “themed” high schools, high schools with civic “charters”–were much more common a century ago than they are today.

I learned an enormous amount from Johanek’s paper, but I had previously explored civic reforms ca. 1900 for my book The New Progressive Era. The stereotype that Progressive Era reformers were technocrats and centralizers is one-sided: that was one strand of reform, but it was countered by serious efforts to decentralize power to deliberating laypeople. Thus I was not surprised to read that public deliberation and engagement, social capital, and civic education were influential themes in that era. They were often combined and understood as part of larger movements for social reform. It’s disturbing how much less influential these themes are today.

OWS research

(On a bus near Concord, NH): Occupy Wall Street may turn out to be a historic watershed or a footnote. Either way, it is an important research opportunity, a chance to study social movements, non-hierarchical organizations, citizens’ impact on media (and vice-versa), personal change, and many other topics in real time. Thus I am very interested in Occupy Research, a wiki page that includes a research agenda, a survey instrument, a semi-structured protocol for qualitative interviews, guides for researchers, and even a sample release form. Doing this in a “wiki” style, so that anyone is allowed to edit the instruments, is of course very much in keeping with the ethos of the movement itself. Whether it will yield interesting research is an open question. I do like the instruments and questions so far.

the disaffection election

I learned in DC last week that political consultants are predicting a very low turnout election in 2012. Voter participation will be suppressed by a combination of dissatisfied “base” voters on both sides of the aisle, discouraged independents who won’t believe that their votes can help the economy, a weak Republican field, maybe $8 billion of spending devoted mostly to negative advertising, and new state legislation designed to keep people from voting.

I agree that’s the most realistic prediction, but I would complicate matters just a bit. The 2004 and 2008 elections were marked by relatively high turnout among Americans of all ages (including those of  special interest to CIRCLE: youth). But something about 2008 was more distinctive than its high turnout rate. Large numbers of people– especially young people and left-of-center activists–flocked to one specific operation: the Obama Campaign. Total youth turnout only inched up compared to 2004, but Barack Obama won an utterly unprecedented two-thirds of the youth vote. Most likely, the turnout of left-leaning young people soared, while young conservatives actually stayed home. Further evidence for that thesis: young African Americans set the all-time record for turnout for any young ethnic group, while voting at least 22-1 for Obama.

Not only did many people choose Obama-Biden on Election Day, but they channeled their energy and activism into the official presidential campaign apparatus (or else stayed home entirely, if they weren’t Democrats). For instance, 2008 set a record for the rate of campaign volunteering among young people, as they signed up to knock on doors for Barack. Meanwhile, a vast proportion of all the money donated to political causes flowed directly to the Campaign, with the result that grassroots groups were actually starved of resources.

So I think the question is not whether any presidential campaign will mobilize high levels of interest and support in 2012. That is virtually impossible. The question is whether people will participate at reasonably high rates in other organizations and movements, ranging from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street–and also including the full range of single-issue organizations: environmental, civil rights, pro- and anti-abortion, pro- and anti-immigration, and so on.

The answer will not only influence who wins the White House, but also how American politics unfolds over the next decade. If the electorate is simply demobilized, I would expect current trends to continue. The two parties will battle bitterly over spending levels and priorities as resources shrink. But if the electorate turns its attention to independent political movements, there will be pressure for the official parties to reconfigure and build new coalitions. For better or for worse, the situation will become quite a bit more fluid.