This blog is now part of the growing collection of democratic education blogs at IDEA: Institute for Democratic Education in America. Visit IDEA at www.democraticeducation.org and thanks for reading!
- Dana Bennis
Visit IDEA for Democratic Education Blogs
June 1st, 2010IDEA: Institute for Democratic Education in America
January 25th, 2010To explain the delay since my last post, I am honored to say that I have been involved with an incredible group of educators and democratic education supporters working to start a new effort to catalyze democratic educational change. It’s called IDEA: the Institute for Democratic Education in America, and you can learn more about it at our website:
IDEA is a national people-powered project designed to publicize and raise credibility for democratic education – education that reflects our democratic values, including freedom and responsibility, participation and collaboration, and equity and justice. Democratic education can be practiced in many ways and in many settings from individual classrooms to entire schools, from non-profit programs to after-school settings, and from early childhood to university levels and beyond.
Democratic education is based on the belief that all young people deserve the opportunity to have a voice in their own learning, to be respected and valued participants in a democratic community, and to gain the skills they need to build a more vibrant and just society.
IDEA’s strategy is to:
- Frame education in terms of democratic values and youth voice
- Build a dynamic community of democratic education practitioners and supporters, and
- Catalyze democratic education change by compiling resources and providing online and on-the-ground organizing to support educational change at the local, regional, national, and international levels.
I’ll be blogging from the IDEA website, along with a great group of IDEA bloggers, including teachers, parents, non-profit leaders, and more. Please visit the site, read the blogs, and add your comments.
We at IDEA welcome your feedback, and we will only be successful with your participation. Find us at www.democraticeducation.org, and write to me directly at dbennis (at) democraticeducation.org.
Onward!
It Matters What We Test For
October 7th, 2009Ever checked out iTunes U? It’s iTunes’ collection of lectures and talks by people from around the world on a huge variety of topics. Basically, it’s like being able to sit in the back of a college lecture hall and hear some pretty smart people talk.
On a recommendation from a friend, I listened to a recording of a talk from a 2008 Stanford University Ethics in Society conference. The topic was “Charter Schools Closing the Achievement Gap: Results from New York City and Chicago,” and the lead speaker was Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford University Professor of Economics and a Hoover Institution Senior Fellow. Hoxby, who recently came out with a new report stemming from similar data, described how the study found that students at charter schools in New York City and Chicago performed better on reading and math scores than students who tried to get into those charter schools but did not get picked in the lottery (most charter schools use lotteries to select from the large pool of students who apply for limited spots).
From a research perspective, what I like about the study is how it controls for family engagement and demographics, since the group selected randomly in the lottery will be similar to the group that was not selected.
However, I was glad to hear my strong concerns about the study reflected by the speaker who was chosen to respond to Hoxby’s talk, Kenneth Strike, a Cultural Foundations of Education Professor at Syracure University. Strike questioned the tools used to assess the students, saying that although math and reading are foundational skills that support other educational goals, “being foundational doesn’t make them proxies for other [goals]” (my emphasis). In other words, we must not forget that there are other educational goals in addition to helping young people learn how to read and do math.
Then came the part I really appreciated. Strike talked about there being both “Cultural Goods” like citizenship and autonomy, as well as “Economic Goods” such as jobs, income, and human capital. He was expanding the goal and purpose of education beyond the narrow approach that looks at young people solely as future workers and job-holders, which justifies a standardized educational delivery for all young people and the merging of the fields of economics and education (such that one can’t be too surprised by policies such as monetary rewards for students).
Strike then questions the assessments themselves:
The way we use testing and accountability has a very high risk of goal distortion. In fact, I think it tends to erode the adequacy and reasonableness of these things [current standardized assessments in math and reading] because it generates so much gaming.
By focusing so much attention on a narrow academic (though important) set of skills, the risk is that we lose sight of other essential educational goals, namely becoming a good citizen, developing autonomy, being creative, working well with other people, etc – Strike’s “Cultural Goods.”
Strike later says that we must look at measures for those cultural sets of skills and try to measure them. They CAN be measured, he says.
They can indeed. Here are a few research studies that study qualities like citizenship, autonomy, creativity, self-determination, compassion, and other important skills. (These often focus more on what kinds of educational environments can best support such skills, rather than a high-stakes test that threatens teachers with firing, students with being held back, and in so doing completely distorting the educational process):
- Self-Determination Theory: hundreds of studies have been carried out researching how people gain and develop self-determination, including the key importance of autonomy-support and internal motivation in learning as well as the negative impact of control and external motivation on learning.
- The Hope Study: research showing that “motivation to learn increases when schools give students more autonomy, a greater sense of belonging, and more opportunities to pursue individual goals.”
- Lives of Passion, School of Hope: a new book that surveys hundreds of graduates of an innovative participatory school, showing that graduates take part in society as active and productive citizens and point to the school as a key reason for that.
- Moral Development in a Democratic School: describes how young people develop moral behavior through being in an environment where they can choose their own activities and where they are involved in decision-making and conflict resolution, providing students with “opportunities for them to develop and deepen understanding of the balance of personal rights and responsibilities within a community.”
- Comparison of Freedom-Based and Conventional Learning Environments: a small study I did as part of my Masters degree, which establishes a correlation between freedom-based schools and a positive school atmosphere, high levels of perceived autonomy-support, high levels of student intrinsic motivation and self-determination, and strong development of personal qualities such as self-confidence, responsibility, and compassion. The results also indicate higher levels of each factor for freedom-based schools as compared to a conventional school.
As Strike says, those important democratic and citizenship skills CAN be measured. We must be wary of the slippery slope potential that measuring could lead to high-stakes assessments in these areas. However, by measuring for these skills we recognize that they are indeed important, and we start to expand the very purpose of education beyond economic goals and standardized academics to include the cultural and citizenship goals that value development of democratic citizenship, self-determination, autonomy, confidence, and compassion.
Reading Rainbow = Democratic Education?
September 2nd, 2009
Remember this show? Watched it, like I did, when you were younger? Loved the theme music? Or perhaps you just heard about it last week when it was reported that it is ending its 26-year run. Regardless, it is indeed a sad day. I was inspired to write about it here after reading an excellent post about it on the PopTen blog. Blogger Morgan Holzer does a great job of capturing the joy and spirit of Reading Rainbow, highlighting some of the great books profiled.
I especially want to point out Morgan’s description of how young people were involved in the show:
Reading was an adventure to be had. It took you to new worlds where anything was possible, and to top it off, you (a kid!) got to review the book in the end. And while pundits decry television, movies, and gaming for dumbing down our youth, I have to say, this is a huge blow as well.
I loved how LeVar Burton (yes, like many others out there I think of him even more as Geordie LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as Kunta Kinte from Alex Haley’s Roots) would always bring in the youth-recommendation section by saying, “But. . . you don’t have to take MY word for it.”
Go Reading Rainbow for respecting young people to review and promote books themselves, and to have the adult host of the show defer to young people rather than saying he is the one to trust on reading! Maybe it was a gimmick to make kids laugh. But I have a feeling there was someone, or someones, on the team creating that show who realized that young people will often listen more to their peers, and that young people themselves have something important to say – in this case, about books.
That belief in and support in the voices of youth – youth voice – is an essential part of democratic education, of good and meaningful education. For that reason, and for the many memories I have of LeVar helping me learn how to make pizza and explore strange new worlds of books, I salute Reading Rainbow and thank you for your many years of reading advocacy and youth empowerment.
New Yes! Magazine Issue on Education
August 25th, 2009
I just received the newest Yes! Magazine issue in my mailbox today. I had heard that the fall issue would be focused on education, and I was excitedly awaiting its delivery. Sure enough, the folks at Yes! did not disappoint. The cover slogan of the issue is, “Learn as You Go,” and the issue features “13 Radical Acts of Education.”
There are articles by leading educators and thinkers like John Taylor Gatto and Ron Miller, an interview with the ever-inspiring Parker Palmer, an account of the great work of Grace Lee Boggs and the Boggs Center in Detroit, and introductions to a ton of great schools and projects like the Albany Free School (where I had the honor and privilege to teach for a year), Foxfire’s community education project running since 1966, the excellent organization Shikshantar in India, and the Reschool Yourself site that chronicles my friend Melia Dicker’s journey to re-visit and re-think her own schooling.
In short, a great snapshot of what education can and ought to be when it is grounded in our nation’s democratic values – where young people, teachers, and community members are dynamic participants in the creation of their own learning and the building of a more vibrant democratic society.
If you don’t subscribe to this incredible magazine, consider signing up or at the very least getting this issue. Yes! is one of the very few magazines out there writing powerfully about the ideas of community living, direct participation, sustainability, equity and justice, and, yes, democratic education.
Talk to Arne Duncan and the U.S. Department of Education
May 11th, 2009Education Secretary Arne Duncan is traveling around speaking and listening to ideas from the public. Wisely, he is also engaging with the public online. Here’s a snippet from his Ed.gov announcement:
I will be going to 15 other places across the country to continue this conversation.
There is one more place I will be going to listen and learn. Here.
In the coming weeks, I will ask questions here. Topics will include raising standards, strengthening teacher quality, using data to improve learning, and turning around low-performing schools.
But I will be reading what you say. So will others here at the U.S. Department of Education.
Today, I want to start with a simple set of questions:
Many states in America are independently considering adopting internationally-benchmarked, college and career-ready standards. Is raising standards a good idea? How should we go about it?
I’m real glad to hear that he is going online, though sad that the democratic engagement piece is missing several key online tools that have become the norm, including on Obama’s transition website, tools such as the ranking of comments and commenting on comments, which would greatly encourage a conversation rather than a straight posting of disconnected thoughts.
Nonetheless, I suggest people go to the site and add their comment. As Duncan wrote, he and members of the U.S. Department of Education will be reading these comments, and I’m taking them at their word. (I surely hope that Obama and his inner circle will be reading them as well, or informed about them from Duncan, so that Obama stays current on the voices of the people on education issues).
Here’s my comment, already posted:
Yes, we should raise standards. But I would differ from your statement about the kinds of standards we should identify and to which we should hold schools accountable. We live in a democratic society grounded in the values of participatory decision-making, individual freedom, personal and community responsibility, and social justice. Therefore, let’s hold schools accountable to practicing those values and nurturing them in young people. Specifically, we might assess the extent to which schools:
- support the voices of students, teachers, parents, and community members in educational decision-making
- provide opportunities for young people to have degrees of control over their own learning
- nurture in students the skills of creativity, curiosity, intellectual development (which is distinct from memorizing academic facts), compassion, cooperation, and self-direction they need to be contributing members of society.
Let us not simply look at young people as adults-in-training to uniformly train into the future workforce. Young people are individuals with unique interests and rights, and the goal of education goes broader than career and workforce. It involves the growth and empowerment of young people to lead successful, happy lives and to be leaders and stewards of the values and rights that form the basis our democratic society.
Ultimately, the over-riding standard for schools in a democracy ought to be that schools are a beacon of democratic values and practice. How can we possibly hope for the strengthening of a more vibrant democratic society without creating spaces for young people to live and learn in democratic environments?
What do you have to say? Join the conversation. Here’s the link again.
School Design That Supports Democratic Education
May 3rd, 2009Amidst all the hot topics in education – high-stakes testing, mayoral control, school choice, and more – one essential issue that seems to get lost in the shuffle (including, to my shame, in this blog) is the arena of educational architecture and design. Yet for me, every now and then, my latent interest in architecture flares up or I discover a new article or website devoted to school architecture, and I am once again reminded that we ignore the topic of physical space and school design to the great detriment of young people.
A few weeks ago, Prakash Nair of the innovative architecture and design company Fielding Nair International, wrote an article for Education Week (PDF link here) on just this topic. I’ve encountered Nair’s name, as well as his partner Randall Fielding, numerous times over the years, and I am deeply impressed with their ideas and designs. They are not only incredible architects, but also insightful education planners and thinkers who create their educational designs in such a way that will support self-directed personalized learning, democratic community participation, and sustainable principles. Nair’s recent article in Ed Week gave recommendations regarding the stimulus money for educational facilities. Wrote Nair:
“If we simply repair broken structures, we will ignore the real problems with American education while giving renewed life to a model of teaching and learning that has been obsolete since the end of the industrial era.
“Let’s start with the fundamental building block of almost every single school in this country: the classroom. Who seriously believes that locking 25 students in a small room with one adult for several hours each day is the best way for them to be “educated”? In the 21st century, education is about project-based learning, connections with peers around the world, service learning, independent research, design and creativity, and, more than anything else, critical thinking and challenges to old assumptions.”
Sound familiar, democratic and progressive educators? Aside from the design bent, these words could have been spoken by anyone from John Dewey to Deborah Meier, from Maria Montessori to Matt Hern and Yaacov Hecht (although admittedly, a couple of those folks would have said “20th” instead of “21st” Century!). Clearly, the democratic education world has allies in the architectural world.
And what does a setting designed to support democratic education look like? What design elements can better enable students to take ownership over their own learning and foster a strong democratic community that upholds the participation and voice of everyone in the learning process? Here are a few key aspects from Fielding and Nair’s articles and designs:
- small schools to insure that every student is known and supported at a personal level
- multifaceted learning studios and common areas for collaborative and hands on activities
- small nooks and study spaces for individualized projects and small group work
- indoor and outdoor spaces to support all kinds of physical activities, including a connection to nature and the environment
- aesthetics that support learning, including indoor and outdoor windows, plentiful daylight, comfortable seating, and deliberately-designed lighting and acoustics
- facilities that support music, theater, and visual arts
Take a listen to an interview with Randall Fielding on Phorecast, in which Fielding explores these theories and how they impact the practical design of school and educational settings. During the interview Fielding mentions the High School for Recording Arts (HSRA) in St. Paul, Minnesota – a school designed by Fielding and Nair’s firm which I had the privilege to visit last year with renowned Minnesota educator and HSRA board member, Wayne Jennings (who Fielding also mentions in the interview).
You can view designs and information about HSRA, as well as Fielding Nair’s other designs, on the Fielding Nair International website. They also wrote a book on this topic, published in 2005: The Language of School Design: Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools.
Luckily, theirs is not the only innovative educational architecture firm out there. I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Interdistrict Downtown School (IDDS) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a school designed with many of the same principles: open windows to the outside and between educational spaces, small and large areas for a variety of collaborative and independent work, and spaces that support physical activity and the arts. IDDS was designed by The Cunningham Group, which also seems to have a solid theoretical stance that supports innovation and personalization in learning.
Another resource to check out, DesignShare is an organization dedicated to supporting many of these same principles in educational design. Their great website includes links to innovative school designs, articles about architecture and schools, and updated news and events related to educational design.
Last but not least, one of the most vibrant schools I have seen also has a great school design: Hadera Democratic School in Hadera, Israel. The Hadera school features a circle of buildings, each with a different focus such as the photography lab or the library or the gym or the self-directed learning lab, all of which form a ring around a large open space in the center for outdoor games, a playground, and more.
Know of other schools that have great designs? Any other resources out there for folks to look into and think about? Please do share. And let’s make sure we keep the element of school design and physical setting front and center in the work for democratic educational change.
“My Suicide”: Youth Voice in a Powerful New Film
April 21st, 2009I recently had the privilege of going to a screening of “My Suicide,” an excellent new film doing the festival circuit and winning awards and much praise. The film won Best Picture in the Generation 14Plus category at the Berlin Film Festival, got great reviews at the South by Southwest Film Festival, and swept the awards at the NYC Gen Art Film Festival this month (where I saw the film) including the Grand Jury Award, Audience Favorite, and the Stargazer Award for lead actor Gabriel Sunday.
What struck me most was the raw, authentic youth voice permeating every aspect of the film: the excellent acting, the writing, the music, the animation sections, and most especially the incredibly relevant way in which the film presents the title issue and the stress, pressures, and influences facing young people today. This should come as no surprise: the team that created “My Suicide” along with Director David Lee Miller was composed largely of young people working with Regenerate Films, a non-profit whose mission is to amplify the voices of young people and produce media “By Youth – For Youth.”
The film (and the trailer, so I’m not giving much away here) begins with Archie, the main character played by Sunday, declaring that for his class project he will kill himself on camera. He then goes on to produce a visual representation of his life, filming himself, fellow students, his parents, and others. To build the tension and bring us into Archie’s world, the pace of the film is rapid and we are often looking at Archie and others through the lens of his own camera. In this way the audience gets a real close and unedited look at Archie’s life, and through that we begin to realize the extent to which media, school, parents, friends, and other pressures influence the lives of young people.
So often issues concerning young people are presented and very often dealt with by adults, without much or any involvement of young people themselves. While adults may be very well-meaning, the lack of youth voices in discussions and problem-solving about issues related to young people has several deep problems. To begin with, such lack of involvement denies young people of their right (asserted in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) to be involved in issues that concern them. They become alienated from adults and youth-serving organizations if they are denied a seat at the table. Indeed it is patronizing to think that young people can not or ought not be involved in issues concerning them. And practically, the ideas and solutions presented without youth involvement often lack relevance to what young people are actually going through. Young people are the experts on what it means to be young, and discussions involving them will lead to richer, more authentic, and more targeted solutions to improving the lives of youth.
(Much more on all this from my gurus on youth voice – Adam Fletcher, and the folks at Youth on Board, among other excellent groups).
Shortly before I saw “My Suicide” I had seen a screening for a film still in the early stages that was also about student stress and suicide. While the film had some good things going for it, I wasn’t at all taken in and gripped by the topic in the way I was with “My Suicide.” Partly I believe this is because the other film was the project of a (albeit very caring and passionate) parent creating a film about young people, and it came off with an adult perspective that I felt was removed from what young people actually go through. It was striking to then see “My Suicide” and realize how different the two films were while dealing with similar issues.
The importance of youth involvement and the pervasive lack of it in society is something I’ve thought about in terms of education, research, public policy, and societal improvement, and I’m glad to think about it now in terms of films and media. Kudos to everyone associated with “My Suicide,” here’s hoping it gets out there big-time.
If you’d like to see “My Suicide,” perhaps you live near one of the festivals they’ll be screening at in the near future:
April 24: Newport Beach Film Festival (southern CA)
May 1-6: San Francisco International Film Festival
May-June: Seattle International Film Festival
Where Will YOU Be the Last Week of June?
March 25th, 2009I know where I’ll NOT be: at any of the following incredible conferences, all of which are booked for around June 25-30, 2009 or thereabouts. I’ll be (excitedly, I might add) celebrating the wedding of my sister-in-law in California. So I implore anyone who can to check out these conferences and head to one. Or head to 2, or even 3! Although I am an avid workshop-bee (buzzing from one workshop to the next when I go to conferences) it may indeed be somewhat difficult to buzz from one state or city to the next. Still, here they are, do look them up and consider going:
1. Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) annual conference in Albany, NY, June 25-28. Continues to be one of the best places to meet up with non-conventional educators from around the country and even the world. Keynotes from excellent speakers (Patch Adams and Deborah Meier are among the crew this year), workshops you can buzz to and from, and late night conversations with anyone and everyone. And young people are welcome and part of the organizing efforts. Also, don’t miss the North American Democratic Education Conference (NADEC) happening at the same site directly before the AERO conference, an experience specifically for those practicing democratic education.
2. Free People, Free Minds: Education Liberation’s conference June 25-28 in Austin, TX. I’ve been hearing about this exciting conference for a bunch of months now, and now that their website is up and running, I’m even more intrigued (and hope to go to their next conference). They merge the pedagogical approach of progressive, student-centered learning with a strong social justice bent and focus specifically on low-income youth and youth of color , something those of us working in non-conventional education need to consider if we are to gain traction and serve all young people. I look forward to hearing how this conference goes.
3. Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) in New York, NY, June 29-30. I attended this amazing conference last year, and it brought me fully into the world I was just starting to learn about on my own: technology, politics, advocacy, social networking, blogging, internet neutrality, and more. They bring the top thinkers and doers in this field, including Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, Jeff Jarvis (I’m reading his new book, What Would Google Do?), Beth Noveck (now in the Obama administration working on technology policy), Joe Rospars of the 2008 Obama campaign, and many others. If you want to learn more about these timely and powerful topics, meet the thousand most “connected” people out there, or if you are involved with social movements or politics, this conference is a mind-blower.
If you are thinking of attending any of these conference, have any thoughts about them, or do attend them, I look forward to hearing from you. Also, know of other conferences and events coming up that others should know about? (I keep feeling that there is yet another conference that same week in June, but can’t seem to remember it. Anyone?)
Who Do We Engage in Conversations about Education?
March 23rd, 2009Two education opinion pieces in the New York Times the past two days have got me thinking about who we seek to engage with in conversation about education. For those passionate about and working for educational change, the short answer might be “anyone and everyone,” right? Well, recently I’ve been wondering if that would be the best use of our time.
To demonstrate what I mean, I’ll briefly describe the two education pieces. The first, by NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in yesterday’s paper, discussed Washington DC Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee’s approach to educational reform, focusing on identifying good and bad teachers, and rewarding or getting rid of them based on their results (aka test scores). The second, appearing in today’s paper by education writer E.D. Hirsch, Jr., proposes more content-specific curriculum and standards so that students will have the knowledge background to score better on tests.
While both pieces unfortunately take an uncritical look at the practice of assessing students and teachers based on test scores, the two writers come from very different starting points. Hirsch’s argument begins with a fundamental stance on the importance of content standards for all children. Looking into his many books confirms this, with titles such as What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know, What Your First Grader Needs to Know, and Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. And here is an excerpt from Hirsch’s op-ed:
These much maligned, fill-in-the-bubble reading tests are technically among the most reliable and valid tests available. The problem is that the reading passages used in these tests are random. They are not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards.
Meanwhile, Kristof’s starting point is that education in the U.S. reflects a deep injustice and “national shame,” and that education itself can be a powerful force for societal change, as he writes in yesterday’s piece:
Education reform could be the most potent antipoverty program in the country, and Ms. Rhee represents the vanguard in this struggle to try new tools to revive American schools.
Just as Hirsch’s starting point with content-standards is clear from his previous writing, Kristof’s social justice, human rights-based starting point is also apparent from his previous columns about the fighting and devastation in Sudan, and the sex trafficking of women around the world, among other topics.
Which leads me to the point that, given that there is an urgent need to work for educational change according to human rights and democratic values and that our personal time and energy is limited, we ought to consider how open people are to questioning their assumptions about education and re-thinking their positions. Perhaps Hirsch, whose core educational stance seems to be the importance of specific pieces of knowledge, may be less likely to think about democratic education than Kristof, who already bases his reporting on the very same values that are at the core of democratic education – namely, participatory decision-making, individual freedom, personal responsibility, and social justice.
The implication being that when there is a choice of who to engage with and reach out to, it may be wise to target those who appear more open and who appear to share one’s values, rather than getting stuck speaking with those who seem to be strongly lined up against those values. This does not mean some people should be completely dismissed, and for sure there will be times when we guess wrongly about where people stand.
Yet, we can get bogged down if we focus on those who are strongly set against our views and are most vocal about it (because, let’s face it, people with the most polarizing of views are often the most emphatic). We may even get burned-out and never realize that while we’ve been putting our energy into the several dozens of outspoken critics we’ve missed out on the several hundreds or several thousands of sometimes quieter potential allies. And I do know that indeed there are many more people who are closer than farther to the views of this blog: that education ought to reflect and practice the democratic values and human rights that our nation and our world hold dear.
So, (as hard as it is to not respond passionately to E.d. Hirsch, Jr. every time he writes something new) let’s not expend all our energy on those who, at least for now, are set in their beliefs in a standardized educational model. Instead, let’s target, identify, and reach out to those people who already know that every sector of our society must reflect and practice the values of a democracy if we are to build a more just, sustainable, productive, and peaceful world. Perhaps they already work for justice in a different sector, such as housing or immigrant rights or world hunger. Perhaps they always tell you about new happenings in the fields of sustainable energy or equal rights for same-sex couples. And perhaps they’d be open to transferring those same motivations for justice and personalization to the education and youth realm.
It is these individuals who can help lay the groundwork for a grassroots, people-powered movement to hold school leaders and policy-makers accountable for an education system and practice guided by our democratic values.
ps – as I posted this, I found a word cloud of Hirsch’s op-ed on Wordle, and decided to do one for Kristof’s, as well as my own post about them both. Thought you might find them intriguing (thanks Gretchen for the Wordle link). You can find these and make your own at www.Wordle.net:
Today’s DE Blog post (also shown below)
