Musings while writing my book

The stakes are so high. I think of George Moses and what he calls the battle for survival. It is a crisis when children are being harmed and they are. They are harmed by test driven pedagogy that is rooted in deficit ideologies about who poor children from non-dominant groups are and what they are capable of. But as Jim Gee told me one time, “schools are bad for all children, white kids just get As for it”. We don’t see the damage so much in white middle class kids because of their tendency to score well and because they receive additional supports in their home communities. Not that poor black kids don’t get support at home, that’s for sure. But something about school (don’t think it’s the ‘matching” practices issue) kills them. White kids are not killed in schools but damage is being done nonetheless. Damage to innovative and creative thinking (Robinson); damage to critical thinking. By critical I don’t mean the ability to analyze or reason. I mean the ability to deconstruct power relations evident in texts (broadly defined) and uncover inequalities in order to rectify them. This is definitely not happening in schools. Frankly, not even the boring definition of “critical” is happening in schools. Pre-packaged, test driven pedagogies have stamped that out. Comprehension becomes the ability to retell a story. Understanding doesn’t seem to count and it’s difficult to understand when texts are abridged or shortened to the point of no longer making any sense.

What’s frustrating is that we (educational researchers) know a ton about this stuff. We know that you can’t do reform from the top down, outside in (Darling-Hammond, Tyack, Cuban, Sarason). We’ve known this for 25 years or more. Yet, government continues to impose reform from the outside and districts implement from the top down. Funny that down is always teachers. And the one grass roots, teacher-driven reform I know of – Whole Language – was squashed vehemently and even banned. Never mind students – they don’t count in the equation at all until their test scores are posted on the classroom door. Now those same scores will drive teacher evaluations in spite of the complete lack of evidence of a connection between teacher performance and student test scores.

We know a ton about learning, especially now that we have been studying the learning theory in video games (Gee) and digital environments (Ito et al.), none of which is in schools. And we know that if we take video games or other digital practices into schools without first transforming schools, we’ll kill whatever it is that makes them attractive to students in the first place.  Street would call this pedagogization or the sucking in of anything meaningful or authentic into autonomous definitions of knowledge. And we are right back into assumptions of inequality of intelligence and the pedagogical myth.