Handbook of Social Justice in Education

William Ayers, Therese M. Quinn, David Stovall, William Ayers, Therese M. Quinn, David Stovall

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135596132
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Éducation
• Categoria: Éducation multiculturelle

The Handbook of Social Justice in Education, a comprehensive and up-to-date review of the field, addresses, from multiple perspectives, education theory, research, and practice in historical and ideological context, with an emphasis on social movements for justice. Each of the nine sections explores a primary theme of social justice and education:

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• Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

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• International Perspectives on Social Justice in Education

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• Race and Ethnicity, Language and Identity: Seeking Social Justice in Education

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• Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice in Education

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• Bodies, Disability and the Fight for Social Justice in Education

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• Youth and Social Justice in Education

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• Globalization: Local and World Issues in Education

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• The Politics of Social Justice Meets Practice: Teacher Education and School Change

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• Classrooms, Pedagogy, and Practicing Justice.

Timely and essential, this is a must-have volume for researchers, professionals, and students across the fields of educational foundations, multicultural/diversity education, educational policy, and curriculum and instruction.

Part 1
Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

Edited and Introduced by Kenneth J. Saltman

If there is any purity left, it is in the stark understanding that social systems based on oppression imprint seemingly irresolvable conflicts onto every sphere of human endeavor. If there is a perspective shared by peoples around the world, it is that at this moment in history there are no easy solutions.

(Glendinning, 2003)

I don’t expect to ever see a utopia. No, I think there will always be something that you’re going to have to work on, always. That’s why, when we have chaos and people say, “I’m scared. I’m scared. I’m concerned,” I say, “Out of that will come something good.” It will, too. They can be afraid if they want to, afraid of what is going to happen. Things will happen, and things will change. The only thing that’s really worthwhile is change. It’s coming.

(Clark & Brown Stokes, 1990, p. 126)

The chapters in this section are unified by their recognition that people and groups struggle over the representation and retelling of history and that these representational contests over the meanings of the past are inextricably tied to broader material and symbolic struggles, forces, and structures of power. Though social justice does not have a unified or static meaning, these chapters are all concerned with elaborating a historical notion of social justice understood through the expansion of democratic values with regard to schooling, curriculum, pedagogy, policy, culture, politics, and economy. In different ways the contributors address the stakes involved for students, teachers, parents, and citizens in comprehending the past and in utilizing that comprehension to struggle for a more just and democratic future. These tasks could not be more pressing at the moment.

Educators, citizens, and activists committed to social justice face a recent history characterized by the radical rise of social injustice. In the United States an economic war against youth, the poor, the working class, and people of color has been waged in which child and family poverty have drastically increased at the same time that extreme wealth has been redistributed to the very top of the economy. Public goods and services including health care, public education, and public housing have been subject to decimation and privatization to turn them into an investment opportunity for those best off. As public schools across the United States in poor and working class communities are denied adequate funding and resources they are subject to punitive action including the denial of much needed funds, school closure, and privatization. These undemocratic upward material redistributions of wealth and resources are accompanied by an ongoing anti-democratic political and cultural onslaught by the political right.

Since 2001 the United States has endured a radical erosion of civil liberties and democratic constitutional protections and an amassing of executive power. The Bush administration, the Republican Party, and a largely complicit Democratic Party have undermined the democratic rights of habeus corpus, posse commitatus, right to privacy, right of assembly, freedom from search and seizure, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and more. Public democracy has been further assaulted by the production of a culture of fear and a culture hostile to critical dissent not to mention historical fact. A large part of this has been created through the ideological work of the mass media and the state that has, under the brand name, the Global War on Terror, instituted an historical amnesia. Within the fundamentalist thought of the “war on terror” not only are incompatible ideologies and values made interchangeable, and not only does the Big Enemy appear as a method of fighting, but to question the history leading to events appears treasonous in the current political climate.

History matters for democracy because it provides a form of intellectual self-defense for public citizens at a time when truth claims are increasingly legitimated by the power of the claimant. From the invasion of Iraq, to the cold war machinations that produced Al Qaeda and the Taliban, to the history of political liberalism and radicalism in the United States to grassroots social justice movements, public culture is increasingly subject to an eternal present and an active forgetting. This has, in part, to do with the commodification of knowledge and information as it is largely produced and circulated by corporate media with financial and ideological interests in selling fleeting spectacle for passive consumption. In fact public schooling remains one of the few places in a hypercommercialized society where knowledge and information can be investigated and debated as the basis for more complex and historically informed perspectives that can be the basis for greater individual and social understanding and public deliberation and action. Put differently, public schooling is a crucial site and stake in the struggle for the making of a democratic ethos. Yet in public schools, public democratic culture is under increasing assault by educational reforms that separate facts from underlying values and framing assumptions, that disconnect claims to truth from the interests and perspectives of those making them, that view knowledge as static discreet objects to be delivered to learners like units of commodity.

In short, the intensified positivism of constant standardized testing, “performance-based assessment,” and standardization of curriculum undermine not only the curiosity and investigative powers of the student but also deny the dialogic nature of knowledge making. The new reforms see knowledge as exclusively needing to be enforced from above, determined by the experts—“the ones who know.” Knowledge and schooling are alleged to be objective and neutral in this perspective. There is, of course, a politics in this denial of the politics of education as the values, interests, and ideological perspectives of “ones who know” are concealed under the guise of objectivity and neutrality fostered by standardized testing, tracking, and grading. The denial of underlying values and framing assumptions do more than threaten the development of critical individuals capable of critically interpreting the world in order to act and change it collectively. Such denials implicit in the positivist reforms also flatten history by falsely suggesting that consecrated knowledge is universally, transhistorically true. To recognize the partial, contextual nature of truth claims is not to deny objective reality but to recognize that truth claims are selected and mediated through subjectivity. The positivism of the new reforms posits a false objectivism in which the role of the subject in interpreting truth plays no part in shaping the object of knowledge itself.

How subjects come to particular claims to truth is historical. Objectivity is more closely approached by bringing the shaping historical force of subjectivity into the process of knowing the object of study. This is not an argument for relativism. On the contrary, subjects draw on historical traditions of thought to interpret and act on the world. The ahistorical tendency of the positivism of the new educational reforms is not only an epistemological matter but an ontological one as well. In seeking to bound knowledge for its standardization, knowledge and the material world are objectified such that changing material realities and changing knowledge appears as a threat to truth rather than as something to comprehend in relation to the forces that make change. But to teach is to make meanings, to produce culture, dialogically with others through exchange. Teaching is not a matter of delivering preordained guaranteed units of objectified truth. In fact, such a conception of education is really about dogma. While teachers inevitably exercise pedagogical and political authority, it is precisely the fallibilism, the nonguaranteed, relatively indeterminate nature of education, the possibility of interpretation that allows knowledge to be understood in relation to broader social issues, pressing matters of public import, and relations of power such that this interpretive knowledge can become the basis for social intervention.

These chapters are also linked by their focus on different aspects of the history of social movements in relation to education. Some chapters focus on broad-based social movements while others focus on social movements within institutional contexts. Deron Boyles, Tony Carusi, and Dennis Attick foreground the section by providing a historical overview of the philosophical origins of social justice with regard to education. Enora Brown provides an account of how education and the law were historically used as instruments of class and racial oppression and offers insights into what history tells us about contemporary neoliberal and antiaffirmative action educational policies and reforms. Sandra Mathison considers the historical struggle over the meaning of educational evaluation and the battle between public and private ideas of evaluation. Her chapter highlights the dangerous shift to a private notion of evaluation that presently services neoliberal ideology. Horace Hall recounts the history of the civil rights movement and the legacy of Brown to elaborate a contemporary theory of critical education. Like Mathison, Marc VanOverbeke provides an institutional history—a history of the higher education extension school movement. He raises a number of questions about the limited successes of this liberal mass education project aimed at the working class. David Gabbard considers the history of the anarchist movement to propose a radical emancipatory turn for public education. Gabbard’s position breaks with the more prevalent Marxian tradition of radical education to call into question the very viability of compulsory state schooling as a means to achieve broad-based social justice. Pepi Leistyna offers a history of contemporary activist youth movements and argues for the centrality of theory and theorizing to achieve democratic social change.

References

Clark, S., & Brown Stokes, C. (1990). Ready from within. Lawrenceville, NJ: African World Press.

Glendinning, C. (2003). Introduction. In W. Churchill (Ed.), On the justice of roosting chickens (pp. 1–2). Oakland, CA: AK Press.

1 Public Good and Private Interest in Educational Evaluation

Sandra Mathison

If we share an apple, we can share a community

So reads the caption on a poster I received upon completion of an evaluation of an accelerated secondary school program. Over a six-month period I worked with this school and its stakeholders (including students, teachers, parents, school administrators, and graduates) to evaluate this accelerated program for precocious eighth and ninth graders. The evaluation was stakeholder based, the types of evidence collected evolved as the evaluation proceeded, the students became interested in the process and worked with me to develop data collection skills and then collect data themselves. The final report and where to go from the results was a collaborative effort among the stakeholder groups.

This is typically the kind of educational evaluation I do, although there is a wide range of approaches used in educational evaluation. But for this work, I did not get paid. The school has no money for evaluation. The school district has no money for evaluation. The evaluation approach the school wanted is not a priority or publicly funded.

Consider this quote from Identifying and Implementing Educational Practices Supported by Rigorous Evidence: A User Friendly Guide, published by the U.S. Department of Education (2003):

Well-designed and implemented randomized controlled trials are considered the “gold standard” for evaluating an intervention’s effectiveness, in fields such as medicine, welfare and employment policy, and psychology. This section discusses what a randomized controlled trial is, and outlines evidence indicating that such trials should play a similar role in education.

And so the stage for the current focus on educational evaluation is set by the U.S. Department of Education.

Educational Evaluation in Historical Context

Educational evaluation is by and large a public good—although evaluation occurs in many fields and in many contexts supported through many means, the genesis of educational evaluation is the stipulations in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) passed in 1965. Established as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the ESEA provides federal assistance to schools, communities, and children in need. With current funding of about $9.5 billion annually, the ESEA continues to be the single largest source of federal funding to K-12 schools. Through its many Title programs, especially Title I, ESEA has been a major force in focusing how and what is taught in schools, as well as the ways those activities are evaluated. With Johnson’s conceptualization of ESEA, educational evaluation was seen to be a public good (just like education and schooling) that should serve the common public good. What I want to illustrate is that although educational evaluation remains a public good it increasingly serves private interests.

While the passage of ESEA marks the beginning of the formalization of educational evaluation, one prior event, the Eight Year Study, also played an important role in educational evaluation, although it is more often associated with developments in curriculum theory and design. The Eight Year Study involved 30 high schools dispersed throughout the United States and serving diverse communities (Aiken, 1942). Each school developed its own curriculum and each was released from government regulations, as well as the need for students to take college entrance examinations. With dissension early in the project about how its success should be evaluated, a young Ralph Tyler was brought on board to direct the evaluation, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Out of the Eight Year Study came what is now known as the “Tyler Rationale,” the commonsense idea that what students were supposed to learn should determine what happened in classrooms and how evaluation should be done (Tyler, 1949).

Tyler’s evaluation team devised many curriculum specific tests, helped to build the capacity for each school to devise its own measures of context specific activities and objectives, identified a role for learners in evaluation, and developed data records to serve intended purposes (including descriptive student report cards) (Smith & Tyler, 1942). All of these developments resonate with conceptual developments in evaluation from the 1970s to the present. The notion of opportunity to learn is related to the curriculum sensitivity of measures; the widespread focus on evaluation capacity building resonates with the Tylerian commitment to helping schools help themselves in judging the quality and value of their work; democratic and empowerment approaches, indeed all stakeholder based approaches, resonate with the learners’ active participation in evaluation; and the naturalistic approaches to evaluation resonate with the use of behavioral descriptive data.

The Eight Year Study ended in 1941 and was published in five volumes in 1942, an event which was overshadowed by its unfortunate coincidence with U.S. troops taking an active role in World War II. Nonetheless, Ralph Tyler and the Eight Year Study evaluation staff provided a foundation, whether always recognized or not, for future education evaluators.

When ESEA was passed in 1965 (legislation which Ralph Tyler had a hand in as an educational advisor to the Johnson administration) the requirement that the expenditure of public funds be accounted for thrust educators into a new and unfamiliar role. Educational researchers and educational psychologists stepped in to fill the need for evaluation created by ESEA. But the efforts of practitioners and researchers alike were generally considered to be only minimally successful at providing the kind of evaluative information envisioned. The compensatory programs supported by ESEA were complex and embedded in the complex organization of schooling.

Since the federal politicians, especially ESEA architect Robert Kennedy, were primarily interested in accountability, evaluation requirements for ESEA, especially for Title I, which was the largest compensatory program, emphasized uniform procedures and comparable data at the state and national levels, a direction many evaluators found misdirected (Jaeger, 1978; Wiley, 1979). During this period, the advances in educational evaluation were, at least in part, over and against the federal approach to evaluation, especially Ti...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives
• PART 2 International Perspectives on Social Justice and Education
• PART 3 Race, Ethnicity, and Language: Seeking Social Justice in Education
• PART 4 Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice in Education
• PART 5 Bodies, Disability, and the Fight for Social Justice in Education
• PART 6 Youth and Social Justice in Education
• PART 7 Globalization and Social Justice in Education
• PART 8 The Politics of Social Justice Meets Practice: Teacher Education and School Change
• PART 9 Classrooms, Pedagogy, and Practicing Justice
• Editors' Conclusion
• Resources
• Contributors
• Index