Curriculum and Students in Classrooms: Everyday Urban Education in an Era of Standardization
242
Curriculum and Students in Classrooms: Everyday Urban Education in an Era of Standardization
242Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781498524964 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Lexington Books |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2020 |
| Series: | Race and Education in the Twenty-First Century |
| Pages: | 242 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.05(w) x 8.78(h) x 0.71(d) |
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Curriculum and Students in Classrooms
Everyday Urban Education in an Era of Standardization
By Walter S. Gershon
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Copyright © 2017 Lexington BooksAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4985-2494-0
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
We live in standardized times, an era parallel to the turn of the last century when we again believe the sciences will save us from our sociocultural patterns and the predictive capabilities of numbers can both plot our pasts and map our futures. Although there are certainly aspects of everyday life that can and should be measured, the continuing assumption that quantitative measurement captures the details of qualitative experiences is in many ways the central vista through which our contemporary lives are governed.
This is particularly evident in contemporary U.S. education where students continue to be measured by a seemingly endless series of standardized assessments. These assessments are in turn representations of state standards, based upon what politicians and advisees believe students should know, and are made in response not to what students learned in class but instead set the timing, pace, and content that students will come to know throughout the course of an academic year. Where assessments in my time as a student and in my earlier teaching career were predominantly created by teachers, it is now fundamentally clear that the tail wags the dog (McNeil, 2000; Taubman, 2009; Valli, Croninger, Chambliss, Graeber and Buese, 2008). This creates a focus on the difficulties and inequities of a standardized testing paradigm, how testing drives kids' everyday classroom lives, and the ways in which teachers, those who spend the most time with students, are often educationally subordinate to those who are the most removed from the daily lives of classrooms, politicians, and corporations (Au and Ferrare, 2015; Metz, 2005).
Making matters worse, our current incarnations of standardized education and its accompanying forms of assessment conflate basic educational assumptions. There is a long history of scholars who argue that teachers' success can be measured by students' outcomes on assessments. The problem with this argument is that students are responsible for their own being/knowing/doing, the complex set of inexorably interrelated processes that people engage when they are involved in educational interactions. Attaching teacher success to student test scores is the logic equivalent of attaching doctors' success to how well their patients take medications. Although there certainly is something to be said for teaching and doctoring well, a combination of attention, intention, care, thought, and knowledge in both cases, these cannot necessarily be measured by the success of students or patients. Teachers teach, students learn, two separate, though often interrelated events.
For example, I often ask students to think about the day they learned long division. Chances are about half the class didn't grasp what their teacher taught. Not the first day, or the first week, or the first month, or even the first year. Conversely, imagine a really awful teacher, someone you hated as a student, I ask the same group of students. Didn't you learn something anyway, in spite of their poor teaching? Although there are certainly contributing factors — such as how clearly the teacher conveyed the information, the multiple steps she took, her attention to students' needs, and the variety of approaches she used to convey that content — the teacher is, at best, in control of 50 percent of this and all educational interactions. Students have to be ready to know something, to grasp ideas, and work to do so. This is because education is reciprocal and interactional, down to conversations with ourselves and the sociocultural norms and values about how one does education (Varenne and McDermott, 1998).
Then there are questions of equity, access, and justice. Contemporary education in the United States has tried to simultaneously attend to the needs of individual children in their roles as students while providing an equitable education for all. Unfortunately, there is overwhelming evidence that current educational practices create a universalist message of sameness-as-equity that serves to mask continuing and increasing educational injustices that are, at their core, anti-Black and Brown, anti-queer, questioning, and trans, anti-female, anti-immigrant, anti-mobility, and, this list is rather long.
What is difficult about these two and other related assumptions is that they are often held by the same group of curriculum scholars. This perspective, that can be traced in a rather direct line from Franklin Bobbit's (1918) The Curriculum, to Ralph Tyler's (1949) Basics Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, Madeline Hunter's (1982) Mastery Learning, and Wiggins and McTighe's (2005) Understanding By Design, is often referred to as the social efficiency group (Kliebard, 2004). It is a set of understandings that conflate being well prepared with being well planned, educational practices with factory assembly lines, efficiency with complexity, and effectiveness with gaining knowledge. From a social efficiency point of view, the best curricula are those that deliver prescribed outcomes for all students regardless of the sociocultural contexts that inform students' lives in and out of schools, the complexity of their humanness in relation to the sociocultural categories through which they are acquired (Varenne and McDermott, 1998, more on this point below), or their individual needs and preferences.
While it is often not framed in this fashion, a social efficiency perspective has much in common with the eugenics policies of its founders, particularly Franklin Bobbitt (see, for example, Winfield, 2007). As incendiary as this claim might at first seem, both eugenics and ends-means education are intentional systems that hide deep prejudices against all who are not Anglo, wealthy, English speaking, male, Christians, etc. For example, there is at least a 100year history of scholarship by renown scholars of color that speaks to the intentional injustices of U.S. education (e.g., Cooper, 1892; hooks, 1988; Watkins, 2011; Woodson, 1933). Woodson argues that physical lynching wouldn't be possible without the educational lynching of Blackness, a point still rings true in many ways today (see, for example, Gershon, 2016, Wozolek, 2015). Further, in addition to the design and use of standardized measurements as means to keep "inferior" races from educational spaces (Winfield, 2007), as I argue elsewhere (Gershon, 2017), education in the United States has always been both a neoliberal and Jim Crow space (on this point, see also Au and Ferrare, 2015 and Spence, 2015).
What in no small part makes these and other such claims seem radical is that a social efficiency perspective continues to dominate educational policy and practice in the United States. Were this not the case, then the following argument from Kenneth Wesson, a founding member of the Association of Black Psychologists, would appear to be so outlandish as to seem laughable — or, at the very least, addressed in the last decade since Henry Giroux's (2003) The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear was first published. "Let's be honest. If poor, inner-city children consistently outscored children from wealthy suburban homes on standardized tests, is anyone naïve enough to believe that we would still insist on using these tests as indicators of success?" (Wesson as cited in Giroux, 2003, p. 89). Yet, still, there is more than a shadow of doubt and a glimmer of truth in this position. If such educational practices were indeed equitable and accessible, righteous, then zip codes would not still be the most consistent marker for students' test scores; gender would not be a factor in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education; and the school-to-prison pipeline would not be so overwhelmingly occupied by young men and women of color who continue to be suspended and expelled at rates exponentially higher than their Anglo peers, two rather interrelated points.
However, there is an odd common ground in the middle of our current educational moment, an understanding shared by both critical educators who oppose this round of a standardized educational paradigm and those who believe it to be a tool for equity and access: good urban schools. By urban schools I mean schools that are in cities and predominantly comprised of poor to working class students of color. Although this definition is explicit or implied across educational scholarship, it is worth noting here because some of the most elite and expensive schools are also in many major U.S. cities, often but a few short blocks from some of the most underserved, underserviced schools in the nation. Schools like the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, started by John Dewey, and Sidwell Friends School in Washington D.C., both schools that President Obama's children attended during his tenure as an Illinois senator and presidential terms, are but two examples.
This book examines a nearly extinct kind of public school in the United States, a truly diverse city school with a majority student of color population that consistently met and exceeded both its state and federal marks in yearly progress. Rather than ask, what does it mean to be a good public school, for this is now nearly always determined by students' scores on their annual standardized assessments, this book examines how everyday education functioned at a good urban school, from the curriculum students received, to the delivery of the curriculum by teachers, through students' reception of those curricula.
At the time this study was conducted (2003–2004) it was not yet clear how such educational practices would shake out: although the state of California had imposed their own requirements of annual yearly progress (AYP), No Child Left Behind (2001) was finally just coming into full swing, Race for the Top (2010) was yet to have been conceived or voted into law, and the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015), the correction to the correction that was NCLB, was over a decade in the future. As will be made clear below, while each act changed in its approach to testing, and, less so, to curricula, they are all in the tradition of social efficiency in which prescribed educational objectives expressed as standards and their effective delivery are the hallmarks of strong educational practice. In short, they are variations on a singular philosophical theme. If each piece of educational legislation were a cereal, they would all be kinds of flakes in similar packaging and equally similar processes of branding, distribution, and nutritional value, but marketed, not unlike various brands of cereal flakes, as if they were in fact radically different improvements.
Another central aspect of this study is that Coachella Elementary, the school that is our focus here, was not just a good urban school, it ranked as a good school in general due to two overarching factors. First, one of the more truly egalitarian aspects of standardized curricula is that it places the same textbooks in the hands of teachers and students across a given district and, equally as often, throughout an entire state. Geared for Success, the language arts program used at Coachella Elementary, was one such curriculum. It was used across the school's large "urban" school district comprised of both urban and suburban schools as well as across many elementary schools throughout the state of Ohio, for example, where I currently reside.
Second, the universalist approach inherent in standardizing curricula that is part and parcel of a social efficiency perspective creates an educational context in which sameness is understood as a direct pathway to fairness. From this perspective, giving everyone the same material and teaching that material in the same way, all of which ascribe to researchbased best practices, is how one gains educational equity. As this book attests, there is a large, material gap between fairness and justice, a gap through which standardized curricula often reproduce inequity under a veneer of multiculturalism, research-based practices, and fairness.
The remainder of this chapter first addresses concepts central to the study upon which this book is based, from notions of studenting to constructions of curriculum, as well as specific aspects of the study, the contexts that informed this research project, and the book's overarching structure. To begin, I address two central concepts around which this work is considered, questions of culture and curriculum, attending first to a consideration of the complications of culture and then outlining how I understand various forms of curriculum in order to render a more transparent employment of these constructs throughout this book.
CULTURE, CULTURAL FACTS, AND CULTURAL TOOLKITS
Culture is a contested term, particularly around constructions of race where it can be understood in many cases as the instrument in the genesis of "race" on one hand and, paradoxically, as a means to avoid speaking about race on the other. In terms of its inception, social scientists in the mid to late nineteenth-century created and utilized race as a means to "scientifically" explain the white, Anglo, Christian, male superiority over all other "savage" peoples and their ancestors (Blanchard, Bancel, and Deroo, 2009; Blanchard, Boëtsch, and Snoop, 2012). Conversely, regardless of their intentions, "culture" and "ethnicity," often coupled with the word "different" as in "different culture," are terms people often use to not speak about race (for a more in depth discussion see Visweswaran, 2010; for a discussion on avoiding talk about race in preservice education see also see Gershon, Peel and Bilinovich, 2009; Gershon, Bilinovich and Peel, 2010). These are concerns I do not take lightly when employing notions sociocultural of ideas and ideals, norms and values, throughout this book.
Sociocultural norms and values tend to gel into fluidly porous yet nonetheless relatively cohesive perspectives for understanding individual and group interactions, processes that simultaneously reaffirm and recreate what is normal and valued through their use. As a result, while othering in their use, "[c]ulture provides the resources with which people bring themselves and their worlds into being while, at the same time, it constrains the selves and worlds that can be made" (Page, 1991, p. 14). What is normal and valued is therefore what Varenne and McDermott (1998) call "a cultural fact, something that was facted (authors' emphasis, p. 4) and predicated on what was "always already there" (p. 14), the accumulated layers of things that were and are yet again made to be true. For example, that race is a constructed and contested idea/ideal does not interrupt its theoretical or practical importance or its rhetorical and material consequences (e.g., Browne, 2015; Morris, 2016; Shabazz, 2015).
What makes cultural analysis potentially powerful for studying overly familiar places like schools and classrooms is that such examinations can speak not only to local choices about how to do school but also to increasingly less local understandings about people, objects, and ecologies in relation. In short, such norms and values are social.
"Social" in this phrase, social construction, has two connotations. First, meaning is a joint production. Even though meaning is taken as something each person designates, individuals' perspectives are shaped, moment-to-moment, by the perspectives of others. ... "Social" also connotes the impingement of wider contexts on the meanings individuals construct face-to-face. (Page, 1991, p. 12)
In these ways, students answering their teachers' questions simultaneously create understandings of academic content, social interpretations about classroom interactions, their relationships to peers and teacher, and operate within previously constructed pathways of how school works and classrooms are to function. It also means that the ideas and ideals expressed in school, although certainly often reiterated and reaffirmed through school and schooling, are expressions of the warp and weft of increasingly less local sociocultural norms and values.
This does not mean, however, that sociocultural norms and values are equally applied or that there is equal access to such knowledge (e.g., Cooper, 1892; Delpit, 2013; Page and Valli, 1991; Rist, 1973; Woodson, 1933). Ann Swidler's (2001) metaphor is helpful here in remembering that people use culture "as a bag of tricks or an oddly assorted tool kit (see Swidler, 1986) containing implements of varying shapes that fit the hand more or less well, are not always easy to use, and only sometimes do the job" (p. 24). In this understanding of culture, a person draws from a repertoire of available cultural tools that best fit a given context even when that tool is not ultimately useful or the person is not particularly skilled in its use. As will become clear as this book unfolds, even the best intentions can carry longstanding inequities and result in curricular processes that reproduce manufactured sociocultural deficits, providing curricular tools designed to empower that instead either practically constrain or grant access to all in ways that only some can use to their benefit.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Curriculum and Students in Classrooms by Walter S. Gershon. Copyright © 2017 Lexington Books. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc..
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