What is the difference between the AFT and the NEA?

The AFT (the American Federation of Teachers) and the NEA (the National Education Association) are the two largest nationa teacher unions.

"I suppose this is something I should know, but I don't, so does anyone out there know what the difference between the NEA and the AFT are?" That is the question asked by Matt Iglesias in his blog, and a number of well-informed readers of his blog obliged with a well clarifying picture of the two unions.

One of the readers of the Iglesias blog notes very informatively:

Historically the NEA viewed teaching as a profession and itself as a professional organization, similar to the AMA. It would help teachers take their place in society and from time to time assist in the peer-to-peer discussions that would occur when wages and working conditions needed to be adjusted.

The AFT viewed teaching, in its political and contractual interactions at least, as a form of hourly labor best thought of in the framework of an industrial trade union (and it is a member of the AFL-CIO).

From the 1940s through the 1960s most teachers thought along the lines of the NEA, and where teachers were organized they tended to join the NEA.

When the 1970s rolled around, stagflation hit, budgets started getting cut, and teachers bearing the brunt of the problems with city school systems, it became apparent that those in power considered teachers to be akin to janitors rather than doctors, and treated them accordingly. At that point the AFT started to grow and take membership away from the NEA. In reaction the NEA became more politically involved and active, but never as much so as the AFT.

Teachers are still highly educated, politically aware and active, and have some free time in the afternoons - so they have always been a good source of foot labor for the Dems. To the extent that the AFT is still more militant and more active, they are the ones that have the most influence on the Dems, but the NEA was still larger numerically last time I checked.

...

One difference is that the AFT, brought to national prominence by Albert Shanker, tends to act more like a regular union, going on strikes, etc., and the NEA more like a professional organization, less militant in its tactics. On the other hand, the AFT has been more willing to consider various accountability/curriculum reforms than the NEA. Certainly true under Shanker, who b/c almost a kind of neocon,this may have changed more recently. AFT tends to be more urban, NEA suburban.

Here's a link to a argument that they should merge that runs down some differences:
http://www.educationpolicy.org/files/neaftbk/book0000.htm#I6

I'd say the Dems are in hock to both. AFT at the local level on issues of pay/work rules. NEA at the national level on the need to water down accountability reforms.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - the contrarian genius

"It would have been better for the peace of France if this man had never existed", said Napoleon of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Or here is what Voltaire wrote to Rousseau about "The Social Contract":

"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves."

A recent biography of Rousseau's life, by Leo Damrosch, apparently hits all bases. Damrosh himself summarizes it very nicely:

Rousseau was "...describing a state of nature that never existed, a political system that never could exist and an educational scheme that never should exist."

The first chapter can be read here. For a summary of the biography, please see Stacy Schiff's 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau' - an unruly mind in the NY Times.

Richard E. Nisbett on Educational Research

Intelligence and how to get it, W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

From p. 67, Nisbett's thoughts of the state of affairs in education research:

"Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on innovative educational programs, and the hundreds upon hundreds of studies evaluating them, the situation in educational research is scandalous. Research is mostly anecdotal, and most self-styled evaluators of educational programs are actually opposed to the experimental method, that is, providing one educational technique to children randomly selected from some population and providing a comparison technique to other randomly selected children. Very little research rises to the level of being scientifically acceptable.

"The situation is as shocking as it would be if pharmaceutical companies were to routinely peddle their medicines without having them backed by evaluation research that went beyond haphazardly giving the medicine to some individuals with a given illness and reporting the percentage of patients who got better (without knowledge of the percentage of patients who would have gotten better without any treatment at all). Only drug trials that identify a patient population and then randomly assign some patients to the treatment condition and some to the non-treatment condition or alternative-treatment condition count as adequate research. Yet this standard is almost never met in research on educational interventions.

...

''Recent research on schools has employed at least some form of control. In some studies, investigators get schools to agree to accept an intervention, for example, a new type of computer instruction for math, and then compare performance at those schools with that at schools that are similar on a predetermined set of criteria, such as social class and race of students, but that were not offered an intervention. This type of research is better than nothing, but not by much. It is susceptible to the self-selection problem: the schools that are offered the intervention may be systematically different in some unknown ways from those not offered the intervention. The problem is particularly acute when there is literal self-selection, that is, when only some of the schools offered the intervention accept it. The schools that accept the intervention may rate better on some of the relevant dimensions than those that do not accept it.

"Also inadequate are studies that simply report scores at schools before the intervention began and compare them with scores after the intervention began. These studies generally yield effect sizes that are substantially greater than those found by studies comparing the schools that had the intervention with presumably comparable schools that did not. An exception to this rule exists when gains after an intervention are extremely large - and discontinuous with what would have been expected if there had been no intervention. Under such circumstances a claim of effectiveness can sometimes be persuasive."

The missing evidence on Learning Styles

Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork have written a survey on Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence

The conclusions are summarized by Daniel Willingham in a Washington Post education blog post.

"... Another article was published reviewing the scientific literature on learning styles. It appeared in a journal called Psychological Science in the Public Interest, published by the Association for Psychological Science.

"This journal has an interesting premise. The editor recruits three or four top researchers to review the scientific literature on a complex topic of public import. The researchers must be knowledgeable, but not directly involved in prior research on the topic, so that they will be impartial.

"The straightforward conclusion matched the one that I have drawn in the past—there is not evidence supporting any of the many learning style theories that have been proposed.

"... The idea that we have in hand a learning styles theory that can be used to improve instruction is remarkably well ingrained. This should raise serious questions about teacher training."

A reader of Willingham's post retorts:

"If the research shows that learning styles is a load of crock, then I will accept that. However, my classroom is a lot more fun for all involved when I present material in a variety of ways. I teach elementary general music, and for any given concept I have a range of activities that include singing, dancing, moving, games, listening, playing instruments, and writing. My students are more engaged, and they have plenty of different chances to master the same concept. So while there might not be different learning styles, I see no reason to stop teaching as if there were. For my students and me, it works."

Does the lack of evidence on Learning Styles mean that teachers should stop presenting material in a variety of ways? Not at all. That practice should continue, because it ensures redundancy and cross-enforcement of the class material presented.

But the crux is that Learning Styles can not be used to excuse students from learning, let's say, more abstract math reasoning because they are not innately 'capable' to learn abstract math.

Daniel Willingham asks: Why does school reading not make better readers?

Willingham's blog post on the Washington Post is a good load of common sense.

"We have supposedly been in the midst of an educational back-to-basics movement since the 1983 release of "A Nation at Risk," a report by a national commission that said American society was in danger of deteriorating because of an eroding public education system.

"Why, then, have reading scores (as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test often called the nation's report card), been flat since 1971?

"One obvious answer is that even if we’re getting back to basics in school, kids read less and less outside of school. Think of all of the new technologies that compete for their time: they have ipods, video games, text messaging, instant messaging, cell phones.

"Who has time to read?

"Surprise! Americans read more now than they did in 1980. A lot more, according to an exhaustive study done at the University of California, San Diego.

"Why? More than ever, we are surrounded by printed words. We read text messages. We read web pages. We read instructions and information on computer games.

"But if we’re reading more, why is literacy dropping?

"If you think that reading is a skill, then practice should improve the skill. We’re reading more than ever, so why aren’t we better than ever at reading? The problem is that, as I’ve noted before, reading comprehension is not a skill.

"Decoding (that is, translating the letters on the page into sounds) is a skill. Practice is necessary for decoding to become fluent ( that is, fast and effortless). Once you’re fluent, the most important factor contributing to comprehension is background knowledge. If you know a bit about the topic, it’s much easier to understand...."

Yet what David Willingham writes is received with sneers:

"I'm sorry", writes reader heatherdc1980, "I can't take your comments about reading comprehension not being a skill seriously. [...] I'm not sure of your pedagogical training, but you will not find a single K-12 reading teacher or reading specialist who agrees with your view."

Which prompts Robert Pondiscio's retort - "Aye, there's the rub..."

On the contrary, while reading volume matters to a certain extent, and can be taught as a skill up to the 2nd or pushing it to 3rd grade - after which progress slows if less attention is paid to the actual reading material content and quality.

Too bad Willingham's and E. D. Hirsch's ideas are completely shunned by current State English language school standards, who make no attempt to specify any content to be included as reading material in K-12 curriculum.

Same observation is made by Sheila Byrd Carmichael et al. regarding the coming National Common Core Reading/Writing/Speaking/Listening Standards, in the Thomas B. Fordham foundation report Stars by which to navigate:

"...The [Common Core] drafters have done a praiseworthy job of defining essential competencies in reading, writing, and speaking and listening for success in both college and the workplace. They are also to be commended for not falling prey to spurious postmodern theories that disavow close reading and encourage interpretations of a text based solely on how it makes the reader feel. Further, the [Common Core] document properly acknowledges that essential communication skills must be embraced and addressed beyond the English classroom, which could lead to valuable collaboration among teachers and more consistent expectations across subjects.

"These skill-centric standards do not, however, suffice to frame a complete English or language arts curriculum. Proper standards for English must also provide enough content guidance to help teachers instill not just useful skills, but also imagination, wonder, and a deep appreciation for our literary heritage. Despite their many virtues, these skills-based competencies cannot serve as a strong framework for the robust liberal arts curricula that will prepare young Americans to thrive as citizens in a free society..."

Debating the Advanced Placement high school program

The New York Times ran a public debate on the Advanced Placement (AP) high school class program. Six specialists were invited to comment on last April's Thomas B. Fordham foundation survey of AP teachers, authored by Ann Duffett and Steve Farkas, which had found that AP class attendance has spiked up in the past years while managing to keep a high academic level. The report indicated that the number of high school students who took one or more AP class had increased from 2002 to 2007 by a remarkable 45%, from 1.1 to 1.6 million.

As usual, the reader's comments are more interesting than the expert opinions. But look at the blackboard picture, pasted from the NYT debate lead page. Quiz: what math detail is wrong?

Can you teach Social Justice...

... if you shun subject matter content? This is what Joanne Jacobs and also Robert Pondiscio are asking, regarding the recent controversy at University of Minnesota’s Education school which pits the American Dream against Social Justice as the 'right' reductionist propositions. The U of M's Teacher Education Redesign Initiative's Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group had submitted its report, where we read:

"The story of the United States is often told in terms of the American Dream. Historian James Truslow Adams is thought to have coined the phrase 'American Dream' in 1931, in his book, The Epic of America. Adams wrote that the American Dream is:

'...That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability and achievement ...It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.'

The Education Redesign report continues:

"Future teachers will understand that despite an ideal about what is considered common culture in the United States, that many groups are typically not included within this celebrated cultural identity and more often than not, many students with multi-generational histories in the United States are routinely perceived to be new immigrants or foreign. That such exclusion is frequently a result of dissimilarities in power and influence."

I can't help but notice that the group titulature, Teacher Education Redesign, sounds awfully close to Teacher Reeducation. If the U of M Education School would be open for some mid XXth Century Eastern European History, with its Reeducation Brigades imposed at the point of bayonets, they would understand why this might be a problem.

Get your history on, or we're condemned to repeat it, right? King Philip's War, the Native American genocide, the French and Indian War, the plight of Blacks and Native Americans in the Revolutionary War, 1812, the conquest of Mexico, the Civil War, the Progressive Era post Reconstruction. All good places to visit. All good excuses to put restless teacher minds to use, especially since these subjects are cursively dismissed in grade and middle schools around the country. Right?

But that would have broken a tenet of school education - that history and content matter are imposing and oppressive. Why bother understanding things of old. Instead, the Education Redesign group will spoon feed future teachers to "make use" in their analysis of the "myth of meritocracy in the United States", the history of white racism "with special focus on current colorblind ideology", and the "history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values".

Curious Social Justice, this one, pitted against meritocracy. Forget that cultural identity and individual differences are hollow if still rested on the old creed of innate limitations. And forget the deeply religious XXth Century American who said:

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream...

"Pedagogy of the Oppressed" - Paulo Freire

"This is truly revolutionary pedagogy", states the 1970's book edition subtitle.

Paulo Freire (1929-1997) taught history and philosophy of education at the University of Recife, in Brazil. His experiments on teaching illiterates in Recife led him to develop a pedagogical method, widely used by the Catholic Church and other groups in literacy campaigns throughout the North East of Brazil. In 1964, a military coup in Brazil put an end to the Freire-inspired literacy campaigns, and imprisoned the philosopher for 70 days as a traitor.

Upon release, Freire was encouraged to leave his country. He moved briefly to Bolivia, then to Chile, where in 1967 he published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. In 1969 he published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was translated to English in 1970 as a best seller.

Harvard University invited Freire as a Visiting Professor in 1969, and a year later Freire moved to Geneva, Switzerland, as a special education adviser to the World Council of Churches. Freire was unable to publish his work in his native country for a long while - not until 1974, when a gradual democratization process began in the country under President Ernesto Geisel. Freire was able to return to Brazil in 1980, where in 1988 he was appointed Secretary of Education for Sao Paulo.

*
Reading Freire's magnum opus, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is an interesting experience. Freire's political views are intertwined with his philosophy of education. If one wonders which came to model the other, his political theory or his theory of education - the answer is found in the way material is ordered within the text. Freire's book starts in the 1st Chapter with a discussion of the class struggle ideology, then moving on in Chapter 2 to a philosophical dissection of pedagogy.

But what formed Freire's view of the class struggle in the 1960's Brazil? What specific examples of oppression did he see? Were them so obvious that they could go unmentioned to his readers? For there is no testimony to oppression acts in the text, and we are left to assume oppression as an axiom. Oppressed peasants may have been illiterate. But if someone in Freire's position as a theoretician of revolution does not describe the oppression acts, they might well be lost to history. We are left to assume a split-class Brazilian society without social bonds and mechanisms serving as glue to hold itself together, without enough levers of freedom to balance the imposition of the haves over the have nots.

Freire's view is that pedagogy should foremost heal oppression.

The central problem is this, he writes: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be "hosts" of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization [p. 33].

Are the illiterate peasants and slum city dwellers better served by a general education for literacy - which lets them draw their own conclusion about class emancipation? Or should their teacher take the automatic next steps for them? The paradigm of pedagogy is that it imparts knowledge, which brings equality, and equality brings emancipation, and emancipation is a political instrument. Freire sees pedagogy directly as emancipation.

As a consequence, more important than the contents of what is taught in class - in Freire's view - is how content is taught. If teachers impart knowledge, "filling" the students with the contents of their narration, then they become oppressors to the students. To Freire it is more important that students learn to free themselves from coercion, even at the expense of learning less material. This is where Freire in effect stands in the line of the older pedagogical philosophies of the pragmatist John Dewey and of the romantic Jean-Jacques Rouseeau.

One could reply to Freire that, as a matter of pedagogy, even coercion itself has less to do with the teaching style and more with the content matter. The most perfectly open and interactive class can still be a venue for political indoctrination - think of history classes which attend to national myths rather than to historic facts.

But the narrator-teacher, to Freire, is the purveyor of a banking system pedagogy, where the teacher deposits knowledge in the student, with the expectation that the student will be able cash it out unchanged. This is a very black-and-white view of the teacher-student relation. Let's go through the list of the narrator-teacher practices, as listed by Freire, which in his view mirror oppressive society as a whole: [p. 59]

a. The teacher teaches and the students are taught. Nothing controversial here.

b. The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing. This is a false antithesis. The students build on earlier knowledge. The teacher may know everything about the subject being taught that very day, but may need to glean from the students what is the most effective way to convey it - that is, in effect, what the teacher needs to learn from the student.

c. The teacher thinks and the students are thought about. The teacher, instead, teaches students how to think.

d. The teacher talks and the students listen - meekly. That is unless of course students are asked to talk and the teacher listens.

e. The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined. True, but the subtlety lies in how the students are disciplined.

f. The teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply. The teacher knows the destination of the conversation, even if multiple paths may lead there.

g. The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher. It remains unexplained what is meant by the teacher's act. But the implication is that the teacher is acting fake.

h. The teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it. In fact, the school, or the education department choose the curriculum content. The students are not yet qualified to be consulted on this point.

i. The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students. But freedom without reflection is freedom of poor quality. True freedom, in Hegelian sense, comes from the integration of the individual within social institutions, and that integration requires knowledge.

j. The teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. Students are the subject, teaching is about them not about the teacher.

In a reflection of old philosophical debates about the primacy of the world of things over the world of ideas, Freire writes [p. 63]:

Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the student's thinking. The teacher cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.

In other words, Freire takes the position that abstract ideas cannot be taught. He does not clarify whether he actually believes abstract ideas really to exist; he would clearly make interesting conversation to Socrates, to whom the unseen ivory-tower ideas were the only immutable truths, opposed to the touchable but changeable things which surround us.

There is a funny paragraph about a group of intellectuals discussing the anthropological concept of culture [p. 69]:

In the midst of the discussion, a peasant who by banking standards was completely ignorant said: "Now I see that without man there is no world." When the educator responded: "Let's say, for the sake of argument, that all the men on earth were to die, but that earth itself remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, the stars... wouldn't all this be a world?" "Oh, no," the peasant replied emphatically. "There would be no one to say: 'This is a world'."

In other words, in absence of consciousness, the world does not exist. That is the ivory-tower idea which the peasant got across, and in doing so he gently proved to Freire that abstract ideas can be taught.

Asylum in Tennessee

German family seeks asylum in the US. in order to be able to home school. Uwe Romeike and his wife, Hannelore, have alleged religious persecution back in Germany and have moved to Morristown, Tenn., last month. Snip from cleveland.com:

Lutz Gorgens, German consul general for the Southeast United States, said he's not familiar with the Romeikes' specific situation but believes the claim of persecution is "far-fetched." He defended Germany's requirements for public education.

"For reasons deeply rooted in history and our belief that only schools properly can ensure the desired level of excellent education, we go a little bit beyond that path which other countries have chosen," Gorgens said.

Germany's approach to homeschooling is starkly different from the United States and other European countries. Homeschool students have been growing by an estimated 8 percent annually in the United States and as of 2007 totaled about 1.5 million.

As upset as you may get with the laic public school system - in the end, is home schooling a good idea?