Flip the System US

How Teachers Can Transform Education and Save Democracy

Michael Soskil, Michael Soskil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

This powerful and honest book uncovers how we can flip the system, building a more democratic, equitable, and cohesive society where teacher expertise drives solutions to education challenges. Editor Michael Soskil brings together a team of diverse voices to highlight solutions, spark positive change, and show us the path forward towards a more civil and more peaceful America. In each chapter, inspiring educators describe how we can create lasting and meaningful change by elevating teacher expertise; educating the whole child; increasing teacher morale; and fighting for all of our children to have equitable opportunity and quality schools.

Part I

Public Education as the Foundation of Democratic Society

An educated electorate is critical to a successful democracy. There is, of course, a difference between being “knowledgeable” and being “educated.” The former involved knowing facts and information, while the latter is much more comprehensive. True education includes comprehension of how knowledge intersects with our understanding of ourselves, the context in which our learning occurs, the perspectives of others around us, and how information can be applied to situations outside school. Healthy democracy demands an educated populace, not just a knowledgeable one.

In the decentralized United States education system, state and local jurisdictions have a great deal of influence over curriculum decisions, policies, and the role of teachers. This is important because public schools are, and will continue to be, intimately intertwined culturally and financially with our communities. Decision making is most effective when decisions are driven by those who are impacted most.

A challenge that we have is coordinating those state and local education systems to educate for societal health in their states and communities, but also for our American society. Are there universal values on which education should rest? What is the purpose of education in a democracy? What skills and competencies should our students learn in order to be informed and engaged citizens? How do we do this in our schools and classrooms?

These are some of the questions the authors in Part I will try to answer.

In Chapter 1, Dennis Shirley explains how an evolution from old educational practices to new imperatives for educational change can produce a flipped system with integrity that can better serve our democracy.

Next, Estella Owoimaha-Church (Chapter 2) provides insight into how we can engender civic activism by sharing the results of a student focus group and allowing teenagers to explain what teaching practices are effective—and what makes them disengage.

Gert Biesta (Chapter 3) then provides a detailed examination of the purpose of education in a democracy, explaining that a balance is needed between preparing students for the work they will do after graduation, helping them find themselves as individuals, and assisting them in understanding their place in our society.

In Chapter 4, Michael Soskil delves into the need for our schools and classrooms to reflect the democratic norms we are trying to develop by sharing examples from his own classroom and a school that is based in a democratic philosophy.

Chapter 1

An American Education System with Integrity

Dennis Shirley

This chapter provides a vision for American education in which evidence, teacher expertise, global context, and knowledge of the unique needs and situations of students fuel the system and coincide with a stronger teaching profession. The author asserts that an education system grounded in these new imperatives of educational change and renewed teacher professionalism is critical to transform education and improve democracy in the United States. By overturning an overly bureaucratic and unresponsive system that limits students’ potential and replacing it with a system that is flexible and inclusive of diverse perspectives and opinions, we can shape a future of which we can be proud.

What would it mean to “flip” the American educational system, and to do so in a way that doesn’t inadvertently exacerbate previously existing problems, but actually moves us forward in a fundamentally new and better direction? Looking back on decades of reform, it’s hard not to conclude that in spite of honorable intentions and herculean efforts, at the ground level of our schools and classrooms many reforms have reinforced a traditional grammar of schooling in which emphasis has been placed upon teacher-centered instruction, rigorously sequenced curricula, and elaborate assessments. The effort to streamline teaching and learning and to guide the whole constellation of potential practices in the direction of tests has had many arguments on its behalf and is perfectly attuned for those who place a premium on accountability.

For those with other ends in mind however—such as the preparation of critical and self-directed thinkers who view the strengthening of democracy as not just one option among many, but as an essential task of public schools in an age of democratic decline—a different kind of education is needed. This would be a system designed from the ground up to prepare students to examine multiple perspectives on complex matters, to provide opportunities for spirited debate in the search of the unencumbered truth, and to be willing to do the hard work of compromise and negotiation in the interests of advancing the public good. Such an education cannot be achieved, however, when prominent advocacy groups like the National Council on Education and the Economy (NCEE) use all of their considerable clout to try to get Americans to focus on “surpassing Shanghai” on international large-scale assessments (Tucker, 2011). The greatest value of such rhetoric is that it lays bare the authoritarian premises of so many recent reforms for all to see.

The odd paradox of our time is that at the very moment when so many of the world’s peoples have been brought into continual contact with one another and when one technological breakthrough after another demonstrates the limitless potential of the human imagination, our schools appear on many levels to be entrenched in practices that have no foundation either in research or in demonstrable efficacy. Given the nature of contemporary political polarization, it is perhaps not surprising that when many reformers seek to improve education, they try to circumvent politics altogether—often by using new technologies in innovative ways. When I have discussed the “Flip the System” series with teachers in the U.S., for example, their immediate assumption has been that books such as this one address first and foremost the “flipped classroom,” in which instruction is provided by on-line resources that students view at home, and in which they then work on problems or have their homework checked in class the next day.

The purpose of this volume, however, is not solely instructional in scope. We are serious about wanting to flip the entire school system. We are not only asking just what can be done at the micro-level of individual classrooms by teachers, but rather what also can be done at the meso-level of their schools or the macro-level of their districts or states to improve our schools and to strengthen our democracy. We know that without addressing the larger organizational framework of schools, practice will revert back to what is familiar. We need to have the courage to be honest and to admit that while there is a great deal of potential for democratic participation in American public education, there also have been powerful counteracting forces in place for many years now. These have steered our schools in other directions and away from their true moral purposes.

What would be necessary to “flip the system” in this more capacious sense? In what follows, I propose five different ways that we could envision the evolution of our schools in a way that could transform education and improve American democracy. The overall argument is that educators need a recovery of professional integrity, from the Latin integritas meaning “whole.” When we let one part of a system grow to a disproportionate influence—be it an unwieldy bureaucracy, a testing apparatus, or a particularly popular classroom management system—it is easy for educators to lose sight of an overall focus on why schools actually exist. Schools have been created to promote students’ learning and their overall personal and social development. This in turn requires their enculturation into norms of civic participation and joint problem-solving that give them the skills and the disposition to persist in tackling the epochal problems of our time. “Flipping the system” here means getting back to that original definition of education—educare in Latin—meaning a “leading out of,” in the sense of facilitating students to lead from a vantage point of their own emergent sense of agency and identity. It means overturning a bureaucratic and unresponsive system in which our students’ potential is limited because our schools do not know how to build upon their interests or are not able to convey to them why the social issues characterizing our time require their engagement and assistance.

If education is to be for the practice of freedom in this broad sense, then the intention here cannot to provide a blueprint, but rather to open up new spaces for public and professional deliberation about a preferred future. These spaces have to be invitational and flexible, in which all of the opinions of all of the members of our diverse communities are welcomed. The following chapters of this book will explore in depth different facets of what such a flipped system could look like. For now, let us examine five concrete “imperatives,” or actions we must undertake—to achieve such a transformation.¹

From the Ideological to the Evidentiary Imperative

In retrospect, one of the great tragedies about the past decades of school reform in the U.S. has been that insistence about improving learning outcomes precluded a discussion about what outcomes we might most wish for our young people and why. It would be going too far to say that the rise of new accountability systems caused the dramatic increase in anxiety and depression among our young people in the past decades, but there is no question that it is correlated with it. An ideology of narrowed emphasis upon academic results has made it difficult for educators and the public to look at more holistic evidence of how our students are doing.

As research increasingly documents that not all is well with our young people, however, policy makers and school leaders at various levels have recognized that they need to respond. Even the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris ultimately reversed its long-standing fixation on the tested achievement of 15-year-olds in mathematics, reading, and science to include well-being measures in 2016. Meanwhile, a tsunami of professional development offerings, individual classroom interventions, and curricular units have entered into the school improvement marketplace. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has been the hub for these activities in the U.S.

On the whole, the new emphasis on gathering all kinds of evidence about our students, including their personal and social well-being, should form a foundational component of “flipping the system” in the U.S. While there inevitably will be missteps here and there, we now have a wealth of evidence that those schools that are integrating meditation, yoga, and other exercises to calm the body and quiet the mind are experiencing positive outcomes. Nor are these kinds of practices just for students; we are finding that teachers and administrators benefit from them also.

As we work to “flip the system” to accommodate the diverse needs of our students in response to evidence of their well-being, however, we should be cautious in two regards. First, if well-being solely is introduced into schools to pacify students and to improve classroom management approaches that deprive them of opportunities to exercise any agency, we will not be changing the system but rather reinforcing it. In some cases, meditation, for example, has become co-opted into the pre-existing practices in schools in ways that have no research base and raise ethical concerns. At Brooklyn Urban Garden School in New York, students are graded on how well they appear to meditate, and their grades are entered into their report cards (Kaleem, 2015). Class scorecards of meditation rankings are posted in the school’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• About the Editor
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I. Public Education as the Foundation of Democratic Society
• PART II. An Equitable System for All
• PART III. Healthy Students, Healthy Schools, and Healthy Communities
• PART IV. Elevating Teacher Expertise into Education Decisions
• PART V. Supporting Teachers in a Flipped System
• Epilogue: The Death and Life of the Teacher
• List of Contributors
• Index