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Here's The Education Schools Project on the number of ed schools:
The country has more than 1,200 schools, colleges and departments of education, covering a spectrum of nonprofit and for-profit programs, undergraduate and graduate.
And here's Frederick Hess on the importance of AERA to the field:
...many schools and departments of education treat AERA presentations as significant evidence of academic accomplishment when it comes to awarding tenure, pay raises, and research support... I have observed or been contacted as part of more than a few tenure or hiring cases where AERA presentations were deemed credible evidence of scholarly activity. So, in the current climate, these presentations have real value in the academy.
I wonder how elections work at AERA.
I also wonder whether AERA sees itself as a proponent of critical pedagogy.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Pablo Freire
Teachers College research at AERA
8 comments:
Well, according to this Sol Stern piece, I'm guessing yes:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html
was written in 2006:
Gutstein’s book comes with the imprimatur of two of the nation’s most influential ed profs, Gloria Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin and William F. Tate of Washington University in St. Louis—the outgoing and incoming presidents of the American Education Research Association. The 25,000-member AERA is the umbrella organization of the ed-school professoriate, and over the past two decades it has moved steadily left, becoming more multicultural, postmodernist, feminist, and enamored of critical race theory and queer theory.
And now the organization has just hired its first national Director of Social Justice. In fact, Ladson-Billings and Tate have coedited their own volume of essays on educational research and social justice, wherein they argue for a critical race theory approach, based on the idea that institutionalized “white supremacy” remains pervasive in American public education. Left unexplained is how these two particular critical race theorists, both black, could have been elected by their overwhelmingly white peers to preside over the education establishment’s premier organization.
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Gutstein's book was what I quoted elsewhere, but it's this:
the pedagogy for teaching social justice through math is even more fully developed than for science. One of the leading lights of the genre is Eric Gutstein, a Marxist colleague of Ayers’s at the University of Illinois and also a full-time Chicago public school math teacher. Gutstein’s new book, Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice, combines critical pedagogy theory and real live math lessons that Gutstein piloted with his predominantly minority seventh-grade students.
Like Ayers, Gutstein reveres Paolo Freire. He approvingly quotes Freire’s dictum that “there neither is, nor has ever been, an educational practice in zero space-time—neutral in the sense of being committed only to preponderantly abstract, intangible ideas.” Gutstein takes this to mean that since all education is political, leftist math teachers who care about the oppressed have a right, indeed a duty, to use a pedagogy that, in Freire’s words, “does not conceal—in fact, which proclaims—its own political character.”
Accordingly, Gutstein has relentlessly politicized his math classes for years, claiming that this approach has improved his students’ math skills while making them more aware of the injustices built in to capitalist society. One lesson, for example, presents charts showing the U.S. income distribution, aiming to get the students to understand the concept of percentages and fractions, while simultaneously showing them how much wealth is concentrated at the top in an economic system that mainly benefits the superrich. After the class does the mathematical calculations, Gutstein asks: “How does all this make you feel?” He triumphantly reports that 19 of 21 students described wealth distribution in America as “bad,” “unfair,” or “shocking,” and he proudly quotes the comments of a child named Rosa: “Well I see that all the wealth in the United States is mostly the wealth of a couple people not the whole nation.”
And he doesn't see any connection between his teaching methods and the maintenence of the status quo? So the goal is not to play the game and win, it's to decide that there should be a different game?
I don't think this sort of thing would be allowed in our town, in spite of the fact that we have a lot of very liberal parents. Does anyone at KTM have any specific examples of this sort of teaching?
The closest thing I know of around here is one "advisory" teacher who tells students not to use the word "war". If she is in a group of adults and one uses the word war (even if they talk about World War II), she will get up and walk out. Actually, that's just weird.
oh, boy
this is a huge question
I have a friend who's pretty much losing her mind over various Practices being Implemented at the 4-5 school.
She's a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat -- loathes George Bush! -- and she's saying things like, "This is Communism! How can we have Communism in the schools with a Republican in the White House!"
(Which reminds me of THE single funniest moment in our household re: school b*s. That would be the night when Ed, left-liberal, Jewish college professor atheist/agnostic, came home from a board meeting and told me, that one of the Spanos had presented our district with a check for God knows how many SMART Boards and had then proceeded to harangue the audience about the evils of George Pataki and his support for charter schools. Ed was irate. "He's a Republican!" Ed said. "He's a Republican and he's criticizing a Republican governor for supporting charter schools!"
The 4-5 kids are now required to work in groups. They have to sit together in groups - this is a requirement.
They are no longer able to earn grades of "A" as a rule. Parents have been told this directly.
A couple of teachers are piloting the new 1-4 report card, and parents are being told that kids won't be receiving 4s except under extraordinary circumstances, for extraordinary performance. A "4" means "exceeds expectations," but a perfect assignment does not exceed expectations. As my friend said, "There's no way to exceed expectations. You can't do the assignment early, because it's assigned overnight. You can't do it better than perfect. The only way to exceed expectations would be if you did it on the moon. That would exceed expectations."
So: the kids work in collectives and are graded as a collective, essentially. No 4s & no 1s. Everyone has been declared, by fiat, the same in all things.
Of course, no one is teaching these kids to question the authority that imposes these practices from above!
So: this isn't "critical" pedagogy in the sense of teaching students to criticize the social structure.
Then again, these are the children of affluent suburbanites.
They are the children of the people who need criticizing, by definition.
These grading practices are extremely damaging for kids whose parents apply to private schools.
We now have a situation where the kids school grades are significantly lower than their scores on standardized tests. This is true of C.
Private schools & universities universally assume that high scores & mediocre or low grades are a sign of trouble. Our own superintendent, who has presided over the institution of these practices, made this comment herself in one of her first public meetings. She said, specifically, that the students she had always worried about were the ones with high standardized scores and low grades.
Those kids are in trouble, she said.
Now she's instituted a grading system in which a very large number of our kids fit that profile.
One lesson, for example, presents charts showing the U.S. income distribution, aiming to get the students to understand the concept of percentages and fractions, while simultaneously showing them how much wealth is concentrated at the top in an economic system that mainly benefits the superrich.
The new book on education & rising inequality has the potential to be a bombshell. I need to get a post up about that.
The people who wrote it are MAJOR, major people: one an economic historian, one an economist.
Academics -- real academics -- don't make the connection between "rising inequality" and "lousy public schools."
I hadn't made it myself; I certainly hadn't seen RISING inequality as a function of the schools. I had been thinking in terms of static categories: rich, poor; black, white; good schools, bad schools.
This book shows a connection across time.
Most left-wing academics -- I think I'm in a position to make this observation -- see rising inequality as a function of capitalism & Reaganism. They think the public schools are scandalously bad; a real Marxist has no truck with math teachers refusing to teach long division to poor black & Hispanic children. But they haven't connected rising inequality with lousy schools.
This book could change the paradigm.
It's possible.
(I don't know whether the book talks about "declining" quality in schools. It may not. But it doesn't matter. What the book says is that schools, at a minimum, have not kept up with technological advances.)
Catherine-I'm looking forward to your post on this. What's the title of the new book? I'm especially curious whether it gets beyond the usual issues of school funding, teacher quality, and class size, to take a critical look at curriculum content (e.g., Reform Math), and the education industrial complex.
I showed my teenager the Wikipedia article on critical pedagogy, and asked him to evaluate his AP World History teacher against some this description.
Critical pedagogy is a teaching approach which attempts to help students question and challenge domination, and the beliefs and practices that dominate.
Then, I selected these features that are on the list of “basic concerns of critical pedagogy":
• a social and educational vision of justice and equality should ground all education
• issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and physical ability are all important domains of oppression and critical anti-hegemonic action.
• the alleviation of oppression and human suffering is a key dimension of educational purpose
• education must both promote emancipatory change and the cultivation of the intellect--these goals should never be in conflict, they should be synergistic
He told me that this pretty much describes his teacher. From what I know about this class, that’s what I expected him to say.
In all other respects, this appears to be a great class that produces excellent AP test scores.
That’s what’s going on in our conservative-leaning leafy suburban school. What’s going on in your school?
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