Can Progressive Education Thrive Under Arne Duncan?
by: Alana Yu-lan Price on November 13th, 2009 | 12 Comments »
All fifty states are buzzing with news about the $4.35 billion in federal education grants now available for school improvement initiatives.
Obama and Duncan announce education grants.
The Obama administration released the final rules for its Race to the Top competition Wednesday, outlining how states can prove themselves worthy of the grant money. States that experiment with charter schools, track student gains over time, use standardized tests to evaluate teachers, and overhaul struggling schools by dismissing teachers en masse are poised to rake in the most money. California and Wisconsin have already sought to become more competitive by changing their laws to allow teacher pay to be linked to student test scores.
It’s great that our executive branch is finally funneling some money toward education — what a welcome change from the last administration! But I can’t help but remain wary of Arne Duncan’s latest exploit, given his track record of inviting the Pentagon into Chicago schools and handing struggling public schools to private contractors.
Here’s what I really want to know: how serious is Duncan when he talks about educational innovation? Might there be an opening for a deep and substantive shift in educational policy right now — a shift away from educational programs that feel oppressive and irrelevant, and toward ones that are instead riveting, joyful, socially engaged, and empowering?
The chance that Duncan will create such an opening is slim according to Black Agenda Report, which has sharply criticized his handling of inner-city Chicago schools:
The “high-stakes testing” regime that has prevailed in Duncan’s [Chicago Public Schools] often makes the inner-city classroom experience unimaginably oppressive. It privileges the authoritarian, mind-dulling search for the narrow-spectrum right answer over the democratic and mind-opening pursuit of the good question. It emphasizes rote, quasi-vocational memorization over the cultivation of intelligent, well-rounded citizenship capacities and creative vision. As Jonathan Kozol notes, it subordinates “critical consciousness” to the “goal of turning minority children into examination soldiers — unquestioning and docile followers of proto-military regulations.”
Nevertheless, with millions of dollars flowing toward education, the time is ripe to push educators to look beyond test scores toward schools focused on helping children to develop empathy, delight, curiosity, and collaborative problem solving skills.
Schools like this already exist. I know because I went to one from kindergarten through eighth grade.
My sixth/seventh/eighth-grade class prepares a picnic.
People don’t believe me when I tell them about it now: No grades. No tests. More pillows than desks. Plenty of recess and reading time. Mixed-age classrooms so that children can teach each other. Training in nonviolent communication strategies and conflict resolution starting in elementary school. “Waiting for the pause” instead of raising hands at age seven. Yearly self-directed independent research projects starting in second grade. Yearly productions of plays written and directed by students. Thematically integrated curricula instead of separate classrooms for separate subjects.
Wingra middle schoolers create a haunted house for younger students on Halloween.
The school, Wingra, is private, but it’s definitely not some prep school that you need to pass a test to attend. It’s a school committed to “progressive education,” and it welcomes students of diverse abilities and temperaments. It’s a good place for kids who can’t sit still through the rigid routines of more traditional programs, as well as for kids who rebel in authoritarian settings. More than a quarter of the students receive tuition scholarships, but the school still struggles to be truly accessible to working class families.
Now imagine how great it would be if massive government grants went toward making education like this accessible to everyone through the public school system!
Wingra’s been on my mind since October, when my middle school teacher, Allen Cross, asked me for reflections about the pros and cons of theme-based integrated curricula. He wanted to share a former student’s thoughts with participants in the Progressive Education Network conference in Washington, D.C.
Research on the effects of integrated theme-based curricula is still pretty sparse, but Allen said members of the Progressive Education Network are starting to gather data and may develop an action research project soon.
Here’s why I hope some of that $4.35 billion in federal grant money will go toward spreading theme-based learning to more schools:
Students sign yearbooks at Wingra in 2007.
Under this model, learning is grounded in pressing questions about how the world works. Whereas segregated curricula push students to achieve competency in separate, abstracted skill sets (that’s often how it felt at my traditionally structured public high school), thematic units make students feel they are always learning something important and new, exploring new methodologies and analytic approaches as they go along. What comes next? A unit on entropy. How do we learn about that? Fractal art, chaos theory, physics, philosophy. And what comes next? A unit on boundaries: immigration, Venn diagrams, osmosis, geographic territories …
For me, one memorable unit in second or third grade was on disabilities: We learned about biology as we studied different sorts of physical disabilities. We learned about the history of the disability rights movement. We learned signs and the alphabet in sign language. We read about Helen Keller. We wrote skits to educate kids in other classes about various disabilities and how to interact in a respectful way with people with disabilities.
Another memorable unit was on waterways: We learned about different waterways around the world. We drew and painted pictures of the lakes and streams in Madison. We wrote poetry about waterways. We learned about pollution in the oceans and rivers. We put on waders, took water samples, and looked at the little organisms that live in water under microscopes.
In middle school, during our unit on the industrial revolution, we read historical fiction, learned about textile mills and various machines, learned about societal shifts from a social science perspective, visited a cloth factory, and learned to spin with drop spindles.
The main weakness of theme-based integrated curricula is that they tend to leave students with a spotty understanding of history: jumping from theme to theme makes it difficult to trace in a continuous way how events unfolded over the centuries. Allen said these days Wingra students trudge through a traditional history textbook, critiquing it but also learning from its chronology. But I bet there are other solutions to this problem, too.
However one solves the history problem, I think theme-based curricula go a long way toward drawing out students’ sense of wonder, awe, and curiosity about the world. Paired with a progressive education approach, this approach can also encourage children to be empathetic and collaborative rather than competitive and status-oriented.
Sound good? Then why not make it happen! We can start by writing to Arne Duncan and talking with local school boards about how to make education feel grounded and engaging.
Dear Dr. Duncan,
I am the parent of third and fifth graders at a public charter school in Baltimore, Maryland. Please generate guidelines and incentives for our schools that encourage arts integration as a modus operandi and that encourage more theme-based learning. As our children make sense of, derive meaning from, and contribute to, our world, they need curricula that balance guidance and foundation-building with opportunities to make creative choices. Arts integration and theme-based curricula foster an exploration of the world and development of sense-making skills that will equip our students to live productively and responsibly.
Sincerely,
Lisa Green-Cudek
Hi, Lisa,
Thanks for taking the time to write this note to Arne Duncan! Have you sent it his way already or were you hoping I’d pass it on? His email address is arne.duncan@ed.gov and his mailing address is LBJ EDUCATION BUILDING, Room 7W311, 400 Maryland Avenue, SW, Washington, DC 20202.
I taught in a PUBLIC middle school on Long Island which, like Lisa’s school, had a WHOLE CHILD philosophy. The school was one of the first to be recognized by the US Department of Education as a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. In the quaint 1980’s, our approach was looked upon as a model of best practices. Now “Best practices” means whatever gets the test scores up— and unfortunately, that’s what the school has now become. More than anything else, the school farm symbolized this Suffolk County’s community’s commitment to its children. I’ve written about the Shoreham Wading River Middle School and former students have chimed in.
http://mrkatzoff.org/news/
Hi Alana,
Great article – very timely and important. A short while ago we were exhibitors at the Teachers for Social Justice Conference in San Francisco. It was incredibly encouraging to be with so many teachers (all ages and stripes) who ARE weaving social justice into their teaching, all realizing that holistic education is much better than drill and kill one subject at a time. Every year we’ve been part of this gathering it has grown and this year was absolutely huge.
Linda Christensen was one of the presenters this year and she just released a fantastic book called “Teaching for Joy and Justice” and a bit of shameless promotion here…… we wouldn’t let her leave the conference without adding that book to our Reach And Teach offerings. She has been inspiring teachers across the country for years to look at the whole child and integrate the whole child into the whole world AND, children who are taught that way get scores that are equal to or higher than the drill-and-kill factories.
Her book is wonderfully inspiring as well as a practical recipe book for any teacher who wants to give this approach a try.
https://www.reachandteach.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=718
Es posible educar niños y niñas en un ambiente armonioso,afectivo y colaborativo.Los paises estan tan preocupados de obtener altos resultados en pruebas estandarizadas que se olvidan de las capacidades individuales de los niños y niñas, nos olvidamos que cada uno aprende de manera diferente ,a ritmos diferentes, pero aprendemos al fin y al cabo. Debemos construir caminos de integración para todos los estudiantes y asi logren ser personas de bien…Nosotros los profesores debemos cuestionarnos a cada momento nuestra labor, ya que trabajamos con personas que tienen contextos de vida diferentes, esquemas mentales diferentes…Trabajar en base a la afectividad si es posible, yo trabajo en un colegio asi, que esta ubicado al final del mundo ,en una ciudad pequeñisima donde se obtienen buenos resultados sin presiones y con pocos recursos…el recurso humano es lo más preciado que tenemos.
Fascinating post. I especially loved all your examples of what you learned and how — the studying of physical disabilities, the images of lots of pillows for cozy reading and how a unit on one thing led naturally to units on other topics. I tell you, my youngest child, especially, would have thrived in such a place. Lives of Passion, School of Hope by Rich Posner tells similar tales, about a progressive public school in Colorado, which studies its alums to answer questions about a school so different from the mainstream: did the kids succeed in college, what do they do for a living, and area they happy, productive adults today? The book is structure around the school’s five goals — one of which especially resonates with me: rediscover the joy of learning. The book shows what’s possible for our public schools — can we take action to CREATE these kinds of schools? My youngest is almost done with teh public school system, but I’d like better for the kids that come next.
Successful education offers joy in life long learning, mastery of knowledges bases, and empowerment thorugh creative engagement of the minds involved–including the teachers’.
Arnes Duncan has got to contentd with a whole slew of forces in public and private schools that threaten all three of these essential aspects of societal enculturation that results in strong, resoning, developed minds, souls and bodies.
Among the challenges the public schools face are these:
*Endemic devaluation of actual learning in cheating by teachers and students.
*Social darwinism and rampant Injustices in the classroom which teach children to fear,bully and hate.
*Violence done to young minds by teachers who are not like Sir, with Love, or Mr. Chips but resemble more the nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest. Schools which babysit rather than instruct the children who are in their charge and rely desperately upon their education to empower lifelong earnings that can complement the wages they have had to hectically hustle to make from the crimializing black market economy that allows poor people, blue collar people, and lower middle class people a chance to survive…
*Pressures incumbant upon powerbrokers like since Mr. Arne Duncan to reform a public school system which has been classist, academically and vocationally failed and discriminatory since pre-Jim Crow, in a nation which decorates and bails out its banks but lets its children study in bathrooms and cubicles among predators of assorted and myriad kinds eincluding the alien vultures who have no respect whatever for the learning capacity or precious vital potentiated nature of their students
*Boards of Education so rife with purchase power, turf and ego struggles, and play wicked foolish shaming/blaming/ostracizing games to ensure their incumbencies that they might not recognize ways in which to mitigate these problems in actuality (rather than add to the body of lies on paper) if Gabriel was attending them with a message from G-d
*The criminal lack of involvement of panels of children in assessing and reforming education
*The essential need for the uniformity of global standards to help mitigate the loss and waste of our most vulnerable children who move from place to place like gypsy nomads only not from choice and their culture but from economic insufficency and environmental instability such as the nation’s shame, its foster “care”
*The inability of the plutocrats at the top of most administrative structures to understand that many many children WANT to graduate high school with vocational rather than skills which mean they can make a living NOW, not indenture themselves to debt service for life by attending college
The unwillingness of far too many bureaucrats to free schools from the impentrable layers of paperwork that do not educate anyone and result only in more time spent cheating the children and the quality conttrol folks than devoted by helping professionals whoi could actually be offfering cunseling and support to abandoned multiply besieged children instead of testing them for special education needs which cripple with their very diagnosis
*the inability of the vast majority of people in education work to cease with the focus on schools of education and focus instead on teachers who can teach, and are motivated to do so, who are educated and intelligent individuals from a myriad of life paths who share a passion and ability (can ONLY be demonstrated) for empowering inspiring and sparking a joy for learning in children.
i will add one mroe, becaue it is so important–
the aboslutely STUPID focus on corporate programming of educational “systems” that are supposedly “researched” byu the very people who are active in education who agceve us an increasingly failed system .
eclecticism and a variety fo approaches to educational empowerment that works can be complemented by particular programs, but these programs can be developed best by allowing for creativity and intellectual application among the community to meet global standards, rather than by mass producing sytems which are designed to provide maximum benefit to those who sell them(profiteers) rather than to those who receive them (students, teachers, communities).
The creative application of a national basic curriculum the States can fine tune, and the instruction of every tecaher and adminsitrator and student in Total Quality Management principles, rather than emprisonment of staff and students in lock-step enlightenment- proof bunkers of educational dogma by profitseeking publishers, would , for example, result in a whole plethora of creative and positive models that could be adopted, not legislated or enforced, by communities who want to provide an experience in public education that could include the approaches that so many writers above have said were marvelous for themselves or their loved ones.
Believe it or not….forty years ago I was a pioneer of establishing the combination of Montessori Method and Open Classroom in Corbin City, New Jersey instead of the chalk and talk method according to the progressive education for deaf students. To be honest, the program was very succcessful and effective because we were very happy at working closely with individuals in the friendly and warm enviornment for more than 10 years.We must follow individual’s own unique development and needs due to their various learning styles through the daily process of causes and effect like TIKKUN instead of the school curriculum so we can feel part of each other like a warm family. There is no doubt that the students will become happy learners in order to enable them to avoid becoming enemies and violent.
In fact some people from the Department of Education visited our classrooms and asked me to share my teaching experiences with audiene at the conferences with sign language interpreter. I did get a lot of positive remarks and praises.
I recommend that Arne Duncan restores the Progressive Education very soon.
I loved this post. I’m positively jumping for joy after reading it.
My kids attended (well, one still does) and Open Classroom Magnet school and I can tell you the stark contrast in school experience and love for learning, retention of knowledge and focus on conceptual understanding (you cannot teach genuine full-bodied “critical thinking” with a standards-based curriculum. It is PROVEN ineffective, you must teach concepts-based learning) that OC programs represent compared to the ave public middle school experience under NCLB. My eldest is in 7th grade and her past two years of un-progressive traditional school have been pure unmitigated HELL. I had a child who loved to learn and could think critically about any set of “facts” and now all she wants to do is stay home. She HATES school. Thank you NCLB and standards-based education.
The reason theme-integrated education works so well is that it is essentially a concepts-based approach to learning. What I’ve witnessed in the past 8 years of Open Classroom involvement is that theme-integrated curricula suffers and declines when forced into NCLB style standards-based education. I’ve watched the devolution happen.
I volunteer in OC supplementary education program “enrichment” in our OC’s 4th-6th grade program. In 18 hours of theme-integrated, special programming over the academic year, that I provide my OC students (using a concepts-based approach to learning–intentionally undermining and subverting the “standards”) I can and have put my OC students against traditional public school kids under NCLB in demonstrating knowledge per the California standards. Guess who tested higher and could demonstrate superior knowledge, most above and off the charts for grade level standards criteria ? My students. We’ve done this for three years to demonstrate to the our school board why we need to change. Their response to us? Gutting the magnet program (our teachers were cut first on Pink Friday last spring). One school board member was quoted as saying, “these are potential troublemakers, they’ll get our funding cut.” Wow. When money is more important than educating a child, is it a surprise that America is now utterly failing our kids under NCLB?
And what’s the power-base’s concern, the owning class’ concern and action in education?Tie teacher pay to standardized test scores, enshrine NCLB and standards-based education. With “reforms” and “improvements” like this why do we even need schools?
Progressive education is the way to the future, a healthy future, There IS NO other path.
You know the depth of my anger came through in my oost and i have been praying for days to mitigate this anger and make it constructive involvement. While it is entirely true that there are many strengths and beauties inherent to the approaches of themed learning, this notion that it cannot coexist with basic learning satndards whicha re quanitfiable is tenuous, ay best. And though it is marveloous to want for our neighbor what we want for ourself, a topic i am exploring in an op-ed i am writing, long ago one of the best teaching coaches i ever knwew taught me in terms of supervision: the Golden rule is about giving others RESPECT for what they need and want and how they flourish..”some people need a pat on the back, some need a kick in the butt, and some need to be left alone”…
We need to look at the desperation we have created for the classes who are forced to work two jobs as a single, or both parents MUST work to support a family, in order to survive. The folks who are struggling to eat two meals aday at best for themselves and their kids are the children whose backgrounds exclude them from the cultural literacy to engage in testing at the upper levels that will determine the course of their entire lives. Unlike kids whose parents belong to the dominant culture that creates the tests, these kids belong to a werold in which success is defined by the materialism rampant in our society, and by the pimping oh children to market clothes and trinkets from an early age, and by teh sex slavery of girls and young women to titillation and to the young men to impossible standrds of collness that ensure that there are many many social losers so the plutocratic winners with teh expenisvely plastic bodies and chemically whitened teeth and barbarously wasteful hordes of trillion dollar industry in vanity cosmetc bags can be the miserable alpha kids who despise everyone else including themselves and use the world for their own personal hedge funds.
Kids who want to have a family, live in a nieghborhood and own a home where the cost of living is predictable enough for them to save and thrive and keep a family stable, want to work productively and learn all they can that is empowering IN THIS SOCIETY. we haven’t got a society that values learning for learning sake and we haven’t had one for a very long time.
as long as all teh playing feilds are completely unlevel, we need to be aware that love of learning is a key factor in kids valuing education, but niot the only factor. and that for children who know they start out behind others and have to learn all about an upper class alien culture in order to thrive and just to survive, they have a right, and their parents have a right, to ensure that they are not babysat but educated. Standards for edcuation exist ion European and Israeli schools and kids are not suffering any, in fact there is cradle to the grave actually wonderful education available as close as canda…so why don’t we stiop the ones size fits all, demonization of folks who are trying and have succeeded in improving titanic like schools that otehrs deserted long ago, and allowe for a myriad of approaches, as well as the NECESSITY of standards to ensure that the only kidas who are sufferingare not perennially left further behind.
THERE ARE MANY PATHS, one GOAL…love of learning, children who can make their way successfully in an adult world, and the capacity of every child to progress instead of fail in school.the only kids who don’t suffer from a lack of measurable standards that are FAIR and achievable, are the children whose lives ahve eben insulated from birth by wealth and power.
Aminah, Thanks for all your heartfelt and substantive comments on this post. I think you are right that there are many paths to making schools work better for kids, and I didn’t intend my expression of enthusiasm about the theme-based learning I experienced as a call for a one-size-fits-all theme-based approach to be forced on all schools or anything like that. What I would like to see is more teachers and schools discovering the theme-based approach as one strategy to use in their attempts to find ways to make school feel relevant and engaging to students. It’s true that different people have different learning needs and I know some kids who went to my theme-based progressive school who later said they might have done better with a little more structure and some more traditional types of evaluation to motivate them. So I definitely hear what you’re saying about the need to respect the wide variety of backgrounds from which people are coming, and to understand that students come to school with a wide variety of goals and needs. I’m totally open to the idea that there are times and places where theme-based learning might not be the right fit. But I WOULD like to see public education money pour toward the ultimate goal of making school feel socially engaged and empowering to students, whether that be through theme-based learning or some other strategy. I think that focusing on this goal could also help with competence in reading/writing etc. because when students feel school is worthwhile and connected to their lives, they will likely engage with it more deeply and be more likely to absorb the ‘basic competence’ skills that are being taught.
In your most recent comment you argued against the idea that theme-based learning “cannot coexist with basic learning standards which are quantifiable” … I agree with you that these two things are not mutually exclusive, and I agree that standardized test scores can be useful in seeing how well our society is fulfilling its responsibility to provide decent public education to kids in all neighborhoods.
What I’m frustrated about is the way that these tests have by most accounts backed teachers into a corner, forcing many of them to teach to the next test with the goal of boosting scores most instead of thinking more holistically about how best to help students really grasp the material and stay engaged with their learning process. It’s also disturbing how classes such as art and music — which serve as havens or points of engagement for students who are feeling alienated or disaffected — are being cut altogether (since they don’t relate to directly tested skills) instead of being used as an entry point to draw students into other kinds of learning. It’s important to know how struggling schools are doing, but the focus on evaluation becomes counterproductive if teachers start feeling pressured to drill kids on test-taking skills instead of focusing on actual things like reading, critical thinking, and problem solving.