Monthly Archives: December 2008

unequal starts

Last week, we joined about 250 other parents in the bleachers of the Belmont (MA) High School gym. Spread across the floor were musical bands ranging from elementary school beginners to the high school’s wind ensemble. The bands took turns playing for more than two hours. While they waited, the 5th- and 6th-grade musicians near me were all reading books–flopping around in their chairs but quiet and intent on their fiction. A little further away, the 7th- and 8th-graders mostly had big textbooks out and were doing homework. Even though there were about 500 people in the room, the only significant background noise was an occasional infant’s cry.

These hundreds of children and parents were all focused all evening on the reading and performance of music and other texts. The whole event was intentionally “developmental”–the 9-year-olds could hear the expertise and success of the high school seniors, who were asked to help the younger kids with their instruments and stands. It was a community-wide function, combining kids from three levels of public school and a significant local nonprofit organization. We were witnessing only about one third of the whole enterprise, because there are equally large events for string ensembles and choruses, not to mention a parent/teacher band.

I suppose one could criticize the program. It takes a lot of parents’ time. Scheduling lessons can produce family stress. These kids are not learning how to organize their own activities because so much of what they do is organized for them. (I write this not at all as a personal complaint but because of the work of the sociologist Annette Lareau.) One could also criticize the music, most of which is written by very minor band composers.

But overall, surely, Belmont Bandarama Night is a model of success and achievement. Kids are receiving massive investments–not only from their well-funded schools, but also from their own parents and other volunteer adults. The investments take the form of time, attention, skill, and awareness of prevailing status markers–each as important as cash. The kids respond with intellectual discipline. Even the teenagers are willing to act publicly in ways that please adults. For instance, the high school chorus recently dressed in medieval costumes to sing downtown. In some communities I can think of, you’d be beaten up for wearing doublet and hose and singing “Greensleeves.” These youth will win prizes, pass tests, attend colleges, and enter the middle class, replicating their parents’ social position. Cultural capital will appreciate and be inherited.

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a game for teaching civics

(Tampa, FL) I have come down here to begin training high school teachers to use a new software package that we call “The Legislative Aide Game.” Students in social studies classes here will log onto a web site that treats them as interns in a fictitious Tampa-area legislator’s office. They will put a real biography on the legislator’s web page and start to receive emails with assignments from the legislator’s staff. These assignments will ask them to study an issue in the real community of Tampa. They will do some initial reading and web research, and then they will start using the same software that we have implemented with college students in Boston. They will generate network maps of people, organizations, and issues relevant to their overall topic. They will interview the people they have put on the map and store the information they learn in nodes. The map will help them to identify “levers”–people, organizations, and networks that are in a position to make a difference on the assigned issue. The students will conclude by writing and presenting an action plan that takes advantage of the “change levers” of the community. Although they don’t have to perform a service or action project in the real world to complete our curriculum, that would be a natural next step.

The teachers I met with this afternoon seemed fairly excited about the project, which will begin in January.

“service” and exploitation

I can’t go into details yet about our data or methods, but we have been talking to inner-city youth about civic and political engagement. I’m forming the hypothesis that when young, working-class and poor Americans hear about “volunteering,” “community service,” or “giving back to the community,” they think of manual labor for no pay. The example that comes up most often is cleaning a street or park. These are precisely the jobs that people in their families and neighborhoods are paid to do (but not paid enough). Nor are such workers treated respectfully by their clients or supervisors; nor do they get opportunities for learning or leadership on the job.

The young adults we talked to attended high schools in which “service-learning” was mandatory. Often in such cases, the students end up cleaning or painting public facilities, under the direction of middle-class adults (teachers and others). So while Mom is cleaning hotel rooms for minimum wage and no benefits, her children may be cleaning parks as part of their education for democracy.

I can hardly think of anything more alienating than to be told that you are now going to study democracy and community, that you will learn habits that you should stick with for the rest of your life, that the way you’re going to study citizenship is to perform low-skilled manual labor, and that no one is going to pay you for that work.

I am proud to be part of the movement for community service and service-learning. I think these opportunities should be expanded. But the first rule is, Do no harm. If done poorly in the context of working-class life, I think service-learning could be one of the most effective and lasting way schools have to disempower their youth.

that narrow curriculum: it’s not all about NCLB

Some time ago, we received a Ford Foundation grant to document the problem that almost everyone decried: because of the testing requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act (the comprehensive federal law related to pre-college education), schools were focusing on math and reading to the exclusion of social studies, art, music, physical education, and extracurriculars. All the data that supposedly demonstrated this problem came from current surveys of educational administrators or citizens, who were asked to say whether they believed curricula had narrowed since the passage of NCLB. They said yes.

We set out to provide supportive evidence by examining historical data about what teachers actually teach and kids actually study (based on contemporaneous surveys of students and teachers). What we found was much more complex and nuanced than our original hypothesis. Instead of “documenting” a problem, we showed that it didn’t exist in the way we had expected.

  • Transcripts show that high school students are studying more diverse subjects. Narrowing is not a problem at the high school level.
  • There is no evidence of curricular change in middle school in the last decade.
  • There has been some narrowing in elementary school, but mostly at first grade. Moreover, the narrowing trend began before NCLB and affects private schools just as much as public schools. Thus the cause is probably not NCLB but rather a combination of parents’ and teachers’ priorities, textbooks, state laws, local policies, etc.
  • We had expected that new teachers would be most likely to focus on reading and math, because they have entered the profession under NCLB. In fact, more experienced teachers offer a narrower curriculum; new teachers are more likely to offer arts and social studies.

I personally believe that the narrowing of the curriculum in the early grades is a significant problem. But it cannot be solved by lifting testing provisions in NCLB. It’s a much broader and more complex issue.

turning “friends” into supporters

In our Boston-area social networking project and related work, we hear repeatedly that the challenge is to convert online connections into “real world” action. Young people are heavy users of online tools like MySpace and Facebook, but they are also quick to criticize these tools for being too easy and superficial and not necessarily changing the world. Allison Fine is producing a series of podcast interviews on the topic. Her first guests are Jonathan Colman of the Nature Conservancy and Carie Lewis of the Humane Society of the United States, both of whom are using Facebook’s “Causes” application effectively. Download the MP3 podcast or check out the site for the series.

Our own criteria of success include the number of students who conduct service or activism as a result of using our social-networking tools, the number of organizations they serve, and the demographic diversity of their networks. We won’t succeed unless they go offline.