A circle, in a circle, by a circle, on a circle, etc…
April 12, 2008 by alicemercer
Since being named a blogger that Deserves a Bigger Audience, I’ve taken to reading eduwonkette, which received the same accolade. I thought of two pieces recently when reading posts here from Doug Noon, and Michaele Sommerville. Michaele thought I was eating too much paste, or something when I said I was going to tie in her recent piece on kindergarten readiness to and eduwonkette article, but let’s see if I can make this work.
First, Graham Wegner’s comment at Bud the Teacher’s blog talks about the edublogosphere as a series of intersecting circles, where you have some overlap, and connections, but no “center” (sorry Graham if I misread your comment, but that was my take-away). This is how I see the intersections in these articles. Now let me elaborate…
When Worlds Don’t Collide | In Practice
where Doug Noon talks about a report on blogging and literacy instruction of High School students in AP classes.
There are two points he makes, the first is about the limits of this case study both because it’s about a “successful model” (Doug is like me, he learns from failure analysis), and high-end students in getting a high end education.
Next, he discuss the incongruity of reading a study of blogging in a traditional print journal format (no hyperlinks, the author having to translate “WTF”, etc.)
Right about the time he posted this, I read eduwonkette: AERA continued: The Teachings of Russ Whitehurst which had Whitehurst discussing the divide between education researchers who want to study things “scientifically” but don’t seem concerned about real world applications, and policy makers who can’t understand why researchers can’t give them a straight answer (i.e. exact policy objectives) from their research. The two are talking past each other, and that’s similar to the feeling discontinuity that Doug felt reading a print journal article about a plugged-in approach to education. Doug feels that this will be resolved when “credentialing” authorities like research journals cease to be the gatekeepers, as more free flowing information bypasses them, much like policy makers like to bypass researchers, and look for more inviting ideas about how to make schools work based in one-off, “case study” narratives (where is Jamie Escalante when you need him?).
So then in eduwonkette: Why Do Journalists Love Shaky Science on Race? the author(ess) tears to shreds, the often cited notion that lower black academic performance is due to blacks not wanting to “act white”. Tucked in there is what she thinks would make a difference:
We could invoke the standard explanation that journalists don’t understand research, but there is plenty of research (bad and good) on structural causes of achievement gaps (i.e. boring stuff like prenatal care) that receives much less coverage…Culture is much easier to write about than structure – the reasons why black kids show up to kindergarten .4-.6 standard deviations behind white kids don’t translate into a chatty crowd-pleasing story about why school isn’t cool
Basically, they are showing up behind from the very start, before they might have developed much of a notion about what “acting white” and “acting black” might mean.
I thought about the readiness issue (and what eduwonkette thinks it’s caused by) as I read through, That Time of Year…Kindergarten Roundup | In Practice by Michaele Sommerville, where she gave a really nice checklist of information/skills she looks for in new students. I have no idea if you could calculate a standard deviation of students from her list, but it took it from the ephemeral (if heated) discussion of research, to the practical practice of how to judge readiness, so you can address your students’ needs, which brought it back full circle to Whitehurst and the gap between research and practice, and the readiness of the children of haves and have-nots.
If our children need to make connections to learn, then maybe, so do we.
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It’s difficult to synthesize a complex relatedness we may see in a widely distributed discussion about education policy and practice, and I want to say that your (and Graham’s) use of the circles metaphor serves well as a way to describe both the problem, and the need to make connections.
There is a disconnect between research, policy, and practice. The structural problems in society have been laid at the classroom door. I suppose they’ve always been there. But I don’t recall a time when the expectations were so high for schools and teachers to finally solve them. Jean Anyon and Kiersten Greene argue [pdf] that NCLB, as an anti-poverty measure , socializes the cost of corporate irresponsibility, leaving the taxpayers with the consequences of low wages and lack of jobs. Policy makers approach their task with an ideal and a theory of social change in mind that isn’t necessarily borne out in practice. The same is true for researchers. The questions they ask are situated within a world view that may not (and I’d say, usually does not) generally apply.
An important issue that you touch on here is, Who gets to be an authority in discussions about education? Ironically, teachers have little status in the larger discussion. People who work at higher levels get more attention than those of us who work in elementary school. At the elementary level, who listens to kindergarten teachers? I do. One of my favorite kindergarten teachers is my buddy class partner this year. She told me once that kids who don’t know the name of the color ‘red’ in kindergarten will have difficulty learning to read. And while we marvel at the fact that a 5 year-old might not be able to name the basic colors, she struggles with the problem of teaching them something so basic that it cannot simply be told and memorized. The questions Michaele asks, and the observations she makes are testimony to the need for us to approach teaching as a form of inquiry. We should all pay more attention to kindergarten teachers.
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Alice, you interpreted my clumsy metaphor exactly as I intended. Definitely no centre except that it doesn’t stop some people from choosing one circle and trying to tell everyone else that it’s the only one that matters! (By the way, this is the correct spelling of “centre” down under.)
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It seems to me that we can often use studies (like statistics) to prove just about anything we want.
I think Doug has hit a good point about who are the authorities about education. It says a lot that we have a secretary of education who has no teaching experience. Teachers have been pushed out of the conversation. We’re also frequently too busy with the responsibilities of the daily job to fight that battle. That’s likely what must happen however.
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